Bonnie Cash for The New York Times
Donald Trump is now beatable. It won’t be easy for Kamala Harris to win the presidency, but until yesterday, I was convinced that the November election was a lost cause for Democrats. No longer.
Thalassa Raasch for The New York Times
And I’m not alone. In The Atlantic, David Frum laid out Trump's weaknesses even before President Biden decided to withdraw from the race.
Formless and digressive as it was, [Trump’s acceptance] speech did have one major theme—a theme that underscores why and how the Democrats should be winning this race.
Trump stood on the podium in Milwaukee to sell nostalgia for his term in office. In fact, the Trump presidency ended in disaster, by many measures the worst fourth year of a presidency since Herbert Hoover’s in 1932: pandemic, mass death, economic collapse, rioting, and a surge in violent crime. By contrast, Biden’s presidency is delivering the best fourth year since … whose? Bill Clinton’s in 1996? Ronald Reagan’s in 1984? Calvin Coolidge’s in 1924?
Unemployment has reached the lowest level in more than half a century. The post-pandemic inflation has stopped and gone into reverse. The stock market has soared to record highs. Social indicators too are improving from the chaos left behind by Trump. In each year of the Trump presidency—not just in pandemic 2020, but for each of the three years before that—the rate of marriages and childbirths in the United States dropped. Under Biden, marriages and childbirths are rising again. Drug-overdose deaths are decreasing. The Trump-era violent-crime wave is receding at last. . .
The Trump theory of his presidency is that Trump deserves credit for the good times of 2017, 2018, and 2019 and no discredit for the crisis of 2020. But both halves of that are backwards. The economy started growing fast in 2014, so Trump arrived in office just in time to claim credit for work that had been done by his predecessors. Managing crises is what Americans hire presidents to do, but Trump’s crisis management was almost uniquely bad. He responded to the pandemic with a blend of denial, callousness, and quackery; then he responded to 2020’s nationwide spasm of riots and the crime spike that occurred on his watch by casting blame upon others.
The truth is that Trump’s record as president was the same as his record as a businessman: rich until the inheritance ran out. . .
And just about everything Trump claims he wants to do in a second term would make things worse. Writing for The Atlantic, another conservative Never-Trumper, Charlie Sykes, distilled Trump's economic moonshine:
Economists are warning that Trump’s reported idea to eliminate the income tax and replace it with massive tariffs on imports would cripple the economy, explode the cost of living, and likely set off a trade war. And because the math doesn’t come close to working, it would also tremendously increase the national debt. .
The politics of Trump’s latest scheme are perhaps even worse, because this plan exposes the hypocrisy of his faux populism. Indeed, what’s striking about the idea is just how regressive and non-populist it is. Replacing the income tax with tariffs would result in massive tax cuts for the ultrarich—at the expense of middle and lower-class Americans. Brendan Duke and Ryan Mulholland of the left-leaning Center for American Progress estimate that Trump’s proposal would raise taxes by $8,300 for the middle 20 percent of households, if American consumers end up bearing the full brunt of tariffs on imports.
Working Americans would be hit first by the higher tariffs and then by the inevitable economic fallout as businesses that rely on imports are crushed. Those same workers would also see the downstream effects of the inevitable retaliation from America’s former trading partners, which would likely result in a global trade war.
Even a more modest version of Trumponomics—imposing a 10 percent tax on all imports and a 60 percent tax on all imports from China, without trying to replace the income tax altogether—could result in a $2,500 annual tax increase for the typical family. Duke and Mulholland estimate that this plan would slap a $260 tax on the typical family’s electronics purchases, an $160 tax on its clothing purchases, and a $120 tax on its pharmaceutical-drug purchases. Middle-class families would pay more for gas and oil, along with toys and food. That’s because, as any economist will tell you, a large portion of increased tariffs are ultimately paid by consumers, not by the companies importing the goods. Republicans used to understand this concept, but now they seem desperate to deny it: Anna Kelly, a Republican National Committee spokesperson, recently insisted, “The notion that tariffs are a tax on U.S. consumers is a lie pushed by outsourcers and the Chinese Communist Party.” This is economic bunkum. . .
In the real world, this huge new tax would suppress demand for imports, which would in turn drive down the revenue from the Trump tariffs. The result: massive deficits as revenue falls short, even-higher taxes on the remaining imports, and draconian cuts in spending, including the entitlement programs, such as Social Security and Medicare, that Trump has promised (if somewhat inconsistently) to protect.
And then there is the Ghost of Smoot-Hawley. Historians and economists regard the 1930 Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act—which dramatically boosted tariffs on imports—as a disastrous miscalculation that deepened the Great Depression. Trump’s tariff tax is Smoot-Hawley with its hair on fire.
Similarly, John Cassidy of The New Yorker exposes the faux-populism of Trump’s running mate, J.D. Vance, and the incoherence of what the MAGA movement is offering to its working class base.
For all the lip service that the former President pays to standing up for the little guy, he has always held in great esteem, and aspired to improve his standing among, the financial élite and billionaire class. And his policies, if not his rhetoric, have reflected this reality.
Between 2017 and 2020, Trump talked frequently about reviving manufacturing, but he didn’t do much about it. Now he is threatening to undo much of the Biden Administration’s genuinely ambitious industrial-policy achievements. In his rambling convention speech last week, he repeated his pledge to eliminate federal subsidies for the purchase of electric vehicles, which have helped spark a spate of investments in new car plants. (Across a variety of bills, Biden has committed to spending more than a hundred billion dollars a year for five years on clean-energy technologies, semiconductors, and public infrastructure, doubling previous levels of spending.)
What else would Trump do in 2025? In public speeches and meetings with donors, he has pledged universal tariffs on imported goods, which would raise prices; mass deportations, which would exacerbate labor shortages; and an extension of tax cuts that were introduced in the G.O.P.’s Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017, which are due to expire at the end of next year. In the Bloomberg interview, he also said he’d like to further reduce the corporate tax rate to fifteen per cent.
The 2017 bill already slashed the corporate rate from thirty-five per cent to twenty-one per cent. And it’s worth being reminded of just how slanted toward the rich the bill’s personal tax cuts were and are. In 2025, according to an analysis by the Tax Policy Center that was done at the time of the bill’s passage, the cuts will boost the after-tax income of a typical middle-class household by $910, or less than twenty dollars a week. A household in the one per cent will enjoy a boost of more than sixty thousand dollars a year, and a household in the 0.1 per cent will see an annual gain of more than a quarter million dollars.
That’s what conservative populism looked like during the first Trump Administration, and it’s hard to imagine it would look much different in a second Trump term: tariffs, tax cuts for the rich, and mass deportations. Two other issues to watch would be financial regulation and antitrust. Vance has coupled his criticisms of Wall Street with praise for Lina Khan, the trust-busting head of Biden’s Federal Trade Commission. But, if Trump gets reëlected, the Wall Street and corporate wings of the Republican Party, including some of Vance’s billionaire donors, would be looking for regulatory relief and the appointment at the F.T.C. of someone more sympathetic to Big Business than Kahn. Would Vance have the power, or the inclination, to thwart them? . .
I’ve been resurfacing some of the newsletters I wrote in 2020 to remind ourselves what it was like to live under Trump’s presidency. In an opinion piece in the NYT, another moderate conservative, David French, remembers Trump as the chaos President.
I watched hour upon hour of the Republican National Convention, something I’ve done every four years since I was a young political nerd in 1984. I was even a Mitt Romney delegate at the Republican convention in 2012, and this was the first that revolved entirely around a fundamentally false premise: that in our troubled time, Donald Trump would be a source of order and stability.
To bolster their case, Republicans misled America. Speaker after speaker repeated the claim that America was safer and the world was more secure when Trump was president. But we can look at Trump’s record and see the truth. America was more dangerous and the world was quite chaotic during Trump’s term. Our enemies were not intimidated by Trump. In fact, Russia improved its strategic position during his time in office.
If past performance is any indicator of future results, Americans should brace themselves for more chaos if Trump wins.
The most egregious example of Republican deception centered around crime. The theme of the second night of the convention was “Make America Safe Again.” Yet the public mustn’t forget that the murder rate skyrocketed under Trump. According to the Pew Research Center, “The year-over-year increase in the U.S. murder rate in 2020 was the largest since at least 1905 — and possibly ever.” . .
Trump’s argument about foreign policy is also fundamentally deceptive. Throughout the convention, we heard variations of the same theme: Russia didn’t invade any other country under Trump, and Iran was broke and powerless. But again, this is misleading. Far from being frightened and intimidated by Trump, both Russia and Iran directly attacked American troops when he was president.
In 2018, Russian mercenaries and their Syrian allies assaulted an American position in northern Syria, leading to a four-hour battle during which American forces deployed artillery and airstrikes to beat back the attack. In 2020, Iran fired a volley of ballistic missiles at American troops in retaliation for our strike against Qassim Suleimani and injured more than 100 American service members.
In both instances, our forces handled themselves with courage, professionalism and skill, but if Russia and Iran were so frightened of Trump, why did they attack Americans? . . .
At the end of Trump’s term, Russia was stronger, Iran was unbowed, and America’s relationship with our key allies was more tenuous. Trump had even threatened to yank the United States out of NATO, our most important alliance, an act that would fulfill one of Putin’s fondest hopes.
Trump is hoping to win the presidency in part through appealing to so-called nostalgia voters, and so far it seems to be working. Millions of Americans appear to have forgotten the bad times in Trump’s term or excuse his failures. It will be up to the Democrats to remind Americans of the aspects of the Trump years that they’ve blocked from their minds — a period that began with alarms about war with North Korea, included a war scare with Iran, and ended with Russia advancing as we retreated. It was a term that began with low crime rates and ended with the worst murder spike in generations and the Capitol under siege.
In the television show “Ted Lasso,” the titular character — a folksy American football coach who manages an English professional soccer team — tells his team that goldfish have the shortest memories in the animal kingdom. “Be a goldfish,” he tells them, urging them to forget their mistakes, and play with confidence. While a short memory can be a virtue in sports, it’s a terrible trap for voters. It makes you vulnerable to lies.
Trump wants you to be a goldfish. He wants you to empty your mind of the past so that he can fill it with his own “alternative facts.” The Republican National Convention was one long exercise in creating memories of a Trump term that never existed. The real Trump term was chaotic and dangerous from start to finish, and if Americans’ memories don’t improve soon, the voters who seek peace and stability will instead bring us violence and tears.
In coming Redburn Reads, I plan to devote as much attention as possible not just to the past messes Trump made but to the future disasters we can expect in a second term. The starting point is the now infamous Project 2025 produced by a number of Trump advisers under the umbrella of the Heritage Foundation. Here’s just a sample of what it contains, from the valuable Substack duo of The Big Picture and Jay Kuo.
If you care about women’s rights and bodily autonomy
Project 2025’s authors never come out and expressly call for a national abortion ban. They are more politically savvy than that.
Instead, they recommend policy changes that would render illegal most abortions in America. In effect, it calls for a Trump presidency to impose as much of a prohibition on abortion as possible to achieve.
How does it propose to do this? It’s a multi-pronged assault, as follows:
Use the power of the FDA to force abortion medication off the market;
Restrict the permitted timeline for abortion medication and how they can be dispensed; and
Enforce a 19th-century law called the Comstock Act that once outlawed abortion medication from being sent through the mail.
Combined with red state laws that already prevent doctors from performing most abortions, these assaults would prove a severe blow to women seeking abortions around the country.
The Alliance Defending Freedom, which works closely with The Heritage Foundation, already sought to get medical abortion off the market by way of a federal court challenge. They shopped for a sympathetic federal judge who then ordered a national ban, but they ultimately lost before the Supreme Court—but only because it ruled that the plaintiffs challenging the FDA’s approval of the drug mifepristone did not have standing to sue. What that means in practice is that they will try again with better plaintiffs, and SCOTUS can render a more favorable ruling in a non-election year.
Short of getting SCOTUS to ban abortion medication, Project 2025 recommends the FDA withdraw its 24-year approval of mifepristone should Trump take office. And as CBS News further reports,
Other proposed actions targeting medication abortion include reinstating more stringent rules for mifepristone's use, which would permit it to be taken up to seven weeks into a pregnancy, instead of the current 10 weeks, and requiring it to be dispensed in-person instead of through the mail.
Project 2025 also cites a little-known but very dangerous law from the 19th century known as the Comstock Act, which it says should now be enforced to prevent abortion medication from being sent through the U.S. mail system.
While Project 2025 never comes out expressly for a national abortion ban, we shouldn’t be fooled. The express goal of Project 2025 is to “maintain a biblically based, social science-reinforced definition of marriage and family." In fact, it expressly recommends that the Department of Health and Human Services make that its goal and should "return to being known as the Department of Life."
Indeed, the plan calls for some Orwellian inversions of the role of HHS. As Axios reported,
HHS would do so "by explicitly rejecting the notion that abortion is health care and by restoring its mission statement under the Strategic Plan and elsewhere to include furthering the health and well-being of all Americans 'from conception to natural death.'"
As part of its "Life Agenda," Project 2025 also calls for the elimination of the HHS Reproductive Healthcare Access Task Force developed by the Biden White House just months prior to the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision.
Heritage would replace this team with "a pro-life task force to ensure that all of the department's divisions seek to use their authority to promote the life and health of women and their unborn children."
And don’t be fooled by the absence of express abortion ban language in the new RNC platform. They achieve that in a different way, which they have clearly signaled.
Take this statement: “We believe that the 14th Amendment to the Constitution of the United States guarantees that no person can be denied Life or Liberty without Due Process and that the States are, therefore, free to pass Laws protecting those rights.”
Sounds great, right? Think again. They are talking here about fetal personhood rights. That’s the practice of recognizing fetuses as legal persons, entitled to all the rights that full humans enjoy. The Alabama Supreme Court recently recognized frozen IVF embryos as people to permit a wrongful death case to proceed, and that’s just a hint of what is coming. As noted by The 19th News,
If established by legislation, fetal personhood would have the practical effect of prohibiting abortion at all stages of pregnancy. Its impact could become national if courts affirm state-level laws that extend the application of the 14th Amendment to fetuses.
It is no coincidence that the RNC platform was overseen by Russ Vought, who is a principal author of Project 2025 and is Trump’s former Director of the Office of Management and Budget. He wrote the chapter on “Taking the Reins of Government” in the Project 2025 blueprint, and he also oversaw the language signaling support for fetal personhood in the RNC platform, which would end abortion rights as we know them. . .
With Joe Biden wisely withdrawing from the campaign, it is worth remembering how much he accomplished in his single term as President. And before our attention turns to the coming battle for America, we should acknowledge the debt we owe this lifelong politician who was underestimated for nearly all of his career. Writing in The New Republic, here’s Timothy Noah making the case for Biden's historic accomplishments.
Like a lot of the Washington press corps, for a long time I got Joe Biden wrong. Biden withdrew from the 2024 presidential race this weekend, as was necessary due to growing evidence of small but worrying age-related infirmities. But as Biden exits, let’s not forget that Biden leaves behind a remarkably strong record on which his Democratic successor will run. Biden has not just been a good president—he has been a transformative one. Which I find no small surprise, having once written him off as a politician with a lot more ambition than talent. . .
Biden’s greatest accomplishments as president were confined mostly to his first two years, because that was when he had a Democratic House and Senate. But his Senate majority was so narrow—48 Democrats plus two independents who caucused with Democrats plus one tie-breaking vice president—that it’s a wonder Biden got anything done at all. Two of the Democrats, Senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, were scarcely Democrats at all (and, indeed, ended up becoming independents, though they continued to caucus with Democrats). Both were given to conservative posturing, and on big administration priorities Manchin in particular was infuriatingly difficult to pin down.
Yet Biden managed to push through Congress a remarkable series of game-changing spending bills:
The $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan. This was, the Princeton sociologist Matthew Desmond observed, “the most important intervention the federal government has made in the lives of low-income Americans since the great society,” including a refundable child tax credit that “reduced child poverty to its lowest rate in U.S. history.” The refundable credit represented a significant change in social policy, weaning Congress off culture-of-poverty arguments that forbade no-strings federal assistance. The refundable credit expired at the end of 2021, but there’s a realistic hope that some version of it will be resurrected.
The $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill. Infrastructure spending isn’t particularly novel, which is why this bill received bipartisan support. But the scale of Biden’s bill was ambitious in a way the country hadn’t seen, arguably, since the New Deal. It dwarfed Obama’s $48 billion 2009 Recovery Act and Obama’s $305 billion follow-up infrastructure bill in 2015. Trump, of course, proved unequal to moving an infrastructure bill at all, even though for two years he enjoyed House and Senate majorities larger than Biden’s.
The $740 billion Inflation Reduction Act. The IRA was the largest investment in green technology in U.S. history, and represented a paradigm shift in prioritizing the carrot of spending over the stick of punitive taxation. Joseph Stiglitz makes a persuasive argument in his 2024 book The Road to Freedom that the stick remains more efficient from an economic point of view, but after years of trying to persuade Congress to apply the stick, Democrats concluded that climate change’s urgency compelled them to make the perfect the enemy of the good and use the carrot instead.
The $280 billion CHIPS Act. For decades, Washington dithered over whether it was all right for the government to “pick winners and losers” through an industrial policy. A decade ago, the Solyndra scandal, which involved a $535 million government loan guarantee to a company that went bankrupt, persuaded many Democrats that industrial policy was just too risky. But the supply chain nightmare of the Covid years altered that calculus, allowing the Biden administration to pass, with Republican support, a bill to return semiconductor production to the U.S. and expand the country’s investment in research and development.
Biden nursed Obamacare back to financial health after Trump and congressional Republicans tried to starve it to death, bringing the percentage of uninsured Americans down from about 10 percent when Biden entered office to about 8 percent today. He also pushed through Congress (in the IRA) a law that finally granted Medicare, two decades after creation of its drug benefit, the power it needed to negotiate the prices of those drugs. And he capped the price of insulin, which had been skyrocketing for a decade, at $35 per month for Medicare recipients. Nearly one-third of all people over 65 have diabetes. . . .
Biden, near the end of an unusually long career in politics, became one of our better presidents, ranking below Franklin Roosevelt but above nearly every president who followed him. A lot of us never imagined such a thing was possible. Biden set us straight. Thank you, Mr. President, for using your last act to make fools of your detractors.
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