Monthly Archives: September 2022

Texas House Democrat on migrant busing: We need solutions and not theater – The Hill

Posted: September 20, 2022 at 8:43 am

Rep. Henry Cuellar (D-Texas) said on Sunday that lawmakers need to find solutions to the ongoing migrant crises instead of turning the situation into theater.

Look, you know, first of all, we need solutions and not theater. By sending off folks off to New York and Chicago, it does bring attention, but I we want to focus more on solutions on the border, Cuellar told CBS Face the Nation moderator Margaret Brennan, noting that the Border Patrol, Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the Department of Homeland Security need better tools to enforce the law at the southern border.

Cuellar also noted the migrant struggles in his hometown of Laredo.

And let me mention one more thing, Margaret, you know, they might get two buses a day in some of those cities, Cuellar said. Just for my hometown in Laredo, were sending out 21 to 26 buses a day out of Laredo, just to give you an idea of whats happening here.

When Brennan asked about areas such as Marthas Vineyard struggling to respond to the influx of migrants, Cuellar replied that migrants need to be treated as human beings instead of political pawns.

Yeah, look, after all, the migrants are human beings, and weve got to treat them like human beings that are being used as political pawns to get publicity, Cuellar said. But at the same time, you know, I represent some of the poorest counties along the border in the nation.

Cuellars remarks as GOP Govs. Greg Abbott of Texas and Ron DeSantis of Florida sent buses and planes filled with migrants to Marthas Vineyard and the residence of Vice President Harris last week.

DeSantis and Abbott, along with Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey (R) have been sending migrants to Democratic-run cities, such as New York, Washington, D.C., and Chicago throughout the summer in protest of Bidens efforts to end Title 42, a Trump-era policy that blocked migrants from seeking asylum during the pandemic.

Follow this link:

Texas House Democrat on migrant busing: We need solutions and not theater - The Hill

Posted in Democrat | Comments Off on Texas House Democrat on migrant busing: We need solutions and not theater – The Hill

Meet the Democrat on a Six-Figure Income Who Cant Afford To Buy Her Kids Shoes – Washington Free Beacon

Posted: at 8:43 am

Democrats

In latest ad, Michigan House candidate Hillary Scholten says her family is forgoing air conditioning, new shoes

Michigan Democrat Hillary Scholten, who is running in one of the country's most competitive congressional races, wants voters to believe she's "making do with less and making things last longer" just like them.

In her latest campaign ad, Scholten claims her family has dramatically cut back on spending because of inflation. Higher energy prices, for example, mean no more air conditioning for the Scholten family, the ad shows.

Nor can Scholten even afford shoes for her children. "Things [are] so expensive," she says after the ad shows her son wearing duct-taped sandals.

But those images may be a tough sell for Michigan voters, considering Scholten netted more than $200,000 last year working as an immigration attorney for a Grand Rapids-area law firm, according to a Washington Free Beacon review of her financial disclosure forms. Her family's total income was likely far higher given her husband scored consulting fees from two nonprofits, on top of his salary as a professor at a local university.

Scholten's latest ad push is part of a broader trend of Democrats struggling to relate to average voters during a period of immense economic uncertainty. For candidates such as Scholten, who makes roughly six to seven times Michigan's median individual income, that means making questionable statements about their own financial security.Scholten did not respond to a request for comment.

In the same ad, Scholten demands Democrats "stop the spending" and promises to "focus on the issues that matter most to Michigan families because they matter to mine too."

Scholten, however, has backed seemingly every Democratic spending proposal since President Joe Biden entered office. In March, she celebrated the one-year anniversary of the nearly $2 trillion American Rescue Plan.

"Every single Republican voted against it," Scholten tweeted. "#Democrats deliver."

Economists from across the political spectrum blame the American Rescue Plan for partially causing the historically high inflation seen in the United States. Consumer prices continued rising in August despite lower gas prices.

Scholten also applauded the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act and claimed it would "lower costs for working families across the country & improve the lives of all [West] Michiganders." Contrary to the bill's name, there is no evidence that the bill will materially lower inflation.

The Free Beacon in April reported that Scholten failed to provide health coverage for her campaign staff. Scholten has called health care a "human right."

Scholten will face Republican John Gibbs in November for the state's Third Congressional District, which is currently held by Republican Peter Meijer. Scholten ran against Meijer in 2020 and lost by 5 points.

See the rest here:

Meet the Democrat on a Six-Figure Income Who Cant Afford To Buy Her Kids Shoes - Washington Free Beacon

Posted in Democrat | Comments Off on Meet the Democrat on a Six-Figure Income Who Cant Afford To Buy Her Kids Shoes – Washington Free Beacon

Rural Counties with the Most Population Loss Voted the Most Democratic in 2020 – Daily Yonder

Posted: at 8:43 am

In the 2020 presidential election, Democrat Joe Biden won the popular vote in only 10% of the nation's rural counties. There was a certain type of rural county where Biden doubled that rate of victory. Unfortunately for Democrats, it was rural counties that are losing the most population.

From 2010 to 2020, 244 rural counties lost 10% or more of their population. Biden won the popular vote in 20% of those counties, as opposed to the rest of rural America, where he won at about half that rate.

Population loss didn't cause those counties to support Biden. Rather, it's the demographics of those counties that are losing population that explain the difference. The rural communities with the most population loss had higher percentages of ethnic or racial minorities than the rest of rural America. And these are populations that tend to vote more Democratic.

Rural counties that lost large portions of their population also tended to be economically distressed. That in turn leads to more people leaving.

Rural counties that lost 10% or more of their population are clustered in a few regions: Central Appalachia, the Mississippi River Delta, the border region of Texas, and parts of the Great Plains, and the Black Belt, a crescent stretching from Virginia to Texas with large numbers of Black residents.

The Black Belt of the Southeast is a region named for its dark soils where plantation agriculture dominated the economy before the Civil War. Because of slaverys impact, systemic disparities persist in the Black Belt, where the average poverty rate is 23.8%. Thats 10 percentage points higher than the national rural average.

The counties with the most population loss also had higher percentages of vulnerable individuals, such as those who are elderly or living in poverty.

Take Quitman County, Mississippi, for example. Quitman County, located in northwest Mississippi, is part of the Delta region. Its a farming community where approximately two-thirds of the population voted for Biden in 2020. Quitman County was classified as a persistent poverty county in 2013, which means the poverty rate exceeded 20% for at least three decades. In 2020, 75.9% of the population were ethnic or racial minorities, compared to 23% of the population in the rest of rural America.

Between 2010 and 2020, Quitman County lost 9.3% of its population, dropping from 8,223 residents in 2010 to 6,176 in 2020, according to the Census. The average population change in rural counties was 1.89% between 2010 and 2020.

Bamberg County, South Carolina, had a 16% decline from 2010 to 2020. The population dropped from 15,987 a decade ago to 13,311 in the last Census. Sixty-two percent of voters in 2020 voted for Biden in Bamberg County, which is also in persistent poverty. Sixty-two percent of the population were ethnic or racial minorities in 2020.

Bamberg and Quitman counties were not exceptions among Black Belt communities. The population change map shows a band of dark blue in the Black Belt region, indicating severe population loss.

Perry County, Alabama, lost 20% of its population between 2010 and 2020, while Duplin County, North Carolina, and Madison Parish, Louisiana, lost 17%. In Perry County, ethnic or racial minorities comprised 72.4% of the population and 65.9% of the population in Madison Parish. Both Perry County and Madison Parish voted for Biden in 2020, while Duplin County voted for Trump, who won by more than 20 percentage points.

The 2020 Census report showed that half of the population was white in Duplin County, which might explain the landslide win for Trump. In 63 of the 64 rural southern counties that had majority Black or African American populations, only Early County, Georgia, voted for Trump in 2020.

Republish This Story

Republish our articles for free, online or in print, under a Creative Commons license.

Close window X

by Sarah Melotte, The Daily Yonder September 20, 2022

This article first appeared on The Daily Yonder and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

See the original post here:

Rural Counties with the Most Population Loss Voted the Most Democratic in 2020 - Daily Yonder

Posted in Democrat | Comments Off on Rural Counties with the Most Population Loss Voted the Most Democratic in 2020 – Daily Yonder

The facts behind the Republican effort to send migrants to Democratic-led cities – CBS News

Posted: at 8:43 am

The intensifying Republican-led efforts to protest President Biden's policies along the southern border by transporting migrants to Democratic-controlled jurisdictions like Martha's Vineyard and Washington, D.C., have reignited a decades-old, divisive debate over U.S. immigration policy.

The Biden administration, Democrats and advocates have called the transportation tactic a dehumanizing political stunt, accusing Republican-led states of using desperate asylum-seekers as props. Republican governors in Texas, Florida and Arizona have argued their efforts force Democratic cities to share the burden of accommodating migrants, which they say has fallen mostly on communities in their states.

Beyond the political back-and-forth, the busing and flying of migrants to locations selected by Republican officials has also raised questions about current border policies, who the people being transported are, what their legal status is, why they're in the U.S., what their futures hold and whether the states' actions are legal.

Here are the facts about the scheme by Republican-led states to bus and fly migrants to certain destinations.

In April, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, a Republican, started busing migrants released from federal immigration custody in his state to D.C., saying he was "going to take the border" to the Biden administration, which he has accused of lax immigration enforcement.

Abbott expanded Texas' busing operation earlier this summer to include New York City and again earlier this month to include Chicago. On Sept. 15, Texas started off-loading migrants near Vice President Kamala Harris' official residence in D.C. Abbott has not ruled out including other cities or locations.

In May, Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey, a Republican, launched his own busing effort to transport migrants from his state to D.C. Arizona's operation has been smaller in scale than Texas' and limited to the capital. A spokesman for Ducey said there were no plans to transport migrants to other cities.

On Sept. 14, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, another Republican, took credit for the transportation of several dozen migrants to Martha's Vineyard, an island vacation destination off the Massachusetts coast. DeSantis said Florida will continue transporting migrants under a $12 million state program, but has not announced other destinations.

The Republican governors in Texas, Arizona and Florida have said their operation to transport migrants to so-called "sanctuary" jurisdictions is designed to pressure Democratic politicians and the Biden administration to enact tougher border measures to deter illegal crossings.

They've also argued that Democratic-controlled states and cities that have adopted "sanctuary" policies, which limit cooperation with federal immigration officials, should help border communities receive migrants amid the record levels of border arrests reported over the past year.

Federal authorities are expected to record more than 2 million migrant apprehensions along the U.S.-Mexico border in fiscal year 2022, a figure that will set an all-time high, according to Customs and Border Protection data. The statistic includes a significant number of repeat border crossings, as well as nearly 1 million rapid expulsions of migrants who were not allowed to stay in the U.S., the data show.

Collectively, Texas and Arizona have transported roughly 13,000 migrants to Democratic-led cities on more than 300 buses in the past several months, according to data provided by state representatives.

As of Sept. 19, Texas had transported more than 8,100 migrants to D.C.; 2,600 to New York; and 675 to Chicago, state data show. Arizona, meanwhile, had bused more than 1,800 migrants to D.C., a spokesman for the governor said. The plane that landed in Martha's Vineyard on Sept. 14 transported roughly 50 migrants.

According to Texas' division of emergency management, the state's migrant busing operation has cost over $12 million. Arizona's busing effort, meanwhile, has cost over $4 million, the state spokesman said.

The migrants transported by Texas, Arizona and Florida were processed by federal border officials after entering the U.S. unlawfully and then released to continue their immigration cases inside the country.

Unlike other recent border-crossers, these migrants, for different reasons, were not expelled from the U.S. under a public health law known as Title 42, which border authorities have used to quickly turn away migrants over 2 million times since March 2020 without allowing them to request asylum.

Decisions to not expel migrants are based on different policy, logistical and diplomatic reasons. For example, as a policy matter, the Biden administration has not been expelling unaccompanied minors, who are instead transferred to shelters. Mexico also generally only accepts expulsions of its citizens and Central Americans.

Moreover, the federal government cannot expel migrants to Venezuela, Cuba or Nicaragua because the authoritarian regimes there don't accept U.S. deportations. Because of this, migrants from these countries are generally released by border officials after some short-term processing.

While Texas, Arizona and Florida have transported migrants from several countries, many of them hail from Venezuela and Cuba, which have seen a record number of their citizens flee to the U.S. in recent months.

Under U.S. law, migrants who are not processed under Title 42 have a legal right to seek asylum, which the government can grant to foreigners who demonstrate they could be persecuted in their home country because of their nationality, race, religion, political views or membership in a social group.

Just because a migrant is not expelled under Title 42 does not mean they have been granted permanent legal status in the U.S. or that they will not ultimately face deportation. But those released by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) have been granted permission to continue their immigration cases inside the U.S.

Migrants who are released after crossing the border illegally are still placed in deportation proceedings before the immigration court system, where they can seek asylum or other forms of humanitarian refuge. They need to attend court hearings to try to halt their deportations, and could be ordered deported if they miss them.

Those who are granted asylum can stay in the U.S. permanently and those who lose their case can be ordered deported, but the adjudication process typically takes years to complete because of the mounting backlog of claims before the immigration courts, which are overseeing nearly 2 million unresolved cases.

Some migrants who are released by DHS are enrolled in "alternatives to detention" supervision programs that can include ankle monitors, other tracking devices and requirements to periodically check in with officials at local U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement offices.

Migrants processed by U.S. border officials, including at official ports of entry, are sometimes granted humanitarian parole, a temporary legal classification that shields them from deportation. While it does not provide migrants permanent legal status, parole makes their presence in the U.S. lawful.

When migrants are released by federal officials, they are allowed to travel to a U.S. destination of their choosing. And they can get there through various means, including the buses and planes that some Republican governors are offering them.

It's not illegal for states to transport migrants if it's voluntary. While critics have accused states of human trafficking and kidnapping, no proof has emerged that migrants have been forced on buses or planes. If the transportation involves coercion or false information, however, civil or criminal liability is possible, lawyers said.

Representatives for Texas and Arizona said their migrant busing operations to D.C., New York and Chicago are voluntary, noting they ask migrants to sign consent waivers. Representatives for Florida's governor did not say whether migrants transported by the state are informed the transportation is voluntary.

But lawyers representing more than two dozen migrants flown to Martha's Vineyard by Florida said their clients were misled by the people who transported them. According to the attorneys, the migrants said they were originally told they were going to Boston and a place with jobs and refugee services.

"It seems like there were clear elements of deception in this particular case. It seems like there was fraud in terms of their transport and what was represented to them," said Julie Dahlstrom, the director of the Immigrants' Rights and Human Trafficking Program at Boston University School of Law.

But Dahlstrom said federal and state officials would still need to determine whether there's sufficient evidence to prove that laws were violated, calling it a "difficult legal question."

Lawyers for Civil Rights, the group representing migrants flown to Martha's Vineyard, asked federal prosecutors and the Massachusetts attorney general to launch criminal investigations into their claims. California Gov. Gavin Newsom, a Democrat, has also urged the Justice Department to investigate the states' transportation efforts, including the question of whether migrants have been targeted because of their national origin, in violation of the 14th Amendment's equal protection clause.

To defend the actions of Texas, Arizona and Florida, Republican lawmakers have said the Biden administration also transports migrants to different states. But it's not an apples-to-apples comparison.

The federal government does transport certain migrants who cross the border unlawfully to locations across the country, but not to make a political statement and the practice has been in place for decades, under Republican and Democratic administrations.

The Department of Health and Human Services, which is legally required to care for migrant children who cross the border without their parents, transports these unaccompanied minors, including on charter flights, to different locations to place them in a shelter or release them to relatives or other sponsors in the U.S.

ICE also transports some migrants arrested along the U.S. southern border to detention centers or to other regions of the border to alleviate overcrowding at holding facilities. Federal immigration officials sometimes fly migrants to different areas of the southern border where Mexico accepts their expulsion.

Camilo Montoya-Galvez is the immigration reporter at CBS News. Based in Washington, he covers immigration policy and politics.

Read the original post:

The facts behind the Republican effort to send migrants to Democratic-led cities - CBS News

Posted in Democrat | Comments Off on The facts behind the Republican effort to send migrants to Democratic-led cities – CBS News

Donald Trump rages that Ron DeSantiss Marthas Vineyard stunt was his …

Posted: at 8:41 am

Donald Trump is privately raging at fellow Republican Ron DeSantis over the governors decision to authorise flights carrying roughly 50 migrants last week from the southern border to Marthas Vineyard, Rolling Stone reported.

The Florida governor patted himself on the back over the weekend while delivering a speech in Wisconsin to stump for GOP candidates, announcing that he intended to tap every penny from the $12m Freedom First budget allocated to the Florida Department of Transportations efforts to transport unauthorised aliens.

And though both Mr DeSantis and anti-immigration sympathisers on Fox News and within the Republican party celebrated the firebrand politicians actions with Texas Senator Ted Cruz even calling for governors to increase their controversial relocation programs and send half a million undocumented migrants on to Washington DC not everyone in right-wing circles was happy with last weeks headlines.

Namely, former president Donald Trump found himself scowling at how his potential rival for the Republican ticket in the 2024 presidential election was dominating the headlines and drawing attention away from his own antics.

Rolling Stone reported that two inside sources close to the twice-impeached president had heard him vent about the Republican governor taking the limelight off Trump and accused him of using the migrant flights to prop up his national profile ahead of a potential bid for the White House.

Neither Mr DeSantis nor Mr Trump have made public commitments to run in 2024, though both men are considered to be frontrunners to challenge President Joe Biden for the Oval Office.

Mr Trump also reportedly raged at his aides in the wake of Mr DeSantiss highly publicised stunt, noting that the Florida governor had taken a page from his own playbook as he contended that flying migrants on planes from the southern border was his idea.

Rolling Stones report on Mr Trump privately seething at Mr DeSantiss rising star is just the latest slight in an ongoing Cold War between two of the most outspoken and divisive figures in US politics.

Story continues

When polls last summer began to point to the Florida governors potential to outpace the man who had once endorsed his campaign, Mr Trump seemed to begin to walk back his full-throated support for the Republican he credits himself as being responsible for landing in the governors office.

In June, the University of New Hampshire shared the results of a survey which showed a shocking change of fortune for the former president who for the first time began to trail the Florida governor among likely primary voters in the state.

On the same day those results were shared, the former president took to his own social media platform Truth Social to post the results of a separate poll from the right-leaning pollster Zogby. In those results, unlike the University of New Hampshires, it indicated that he was the clear favourite for winning the 2024 GOP presidential nomination, 42 points ahead of Mr DeSantis in a survey of GOP voters nationally.

The former president has even struck out at his once-avowed network of preference, Fox News, for airing what he viewed as inaccurate polling results during one of their morning news programs.

@foxandfriends just botched my poll numbers, no doubt on purpose, the one-term president wrote on Truth Social back in July, calling out a segment where hosts had presented the findings from both the University of New Hampshire survey and Blueprint in Florida that showed Mr DeSantis being the favourite of the two. That show has been terrible gone to the dark side, he added.

One of the pillars of Trumps 2016 platform zeroed in on the countrys southern border policies, with his build the wall tagline becoming nearly as synonymous with his campaign as the make America great again slogan.

Though he pledged on the campaign trail that he would build a great, great wall on our southern border that the Mexican government would pay for, by the end of his presidency his administration had constructed 452 miles in total, according to the latest US Customs and Border Protection (CBP).

Most of those 452 miles, however, were reinforcing walls that had been built during previous US administrations as only 80 miles of new structures were erected where there had previously been nothing.

See original here:

Donald Trump rages that Ron DeSantiss Marthas Vineyard stunt was his ...

Posted in Donald Trump | Comments Off on Donald Trump rages that Ron DeSantiss Marthas Vineyard stunt was his …

Donald Trump Is More Deranged Than Ever – The New Republic

Posted: at 8:41 am

But even this was just part of the build-up to what ended up being a full QAnon passion play, as the rally culminated with Trump fulminatingreciting a series of grievances over swelling strings. His followers, commanded to raise their fingers in salute, did soresulting in a scene that looked like it was freshly plucked from Leni Riefenstahls back catalogue. The swelling music over which he ranted was eerily similar to the QAnon anthem Wwg1wgaa reference to the conspiracy theorys slogan Where we go one, we go all. The one finger salute was also a nod to the title of that song. Two other speakers at the rally, including Marjorie Taylor Greene, have promoted QAnon over the last several years. Trump himself has recently posted or reposted several QAnon-linked images on his Truth Social platform.

Now we are a nation in decline. We are a failing nation, Trump said, riffing on what has become a familiar theme in his speechesreferencing high inflation and energy costs and the need for more domestic energy production. It was very much akin to traditional fascist myth-making: Only one man can restore the glory and wealth and prestige of the motherland and that person is a real estate developer/con man turned insurrectionist.

That Trumps eventual embrace of QAnon was pretty much fore-ordained, its still disturbing. The conspiracy theory is propped up by his most devoted followers, who believe, among other things, that he will be reinstated as president of the United States and that the Democratic Party is run by a cabal of child sex traffickers. That combination of extreme loyalty to himself and an extraordinary antipathy to his rivals is what he has always promoted among his supporters. As Trump has become more and more obsessed with the investigations engulfing himinto the attempt to overturn the 2020 election, into his apparent theft of hundreds of classified documents, into his corrupt businessesit only grows more necessary to play more directly to those most willing to believe his claims of victimhood.

Read more here:

Donald Trump Is More Deranged Than Ever - The New Republic

Posted in Donald Trump | Comments Off on Donald Trump Is More Deranged Than Ever – The New Republic

Hope Hicks told Donald Trump he lost the 2020 election and that ‘nobody’s convinced me otherwise," book says – Yahoo News

Posted: at 8:41 am

Former President Donald Trump and Hope Hicks on March 29, 2018.MANDEL NGAN/AFP via Getty Images

Longtime Trump aide Hope Hicks didn't buy into his false claims that he won the 2020 election.

She told him to move on, according to the book "The Divider: Trump in the White House, 2017-2021."

"Trump responded bitterly. "Well, Hope doesn't believe in me," he'd say in meetings," they wrote.

After the 2020 presidential election, Donald Trump's longtime aide Hope Hicks told him what he didn't want to hear: He lost.

The close aide was preparing to leave the White House and stayed away from Trump's 2020 election challenges, even as he brooded and "talked of little else" in the aftermath of the race being called for President Joe Biden, wrote New York Times chief White House correspondent Peter Baker and New Yorker staff writer and CNN global affairs analyst Susan Glasser in their new book "The Divider: Trump in the White House, 2017-2021."

Hicks told Trump it was time to move on, according to the book set to publish Tuesday.

"Trump responded bitterly. 'Well, Hope doesn't believe in me,' he would say in meetings," they wrote. "'No, I don't,' she would reply. 'Nobody's convinced me otherwise.' She concluded any further efforts to try to steer Trump would simply be, as she told an associate, 'a waste of time.'"

Hicks worked for the Trump Organization and campaign before serving on the White House communications team and then, after some time at Fox Corporation, as counselor to Trump. But she was "marginalized" after telling Trump his election challenge was wrong and "did not even bother to go into the office" on January 6, 2021, the day of the Capitol insurrection, according to the authors.

Some advisors thought Trump "wavered" on the big lie in the first few days after his loss and that he understood he had come up short. Once, the authors wrote, when seeing Biden on television, he said, "'Can you believe I lost to this fucking guy?'"

"But the kind of advisers who might have steered him toward acceptance were no longer around the brooding president, who remained cloistered for days after the election and talked of little else," the authors wrote.

Story continues

Alyssa Farah, Trump's strategic communications director, soon resigned "out of disgust."

Trump's daughter Ivanka Trump and son-in-law Jared Kushner "surrendered the field" when they saw the outgoing president was empowering his lawyer Rudy Giuliani, who they blamed for his first impeachment, the authors wrote.

"'Obviously, I support you, but I can't help you on that,'" Kushner told Trump, as he related the story to another Republican at the time," the authors wrote.

Read the original article on Business Insider

Follow this link:

Hope Hicks told Donald Trump he lost the 2020 election and that 'nobody's convinced me otherwise," book says - Yahoo News

Posted in Donald Trump | Comments Off on Hope Hicks told Donald Trump he lost the 2020 election and that ‘nobody’s convinced me otherwise," book says – Yahoo News

Does a Book Call Trump ‘The Son of Man, The Christ’? – Snopes.com

Posted: at 8:41 am

A book that names Donald Trump as the son of man and the Christ was promoted by its author at multiple rallies for the former U.S. president.

Author Helgard Mller said that he believes there are two Christs, with Jesus being the son of God who was betrayed by Judas, and Trump being the son of man who was betrayed by [former U.S. Vice President Mike] Pence. He also claimed that his book, President Donald J. Trump, The Son of Man The Christ, was not satire.

In September 2022, a Twitter user posted that flyers were available at an Ohio rally held for former U.S. President Donald Trump that named him as the son of man and the Christ. It was true that the flyers showed the cover of a real, published book from author Helgard Mller, titled, President Donald J. Trump, The Son of Man The Christ. The rally took place on Sept. 17 at the Covelli Centre arena in Youngstown.

Mller confirmed to us via the Messenger app that he personally handed the flyers out at the Youngstown Trump rally. I did hand the flyers out. I gave them to the people in line. Some were sitting, he said. We also asked him if anyone with Trumps campaign or team had ever handed out the flyers in any official capacity. No, he answered.

Posts on Mllers Facebook page showed that he traveled with a trailer (the small one below) and some signage to help promote his book at Trump rallies. The books release appeared to have been around March 2022.

Is this satire?, a Facebook commenter asked. Nope, Mller answered. The real deal.

Another Facebook commenter asked for an explanation, posting, What!!?? TrumpThe Christ? Are you pulling our leg? Mller provided an answer by pointing to his interpretation of Bible verses, saying he believed the son of God to be Jesus Christ, and the son of man to be Trump, meaning he believed there to be two Christs:

You know that Jesus, the Son of God always spoke about the Son of MAN in a third person?

For whosoever shall be ashamed of me and of my words (Jesus, the Son of God), of him shall the Son of man be ashamed, when he shall come in his ownglory, and in his Fathers, and of the holy angels.

Have you not notice how Jesus, the Son of God spoke in the first person about himself and always referred to the Son of MAN in the third person?

Mller also told us that he believed there to be a comparison between Jesus being betrayed by Judas and Trump purportedly being betrayed by Pence, purportedly referring to the former U.S. vice presidents decision to follow the U.S. Constitution rather than overturning the results of the 2020 U.S. presidential election based on conspiracy theories. (In reality, no credible evidence of massive voter fraud has ever been produced to show that the election was stolen, as Trump often claimed.)

Following the Ohio rally, Mller uploaded a video that provided a longer explanation as to why he believed Trump to be the son of man and the Christ, as mentioned on the cover of his book. Dont get offended. Dont say, Ew, thats blasphemous,' he said. Jesus is the king of the Jews. Trump is the king of kings.

In sum, yes, its true that flyers were being handed out at a Trump rally for a book that called Trump the son of God and the Christ.

Sources:

Article IIExecutive Branch. Constitution Annotated, https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/article-2/section-1/.

@HelgardMullerShow. Facebook, https://www.facebook.com/HelgardMullerShow/.

Howie, Craig. Trump Rallies for Vance and Himself in Ohio. POLITICO, 17 Sept. 2022, https://www.politico.com/news/2022/09/17/trump-rally-vance-ohio-midterms-00057341.

Luke 22 New International Version.Bible Gateway, https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Luke%2022&version=NIV.

Mller, Helgard.President Donald J. Trump, The Son of Man The Christ. Outskirts Press, Incorporated, 2022.

@nothoodlum. Twitter, 19 Sept. 2022, https://twitter.com/nothoodlum/status/1571904092720746502.

Originally posted here:

Does a Book Call Trump 'The Son of Man, The Christ'? - Snopes.com

Posted in Donald Trump | Comments Off on Does a Book Call Trump ‘The Son of Man, The Christ’? – Snopes.com

President Trump and the shallow state – Brookings Institution

Posted: at 8:41 am

President Trump often complained about the deep state of career civil servants who, he asserted, were determined to undermine his presidency. He promised to drain the swamp, and his aide Steve Bannon predicted the deconstruction of the administrative state.

But it was his own presidential appointees who most visibly resisted his directives. Political appointees are expected to be the most loyal advocates of a presidents policy agenda, riding herd on the many bureaucracies of the executive branch. Yet Trumps appointees in the White House, cabinet, military, and intelligence community refused to carry out many of the presidents directives to an extent unprecedented in the modern presidency. President Trumps appointees went well beyond the normal disagreements about policy that are typical in every administration; they resorted to slow walking orders, refusing to comply with directives, and even outright sabotage. Leadership is central to the presidency. The resistance to President Trump by his highest level officials illustrates how his own appointees judged his leadership.

Senior members of the White House staff often tried to thwart Trumps instincts. For example, Staff Secretary Rob Porter considered Trumps desire to withdraw from the Paris Climate Accord unwise. So, Porter took a draft statement off Trumps desk. Similarly, National Economic Council Director Gary Cohn and Porter decided to slow-walk an order to withdraw from the NAFTA free trade agreement. Cohn told Porter: I can stop this. Ill just take the paper off his desk before I leave. If hes going to sign it, hes going to need another piece of paper. Later, after multiple reviews, Trump got his way on the Paris Accord and NAFTA.

In August 2017, Trump wanted to fulfill a campaign promise to withdraw from the U.S. free trade agreement with South Korea, and a letter was prepared to that effect. Cohn thought that if Trump saw the letter, he would sign it; so Cohn quietly removed it from Trumps desk. Eventually Secretary of Defense James Mattis talked the president out of abandoning the agreement.

During the Mueller investigation about possible Trump campaign coordination with Russia, Trump ordered White House Counsel Donald McGahn and Chief of Staff Reince Priebus to have Mueller removed, but they refused. Trumps counsel, Pat Cipollone, refused Trumps order to take a 2020 election case to the Supreme Court.

Reflecting on his White House service, Staff Secretary Rob Porter recalled: A third of my job was trying to react to some of the really dangerous ideas that he had and try to give him reasons to believe that maybe they werent such good ideas. When top economic adviser Gary Cohn recalled how he removed decision papers from the presidents desk, he said: Its not what we did for the country. Its what we saved him from doing.

Though White House staffers are powerful, cabinet secretaries are officers of the United States and hold the most authority in the executive branch, short of the president. Yet Trumps appointees often refused to do his bidding. When Secretary of Homeland Security Kirstjen Nielson refused to implement a White House plan to arrest thousands of immigrants in major cities across the country and deport them, Trump fired her.

For all of his posturing about the military power of the United States, President Trump did not respect the norms of military leadership. President Trump demonstrated his attitude toward his secretaries of state and defense as well as military leaders. In a meeting with them in July 2017 at the Pentagon, after Trump had been briefed on the status of U.S. forces, Trump lashed out at his top civilian and military leaders: Youre all losers. . .. Youre a bunch of dopes and babies. No commander in chief had ever spoken to his top national security appointees in that manner.

In the spring of 2017, Trump ordered the removal from South Korea of the U.S. radar installation, that was essential for detecting any missiles coming from North Korea. Secretary of Defense Mattis refused to carry out the direct order until he was able to talk the President out of his decision. Secretary Mattis also rejected Trumps desire to Kill Bashar al-Assad

On July 26, 2017 President Trump tweeted that, contrary to then current policy, the military would not allow any transgender individuals to enter the armed forces. Mattis slow walked the order until the Supreme Court allowed it to go into effect. On November 11, 2020, General Mark Milley was given a memo, signed by President Trump, stating: I hereby direct you to withdraw all U.S forces from Afghanistan. General Milley and Acting Defense Secretary Christopher Miller went to the White House and Trump was convinced to rescind the memo.

In line with President Trumps distrust of the career services, he considered the intelligence community to be part of the deep state. After meeting with President Putin, Trump took him at his word that Russia did not try to affect the 2016 election. In doing so, he ignored the unanimous consensus among the DNI, CIA, NSA, and FBI.

Trump was not the only president to have conflicts in his White House staff or who requested the resignations of cabinet secretaries. But his administration set records in turnover in Executive Office of the President (EOP) and the cabinet.

At the White House level, Trump had four chiefs of staff, four national security advisors, five directors of National Intelligence, four press secretaries, and six communications advisors (including acting officials). Likewise, the turnover in Trumps cabinet (14) exceeded by far the first term turnover of all other modern presidents. Trump had four secretaries of defense, four attorneys general, and four secretaries of homeland security (including acting secretaries). When Trump decided to replace his officials, he often insultingly fired them by tweet (for example, Priebus, Esper, Nielsen, Tillerson, and Coats, among others).

Despite President Trumps complaints about the deep state, the above examples illustrate the willingness of top-level White House aides and cabinet secretaries to actively undermine his wishes.The danger is that in a second term Trump would not make the mistake of appointing officials with integrity and courage.

Originally posted here:

President Trump and the shallow state - Brookings Institution

Posted in Donald Trump | Comments Off on President Trump and the shallow state – Brookings Institution

The Republican Party Was Trumpy Long Before Trump – The Atlantic

Posted: at 8:41 am

In February 1992, a small, graying man in a slightly wrinkled suit eased himself into a seat across from the television host Larry King. Larry King Live was the hottest show on cable newsmostly because it was the top-rated show on CNN, the only cable-news channel widely available in the U.S. at the time. And so it was there that a reedy-voiced Texan announced that he would run for president if and only if his supporters got him on the ballot in all 50 states.

Thus began the improbable rise of Ross Perot, the billionaire presidential candidate who threw the 1992 presidential campaign into disarray, first by entering as an independent, then by dropping out just a few months before the election, and finally by jumping back in with only a month left to go. Despite his erratic campaign, he captured nearly 20 percent of the vote: the best showing for a third-party presidential candidate in 80 years.

From the May 1993 issue: Ross is boss

The Perot phenomenon was more than a curiosity of the 1992 campaign. It revealed a political culture in crisis, one reeling from the end of the Cold War, profound economic shifts, a rapidly transforming media landscape, and a newly empowered generation of women and nonwhite Americans. It also revealed a frustrated and malleable electorate with loose ties to the major parties and their platforms.

It was a moment that mattered because of both the discontent and the possibilities it highlighted. And although Perot was an independent, his run sheds light on the current state of the Republican Party. People curious about the dramatic changes in the party over the past several years often start with the 2016 election, but they would do better to look back to 1992. In that election, as well as in the years that followed, the party sketched out a path designed to attract disillusioned voters not through the flexible, heterodox politics of the Perot campaign but through a hard-right, reactionary politics made palatable by a new style of political entertainment and a deepening anti-establishment posture. That path led to the election of Donald Trump, which by the 2010s was not only a possible outcome of the choices the right had made in the 1990s, but one that had been a long time coming.

The 1992 election, the first after the end of the Cold War, came after a decade of Republican successes. Ronald Reagan won two terms as president in back-to-back landslides, and his vice president, George H. W. Bush, won in 1988 in a landslide of his own. But by the early 1990s, the electorate was frustrated, if not furious. The adrenaline spike of the Gulf War, which sent Bushs approval rating into record-high territory, vanished as the economy stuttered into a recession.

That recession was compounded by broader domestic shifts and the new geopolitical reality of the postCold War world. California, which had been particularly reliant on the Cold War to fuel its universities and aerospace industry, felt the collapse the hardest. But the pain was also felt by factory workers, who were caught in a decades-long shift to service and information-sector work. Added to the frustrations of the recession was genuine uncertainty about what role, if any, the U.S. should play in the world now that the Cold War was over. The Gulf War had been a short, triumphal affair, but as it faded from the headlines, it offered few answers about what should follow.

But Pat Buchanan did have answers. Buchanan, a former communications director in the Reagan White House and a popular television personality, felt unconstrained by party orthodoxies. He had long professed his belief that the biggest vacuum in American politics today is to the right of Ronald Reagan, and he set out to prove that in his 1992 campaign for the Republican nomination. He ran well to the right of Bush, not just taking hard-line positions on issues such as immigration (he called for a Buchanan fence at the border) and affirmative action but also resurrecting themes of the Old Right of the 1930s and 40s: a closed, cramped vision of an America that needed to be protected from foreign trade, foreign people, and foreign entanglements. He carried out an America First campaign that argued against U.S. involvement abroad and denounced free-trade deals such as the newly negotiated North American Free Trade Agreement.

From the February 1996 issue: Right-wing populist

He also brought a dark note to the campaign, calling for a revolution against a whole slew of enemies: liberals, feminists, immigrants, even Republicans such as George Bush. Running against Bush for the nomination, Buchanan took to calling him King George, promising that his supporters, the Buchanan brigade, would lead a new American revolution if Buchanan won. Even Buchanan was stunned by how well his message resonated. When reports came in on the day of the New Hampshire primary that he and Bush were neck and neck, Buchanan, who was in the middle of typing his speech withdrawing from the race, looked around his hotel room and asked, What the fuck do we do now?

Buchanan lost that night, but his unexpectedly strong showing suggested two things: first, that an incumbent president could be vulnerable to a challenger, and second, that the challenger didnt need to be a political insider. Buchanan had never held elected office before, and neither had the man who, two days later, sat down on Larry King Live to announce that he would welcome efforts to draft him into the 1992 race.

That outsider, anti-establishment ethos coursed through the 1992 campaign. It was most obviously present in Perots independent runthe first efforts to draft him came from a group called THRO, Throw the Hypocritical Rascals Outbut it was also part of the Buchanan campaign. Bill Clinton, the young Arkansas governor running for the Democratic nomination, also tapped into the outsider aesthetic, playing the saxophone on The Arsenio Hall Show and fielding questions from an MTV audience on everything from his youthful drug use to his underwear preferences. But for Clinton, this shake-things-up approach was mostly superficial, playing into the sentiment of the moment without offering much of substance to address it and not as novel as it appeared: Presidential candidates had been dabbling in those sorts of cameos for decades, including Richard Nixon, who popped up on the sketch-comedy show Laugh-In during the 1968 race.

The real media innovators on the trail in 1992 were Buchanan and Perot. Neither man had ever held elected office; both built their following through regular media appearances. Buchanan, who had been an editorial writer for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch before he joined Nixons 1968 campaign, rose to national fame as the host of CNNs Crossfire and a regular panelist on PBSs The McLaughlin Group. Perots path was more deliberately plotted: He sold himself as a swashbuckling billionaire, and his antics, including a daring rescue mission to pluck hostages out of Iran, became the stuff of legendand of the 1986 miniseries On Wings of Eagles (starring Richard Crenna as Perot). He then transformed himself into a political figure through frequent ratings-spiking appearances on Larry King Live.

Politics in the United States had always been full of artifice, but presidential candidates had nevertheless found it necessary to construct their personas around experiencetime spent in elected office or military leadership. For Buchanan and Perot, the new age of interactive media (both Crossfire and Larry King Live started as call-in radio shows) infused their candidacies with a sense of novelty and authenticity. And the potent anti-establishment anger coursing through the country meant that they wore their inexperience as a feature, not a flaw.

Neither Perot nor Buchanan won in 1992, but they left a lasting impact on politics. At first, Perots vision appeared to be winning out. As the 1994 midterms approached two years later, both Democrats and Republicans fretted over how to capture the Perot vote. It was a hard segment of the electorate to pin down. Perots personality was mercurial, his leadership style authoritarian, and his views heterodox. He opposed free trade and abortion restrictions and supported gun regulation and balanced budgets. Unlocking the key to his appeal, which attracted Republicans and Democrats in roughly equal numbers, would not be easy.

Todd S. Purdum: Were all living in the world Ross Perot made

On the Republican side, House Minority Whip Newt Gingrich leaned into the challenge. He brought aboard Frank Luntz, who had worked as a pollster first for Buchanan and then for Perot, to crack the Perot code. Luntz argued that Perot appealed to so many people because he was explicitly nonpartisan and devoted to reining in the excesses and privileges of political elites. If Republicans wanted to win over his voters, they would have to focus less on attacking Democrats and more on developing a robust reform agenda.

That advice was an awkward fit for Gingrich. He had built his reputation by weaponizing ethics charges, which left an air of scandal around Democratic Speaker of the House Jim Wright that eventually led to his resignation. He had also spent the past few years using the organization GOPAC to train Republicans in rhetorical tricks for demonizing Democratspart of an ongoing effort to polarize the parties.

Eager to build a coalition that would put Republicans in the majority and himself in the speakers office, Gingrich worked with Luntz to create the Contract With America, a document that made no reference to President Clinton or either political party, and that was ostensibly designed to promote only 60 percent issuespolicies that polled with at least 60 percent support.

Gingrich, the Contract, and Republicans all won in 1994, a historic victory that ushered in a new freshman class further to the right than that of any other House in modern U.S. history. Yet if pursuit of the Perot vote shaped Gingrichs rise to the speakers office, he quickly abandoned it for his preferred path of polarization. Under pressure from the True Believers, as the right-wing hard-liners in his caucus dubbed themselves, he shifted focus from reform to a series of innovative obstructionist maneuvers, including endless investigations, lengthy government shutdowns, and an unpopular impeachment effortnone of which spoke to the frustrations and angers of postCold War Americans.

As Perots popularity suggests, those frustrations and angers could have attached themselves to any of a number of political figures and agendas. But the agenda that the right built over the course of the 1990s would be far more Buchanan than Perot. When an anti-government militia movement gained power in the early 90s, the right saw it as an opportunity, not a warning. Republicans such as Representative Helen Chenoweth of Idaho embraced the causes and conspiracies of her militia constituents, and the NRA played into attacks on federal agents in fundraising letters that called the agents jack-booted government thugs. (After the Oklahoma City bombing, George H. W. Bush resigned from the NRA in response to those comments.)

On other issues, too, the party lurched to the right. Republicans and Democrats both took a hard turn toward restricting immigration, opening the door for Buchananite calls to build a border wall, end birthright citizenship, restrict nonwhite immigration, and cut off nearly all nonemergency public services, including education, to undocumented migrants. And although the party had been moving toward a more hard-line position on abortion for two decades, there still seemed to be room to maneuver: After a significant number of Republicans voted for Perot, they then briefly flocked to Colin Powell, who also supported abortion rights, in the lead-up to the 1996 presidential primaries. But the party ultimately chose a hardline position on reproductive rights.

On issue after issue, the right developed a politics of resentment. Feminism was to blame for flooding the workplace with women who not only competed for wages but raised complaints about harassment and unequal treatment. Immigrants were to blame for overcrowded schools, high housing costs, and lower wages. Government agents were coming for your guns, your land, your money, and your rights, using immigration policy and affirmative action to ensure that white men would not have the resources or the power they once enjoyed.

These were not popular politics in the 1990s. Outsider candidates such as Perot and even Clinton offered an alternative vision to the exclusionary populism of Buchanan. But voters who subscribed to these politics were always there, and the party chose them and cultivated them, slowly over the next decade and then very quickly once Barack Obama took office. That choice gave us the politics of white-male resentment and the new generation of pundit-politicians we have today.

In that sense, the party had been preparing for a quarter century for a figure like Donald Trump: a bombastic television personality whose solutions to voter frustrations involved pointing at the very same groups that Buchanan once had. Trump was not an exception; he was simply the next step on a path the right had started down almost three decades before.

See the original post:

The Republican Party Was Trumpy Long Before Trump - The Atlantic

Posted in Donald Trump | Comments Off on The Republican Party Was Trumpy Long Before Trump – The Atlantic