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The Republican Party now belongs to Trump

by

Heather Cox Richardson | Letters from an American

Heather Cox Richardson

March 8, 2024

The Republican Party now belongs to Trump. On the heels of his wins on Super Tuesday, former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley, his last serious contender for the Republican presidential nomination, suspended her campaign Wednesday morning. That afternoon, Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY), who enabled Trump during his administration but apparently hoped to see him replaced at the top of the party, endorsed him.

Haley did not endorse former president Trump, suggesting he needed to earn the support of those Republicans who don’t back him. But Trump’s team has dismissed Haley supporters, saying he doesn’t need them.

In contrast, President Joe Biden continued to broaden the Democrats’ tent. Biden reached out in a statement, saying there was a place for Haley supporters in his campaign. “I know there is a lot we won’t agree on,” he said, “But on the fundamental issues of preserving American democracy, on standing up for the rule of law, on treating each other with decency and dignity and respect, on preserving NATO and standing up to America’s adversaries, I hope and believe we can find common ground.”

President Biden continued to outline the differences between MAGA Republicans and the rest of the country in tonight’s State of the Union address. 

Biden launched the speech, a draft of which the White House made available in advance, by referring to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s attempt in January 1941, about a year before the bombing of Pearl Harbor, “to wake up the Congress and alert the American people that…[f]reedom and democracy were under assault in the world.” Biden identified the same crisis in the present. “Not since President Lincoln and the Civil War have freedom and democracy been under assault here at home as they are today,” he said. 

Overseas, Russian president Vladimir Putin has invaded Ukraine and threatens Europe, Biden said, putting “the free world at risk.” He warned that those blocking aid to Ukraine are destroying “our leadership in the world” and blasted Trump for saying he would tell Putin to “do whatever the hell you want.” Biden urged Congress to “stand up to Putin. Send me the Bipartisan National Security Bill” that funds Ukraine.

Then he turned to the home front. Identifying those who attacked the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, as “insurrectionists” who “had come to stop the peaceful transfer of power and to overturn the will of the people,” Biden called “January 6th and the lies about the 2020 election, and the plots to steal the election…the gravest threat to our democracy since the Civil War.” 

That threat remains, he said. He asked Republicans to “speak the truth and bury the lies.” He urged them to “[r]emember your oath of office to defend against all threats foreign and domestic. Respect free and fair elections. Restore trust in our institutions. And make clear—political violence has absolutely no place in America.” 

As Democrats stood to applaud, Republicans remained resolutely in their seats.

Biden continued his study in contrasts. He urged Republicans to guarantee the right to in vitro fertilization, a popular measure that they killed in the Senate again this week. He called out Republicans for trying to pass a national abortion ban and declared, “If Americans send me a Congress that supports the right to choose, I promise you, I will restore Roe v. Wade as the law of the land again.” 

He touted the economic successes of his administration—15 million new jobs, unemployment at 50-year lows, 16 million new businesses, 800,000 new manufacturing jobs, more people with health insurance, rising wages, falling inflation—and described a nation with a thriving middle class. He reiterated his support for unions, noting that he was the first president to walk a picket line, and praised United Auto Workers president Shawn Fain, who responded by putting his fist in the air and mouthing, “Thank YOU!” 

Biden then looked ahead to “a future where the days of trickle-down economics are over and the wealthy and biggest corporations no longer get all the breaks.” He promised to continue to fight unfair tax codes, price gouging, shrinkflation, and junk fees. 

Biden called out the Republicans for bowing to Trump’s demand that they kill the bipartisan border bill, which would provide 1,500 more border security officers, 100 more immigration judges, 4,300 more asylum officers, and 100 more high-tech drug detection machines and give the president authority to shut down the border when the number of migrants reaches a certain level. As House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) shook his head in apparent disagreement, Senator James Lankford (R-OK), a staunch conservative who negotiated the bill, nodded, saying, “That’s true.” 

Biden took on the two biggest controversies in his presidency directly. “I know the last five months have been gut-wrenching for so many people, for the Israeli people, the Palestinian people, and so many here in America,” he said. 

He recounted the deadly attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, continued to defend Israel’s right “to go after Hamas,” and promised to continue to negotiate for the remaining hostages. He also said that the war “has taken a greater toll on innocent civilians than all previous wars in Gaza combined. More than 30,000 Palestinians have been killed…. Nearly 2 million more Palestinians under bombardment or displaced. Homes destroyed, neighborhoods in rubble, cities in ruin. Families without food, water, medicine.”

The U.S. has “been working non-stop to establish an immediate ceasefire that would last for at least six weeks,” Biden said. “It would get the hostages home, ease the intolerable humanitarian crisis, and build toward something more enduring.” The U.S. has “been leading international efforts to get more humanitarian assistance into Gaza” and is now building a temporary pier on the Gaza coast to “receive large ships carrying food, water, medicine and temporary shelters.”

Biden addressed Israel’s leaders directly: “As we look to the future, the only real solution is a two-state solution. I say this as a lifelong supporter of Israel and the only American president to visit Israel in wartime. There is no other path that guarantees Israel’s security and democracy. There is no other path that guarantees Palestinians can live with peace and dignity. There is no other path that guarantees peace between Israel and all of its Arab neighbors, including Saudi Arabia. Creating stability in the Middle East also means containing the threat posed by Iran.”  

Biden then took on the issue of his 81 years. Age makes “certain things become clearer than ever before,” he said. “I know the American story.”

“Again and again I’ve seen the contest between competing forces in the battle for the soul of our nation. Between those who want to pull America back to the past and those who want to move America into the future. My lifetime has taught me to embrace freedom and democracy. A future based on the core values that have defined America. Honesty. Decency. Dignity. Equality. To respect everyone. To give everyone a fair shot. To give hate no safe harbor.  

“Now some other people my age see a different story,” he said, in a reference to Trump, who will turn 78 in June. “An American story of resentment, revenge, and retribution.”

“[T]he issue facing our nation isn’t how old we are, it’s how old our ideas are,” Biden said. “Hate, anger, revenge, retribution are among the oldest of ideas, but you can’t lead America with…ideas that only take us back. To lead America, the land of possibilities, you need a vision for the future of what America can and should be…. I see a future where we defend democracy, not diminish it. I see a future where we restore the right to choose and protect other freedoms, not take them away. I see a future where the middle class finally has a fair shot and the wealthy finally have to pay their fair share in taxes. I see a future where we save the planet from the climate crisis and our country from gun violence. Above all, I see a future for all Americans…. So let’s build that future together.” 

Biden spoke powerfully for an hour and a half, veering off script to make points stronger or respond to Republican heckling. He seemed to enjoy the scrapping (and might even have set it up), using the back and forth to get Republicans to reject tax cuts just as last year he forced them to reject cutting Social Security.

The Republicans tapped Senator Katie Britt (R-AL) to give their rebuttal to the speech, evidently hoping to contrast her youth—she’s 42—with Biden’s age. But while her team helpfully distributed talking points to Republican influencers before either Biden or Britt had spoken, suggesting they describe her as “America’s mom” and say that Biden’s speech was “tone deaf” while hers was “the perfect pitch,” the fact that the Republicans had a female senator give what could be the most important speech of her life in a kitchen seemed to tell its own, more powerful, story.

He couldn’t indict Biden legally so he tried to indict Biden politically

by

Heather Cox Richardson | Letters from an American

Heather Cox Richardson

February 9, 2024

Yesterday, Special Counsel Robert Hur, appointed by Attorney General Merrick Garland in January 2023 to investigate President Joe Biden’s handling of classified documents before he was president, released his report. It begins: “We conclude that no criminal charges are warranted in this matter. We would reach the same conclusion even if Department of Justice policy did not foreclose criminal charges against a sitting president.” The Department of Justice closed a similar case against former Vice President Mike Pence on June 1, 2023, days before Pence announced his presidential bid, with a brief, one-page letter. 

But in Biden’s case, what followed the announcement that he had not broken a law was more than 300 pages of commentary, including assertions that Biden was old, infirm, and losing his marbles and even that “[h]e did not remember, even within several years, when his son Beau died” (p. 208).

As television host and former Republican representative from Florida Joe Scarborough put it: “He couldn’t indict Biden legally so he tried to indict Biden politically.”

Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris, and their teams came out swinging against what amounted to a partisan hit job by a Republican special counsel. The president’s lawyers noted that it is not Department of Justice practice and protocol to criticize someone who is not going to be charged, and tore apart Hur’s nine references to Biden’s memory in contrast to his willingness to “accept…other witnesses’ memory loss as completely understandable given the passage of time.” 

They pointed out that “there is ample evidence from your interview that the President did well in answering your questions about years-old events over the course of five hours. This is especially true under the circumstances, which you do not mention in your report, that his interview began the day after the October 7 attacks on Israel. In the lead up to the interview, the President was conducting calls with heads of state, Cabinet members, members of Congress, and meeting repeatedly with his national security team.” 

Nonetheless, they note, Biden provided “often detailed recollections across a wide range of questions, from staff management of paper flow in the West Wing to the events surrounding the creation of the 2009 memorandum on the Afghanistan surge. He engaged at length on theories you offered about the way materials were packed and moved during the transition out of the vice presidency and between residences. He pointed to flaws in the assumptions behind specific lines of questioning.” 

They were not alone in their criticism. Others pointed out that Republicans have made Biden’s age a central point of attack, but Politico reported last October that while former House speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) was publicly mocking Biden’s age and mental fitness, he was “privately telling allies that he found the president sharp and substantive in their conversations.” Dan Pfeiffer of Pod Save America and Message Box noted that the report’s “characterizations of Biden don’t match those relayed by everyone who talks to him, including [Republicans].” 

He explained: “There are few secrets in [Washington], and if Joe Biden acted like Hur says, we would all know. Biden meets with dozens of people daily—staffers, members of Congress, CEOs, labor officials, foreign leaders, and military and intelligence officials…. If Biden was regularly misremembering obvious pieces of information or making other mistakes that suggested he was not up to the job, it would be in the press. Washington is not capable of keeping something like that secret.”

But the media ran not with the official takeaway of the investigation—that Biden had not committed a crime—or with a reflection on the accuracy or partisan reason for Hur’s commentary, but with Hur’s insinuations. Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo noted that the New York Times today ran five front-page stories above the fold about the report and Biden’s memory.

Matt Gertz of Media Matters collected some of the day’s headlines: “Eight Words and a Verbal Slip Put Biden’s Age Back at the Center of 2024 (New York Times); “1 Big thing: Report Questions Biden’s memory (Axios)”; “Biden tries to lay to rest age concerns, but may have exacerbated them” (CNN); “Biden disputes special counsel findings, insists his memory is fine” (CBS News); “Age isn’t just a number. It’s a profound and growing problem for Biden” (Politico); and so on. 

As far back as 1950, when Senator Joe McCarthy (R-WI) insisted—without evidence—that the Department of State under Democratic president Harry Truman had been infiltrated by Communists, Republicans have used official investigations to smear their opponents. State Department officials condemned McCarthy’s “Sewer Politics” and the New York Times complained about his “hit-and-run” attacks, but McCarthy’s outrageous statements and hearings kept his accusations in the news. That media coverage, in turn, convinced many Americans that his charges were true.

Other Republicans finally rejected McCarthy, but in 1996, congressional Republicans frustrated by the election of Democratic president Bill Clinton in 1992 and the Democrats’ subsequent expansion of the vote with the so-called Motor Voter law in 1993 resurrected his tactics. They launched investigations into two elections they insisted the Democrats had stolen. They discovered no fraud, but their investigation convinced a number of Americans that voter fraud was a serious problem.

There were ten investigations into the 2012 attack on two U.S. government facilities in Benghazi, Libya, in which four Americans were killed and several others wounded; Republican-dominated House committees held six of them. Kevin McCarthy bragged to Fox News personality Sean Hannity that the Benghazi special committee was part of a “strategy to fight and win” against then–Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. 

The strategy of weaponizing investigations went on to be central to the 2016 election, when Trump ran on the investigation of Clinton’s email practices, and to the 2020 election, when Trump tried to weaken Biden’s candidacy by trying to force Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky to say that Ukraine was opening an investigation into Hunter Biden and the company he worked for. 

Going into 2024, the House is investigating Hunter Biden, and while witness testimony and evidence has not supported their contention that President Biden is corrupt, the stench of the hearings has convinced a number of MAGA voters of the opposite.

And now the media appears to be falling for this strategy yet again.

Political commentator Brian Tyler Cohen outlined how Biden’s performance disproves the argument that he is unfit for the presidency: “The thing about Biden’s memory,” Cohen wrote, “is that he’s presided over the addition of ~15 million jobs & 800k manufacturing jobs, 23 straight months of sub-4% unemployment, surging consumer sentiment, wages outpacing inflation, the American Rescue Plan, Inflation Reduction Act, CHIPs Act, PACT Act, infrastructure law, gun safety law, VAWA, codified marriage equality, canceled $136 billion in student loan debt for 3.7 million borrowers, bolstered NATO, and presided over electoral wins in ‘20, ‘22 and ‘23.”

Political strategist Simon Rosenberg had his own take: “As we end this crazy week I am struck that somehow the claim that Biden’s memory is faulty has gotten more attention than a jury confirming that Trump raped E. Jean Carroll in a department store dressing room.”

It may be, though, that the report has been a game changer in a different way than Hur intended it. Hur’s suggestion that Biden does not remember when his son died seems to echo the moment in the 1954 Army-McCarthy hearings in which Senator McCarthy was trying to prove that the U.S. Army had been infiltrated by Communists. Sensing himself losing, McCarthy attacked on national television a young aide of Joseph Nye Welch, the lawyer defending the Army. 

“Have you no sense of decency, sir?” Welch demanded. “At long last, have you left no sense of decency?” McCarthy didn’t, but Americans did, and they finally threw him off the public stage. 

Biden supporters took their gloves off today, producing videos of Trump’s incoherence, gaffes, and wandering off stages, and noting that he mistook writer E. Jean Carroll, whom he sexually assaulted, for his second wife, Marla Maples, when asked to identify Carroll in a photograph. They also produced clips of Fox News Channel personalities Sean Hannity and Jesse Watters messing up names themselves on screen, and gaffes from Republican lawmakers.  

Senior communications advisor for the Biden-Harris campaign T.J. Ducklo released a statement lambasting Trump for a speech he gave tonight in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, saying: “Tonight, he lied more than two dozen times, slurred his words, confused basic facts, and placated the gun lobby weeks after telling parents to ‘get over it’ after their kids were gunned down at school. But you won’t hear about any of it if you watch cable news, read this weekend’s papers, or watch the Sunday shows.”  

But it was Biden who responded most powerfully. “There’s even a reference that I don’t remember when my son died,” he told reporters. “How in the hell dare he raise that…. I don’t need anyone to remind me when he passed away.” And when asked about Hur’s dismissal of him as a “well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory,” Biden responded with justified anger: “I am well-meaning, and I’m an elderly man, and I know what the hell I’m doing. I’ve been President. I put this country back on its feet.” 

Embarrassing days for Republican leadership? This one is pretty high on the list

by

Heather Cox Richardson | Letters from an American

Heather Cox Richardson

February 6, 2024

MAGA Republicans appear to have killed the Emergency National Security Supplemental Appropriations Act, after senators and Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas spent four months writing the border security piece of the bill that the House MAGA Republicans themselves demanded. House Republicans insisted that border security be added to the supplemental national security bill that provided additional assistance to Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan and provided humanitarian aid to Gaza. 

It turns out that they were apparently hoping to kill support for Ukraine, which is widely popular both in Congress and with voters across the country, and figured that Democrats would never agree to their demands for a border measure. Thus they could kill aid to Ukraine and hammer Democrats for leaving the border in crisis. 

But Democrats see aid to Ukraine as so fundamental to our national security that they were willing to give up even the path to citizenship for the Dreamers, those brought to the U.S. as children, a requirement on which they have previously stood firm, in order to get Republicans to pass the national security measure. The final compromise, released by the Senate negotiators late Sunday night, had much of what Republicans have wanted to impose on the border for a long time. 

But Trump, who wants to use the confusion on the border as a campaign issue, pressed the Republicans to reject the measure. While the Senate will vote tomorrow on whether to take it up, enough Republicans have now come out against it that it appears to have little hope of advancing. As the headline of Carl Hulse’s analysis in the New York Times puts it: “On the Border, Republicans Set a Trap, Then Fell Into It.”

In a speech at the White House today, President Joe Biden urged Congress to pass the bill. He thanked the negotiators who have worked so hard on it, and blamed Trump for shooting it down. Trump has been working the phones, calling Republican lawmakers to “threaten them and try to intimidate them to vote against this proposal,” Biden said. “And it looks like they’re caving.” 

Biden pointed out that “everyone from the Wall Street Journal to the Border Patrol [Union] to the…United States Chamber of Commerce support[s] this bill,” and that the Border Patrol Union endorsed Trump in 2020. 

“[I]f the bill fails,” Biden told Republicans, “I want to be absolutely clear about something: The American people are going to know why it failed. I’ll be taking this issue to the country, and the voters are going to know that…just at the moment we were going to secure the border and fund these other programs, Trump and the MAGA Republicans said no because they’re afraid of Donald Trump.”

“Every day between now and November, the American people are going to know that the only reason the border is not secure is Donald Trump and his MAGA Republican friends. It’s time for Republicans in the Congress to show a little courage, to show a little spine to make it clear to the American people that you work for them and not for anyone else.” 

Then, this afternoon, House leadership called a vote on the impeachment of Homeland Security Secretary Mayorkas, who they insist is not enforcing the laws that should protect the border. Just to be clear, good leadership would never call such an important vote unless they were absolutely certain it had the votes to pass. 

You know where this is going, right?

It did not have the votes to pass. Three Republicans joined the Democrats to make up a majority of 216, while the Republicans could muster only 214. Republicans say they will bring the measure up again later. 

Then House leadership decided to bring to the House floor a standalone bill providing $17.6 billion to Israel, without aid for Ukraine or Taiwan, or humanitarian aid for the Palestinians. That, too, failed, by a vote of 250 to 180. 

Jake Sherman of Punchbowl News posted on social media: “I’ve seen a lot of embarrassing days for different House Republican leadership teams. This one is pretty high on the list. They lost a vote to impeach Mayorkas. And then they lost a vote to send $17.6 billion to Israel. They didn’t need to vote on the Israel bill today. They knew it would fail. They chose to.” 

News broke today that Republican National Committee Chair Ronna McDaniel is planning to leave her position under pressure from Trump, who wants a more fervent loyalist in the job—despite the unquestioned loyalty that had McDaniel participating in Trump’s attempt to steal the 2020 election—and is unhappy with the RNC’s dismal finances. The RNC’s chief of staff under McDaniel, Mike Reed, will also be stepping down.

Meanwhile, former Fox News Channel personality Tucker Carlson released a video today confirming that he is in Moscow to interview Russian president Vladimir Putin. He says he plans to tell people the “truth” of Russia’s war on Ukraine. Carlson says that no U.S. journalist has tried to interview Putin since the conflict began, a comment that drew the astonishment of CNN’s Christiane Amanpour, who pointed out that real journalists (unlike Carlson, whose lawyers have successfully defended him in court from slander charges by saying he should not be expected to tell the truth) have been trying to get an interview with Putin since the war began but he will only talk to propaganda outlets.

Putin has, of course, imprisoned American journalists Evan Gershkovich of the Wall Street Journal and Alsu Kurmasheva of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. 

Carlson said Elon Musk is permitting him to post the interview on X, formerly Twitter.

And finally today, last but very much not least, the three judges on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit reviewing the question of whether Trump is immune from criminal prosecution for his attempt to overturn the 2020 presidential election released their decision. 

He is not immune.

The panel wrote: “We cannot accept former President Trump’s claim that a President has unbounded authority to commit crimes that would neutralize the most fundamental check on executive power—the recognition and implementation of election results. Nor can we sanction his apparent contention that the Executive has carte blanche to violate the rights of individual citizens to vote and to have their votes count….

“We cannot accept that the office of the Presidency places its former occupants above the law for all time thereafter….

“For the purposes of this criminal case, former President Trump has become citizen Trump, with all of the defenses of any other criminal defendant. But any executive immunity that may have protected him while he served as President no longer protects him against this prosecution….”

Trump’s lawyers say they will appeal the decision.