On January 6, 2021, as rioters swarmed the U.S. Capitol, one of America’s most powerful business lobbies—the National Association of Manufacturers—issued an extraordinary condemnation. 

Headlined “Manufacturers Call on Armed Thugs to Cease Violence at Capitol,” the statement by NAM President Jay Timmons decried the attack as “chaos” and “mob rule”: 

This is sedition and should be treated as such. The outgoing president incited violence in an attempt to retain power, and any elected leader defending him is violating their oath to the Constitution and rejecting democracy in favor of anarchy. Anyone indulging conspiracy theories to raise campaign dollars is complicit.

Timmons even went on to suggest that then-Vice President Mike Pence “seriously consider” invoking the 25th Amendment to remove Donald Trump from power. “This is not the vision of America that manufacturers believe in and work so hard to defend,” the statement continued. 

But since then? Crickets. 

Businesses have gone noticeably mum since Trump’s return to power in 2025. In fact, many of America’s most prominent executives have gone out of their way to accommodate the president, even as he has increasingly asserted control over their industries. A phalanx of billionaires paid court at Trump’s inauguration, while top companies—including Caterpillar, T-Mobile, and Altria—are helping to fund Trump’s ballroom. Other firms have acceded to their partial nationalization; US Steel, for instance, handed the administration a “golden share” in the company, essentially ceding control over its strategic direction to the government. 

The business community’s capitulation to Trump is baffling, given just how damaging Trump’s kleptocratic, autocratic policies have been for both individual businesses and the broader economy. For instance: 

• Tariffs. Trump’s tariffs have raised costs for US businesses, depressed economic growth, and failed to create the manufacturing renaissance Trump promised. The Yale Budget Lab estimates that the Trump administration extracted $165 billion from businesses in illegal tariffs (for which rebates are still pending), and the Tax Foundation projects that tariffs imposed under legal authority will reduce long-term GDP by 0.2-0.3 percent. Manufacturing, meanwhile, lost 108,00 jobs in Trump’s first year back in office.
• Corruption. Trump has shamelessly blurred the line between his presidency and his family finances, earning at least $2.2 billion in 2025. Allies and donors win lucrative, no-bid contracts for government work, while foreign governments shower the president with “gifts.” Crony capitalism not only hurts the overwhelming majority of businesses that aren’t Trump family cronies, it’s also inefficient. At least one study finds that corruption leads to real declines in per capita GDP, with the biggest impacts in “autocracies and countries with low government effectiveness and rule of law.” 
• Uncertainty. Though Trump may revel in his unpredictability, businesses eschew it. Uncertainty makes long-term planning and investment difficult and increases risk. Nearly 43 percent of US CEOs said “uncertainty” was the top factor “expected to have the greatest negative impact on their business” in 2026, according to the Conference Board’s annual survey of CEOs. 

Certainly, some businesses aren’t speaking out because they’re benefiting from the current system. Many companies likely fear retaliation, while others are content to lobby on narrower issues, like tax and regulatory relief. 

Yet this failure of business to assert itself could accelerate the nation’s slide into authoritarianism, warns Daniella Ballou-Aares, founder and CEO of Leadership Now, a pro-democracy business coalition. “To think that large influential actors can stay out of things when democracy is threatened is an illusion, frankly,” she says. 

Founded in 2017, at the start of Trump’s first term, Leadership Now is perhaps the nation’s only bipartisan business group committed to defending democracy. The organization includes more than 400 business leaders nationwide, with chapters in eight states. It has taken a strong stand against election denialism and created a “democracy report card” for business leaders. It also recently debuted a “Business Plan for America,” which emphasizes the importance of political stability and the rule of law for economic growth. 

I interviewed Ballou-Aares about her organization’s impact for the Monthly podcast. (You can watch a preview on our Substack here or subscribe on Spotify here.) You’ll find her work at Leadership Now to be a refreshing antidote to whatever cynicism you may be feeling these days about the state of capitalism and the role of business in America. 

Don’t miss at the Monthly….

Can’t Democrats just get along? The implosion of Graham Platner’s candidacy in Maine, coupled with aggressive energy on the progressive left, has reopened the long-running internecine feud between the center and the left. It’s a fight that Politics Editor Bill Scher argues is completely unnecessary. Witness the success of Georgia Sen. Jon Ossoff, who is popular on his terms, and without picking fights with the left. “The name of the game when winning elections is addition, not subtraction, and that requires finding and elevating areas of common ground,” Bill writes. “While antsy pundits tend to glorify jumping on political land mines as acts of bravery, Ossoff is providing a master class in how to navigate around them and stay alive.” Read here. 

When history rhymes. Everyone middle-schooler learns about the caning of Charles Sumner on the Senate floor in the run-up to the Civil War. But as a new book argues, it’s the story of the perpetrator—South Carolina Representative Preston Brooks—that has the most to teach us about the current moment. As law professor Paul Finkelman writes in his review of Paul Quigley’s The Man Behind the Cane, the American South of Brooks’s era was intolerant and autocratic—with uncomfortable echoes of today. “Free speech was illegal, if that speech challenged slavery, racism, southern rights, or the self-proclaimed right of the South to leave the Union,” Finkelman writes. Though celebrated at home, Brooks’s shocking act of violence accelerated the vilification and rejection of slaveholder culture and the inevitable fall of the South. Most importantly, Finkelman argues, the episode confirmed that “speech, debate, and arguments are central to a democracy,” and that “violence and suppression are, in the end, the tools of dictators, kings, and slaveowners.” Read here. 

“Patriotic but disillusioned.” A new survey by the National Collaborative for Health Equity finds that many Americans are losing faith in the American Dream, even as they still long for national healing. More than half of Americans now say the American Dream is “out of reach,” and large majorities feel burdened by the costs of everyday living. As many as 81 percent of Americans, for instance, feel pressure from grocery costs, while 71 percent worry about housing. But as NCHE Executive Director Gail Christopher writes, more than 70 percent of Americans “remain hopeful that Americans can work through their differences and find lasting common ground.” That path to national healing begins in November. Read here. 

Higher ed eats its own. Dwindling enrollments and a shortage of 18-year-olds have sparked a war among colleges desperate to attract students. Community colleges are offering bachelor’s degrees, while four-year schools are providing workforce training. Both are encroaching on the territory K-12 with “dual enrollment.” “Some of this intensifying competition could benefit students and families, who are getting more choices, larger discounts, and other perks from colleges and universities that need to fill seats,” writes Jon Marcus in a piece published in partnership with The Hechinger Report. “In many cases, however, ‘turf wars’ and ‘mission creep’—as critics call this infighting—are heightening anxiety among students and families and preventing changes that could serve them.” Read here.

Plus…

• Editor in Chief Paul Glastris writes about why right wing whiners are losing their battle against The Odyssey. 
• Can England’s new prime minister, Andy Burnham, succeed where Keir Starmer failed? The University of Michigan’s John Austin and the University of Manchester’s Andy Westwood lay out the many, many challenges ahead. 
• Bill Scher also takes apart Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed’s equivocation on Israel’s right to exist. (El-Sayed’s position carries echoes of young Americans’ rising skepticism on this issue, which is deeply troubling.) 

Coda…

So far, “anti-woke” education is a bust… 

The EDULedger reports that a $3 million “anti-woke” education program at West Virginia University that launched this year has so far enrolled … one student. 

WVU’s Washington Center for Civics, Culture and Statesmanship was created last year by the state legislature “to address a perceived ‘crisis’ of ‘wokeness’ in America,” according to EDULedger. Center Director Patrick Lee Miller—who earns more than $300,000 a year—created 18 classes, including courses titled “The New Right,” and “Woke.” None of the classes are accredited, and the center’s launch follows massive budget cuts at WVU that saw the loss of 143 faculty jobs and 28 majors. “There is a question about whether or not this is the best use of public funds,” WVU political science professor Erik Herron told West Virginia Watch. 

A similar drama is unfolding at the University of Iowa’s Center of Intellectual Freedom, which had to postpone classes this spring due to lack of student interest. The Daily Iowan reported that the center’s “Political and Economic Institutions” class had enrolled just two students as of February, while another class had attracted four. 

In June, Governor Kim Reynolds signed legislation forcing students to take the center’s classes if they wanted to graduate—a requirement hilariously at odds with the center’s name. “If we are to be a Center for Intellectual Freedom, why is it mandatory?” a former Democratic member of the Iowa Senate told the Daily Iowan. 

Lawmakers in both states should have known these initiatives would fall flat. As Monthly Editor Nate Weisberg wrote last winter, Governor Ron DeSantis’s “anti-woke” makeover of the New College of Florida was an utter disaster, and the institution now faces closure. 

As always, thanks for reading, and please don’t forget to share, like and subscribe. 

Have a great week!

Anne Kim, Senior Editor

This newsletter is also available on our Substack. Subscribe here.

The post Why Autocracy Doesn’t Pay appeared first on Washington Monthly.

“The question about Israel isn’t about the theoretical right to exist of a country that exists. The question about Israel is, do they have a right to our tax dollars?” This is how, during a podcast interview with Pod Save America’s Alex Wagner, Abdul El-Sayed waded into the thicket of Middle East politics. 

Throughout his U.S. Senate campaign, when asked about Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state, El-Sayed—who faces Michigan voters in the August 4 Democratic primary—has rejected or recast the premise of the question to avoid directly answering. But with Wagner, El-Sayed stumbled into an inherent contradiction. 

Assuring voters that he does not “want ill will for Jewish Israeli people,” El-Sayed leaned on the egalitarian principle of self-determination for all: “I believe in equal rights, to peace, dignity, and self-determination for Palestinians and Jewish Israelis alike.” But what self-determination means for Jewish Israelis is an Israel that is a Jewish state, just as what self-determination means for Palestinians is a Palestinian state. (And for Hamas, at least, it means a Palestine that is an Islamic state.) 

But instead of acknowledging that the principle of self-determination leads to helping both peoples peaceably live in states of their own design, El-Sayed abruptly moved away from such international-universalist sentiments into America First isolationist policy: “But I also understand that in an era where people ask you, ‘How you going to pay for that when you want to give people healthcare or how you going to pay for that when you want to give people good schools?’ It’s pretty crazy to be sending our money over there when it could be used over here.” 

This is a false choice used as misdirection. For the last 15 years, the U.S. has spent about $4 to 5 billion a year on military aid to Israel, except for a one-year spike to $12.5 billion in Fiscal Year 2024 following the October 7 attacks. Annual federal spending on education between 2021 and 2024 roughly ranged from $170 to $180 billion. For health care, the range is $1.8 to $2.1 trillion. Aid to Israel is minuscule in comparison. One can argue we should spend more on health care and education and less on Israel, but our ability to spend on health care and education—especially since the federal budget is not subject to any balanced budget rules—is not constrained by what we give to Israel.  

Taking an isolationist approach to the Israel-Palestine conflict is no way to ensure peaceful self-determination for all wins the day. People on both sides have no problem killing each other regardless of U.S. aid to Israel, Egypt, the Palestinian Authority and other actors in the region. This has been true since the founding of Israel in 1948 and the Arab-Israeli war that followed. 

President Harry Truman, reflecting on the creation of Israel in a post-presidential interview, said he needed to forge a compromise because: “The Jews wanted to chase all the Arabs into the Tigris and Euphrates River and the Arabs wanted to chase all the Jews into the Red Sea.” 

The conflict bedeviled Truman, and most of his top aides wanted him to stay out of it. “Forty million Arabs are going to push four hundred thousand Jews into the sea. And that’s all there is to it. Oil: that is the side we ought to be on,” said his Defense Secretary James Forrestal. Truman wrote in his memoirs, “The Department of State’s specialists on the Near East were, almost without exception, unfriendly to the idea of a Jewish state. Their thinking went along this line: Great Britain has maintained her position in the area by cultivating the Arabs; now that she seems no longer able to hold this position, the United States must take over, and it must be done by exactly the same formula; if the Arabs are antagonized, they will go over into the Soviet camp.” He added, “I am sorry to say that there were some among them who were also inclined to be anti-Semitic.”  

Truman did not approach the matter from such a cold standpoint: “My primary concern was to see justice done without bloodshed.” He pushed for a partition in a 1946 statement, which heavily influenced the United Nations decision to approve of one in 1947. Israel declared independence in 1948, which Truman swiftly recognized.

But when Arab armies attacked the embryonic Jewish state, Truman frustrated Jews by refusing to lift a regional arms embargo. He didn’t want to get into a proxy war with Arab-friendly Great Britain. The decision could have lost him the 1948 presidential election, as socialistic Jews played a pivotal role in taking the biggest Electoral College prize New York.  

Democrats couldn’t take the Empire State for granted because in 1944 Franklin Roosevelt won it by only five points over Republican Thomas Dewey, the state’s governor. Dewey was the GOP nominee again in 1948, but so was a left-wing third-party candidate, Roosevelt’s second Vice President Henry Wallace, who had been jettisoned from the ticket in 1944 to make room for Truman. 

In an October speech in New York City, Wallace said because the incumbent wouldn’t arm Israel, Truman, “stands like Lady Macbeth looking at his blood-stained hands. Like Lady Macbeth, he says, ‘Out, out, damned spot!’ But like Lady Macbeth, the spot will not out. The blood cannot be driven out when it is fixed in hands by oil.” The lashing left its mark. Wallace took 8 percent of the New York vote, allowing the Republican challenger Thomas Dewey to win the state by a single percentage point.  

But Truman offset the loss of New York and won re-election, allowing him to continue trying to establish peace and self-determination in the region. According to historian Benny Morris in the book 1948, by 1949 Israel was winning the war. However, while Israel’s leading general wanted to push on, Israel’s top diplomat in the U.S. knew Truman had begun to see the new country as a “trouble-maker.” With American patience wearing thin, the ambassador convinced Israel’s prime minister to withdraw forces from Egypt and negotiate an armistice on favorable terms.  

Only then did Truman lift the arms embargo, not initially to help the victorious Israel but to remedy “the weaknesses of the Arab governments.” He also authorized millions in aid to Palestinian refugees and supported the work of the United Nations Palestine Conciliation Commission to forge a lasting peace. Of course, this did not work. “None of the parties, including Israel, was prepared to make the necessary concessions to ensure peace in the area,” noted historian Donald McCoy in The Presidency of Harry S. Truman. 

Violence has ebbed and flowed in the region ever since. But in part because Truman used American soft power, at least one side did not fully kill off the other.  

Moreover, the region is better off when American presidents constructively engage in the cause of peace. Dwight Eisenhower’s pressure to stop Israel, aided by France and Great Britain, from taking the Suez Canal in 1956, probably averted a regional disaster. Richard Nixon (with Henry Kissinger) brokered an armistice and peacekeeping force in the Sinai following the 1973 Arab-Israeli war. Jimmy Carter successfully orchestrated the Camp David Accords between Israel and Egypt.Even Bill Clinton’s ultimately unsuccessful Oslo Accords process, which came close to forging a two-state solution between Israelis and Palestinians, was better than not trying at all. To reiterate a point I made last month, Middle East analysts used to compare the Israel-Palestine peace process to a bicycle that needs to keep pedaling forward, or else the rider falls off. We’re seeing that adage proved true as. Clinton’s failed peace attempt served the region better than the warmongering unleashed by Trump, laying waste to whatever hope people had of the Abraham Accords 

And America’s ability to play a constructive international role stems from our ability to provide aid, both military and humanitarian. One person who once understood that is Abdul El-Sayed.  

In a Huffington Post blog written 15 years ago, El-Sayed urged then-President Barack Obama to support pro-democracy protestors in Egypt. He noted that Egypt’s then-$2 billion annual aid package, of which the majority went to the military, would serve American interests whether Mubarak was toppled: 

… with a weakened state security apparatus following this uprising, if he does survive, he will undoubtedly be more reliant on the army for power than he was before, increasing US leverage. [Or,] because the army will likely broker any transition of power if Mubarak is to fall, the US would likely maintain a degree of leverage with a future government, as well. 

El-Sayed further argued that we should not fear an Islamist government controlled by the Muslim Brotherhood because the American-funded Egyptian military wouldn’t allow it: “the military is, and will remain for the time being, Egypt’s principal powerbroker–it is safe to say that the military wouldn’t back a Muslim Brotherhood government without strong liberal democratic structures in place.” (This proved all too true. Once Mubarak was ousted, a democratically elected president linked to the Muslim Brotherhood lasted only a year before he was ousted in a military coup.) 

Today, El-Sayed holds a different position on the value of aid to Egypt. During the Pod Save America interview, he extended his logic regarding Israeli aid and Israeli existence: 

My family’s from Egypt, OK? Would it be crazy if somebody was asking, “Hey, do you think Egypt has the right to exist?” People would be, like, “Egypt exists.”  

If somebody wanted to change the nature of Egypt, do you think the United States should be spending all of its money to make sure, or any of its money, to make sure that that happens? And people [would say,] “I don’t know … that seems like a different country’s issue.” 

I’m just saying that you can both say that “Israel exists,” but it doesn’t have a right to my tax dollars. 

Fifteen years ago, El-Sayed did want to change the nature of Egypt and leverage American aid to that end. (I did too.) He did so because Egyptians deserve self-determination, as do Israelis and as do Palestinians. That realizing these principles in the Middle East has proven exceptionally hard, and that the power of American aid is limited, is not reason to give up and say that’s a “different country’s issue,” especially when washing our hands of it won’t do anything for American education and health care.  

El-Sayed is correct to say Israel “doesn’t have a right to my tax dollars.” Israel only deserves aid insofar as it serves to protect the principle of self-determination. The Israeli government led by Benjamin Netanyahu has shown no interest in Palestinian self-determination. That strengthens the case for conditioning American aid and being more assertive in exerting leverage. But as horribly murderous as Israelis have been to Palestinians, so have Hamas’s legions been to Israelis. Cutting off all military aid, even for defensive weapons, is not likely to reduce violence any more than Truman’s arms embargo did. The hatreds run too deep. 

Moreover, El-Sayed glibly saying “Israel exists” just as “Egypt exists” is no different an evasion than when Republican Supreme Court nominees would assure Democratic senators that they acknowledge Roe v. Wade was a settled case. That left open the possibility that they wanted to unsettle Roe and would, if given the power to do so, which they did.  

Nobody has good answers for ameliorating the hatreds cultivated over multiple generations. But deflecting the question of whether Israel has a right to exist by saying you believe in self-determination for all peoples elides acknowledging that very principle means that Israelis, as well as Palestinians, have a right to exist–on terms of their choosing. 

Since the current terms of desired existence for Israelis and Palestinians deeply conflict, humanity—as well as global stability—demands we intervene to help them find common ground, however painstaking, elusive, and expensive. But our help from above must be informed by what is called for on the ground. For El-Sayed and other like-minded politicians to acknowledge the right of self-determination but not acknowledge that, for Israelis, that means Israel must exist as a Jewish state, shows a failure to truly commit to the principle.  

The post Abdul El-Sayed’s Slippery Argument About Israel’s Right to Exist  appeared first on Washington Monthly.

It seemed like a win-win: A proposal to let community colleges in Illinois award bachelor’s degrees in certain fields to rural residents and working adults who live beyond commuting distance of any four-year university.

Backers, including Governor JB Pritzker, said the change would not only make things “easier and more affordable for students,” but also increase the supply of workers with the skills employers need. 

But four-year universities lined up against the proposal. A political ally, flanked by several of their presidents, was blunt about why: It would cut into their business.

“We’ll lose those students to the community college level,” Senate Majority Leader Kimberly Lightford said.

Under political attack, scorned by the public over their cost, and facing unprecedented enrollment and financial problems, colleges and universities are taking the fight—to each other.

Even as they lobby against community college bachelor’s degrees, four-year universities are pursuing the fast-growing dual-enrollment and short-term workforce training markets that community colleges have dominated.

The most selective schools are expanding their early decision programs to lock in more applicants and prevent them from enrolling elsewhere. Recruiters are poaching students from competing colleges, even after they’ve put down their deposits—something admissions officers once explicitly agreed never to do. 

Public universities are dangling incentives to lure high school graduates from neighboring states away from their home-state campuses, while private nonprofit colleges are opening satellite branches in other schools’ backyards.

“This is the clash that occurs when you have declining populations overall and declining high school graduating classes,” said Davis Jenkins, senior research scholar at the Community College Research Center at Teachers College, Columbia University. (The Hechinger Report, which produced this story, is an independent unit of Teachers College.)

Some of this intensifying competition could benefit students and families, who are getting more choices, larger discounts, and other perks from colleges and universities that need to fill seats. 

In many cases, however, “turf wars” and “mission creep”—as critics call this infighting—are heightening anxiety among students and families and preventing changes that could serve them.

“That was one of my biggest frustrations with the debate, because it felt like there wasn’t even a willingness to acknowledge a problem, and we have a problem in this state,” said Emily Shields, executive director of Community Colleges for Iowa, where lobbying by private four-year colleges blocked a plan to let community colleges in rural areas offer bachelor’s degrees. 

“We have people in every region who would like to get a bachelor’s degree but can’t” because they live too far from four-year campuses and have families and jobs, Shields said. 

More than 35 million people live beyond what the federal government defines as a typical commuting distance from a public four-year university, according to a study published by the Annenberg Institute at Brown University. 

That helps explain why legislators in 24 states have passed laws allowing community colleges to offer bachelor’s degrees. 

But momentum behind this approach has slowed, as four-year colleges worry it will siphon off some of their dwindling supply of students. Enrollment at colleges and universities nationwide already fell by nearly 2 million from 2010 to 2023—the most recent period for which the figure is available—and the number of 18-year-olds, who make up most first-year students, is projected to decline by 13 percent from this year until 2041. 

Only about 76,000 students are enrolled in bachelor’s degree programs at community colleges nationwide, compared with 5.3 million at four-year colleges and universities. Research shows that most are 25 or older and unlikely to choose a four-year campus otherwise. It also shows that adding bachelor’s degrees at community colleges does not significantly affect enrollment at their four-year public and private, nonprofit counterparts. 

Yet private four-year colleges in Iowa argued that some would be forced to close if legislators let community colleges offer four-year degrees. The idea has also now stalled in Illinois, where more than a dozen community colleges are in areas where the nearest four-year university is too far away to commute.

An even bigger battleground in the fight for students is dual enrollment—also called dual credit, early college and concurrent enrollment—through which high school students take college-level courses for credit. Community colleges provide these courses to more than 70 percent of participating high school students. The market has quickly grown to 2.8 million students—so many that they now comprise more than a fifth of community college enrollment and its fastest-growing segment.

This has not escaped the notice of four-year colleges and universities, which are adding their own dual-enrollment programs at an accelerating pace. 

The number of four-year universities that have joined the National Alliance of Concurrent Enrollment Partnerships, or NACEP, which accredits these kinds of programs, rose by 36 schools between 2022 and last year—a 27 percent jump.

“To see that kind of increase really raised our eyebrows,” said Amy Williams, NACEP’s executive director. 

A NACEP survey found that institutions’ top reason for entering the market was to use dual enrollment as a recruiting tool.

That may serve universities, but NACEP warns that it does not always help students. NACEP found that more than one institution now provides dual enrollment in 90 percent of the high schools that offer it. In nearly 60 percent of those cases, two or more providers offer the same courses to students in the same high schools. 

“Understandably, learners cite challenges navigating different enrollment deadlines, fee structures, degree pathways and transcript requests across institutions,” NACEP notes.

Four-year universities continue to expand their dual-enrollment offerings, however. In Nevada, for instance, the state’s faculty association wrote that universities were doing so as “a means to mitigate the impacts of declining enrollment among their traditional students.” In the process, faculty members alleged, “quality and rigor are often trampled upon.” 

Colorado lawmakers recently passed legislation making it easier for four-year universities to provide more dual-enrollment courses in that state’s high schools. 

“Demographics are absolutely a factor” there, too, said John Albright, executive vice chancellor of the Colorado Community College System. 

“There are fewer traditional-age students. Birthrates are declining. Institutions are responding to this,” Albright said. The question, he said, is whether adding more providers “expands opportunity and keeps pathways clear for students or creates a more fragmented system. We don’t know the answer to that.”

Four-year universities are targeting another traditional community college domain—and growth area: short-term workforce training. 

Enrollment in community college certificate programs has risen 28 percent since the fall of 2021. It is likely to keep growing as students in these programs can now qualify for federal Pell Grants. 

Seventy percent of four-year university and college presidents said they plan to add or expand short-term workforce training, according to a recent survey by Hanover Research and the industry news outlet Inside Higher Ed. The conservative Manhattan Institute has called this a strategic opportunity—not only because such programs can attract students who would not enroll in degree programs, but also because they can “demonstrate concrete economic value and responsiveness to workforce needs” at a time of falling public faith in higher education.

But DeRionne Pollard, president and CEO of the American Association of Community Colleges, has some questions about the blurring of these boundaries.

“Is there a need that is not being met by the two-year institutions that have traditionally delivered dual-credit or workforce training in those communities?” Pollard asked. “What’s in the best interest of students? What’s in the best interest of the communities being served?” 

Students and families, she said, “don’t need duplication or competition. They don’t need confusion. They need pathways” that will help them get the education they want affordably and in a reasonable period of time—whatever kind of institution they attend.

“The future should be built on partnerships, not turf,” said Pollard.

Four-year colleges and universities are not just pursuing community college students. They are also going after one another’s.

Public universities in regions where the number of high school graduates has already started falling are offering lower tuition to students in neighboring states and even more distant, faster-growing places. California residents, for instance, can go to most State University of New York schools for the same price they would pay at a flagship public university in California.

Private, nonprofit four-year universities are opening satellite campuses in the territories of other institutions. Northeastern and Carnegie Mellon universities operate branches in the San Francisco Bay Area, for example, where Vanderbilt University will also open a campus next year.

The fiercest competition comes in the admissions process.

Selective schools are relying more heavily on early decision, which can increase applicants’ odds of admission but bars those accepted from considering another college. Research from the advocacy organization Class Action finds that these schools are admitting larger shares of their classes that way. To encourage that commitment, some offer inducements such as priority housing, early move-in, parking privileges, and meal plan upgrades.

For students admitted through the conventional process, recruiting now continues well past the day on which they put down their deposits. That practice was previously barred by an admissions-officer ethics code provision that was dropped in 2020 to settle a federal antitrust case.

After the antitrust settlement, “it became the Wild West,” said Christy Pratt, former head of undergraduate admissions at the University of Notre Dame and a consultant at the executive search firm WittKieffer. Colleges and universities now poach one another’s admitted students after the traditional May 1 deposit day, and competition can drag on until September or October, when institutions close their books on the entering class.  

That can mean lower prices for families, said David Attis, managing director of research advisory services at the enrollment management recruiting firm EAB. But it also “makes it much harder for students to plan and manage,” Attis said.

Nearly half of college and university applicants who were admitted from waiting lists said they were notified after May 1, according to a June survey by the college ratings platform Niche. That means most have already committed somewhere else, and have hard decisions to make, said Caroline Koppelman, founder and CEO of the private college admissions consulting firm The Koppelman Group.

“In general, the kids are more stressed out, and extending the admissions process doesn’t quell their anxiety,” Koppelman said.

To hedge their bets, students and families are increasingly putting down deposits at more than one school. Fourteen percent of students who entered college in the academic year just ended paid deposits to two or more universities or colleges, up from near-zero who did this in 2019, according to EAB. The wealthier the family, the more deposits it makes.

In some states, policymakers are stepping in to try to quash the wrangling over students. California legislators have proposed stripping the California State University System of authority it’s used repeatedly to stop community colleges from offering bachelor’s degrees, for example, as long as those degrees don’t duplicate programs available at nearby four-year universities.

In the end, said advocates, the best way for universities and colleges to vie for consumers is by giving them what they need.

“There are going to be these high-level squabbles over what are really small potatoes. What’s going to matter is that you offer value,” said Jenkins, the community college researcher.

“As far as trying to play nice in the sandbox,” Albright added, in Colorado “everyone has a shared interest in trying to be responsive to students.”

Contact writer Jon Marcus at 212-678-7556, jmarcus@hechingerreport.org or jpm.82 on Signal.

This story about competition among colleges and universities was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for their higher education newsletter. 

The post Facing Political Attack and Falling Enrollment, Colleges Take the Fight to … Each Other appeared first on Washington Monthly.

Now that our nation has reached its 250th anniversary, I keep returning to a simple truth revealed in our latest survey: Our hearts beat in similar ways. Beneath the noise of our politics, beneath the headlines that sort us into warring camps, most Americans want the same thing. They want relief from the anxiety that dominates our public life. They want to belong. They want the promise of this country to become real in their own homes, communities, and lives. 

The 4th Annual Heart of America Survey, conducted by Empirica Advisors for the National Collaborative for Health Equity (NCHE), was designed to look past the sound bites and take the pulse of the American people. What we found: a nation holding two truths at once. Americans remain deeply attached to the ideals this country was founded upon. And Americans are increasingly worried that those ideals are not being delivered in their daily lives. 

Patriotic, but Disillusioned 

The numbers tell the story. Sixty-two percent of Americans say they are proud to be American. That is still a majority, but it has fallen sharply from 72 percent just a year ago. At the same time, only 36 percent say the country is living up to its ideals of freedom, fairness, and equal opportunity. 

Think about what that gap means. Two out of three Americans do not believe the nation is honoring its own creed. This is not the cynicism of people who have given up. It is the disappointment of a citizenry that still believes. You do not measure your country against its highest ideals unless you take those ideals seriously. This is what I would call “ambivalent patriotism”: attachment without satisfaction, loyalty without confidence. 

The pressures driving this disappointment are concrete and immediate. Over half of Americans, 52 percent, now say the American Dream is out of reach. And the burdens they describe are anything but abstract: 81 percent feel pressure from grocery costs, 75 percent from wages not keeping pace with the cost of living, 72 percent from health care costs, and 71 percent from housing costs. One finding demonstrated how family strain escalates. Elder care, at 53 percent, now tops childcare, at 44 percent, as a source of family strain.  

The results help explain why the American Dream is slipping away from many. It has never really been about individual successes. It is about whether families have the support to care for one another across the generations. Right now, too many families feel they do not. 

A Shared Heartbeat 

What gives us hope is that, even in a divided country, Americans are not embracing division. They are reaching for something better. 

Eighty-nine percent say we need leaders who are transformers, people who can see through labels and political tricks and view the world in a new way. Eighty-three percent say they would support a leader who aims to unite everyone, even if they disagree on some issues. Eighty-four percent believe that through faith, kindness, and empathy, America can overcome its differences. And 71 percent remain hopeful that Americans can work through their differences and find lasting common ground. 

These are not the expressions of people who want to keep the fight brewing. These are people exhausted by conflict and hungry for connection. Eighty-five percent told us they believe Americans are hungry to belong, to connect, and to trust each other again. 

Since the 1990s, the dominant narrative of our public life has been about polarization and division. But that narrative muzzles a quieter, more persistent cry: the genuine cry of ordinary people to connect and to overcome what separates them. Our survey did more than notice that cry. We measured it. And the results are clear: the desire for unity and solidarity is overwhelming, looming under the radar. Eighty-five percent of Americans said they are hungry to feel connected to each other and trust each other again. 

Lessons From the Hero Next Door 

Many Americans across the political spectrum believe they are engaged in a cultural war. Like any war, it can stir intense and volatile emotions—not only in individuals, but also among their families and friends—pushing some into states of dysregulation and disrupting their normal emotional and physiological balance. For others, it can reveal a deeper sense of pride, conviction, and patriotism. 

As the United States faces growing internal division and war with Iran, Martha Raddatz, the ABC News chief global affairs correspondent, has published The Hero Next Door, which chronicles the experiences of soldiers who served in Iraq and Afghanistan. Her work may also offer insight into the risks of today’s culture wars. 

Raddatz tells the stories of the young men and women whose sense of duty compelled them to serve multiple tours. These are stark, humbling reminders of our common humanity. 

When you walk alongside these warriors and their families, when you sit with them through amputations, brain injuries, and the long shadow of post-traumatic stress, something in you shifts. You stop seeing them through the lens of politics, region, or party. Instead, you are compelled to empathize, respect, and admire.  

These young people were willing to give what Abraham Lincoln called at Gettysburg “the last full measure of devotion.” They did it for the ideals reiterated during our nation’s Second Founding at the end of the Civil War: the right to life, to liberty, and to the pursuit of happiness. Their sacrifice should teach us something urgent. 

War is what happens when we fail to hear and address the persistent cries for unity, both within our nation and around the world. We consistently underestimate the true cost of that failure. The theaters of war reveal the most dramatic costs of conflict. But there are quieter costs, too. Continuous exposure to the culture war narrative generates chronic anxiety and fear. Anxiety and fear are directly linked to the escalation of chronic illnesses in the country, affecting individuals, families, and communities. When we choose to amplify division, we are literally making ourselves sick. 

Naming the Real Root 

We need to be honest about what people often mean when they talk about “culture wars.” Culture is comprised of a society’s beliefs and behaviors. Our beliefs are shaped by what we experience, and those beliefs influence how we see the world, how we feel, and how we act. 

From the 15th through the 20th century, this country followed a belief system that ranked human worth by race, placing white people atop the social and economic order and assigning others a lower status based on the color of their skin. The phrase “culture wars” can serve as a convenient mask for that underlying ideology. It allows us to sidestep naming what is really at the heart of the conflict. 

The good news is that there has always been resistance to that false belief. Indigenous peoples never accepted that they were inferior, and they fought back. Enslaved and free African Americans never accepted it, and so escaped, rebelled, protested—and achieved. Chinese and Mexican immigrants never accepted it. Women never accepted it. For that matter, the founders who wrote our Constitution refused to accept that they were inferior to a British monarch. 

There is an inner knowing, an innate awareness of our equal value as human beings. America, at its best, has always been the struggle to actualize this value and realize this nation’s founding ideals. 

The Heart of America at Work 

I saw this heart beating in Minneapolis. When immigrant neighbors were being seized, injured, and killed in ICE-related violence, the people of that city did something extraordinary. They stood outside in sub-zero temperatures to protect and stand with their neighbors. They refused to see the perceived other as other. They saw a neighbor. 

That is the Heart of America at work. It is the ability to stand with and for one another despite differences. It stirs in communities across the country, palpable and real.  

The Heart of America survey shows this desire for repair runs far broader than our political rhetoric. Eighty-two percent say promoting diversity in the workplace is important to racial healing, including 74 percent of Republicans, 79 percent of Independents, and 92 percent of Democrats. Eighty percent say reducing racial segregation in housing matters. And 92 percent support teaching the full history of America, including slavery and racism. Support for reparations for enslavement and its aftermath now commands a majority of Americans. It has climbed to 56 percent, up from 46 percent in 2023. 

Americans are not just naming what divides them. They are naming the work required to become whole. 

The Path Forward 

So, what will it take to build the America we want? A democracy standing tall, with greater equity and fairness? 

First, we must tell a truer story. Our beliefs are shaped by the stories we tell and the stories we hear. We must lift new narratives of our shared humanity. The Hero Next Door is one. Countless others are waiting to be told. 

Second, we must educate honestly. For four straight years, more than 80 percent of Americans have told us they want the true history of this country taught in our schools, the history of protest, injustice, and racism, but also the history of progress. When we succeed, we teach our children that America is not a fixed thing to defend, but a promise to work toward. 

Third, we must demand transformational leadership. Americans are yearning for wise, mature, and stable leaders who respond to their specific anxieties about housing, health care, and wages. These leaders lead with love rather than cruelty and see people, not labels. 

Fourth, this must be the work of every sector. Education, public health, media, and technology all shape the stories we absorb and the conditions we live in. Healing must become our shared national project. 

A Moment of Renewal 

The atrocities of war have always sparked yearnings for peace. Reconstruction after the Civil War, the founding of NATO, and treaties banning nuclear weapons all show how extremes help us see the need for something better. Our culture wars and political polarization are giving rise to the same thing: a call for unity and healing. The good news is that the majority is voicing this call. 

We can replace culture war with cultural peace. We can replace the myth of division with the reality that most Americans want civility, solidarity, and fairness. This is the work America’s 250th anniversary calls us to begin. 

If this experiment in a multi-ethnic, multiracial, multireligious democracy is to prevail, and if we are to celebrate a 500th anniversary, we must embrace what our neighbors are telling us. The Heart of America beats for fairness and justice. Most of all, it beats for connection.

The post The Heart of America Still Beats for Connection appeared first on Washington Monthly.

In recent years, conservative pundits have compiled an unbroken record of attacking the American entertainment industry’s biggest stars and then finding themselves on the wrong side of public opinion. They disparaged Greta Gewig’s Barbie as woke and anti-male, only to watch it become the highest-grossing movie of 2023. That same year, they badmouthed Taylor Swift for her nonpartisan advocacy of voting (“Taylor Swift is dumb and her music sucks,” wrote Sean Davis, the CEO and co-founder of The Federalist), even as her Eras Tour became the highest-grossing concert tour of all time. Then, last year, they protested the choice of Bad Bunny to headline the Super Bowl halftime show because of the Puerto Rican rapper’s criticism of ICE raids. His performance averaged 128.2 million viewers, 3 million more than tuned into the game itself and 122 million more than watched Turning Point USA’s conservative alternative featuring Kid Rock. 

It was perhaps predictable, then, that right-wingers would fulminate over Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey before any of them had seen it. When Nolan confirmed that Lupita Nyong’o would play Helen of Troy, Elon Musk accused the director of “desecrating” Homer to win an Oscar, and conservative commentator Matt Walsh called him “a coward.” The fixation on Nyong’o’s race was, of course, just racism. The ancient Greeks knew of and traded with Black Africans, whom they called Ethiopians, and Homer himself praised their virtues. A Black Helen of Troy is hardly more of a stretch than a man of English and Nordic descent, Matt Damon, playing Odysseus. Still, other Nolan choices, such as casting trans actor Elliot Page as the Greek soldier Sinon, convinced conservatives—who pride themselves on being more in touch with ordinary Americans than liberals are—that The Odyssey would flop. “Nobody is going to go see this woke movie, and it’s going to be a box office bust,” predicted Newsmax commentator Katie Zacharia. 

Then the movie came out. Suddenly, conservatives had to contend not only the fact that it brought in more revenue in one weekend ($264 billion) than it cost to make ($250 million), but that, as Ben Shapiro conceded after watching it in IMAX, “it’s really, really, really good.” 

In moments like this, when ideologues are mugged by reality, a period of adjustment ensues as political allies attempt to get their story straight. We are in that sort of moment now. While some conservative dead-enders are still grousing about the movie’s multiracial casting, others are testing out, to borrow Kurt Cobain’s phrase, “a new complaint.” The complaint is that Matt Damon plays an Odysseus wracked by a kind of liberal guilt foreign to the character in the ancient text. “The main struggle for Nolan and his producer wife is that they can’t make the ancient Greeks too heroic, masculine, iconic because that would uphold the Euro-supremacist roots of all Western Civilization,” conservative cultural commentator Peachy Keenan wrote on X, “so you cast a woke manlet as the King.” 

On his eponymous CNN show, Fareed Zakaria helped advance a less vulgar version of that argument by asking classics scholar Daniel Mendelsohn whether he thought the film was “woke.” Mendelsohn did not quite go there. But he did complain that whereas Homer’s Odysseus is “a trickster” who is “sly,” “seductive,” and has “brio,” Damon’s character is “a modern, guilt-ridden, anguished anti-hero” who is “made to feel guilty about the destruction of Troy”—a guilt with which the ancient Greeks did not wrestle. 

The truth of that observation is obvious to anyone who has both read the epic and seen the movie. But Mendelsohn then said that “every adaptation legitimately projects … the ideas of a given moment”—and that is not quite right. The sensibilities Damon’s Odysseus expresses are not merely “of the moment.” They were forged over more than a century of total war. They began with the pointless slaughter of World War I; accelerated with the unrivaled carnage of World War II, the Holocaust, and the use of nuclear weapons on populations; crystallized in the U.N. Charter’s prohibition on cross-border aggression and the Genocide Convention; and were reinforced in the public consciousness by subsequent horrors from Vietnam to Rwanda. This worldwide, century-long effort to hem in civilization-threatening forms of warfare is a manifestation of enlightenment, not wokeism. Nor is it wholly modern. It is one of the underlying themes of Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War, to say nothing of The New Testament. 

For Nolan to have made a film in which pillage and butchery were simply part of the fun would be like someone today making a movie about the antebellum South that celebrated working Black people to death, raping women, and selling children. Some conservatives may, in their darker moments, hanker for such a film. But I suspect that most would be horrified, as would the vast majority of people around the globe. Had Nolan rendered an Odyssey in which the hero reveled in mass slaughter of the innocent, many of those same conservatives would have condemned it as the inevitable product of sick, post-modern, morally relativistic progressive thinking. 

Matt Damon’s character is tormented not because he’s exquisitely sensitive but because, in Nolan’s rewriting of the epic tale, the hero sees the consequences of his actions in ways informed by modern understandings. Near the end of the movie, Odysseus explains to his wife Penelope (played by Anne Hathaway), that the siege and sacking of Troy was not about retrieving Helen but about wresting control of trade routes. As he speaks, he suddenly realizes that he and his comrades are the “people of the sea”—the rumored and much feared invaders whose lawless attacks threaten the whole of society. The dialogue in that scene channels modern scholarship suggesting that the fall of the Greek Mycenean civilization depicted by Homer was the consequence of disrupted trade and mounting warfare within and between fortified cities, all of it likely accelerated by natural disasters such as earthquakes and long-term droughts.    

It is not too much of a leap to see Nolan’s The Odyssey as a warning about the potential consequences of the Trump administration’s abandonment of international norms, double-crossing of allies, and performative machismo. That, I suspect, is where the evolving conservative critique will ultimately land: it’s all just Trump Derangement Syndrome. What these conservatives can’t seem to understand is that Nolan’s moral sensibility, which they claim to hate, is also what makes his film a masterpiece—and a blockbuster.  

The post Why Conservatives Are Losing Their War Against The Odyssey  appeared first on Washington Monthly.

On May 19 and 20, 1856, Charles Sumner of Massachusetts delivered his “Crime Against Kansas” speech in the U.S. Senate. The printed version ran 95 pages, but the brilliant scholar, writer, and Harvard-trained lawyer gave the speech from memory. A rhetorical and provocative tour de force, Sumner attacked Southerners and their Northern “doughface” allies for the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 (which repealed the Compromise of 1820’s ban on slavery in the territories north and west of Missouri) and the ongoing violence designed to force slavery on the Kansas Territory. The act was sponsored by Senator Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois, who claimed he did not care if slavery was voted “up or down” (and whose wife owned about 100 slaves on a Mississippi plantation). 

Sumner’s speech was a biting, sarcastic, and penetrating attack on proslavery Senators intent on spreading slavery into the West. It included personal attacks on proslavery Senators. Comparing South Carolina’s Senator Andrew Butler to Don Quixote, Sumner said the slavery stalwart “believes himself a chivalrous knight with sentiments of honor and courage” who had “chosen a mistress to whom he has made his vows, and who, though ugly to others, is always lovely to him; though polluted in the sight of the world, is chaste in his sight—I mean the harlot Slavery. For her, his tongue is always profuse in words. Let her be impeached in character, or any proposition made to shut her out from the extension of her wantonness, and no extravagance of manner or hardihood of assertion is then too great for this senator.”  

The context makes this even sharper: Rumors abounded that Butler had fathered children with his own slave. Sumner asserted Butler “touches nothing which he does not disfigure with error, sometimes of principle, sometimes of fact. He cannot open his mouth, but out there flies a blunder.” Butler had recently suffered a stroke, and his speech was impaired. So along with the innuendos about his slave mistress, the invective of the speech was deeply personal. Sumner compared Senator Douglas to Don Quixote’s faithful servant, “the senator from Illinois is the squire of Slavery, its very Sancho Panza, ready to do all its humiliating offices.”  

On May 22, Representative Preston Brooks of South Carolina (a cousin of Senator Butler) quietly slipped into the Senate after adjournment, carrying a heavy metal-tipped cane. Sumner was writing letters at a desk which folded over the head of the occupant, so the New Englander could not get out of his chair without first lifting the desk over his head. Brooks snuck up behind Sumner and, after briefly shouting at him, began to beat Sumner with the cane. He only stopped when the cane broke. Sumner managed to stand up during the attack but then fell to the floor bleeding profusely. While Brooks beat Sumner from behind, another southern representative waved a cane, threatening to hit anyone who interfered with the attack. Sumner eventually returned to the Senate but only after three years recovering from what today would be diagnosed as traumatic brain injury. During this period, the Massachusetts legislature re-elected him to the Senate. (This of course predates the direct election of senators, starting in 1913.) For the rest of his life, Sumner was plagued by the injuries he sustained. 

The caning of Sumner was a dramatic moment on the road to the Civil War. For Northerners, it illustrated the violence and intolerance of the slave South. Brooks ambushed Sumner from behind to defend the honor of his cousin, his state, and slaveholders. As Paul Quigley details in The Man Behind the Cane, an important, elegantly written, and carefully researched book, Brooks was afraid to challenge Sumner “face-to-face” because he feared that Sumner might win a fair fight. At the time, Sumner was 45, and Brooks was 36. Both were tall and in good health. But the “bully” Brooks (as he became known) was taking no chances with the trim and athletic Sumner. Brooks, who became the face of southern “chivalry” because of this near homicide, believed the sneak attack was appropriate because Sumner’s insults had to be avenged.  

The sneak attack “proved” to Northerners (and many in Europe) that slaveowners like Brooks were inherently violent, dangerous, and uncivilized. The attack also illustrated the chasm between southern white slave owning culture and the rest of the nation. Slaveowners like Butler lobbed personal and nasty insults at Northerners, including innuendos about the bachelor Sumner’s sexuality, but when Northerners responded in kind, as Sumner had, they were challenged to duels, threatened with violence, and, in the case of Sumner, nearly killed. Neither Brooks nor his cousin Butler had the rhetorical skills to answer Sumner, whose pen was clearly too mighty. Brooks could only reply with his cane.  

Brooks might have challenged Sumner to a duel, but that would have given him no satisfaction, since Sumner would surely have declined, and no doubt mocked Brooks in yet another speech. In addition, duels were fought between “gentlemen” of equal status, defending their honor in public, highly choreographed confrontations, which could end without shots being fired. Brooks did not consider Sumner a “gentleman”—despite his education and status—and only wanted to violently discipline him, the way he would a social inferior, or one of his own slaves. He did not seek a fair fight between equals.  

While some Southerners were appalled by the assault, most cheered it. Brooks returned to South Carolina a hero who had avenged northern criticism of slavery and southern white culture, by punishing Sumner the way a man might punish a recalcitrant slave. The public and newspapers cheered him on and praised his defense of the South. 

Beyond the event, Quigley examines Brooks the man. Born to wealth and power, he never quite succeeded in rural South Carolina as the “man” he wanted to be. He had an unsuccessful duel early in life. He was an officer in the Mexican-American War, but caught a near-fatal fever and was sent home. His brother gallantly died in the combat—a real hero by South Carolina standards. But Preston looked to many like a shirker or even a coward, coming back from the war in a sick bed. Quigley describes a quick-tempered, spoiled young man (expelled from college after numerous instances of violent behavior including brandishing pistols), who holds office, owns slaves, lives well, has a problem with alcohol, and is never able to truly assert his manhood. The attack on Sumner became his chance for manly success. Quigley shows us just who was “the man behind the cane.” It is not a pretty picture. 

The import of this book, however, is not the story of a maladjusted, ill-tempered, violent young Congressmen, who drank too much, and despite claiming to be a devout Christian, likely had sex (committed adultery) with his slaves, a situation where consent was not possible. The “man” behind the cane may have been uniquely damaged and desperate for personal recognition but nevertheless embodied the values of the slave South and acted on them. His neighbors considered the sneak attack and beating of the unarmed Sumner to be justified and honorable. 

Beyond Brooks’ personal life, the book tells us about slavery, politics, and a society which rejected free speech, intellectual challenges, and open debate. By the time Brooks attacked Sumner, the slave South was essentially a closed society. Free speech was illegal, if that speech challenged slavery, racism, southern rights, or the self-proclaimed right of the South to leave the Union. Brooks was fined a mere $100 for his attack on Sumner and a majority of the House (but not the necessary super majority) voted to expel him. He then resigned from Congress and returned to South Carolina where he was wined and dined. Students at the University of Virginia sent him a cane with a heavy gold head. The mayor of Columbia, South Carolina, gifted him a goblet, a silver pitcher, and a new cane. At a banquet near his hometown, South Carolina’s governor and Senator Robert Toombs of Georgia spoke, while Brooks received “a gold goblet, a silver goblet, two gold headed walking canes & a Pair of So[uth] Ca[rolina] made pistols.” He was finally a hero, and a man’s man. At this banquet a local leader declared that Sumner’s speech was the weapon of an “assassin.” Thus, the South had a hero who stood up to antislavery rhetoric, while equating northern speech with lethal violence. Across the South the cheer, in public events and newspapers was “hit him again.” 

By this time, most Southerners no longer spoke to Northerners and refused to engage in discussions that challenged slavery. The most famous book of the decade, indeed of the 19^th century, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin was banned in the South, even as it won audiences globally. The North and the world knew of her fictional Simon Legree, beating Uncle Tom to death, and then, as if sent from central casting, Preston Brooks walked onstage, nearly beating Senator Sumner to death.  

Even as he became a southern hero, Brooks was vilified in the North and Europe. A Republican songbook for the 1856 presidential election included a new ballad, Bully Brooks. Cartoons mocked his chivalry; editorials called him a coward when he refused to come North to speak. A devastating cartoon showed him beating the bloodied Sumner with a cane, while the civilized, articulate Sumner held a pen in his hand.  

Then, as quickly as Bully Brooks rose to fame, he left the stage, dying from asphyxiation, from an undiagnosed infection, in a Washington, D.C. hotel room in January 1857. Southerners mourned him as a symbol of proslavery heroism. But the descendants of Puritans had the last word. The Boston Atlas explained his “sudden death” by a “virulent and painful disease” could “scarcely fail to impress the public as a signal instance of Divine retribution for atrocious and peculiar crime.” Thus the “bold and arrogant man, while yet boasting of his dastardly outrage … is seized by the throat by an invisible and irresistible grasp, and strangled to death.” 

Quigley notes Northerners learned from Brooks “that free speech must be actively fought for.” Reverend Henry Ward Beecher (Harriet Beecher Stowe’s brother) neatly summed up the event: “The symbol of the North is the pen; the symbol of the South is the Bludgeon.” The attack was part of a “long-formed, deeply-laid plan, of destroying free speech in the Republic, and making SILENCE NATIONAL.” The campaign slogan of the Republican Party in 1856, just a few months after the caning, was “Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Speech, and Free Men.” After the Civil War, the Republicans would pass the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution to make the First Amendment applicable to the states. The Supreme Court would misunderstand this central constitutional change during Reconstruction, but eventually it figured it out. The lesson of Bully Brooks is that speech, debate, and arguments are central to a democracy. Violence and suppression are, in the end, the tools of dictators, kings, and slaveowners. It is a lesson for our own times, too. 

The post Blood on the U.S. Senate Floor appeared first on Washington Monthly.

In response to a poll finding that swing voters by a two-to-one margin have an unfavorable view of the Democratic Party, last week Thomas B. Edsall, the New York Times columnist, counseled the party “to perform a kind of brutal surgery on itself” amounting to an “ideological exorcism.” 

For example, he proposed deportation for all unauthorized immigrants who have been in America for less than five years (while offering green cards for those here longer and without criminal records), “lifetime sentences for offenders convicted of multiple violent crimes,” “the death penalty if supported by the voters in a state,” declaring that “there are two sexes: men and women,” and banning gender-affirming medical treatments for minors. 

Edsall is hardly alone in urging Democrats to punch left to win the center. Ruy Teixeira, in his now-defunct newsletter The Liberal Patriot, regularly made pleas similar to Edsall’s and layered on top a rejection of “a rapid clean energy transition” and accepting that “fossil fuels, especially natural gas and oil, will be a big part of the energy mix for many, many years to come.” 

Another prominent Substacker, Matthew Yglesias, last fall made the “uncomfortable” argument that “a political coalition large enough to wield power and accomplish useful things absolutely needs to include bigots” (emphasis original) and the reason why “Republicans are winning more elections” is because the “range of views that one is allowed to hold or express while remaining a member in good standing of America’s center-left has gotten smaller.” Last Friday, during an exchange on X about “wokeness” in the Democratic “establishment,” Yglesias pledged to “endorse” the anti-establishment Senate candidate in Michigan, Abdul El-Sayed, if he would “come out against affirmative action and for assigning kids to sports teams based on biological sex.” 

Are these uncomfortable truths? Or misguided overcorrections?  

I’ve been arguing the latter, as Democratic Party unfavorability in polls is not as good a metric as Democratic performance at the ballot box. Without throwing transgender people or other vulnerable constituencies under the proverbial bus, Democrats have won a critical Wisconsin Supreme Court seat and flipped a state Senate seat in a Fort Worth, Texas district that Donald Trump won by 17 points. In fact, since Trump’s inauguration, Democrats have flipped 30 state legislative seats and coughed up zero; such an election-cycle shutout hasn’t happened in at least 15 years. 

The November midterms will be a more significant acid test, with coast-to-middle-America-to-coast House races and several Senate and gubernatorial races in battleground states. But Senator Jon Ossoff, the Georgia Democrat, is already disproving the hysterical advice from the vociferously anti-woke, having built a healthy lead without any scars from political surgery.  

At the start of 2026, Ossoff was the only incumbent Democratic Senator in a race deemed a “tossup” by the handicappers at The Cook Political Report with Amy Walter.  

The presumption of a tight race was sound, even though Ossoff led most general election trial heats sampled in 2025. After all, Ossoff represents a state where Trump won in 2024, and Republicans have total control of the state government. In January 2021, he barely eked out a narrow runoff election victory to secure his first term, unwittingly abetted by Trump who was publicly and baselessly challenging the integrity of Georgia’s Republican-managed election administration. 

But in April, before Georgia Republicans settled on a nominee, Cook shifted its rating of the race to “Lean Democratic,” based in part on intra-party GOP division and Ossoff’s “eye-popping” war chest. Representative Mike Collins won the GOP runoff one month ago, yet we haven’t seen fresh evidence of robust party unity, making the race more competitive. Ossoff continues to lead in polls, including a June survey from Fox News finding a stunning 13-point lead over Collins. (Another June poll from Wick, an online pollster that employs artificial intelligence technology, has Ossoff up by four.) And Ossoff is crushing the fundraising race, outraising Collins 10-to-1 in the second quarter and boasting a $42 million-to-$2 million cash-on-hand advantage. All this happened without Ossoff making any jarring breaks with his party.  

In 2025, he voted against Trump 91 percent of the time, more than any other Senate Democrat representing a state Trump won except for Wisconsin’s Tammy Baldwin.  

Early in 2025, Ossoff joined a successful filibuster of Republican legislation that would have codified an executive order denying federal funds to schools that let transgender athletes play on girls’ teams. One Nation, a political action committee tied to the Senate Republican leadership, tried to exploit the vote in a TV ad. Over footage of a male basketball player wearing an “Ossoff” jersey and swatting the ball out of the hands of a female opponent, a narrator says, “Man-to-man defense isn’t woke enough for Ossoff. He’s playing for they/them. Call and tell Senator Ossoff: Stop dunking on defenseless girls.” A Republican primary candidate, Buddy Carter, aired an ad featuring an actor playing a transgender woman who says, “Buddy Carter even believes there’s only two genders. Now Buddy wants to help Trump in the Senate and beat Jon Ossoff. After all, Ossoff is done for us. It’s just not fair.” Neither ad slowed Ossoff’s roll, and Carter came in third. 

One of the few times Ossoff voted with Trump was on the Laken Riley Act, which requires mandatory detention without bail of undocumented immigrants who were charged—but not necessarily convicted—of low-level crimes. The bill, brought to the Senate floor mere days after Trump’s inauguration, was named after a Georgia nursing student murdered by an undocumented immigrant. Ossoff crossed the aisle with 11 other Senate Democrats, including his fellow Georgian Raphael Warnock. In the wake of Trump’s out-of-control mass deportation operation, most Democrats who backed the bill probably now regret their vote. But as a Georgian, Ossoff (and Warnock) had little political choice.  

Otherwise, Ossoff has not leaned right on immigration. In fact, he has taken the lead on investigating human rights abuses in immigration detention centers and has charged the Trump administration with blocking access to congressional investigators. He sponsored legislation requiring local approval before the federal government can open new immigration detention facilities, and successfully lobbied to prevent the opening of a 10,000-bed facility in Social Circle, Georgia—a stance for which Ossoff was aligned with the local political leadership in a Trump stronghold. After ICE agents shot and killed two protestors in Minnesota, Ossoff opposed further federal funding for ICE without the adoption of civil liberties protections.  

Ossoff has not embraced the “Abolish ICE” slogan, which might disappoint some on the left. But he is firmly on the side of ICE reform and hasn’t paired it with any conservative rhetoric favorable to mass deportations as Edsall and Teixeira have urged. This hasn’t stopped Republicans from airing ads baselessly claiming Ossoff wants to give health care to illegal immigrants, but these spots have yet to draw any political blood. 

Ossoff has become widely known for his withering speeches accusing Trump of corruption, linking Trump’s self-enrichment to the economic concerns Americans are feeling amid continuing high prices and war in the Mideast. Not only has he refused to distance himself from a supposedly toxic Democratic brand, but the 39-year-old who spent much of his pre-electoral career making documentaries about malfeasance abroad is also explicitly campaigning for a Democratic Senate majority as the best way to end Trump’s corruption. At a Friday rally, Ossoff declared, “We won’t just restore checks and balances for the next two years. We will rebuke him so decisively that no president will dare try this kind of brazen corruption and abuse again for centuries.” 

How is Ossoff getting away with this in Georgia of all places?  

First, unlike some Democratic incumbents in the House representing deep blue districts, Ossoff avoided a primary challenge. That has allowed him to tread lightly and walk a careful line on controversial subjects without being loudly accused of ideological impurity from his left flank. For example, regarding Israel—a subject that has opened up intra-party rifts in other Democratic primaries—Ossoff has carved a delicate path, voting for blocking the sale of rifles that could be used in Gaza but voting against blocking sales of “air-to-ground munitions” needed to defend against attacks “from Iran, Lebanon, and Yemen.” Freed from intra-party tangles, Ossoff has been able to train his political fire on Trump. 

Second, Trump is not popular in Georgia. Yes, he won two years ago, but not by much. And his job approval is underwater there and in every other swing state. Ossoff has no reason to pull his punches.  

Third, Georgia may be trending blue up and down the ballot. The Democratic nominee for governor, former Atlanta mayor and Joe Biden administration official Keisha Lance Bottoms, leads by 5 points in a recent Fox News poll, and by 7, according to a recent State Navigate poll. The latter further found that Democrats have a shocking 8-point lead in a generic ballot test for the Georgia state House.  

Finally, and most importantly, we don’t have any evidence the Democratic Party needs “brutal surgery on itself,” performed by Ossoff or anyone else, to win elections when the public is livid at how Republicans have failed to better the lives of average Americans. If any brand is currently toxic, it’s the GOP brand.  

Sure, Democrats may not be beloved by swing voters, and would have to prove themselves worthy stewards to the public should they reclaim power. But poll numbers showing unfavorability need not be sloppily interpreted to mean picking an ostentatious fight with the party’s left wing is necessary.  

Such data does not demand making crude political calculations to appeal to one voter faction over another. The name of the game when winning elections is addition, not subtraction, and that requires finding and elevating areas of common ground. While antsy pundits tend to glorify jumping on political land mines as acts of bravery, Ossoff is providing a master class in how to navigate around them and stay alive. 

The post Jon Ossoff Is Proving Democrats Don’t Need to Punch Left  appeared first on Washington Monthly.

Sheffield, Scunthorpe, Port Talbot, Tyne, Teesside and Clyde. South Wales, central Scotland, Lancashire, and the mill towns across the Pennines—these were the ailing milling, mining, manufacturing, and shipbuilding communities and regions name-checked by Andy Burnham as he accepted the mantle of Labour Party leadership—three days before becoming prime minister of the United Kingdom. Communities where successive governments had failed working people, and decades of British economic policy had ignored. The places where—absent meaningful improvement in their lives—voters otherwise turn to the nationalism and resentment-driven politics on offer from the Reform Party.

Burnham’s rapid ascent to Britain’s premiership has been remarkably smooth. In a country reeling from political instability, a surging populist right, and years of stagnant growth and living standards, Greater Manchester and its former mayor offer a ray of hope for reviving the economy and beating back the nationalist and anti-immigration Reform UK Party before Britain succumbs to the MAGA-style politics that have propelled Donald Trump to the presidency twice and put the Republican Party in charge of Congress, at least for now. Burnham promises a more consensual, place-before-party politics, built around the large-scale devolution of power and resources from Westminster to Britain’s long-neglected cities and regions.

The economic and political dynamics that elevated Trump remain a threat across democracies. Whether in France, Germany, Belgium, the U.S., or the U.K.—the same type of hollowed-out industrial communities that Burnham called out in Britain are the wellspring of nationalist, anti-system sentiment that empowers the extremes. As living standards decline and economic security erodes, residents of once-vibrant heartland regions can become fertile ground for anti-democratic populists who stoke resentment, peddle nostalgia and ethnonationalism, and offer simple answers to long-term problems.

It’s, of course, a now familiar story on the continent. In Germany, the nationalist Alternative for Germany (AfD) is positioned to win power in key states. In the industrial swing states of the American Midwest and the rural and Rust Belt communities of France, support runs high for Trump and Marine Le Pen’s far-right National Rally. These voters are frustrated and looking for change. When traditional parties fail to deliver, residents of struggling industrial and rural regions can turn to resentment politics, resurgent nationalism, and the far right’s promise that a strongman can fix it all.

Economic decline is one force fueling the growth of far-right parties. But our work with the Heartlands Transformation Network—a transatlantic collaborative of leaders and economic change makers from 30 countries dedicated to closing geographic economic divides and reconnecting residents of rural and former industrial communities to economic opportunity suggests that when once-mighty communities turn an economic corner and begin to prosper again, hope and optimism return, resentments cool, and politics becomes less polarized—and more normal. 

As we wrote for the Brookings Institution, we have seen the political temperature cool alongside economic recovery in older industrial communities, including Grand Rapids, Michigan; Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; Duisburg, Germany; and Lyon and Strasbourg, France. 

How do such communities find a path to economic regeneration and a healthier polity? Examples we have presented through the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) point to the importance of mayors and other local political, business, and civic leaders who know and engage their communities, helping them chart futures rooted in their own identities and assets.

That is why hopes are high for Burnham. Among the many struggling communities of northern England, Greater Manchester stands out as an example of successful economic transformation. Often described as the birthplace of the Industrial Revolution, the city-region fell on hard times, as did many towns across the Midlands and the North. Today, it is a dynamic hub for technology, arts, and finance. The Greater Manchester mayoralty, established in 2015, and the University of Manchester have helped provide the institutional foundation for that resurgence. Burnham, 56, the first elected Greater Manchester Mayor entering office in 2017, did not create the transformation, but he has helped accelerate it by clearly communicating what he would do and why. As he told us at the Heartlands Transformation Network’s first transatlantic symposium, progress starts small, by building trust. Tangible improvements to basic public services—such as making the bus system work—have helped persuade residents that government can deliver and can take on bigger challenges.

Alongside affordable, reliable local transportation, Burnham has focused on access to good homes, jobs, and training—or, as British political analyst Sam Freedman, senior fellow at the Institute for Government, puts it, the “foundational infrastructure of people’s everyday lives.” During nearly a decade leading one of England’s largest city-regions outside London, he has been a high-profile, accessible mayor, widely seen across the political spectrum as standing up for Greater Manchester’s residents and businesses. During the COVID-19 pandemic, when Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s government sought to impose a local lockdown, Burnham campaigned for compensation for families and businesses and was dubbed the “King of the North.” The name—and the style—stuck.

Effective local leaders also learn from—and shamelessly “steal” good ideas from—one another, as former Grand Rapids Mayor George Heartwell told us in another forum. During his 12 years in office, Heartwell helped guide the manufacturing city, long known as “Furniture City,” through a broader regional renaissance and helped earn it recognition as one of America’s greenest midsize cities. The traditionally Republican region has since rejected some of the most extreme MAGA candidates while electing a Democrat to Congress (Representative Hillary Scholten) for the first time in 50 years, and supporting a Democrat for Governor (Gretchen Whitmer in 2018 and 2022) for the first time in over 30 years.

International learning networks that connect leaders from similarly situated coal, steel, chemical, heavy-manufacturing, and milling communities have been an important part of Greater Manchester’s success. At a recent Bennett Institute conference, Burnham cited a network organized by former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg as a political model, through which he met former Pittsburgh Mayor Bill Peduto. Peduto helped along Pittsburgh’s decades-long transition from steel capital to a center of AI, data science, robotics, automation, and health care, offering lessons for Manchester and other industrial cities. The network also helped lay the groundwork for trade missions and agreements linking Greater Manchester with Boston, Austin, Dublin, Osaka, and Germany’s Ruhr region.

That economic transformation is possible—even in former industrial heartlands hit hard by globalization and technological change—offers hope not only for Burnham and Britain but for leaders across democracies who want to deliver a better life for their communities and head off the political extremes.

But it will not be easy. Residents of former mill, mining, and manufacturing communities across Britain have been promised “big change” before: through Brexit, Boris Johnson’s pledge to “level up” the Midlands and the North, and Labour’s sweeping 2024 mandate after 14 years of Conservative rule, austerity, and political dysfunction. Those unfulfilled promises have only deepened voter anger and cynicism—and intensified the search for someone to blame, whether the European Union or immigration. That discontent has long underpinned the appeal of Nigel Farage and his succession of right-wing populist parties. Reform UK, the latest iteration, has frequently led national polls since 2025.

So far, Burnham, who hails from a Catholic working-class background, has hit the right notes. On July 17, Labour confirmed him as its new leader; on July 20, King Charles III formally appointed him prime minister. His rise has happened gradually and then suddenly. Less than a month ago, he returned to Parliament after winning the Makerfield by-election, in a post-industrial constituency in Greater Manchester near his family home. Asked whether the seat was a “stepping-stone,” Burnham called it a “touchstone”: a test of whether he can deliver tangible improvements for Makerfield and communities like it across the country.

That is the common test across democracies: Can leaders deliver and bring hope to heartlands like Greater Manchester? Burnham has made that promise, but fulfilling it will be far from straightforward, and voters’ patience is running short. Time will tell—but there is not much of it.

The post Andy Burnham’s Challenge appeared first on Washington Monthly.

As a U.S. Senator from Oklahoma, Markwayne Mullin enjoyed a reputation for confrontation and theatricality. He often donned a cowboy hat on the Senate floor (a no-no for a body that prizes decorum) and strode the hallways of the Capitol bouncing a rubber stress ball. 

During a 2023 Senate hearing, the former mixed martial arts fighter challenged Teamsters President Sean O’Brien to a fistfight, taunting him to “stand your butt up.” In a separate incident last fall, Mullin “joked” about killing journalists. 

Mullin’s confirmation hearing to replace Kristi Noem as Secretary of Homeland Security this spring was likewise combative. Sen. Rand Paul—whom Mullin had called a “freaking snake”—challenged his temperament and lack of expertise. “Explain to the American people why they should trust a man with anger issues to set the proper example for ICE and border patrol agents,” Paul said. 

Since ascending to DHS, however, Mullin has submerged his ostentatious persona. Unlike Noem, whose shock-and-awe immigration enforcement tactics sparked widespread public outrage, Mullin has been relatively low-key. No dehumanizing videos, no embarrassing cosplay, no obvious corruption. 

He’s also built a brutally efficient deportation machine that—until last week—was largely escaping protest from an easily distractible public:

• Arrests have surged to 2,000 per day, according to the New York Times, and more than 63,000 people were in ICE custody at the start of July, often in horrific conditions. 
• ICE has especially targeted unaccompanied minors, reports ProPublica, and judges are signing more than 10,000 deportation or removal orders each month. 
• Immigration judges have also sharply reduced the number of immigrants granted asylum, while judges resistant to the administration’s policies have been fired.
• Judges are now also holding mass deportation hearings involving as many as 100 cases at a time, according to NPR, often with little or no notice to the people involved. 
• Deportation flights reached a record high in May, according to the nonprofit Human Rights First, with 288 flights to 38 countries, including St. Kitts, Nevis, Paraguay, Ghana, and Cameroon. 
• DHS has also told employers to fire thousands of legal immigrant workers who are likely to lose their Temporary Protected Status in coming weeks, thanks to a recent Supreme Court decision granting the administration broad discretion over TPS status. 

The fatal shooting of a Houston man by ICE agents earlier this month, along with another killing last week in Maine and the death of yet another man in Florida, have revived some public scrutiny of ICE’s tactics. But the national outcry has so far been relatively muted compared to the protests in Minneapolis, Portland, and other cities earlier this year. These recent shootings have not involved U.S. citizens, unlike the killings in Minneapolis, and ICE has taken pains to avoid the massive shows of force that frightened or inconvenienced ordinary Americans. “It’s by design,” as one anonymous source told Politico. 

Even as outrage is building anew over ICE’s abuses, thousands of people have already been quietly disappeared from their neighborhoods, schools, and workplaces. Perhaps you no longer see the family that lived next door, the server at your favorite restaurant, the custodian at your children’s school, or the aide who helped your elderly parents. And perhaps the reasons for their absence are perfectly benign. Many Americans will tell themselves that. 

But it’s exactly that silent complicity that Mullin and his agents have been counting on to carry out their mass deportations. The current furor may yet die down. Don’t look away. 

Don’t miss at the Monthly…

Can Trump really steal the midterms? Trump’s escalating lies about election integrity, including his speech on Thursday, are stoking increasing fears about election interference this fall. Building on Legal Affairs Editor Garrett Epps’ recent analysis, Executive Editor Digital Matt Cooper sums up what you need to worry about—and what you don’t. He also dissects Trump’s dud of a speech Thursday night, which promised blockbuster revelations but “landed with all the force of a cotton ball.” The bottom line: Be worried, but don’t panic. Read here and here.

“Disaster insurance for all?” Repeated wildfires have left California homes all but uninsurable. State Farm and Allstate have fled the market, leaving homeowners frustrated and unprotected in the case of a catastrophe. Could a disaster insurance equivalent of “Medicare for All” be the answer? Editor Kainoa Lowman explores the pros and cons of this idea, proposed by a leading candidate for state insurance commissioner, Jane Kim. Kainoa concludes that it’s probably too pricey to be practicable but could have the effect of forcing a much-needed debate on solving California’s insurance problem. Read here. 

A sea change in the war against sexual violence. Despite a decade of research, award-winning Deanne Stillman struggled to find a publisher for her investigation of the rape and murder of two girls by a Marine in the town of Twentynine Palms, California. This year, on the 25th anniversary of its publication, Twentynine Palms has been recognized by the Los Angeles Times as a “best book of the year.” What’s changed, Stillman says, is a shift in public attitudes toward sexual violence and its victims. “For decades … women remained in the shadows, lest they face excoriation, threats, and erasure,” she writes. “This is all still happening, but not to the degree that it once was. Indeed, something of an emotional security space has emerged, and the floodgates have opened.” One turning point, she argues, was the case of Frenchwoman Gisele Pelicot, whose wrenching memoir turned her into a global heroine in the fight against sexual violence. Read here. 

Plus…

• The author of Enshittification has a new book on what to think about AI. Anita Jain writes that Cory Doctorow is surprisingly complacent about humanity’s fate. 
• Christoph Irmscher finds that America has always fallen short of its egalitarian ideals. In his review of Kim Phillips-Fein’s Country of Lords, Christoph chronicles the ugly impacts of racism on our pretensions to equality. 
• Contributing writer Jonathan Alter faults PEN America President Dinaw Mengestu for his theatrical—and hypocritical—resignation over an article protesting the silencing of Israeli writers. 
• Stanley Institute researchers E. Fuller Torrey and Wendy Simmons imagine a letter to Trump from the discoverer of Parkinson’s Disease, proposing a renaming. 

Coda (law rules edition…) 

If you read only one thing this week (aside from this newsletter, of course), read federal judge Kathleen Williams’ extraordinary order nullifying Trump’s “settlement” with the IRS after his $10 billion lawsuit against the agency. 

The bottom line: You can’t have a legitimate settlement if the underlying lawsuit is fake. 

In this case, Trump’s control of the IRS meant that Trump was suing (and “settling” with) himself. Trump’s lawsuit, Williams found, was a pretext to gain legitimacy for the outcome—lifetime immunity from audits and a $1.8 billion slush fund (which acting Attorney General Todd Blanche has disavowed): 

“Whether Executive Branch actors can privately agree to give themselves and their former clients blanket immunities and billions of dollars in tax monies for legally undefined grievances was never an issue advanced to this Court. The question is whether the Parties could do so by claiming to be adverse and engaging the legitimacy of a court proceeding. The answer is a resounding ‘no’: the Lead Plaintiff and the Government are one, a fully realized unitary interest. … And because this fact was so obvious and insurmountable, the Court finds that the matter was brought for an improper purpose—to gain the imprimatur of judicial legitimacy for a ‘settlement’ that had no viable basis in law or in fact.”

Trump will, of course, appeal the ruling, but the law is pretty clear. Trump’s lawyers, meanwhile, are facing sanctions for their abuse of the courts. This includes Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, whose confirmation hearing to be the permanent Attorney General took place last week. That so many GOP senators have no problem confirming Trump’s personal lawyer to head the Department of Justice is a stain on the institution. 

As always, thanks for reading, and please don’t forget to share, like, and subscribe. Independent media depends on people like you! 

Have a great week!

Anne Kim, Senior Editor

The post ICE Has Only Seemed To Be Quieter appeared first on Washington Monthly.

When President Donald Trump addressed the nation regarding alleged vulnerabilities in the U.S. election system, he proclaimed that “no country can be great without fair and honest elections.” No argument there.

What he said, however, was mostly not new, and what was new was riddled with overstatement and exaggeration. While he promised the truth lay in a document dump to be posted online, the papers, upon examination, do not contain significant new revelations about vulnerabilities in election systems. If his purpose was to undermine the midterm elections, which he desperately needs to win and is almost sure to lose, it was one big nothing burger.

While he did not repeat his canard that he actually won the presidential election he lost in 2020, Jay Clayton, his nominee for Director of National Intelligence, appearing before the Senate Intelligence Committee that afternoon, toed the Trump line, absurdly refusing to answer the simple question, “Who won the 2020 election?” So, the fantasy of 2020 election denial is alive and well in Trump’s Washington.

Trump did declassify some highly redacted documents he said showed an influence campaign by China in 2019, a cover-up by U.S. intelligence officials, fraud in Michigan, and voting machine tampering in Venezuela. The unconvincing evidence, however, did not support the claim of vulnerability. But it will certainly form the basis for Trump’s spurious efforts to curtail mail-in voting, add onerous voter ID requirements, and perhaps declare a national emergency so he can station ICE agents or National Guardsmen at key polling places. Trump was laying down an authoritarian marker.

He accused the “fake news” media, ABC and NBC, of refusing to cover his speech “because they know how corrupt our system is and they don’t want to reveal it.” He said the networks “and others in the media are part of a plot; they want to continue this fraud for whatever reason.” And he once again called for the revocation of the networks’ government-issued broadcast licenses. Both networks broadcast the speech live on their streaming platforms. Failing to cover a presidential prime-time speech is hardly new. Mainstream media also declined to air primetime addresses by Presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden.

A broken election system has been a Trump leitmotif for the past decade. “Great damage has been done to our country,” he said. “Our elections were left vulnerable to being rigged and stolen, and the trust of the American people was lost. This cannot be allowed to continue.”

“If you look at voting today, it’s in such bad shape in so many states,” Trump said. “And we are committing to fix it, and we are also committing to work with those states and local jurisdictions to help them fix and patch known technical vulnerabilities before the midterm elections.”

But Trump has spent the first part of his second term dismantling the election protections built up over previous years. The FBI task force on foreign influence was shut down; the Office of the Director of National Intelligence sharply cut back a task force that warned against foreign meddling; and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency has been eviscerated.

The documents Trump released to support his claims—and previous assessments from the intelligence community—do not support his hyperbolic statements about election security. Actually, some of the evidence points toward the opposite conclusion. One of the documents posted on the White House website was blunt: “We assess that vote tabulation systems would be difficult to manipulate on a wide enough scale to compromise election results.”

Trump embellished facts long known to the public to the point of distortion. He said that China in 2019 had bought, stolen, or hacked tens of millions of voter data files across 18 states. But U.S. intelligence and congressional officials have long known that China obtained voter data—publicly available information often purchased by political campaigns. What’s more, former intelligence officials have said that China gathered the data not to manipulate voting results but to craft influence campaigns better to shape voters’ perceptions. And Trump did not claim that either China or anyone else used registration information to penetrate or manipulate the voting process.

Trump discussed documents related to an investigation into a voter-registration group in Muskegon, Michigan. The investigation itself has long been well known. In newly released documents, former employees of the organization said they were encouraged to provide false information on voter registration forms to meet quotas and get paid. But in October 2020, the election clerk said hundreds of “irregular” applications had been caught, and none of the fake forms had resulted in any ballots being sent out incorrectly. 

As for Venezuela, he said, “It is now working with us to produce millions and millions of barrels of oil.” Notice the prevarication “is now working with us.” The premise of the statement is false. Oil analysts say it will take at least a decade for Venezuela to get from its current production of 800,000 barrels a day to one million, and this would require around $15 to $20 billion in infrastructure investment over the next decade to raise Venezuela’s oil output to 1.5 million barrels.

Trump claimed Venezuela’s election was rigged in 2020 through manipulation of voting machine technology. A CIA analysis last month determined that such technology was capable of committing “large-scale electronic fraud” in Venezuela, but there was no evidence it had done so. Most importantly, it determined that the Venezuelan government could not rig elections outside its own country.

Trump charged a “deep state” conspiracy to suppress the information. Every conspiracy needs a cover-up. True that the documents show an intense debate among intelligence officials about alerting Congress or their superiors. But the fact is that U.S. intelligence and congressional officials have long known that China obtained publicly available voter data. And former intelligence officials have said that China gathered the data not to manipulate voting results but to better craft influence campaigns that shape voters’ perceptions. While the documents disclose a passing interest by China in influence operations, they concede Beijing never endorsed any broad-based effort to subvert Trump’s election.

Trump’s conspiracy theories are Looney Tunes. His supporters alleged that China hacked voting machines through thermostats. They floated the notion that Italian satellites were directed to flip votes. They accused election officials of smuggling in votes for Biden in suitcases. Investigation debunked each of these chimerical claims.

Trump’s claims of a stolen 2020 election were exhaustively investigated, litigated, and found to be without merit. There were dozens of investigations, audits, recounts, and lawsuits at the local, state, and federal levels that examined the 2020 election, which experts said was the most scrutinized election in U.S. history. There were over 60 court cases in which judges, including those appointed by Trump and other Republican presidents, reviewed the evidence and found no widespread fraud. Some were withdrawn by the Trump team before the courts ever ruled. Others were dismissed on procedural grounds. But many were decided on the merits, and after reviewing all the evidence, those courts found that the Trump campaign’s claims were unsupported by the law and the facts. None uncovered the extensive voter fraud that Trump claimed had tilted the outcome of the election.

The Department of Justice and Trump’s own attorney general, Bill Barr, found the claims lacking. Cybersecurity agencies declared the 2020 election the most secure in history. States conducted audits and hand recounts, with none finding what Trump alleged. An official report issued by the intelligence community, declassified in March 2021, concluded that there were “no indications that any foreign actor attempted to alter any technical aspect of the voting process in the 2020 U.S. election, including voter registration, casting ballots, vote tabulation, or reporting results.”

The only indication that has surfaced of attempted fraud was an attempt by Trump himself. In one famous episode, he tried to pressure Brad Raffensperger, Republican secretary of state in Georgia, to find enough votes to allow him to win. Among Trump’s claims: that 5,000 dead people “voted”; Raffensperger said the number was closer to two.

Christopher Krebs, who served as the first director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency under Trump, faced the president’s wrath because he refused to go along with his false claims.

“One scenario that required our attention was the possibility — even if unlikely — of a direct hack of voting machines,”  Krebs testified before the Senate in 2020. “To be clear, based on my experience and understanding, no adversary has yet developed the ability to manipulate a single vote cast in a U.S. election. Furthermore, even if such a hack were conducted, it would be incredibly difficult to carry out such an operation on a scale that could change the outcome of a national election.”

The conclusion is inescapable that Trump is not trying to secure our election system; he is trying to undermine it by delegitimating the voters and the count.

Senator Mark Warner , the Virginai Democrat, rejected  Trump’s claims that China meddled with the 2020 presidential election, calling the allegations “so completely false” and accusing Trump of trying to undermine confidence in future elections.

No wonder major networks didn’t cover Trump’s speech. It was “full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” Tragically, it all comes from the most powerful man in the country.

In another context, Shakespeare also wrote, “he speaks too much. Such men are dangerous.”

The post Trump’s Election Integrity Speech Was Even Worse Than You Thought appeared first on Washington Monthly.