I must admit, last week’s election took me by surprise. I knew all the polls predicted a close race, but I kept telling myself that the American I believed in would not elect such a man, again, knowing full well all the things he has said and done – in his personal, professional, and political lives. I was giving us too much credit.
Democrats might tell the public that Wall Street was hitting record highs, that GDP growth was among the best in the world, that unemployment was low, and that inflation was finally back under control, but voters didn’t believe them. For most people, the economy isn’t working.
When two-thirds of voters say the country is on the wrong track (NBC News), when almost three-quarters of Americans are dissatisfied with the way things are going in the U.S. (Gallop), when 62% of voters think the economy is weak and 48% say their personal financial situation is getting worse (Harvard CAPS/Harris) – well, threats to democracy tomorrow don’t compare to the price of eggs today.
Let’s face it: we are on the wrong road. We’re not on a road that is good for most people. We’re not on a road that is getting us ready for the challenges and opportunities that the 21st century is bringing/is going to bring us. And we’re kidding ourselves about the America we believe in versus the America we actually live in. Our views about our country are delusional, they’re disorganized thinking, they may even be hallucinations. I.e., they’re schizophrenic.
Funny think about that Project 2025’s “Mandate for Leadership.” Trump declared in this week’s debate, “I know nothing about it.” But in addition to the vast majority of authors and editors of the document having served in the prior Trump administration, the former President’s name is mentioned in the 887 page document over 300 times.
Described by Pulitzer Prize winning economics columnist, Carlos Lozada, the work itself is an “off-the-shelf governing plan.” It’s packed with conservative fan favorites, not simply “militarizing the southern border” and reversing what they call “climate fanaticism”, but especially placing DEI (diversity, equity, inclusion) efforts in the waste bin, banning abortion nationally, and pushing deregulation and tax cuts for the richy rich.
None of that is surprising if you’ve run into these characters on K street and beyond. This is who they are, and largely who they have always been. Over the years, I’ve bumped elbows with them in Washington and in corporate C-suites galore. What makes this effort a bit unique is, of course, the presence of a cooperative headliner who will clearly endorse “the elevation of religious beliefs in government affairs” and actively diminish “the powers of Congress and the Judiciary.”
This is political jiu-jitsu practiced at its highest level. Rather than dismantling the “deep state,” these operators are fast at work “capturing the administrative state” for their own self-serving purposes.
Understanding jiu-jitsu takes one a long way toward understanding the Heritage Foundation and Freedom Institute’s puppet masters. The word “Jū” means “gentle, soft, supple, flexible, pliable, or yielding.” It’s companion, “jutsu” is the “art or technique.” Combine the two, and you have the ”yielding-art.” The intent in bodily (or political) combat is to harness an opponent’s power against himself, rather that confronting him directly.
Political jiu-jitsu may be deceptive and confusing in the absence of visible weaponry, but it is anything but gentle. In the physical version, you are instructed in joint locks and chokeholds of course, but also biting, hair pulling, and gouging. Kevin Roberts, the President of the Heritage Foundation and editor of Project 2025, is a master of the political version. While he and Trump outwardly employed a “nothing to see here” stance, demographic realities were cued up in the document. The solution to the growing minority status for Republicans? “Voter efficiency” and a rigged census. Or in the Project’s words: “Strong political leadership is needed to increase efficiency and align the Census Bureau’s mission with conservative principles.”
Robert’s language is soft, but its impact hard indeed. In the introduction he suggests that the Declaration of Independence’s words “pursuit of happiness” were better understood to be “the pursuit of blessedness” while providing corporations a market free hand “to flourish.” Career civil servants are recast as “holdovers” without “moral legitimacy.” And the Justice Department suffers this put-down – “a bloated bureaucracy with a critical core of personnel who are infatuated with the perpetuation of a radical liberal agenda.”
Majority rules and demographic changes being what they may, alternative facts and voter suppression have been added to the tools of “political jiu-jitsu” artists. But Kelly Anne Conway was nowhere to be seen this week, and their headliner was long-winded, boring, and tired. As for voter integrity, the Democrats are fully funded and lawyered up. Finally, good Republicans everywhere have begun to recognize that towing the MAGA line much further puts their down-ballot hopes in the direct line of fire. Those 300 mentions are beginning to look like a liability instead of an asset.
This has been two weeks of mixed messages when it comes to the highest offices of the land. Just two weeks ago on July 1, 2024, a majority of the Supreme Court decided to expand Presidential immunity for criminal malfeasance while in the office that former President Trump had so severely tarnished on January 6, 2021.
The Supreme Court’s meddling occurred just three days after President Biden was forced to acknowledge that he had badly flubbed the First Presidential debate, which led to a series of recovery moves (the ABC Stephanopoulos interview on July 6; the live Press Conference in D.C. on July 11; and the full-energy “Don’t You Quit” rally in Detroit, Michigan on July 12) to try to prove he wasn’t too old or infirm to do the job.
In the meantime, Vice President Kamala Harris remained loyal and capable in the wings, while Trump went silent, cagily delaying his decision on his own running mate until he had greater clarity on who exactly he was running against.
And one day later, a 20-year old registered Republican, came within inches of successfully assassinating the former President with an automatic sniper rifle of the variety vigorously defended as just fine for civilian circulation by Republicans.
All of this might lead you to believe, when it comes to the top two positions in our Executive Branch of government, that we have entered unusual times. But, as history well illustrates, nothing could be farther from the truth.
In our brief history as a functioning Democracy, eight of our Presidents have died in office and one has resigned. Four sitting Presidents were killed by gunshot (Lincoln, Garfield, McKinley, JFK) and three have survived attempts on their lives (Reagan, Teddy Roosevelt, and now Donald Trump). As for their #2’s, seven VP’s have died in office and two have resigned in office. And that doesn’t even begin to cover the many cases where these top elected officials have managed to maintain their positions by hiding and covering-up a range of debilitating physical and mental illnesses while in office.
Democrats’ despair after Joe Biden’s pallid and halting debate performance stems from the realization that the uphill climb needed to prevent the return of Donald Trump might be too steep. What is less obvious is the awareness of the urban intelligentsia of the root causes of the adverse political climate, which can be seen in this map, taken from the Economist’s April 20 feature on declining US population.
America’s economy is booming, and the gap between its economic performance and that of the rest of the world is widening. The on-the-ground political reality is very different depending crucially on where you live. People who live in the red parts of this map do not need convincing that all that wealth, and the power that goes with it, has eluded them. Many of them believe that it has been stolen from them by corrupt leaders and the oligarchs and corporate interests that finance their campaigns.
That is the underlying reality of MAGA. Ninety percent of those red counties voted for Donald Trump in 2020. People in metro Austin, Manhattan or the suburbs of Houston do not resonate with the need to make America great again. It’s already great for many of them.
For folks living in the abandoned parts of the US, the on-the-ground reality is absurd gas prices, unaffordable mortgages, a mountain of forever debt, deteriorating public services, dreams cruelly out of reach and the despair that goes with all of it-alcohol and drug dependency, depression and anxiety, obesity, domestic violence. There is an almost perfect correspondence between the above map and that of the epidemic of “deaths of despair” suicide, drug overdoses and alcohol poisoning. This phenomenon is rooted in middle-aged whites, the overwhelming demographic of the red parts of this map, but affects all demographic segments including black and Hispanic folks who traditionally supported Democrats.
After 2016, political analysts believed that the prevalence of non-college educated whites in a local electorate was the single best predictor of Donald Trump’s shocking victory. That was not the case. A post-election analysis by the Economist revealed that a better predictor of Trump’s victory was a composite measure of health/life expectancy, specifically “county-level data on life expectancy and the prevalence of obesity, diabetes, heavy drinking and regular physical activity (or lack thereof)”, the mapping of which again correlates remarkably with the map of population decline above.
The very same forces of outmigration and economic stagnation are destroying these communities’ local health systems, as well as their schools, commercial businesses and churches. The same red areas are also areas where local physicians have retired and were not replaced, and whose hospitals closed or merged with larger regional conglomerates. A recent scurrilous analysis by Yale and University of Chicago economists blamed the rising deaths of despair and local business’s economic struggles on hospital mergers, an absolutely “from central casting” example of blaming the victim.
Yet due to the arrogance and isolation of the progressive policy advocates that shaped this legislation, it was simply self-evidently obvious that the most ambitious domestic reconstruction program in the ninety years since Roosevelt will help many of the most economically challenged areas in the country. Proud and sparsely attended ribbon cutting ceremonies made the local newspaper, if there still is one. News of these investments never arrived via the partisan news channels and hyper-targeted social media venues on which most ordinary Americans rely these days. That attitude of “self-evident good works” is of a piece with the “Why Bother Visiting Wisconsin” arrogance that let Trump into the White House in the first place.
If post-debate polling is any guide, all these trillions of dollars of good works, funded with money borrowed from our grandchildren, will not be enough to turn the red tide, which could well leave the Republicans firmly in control of all three branches of the federal government. As they go to their cushy post-administration redoubts at the Brookings Institution, Yale, Hopkins and Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, and hobnob at Aspen Institute and Martha’s Vineyard cocktail parties, the executors of all these good works, for the unforgiveable political sin of failing to communicate effectively with the struggling working class they used to champion, will have fully earned their retirement.
Jeff Goldsmith is a veteran health care futurist, President of Health Futures Inc and regular THCB Contributor. This comes from his personal substack
As we approach the 20th anniversary of the death of Christopher Reeve, I’m drawn back to the evening of September 25, 2002, and a private conversation in a back room off the ballroom of the Marriott Marquis Hotel. As we awaited the ceremonial beginnings of the Christopher Reeve Paralysis Foundation Benefit Gala that evening, he said, “What I didn’t expect was that in this country, home of ‘Truth, Justice and the American way,’ hope would be determined by politics.”
That sentiment was, no doubt, fresh in his mind, having just appeared in his book, “Nothing Is Impossible: Reflections On A New Life” (Random House), a week earlier. And it was top of mind last month while (with millions of other Americans) I awaited a verdict in the New York trial of Donald Trump.
A month earlier, Smithsonian Magazine had run a feature on the first issue of the Superman comic book. The original copy of the 1938 “Action Comics No. 1” had just sold for $6 million at auction. A large part of that value tracked back to Chris Reeves himself – the enduring image and voice of Superman – a genuine American hero.
The famous slogan, “Truth, Justice, and the American Way”, however did not appear in that first publication. It surfaced later, in the early 1940’s comic books, written by Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, “to cheer on American military efforts in World War II.” Its use waxed and waned over the next three decades until 1978. That’s when the Richard Donner film “Superman: The Movie” was released starring Christopher Reeve. As the Superman Homepage News acknowledges, it was thanks to Reeve’s performance that “the ‘Truth, Justice and The American Way’ motto was really cemented in popular culture for generations to come.”
In a controversial move, at the DC FanDome on October 21, 2021, DC Publisher Jim Lee announced that Superman’s motto “Truth, Justice and the American Way” would be “evolving.” “The American Way” would now be replaced by “a Better Tomorrow.” A press statement elaborated that the move was made “to better reflect the storylines that we are telling across DC and to honor Superman’s incredible legacy of over 80 years of building a better world.” Rolling Stone was given a slightly different spin by DC Comics which said, “Superman has long been a symbol of hope who inspires people from around the world, and it is that optimism and hope that powers him forward.”
Whether commercial, philosophical or political in motivation, now two years later, as Trump self declares his own “Superman-status” its worth contrasting two very different versions of “the American way.” As NewYork Magazine reported in 2012, “Among the many laughably unrealistic images in the Donald TrumpNFT collection, one stood out: the illustration of the former president in the classic Superman pose, ripping open his dress shirt to reveal a superhero costume underneath. Trump used this image, which was animated to show lasers shooting out of his eyes, to tease a ‘major announcement’ on December 15, which turned out to be a collection of 45,000 digital trading cards. ‘America needs a superhero!’ Trump proclaimed.”
OK, how many of you had on your women-in-power bingo cards that, in 2022, Sheryl Sandberg would be out at Facebook but Queen Elizabeth II would still be Queen? It’s the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee, marking seventy years on the throne. She’s getting a lot of love for that tenure, but it makes me think, geez, some people just don’t know when to step away.
Perhaps what sparked my cynicism about the Queen was an op-ed by Yuval Levin, Why Are We Still Governed by Baby Boomers and the Remarkably Old? Dr. Levin is, of course, referring to the U.S., and he’s spot-on about our governance problem. But I think the problem goes further: we have too many old people running our companies and major institutions as well.
Whether it is, say, healthcare, education, or the military, we’re so busy protecting the past that we’re not really getting ready for the future.
With the long-awaited inauguration day behind us, America is finally getting something we desperately need: an elected woman in the White House.
On the heels of chaos and violence at the Capitol and after four years of the Trump Administration, we are ready for strong female leadership in the executive branch to help put the country on the right course. In fact, it is long overdue.
Kamala Harris didn’t just need our votes to make history as America’s first female Vice President. To be successful, she’ll need every ounce of our ongoing support as she steels herself to direct threats to her life and faces the challenge, along with President-elect Biden, of healing a deeply fractured nation.
Female leaders around the world have modeled that strong leadership through 2020’s most difficult times. Women have led some of the most effective pandemic responses worldwide. Countries led by women leaders had six times fewer confirmed COVID-19 deaths — and fewer days with confirmed deaths — than countries led by men. New Zealand, Taiwan, Germany, and Iceland — all led by women — are among the coronavirus management success stories.
These women acknowledged the threat from coronavirus rather than underplaying it. They were decisive, and used data and science to drive their decision-making. They took a long-view when designing their response, prioritizing long-term well-being over short-term economic pain. They listened to outside voices to ensure they had the best possible input and solutions for their countries. And they showed empathy. Having a female leader became a symbol of inclusive, open-minded, effective leadership.
And the world took notice, lauding leaders like Jacinda Ardern, who was rewarded with a decisive victory in New Zealand’s October national elections.
We’re in the midst of a major U.S. election, as well as hearings on a Supreme Court vacancy, so people are thinking about litmus tests and single issue voters – the most typical of which is whether someone is “pro-life” or “pro-choice.” Well, I’m a single issue person too; my litmus test is whether someone believes in evolution.
I’m pro-science, and these are scary times.
Within the last week there have been editorials in Scientific American, The New England Journal of Medicine, and Nature – all respected, normally nonpartisan, scientific publications – taking the current Administration to task for its coronavirus response. Each, in its own way, accuses the Administration of letting politics, not science, drive its response.
SA urges voters to “think about voting to protect science instead of destroying it.” They cite, among other examples, Columbia Law School’s Silencing Science Tracker, which “tracks government attempts to restrict or prohibit scientific research, education or discussion, or the publication or use of scientific information, since the November 2016 election.” Their count is over 450 by now, across a broad range of topics in numerous federal agencies on a variety of topics.
Science, built on facts and evidence-based analysis, is fundamental to a safe and fair America. Upholding science is not a Democratic or Republican issue.
Our current leaders have undercut trust in science and in government,4 causing damage that will certainly outlast them. Instead of relying on expertise, the administration has turned to uninformed “opinion leaders” and charlatans who obscure the truth and facilitate the promulgation of outright lies.
As he seeks re-election on 3 November, Trump’s actions in the face of COVID-19 are just one example of the damage he has inflicted on science and its institutions over the past four years, with repercussions for lives and livelihoods.
I walked into my exam room to see a patient I first met two decades ago. On presentation, his co-morbidities included poorly controlled DM-1, hypertension, hyperlipidemia, and a substance abuse disorder. Over the years our healthcare system has served him well as he has remained free of diabetic complications and now leads a productive life. Watching this transformation has been both professionally rewarding, personally enjoyable, and I look forward to our periodic interactions.
At this visit, he was sporting a MAGA hat. I was confused. How can my patient, who has so clearly benefited from America’s healthcare system, support a politician who has tried to abolish the Affordable Care Act, used the bully pulpit to undermine America’s public health experts, refused to implement healthcare policies which would mitigate COVID-19’s morbidity and mortality, and who minimizes the severity of the coronavirus pandemic every day. Why does he support a politician whose healthcare policies are an immediate threat to his health and longevity?
My brain says, “You are the physician this patient trusts to take care of his medical problems. You must teach him that COVID-19 is a serious risk to his health and explain how the President’s public health policies threatens his health. You must engage in a political conversation.”
As we witnessed in last week’s Republication convention, when in doubt, go with the golden oldies. Australian songwriter Peter Allen said as much in the fourth stanza of his classic song, “Everything Old Is New Again”, which reads:
“Don’t throw the past away
You might need it some rainy day
Dreams can come true again
When everything old is new again”
In fact, there’s nothing original in Trump’s playbook, and that includes his postal service gambit. Manipulating and militarizing the US Postal Service dates back to 1873 in the form of one Anthony Comstock, a zealot who was fond of describing himself as a “weeder in God’s garden.”
A savvy New York City insider, he created the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice declaring himself committed to stamping out smut. But to accomplish this task, he needed a hammer. He turned to political allies in the United States Postal Service who provided him with police powers and the right to carry a weapon.
Still, the weapon was of little use without a law to enforce. So he turned to his friends in industry who reached out to Congress. “An Act for the Suppression of Trade in, and Circulation of, Obscene Literature and Articles of Immoral Use” was passed on March 3, 1873, ch. 258, § 2, 17 Stat. 599. Forever after known as the Comstock Law, the statute’s lofty intent was “to prevent the mails from being used to corrupt the public morals.”
