Trump-inspired wave of threats against election officials raises midterm tensions as some workers simply quit
Archive for category: #Fascism #Elections #Bonapartism
Biden’s generosity is admirable — but this is the moment to confront the fascists and defeat them forever
While the Christian Right has been an increasingly powerful factor in American politics for decades,…
Earlier this year, Canada’s ‘Freedom Convoy’ movement stormed the nation’s capital at Ottawa and occupied the grounds of the Parliamentary building for weeks to demand an end to vaccine mandates and other protective measures against COVID-19. The movement quickly spread to other Canadian and nearby US cities, despite vocal condemnations from Canadian labor organizations, including the Teamsters. Although the ‘Freedom Convoy’ seemed to come out of nowhere for most observers, its origins lay in an earlier 2019 convoy movement of truckers and small farmers opposed to carbon taxes. Since the Ottawa blockade, the convoy movement has taken an increasingly Christian nationalist turn, with some elements advocating a divine mission to overthrow the Canadian government. Emily Leedham joins The Marc Steiner Show to discuss the history of the ‘Freedom Convoy,’ and what its merger with the religious right could mean for Canada’s future.
Emily Leedham is PressProgress’ prairies reporter. Her reporting has a special focus on workers and communities, big money and corporate influence, and systemic racism.
Post-Production: Stephen Frank
Transcript
This transcript will be made available as soon as possible.
Former U.S. Secretary of Defense William Cohen says he agrees that Donald Trump is a “clear and present threat to democracy,” and adds his possession of classified documents including one revealing the nuclear capabilities of a foreign government is “offense enough” for him to be “subject to criminal prosecution.”
Cohen, a Republican and former U.S. Congressman and U.S. Senator from Maine, served as President Bill Clinton’s Defense Secretary. He noted that if he had the same documents in his house where he left office as Donald Trump did, “I would be in handcuffs.”
Late Tuesday night The Washington Post reported that a “document describing a foreign government’s military defenses, including its nuclear capabilities, was found by FBI agents who searched former president Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence and private club last month, according to people familiar with the matter, underscoring concerns among U.S. intelligence officials about classified material stashed in the Florida property.”
READ MORE: Nuclear Docs at Mar-a-Lago ‘Hugely Important for Prosecution of Espionage Act’: Expert
“Some of the seized documents detail top-secret U.S. operations so closely guarded that many senior national security officials are kept in the dark about them,” the Post continued. “Only the president, some members of his Cabinet or a near-Cabinet-level official could authorize other government officials to know details of these special-access programs.”
MSNBC Wednesday morning, “We go back to the January 6th committee, where Judge Luttig — a very conservative judge — said that Donald Trump is a ‘clear and present threat to democracy,’” Mediate reported. “That’s been confirmed over and over.”
“The notion that the former president had documents, highly classified documents, in his possession and in unsafe circumstances, or any circumstances, puts our nation at risk, potentially. So, I think there’s no justification. There’s no way they can say, ‘oh, it’s a mistake.’ I think that’s been disproved, and anyone who says that is flat-out lying.”
Cohen also suggested the discovery of the nuclear document is a game-changer for how Attorney General Merrick Garland will move the investigation forward.
“I think the Justice Department is going about it very methodically and very deferentially,” Cohen said. “I think that time has come to an end.”
Brazil marks two centuries of independence from Portugal today. Far-right president Jair Bolsonaro is using the occasion to help create the mood music for a coup against Brazilian democracy after an October election that he expects to lose.
Jair Bolsonaro speaks during the National Convention to formalize his candidacy for a second term in Rio de Janeiro on July 24, 2022. (Andre Borges / Bloomberg via Getty Images)
Today, September 7, Brazil is celebrating two centuries of independence from Portugal. Soon afterward, on October 2, more than two hundred million Brazilians will elect their next president.
With rival challengers failing to gain traction, most voters will likely choose between two of Brazil’s best-known politicians: current president Jair Messias Bolsonaro, who is struggling for reelection after four tumultuous years, and former president Luis Inácio Lula da Silva of the left-wing Workers’ Party (PT), who is aiming for an unprecedented (and nonconsecutive) third term.
With Brazilian society deeply polarized between supporters of the far-right incumbent, who refuses to say whether he will accept an electoral defeat, and his center-left challenger, the election is certain to test Brazil’s weakened democratic institutions.
A Turbulent History
The forthcoming election, however, is far from being the first time that Brazilian democracy has faced an existential threat. Since its foundation in 1889, the Brazilian Republic has been playing a game of musical chairs among the elite, the military, and progressives.
A brief history of several past threats to Brazilian democracy can help us make sense of Bolsonaro’s likely attempt at a “self-coup” and its prospects for success should he lose the election to Lula, as nearly all polls are predicting he will. Such a brazen act of violent subversion would not only draw inspiration from Donald Trump’s attempt to overturn his loss in the 2020 US presidential election. Unfortunately, it would also be just the latest episode in Brazil’s long history of divisive elections, coups, and attempted coups.
In 1889, after slavery was abolished, the agrarian elite withdrew its support for the monarchy and allied with a disgruntled military to stage a coup that removed the emperor, Pedro II. This agrarian-military alliance established an oligarchic republic which they subsequently dominated to protect their interests.
This First Republic was in turn toppled by the “Revolution of 1930,” in which the urban middle class allied with disgruntled military officers led by Getúlio Vargas to wrest power from the agrarian elite. President Vargas’s authoritarian government was responsible for some progressive social reforms. Then in 1937, Vargas launched a self-coup to reinforce his grip on the country by imposing an anti-communist “corporatist” dictatorship, before he was himself ousted from power in 1945 by a growing democratic opposition.
The forthcoming election is far from being the first time that Brazilian democracy has faced an existential threat.
Twenty years of unstable democratic rule followed until, in 1964, left-wing president João Goulart came under fire from the conservative elite that opposed his radical social reforms. Goulart’s increase of the minimum wage, expansion of labor rights, and plans for an agrarian reform (the first one in the country’s history) were more than enough to bring the elite and the military together to stage a US-backed coup promoted as a “defense against communism.”
The bloody dictatorship that held power from 1964 to 1985 tortured and murdered left-wing dissidents and massively increased the national debt. While doing so, it deflected from its crimes through the use of nationalistic rhetoric — rhetoric that Bolsonaro perpetuates, as we shall see.
It is against this decades-long backdrop of violent conservative reaction that the stage was set for the upcoming election. Although the current Brazilian republic, born in 1985, was founded on democratic principles, there should be no illusion that it is somehow immune to coups. With Bolsonaro having brought back the specter of military rule to the Brazilian political scene, much uncertainty now looms over the outcome of the forthcoming election.
Lula’s Rise
Lula’s first term as president from 2002 to 2010 saw the development of social programs in partnership with the private sector that quickly returned the economy to sustained 4 percent annual growth levels after years of neoliberal crisis. Programs like “Bolsa Família,” which established a universal basic income for families living below the poverty line, and “Fome Zero” (Zero Hunger), proved highly successful in combating poverty and improving education. Economically, Lula’s government was aided by high commodity prices, which enabled it to make large investments in sectors such as energy and infrastructure.
However, all was not roses in Lula’s government. In 2005, a large-scale bribery scandal broke in Congress. Dubbed “mensalão” (monthly payment), the scandal involved buying votes for federal programs with public money. The largest of its kind until then, the mensalão controversy damaged the PT’s image as being “outside” Brazil’s notoriously corrupt governing system. Nevertheless, by the time Lula left office, his personal approval rating had reached a record high of 87 percent.
By the time Lula left office, his personal approval rating had reached a record high of 87 percent.
Lula’s personal popularity did not rub off on his handpicked successor and long-term ally Dilma Rousseff. Much slower economic growth and increasingly partisan politics ultimately overshadowed Rousseff’s historic election as the first woman president of Brazil. Decidedly less pragmatic than Lula, Dilma became more isolated as she refused to go along with the patronage politics of PT-allied parties.
Following her reelection in 2014, the defeated right-wing opposition party, the ironically named Brazilian Social Democratic Party (PSDB), announced its refusal to accept the results. During Rousseff’s second term, she then faced an historically aggressive opposition bent on removing her by any means necessary.
Car Wash or Lawfare?
By 2015, with a full-blown economic recession under way, the Brazilian Congress, then mostly opposed to Rousseff, pounced on what was dubbed “fiscal pedaling.” This was a new term meant to describe the use of state-owned banks by one branch of the federal government to front funds required for paying general government obligations without officially declaring a loan.
Though it had long been a common fiscal practice, Congress now labeled such measures “unauthorized loans” that were not only economically irresponsible, but also constituted an impeachable offense. Rousseff’s subsequent removal appeared to be a coup in all but name, as her successor, the conservative vice president Michel Temer, moved quickly to undo many of the PT’s most successful social policies without an electoral mandate.
At the same time, Operation Car Wash, a federal operation authorized by the conservative magistrate Sérgio Moro, carried out an extensive investigation of government corruption. It led to the arrest of numerous politicians, almost all on the Left, even though right-wing politicians — including Temer — were also mired in corruption scandals. Indeed, Operation Car Wash’s principal target was Lula himself, who was arrested and charged almost in tandem with Rousseff’s impeachment.
Leaked messages offered strong evidence of blatant political bias on the part of Sérgio Moro and his colleagues.
There was scant evidence of wrongdoing in Lula’s case, with the chief prosecutor noting that “we don’t have evidence, but we have conviction [of his guilt].” Leaked messages offered strong evidence of blatant political bias on the part of Moro and his colleagues. This convinced many Brazilians that Operation Car Wash was little more than a purge of the Left.
By impeaching Rousseff, imprisoning Lula on trumped-up charges, and sweeping the PT’s impressive accomplishments under the rug while singling the party out as a den of corruption, the conservative reaction of the mid 2010s helped pave the way for far-right fringe politician Jair Bolsonaro to be elected president.
The Bolsonaro Phenomenon
The former low-ranking army officer turned politician made his career as a far-right polemicist. He has whitewashed the history of the military dictatorship, called for the arrest and torture of leftists, expressed hostility to protecting the environment (especially the Amazon rainforest, much of which has been destroyed), and otherwise embraced every conceivable reactionary talking point. The global trend of the 2010s of increased polarization, as “mainstream” conservative politicians lost ground to reactionaries, combined with a severe economic crisis to create the perfect conditions for Bolsonaro’s unlikely rise.
His campaign successfully painted the PT as a kleptocratic force guilty of impoverishing the country. Bolsonaro’s success in the second round of the 2018 presidential election, in a runoff against the PT candidate Fernando Haddad, was due less to widespread popular support for Bolsonaro than to a repudiation of the unfairly demonized PT.
The Bolsonaro storm was only possible because of Lula’s arrest in 2018, which shattered the long-standing balance between the center-left PT and the center-right PSDB that had existed since the 1990s. As Lula sat in jail during the run-up to that year’s election, the left electorate split three ways between Haddad, Lula’s hastily anointed successor, the pragmatist center-left figure Ciro Gomes, and the decidedly socialist Guilherme Boulos.
The Right did not experience the same level of division since the reactionary Bolsonaro overwhelmed all other brands of conservatism by becoming a unifying symbol of opposition to anything deemed “leftist” and therefore politically toxic. The turning point came when Bolsonaro was stabbed during a campaign rally, which immediately boosted his popularity not only on the Right, but also among millions of disaffected Brazilians.
The Bolsonaro storm was only possible because of Lula’s arrest in 2018.
Finally, social media — especially WhatsApp, which is highly popular in Brazil — played a major role in facilitating the spread of election disinformation. The result was that voters in the 2018 election cast a record number of null and blank ballots, which helped swing the election to the extreme right-wing demagogue.
Much has changed in the past four years. Bolsonaro has virtually no legislative achievements to boast about. Bolsonaro and his neoliberal treasury minister, Paulo Guedes, whose control of the government agenda resembles that of an Ottoman grand vizier, have been guilty of serious economic mismanagement. This has combined with a negligent, denialist response to the COVID-19 crisis to undermine public confidence in his administration.
Bolsonaro has also presided over a revolving-door cabinet which has seen ministers resign or be sacked at breakneck speed: there were four different health ministers in 2020 alone, as Bolsonaro sacked two of them for opposing his COVID denialist stance. With inflation now running at its highest in decades and poverty rates having risen for several years, the general feeling is one of chaos.
Following his disastrous handling of the pandemic, the president has been relying more and more on high-ranking military officers to lead government ministries. Treasury minister Guedes is the last one left of his original cabinet. His vice president, the army general Hamilton Mourão, fell out with Bolsonaro, who replaced him on the presidential ticket with a former minister of defense, General Braga Netto. Amid such instability, Lula has appeared as a phoenix rising from the ashes.
The New Lula
Lula was expected to run for president again as soon as he was released from prison in November 2019. His imprisonment in 2018, seen by many as a right-wing scheme that prevented him from regaining the presidency, all but doomed the PT’s electoral strategy and ensured Bolsonaro’s victory. Indeed, with Lula facing new levels of scrutiny, and with the PT having suffered years of right-wing disinformation and demonization, the path ahead for the liberated ex-president was not straightforward.
Lula has presented himself as the common-sense, stable solution to Bolsonaro’s ongoing political chaos.
Rather than mounting a campaign based on political vindication, or the return of left-of-center governance, Lula has instead presented himself as the common-sense, stable solution to Bolsonaro’s ongoing political chaos. Lula has said on more than one occasion that “Brazil is [currently] without government.” In response, he has forged an anti-Bolsonaro coalition that has moved toward the center in the hope of appealing to a broad swath of voters who reject the current president’s far-right extremism.
Lula has made his centrist orientation crystal clear with his choice for running mate, Geraldo Alckmin, the former governor of São Paulo. Alckmin was one of the main pillars of the neoliberal PSDB long opposed to the PT. Once rivals, Alckmin and Lula have now joined forces, with Lula praising his former rival in a show of pragmatism that many had forgotten was possible in Brazilian politics:
In the 2010s, the opposition to my government were my adversaries, not my enemies. I dream of the polarization we had in the 2010s. A democratic Republic needs to have polarization. What it doesn’t need is hatred.
Though the move certainly displeased many on the Left, the prospect of defeating Bolsonaro has taken precedence for most. Lula has since consistently led in the polls, often by large margins, although the race has tightened somewhat as the election draws nearer.
For those of us on the Left, it’s obvious that the Lula of 2022 is not the same politician who won the presidency in 2002 — who, in turn, it must be acknowledged, was no longer the icon of Brazilian socialists in the 1980s and ’90s, when he first emerged as a trade union leader and national political candidate during the PT’s early years.
Undermining the Election
Much like Donald Trump falsely claiming that he would have won the popular vote had undocumented immigrants not been allowed to vote in 2016, Bolsonaro alleged that his victory in 2018 would have come in the first round were it not for supposed irregularities. Though multiple national and international electoral bodies have declared Brazil’s voting machines secure time and again, Bolsonaro continues to contend that voting with electronic machines only is unsafe, and that paper ballots are the sole way to ensure transparency.
On more than one occasion, he has ordered the armed forces to inspect electronic voting machines, albeit to no avail. This year, such unfounded accusations have continued to grow to the point of dominating Bolsonaro’s political discourse. Bolsonaro’s constant threats to democracy have placed him firmly against the nation’s judiciary, whose chief justices have, with few exceptions, all taken turns criticizing the president’s slew of public statements expressing authoritarian intent.
Such statements clearly reflect poll results showing Lula maintaining a comfortable lead over Bolsonaro. This raises an existential question for Brazilian democracy. What will happen the day after the election?
The questioning of electronic ballots is by no means the only way that Bolsonaro is threatening the democratic process.
The questioning of electronic ballots is by no means the only way that Bolsonaro is threatening the democratic process. The presence of disinformation and electoral attack ads on social media apps such as WhatsApp have placed the courts on high alert for election day. Unlike in the United States, electoral ads in Brazil determined to contain disinformation can be legally targeted and removed. As of late August, dozens of ads have been removed from television, but the enforcement of such rules for social media remains more challenging.
A Sinking Ship
With the nation’s economy in turmoil and the executive branch in conflict with Congress, the judiciary, and itself, it is no wonder that many of Bolsonaro’s supporters have been deserting him. Multiple letters signed by private groups have been published, criticizing the president’s policies toward the economy and the pandemic.
One notable open letter criticizing Bolsonaro, “Manifesto for Democracy,” released by the State University of São Paulo, has been signed by over seven hundred thousand people, including agricultural lobbyists and representatives of many banking and financial institutions. Though some stalwarts of Bolsonarism remain faithful to the president — such as the reactionary owner of the retail giant Havan, Luciano Hang, who pressured his employees to vote for Bolsonaro in 2018 — many more figures have repudiated the incumbent and are even openly supporting the left-wing opposition they once despised.
It seems that the corporate elite, such an important player in Brazil’s political game, is abandoning Bolsonaro’s sinking ship.
Meanwhile, as Lula allies himself with centrist groups and former political rivals of neoliberal stamp, that opposition is looking and sounding increasingly less leftist. Indeed, it seems that the corporate elite, such an important player in Brazil’s political game, is abandoning Bolsonaro’s sinking ship. It is little wonder the president is growing desperate and has scheduled military parades in the major cities of Brazil to celebrate the bicentennial today.
For a country like Brazil, military parades are at best uncommon and at worst regarded as a distasteful form of nationalism that harkens back to oppressive times. Nevertheless, Bolsonaro has continued to do what he does best by equating the armed forces with patriotism and appropriating the Brazilian flag for his own reactionary purposes.
The Tell-Tale Heart
In August, Bolsonaro organized a special gala for the embalmed heart of Dom Pedro I, the first emperor of Brazil who proclaimed the country’s independence in 1822. Pedro I died in Portugal in 1834. The rest of his body was transferred to Brazil in 1972, but his heart was kept separately in a church in Porto, where it will be returned after the bicentennial.
There is much irony to this gesture. Back in 1824, Pedro dissolved the Constitutional Assembly tasked with producing a new constitution for independent Brazil. The document, in Pedro’s eyes, excessively constrained his executive powers, so he scrapped it, exiled some of the opposition, and wrote his own constitution.
What could be more to Bolsonaro’s liking than the story of independent Brazil’s first coup? Much of the Brazilian population and many institutions fear he will try to repeat it.
In a recent interview, Bolsonaro once again claimed that he will accept the outcome of the election only if it is “honest and transparent” — a form of doublespeak like that of Donald Trump. The allegation of fraud, the most likely pretext for a self-coup attempt, depends on how successfully Bolsonaro can sow doubt in the democratic process. If he can succeed in this task, he would then need the military’s support to accomplish an undemocratic seizure of power.
The current political situation suggests that a coup attempt by Bolsonaro would be a desperate gamble, and likely to fail.
The US military command resisted Trump’s entreaties to support him in 2020, but we cannot count on the Brazilian army remaining impartial in such matters. With a president who has relied so heavily on the army, continually praises its institutions, elevates its members to high positions within his administration, and celebrates its history, it is not hard to imagine that Bolsonaro could enlist military support for his efforts.
The current political situation suggests that a coup attempt would be a desperate gamble, and likely to fail. Elite economic interests have drifted away from his administration, the Supreme Court has increasingly opposed him, and the memory of the military dictatorship is still seen in a negative light by all but his most hard-line supporters. Bolsonaro would be relying solely on the ability of the military to seize control of one of the world’s largest democracies.
And yet his chances of success in such an endeavor are still higher than zero. Bolsonaro has worked hard to turn the celebration of the bicentennial into a military affair and to ingratiate himself as much as possible with the army while trying to undermine the democratic process at every turn. Should the first round on October 2 prove close enough for Bolsonaro to convince enough Brazilians to question their legitimacy, he might yet succeed where Donald Trump has failed (so far) in the United States.
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Joe Biden’s “Soul of the Nation” address got at a cold and disquieting truth: The MAGA movement cannot be placated, reasoned with, or politically accommodated in any way. There is nothing its adherents want—and nothing anyone can give them—beyond chaos and political destruction.
But first, here are three new stories from The Atlantic.
- Biden laid the trap. Trump walked into it.
- The Mar-a-Lago document ruling is untethered to the law.
- What’s causing Black flight?
Soul Sickness
Joe Biden’s address to the American people last week was, as I wrote at the time, necessary and right. The staging was bizarre, and the speech had some of the hallmarks of a group product that hadn’t been subjected to a final spackle-and-smooth by a chief writer. But Biden got one big thing right, and that one thing explains why Donald Trump and the MAGA World apologists are reacting with such fury. The president outed them as anti-American nihilists:
They promote authoritarian leaders, and they fan the flames of political violence that are a threat to our personal rights, to the pursuit of justice, to the rule of law, to the very soul of this country … MAGA Republicans have made their choice. They embrace anger. They thrive on chaos. They live not in the light of truth but in the shadow of lies.
This, as Biden pointed out, is what makes the MAGA movement so dangerous. It has no functional compass and no set of actual preferences beyond a generalized resentment, a basket of gripes and grudges against others who the Trumpists think are looking down upon them or living better lives than they are. It is a movement composed of people who are economically comfortable and middle-class, who enjoy a relatively high standard of living, and yet who seethe with a sense that they have been done dirt, screwed over, betrayed—and they are determined to get revenge.
Biden broke with tradition by saying what presidents are never supposed to say: He admitted that he was finally giving up on trying to accommodate a group of Americans, because he understands that they do not want to be accommodated. I know that some of my friends and colleagues believe that Biden, as president, must continue to reach out to MAGA voters because they are our neighbors and our fellow citizens. (The former GOP operative and my fellow Never Trumper Tim Miller made this point just this morning.) My instinct is to agree with them. But how do we reach those voters? These citizens do not want a discussion or a compromise. They don’t even want to “win,” in any traditional political sense of that word. They want to vent anger over their lives—their personal problems, their haunted sense of inferiority, and their fears about social status—on other Americans, as vehemently as possible, even to the point of violence.
How do any of us, and especially the president, engage with such a movement, when every discussion includes the belief that the only legitimate outcomes are ones in which the MAGA choice wins? Such an insistence is not civic or democratic in any way, and it is not amenable to resolution through the democratic process.
This, by the way, is why it was a mistake for Biden to raise issues such as abortion and privacy in his speech. Yes, the opportunists who will ride into political office on the bed of a pickup flying MAGA flags will attack these rights, but that is incidental to their real interest, which is power and the spoils it brings. Issues such as abortion, LGBTQ rights, and contraception are really just hot buttons meant to rile up the voters. (MAGA World, as a movement, seems to have a kind of tabloid-television-style obsession with sex, which makes sense, as it is led by a tabloid star who literally bragged about the size of his penis on a GOP debate stage.)
For Biden even to mention something like abortion undermined the more important part of his speech, which is that MAGA is a movement that doesn’t believe in anything but violence, chaos, and power. Right-wing pundits have seized on that part of his speech because it was the only thing they could argue with; they know that trying to describe MAGA and Trumpism with any consistency is pointless. Smaller government? More democracy? Power to “We the People”? Good luck with that: Trump just endorsed a GOP candidate for governor, Geoff Diehl in Massachusetts, by telling a crowd that Diehl will “rule your state with an iron fist, and he’ll do what has to be done.”
As a native son of the Commonwealth, I have no concerns that the Bay State is going to elect someone on Donald Trump’s say-so. But Trump’s authoritarian blather makes Biden’s point. The MAGA movement isn’t interested in politics, or policies, or compromises. It is interested in destruction and seeing others made as miserable as its followers are. MAGA is a movement of people who seem to be, in so many ways, deeply and profoundly unhappy, and suffering from an emptiness and anger deep in their spirit. There is no political solution for that. All Joe Biden did was finally say this obvious truth out loud.
Related:
Today’s News
- Newly declassified American intelligence reveals that Russia, hampered by sanctions, is buying artillery shells and rockets from North Korea.
- Yesterday, Canadian police found the dead body of one of the suspects in Sunday’s mass stabbing spree on an Indigenous reserve in the province of Saskatchewan, in which 10 people were killed. Police are still searching for a second suspect.
- The e-cigarette maker Juul tentatively agreed to pay $438.5 million to nearly three dozen states in a settlement over its role in teenage vaping.
Dispatches
- Humans Being: Jordan Calhoun writes about the Netflix comedy Mo, which explores the role of therapy among religious believers.
- Up for Debate: Readers weigh in on defunding the police.
- I Have Notes: Nicole Chung asks: What could you write if you weren’t afraid?
- Famous People: On the 50th anniversary of the Watergate break-in, Lizzie and Kaitlyn try Nixon’s favorite food.
Evening Read
(Bill Clark / Getty)
The Val Demings Gamble
By Adam Harris
On a hot D.C. Wednesday in the middle of July, an 11-foot statue honoring Mary McLeod Bethune—carved out of marble extracted from the same Tuscan quarry that Michelangelo used for his David—stood draped in a black cloak in the U.S. Capitol’s National Statuary Hall. A group of distinguished guests had gathered to honor Bethune, the prominent educator and civil-rights activist who founded a college for Black students in Daytona Beach, Florida, and later served as an adviser to President Franklin D. Roosevelt. She is now the first Black American to have a state statue in the hall.
The group, which included several members of Florida’s congressional delegation, smiled as cameras flashed. Two of those present, Senator Marco Rubio and Representative Val Demings, are opponents in the race for Rubio’s Senate seat—a race that could secure the Democrats’ control of the Senate.
More From The Atlantic
- America has a rabid-racoon problem.
- Even the Founders didn’t believe in originalism.
- Lowering the cost of insulin could be deadly.
Culture Break
Characters from Amazon’s “The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power.” (Ben Rothstein / Prime Video)
Read. Daisy Lafarge’s new novel, Paul, makes it impossible to separate the art from the artist.
Watch. Catch up on The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power before the third episode airs on Amazon Prime this weekend. Our critic writes that the first two episodes felt like he’d “barely begun an appetizer course”—suggesting that the best of the show may still be ahead.
P.S.
Before I came to The Atlantic, I taught for 25 years in the U.S. Naval War College, a graduate school for military officers, and my time as part of the Navy family coincided with the Fat Leonard imbroglio, the worst black eye for the service since Tailhook in 1991 and the most severe corruption scandal ever to hit the modern Navy. In a movie script that would be too off-the-wall even for Hollywood, a defense contractor named Leonard Francis, known affectionately to his clientele as “Fat Leonard,” plied Navy officers with money, sex, food, and booze in order to steer Navy business his way. Francis pled guilty in 2015 and was released from detention for health issues in 2018.
This reality show has an epilogue: On Sunday, Francis cut his home-detention bracelet off his leg, and he is now on the lam. (I wish I could take credit for saying that “Fat Leonard is at large,” but my Atlantic colleague Nick Catucci thought of it first.) Amazingly, a guy with international connections at the center of a gigantic corruption case turned out to be a flight risk. More to come.
P.P.S.
I’ll add more reminders on this in the coming weeks, but The Atlantic will hold its annual festival September 21–23, which you can attend in person or virtually. Join me at our Ideas Stage on September 21! You can register here.
Isabel Fattal contributed to this newsletter.
A functioning democracy could easily dispatch Donald Trump and his doppelgängers. A failed democracy and bankrupt liberalism assures their ascendancy.
In a series of tweets on Tuesday, former Republican Party campaign advisor Steve Schmidt backed President Joe Biden’s contention that Donald Trump and his “MAGA Republicans” are dangerous to democracy and then warned that the former president’s “rhetoric is becoming more overtly extreme.”
Reacting to both Biden’s speech and the over-the-top reactions from conservative commentators and far-right GOP politicians, Schmidt made the case that the current president was extending an olive branch to mainstream Republicans and imploring them to reject Trumpism.
In his first tweet he wrote, “President Biden has offered a compromise to tens of millions of Republican voters who don’t want to abandon democracy. He has said let’s work together and destroy the MAGA movement. That is the compromise. It is necessary. It must be crushed to save America.”
He continued, “Trump’s rhetoric is becoming more overtly extreme and is filled with promises of violence and revenge. He means every word. The Political coverage is filled with stories about fascists like @JDVance1 and @bgmasters trying to soften their anti woman extremism in time for Nov,” before adding, “The American people must end this madness. The American people must rise up against the coward politicians who have gone off the rails and vandalized the American Republic to sate Trump and protect themselves from his ire. The fall campaign is underway and the choice is here.”
As for the former president, he wrote, “Donald Trump is deranged, addled and depraved. He is unfit, disgraced and incompetent. He leads a minority faction that is beyond belligerent. They are teeming with menace. Enough. What they stand for is the worst cause since the last stand of Jim Crow and the Confederacy.”
“The lies about the election results by MAGA extremists and Trump parrots have poisoned faith and belief in AmerIcan democracy and convinced millions of susceptible suckers that they live in an occupied dystopia that is plotting against them in a massive conspiracy that only Trump and his loyal team of patriots can stop,” he explained. “It leaves the overwhelming majority slack jawed while the Trump minority led by some of the worst politicians in our history stoke the most feeble among them with crude masturbatory fantasies about Civil War, race war, religious war, the end times and a thousand other permutations of apocalyptic idiocy. Around all of the teeming madness is a level of grift and corruption that beggars belief.”
He concluded, “The great national gaslighting rolls along for now. Time to stop it cold.“
Among Republican House candidates, “118 election deniers and eight election doubters have at least a 95% chance of winning,” according to a new analysis.