DOGE

Our forthcoming book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. The second Trump administration is off to an ominous start.

Lisa Rein, Hannah Natanson and Elizabeth Dwoskin at WP:

Retirees and disabled people are facing chronic website outages and other access problems as they attempt to log in to their online Social Security accounts, even as they are being directed to do more of their business with the agency online.

The website has crashed repeatedly in recent weeks, with outages lasting anywhere from 20 minutes to almost a day, according to six current and former officials with knowledge of the issues. Even when the site is back online, many customers have not been able to sign in to their accounts — or have logged in only to find information missing. For others, access to the system has been slow, requiring repeated tries to get in.

The problems come as the Trump administration’s cost-cutting team, led by Elon Musk, has imposed a downsizing that’s led to 7,000 job cuts and is preparing to push out thousands more employees at an agency that serves 73 million Americans. The new demands from Musk’s U.S. DOGE Service include a 50 percent cut to the technology division responsible for the website and other electronic access.

Alexandra Ulmer, Marisa Taylor, Jeffrey Dastin and Alexandra Alper at Reuters:

The use of AI and Signal reinforces concerns among cybersecurity experts and government ethicists that DOGE is operating with limited transparency and that billionaire Musk or the Trump administration could use information gathered with AI to further their own interests, or to go after political targets.

Kathleen Clark, a government ethics expert at Washington University in St. Louis, said DOGE’s use of privacy-focused Signal adds to growing concerns over data security practices after top Trump administration officials came under fire last month for the mistaken inclusion of a journalist in a group chat about high-level planning for military operations in Yemen.

“If they’re using Signal and not backing up every message to federal files, then they are acting unlawfully,” she said.

Reuters’ interviews with nearly 20 people with knowledge of DOGE’s operations – and an examination of hundreds of pages of court documents from lawsuits challenging DOGE's access to data – highlight its unorthodox usage of AI and other technology in federal government operations.

At the Environmental Protection Agency, for instance, some EPA managers were told by Trump appointees that Musk’s team is rolling out AI to monitor workers, including looking for language in communications considered hostile to Trump or Musk, the two people said.

Trump's Language Gets Slimier

Our latest book is Divided We Stand The 2020 Elections and American Politics. Our next book will look at the 2024 race.  Trump has a history of stoking racism, threatening his opponents, and despising people with disabilities.

Myah Ward at Politico:

Donald Trump vowed to “rescue” the Denver suburb of Aurora, Colorado, from the rapists, “blood thirsty criminals,” and “most violent people on earth” he insists are ruining the “fabric” of the country and its culture: immigrants.

Trump’s message in Aurora, a city that has become a central part of his campaign speeches in the final stretch to Election Day, marks another example of how the former president has escalated his xenophobic and racist rhetoric against migrants and minority groups he says are genetically predisposed to commit crimes. The supposed threat migrants pose is the core part of the former president’s closing argument, as he promises his base that he’s the one who can save the country from a group of people he calls “animals,” “stone cold killers,” the “worst people,” and the “enemy from within.”

...

His rhetoric has veered more than ever into conspiracy theories and rumors, like when he amplified false claims about Haitian immigrants in Ohio eating pets. And Trump has demonized minority groups and used increasingly dark, graphic imagery to talk about migrants in every one of his speeches since the Sept. 10 presidential debate, according to a POLITICO review of more than 20 campaign events. It’s a stark escalation over the last month of what some experts in political rhetoric, fascism, and immigration say is a strong echo of authoritarians and Nazi ideology.

Blanca Begert at LAT:

Donald Trump cast California as a “Paradise Lost,” at a rally in the Coachella Valley Saturday, blaming Kamala Harris for turning the state into what he described as a hellscape flooded with murderous gangs.

“She’s imported an army of illegal alien gang members and migrant criminals from the dungeons of the Third World,” Trump said, donning a red Make America Great Again hat as the 100 degree desert sun beat down on the crowd.

The messaging tracked with the increasingly xenophobic and racist rhetoric he has directed against immigrants who he depicts as criminals.

...

He vowed to force Newsom to give California farmers more water and repeated a threat to withhold federal funding for wildfires if the governor didn’t open the spigots.

“We’ll force it down his throat and we’ll say, “Gavin if you don’t do it, we won’t give you any of that fire money for all the forest fires.”

Newsom responded with an X post, saying Trump showed “us exactly who he is—threatening life saving disaster aid to achieve his political goals.”

“This man is sick,” Newsom wrote.

 Jonathan Swan, Maggie Haberman and Shane Goldmacher at NYT:

Donald J. Trump took his seat at the dining table in his triplex penthouse apartment atop Trump Tower on the last Sunday in September, alongside some of the most sought-after and wealthiest figures in the Republican Party.

...

He disparaged Vice President Kamala Harris as “retarded.” He complained about the number of Jews still backing Ms. Harris, saying they needed their heads examined for not supporting him despite everything he had done for the state of Israel.

Disability Politics in 2016

Callum Borchers reports at The Washington Post:

Nine months after a rally in South Carolina where Trump contorted his arms in a way that was clearly meant to imitate the effects of arthrogryposis, which visibly limits flexibility in the arms of journalist Serge F. Kovaleski, voters say the incident still disturbs them. In a Bloomberg Politics poll published Thursday, 83 percent of respondents said they are bothered by the episode — more than said they were bothered by Trump’s recent feud with a Gold Star family, his praise for Russian President Vladimir Putin or lawsuits against Trump University.

In fact, making fun of a reporter with a disability registered as more unsettling than any concern about either major-party presidential nominee in the survey — ahead of Hillary Clinton's email scandal, even.

Democrats have known for a while that Trump’s attack on Kovaleski had a powerful effect on voters. Before the first ballots of the primary season were cast, a pro-Clinton super PAC was already using it in a well-funded ad campaign.

During the Democratic convention, Ari Ne'eman wrote at Vox:

People with disabilities are used to feeling like a second-class minority group. In American politics, when disability is mentioned at all, it’s too often in the context of trite inspiration porn or offensive and inaccurate myths about people faking problems to unfairly access public benefits. Rarely do disabled Americans hear meaningful discussion of the issues that impact our lives.

That’s what makes this year’s Democratic National Convention so surprising. The first two nights of the convention included an unusual level of disability-rights content. Both evenings have included prominent remarks from disabled speakers with decades-long relationships with Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton.

...
Behind this growing interest is a fundamental political reality. Nearly one in five Americanspossess a disability of some kind. While many are disconnected from disability politics, a substantial minority of disabled Americans and their family members consider disability issues a major factor in their voting decisions. (At the Democratic convention itself, the number of disabled delegates is up 35 percent, relative to the 2012 convention.)

Polling of the community suggests disabled voters are distributed through both political parties at about the same rate as the general population. Meaning that they remain up for grabs for either party. Disability issues can meaningfully influence voting behavior. In a 2013 poll, 87 percent of voters with disabilities reported they would consider voting against a candidate they otherwise supported if that candidate favored cutting disability services. Forty-five percent indicated such a stance would definitely lose their vote.

Trump Keeps Getting Worse

CNN reports that Donald Trump mocked a reporter with a disability:



Reuters reports:

"We're not gonna take it anymore," a crowd of thousands sang as Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump entered a South Carolina convention center on Tuesday night as a 1980s heavy metal song by the band Twisted Sister blared from speakers.

The billionaire real-estate developer's packed rallies have been among the liveliest events in the long build-up to the November 2016 U.S. presidential election.

But they are increasingly becoming known for their undercurrent of aggression, which escalated into a physical altercation over the weekend when white Trump supporters attacked a black protester at his rally, to the candidate's approval.

Out in the crowds, the mix of emotions is heady, setting a Trump rally apart from those of virtually all the other Republican and Democratic White House hopefuls. The rallies combine a gleeful rejection of establishment politics, a fear that the country is about to be transformed into something un-American, and a simmering aggression toward those who dissent from Trump's world view.

Although he has been the front-runner almost without interruption for four months in the race for the Republican Party's presidential nomination, Trump is not the only candidate who can draw more supporters than a venue has chairs.

But at rallies other than Trump's, it would be unusual for disputes over blocked views between those who are standing and those who are sitting to escalate into yelling matches, as happened a couple of times mid-speech on Tuesday. On one occasion, police officers intervened to calm tempers.

At a Trump rally in Alabama on Saturday attended predominantly by white people, Trump supporters punched and kicked a black civil-rights activist who shouted "Black lives matter!" as Trump called from the stage for the activist to be thrown out.
Trump later said the activist was "obnoxious" and deserved to be "roughed up."

The New York Times reports:

How alarmed were New Jersey officials by reports of Muslims dancing in the streets of Jersey City and Paterson on Sept. 11, 2001, to celebrate the destruction of the World Trade Center?

They feared riots would break out and were ready to send in the National Guard and the State Police to preserve order.

But John J. Farmer Jr., then the New Jersey attorney general and the state’s chief law enforcement officer, said on Tuesday that he ordered an investigation that very day and found the reports to be bogus, more wild stories born in the stricken hours after the attacks.

Nevertheless, those ancient, false rumors were recycled as truth over the weekend by Donald J. Trump, who has folded them into his calls for the national registration of Muslims and possible closing of mosques. Speaking in Alabama, Mr. Trump said: “Hey, I watched when the World Trade Center came tumbling down. And I watched in Jersey City, N.J., where thousands and thousands of people were cheering as that building was coming down. Thousands of people were cheering.”

Bush and Developmental Disabilities

 At a town hall in Derry, New Hampshire on Tuesday, Jeb Bush heard from Lorraine Butler, a woman with special needs. Bush discussed his record on disability issues as Governor of Florida.

The Wheelchair Ad

The Texas Tribune reports:

State Sen. Wendy Davis touched off a political firestorm Friday with a 30-second TV ad that features an empty wheelchair and slams Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott for working against disabled people despite winning a settlement after he was disabled himself.

“Wendy Davis is running one of the nastiest campaign ads you’ll ever see,” The Washington Post blared.

A “historic low” is how the attack ad was described by the Abbott campaign, which saw fellow Republicans rally to his side and issue demands that she pull down the ad.

Even liberal Mother Jones magazine unloaded on Davis, a Democrat.

“It's offensive and nasty and it shouldn't exist,” wrote Ben Dreyfess. “She's basically calling Abbott a cripple.”

Democrats Botch Ads

The Hill reports:

The Democratic National Committee (DNC) said Thursday that it would refrain from using the Romney's dressage horse, Rafalca, in future advertisements after suggestions the ad could be offensive to the Republican challenger's wife, Ann.

The horse, which will be competing later this month in London's Summer Olympics, is one of a number of animals that Ann Romney owns and rides as part of her treatment for multiple sclerosis.

In a series of Web ads, the DNC used the horse to knock Romney for refusing to release his tax records — joking he was "dancing around the issue." Dressage, a highly technical — and expensive — equestrian sport, is sometimes referred to as "horse ballet.

 But on Wednesday, the DNC apologized for offending Ann Romney, who has cited horse riding as a crucial part of her MS treatment.

The Weekly Standard cites an even more bizarre ad, which attacks Romney for quoting Obama's "You didn't build that" line:

"Mitt Romney is launching a false attack," the ad's text states. But the weird thing is: The Obama campaign is purposefully trying to make it sound like Romney is misquoting the president, when the official White House transcript backs up Romney's quotation.

In the ad, Romney says that Obama revealed his thoughts on business when he said this, "If you’ve got a business -- you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen."
And, in fact, according to official White House transcript that's precisely what Obama said on July 13, 2012 in Roanoke, Virginia.

Arguably, the president meant to say something different, but drawing attention to the gaffe is not going to work to his advantage.

A Top Bush Guy for Huntsman

Mark Halperin reports at Time that C. Boyden Gray is endorsing Huntsman and will chair his policy team. Halperin calls the endorsement "a semiotic dog whistle for a lot of big-time bundlers."

Gray's public role could draw attacks over the issue of cap-and-trade. As The Smithsonian reported a couple of years ago, Gray was an early advocate of a version of cap-and-trade:

EDF president Fred Krupp phoned Bush's new White House counsel—Boyden Gray—and suggested that the best way for Bush to make good on his pledge to become the "environmental president" was to fix the acid rain problem, and the best way to do that was by using the new tool of emissions trading. Gray liked the marketplace approach, and even before the Reagan administration expired, he put EDF staffers to work drafting legislation to make it happen. The immediate aim was to break the impasse over acid rain. But global warming had also registered as front-page news for the first time that sweltering summer of 1988; according to Krupp, EDF and the Bush White House both felt from the start that emissions trading would ultimately be the best way to address this much larger challenge.

But Gray has been highly critical of recent cap-and-trade legislation, as he wrote in 2010:

As noted, the White House and the sponsors of the Waxman-Markey legislation passed last year prominently asserted that their proposals were based on the successful acid rain cap and trade program by the CAAA in 1990. But the acid rain reduction and other successes based on it did not involve the impossibly complicated $1 trillion auction/tax/allowance reallocation scheme that Waxman-Markey features, as a result of the political logrolling necessary to secure the close 219-212 House vote.

To the contrary, all previous cap and trade programs have been based on an annual reduction of allowances initially allocated on the basis of an average of previous emissions that were well documented -- a simple formula that has been totally abandoned by Waxman-Markey.

Gray was also an advocate for the disabled. Mary Lou Breslin, cofounder of a disability-rights group, recalls that Gray first started working on the issue when he was in the Office of the Vice President during the 1980s:

But at this early stage, in the sort of '81 to '83 period, his general counsel was C. Boyden Gray. Boyden Gray played bridge with Evan Kemp, and we were hanging out at Evan Kemp's house. Basically, we made friends--"friends" is a reasonable thing to say, although there's a lot of backlash about hanging out with the Republicans these days--we developed a personal relationship with Boyden Gray. Over a period of years, and certainly at the very beginning, Boyden got convinced that disability issues were legitimate civil rights issues and was very influential in reversing the task force's intent to deregulate 504 particularly. He had a very big hand in running interference between the Office of Management and Budget and the Department of Justice and the task force, and he remained Bush's general counsel when he became president.

So the early seeds that were planted with Boyden Gray in terms of disability as a legitimate civil rights issue were personal experiences. He sat around the table with Bob and Pat and Evan, and to a lesser extent, me, and we got to hear the stories about everybody's experiences growing up with disability. Evan got out of law school and applied to seventy-five jobs or something and couldn't get a job because he had a disability. I'm sure it was because he used a wheelchair. Nobody would hire him. Boyden was moved by that, because they're both good old Southern boys and they both went to law school. He began to understand what that might mean. He was developing a perception of these issues, and that single contact and that shift--not alone, by any means; there are four or five other absolutely critical things that happened--but that was an incredibly important contact.