Trump on Ukraine and Other Things

Our latest book is titled Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics.  Among other things, it discusses foreign influence and Trump's attack on democracy.  Russia helped Trump through 2020.  As Russia began its latest invasion of Ukraine, Trump lavished praise on Russian dictator Vladimir Putin. 

During his first impeachment, he falsely accused Ukraine of interfering in the 2016 election.

Josh Dawey at WP:

Former president Donald Trump mused Saturday to the GOP’s top donors that the United States should label its F-22 planes with the Chinese flag and “bomb the s--t out of Russia.” He also praised North Korean leader Kim Jong Un as “seriously tough,” claimed he was harder on Vladimir Putin than any other president, reiterated his false claims that he won the 2020 election, urged his party to be “tougher” on supposed election fraud, disparaged a range of prominent party opponents and called global warming “a great hoax” that could actually bring a welcome development: more waterfront property.

“And then we say, China did it, we didn’t do it, China did it, and then they start fighting with each other and we sit back and watch,” he said of labeling U.S. military planes with Chinese flags and bombing Russia, which was met with laughter from the crowd of donors, according to a recording of the speech obtained by The Washington Post.

...

 Trump made an ominous call for the party to be more loyal in backing up his claims about fraud.

"The vote counter is often more important than the candidate,” he told the crowd, saying he had learned that from radio show host Mark Levin. “ … We have to get a lot tougher and smarter at the polls.”

...

 He also viciously mocked Republicans who didn’t back him in his crusade to hold power after he lost the 2020 election. “Stupid, corrupt Mitch McConnell,” he said of the Senate minority leader, before labeling former vice president Mike Pence a “conveyor belt — like corn” for opening and counting the electoral college votes as the Constitution requires.

Gabby Orr at CNN:

Former Vice President Mike Pence on Friday condemned Republican “apologists” who have used positive language to describe Russian President Vladimir Putin amid his invasion of Ukraine, according to a source who was in the room as Pence spoke to top GOP donors.

“There is no room in this party for apologists for Putin. There is only room for champions of freedom,” Pence said. The line received applause from donors who were gathered for a Republican National Committee retreat in New Orleans, the source said. The event was closed to the press.

Pence’s speech came just days after former President Donald Trump described Putin as “genius” and “savvy” for launching a full-scale invasion in Ukraine, where civilian casualties continue to pile up despite global condemnation of the Russian leader’s actions.

 

Gen Z Rejects GOP

 In Defying the Odds, we talk about the social and economic divides that enabled Trump to enter the White House. In Divided We Stand, we discuss how these divides played out in 2020.

Mike Allen at Axios:

Gen Xers have always been a swing voting group, but their kids — Gen Z, sometimes called Zoomers — overwhelmingly back Democrats.

What they're saying: "Generational replacement will not be kind to Trump’s Republican Party," John Della Volpe, polling director at the Harvard Kennedy School Institute of Politics, and CEO of SocialSphere, told me.

Della Volpe will be out tomorrow with "Fight: How Gen Z Is Channeling Their Fear and Passion to Save America," digging into the mindset of these 70 million young Americans born beginning in the mid-1990s.

"They are the most diverse and most educated generation in history," Della Volpe writes.

The big picture: Della Volpe says five events shaped this rising bloc:

• Occupy Wall Street: Millennial-led discussions about inequality became political drivers as Zoomers came of age.
• Donald Trump.
• The Parkland, Fla., high school shooting and March for Our Lives movement.
• 17-year-old Darnella Frazier's use of her iPhone to record the murder of George Floyd.
• Greta Thunberg's climate strike.

GOP is Going South

Our forthcoming book is titled Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics.  Among other things, it discusses the state of the parties.  GOP conservatism is in intellectual decline.

Texas' decision to have a separate, underfunded electrical grid led to disaster last week. Lloyd Green at The Guardian:

Innocent lives have been lost and upended in the name of retrograde ideology masked as policy. Real people, families and business have been destroyed. Climate change denial comes with a high human cost. Standing apart from the national electric grid isn’t independence. It is a death wish by another name.

Confederacy 2.0.

Alexander Stephens, vice-president of the breakaway states, summed up this attitude in 1861: “If Charleston harbor needs improvement, let the commerce of Charleston bear the burden. If the mouth of the Savannah River has to be cleared out, let the sea-going navigation which is benefited by it, bear the burden.”

Sounds familiar?

Other than when it came to repelling Abraham Lincoln, the Confederacy was not a mutual assistance pact. Before this latest man-made debacle, Republicans were dreaming of drowning government in a bathtub. Hopefully, in Texas that may change.

Nick Corasaniti, Annie Karni and Isabella Grullón Paz at NYT:

 An analysis of January voting records by The New York Times found that nearly 140,000 Republicans had quit the party in 25 states that had readily available data (19 states do not have registration by party). Voting experts said the data indicated a stronger-than-usual flight from a political party after a presidential election, as well as the potential start of a damaging period for G.O.P. registrations as voters recoil from the Capitol violence and its fallout.

 Julia Terruso and Jonathan Lai at The Philadelphia Inquirer:

About 19,000 Pennsylvanians have left the Republican Party since Jan 6. That’s a drop in the bucket for a state with more than 8.8 million registered voters, and almost 3.5 million Republicans. But it’s also an unusually high rate of defections: Almost two-thirds of the voters who have switched parties this year left the GOP, compared with a third or less typically.

David Brooks at NYT:

The party is politically viable, but it is intellectually and morally bankrupt. Under Trump it became an apocalyptic personality cult. But you should know, as I’m sure you do, that there are many Republicans who want to change their party and make it a vehicle for conservative ideas...This is a struggle to create a Republican Party that is democratic and not authoritarian, patriotic and not nationalistic, conservative and not reactionary, benevolent and not belligerent, intellectually self-confident and not apocalyptic and dishonest.

Republicans will beat Trumpism not by confronting it directly but by focusing on policymaking, by becoming a regular party once again. As Senator Ben Sasse put it, it’s to make the Republican Party about more than one dude. You may have noticed that this week, Mitt Romney and Tom Cotton are teaming up on an effort to raise the minimum wage and enforce immigration laws, two plans to boost working class wages. That’s what there needs to be more of.

Will this work? Is the Republican Party salvageable? Nobody knows. Right now Republicans are rallying around Trump because they believe Democrats and the media are going after him. It’s pie in the sky to ask rank-and-file Republicans to denounce the man they’ve clung to. But, as has been observed, we Americans don’t solve our problems, we just leave them behind.

 

Climate Politics

In Defying the Odds, we discuss state and congressional elections as well as the presidential race. The update -- recently published -- looks at political and demographic trends through the 2018 midterm.

Climate change is an extremely important issue, but it has been a peripheral concern in presidential campaigns.  For most Americans, the impact has seemed abstract and speculative.  But the Western wildfires may be making it more visible and urgent.  The effects are not limited to coastal areas.  As of this week, the smoke had drifted as far east as Illinois.

Seung Min Kim and Brady Dennis at WP:

Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden excoriated President Trump on Monday over his environmental record as wildfires continued to burn through much of the West and as the president used a trip to California to question the scientific consensus that climate change is a leading cause of the devastating blazes.

Biden said during a speech in Wilmington, Del., that the “undeniable, accelerating, punishing reality” of global warming was playing out in the wildfires and hurricanes that have marked the end of summer, arguing it is a problem that “requires action, not denial.”

Across the country in California, Trump sought to pin the blame for the fires on another culprit — forest management — while shrugging off warnings that human-caused climate warming will continue to make Western states a tinderbox with annual fires that destroy communities.

“It will start getting cooler. You just watch,” he said during a briefing with state and local leaders in McClellan Park, Calif.

California Natural Resources Secretary @WadeCrowfoot: "We've had temperatures explode this summer..."

President Trump: "It'll start getting cooler, you just watch."

Crowfoot: "I wish science agreed with you."

Trump: "I don't think science knows, actually." pic.twitter.com/xJPYoTjJBo

— CSPAN (@cspan) September 14, 2020

The issue is showing up in Senate races:

• Montana
• North Carolina
• Kentucky

Policy Lobotomy

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

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo: "Steady reductions in sea ice are opening new passageways and new opportunities for trade. This could potentially slash the time it takes to travel between Asia and the West by as much as 20 days."

Tina Nguyen at Vanity Fair notes the administration flip-flop: from denying climate change to endorsing it as a good thing.

Ironically, this piecemeal approach has the potential to hurt Trump in 2020. According to a recent poll from the Harvard Kennedy School Institute of Politics, quite a large portion of younger voters, who are increasingly in the majority, care deeply about climate change. Among voters under 30, 25 percent viewed climate change as a “problem,” 50 percent called it a “crisis” that “demands urgent action,” and a whopping 74 percent disapproved of Trump’s actions regarding climate change. “The energy surrounding the Green New Deal means there are a lot of Americans that want to see Congress take bold action to lower emissions,” Former Representative Carlos Curbelo told Politico. “[Republicans] will alienate younger voters if they criticize without offering an alternative.” Presumably, this includes treating the Arctic like a slushy, walrus-corpse-riddled Risk board.

Ryan McCrimmon at Politico:

Economists in the Agriculture Department's research branch say the Trump administration is retaliating against them for publishing reports that shed negative light on White House policies, spurring an exodus that included six of them quitting the department on a single day in late April.

The Economic Research Service — a source of closely read reports on farm income and other topics that can shape federal policy, planting decisions and commodity markets — has run afoul of Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue with its findings on how farmers have been financially harmed by President Donald Trump's trade feuds, the Republican tax code rewrite and other sensitive issues, according to current and former agency employees.

The reports highlight the continued decline under Trump’s watch in farm income, which has dropped about 50 percent since 2013. Rural voters were a crucial source of support for Trump in 2016, and analysts say even a small retreat in 2020 could jeopardize the president’s standing in several battleground states.

“The administration didn’t appreciate some of our findings, so this is retaliation to harm the agency and send a message,” said one current ERS employee, who asked not to be named to avoid retribution.

For example, two ERS researchers presented a paper at an economic conference in early 2018 that indicated the GOP tax overhaul would largely benefit the wealthiest farmers — generating negative press coverage that staff members said irked senior officials at USDA.

Then, in August, Perdue stunned members of the roughly 300-member research service by announcing plans to bring ERS under the control of USDA’s chief economist, who reports more directly to the secretary. Equally significant, he said the USDA would move the agency out of Washington to a location closer to the U.S. heartland.

Leftward Ho, 2019

In Defying the Odds, we discuss the Sanders candidacy and the leftward drift of the Democratic Party.

Mike Allen at Axios:

President Trump redefined mainstream conservatism. Now, a cast of rising Democratic stars and 2020 candidates are redefining mainstream liberalism.

You see it in many of the major domestic debates of our times, Axios' Jim VandeHei points out:

• Support for a big government "Green New Deal" to fight climate change. Watch the 2020 candidates jump on this bandwagon.
• Support for Medicare for All, calling for a much bigger government role in health care, beyond the Affordable Care Act.
• A rush away from tough-on-security as crucial to immigration reform, which until recently was seen by most Democrats as essential to not looking soft on crime or terrorism.

Lydia Saad at Gallup:

Americans' assessment of their political ideology was unchanged in 2018 compared with the year prior when 35% on average described themselves as conservative, 35% as moderate and 26% as liberal. Although conservatives continue to outnumber liberals, the gap in conservatives' favor has narrowed from 19 percentage points in Gallup's 1992 baseline measurement to nine points each of the past two years.

Since 1992, the percentage of Americans identifying as liberal has risen from 17% then to 26% today. This has been mostly offset by a shrinking percentage of moderates, from 43% to 35%. Meanwhile, from 1993 to 2016 the percentage conservative was consistently between 36% and 40%, before dipping to 35% in 2017 and holding at that level in 2018.

These ideology figures are based on combined data from Gallup's monthly GPSS and other standalone surveys conducted each year. The 2018 aggregate includes 13 surveys totaling more than 13,000 national adults.

The percentage of Democrats identifying as liberal averaged 51% in 2018, up from 50% in 2017, marking the first time a majority of Democrats have adopted this term, following gradual increases since the 1990s.

OC GOP, RIP

In Defying the Odds, we discuss state and congressional elections as well as the presidential race.   California is an important part of the story.

 Karl Evers-Hillstrom at Open Secrets:

With nearly $37 million spent in total, the battle for the open seat in California’s 39th District takes the cake for the most expensive non-special election House race ever.

Winning Democrat Gil Cisneros, a Navy war veteran and Mega Millions lottery winner, poured more than $9 million of his own money into his campaign and raised $2.8 million.

The Paul Ryan-aligned Congressional Leadership Fund (CLF) made Cisneros its top target during the general election, buying $6.2 million in ads — including several roughly-$1 million ad buys in October — attacking the Democrat.

Deciding that the best defense is a good offense, the Nancy Pelosi-aligned House Majority PAC (HMP) spent $2.8 million in negative media buys against Republican Young Kim, most of which came during the same time as CLF’s spending spree. The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) dropped another $2 million into the race to help Cisneros.

In California’s 48th District, losing incumbent Rep. Dana Rohrabacher was on the wrong side of $11 million in outside spending, the most in opposition spending of any non-special election House candidate in U.S. history. The 15-term congressman endured attacks from almost every major liberal super PAC in existence, these ads focused particularly on his denial of climate change and his frequent trips to Russia.

Among the environmental-focused super PACs, Independence USA spent a race-high $4.5 million in attack ads against Rohrabacher.

From the League of Conservation Voters:

A new post-election survey in California’s 48th Congressional District shows that efforts by LCV Victory Fund and its allies to highlight Dana Rohrabacher’s record of denying climate change and opposition to climate action as well as efforts to protect California’s air from pollution were extremely effective in helping propel Harley Rouda to victory over a 15-term incumbent. Voters volunteered Rohrabacher’s position on climate as one of the top reasons for their vote against him, and voters who recall hearing LCV
Victory Fund’s message on climate and air pollution were significantly more likely to vote for Rouda when controlling for partisanship

Joe Mozingo at LAT writes that Orange County was not just Republican, but that it also represented a flamboyant brand of often-extreme conservatism.

With Rohrabacher winding down his last days in Congress after his defeat in November, his departure will mark the end of an outsize Orange County export to the nation: The extreme anti-communist politico whose fears of Soviet domination and anger at American cultural change conjured a litany of bogeymen — gays, liberals, feminists, Latinos, African Americans, Jews, Muslims.

“Dana was the last of them,” said Fred Smoller, associate professor of political science at Chapman University. “That’s why his defeat was so enormous.”
...
The first wave of demographic change in Orange County knocked Dornan out of office in 1996, when Democrat Loretta Sanchez took that seat.

But Rohrabacher was secure in his mostly white, deeply Republican district. He was not nearly as caustic as Dannemeyer or Dornan, who used to call him a “fruitcake.”
...

“Dana Rohrabacher came out of the Reagan Revolution, and he really reflected Orange County conservative politics for a generation,” said Mark Baldassare, president of the Public Policy Institute of California, a nonpartisan think tank, and former pollster at UC Irvine. “I think he reflected the values of his district for a long time, and those values changed as it became more politically and demographically diverse.”

Acknowledgement of Harm

In Defying the Odds, we talk about the political impact of economic and regulatory policy.

Coral Davenport and Kendra Pierre-Louis at NYT:

A major scientific report issued by 13 federal agencies on Friday presents the starkest warnings to date of the consequences of climate change for the United States, predicting that if significant steps are not taken to rein in global warming, the damage will knock as much as 10 percent off the size of the American economy by century’s end.

The report, which was mandated by Congress and made public by the White House, is notable not only for the precision of its calculations and bluntness of its conclusions, but also because its findings are directly at odds with President Trump’s agenda of environmental deregulation, which he asserts will spur economic growth.

Mr. Trump has taken aggressive steps to allow more planet-warming pollution from vehicle tailpipes and power plant smokestacks, and has vowed to pull the United States out of the Paris Agreement, under which nearly every country in the world pledged to cut carbon emissions. Just this week, he mocked the science of climate change because of a cold snap in the Northeast, tweeting, “Whatever happened to Global Warming?”

But in direct language, the 1,656-page assessment lays out the devastating effects of a changing climate on the economy, health and environment, including record wildfires in California, crop failures in the Midwest and crumbling infrastructure in the South. Going forward, American exports and supply chains could be disrupted, agricultural yields could fall to 1980s levels by midcentury and fire season could spread to the Southeast, the report finds.

Noam Levey and Evan Halper at LAT report ton regulatory and legal filings acknowledging multiple kinds of harm from Trump's deregulatory policies.

The Department of Education, for example, did not report how many student borrowers would be affected by a proposed rule issued earlier this year making it more difficult for students who have been defrauded by colleges or universities to get debt relief. Nor did the agency report how much more debt these students could face.

Only when borrowers sued did the agency acknowledge in court filings that scaling back the federal government’s debt relief program had left students with $56.9 million in additional debt.

Similarly, the Department of Health and Human Services has been granting states permission to impose work requirements on Medicaid beneficiaries without any assessment of how many people could lose health coverage as a result.

Many advocates fear that the administration may simply stop reporting potential adverse effects from their proposals.

To date, however, agencies have acknowledged that several of the administration’s highest-profile policy shifts would likely cause significant harm.

Nowhere has this been more apparent than at the EPA, an agency that has long set the standard for evaluating the costs and benefits of proposed regulatory moves.

When Trump in 2017 ordered the EPA to scrap President Obama’s landmark initiative to fight climate change by limiting power plant emissions, agency scientists reported the move would cause up to 4,500 premature deaths annually.

Cultural Gaps and Polarization

In Defying the Odds, we discuss the cultural gap in the 2016 election.

At WSJ, Janet Hook reports on a new poll:

The poll found deep splits along geographic and educational lines. Rural Americans and people without a four-year college degree are notably more pessimistic about the economy and more conservative on social issues. Those groups make up an increasingly large share of the GOP.

...

 Views of immigration have also become more partisan. In an April 2005 poll that asked whether immigration strengthened or weakened the U.S., a plurality of 48% said it weakened the nation, with 41% saying immigration strengthened the country.

Now, a substantial majority of 64% view immigration as strengthening the country, while 28% say it weakens the U.S. The change is due almost entirely to a sharp shift in Democrats' views. In 2005, just 45% of Democrats said the country was strengthened by immigration; now the share is 81%.

...
 Among people without a four-year college degree, a plurality of 44% identified as Democrats in 2010. Now, only 36% do. Among those who are college graduates, just 36% now identify as Republican, versus 41% in 2010.

Romney and Unofficial Conservative Powers

Ben Smith writes at Politico:

The Drudge primary has begun, and Mitt Romney is winning.

The former governor of Massachusetts may be the punching bag of the conservative media, ridiculed on blogs and talk radio as a plasticine, untrustworthy flip-flopper and the grandfather of the hated Obamacare.

But on the Drudge Report, Matt Drudge’s no frills but enduringly influential website, Romney is simply the frontrunner (“ROMNEY WINS NH STRAW POLL”,), the “BILLION DOLLAR MAN,” and the president’s most implacable foe (“ROMNEY: FIRST THING I WOULD UNDO IS OBAMACARE”).

A survey of the last year’s worth of Drudge headlines found only one debatably negative reference to the 2002 Olympics CEO (“Bachmann outraises Romney”) — and a survey of aides to his rivals found a rising level of frustration at what one described as “favoritism” by one of the most important, if also one of the quirkiest, referees.

“One of the mysteries of Drudge is how he continues to be such a mystery. Never clear how or why he leans for or against candidates. But there is a lot of behind the scenes, very quiet and secretive mojo that goes on,” said Mark McKinnon, who, as a top adviser to Sen. John McCain in 2008, watched with dismay as Drudge gave top billing to — in particular — questions about the Arizonan’s health.

“It looks like someone in Romneyland has figured out the secret code,” McKinnon said.

Frustrated rivals think they know the secret: a low-profile, hard-driving Republican operative named Matt Rhoades, who is now Romney’s campaign manager. Rhoades met Drudge, as POLITICO Editor-in-Chief John F. Harris and Mark Halperin reported in their book “The Way to Win,” when he became research director of the Republican National Committee and was introduced by his predecessor on a special trip to Miami. Rhoades has since been seen as a pipeline to the reclusive editor, who now has two veteran Washington reporters working on the site as well.

As Kathleen Parker observes, however, Rush Limbaugh is not on board:

Now he’s in the “hot seat” on global warming, a Post headline informs us. Romney has said that he believes global warming is real and that humans are contributing to it.

Whoa! Sorry, bub, but if you’re a Republican presidential contender, this is not an ideologically approved position. None other than Rush Limbaugh says Romney is history — “Bye-bye, nomination.”

One can infer that Romney is not Limbaugh’s candidate of choice, but is it really so remarkable that Romney would accept scientific evidence that Earth’s climate is changing and that humans, because of their historically unprecedented carbon emissions, might contribute to that effect?

Never mind that Romney couched his comments with enough disclaimers to leave a T. rex wiggle room, even saying that he didn’t know the degree of human contribution, the crux of the debate. The mere mention of a human role (vs., presumably, a divine plan) was enough to bestir the guardians of scientific inquiry at Conservatives4Palin, who averred that Romney is “simpatico” with Obama and that he “totally bought into the man-made global warming hoax.”

Mandates

The final version of health legislation is likely to include individual mandates.  Expect opponents of the legislation to remind the president of what he said during the 2008 campaign, when Edwards and Clinton supported such mandates and Obama opposed them.

January 21, 2008

With respect to universal coverage, understand what this debate is about. And this is a legitimate policy debate. And I respect the positions that John and Hillary have taken. They have decided that we should mandate coverage for all adults. I believe that the problem -- and understand what that means. A mandate means that, in some fashion, everybody will be forced to buy health insurance. Now, John has been honest that that may mean taking money out of people's paychecks in order to make sure that they're covered. Senator Clinton has not been clear about how that mandate would be enforced. But I believe the problem is not that folks are trying to avoid getting health care; the problem is they can't afford it.

January 31, 2008:

OBAMA: Now, under any mandate, you are going to have problems with people who don't end up having health coverage. Massachusetts right now embarked on an experiment where they mandated coverage. And, by the way, I want to congratulate Governor Schwarzenegger and the speaker and others who have been trying to do this in California, but I know that those who have looked at it understand, you can mandate it, but there's still going to be people who can't afford it. And if they cannot afford it, then the question is, what are you going to do about it?

Are you going to fine them? Are you going to garnish their wages? You know, those are questions that Senator Clinton has not answered with respect to her plan, but I think we can anticipate that there would also be people potentially who are not covered and are actually hurt if they have a mandate imposed on them.

February 26, 2008

And the last point I would make is, the insurance companies actually are happy to have a mandate. The insurance companies don't mind making sure that everybody has to purchase their product. That's not something they're objecting to. The question is, are we going to make sure that it is affordable for everybody?

Filling Gaps in the White House Website, Part 8

The New York Times recently interviewed the president on climate change. Although the paper credited the White House for providing the transcript (click here for full text), it did not appear on the White House website. At one point, the president expressed his reservations about the House bill's tariff provisions, but added:

So certainly it is a legitimate concern on the part of American businesses that they are not disadvantaged vis-a-vis their global competitors. Now, keep in mind, European industries are looking at an even more ambitious approach than we are. And they obviously have confidence that they can compete internationally under a regime that controls carbons. I think the Chinese are starting to move in the direction of recognizing that the future requires them to take a clean energy approach. In fact, in some ways they're already ahead of us -- on fuel efficiency standards, for example, they've moved beyond where we've moved on this.