There’s More….

Yesterday, I shared some of the disturbing proposals of Project 2025, but of course, a document of nearly 1000 pages includes many other terrifying “ideas.”  The New Republic has listed several, gleaned from an advance copy of the book by Kevin Roberts, who captained the Project for the Heritage Foundation.

There’s good reason publication of the book has been delayed until after the election.

Dawn’s Early Light has all the misplaced confidence of a movement that’s mistaken a 6–3 Supreme Court and an easily played New York Times op-ed page for some kind of mandate. The party that has won the popular vote in a presidential election exactly once in the last 35 years is not popular, and people do not want what they’re selling. When your only path to power consists in gerrymandering and shaving tight victories in a few key swing states while the opposition runs up the margins nearly everywhere else, you might try for some soul-searching about why people don’t like you, but Roberts and his Heritage Foundation have instead opted for violent threats, claiming a “second American revolution” is coming that will remain “bloodless” only “if the left allows it to be.”

The book details the Project’s enemies: public schools, China, godlessness, and government regulations are prominent, but the Project proposes widespread destruction of numerous other American institutions.

“Every Ivy League college, the FBI, the New York Times, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, the Department of Education, 80 percent of ‘Catholic’ higher education, BlackRock, the Loudoun County Public School System, the Boy Scouts of America, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the World Economic Forum, the Chinese Communist Party, and the National Endowment for Democracy.”

What is the plan to enact this bloodletting? While there are sops to Ronald Reagan throughout, Dawn’s Early Light is clear that the era of small government is over; Roberts thinks government should be the change he wants to see in the world. The New Conservative Movement, as he terms it, will use the federal government as a bludgeon against any and all of its cultural and economic foes, while the small-minded small government folk are derided throughout as “wax-museum conservatives.”

Roberts wants government to force American to embrace his vision of “Faith, Family, Community, and Work.” And–not surprisingly–“Faith” means Christianity.

Policies that encourage religious observance, such as Sabbath laws and voucher programs that include religious schools, should be encouraged. American society is rooted in the Christian faith—certainly public institutions should not establish anything offensive to Christian morals under the guise of “religious freedom” or “diversity, equity, and inclusion.”

As I noted yesterday, Roberts reserves special animus for reproductive freedom, especially the birth control pill–which he wants to outlaw.

“The birth control pill,” he tells us, “was the product of a decades-long research agenda paid for by the Rockefeller Foundation and other eugenicist and population control-oriented groups.” These eugenicist-sponsored technologies, Roberts believes, are the true culprits, for they “shift norms, incentives, and choices, often invisibly and involuntarily,” making us think we want something that we in fact don’t.

Even a thing you might think the pro-birth crowd might like, like in vitro fertilization—which produces babies!—is not good in Roberts’s view….

This technological conspiracy, where every modern convenience from the Pill to the Playstation is keeping us from our God-given duty to be fruitful and multiply, must be fought at every level—from government tax policy and regulation (to encourage stay-at-home mothers) to pro-family technologies (like Tinder rival “Keeper,” a dating app whose mission is to “end human loneliness by giving everyone the opportunity to start a happy, healthy family”).

The article has much more of this insane world-view. (I just learned that Heritage wants to end government’s hard-won new ability to negotiate drug prices, something that just saved seniors and government billions!) But you might also be wondering how these lunatics plan to sell their vision to an American public unlikely to favor their version of utopia.

Pro Publica has answered that. It’s reporters uncovered “training videos” produced for Project 2025’s proponents/salespersons.

“Eradicate climate change references”; only talk to conservative media; don’t leave a paper trail for watchdogs to discover. In a series of never-before-published videos, Project 2025 details how a second Trump administration would operate.

The videos have strategies for avoiding Freedom of Information Act disclosures, for ensuring that conservative policies aren’t struck down by “left-wing judges,” and for “radically changing how the federal government works and what it does.”

This entire enterprise is delusional. It entirely ignores the existence of a robust contemporary culture that would resist a U-turn to the 1950s (or, really, the 1850’s).

Project 2025 accurately reflects the MAGA worldview. Sane people must defeat it in November.

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Speaking Of Project 2025…

If–as I fondly hope–the Democrats are victorious in November, future analysts of this year’s election are likely to focus on two major reasons for that success: Donald Trump and Heritage’s incredibly witless decision to leak the existence of Project 2025.

I need not belabor Trump’s rapidly disintegrating campaign. He can still pull this election out–if there are more MAGA cult members than I want to believe and too few rational people who vote–but at this juncture, he is rapidly descending into incoherence and obvious senility, and struggling to find an insult for Harris that will resonate. His choice of JD Vance as Vice-Presidential candidate once again displayed his lack of judgment. His constant insistence that America is a hellhole teetering on the edge of depression and teeming with criminals is evidence of his looney-tunes detachment from reality.

Trump’s inability to reach beyond his base– the voters who applaud his incivility and share his bigotries– is one thing; the revelations of Project 2025– the GOP’s transition plan–is another. To call the Plan’s measures “unpopular” is an understatement. As one pundit observed, “it polls like Ebola.”

In a recent Letter from an American, Heather Cox Richardson reported on several of the elements of that document, calling it an “extremist vision of a country ruled by a strongman who took the civil service, the Department of Justice, and the military under his own control in order to slash the popular, secular parts of the government and replace them with Christian nationalism.”

Right-wing evangelicals liked what was outlined in the project, but when the majority of Americans began to understand what was in it, they were quite clear they wanted no part of it. Trump then tried to distance himself from it, although he had publicly praised it, his political action committee had called it his plan, and more than 100 of its architects were people who had served in his administration.

And then it turned out that Trump’s vice presidential pick, J. D. Vance, had written the introduction for a book by Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts, the chief author of Project 2025. The original publication date for the book, which calls for “a peaceful ‘Second American Revolution,’” was in September, shortly before the election, but today the publisher announced it would put off publication until November, after the election.

The publication may have been delayed, but several copies of the book were already in the hands of reviewers. Despite Republican efforts to soften or otherwise obscure the party’s efforts to ban women’s reproductive freedoms, the book makes very clear that the folks currently in control of the GOP intend to come not just for abortion, but for birth control and in vitro fertilization. According to these Christian Nationalists, having children should not be considered an ‘optional individual choice,’ but a ‘social expectation.’” The book characterizes reproductive choice as a “snake strangling the American family.”

(The book also says dog parks are “anti-family.” I am not making this up–google it. In the book, Roberts complains that parks catering to dogs, rather than children, are evidence of “the antifamily culture shaping legislation, regulation, and enforcement throughout our sprawling government.” Take that, Rover!!)

Richardson also tells us that–in addition to his enthusiastic introduction to Project 2025–Vance wrote a glowing blurb for another Right-wing screed.

The book, titled “Unhumans: The Secret History of Communist Revolutions (and How to Crush Them),” calls for purging their enemies from society. “In the past, communists marched in the streets waving red flags,” Vance wrote. “Today, they march through HR, college campuses, and courtrooms to wage lawfare against good, honest people… In ‘Unhumans,’ Jack Posobiec and Joshua Lisec reveal their plans and show us what to do to fight back.”

Vance, Heritage and the MAGA movement don’t just oppose reproductive liberty. They oppose Separation of Church and State, “HR, college campuses and courtrooms”–in other words, diversity (“those people”), education (Project 2025 proposes to replace public schools with voucher programs, and endorses current Republican assaults on academic freedom) and the rule of law. The GOP doesn’t just want women returned to the kitchen and bedroom; it wants gay folks back in the closet. And it denies the existence–let alone the medical needs– of trans people.

CNN recently reported on the secret taping of a conversation with one of the Project’s authors, a self-described Christian Nationalist who disclosed–among many other things– the current preparation of Executive Orders and other legal documents in order to facilitate the rapid implementation of Project policies by an incoming Trump Administration.

A vote for any Republican is a vote for this entirely anti-American Project.

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So Here’s The Thing…

Since 2016, I have participated in more conversations than I can count focused on the query: “How can anyone look at Donald Trump and conclude this mentally-ill buffoon should be President?'”

The only answer I’ve been able to come up with, after surveying the research, is that Trump hates the same people they do, and to MAGA, shared racism is all that matters.

During the last few months, that question has taken on even more relevance, because Trump’s mental processes–such as they were–have dramatically declined. That deterioration was “front and center” during what was billed as a press conference a week or so ago.

The best account of that event–attended by what was evidently a hand-picked group of “journalists” unlikely to ask pertinent or follow-up questions–was written by Tom Nichols in the Atlantic. 

Donald Trump’s public events are a challenge for anyone who writes about him. His rallies and press conferences are rich sources of material, fountains of molten weirdness that blurp up stuff that would sink the career of any other politician. By the time they’re over, all of the attendees are covered in gloppy nonsense.

And then, once everyone cleans up and shakes the debris off their phones and laptops, so much of what Trump said seems too bonkers to have come from a former president and the nominee of a major party that journalists are left trying to piece together a story as if Trump were a normal person. This is what The Atlantic’s editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, has described as the “bias toward coherence,” and it leads to careful circumlocutions instead of stunned headlines.

The so-called “press conference” was Trump’s response to the publicity that Harris and Walz were generating (Trump can’t bear not being the center of attention) and was even more bizarre than usual.

Trump, predictably, did an afternoon concert of his greatest hits, including “Doctors and Mothers Are Murdering Babies After They’re Born,” “Putin and Xi Love Me and I Love Them,” and “Gas Used to Be a Buck-Eighty-Something a Gallon.” But the new material was pretty shocking…

He said (again) that the convicted January 6 insurrectionists have been treated horribly, but this time he added that no one died during the assault on the Capitol. (In fact, four people died that day.) He made his usual assertion that Russia would never have invaded Ukraine if he’d been in office, but this time he added how much he looked forward to getting along with the Iranians, despite also bragging about how he tanked the nuclear deal with them.

Harris recently spoke to approximately 15,000 people in Detroit; 30 times that would be nearly half a million people, so Trump is now saying that he’s having rallies that are five times bigger than the average crowd at a Super Bowl—bigger, even, than Woodstock—and somehow fitting them all into arenas with seats to spare….

He claimed that attendance at the rally preceding the January 6 insurrection exceeded that of Martin Luther King’s March on Washington–an event that drew a quarter of a million people.

Trump also invented a helicopter ride with Willie Brown, who had once dated Kamala Harris, saying that Brown had told him (unspecified) “terrible” things about Harris. (Brown says no such ride ever took place.)

Nichols properly described the bottom line to all this:

The issue is that a former president is frighteningly delusional, and if any other candidate had done this—Biden was roasted over stories that were obscure but turned out to be true—it would dominate the news with understandable alarm about the well-being of the candidate.

The New York Times ran this headline: “Trump Tries to Wrestle Back Attention at Mar-a-Lago News Conference.” The Washington Post said: “Trump Holds Meandering News Conference, Where He Agrees to Debate Harris.” The British paper The Independent got closer with: “Trump Holds Seemingly Pointless Press Conference Filled With False Claims,” but CNN went with “Trump Attacks Harris and Walz During First News Conference Since Democratic Ticket Was Announced.”

All of these headlines are technically true, but they miss the point: The Republican nominee, the man who could return to office and regain the sole authority to use American nuclear weapons, is a serial liar and can’t tell the difference between reality and fantasy.

Donald Trump is not well. He is not stable. There’s something deeply wrong with him.

Here in the real world, we’ve noticed.

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The Best People

Among the many boasts we’ve become accustomed to hearing from Donald Trump is his repeated insistence that he hires “the best people.” I thought about that boast in the wake the Vice-Presidential choices made by Trump and Harris: JD Vance is one of the most disliked VP candidates of all times, while the selection of Tim Walz has been greeted with widespread enthusiasm.

When it comes to fitness for office, Vance has almost no experience in elective office, while Walz has served in Congress and as Governor of Minnesota. (Even Sarah Palin–to whom he is often compared–had more governing experience than Vance.)

Trump’s choice of an unsuitable running mate is not an aberration. As a recent article in The New Republic put it, the selection confirms that Trump picks the very worst people. The article reminded readers of the many “incompetent and corrupt” members of his administration:

Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price, who resigned after squandering hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars on private travel; Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt, who resigned “after being embroiled in one ethics controversy after the next,” as CNN put it; Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke, who “resigned under the weight of more than a dozen federal investigations into his actions,” according to The Washington Post (Zinke is back in Congress, of course, where he is speculating that the recent attempt on Trump’s life was part of a government “plot”); Mike Flynn, the national security adviser who lied to the FBI in the Russia probe and went to jail (Trump pardoned him); swamp thing and Trump campaign chief Paul Manafort, who went up the river for tax and bank fraud (Trump pardoned him too); alt-right guru Steve Bannon and trade troll Peter Navarro, who were convicted of contempt of Congress; would-be Batman villain Roger Stone, who was convicted of lying to Congress (Trump commuted his sentence before, ultimately, pardoning him too).

The list went on. And on. And Trump seems incapable of learning from his mistakes. (Of course, he is also incapable of admitting that he makes mistakes..)

Having run the administration with the highest turnover rate in history presumably gave Trump plenty of experience to avoid making the same mistakes, but it’s not like later-term personnel were much better than their predecessors in his own estimation. John Bolton, Trump’s third national security adviser, was a “dope” who “Never had a clue, was ostracized & happily dumped.” Mark Esper, Trump’s last confirmed defense secretary, was “weak and totally ineffective”; Attorney General Bill Barr, who parted ways with Trump only after belying his claims of widespread 2020 voter fraud and later said that Trump “shouldn’t be anywhere near the Oval Office,” was “Weak, Slow Moving, Lethargic, Gutless, and Lazy” (though once Barr endorsed him this year anyway, the magnanimous ex-president retracted the “Lethargic” label).

There is no love lost between Trump and those who entered and left through the revolving door that was his chaotic administration. CNN has identified twenty-four members of that administration who are warning voters against a repeat. Even Mike Pence–sycophant extraordinaire–has refused to endorse him.

His first secretary of defense, James Mattis: “Donald Trump is the first president in my lifetime who does not try to unite the American people – does not even pretend to try. Instead he tries to divide us.”

His second secretary of defense, Mark Esper: “I think he’s unfit for office. … He puts himself before country. His actions are all about him and not about the country. And then, of course, I believe he has integrity and character issues as well.”

His chairman of the joint chiefs, retired Gen. Mark Milley …. “We don’t take an oath to a wannabe dictator. We take an oath to the Constitution and we take an oath to the idea that is America – and we’re willing to die to protect it.”

 His first secretary of state, Rex Tillerson: “(Trump’s) understanding of global events, his understanding of global history, his understanding of US history was really limited. It’s really hard to have a conversation with someone who doesn’t even understand the concept for why we’re talking about this.”

His presidential transition vice-chairman, Chris Christie: “Someone who I would argue now is just out for himself.”

His second national security adviser, HR McMaster: “We saw the absence of leadership, really anti-leadership, and what that can do to our country.”

His third national security adviser, John Bolton: “I believe (foreign leaders) think he is a laughing fool.”

There are others quoted, but this sample is representative.

So much for the hope that this buffoon would be restrained by “adults in the room.

The adults have all run for the hills.

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Why Definitions Matter

You may have noticed that we Americans have trouble communicating. We may–or may not– talk to each other, but talking is not the same thing as communicating.

One of the reasons we are so polarized is that we not only occupy different realities, we use the same words to describe very different things.

I’ve previously pointed out that “conservative” does not accurately describe a radical MAGA movement filled with White “Christian” Nationalists. Labeling every social program, no matter how modest, as “socialist” confuses modern mixed economies with soviet-style, authoritarian regimes. But the problem goes beyond propaganda and intentional misdirection, because we can’t solve our problems if we can’t describe those problems accurately.

In an article awhile back Vox illustrated that problem. The first paragraph was eye-opening:

A person who is looking for a full-time job that pays a living wage — but who can’t find one — is unemployed. If you accept that definition, the true unemployment rate in the U.S. is a stunning 26.1%, according to an important new dataset shared exclusively with “Axios on HBO.”

The article then noted that the official unemployment rate excludes people who might be earning only a few dollars a week, along with people who have stopped looking for work for whatever reason–perhaps a lack of available jobs or child care. The definition of “unemployed” that we use affects our evaluation of the severity of the problem. As the 2020 article pointed out, that year, if we had identified as unemployed anyone over 16 years old who wasn’t earning a living wage, the overall rate would have been 54.6%. For Black Americans, it would have been 59.2%.

The Axios article gave the backstory of our current measurement metric:

The official definition of unemployment can be traced back to the 1870s, when a Massachusetts statistician named Carroll Wright diagnosed what he referred to as “industrial hypochondria”.

By restricting the “unemployed” label to men who “really want employment,” Wright managed to minimize the unemployment figure.

Wright went on to found the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and he brought his unemployment definition with him.
To this day, to be officially counted as unemployed you need to be earning no money at all, and you need to be actively looking for work.

More recently, Gene Ludwig, a former U.S. Comptroller of the Currency, founded the Ludwig Institute for Shared Economic Prosperity.  According to calculations by that institute, in January of 2020, when the official rate of unemployment was 3.6%, the true rate was seven times greater — 23.4%. Whether you agree with Ludwig that the higher number is the “true” unemployment rate is less significant than the fact that most Americans don’t understand what the official number measures.

What would be helpful–what would allow us to actually communicate about jobs and wages– would be a report that broke down the data into categories: these are people actively searching for jobs who don’t have one; these are people whose jobs don’t pay a living wage; etc. That sort of report would allow voters and policymakers to focus on the actual issues involved. As it is, a single number that excludes everyone who has any sort of employment–whether part-time or poorly paid–obscures reality.

We can’t fix a problem we can’t properly define.

Insufficient jobs and insufficient wages are two very different problems. The Biden administration has done an admirable job of creating new jobs, and various economic reports indicate that the administration has also presided over significant wage gains, but few of us have the time or ability to delve into the official data of the Bureau of Labor Statistics and to calculate what percentage of workers has escaped the “under-employed” category.

This problem of accurate–or at least agreed-upon–definition isn’t limited to employment figures. Some years ago, I was looking into arguments about the U.S. balance of trade, and realized that those official calculations only included tangible goods–not services or other intangibles. So if we were sending printed books (or cars or widgets) abroad, those got counted; but if Americans were selling publishing rights (or providing design services) to consumers in other countries, the value of those exports wasn’t included. (I don’t know whether that is still the case.)

What was that bible story about the Tower of Babel?

We live in a very complex society, and wide differences in culture, education and expertise add other complications to even the most sincere efforts at communication. But–assuming we elect people in November who are committed to running a functional government–we really need to look at the way official data is compiled and reported.

Using the same words to talk about the same things would be a start….

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