Letters from an American

October 2, 2024
More than 45,000 U.S. dock workers went on strike today for the first time since 1977, nearly 50 years ago. The International Longshoremen's Association union, which represents 45,000 port workers, is negotiating with the United States Maritime Alliance (USMX) employer group over a new contract. The strike will shut down 36 ports from Maine to Texas, affecting about half the country’s shipping. Analysts from J.P. Morgan estimate that the strike could cost the U.S. economy about $5 billion a day. The strikers have said they will continue to unload military cargo.

Dockworkers want a 77% increase in pay over six years and better benefits, while USMX has said it has offered to increase wages by nearly 50%, triple employer contributions to retirement plans, and improve health care options. In the Washington Post, economics columnist Heather Long pointed out that the big issue at stake is the automation that threatens union jobs.

Although the strike threatens to slow the economy depending on how long it lasts, President Joe Biden has refused requests to force the strikers back to work, reiterating his support for collective bargaining. He noted that ocean carriers have made record profits since the pandemic—sometimes in excess of 800% over prepandemic levels—and that executive compensation and shareholder profits have reflected those profits. “It’s only fair that workers, who put themselves at risk during the pandemic to keep ports open, see a meaningful increase in their wages as well,” Biden said in a statement.

In the presidential contest, the Trump-Vance campaign is trying to preserve its false narrative. In Wisconsin today, Trump accused Vice President Harris of murder—although he appeared to get confused about the victim—and claimed that she has a phone app on which the heads of cartels can get information about where to drop undocumented immigrants. He also said that Kim Jong Un of North Korea is trying to kill him.

When asked if he should have been tougher on Iran after it launched ballistic missiles in 2020 on U.S. forces in Iraq, leaving more than 100 U.S. soldiers injured, Trump rejected the idea that soldiers with traumatic brain injuries were actually hurt. He said “they had a headache” and said he thought the attack “was a very nice thing because they didn’t want us to retaliate.”

Trump also backed out of a scheduled interview with 60 Minutes that correspondent Scott Pelley was slated to conduct on Thursday. 60 Minutes noted that for more than 50 years, the show has invited both campaigns to appear on the broadcast before the election and this year, both campaigns agreed to an interview. Trump’s spokesperson complained that 60 Minutes “insisted on doing live fact checking, which is unprecedented.” Vice President Kamala Harris will participate in her interview as planned.

The campaign’s resistance to independent fact checking of their false narrative came up in tonight’s vice presidential debate on CBS between Minnesota governor Tim Walz, Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris’s running mate, and Ohio senator J.D. Vance, running mate for Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump. CBS Evening News anchor Norah O'Donnell and Face the Nation moderator and chief foreign affairs correspondent Margaret Brennan moderated the debate.

Walz’s goal in the debate was to do no harm to Vice President Harris’s campaign, and he achieved that. Vance’s goal was harder: to give people a reason to vote for Donald Trump. It is doubtful he moved any needles there.

The moments that did stand out in the debate put a spotlight on Vance’s tenuous relationship with the truth. When Vance lied again about the migrants in Springfield, Ohio, who are in the United States legally, Brennan added: "Just to clarify for our viewers, Springfield, Ohio, does have a large number of Haitian migrants who have legal status."

Vance responded: "The rules were that you guys weren't going to fact-check.”

There were two other big moments of the evening, both based in lies. First, Vance claimed that Trump, who tried repeatedly to repeal or weaken the Affordable Care Act, “saved” it. Then, Walz asked Vance directly if Trump lost the 2020 presidential election. Vance refused to answer, saying he is “focused on the future,” and warned that “the threat of censorship” is the real problem in the U.S.

Walz said: “That’s a damning non-answer.”

Former chair of the Republican Party Michael Steele said after the debate: “I don't care where you are on policy…. If you cannot in 2024 answer that question, you are unfit for office.”

It was significant that Vance tried to avoid saying either that Trump won in 2020—a litmus test for MAGA Republicans—or that he lost, a reflection of reality. While this debate probably didn’t move a lot of voters for the 2024 election, what it did do was make Vance look like a far more viable candidate than his running mate. Waffling on the Big Lie seemed designed to preserve his candidacy for future elections.

It seems likely that the message behind Vance’s smooth performance wasn’t lost on Trump. As the debate was going on, Trump posted: “The GREAT Pete Rose just died. He was one of the most magnificent baseball players ever to play the game. He paid the price! Major League Baseball should have allowed him into the Hall of Fame many years ago. Do it now, before his funeral!”

Former Cincinnati Reds baseball player Rose died yesterday at 83.

 

For perhaps the first time I agree with Trump, Rose should be in the BH of F. About last night's debate, I was annoyed by both candidates steadfast refusal to answer direct questions. To me the event was not a tie, to me they both lost.

 

I got behind in my posting.
Written October 2 and posted on October 3rd
Part One

When moderator Margaret Brennan noted during last night’s vice presidential debate that Republican nominee J.D. Vance had, once again, lied about the legal status of migrants in Springfield, Ohio, Vance retorted: “The rules were that you guys weren’t going to fact-check!” As scholar of propaganda Pekka Kallioniemi noted, this was “[t]he epitome of post-truth politics.”

Vance lied throughout the debate and has lied throughout this campaign, and in that, he is following the MAGA Republicans and Trump, who has become entirely untethered from reality. Aaron Rupar, who watches Trump’s rallies, and Noah Berlatsky wrote in Public Notice that Trump’s growing mental incapacity was obvious yesterday, as in two rallies he made a “wide-ranging journey through conspiracy theories, hatred, and nonsense.” He “seems ever more adrift in his own fog of hate and ego,” Rupar and Berlatsky wrote, “He mixes up world leaders, confuses countries, garbles pronouns, loses track of his nonsense talking points.”

Vance’s post-truth world did not dominate last night’s debate. A Politico/Focaldata snap poll afterward showed that while party voters overwhelmingly declared their party’s nominee the winner, 58% of Independents backed Democratic vice presidential nominee Tim Walz.

Before the debate, political consultant Stuart Stevens posted: “If you want to know what the campaigns think of their VP candidates debate, just watch how they schedule the candidates post-debate. After Cheney VP debates, Lieberman and Edwards basically disappeared, banished to tiny markets. If Trump world believes America wants more Vance, they can put him in big markets in big states. I’m doubting that will happen. I suspect that [the] Harris campaign gets Walz in front of more voters after debate. He wears well.”

Today, Stevens noted that the campaign is ramping up Walz’s schedule, sending him through Pennsylvania, Nevada, and Arizona and adding more media, including “two national TV interviews, a podcast and a late-night TV appearance,” and that Trump said he was “satisfied with Vance’s ‘fantastic’ performance.”

But Vance’s willingness to lie matters to Trump, and nowhere more than in his refusal to acknowledge that Trump lost the 2020 presidential election. Vance has repeatedly said he would have done what Vice President Mike Pence would not: go along with Trump’s attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election, urging the states to approve “alternative” slates of electors than the ones that accurately reflected the choice voters made at the polls.

“Let’s be clear,” former representative Liz Cheney (R-WY) responded, “This is illegal and unconstitutional. The American people had voted. The courts had ruled. The Electoral College had met and voted. The Governor in every state had certified the results and sent a legal slate of electors to the Congress to be counted. The Vice President has no constitutional authority to tell states to submit alternative slates of electors because his candidate lost. That is tyranny.”

Vance’s stance was poorly timed. This afternoon, Judge Tanya Chutkan released the government’s motion for immunity determinations, special counsel Jack Smith’s legal filing laying out the government’s case against Trump for his attempt to overturn the 2020 presidential election. The filing pulls from previously unreleased interviews, calls, and messages to paint a damning picture of Trump’s behavior as he tried to steal the presidency. Names in it are redacted, but journalists have already figured them out.

The filing is coming now because Trump and then the Supreme Court repeatedly delayed the case. After the Supreme Court decided that presidents are immune from prosecution for crimes committed as part of a president’s official acts, the court had to take on what constituted an official act. In today’s filing, Smith argued that where Trump “was acting ‘as office-seeker, not office-holder,’ no immunity attaches.” The government asks that “the Court determine that the defendant must stand trial for his private crimes as would any other citizen.”

 

Part Two, October 2nd
The facts of the case begin with a damning statement: “When the defendant lost the 2020 presidential election, he resorted to crimes to try to stay in office.”

Fundamental to those crimes was disinformation. The entire plan for keeping Trump in office depended on Trump and his loyalists lying to the American people, convincing them of a completely false story that the 2020 presidential election had been stolen.

That effort started long before the actual election when it became clear to the Trump team that he was unlikely to win. They knew, though, that since Democrats were more likely than Republicans to use mail-in ballots, there would be an initial period when his numbers were higher than Democratic nominee Joe Biden’s.

In that case, Trump told advisor Roger Stone, his chief of staff Mark Meadows, and Vice President Mike Pence’s chief of staff Mark Short, he would simply declare before all the ballots had been counted that he had won. In the meantime, he planted the idea that the election would be stolen from him, publicly saying, for example, that he would “have to see” whether he would accept the election results and saying that the only way he could lose would be if the election was rigged.

On October 31, advisor Steve Bannon, whose specialty was disinformation, told a group of supporters that Trump was simply “going to declare victory. That doesn’t mean he’s the winner, he’s just going to say he’s the winner…that’s our strategy.”

That’s exactly what Trump did. He claimed there had been fraud in the election and that he had won. Then, as states continued to count votes, Trump’s operatives tried to create chaos at the polling places. When the vote count in Detroit swung toward Biden, for example, operative Michael Roman told a colleague there to “give me options to file litigation… even if itbis [sic],” apparently meaning “even if it is BS.” Smith noted that “[w]hen a colleague suggested there was about to be unrest reminiscent of the Brooks Brothers Riot, a violent effort to stop the vote count in Florida after the 2000 presidential election”—a riot in which Roger Stone had participated—Roman responded: “Make them riot” and “Do it!!!”

Even as Trump publicly claimed victory, his campaign staff told him his chances of prevailing were slim. To win, they told him, he must carry Arizona, Georgia, and Wisconsin. When the campaign conceded its litigation in Arizona on November 13, it effectively admitted Trump had lost the election. As soon as his lawyers conceded in Arizona, Trump sidelined his campaign staff and turned to Giuliani and lawyers who would back the Big Lie.

To overturn the election results, Trump and his loyalists turned to pressuring Republicans in the states he had lost, especially Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, as well as in states that used certain voting machines, to say the election had been fraudulent. When officials demanded proof of their claims, Trump and Giuliani threatened them, then accused them of betrayal and spread their names to angry supporters, who harassed them. Again and again, Republican officials told Trump his numbers were wrong and that he had lost the election. They begged him to stop spreading lies.

As for the idea that voting machines had been compromised, Chris Krebs, the director of the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, publicly posted that claims of election fraud through voting machines “either have been unsubstantiated or are technically incoherent.” When Trump tried to get then–Republican National Committee chair Ronna McDaniel to publicize a report that claimed machines in Antrim County, Michigan, had affected the vote, McDaniel declined, saying she had already discussed the report with Michigan’s speaker of the house, who had told her the report was “f*cking nuts.”

By late November, neither the legal challenges nor the threats had worked. So in early December the conspirators decided to get the people who would have been the electors if Trump had won to sign certifications saying that they were the legitimate electors and were casting their electoral votes for Trump. The lawyer who came up with the plan, Ken Chesebro, admitted that “the votes aren’t legal” but thought Congress could use them to challenge the real votes.

Many of the electors were wary of the plan, but Trump and his conspirators managed to get the slates of fake electors on December 14, the appointed day for real electors to meet. The plan was for Vice President Mike Pence, who as president of the Senate would preside over the counting of the electoral votes, to use the fake electors to say there were competing slates of electors and thus to “negotiate a solution to defeat Biden.” On December 19, Trump posted: “Statistically impossible to have lost the 2020 Election. Big protest in D.C. on January 6. Be there, will be wild!”

But the plan hit a snag. Pence maintained he did not have the power to do any such thing. The more Pence refused, the more insistent Trump became. After another argument on January 1, 2021, Trump told Pence that “hundreds of thousands of people are going to hate your guts,” “people are gonna think you’re stupid,” and, finally, “You’re too honest.”

Trump, Bannon, and Trump’s lawyers all continued to pressure Pence, and Bannon normalized the plan on his podcast. Trump continued to talk publicly of fighting to make sure his opponents didn’t take the White House and continued to pressure Pence. On January 5—the day before the election certification proceeding—he talked to Bannon, and less than two hours later, on his podcast, Bannon told his listeners: “All Hell is going to break loose tomorrow” in Washington, D.C.

Concerned at Trump’s escalating fury at Pence, Pence’s chief of staff Mark Short alerted Pence’s secret service detail. Then, after Trump spoke with Bannon and lawyer John Eastman, who had come up with the legal argument for Pence’s power to affect the count, he simply lied on social media that Pence agreed the vice president could change the election results, then posted: “Do it, Mike, this is a time for extreme courage!”

When Pence continued to refuse, on January 6, Trump told his supporters at the Ellipse that Pence had let him down and then continued to lie that the election had been stolen, assuring them they would “never take back our country with weakness.” Then he sent the crowd to obstruct the proceedings.

Trump sat in the small dining room off the Oval Office watching the Fox News Channel and scrolling through Twitter as the crowd broke into the Capitol. At 2:24, Trump tweeted that “Mike Pence didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our Country and our Constitution, giving States a chance to certify a corrected set of facts, not the fraudulent or inaccurate ones which they were asked to previously certify. USA demands the truth!” A rioter read the tweet through a bullhorn for the crowd. A minute later, the Secret Service had to evacuate Pence to a secure location. When told of Pence’s danger, Trump answered: “So what?”

When Congress came back after the riot, Trump and Giuliani tried to delay further, calling senators and one representative to slow the process down. It didn’t work. On January 7, at 3:41 in the morning, Pence announced that Biden’s election had been certified.

It was all a lie.

One hundred and forty police officers assaulted, close to $3 million in damage, close to 1,200 people charged, more than 450 serving prison sentences, a poisonous political movement taking root, and voter suppression laws…all because Trump couldn’t bear to have lost an election.

“Post-truth politics” has real-world repercussions.

Last night, when a reporter in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, asked him if trusted the electoral process this time around, Trump answered: “I’ll let you know in about 33 days.”

 

October 3, 2024 (Thursday)
Part One
Former Republican representative Liz Cheney of Wyoming joined Vice President Kamala Harris on a stage hung with red, white, and blue bunting and signs that said “Country Over Party.” As Cheney took the stage, the crowd chanted, “Thank you, Liz!” The two were on the campaign trail today in Ripon, Wisconsin, the town that claims to be the birthplace of the Republican Party. It was in that then-tiny town in 1852 that Alvan E. Bovay, who had recently emigrated from New York, called for a new political party to stand against slavery.

The idea of a new party took off in 1854 when it became clear the Kansas-Nebraska Act permitting the westward expansion of human enslavement would become law. When they met in February of that year, people in Ripon were early participants in the movement of people across the North to defend democracy. Rather than standing against slavery alone, those organizing in 1854 stood against an entire political system, opposing the small group of elite enslavers who had taken over the U.S. government in order to establish an oligarchy and were quite clear they rejected the self-evident truth in the Declaration of Independence that all men were created equal. Instead, they intended to rule over the nation’s majority, whose labor produced the capital that southern leaders believed only elites should control.

In the face of this existential threat to the country, party divisions crumbled.

Pundits have described today’s event as a component of Harris’s ongoing outreach to Republicans, and in part, it is. That outreach, begun under President Joe Biden and continuing even more aggressively under Harris, is bearing fruit as in an open letter today, two dozen Republican former officials and lawmakers in Wisconsin endorsed Harris and her running mate Minnesota governor Tim Walz. “We have plenty of policy disagreements with Vice President Harris,” the Republicans wrote. “But what we do agree upon is more important. We agree that we cannot afford another four years of the broken promises, election denialism, and chaos of Donald Trump’s leadership.”

Lately, there have been indications of what returning Trump to office might mean.

On Tuesday, Trump suggested that the U.S. soldiers who sustained traumatic brain injuries (TBI) when Iran attacked an Iraqi base where they were stationed were not truly injured, but simply had “headaches.” Trump’s statement brought back to light a 2021 CBS report by Catherine Herridge and Michael Kaplan that found the injured soldiers had not been recognized with a Purple Heart, awarded to service members wounded or killed in the line of duty, despite qualifying for it. This slight meant they were denied the medical benefits that come with that military decoration.
The soldiers told Herridge and Kaplan that they were pressured to downplay their injuries to avoid undercutting Trump’s attempt to keep the casualty numbers in that incident low. With the story back in the news, Kaplan posted that after the report, the Army awarded the soldiers the Purple Hearts they deserved.

Journalist Magdi Jacobs recalled the argument of Trump’s lawyers before the Supreme Court that Trump could not prod a SEAL team to assassinate a rival because service members would adhere to the rules of their institutions. The Army officers’ bowing to Trump’s political demands proved that argument was wrong and set off “[m]ajor alarm bells,” Jacobs posted, suggesting that the military would not stand firm against Trump in a second term, especially now that the Supreme Court says a president cannot be prosecuted for crimes committed as part of official duties.

Scott Waldman and Thomas Frank of Politico’s E&E News covering energy and the environment reported today that two former White House officials said that Trump was “flagrantly partisan” when responding to natural disasters. One said that in 2018 Trump refused to approve disaster aid after wildfires to California, perceiving it as a Democratic state. To get disaster money, the aide showed Trump polling results revealing that Orange County, which had been badly damaged in the fires, “had more Trump supporters than the entire state of Iowa.”

Defending the Big Lie that Trump had won the 2020 presidential election, former Colorado county clerk Tina Peters in 2021 gave a security badge to a man associated with MyPillow owner Mike Lindell to enable him to breach the county’s voting systems in an unsuccessful attempt to find evidence of voter fraud. A jury found Peters guilty of four felonies related to the scheme. Today, District Court Judge Matthew Barrett sentenced Peters to nine years in prison.

 

Part Two
But there are other stories these days of what the government can accomplish when it is focused on the good of all Americans.

About 45,000 dock workers in the International Longshoremen’s Association went on strike Tuesday when the union could not reach an agreement with the United States Maritime Alliance (USMX) employer group over a new contract. The strike shut down 36 ports from Maine to Texas, affecting about half the country’s shipping just as the areas hammered by Hurricane Helene desperately needed supplies. Dockworkers wanted a pay increase of up to 77% over six years and better benefits, as well as an end to the automation that threatens union jobs.
President Joe Biden reiterated his support for collective bargaining despite the threat of an economic slowdown from the strike. The Wall Street Journal editorial board excoriated Biden and the union, saying: “President Biden wants unions to have extortionary bargaining power, and he’s getting a demonstration of it on election eve. Congratulations.”

But today the International Longshoremen’s Association suspended the strike after USMX agreed to wage increases of 62% over six years. The two sides agreed to extend the current contract until January 15 to address the issues of benefits and automation. Administration officials White House Chief of Staff Jeff Zients, top White House economic advisor Lael Brainard, Acting Secretary of Labor Julie Su, and Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg helped broker the temporary agreement.

The government’s power to make things better is also on display amid the rubble and ruin left behind by Hurricane Helene. Yesterday evening, after taking an aerial tour of western North Carolina to survey the damage and receiving a briefing in Raleigh, President Biden thanked both “the Republican governor of South Carolina and the Democratic governor of North Carolina and all of the elected officials who’ve focused on the task at hand. In a moment like this, we put politics aside. At least we should put it all aside, and we have here. There are no Democrats or Republicans; there are only Americans. And our job is to help as many people as we can as quickly as we can and as thoroughly as we can.”
Biden explained that the federal government had 1,000 first responders in place before the storms hit, and that he had approved emergency declarations as soon as he received the requests from the governors. Yesterday he directed the Defense Department to move 1,000 soldiers to reinforce North Carolina’s National Guard to speed up the delivery of supplies like food, water, and medicine to isolated communities, some of which are accessible now only by pack mule.

He has already deployed 50 Starlink satellites for communication, and more are coming.

Teams from the Federal Emergency Management Agency are offering free temporary housing, as well as delivering food and water. They are helping people apply for the help that they need.

While Trump and MAGA Republicans insist that Biden is botching the response to Helene, CNN fact checker Daniel Dale noted that the response has gotten bipartisan praise. Republican governors Henry McMaster of South Carolina and Glenn Youngkin of Virginia both thanked Biden by name for what McMaster called a “superb” response.

So today’s bipartisan event in Ripon suggests far more than Democratic outreach to Republicans. It appears to be a commitment to a government that advances the interests of ordinary people, and protects the right of everyone to be treated equally before the law and to have a say in their government. Republican Abraham Lincoln articulated this worldview for his fledgling party in 1859 as it took a stand against oligarchs. Believing these principles accurately represented the aspirations of the nation’s founders, Lincoln called them “conservative.” People from all parties rallied to the party that promised to defend those principles.

“The president of the United States must not look at our country through the narrow lens of ideology or petty partisanship or self-interest,” Harris said today.

“The president of the United States must not look at our country as an instrument for their own ambitions. Our nation is not some spoil to be won. The United States of America is the greatest idea humanity ever devised: the nation that inspired the world to believe in the possibility of a representative government. And so in the face of those who would endanger our magnificent experiment, people of every party must stand together.”
"In this election, putting patriotism ahead of partisanship is not an aspiration. It is our duty,” Cheney said. “I ask all of you here and everyone listening across this great country to join us. I ask you to meet this moment. I ask you to stand in truth, to reject the depraved cruelty of Donald Trump. And I ask you instead to help us elect Kamala Harris for president.

"I know…that…a president Harris will be able to unite this nation. I know that she will be a president who will defend the rule of law, and I know that she will be a president who can inspire all of our children—and if I might say so, especially our little girls—to do great things. So help us right the ship of our democracy so that history will say of us, when our time of testing came, we did our duty and we prevailed because we loved our country more.”