Category Archives: Donald Trump

Its a gray afternoon, promising rain and with temperatures in the 50s, people have taken their jackets out of the closet.

The streets of downtown Monroe, Georgia, a town of about 14,000 residents 45 miles due east of Atlanta, are quiet for a Saturday. Its the county seat of Walton county and a monument honoring Confederate veterans stands tall outside the county courthouse. The soldier carved from granite looks across Broad Street to the towns police station and is flanked to the south by the Walton Tribunes office and a district office for representative Jody Hice.

Hice, a Republican and former pastor and talkshow host, has announced his candidacy for Georgias next secretary of state and is one of three candidates for statewide offices in next years national elections who have received Donald Trumps endorsement. Unsurprisingly, 74% of Walton countys residents voted for Trump last November.

And, although Monroe had the opportunity on 2 November to vote for Democrat Emilio Kelly as the towns first Black mayor in its 200 years of history, residents three days before election day wanted to talk about what one man called the disastrous state of affairs they see in the US. (Kelly would go on to lose.)

A year on from an election Trump lost, they believe theyre living in a country where Joe Biden was not legitimately elected, the government is paying people not to work and the state is contaminating childrens minds in public schools, while violating the rights of parents by insisting on teaching about racism that happened a long time ago. Some are pretty sure Covid was created in a lab, that natural immunity works fine and that vaccines could make you sicker.

The situation is so dire that the current administration has possibly damaged our country permanently, said Patrick Graham, owner of the Tribune and author of a recent editorial titled, Yall Biden Folks Proud Yet?

None of the Trump supporters picking up pizza or visiting candle and antique stores downtown believed the presidential vote tallies announced a year ago were accurate. They pointed to the allegations made prominent in Trumps failed lawsuits across the country and in Georgia.

With everyone screaming, Lets Go Brandon, theres no way in the world he had 81m votes, said Mark Kramer, a 68-year-old retiree who moved from nearby Lawrenceville a year ago.

A couple of blocks south, Mike, a 53-year-old, self-described good ol country boy who didnt want his last name known, had stopped at a gas station before heading home to watch the Atlanta Braves in the World Series. He believes the 2020 election was fixed.

Im not a conspiracy person but the more thought I put into it not in the state of Georgia, I dont believe it happened, he said, referring to Biden winning the popular vote.

I dont want to go so far as to say it was stolen, but ballots were trashed and a lot of things went wrong including here in Georgia, said Holland, a 54-year-old legal assistant at an Atlanta corporate law firm who was walking her dog Henry in the late afternoon drizzle.

About half the people the Guardian spoke to in Monroe had been vaccinated, a figure in line with Georgia as a whole, consistently in the bottom of national rankings for vaccination rates. Graham, the Tribune editor, expressed concern over the government forcing an experimental chemical into peoples bodies to keep them employed If we keep going in this direction, its going to erode our freedoms.

I dont care for masks or vaccines, said Jason Mealer, a 38-year-old McDonalds employee. We had Ebola here and that was deadly. Why do something about it now? I say, just live your life.

Retiree Mark Kramer said theres no ingredients you can read in Covid vaccines, and that they are poison theyll cause you more disease than anything else. No one in his family had been vaccinated, he added, pointing to a restaurant nearby where they were waiting for him. Kramer didnt want his picture taken; his son-in-law standing nearby explained their objections: You have BLM, antifa you have no idea what they might do if a photograph were to appear online.

The personal impacts of global or macroeconomic forces were also on peoples minds in downtown Monroe, without much interest in the global or macro sides of the equation. High gas prices, bottled supply chains, short staffing consensus was, they are all due to the current administration.

I went to Ihop and their schedule had changed to 7am to 4pm due to staff shortages, said Holland. People in my own town are staying at home instead of working, she said. Biden is paying people to stay home.

The notion that radical changes have taken place in how students from kindergarten through grade 12 are taught about race and racism in US history tagged as CRT or critical race theory is not absent among Trump supporters in Monroe, where most Black and white residents live in separate parts of town to this day. CRT is an academic discipline that examines the ways in which racism operates in US laws and society. It is not taught in Georgia schools.

I dont agree with whats being taught in schools, said Holland. Parents should have a say, and teaching kids that white people are racist is the wrong thing. Its almost like they want to recreate history, she said.

Bringing in CRT is not what teaching is all about, she said. Preparing for college, for the real world, is what its about. Not about race, or anything else.

But race and racism is woven into Monroes history.

A few miles from where Holland spoke, in 1946, a mob of several dozen white people shot and lynched two Black couples, by Moores Ford Bridge, which crosses the Appalachee River.

The gruesome act of violence led a 17-year-old Martin Luther King Jr to write a letter to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and President Harry Truman ordered the FBI to investigate. No one was found guilty. In an ongoing lawsuit, the 11th circuit US court of appeals ruled in March of last year that grand jury records from the case must remain sealed, keeping all of us from potentially learning what happened that day, and who was responsible.

The Moores Ford lynching persists not just in the courts, and the memories of many; only two months ago, Monroes current mayor, John Howard, presented a statement to the towns city council publicly acknowledging it for the first time. One Black city council member refused to sign the statement, calling it a political stunt aimed at currying favor among the towns Black voters in Howards bid for re-election.

Should schools in Monroe teach children about the lynching at Moores Ford? If so, how? That sort of history though it was ghastly should be taught, said Jeff Blackstone, a 58-year-old who owns a company that installs hotel TV systems. But we have all learned from our mistakes. Although there are still some outliers who go back to the horrid ways of previous years, that should not be tolerated. And I dont agree with what the government is trying to do with our lives like CRT trying to teach us societal views.

I think we need to move beyond Black, white and brown, Blackstone said. I hire and fire people and dont judge by their color, but what they can do to help me.

James Trae Welborn III, associate professor of history at Georgia College & State University, says racism and its expression has changed over time.

Racism now takes seemingly benign forms talk of personal liberties, colorblindness The idea is that racism is people running around in white hoods, burning white crosses. So you say, I wouldnt do that, and anything that falls short of that isnt racism.

Welborn also pointed to the idea that racism happened a long time ago, the shared urgency among Trump supporters to deny and marginalize the issue of race and racism, in favor of the beacon of liberty and freedom narrative in American history. A civil war historian, Welborn sees parallels between the views and rhetoric of Trump supporters and those of the Confederacy. Theres even similar language the threats of violence: Come to the Capitol and give em what for, he said.

Meanwhile, in the present, many Trump supporters in Georgia are following Garland Favorito and his organization, VoterGA, which has two lawsuits in state courts tied to last years elections. Favoritos organization is 15 years old and works on election integrity a term which was then used in public discourse in reference to issues such as how to employ audit methods that could truly verify elections results, and now is mostly used to underline any supposed evidence that Trump won. Until last year, VoterGA was primarily supported by progressive Democrats. Now, Favorito receives social media followers, and donations, from thousands of Trump supporters, in Georgia and elsewhere.

As for last years election, he said, the truth is, nobody knows who won. The secretary of state [in Georgia] can tell you he knows, but he has no idea. This is because, he said, allegations of ballot stuffing have not been satisfactorily investigated by the state and a forensic analysis of election system servers in the states 159 counties has not been performed. The problem is that nobody wants to get to the truth.

Asked about the process followed in Arizona, where a group called Cyber Ninjas took months to review election materials from the states largest county and still concluded that Joe Biden won Favorito said that the groups work was never really completed, because the state didnt supply them with everything they sought to examine. This means we will never know who won in Arizona, he said.

Asked if it concerns him that many of the Trump supporters supporting his work in Georgia are the same people who hold positions such as the vaccine being poison, he said, No, it doesnt concern me to speak truth Trump supporters have just as much a right to say Trump won as the secretary of state says Biden won, because we dont know the truth.

Read the rest here:

In Trumpland parallel reality, election was stolen and racism was long ago - The Guardian

Although the United States was born of a revolution, one common view maintains that the Constitution tamed our rebellious impulse and launched a distinctly nonrevolutionary political experiment. But throughout American history, an important strand of conservatism has repeatedly championed rebellionsor what are better understood as counterrevolutions.

They emerge like clockwork: Each time political minorities advocate for and achieve greater equality, conservatives rebel, trying to force a reinstatement of the status quo.

The term counterrevolution is significant not only because conservatives have regularly employed it, but also because it highlights their own agency, something they often seek to conceal. In order to portray their actions as defensive rather than aggressive, conservatives tend to depict themselves as acted upon and besieged. As William F. Buckley wrote in the National Reviews mission statement in 1955, conservatism stands athwart history, yelling Stop. Here the agent is history; conservatives are merely making a reply. But such rhetorical gestures discount what any close look at these movements makes clear: Conservatives have done much more than yell. They have fought against equality vigorously, often violently.

David Frum: The conservative cult of victimhood

Three historical momentsthe revolt against postCivil War Reconstruction, the mid-century fight against civil rights, and the modern Tea Party and Trump movementsstand out as perfect examples of the counterrevolutionary dynamic. They share certain broad themes: a hostility to racial equality, the invocation of apocalyptic rhetoricthat America is under siege, as President Donald Trump told the crowd on January 6 prior to the Capitol insurrectionand a deep distrust of democracy.

During Reconstruction, conservatives denounced its proponents as dangerous revolutionaries, often comparing them to notorious figures from the French Revolution. We do not know of two men who have come up prominently before the world in revolutionary times more alike than Marat and Thaddeus Stevens, The New York Herald said in 1866. One Nashville newspaper contended in 1868 that the Radical Republicans in Congress aim to abolish the constitution, to destroy public liberty, and to concentrate the power of the country in the hands of usurpers embodying the very essence of despotism that shocked the world and subjected France to the reign of terror under Jacobin rule.

The reign of terror that the Nashville newspaper decried was in fact the emergence of multiracial democracy. Many conservatives were entirely frank about this, such as the one featured in Mississippis The Meriden Daily Republican who wrote, The two races cannot and will not rule jointly and coequally One or the other must become subordinate. This is the history of all such experiments everywhere.

Outlawing racial discrimination, in this view, was grounds for regime change, even violence. Take, for example, an editorial statement of Missouris aptly named The Lexington Weekly Caucasian from 1872. It began with two demands, State Sovereignty! White Supremacy! and threatened ANOTHER REBELLION if they were not acceded to. Revolution must be met by CounterRevolutionForce by ForceViolence by Violenceand Usurpation should be Overthrown, if needs be, by the Bayonet! Calling white supremacy a counterrevolution could justify nearly anything, bloodshed included.

The counterrevolutionary politics of this era proved to be extremely effective, as much of the racial progress achieved during Reconstruction was wiped out or even reversed in subsequent decades. By the mid-20th century, the conservative backlash had reinforced white supremacy through Jim Crow laws and intense voter suppression. W. E. B. Du Bois famously called this the counter-revolution of property. Black citizens in Indianola, Mississippi, for example, constituted a majority of the local countys population but only 0.03 percent of its registered voters. Du Bois reflected on this state of affairs, writing, The slave went free; stood a brief moment in the sun; then moved back again toward slavery.

When the civil-rights movement mobilized against this oppression and inequality, conservatives began to fear that what some were calling the Second Reconstruction might be as dangerous for them as the first. Barry Goldwater, in many ways the prototypical modern conservative, was among them. In a letter he wrote while running for president in 1963, Goldwater called the civil-rights movement a revolution and said that he was very apprehensive about how far it will go.

So conservatives responded with yet another counterrevolution, one intended to maintain carefully constructed racial, economic, and social hierarchies. As the Black historian Lerone Bennett Jr. wrote in Ebony magazine in 1966, the counter-revolutionary campaign of terror against Reconstruction was merely the first white backlash; the United States was living through the second.

The guiding principles of this backlash had been laid out 10 years earlier in the Southern Manifesto of 1956. Signed by more than 100 congressmen, the manifesto responded to the Brown v. Board decision mandating school desegregation by issuing a bold defense of the Jim Crow status quo and pledging to fight the revolutionary changes in our public school systems. As schools became battlegrounds, conservatives, especially those in the South, dug in their heels.

From the October 2020 issue: The new Reconstruction

For many right-wingers, the historical memory of Reconstruction-era radicalism combined with Cold War anxieties. To them, civil-rights activism was the work not only of revolutionaries but of communists. As the Oklahoma minister Billy James Hargis warned in one newspaper column, The communists have been urging their followers to bring pressure upon the federal government, to force Reconstruction days upon the Southern states again. In a 1965 essay titled Two Revolutions at Once, Robert Welch, the leader of the far-right John Birch Society, derided the push for civil rights as a Negro Revolutionary Movement driven by communist saboteurs rather than oppressed Black citizens.

As was the case during Reconstruction, this counterrevolutionary rhetoric enabled violenceviolence against leaders like Martin Luther King Jr., violence against activists like the Freedom Riders, violence on college campuses, violence at the hands of the Ku Klux Klan, violence at the hands of the police. But conservatives frequently accused activists of inciting it. Following the Selma march, a piece in American Opinion, the Birch Societys flagship magazine, claimed, The violence in Selma doesnt have to do with voting rights at all it has to do with Communist Revolution, with Communists intentionally setting the stage for race war. A menacing enemy within justified a violent illiberalism.

As politicians debated the proposed Civil Rights Act, the fury of white southerners increased. If dictatorial planners insist upon ignoring and trampling majority rights in efforts to favor minority groups, they may in time provoke a White Revolution, Tom Ethridge wrote in The Clarion-Ledger in Jackson, Mississippi. This so-called white revolution was, in fact, a counterrevolution designed to shore up the racial caste system.

When that caste system showed signs of decay some four decades later, a similar backlash came about. Shortly after the election of Americas first Black president, the Tea Party exploded into the public consciousness. Its members adopted the iconography and language of the American Revolution, styling themselves patriots and attending rallies clad in knee breeches and tricornered hats. Despite this getup, the Tea Party was not a revolution but a counterrevolutiona defense of privilege and hierarchy rather than a call for egalitarianism.

Racial resentment played a crucial role in Tea Party ideology. Birther conspiracies flourished within the movement, whose adherents viewed President Barack Obama more as a fifth-column threat than a legitimate political opponent. Tea Partiers claimed that some people were getting too many handouts or werent working hard enough to earn their keep; typically those people were illegal immigrants or other minority groups that were referred to using coded language. As recounted by Theda Skocpol and Vanessa Williamson in The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism, one Virginia Tea Partier asserted that a plantation mentality prevented some people from getting off the dole, a racist argument that reflected the counterrevolutions Reconstruction-era origins. The solution, according to the movement, was to dramatically reduce the governmentat least the parts of it that benefited the wrong people. This had the added advantage of divesting power from leaders who couldnt be trusted. As one Tea Partier put it to Skocpol and Williamson, The people I was looking for back when I was a cop are now running the government.

Despite the fact that the Tea Party received heavy funding from right-wing plutocrats, the movement had a populist panache. The counterrevolution had gone mainstream, and all of the aggrievement, mistrust, and racial resentments that had festered within conservatism for generations laid the foundation for the rise of Donald Trump.

Although Trump is often described as unprecedented or norm-breaking, his rhetoric has deep roots in the conservative movements counterrevolutionary tradition. He warned us that America was beset by enemies, an often-racialized group of others who were amassing power too quickly and using it to threaten the American way of life. Obama was a Kenyan-born Muslim imposing radical views on the United States. Immigrants were invading and taking our jobs. The media were the enemy of the people, and Democrats were treasonous and un-American. Washington, the home of illegitimate majorities, was a swamp that needed draining.

Beyond adopting the rhetoric of counterrevolution, Trump also embraced its most dangerous element: a call for political violence. On January 6, he stood before thousands of supporters and proclaimed, We fight like hell. And if you dont fight like hell, youre not going to have a country anymore. Just a few beats later, Trump declared, Were going to walk down Pennsylvania Avenue And were going to the Capitol, and were going to try and give. He stopped short of issuing a direct instruction, but his assembled supporters understood the assignment, storming the U.S. Capitol in an effort to overturn the election. That the Capitol siege failedas did subsequent efforts to overturn the election through courts and auditsdoes not diminish the dangers presented by the counterrevolutionary impulse in todays conservatism.

Adam Serwer: The Capitol riot was an attack on multiracial democracy

It was not long before the GOP followed Trumps lead. Dan Patrick, the lieutenant governor of Texas, promoted the white supremacist great replacement theory on Laura Ingrahams show. The revolution has begun, Patrick said, arguing that, by allowing more migrants into the U.S., the Democrats were trying to take over our country without firing a shot. And now, at Trumps behest, the state of Texas is auditing the 2020 votes in the states four largest counties, all of which are Democratic strongholds. The audit ploy may have failed in Arizona, but the counterrevolution continues.

If conservatives become convinced that they cannot win democratically, they will not abandon conservatism, David Frum, a Never Trump conservative, wrote in The Atlantic. They will reject democracy. But Frums warning about the dead end of Trumpism ignored the illiberalism and minoritarian inclinations baked into the conservative pie. The reality is that the counterrevolutionary mindset is a feature, not a glitch, of modern conservatism, one that offers authoritarian solutions to democracys right-wing discontents.

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The Conservative Backlash to Progress - The Atlantic

Last month, The New York Times reported that Westchester County D.A.s office had opened a separate criminal probe into the Trump Organization thought to be focused in part on whether the company misled local officials about the Trump National Golf Club Westchesters property value with the express intent of lowering its tax bill. For instance, in one year, town officials assessed the property at roughly $15 million, while the Trump Organization claimed it was worth just $1.4 million. Meanwhile, on federal disclosure forms filed while he was president, Trump said the club was worth more than $50 million. Which is quite the discrepancy!

Of course, the idea that a company run by Donald Trump would claim a property was worth significantly less than what local officials said it was should come as no surprise whatsoever. In February 2019, Michael Cohen, Trumps former personal attorney,toldCongress that in his experience,Trumpinflatedhis totalassetswhen it served his purposes, such as trying to be listed amongst the wealthiest people inForbes,anddeflatedhisassetsto reduce his real estate taxes. Cohen cited portions of documents known as Statements of Financial Condition, which were write-ups of Trumps real estate assets and debts, which Cohen said were intended to demonstrate his wealth, particularly to lenders who he wanted to loan him money. A month after Cohens testimony, the Post dove into such documents, and found that they were filled with a comical number of lies.

In 2011, for instance, a Statement of Financial Condition claimed that Trump owned 55 home lots ready to sell for at least $3 million apiece at his Southern California golf course. Yet, in reality, hed only been zoned for 31, thereby overstating his future revenue by approximately $72 million. In a document from 2012, he added an extra 800 acres to the size of his 1,200-acre Virginia vineyard. In 2013, in an attempt to bolster his bid for the Buffalo Bills, a two-page Summary of Net Worth conveniently omitted his ownership of two hotels, in Chicago and Las Vegas, meaning, as the Post noted,some of Trumps actual debt load was hidden from anyone reading the statement. In perhaps the most brazen example of Trumpian exaggeration, he invented an extra 10 stories at Trump Tower, claiming that the building was 68 stories when, in actuality, there are 58.

As the Post noted on Thursday, its possible the second grand jury could conclude without handing down further indictments, though if the prior one is any guide, that may not be the case. The Trump Organization did not respond to the Posts request for comment. Trumps personal lawyers Ron Fischetti and Phyllis Malgieri declined to comment. In previous statements, Trump, his spokespeople, and his family have decried any investigations into the ex-president and his family business as politically motivated witch hunts. Last year, Eric Trump told the Post, This type of targeting and harassment violates every ethical guideline of a prosecutor. Its wrong.

Read more:

Report: The Trump Organization Should Be Soiling Itself Right Now - Vanity Fair

Welp, he was trying to do something nice ... but former President Donald Trump knocked a kid upside the head with a baseball at the World Series, and the video is pretty funny.

(The boy is okay!!)

#45 was in the house at Truist Park in Atlanta for game 4 of the World Series last Saturday night -- sitting in an open-air suite with Melania Trump -- a game the Braves won 3-2 over the Astros.

The video shows a young boy desperately attempting to get DT's attention. Finally, the ex-prez heard the kid, and asked him to throw a baseball for him to sign.

The boy complies ... and Trump -- who claimed he could've gone pro as a baseball player -- made a nice catch, snagging the ball, which was underthrown by the kid.

The 75-year-old politician grabbed a marker from a Secret Service agent ... and signed the baseball.

Then came time to toss the ball back ... and that's when Trump plunked a kid square in the dome, after an adult male who was with the kid failed to make the routine catch.

Thankfully, the boy appears to be okay ... and fans nearby were able to retrieve the baseball.

The silver lining ... we previously reported on Trump-signed balls that have sold for around a thousand bucks a pop.

As for Trump, he spoke about his baseball prowess back in 2004.

I was supposed to be a pro baseball player. At the New York Military Academy, I was captain of the baseball team. I worked hard like everyone else, but I had good talent.

Official ruling ... error on the catch.

See more here:

Donald Trump Hits Kid In The Head W/ Baseball At World Series - TMZ

A week before the Virginia governors race, President Joe Biden came to Arlington to rally for Democratic candidate Terry McAuliffe. He dutifully ticked through McAuliffes record, mentioned McAuliffes campaign promises, and then did what he really came to do: talk about Donald Trump.

Just remember this, Biden told the crowd. I ran against Donald Trump. And Terry is running against an acolyte of Donald Trump.

Biden spoke at length about GOP candidate Glenn Youngkins veiled embrace of the ex-president. And he reminded everyone of Trumps greatest hits, from fomenting the Jan. 6 Capitol riot to his tendency to speak ill of deceased critics like John McCain and Colin Powell.

By the time Biden closedsaying extremism could come from a rage-driven mob or a smile and a fleece vest, a clear reference to Youngkins personal campaign uniformthe president had mentioned Trump as many times as he had mentioned McAuliffe.

The moment reflected a culmination of a clear strategy for Democrats in Virginia: rev up a burnt out electorate in a state Biden had just won by 10 points by connecting a fresh face to Trump.

But on Election Day, the guy that Democrats dubbed Trumpkin bested McAuliffe by more than two points to become the first Republican elected Virginia governor in 12 years.

The finger-pointing flowed freely and instantly among Democrats. But many fished out of the rubble a quick lesson as they wobble into the 2022 midterm elections: think twice about making everything about Trump, even where he is unpopular, and focus on making Democrats more popular.

As long as Donald Trump is a former president, I think Democrats have a responsibility to look more to the future, said Rep. Dean Phillips (D-MN), who flipped a suburban Minneapolis district in 2018.

Rep. Gerry Connolly (D-VA), who represents a solidly Democratic area of northern Virginia, said his takeaway from Tuesdays results was that Trump talk is not enough.

Trump is a uniquely unpopular and polarizing figure, and I think it's a playbook that worked for a long time. But last night shows there are ways for Republicans to inoculate themselves against it.

Sean McElwee, executive director for Data For Progress

I wouldnt say dont do it, Connolly told The Daily Beast. But if youre counting on that to be 100 percent effective and dispositive, then last night tells you otherwise.

In the aftermath of the off-year electionsand a year out from the 2022 midtermsDemocrats seem to agree that the anti-Trump playbook that propelled them to control of Congress and the White House may no longer work. Certainly, Youngkin had little trouble dodging that familiar Democratic messaging.

The former venture capital CEO avoided alienating the ex-president but also avoided him in general, making Democratic attempts to paint him and Trump as one and the same seem like a reach.

Democrats largely relied on one quote from early in the campaign, in which Youngkin vaguely praised Trump for inspiring him to run as a first-time candidate, as the main connective tissue. And at one point, Virginia Democrats paid for a mailer reminding voters that Youngkin was endorsed by Trumpwhich may have ended up doing some of Youngkins work with the GOP base for him.

Ultimately, Democrats did vote in large numbers, with liberal strongholds posting higher turnout totals for McAuliffes defeat than they did for Democratic Gov. Ralph Northams win in 2017. But deep-red pockets of the state turned out for Youngkin in historic numbers, and McAuliffe lost ground with independent voters in the suburban areas that turned against Trump in 2018 and 2020.

Democrats cant assume anymore that Republican voters will only show up when Trump is on the ballot, or that mere mention of him will turn independents off, said Sean McElwee, who heads up Data For Progress, the progressive polling firm.

Trump is a uniquely unpopular and polarizing figure, and I think it's a playbook that worked for a long time, McElwee said. But last night shows there are ways for Republicans to inoculate themselves against it.

Democrats working to keep Congress in 2022 adopted a Trump-heavy playbook from the get-go. In February, Rep. Sean Patrick Maloney (D-NY), the new chair of House Democrats official campaign arm, stated a goal of tying Republicans to the far right. They can do QAnon, or they can do college-educated voters, Maloney said.

And Senate Democratic operatives have already identified Trump as a foil in key races, where his all-important endorsement could produce far fewer Glenn Youngkins and many more hardcore MAGA partisans who won primaries by espousing toxic ideas like the stolen 2020 election conspiracy.

But one former DCCC staffer told The Daily Beast that Democrats run a real risk if they continue just tying every Republican to Trump.

We have a massive credibility gap with voters, and were screwed if we dont get it right, this former DCCC staffer said. Voters think were elitist and out of touch. They find it offensive that we paper this over with endless ads about how some old school country club Republican is a Trump twin.

This former staffer added that voters just werent buying it, and that Trump wasnt a get out of jail free card.

We have a massive credibility gap with voters, and were screwed if we dont get it right. Voters think were elitist and out of touch. They find it offensive that we paper this over with endless ads about some old school country club Republican is a Trump twin.

former senior staffer at the DCCC

Still, the prospect of a wave of actual Trump acolytes running in 2022 is part of the reason why many Democrats believe that this playbook should be employed strategicallyand believe that Trumps negative force may remain strong enough to sustain the partys political coalition.

Donald Trump will still motivate Democratic voters, especially in congressional races, said Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-MD), a former chair of Senate Democrats campaign arm.

But many strategists working to protect Democrats paper-thin majorities in 2022 argue that a balance will need to be struck.

Jesse Ferguson, a veteran Democratic strategist from Virginia, argued you cant not talk about Trump because too many voters see him as too risky to the countrys institutions and economy.

The right message isnt about choosing between a positive story about ourselves or a negative story about Trump, Ferguson said. The right story shows the contrast between how were delivering for people and how letting them take power would put everything at risk. The current problem for Democratsand, for some, a reason behind McAuliffes reliance on the Trump playbookis that they have not yet delivered most of the policy achievements they intend to run on in 2022.

Democrats agenda, a $1 trillion infrastructure bill and a $1.75 trillion social spending package, is inching through Congress. On Wednesday, Virginias Democratic senators, Tim Kaine and Mark Warner, blamed McAuliffes loss not on strategic missteps but on Congress failure to enact the infrastructure bill, which they said would have demonstrated Democratic leadership.

Still, McAuliffe served as governor for four years and had a solid record on which to run. And in Washington, Democrats could still point to their $1.9 trillion COVID relief bill from March, ambitious legislation in its own right that contained a monthly per-child tax benefit for most families, stimulus checks, and other benefits.

McAuliffe and his allies emphasized those topics, but many Democrats believe they could have emphasized them far more on the campaign trail in Virginia.

Its very clear there are suburban voters who dont like Trump but voted for Youngkin, McElwee said. Thats because Democrats need to have a message showing that the problems Americans are facing, were taking concrete actions to solve them.

American Bridge, the Democratic PAC that runs advertisements in key races, did an experiment in Virginia over the summer that showed the upside of such an approach. They bankrolled spots, targeted at suburban women in Richmond, talking up Biden and Democrats economic agenda. They found that those ads backed up McAuliffes standing and raised Bidens approval rating in key demographics.

Jessica Floyd, American Bridges president, told The Daily Beast that the ads showed Democrats can remind people who is delivering the policies that are actually impacting their day-to-day, rather than some unconnected policy fight in Washington.

Asked if Democrats could have benefited from more of that approach in the home stretch of the race, Floyd said she would not second-guess strategy. But she said it was a false choice to have Democrats pick between focusing on Trump and focusing on their records.

It needs to be, both and, she said.

An election cycle that has become shorthand for Trump backlash, 2018s so-called Blue Wave, was a lesson in striking this balance.

There are some things that are just kind of constant in this environment. Theres clearly something that transcends how these campaigns go.

Rep. Andy Kim (D-NJ)

Cole Leiter, a campaign manager at political firm Purple Strategies who worked for House Democrats campaign arm in 2018, said that many of the 40 Democrats who flipped seats that year didnt explicitly run against Trump. They ran on health care and kitchen table economic issuesthings that impact folks' daily lives, he said.

Democrats running in 2022 should follow suit, Leiter argued. When a persuadable voter thinks about your candidate, most of the time, you want them to think first about who you are, what youre made of and what youre going to do, not just that youre against former President Trump, he said.

Some Democrats have wondered if any strategic shift could have helped McAuliffe overcome stiff headwindsnearly every jurisdiction in the state shifted rightand if a midterm shellacking is in motion, no matter how or when they talk about Trump.

Tuesdays other election, in New Jersey, may have been proof. Democratic Gov. Phil Murphys re-election was far less watched than Virginias race. But Murphy ended up embroiled in a nail-biter with his GOP challenger in a state that is far more solidly Democratic than Virginia.

To many Democrats, Murphys razor-thin win is more alarming than McAuliffes loss.

Rep. Andy Kim, a Democrat who represents a New Jersey district Trump won, said Murphy did not talk much about Trump in his race, preferring instead to focus on his administrations recovery from the pandemic. Nonetheless, Murphy barely prevailed.

There are some things that are just kind of constant in this environment, Kim told The Daily Beast. Theres clearly something that transcends how these campaigns go.

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'We're Screwed': Dems Worry the Anti-Trump Playbook May Be Useless - The Daily Beast

Bill McCann| Special to the Advertiser

Have you heard about TRUTH Social? No, it isnt a dating app for singles seeking an honest relationship. Its former President Donald Trumps newly announced venture to compete with social media giants like Twitter and Facebook. He hopes for a test launch this month and full rollout in 2022.

An angry Trump apparently cooked up the idea for his own social media network after being kicked off Twitter and Facebook following an insurrection by Trump supporters at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6. Trump helped instigate the insurrection by spreading election-fraud lies.

In an announcement on Oct. 20, Trump said his social network would stand up to the tyranny of Big Tech. The problem is to borrow a line from Jack Nicholsons character in the movie "A Few Good Men" Trump cant handle the truth. Trump used Twitter as a major megaphone of misinformation throughout his presidency. During Trumps four years in office, he made 30,573 false or misleading claims, according to Washington Post fact checkers.

Aside from the fact that the words truth and Trump dont belong in the same sentence, Trumps history of failed businesses does not bode well for his new venture. His companies have filed for bankruptcy six times. Plus, he has had a lengthy list of failures, including Trump Airlines, Trump Steaksand Trump Mortgage. Who would fly in a plane, buy meat or borrow money from this guy? And dont forget Trump University, his real estate training school that paid a $25 million settlement to duped students.

While TRUTH Social states it encourages an open, free, and honest global conversation without discriminating against political ideology, its terms of service prohibit users from using the platform to disparage, tarnish, or otherwise harm, in our opinion, us and/or the Site, National Public Radio reported. In other words, you can say any crazy thing you want as long as you dont diss Trump. Its the kind of free speech that only Trumpublicans could love.

One ominous sign for Trumps new social network occurred last spring when he yanked a blog called From the Desk of Donald J. Trump after only a month due to low readership. But some critics think that even if TRUTH Social doesnt resonate with social media users, he might enrich himself anyway. And thats always Trumps priority.

TRUTH Social will be the first product of a new company called Trump Media & Technology Group, which is merging with a special-purpose acquisition firm to form a publicly traded company. Critics suggest that if Trump can convince enough of his supporters to buy stock, he could end up with a pile of money.

In any event, Trump needs to find a better name for his new network. TRUTH Social is dull. It doesnt say what its really about. I asked a friend for ideas. Heres what we came up with to make it more appealing and accurate.

McCann is a contributing columnist for the Advertiser. He is a retired journalist and may be reached at Easywriter12345@yahoo.com.

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Opinion: Donald Trump cant handle the truth - Austin American-Statesman

Molly Jong-Fast talks with Eric Boehlert of Press Run about how the hangover from the Trump years is lingering.

Everything has to be a churning drama now, says Boehlert, and, judging from the press stories, losing a big local race in Virginia basically marked the end of the Democratic Partyeven as COVID is coming down unemployment is down and the stock market is at 36,000. When Obama lost Virginia and New Jersey in 2009, he notes, The New York Times did not publish 10 stories the next day and The Washington Post website didn't have 16 stories upwe are so over the top.

As to Glenn Youngkin, Molly says the guy is Trump. Hes just dressed up as Jeb Bush.

Subscribe to The New Abnormal on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Stitcher, Amazon Music, or Overcast. To listen to our weekly members-only bonus episodes, join Beast Inside here. Already a member? You can listen here and sign up for new episode email alerts here.

I dont know who talked to Trump and told them to sit it out, but he did, says Boehlert, and theres no way thats going to work next year: He is not going to sit on the sidelines. Hes just absolutely not. Hes an egomaniac and whoever was responsible for keeping him under lock and key deserves a medal because he stayed away and thats the only reason they were able to win. Do I think theyre going to be able to do that for the next 12 months? Absolutely not.

Plus, Molly talks with Harvard Prof. Lawrence Lessig, who says, I dont like to gloat a decade after his book Republic, Lost warned where American democracy was headed if we didnt pass real campaign finance reform. But the truth is its actually much worse a thousand times worse today.

And Emily Atkin of the newsletter HEATED talks about why the Glasgow climate summit shouldve been covered like insurrection, but its super-not.

Listen to The New Abnormal on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon and Stitcher.

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Glenn Youngkin Is Donald Trump Dressed Up as Jeb Bush - The Daily Beast

A Russia analyst who contributed key research to the so-called Steele dossier that detailed alleged ties between ex-President Donald Trump and Russia during the 2016 election was arrested Thursday as part of a probe by special counsel John Durham.

Igor Danchenko, the analyst, was charged in a grand jury indictment with five counts of making false statements to FBI agents during several interviews with agents in 2017 about his work providing information to former British spy Christopher Steele for the dossier.

Steele's controversial dossier on Trump became the basis for the application of an FBI warrant to tap the phone of former Trump campaign advisor Carter Page a month before Election Day in 2016

Steele's inquiry was funded by the firm Fusion GPS, which itself had been hired by the Democratic National Committee to conduct opposition research on the then-Republican candidate Trump.

Danchenko, 43, is the third person criminally charged in Durham's investigation, which is focused on the origins of the federal probe into the Trump campaign's suspected coordination with Russian agents to influence the outcome of the 2016 race for the White House.

The Department of Justice said that Danchenko, a Russian national who lives in Virginia, was taken into custody Thursday morning. He later appeared in federal court in Alexandria, Virginia, where he reportedly was released on a $100,000 bond.

Read more of CNBC's politics coverage:

The indictment charges that Danchenko lied when he told FBI agents he had never communicated with a public relations executive who was active in Democratic politics about allegations in Steele's reports, when in fact Danchenko had sourced at least one of those allegations to the executive.

That public relations executive is not identified by name in the indictment, but a lawyer for him confirmed to CNBC that he is Charles Dolan Jr., who most recently has worked at KGlobal in Washington. Dolan has worked on issues related to Russia.

Dolan also served as state chairman of the Virginia presidential campaigns of President Bill Clinton in 1992 and 1996, and is a former executive director of the Democratic Governors' Association. An online biography shows he also was on the U.S. Advisory Commission on Public Diplomacy at the State Department.

"Chuck understands andappreciates your interest," Dolan's lawyer Ralph Martin told CNBC. "I can confirm that he is PR Executive-1 in the indictment.As he is a witness in an ongoing case, it would not be appropriate for Chuck to comment further on the allegations in the indictment at this time."

Danchenko also is accused of falsely telling agents that he received an anonymous phone call in July 2016 from a person he believed to be the then-president of the Russian-American Chamber of Commerce about information that later was described by Steele as a "conspiracy of cooperation" between Trump's campaign and Russian officials.

"The information purportedly conveyed by the anonymous caller included the allegation that there were communications ongoing between the Trump campaign and Russian officials and that the caller had indicated the Kremlin might be of help in getting Trump elected," Durham's office said in a press release.

The indictment says that Danchenko "never received such a phone call or such information" from that person and that he never arranged to meet that person in New York, as he has claimed to FBI agents.

The indictment charges that Danchenko's lies had a major impact on the FBI's investigation of the Trump campaign.

It notes that the FBI's applications for warrants related to Page heavily relied on Steele's reports to Fusion GPS, which were based on information Danchenko had collected.

The FBI "ultimately was not able to confirm or corroborate most of their substantive allegations," the indictment says.

Some of Danchenko's alleged lies "deprived FBI agents and analysts of probative information" that would have helped them vet the reliability of the reports they received,the indictment says.

Christopher Schafbuch, a lawyer who represented Danchenko in a 2017 civil case, would not confirm or deny that he was currently Danchenko's lawyer.

In September, Durham obtained an indictment against then-Perkins Coie law firm partner Michael Sussmann for allegedly lying to the FBI when he offered a tip in 2016 about the possible secret electronic channel between Trump's company and a Russian bank. Sussmann has denied the allegation.

In January, a former FBI lawyer, Kevin Clinesmith, was sentenced to probation for having falsified a claim that was used to maintain surveillance of Page.

Christopher Steele, the former MI6 agent in London where he speaks to the media for the first time, March 7, 2017.

Victoria Jones | PA Images | Getty Images

Trump and his allies have strongly criticized the Steele dossier, which contains unsubstantiated and refuted claims.

They have argued that the entire original federal probe into Trump's ties to Russia and possible obstruction of justice by Trump for seeking to undercut the inquiry was groundless and tainted by political motivations because of the Steele dossier.

The investigation by former special counsel Robert Mueller found that there was an aggressive effort by Russian agents to use social media and computer hacking to help Trump's bid to win the presidency over Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton. But Mueller said he did not find enough evidence to charge Trump campaign affiliates with conspiring with the Russians in that effort.

Mueller also did not charge Trump with any wrongdoing, but his final report pointedly did not exonerate the then president.

"If we had had confidence that the president clearly did not commit a crime, we would have said so," Mueller told reporters in 2019.

Mueller did file more than 100 criminal charges against three Russian companies and nearly three dozen individuals, including half a dozen former Trump advisors, among them former Trump campaign chief Paul Manafort.

Durham was tasked with investigating the roots of the Trump-Russia probe during the Trump administration.

Trump himself had repeatedly called the Mueller probe a "witch hunt." But he has also repeatedly expressed frustration with Durham's investigation, which to date has not resulted in criminal charges that seriously undercut the findings of Mueller's probe.

- Additional reporting by CNBC's Brian Schwartz

Correction: In September, Durham obtained an indictment against then-Perkins Coie law firm partner Michael Sussmann. An earlier version misspelled Sussmann's name.

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Durham probe: Analyst charged with lying to FBI about Christopher Steele's Trump-Russia dossier - CNBC

BOISE, Idaho (AP) Idaho Republican Lt. Gov. Janice McGeachin said Thursday she met earlier this week with former President Donald Trump at his Mar-a-Lago club in Palm Beach, Florida.

McGeachin in a statement said she spoke with Trump on Tuesday about Idaho-related matters and on continuing his America First agenda that involves nationalist tendencies and Trumps belief that the United States should stay out of world conflicts.

It is such an honor to meet personally with President Trump, McGeachin said.

McGeachin is challenging first-term Republican Gov. Brad Little, as are a handful of other candidates that include Ammon Bundy, the founder of a far-right anti-government group that has seen rapid growth.

In Idaho, the governor and lieutenant governor run on separate tickets.

Trump hasnt endorsed anyone in the race in the deep-red state that he won with nearly 64% of the vote in the presidential election.

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McGeachin meets with former President Trump in Florida - Associated Press

The CEOs started calling before President Trump had even finished speaking. What Americas titans of industry were hearing from the Commander in Chief was sending them into a panic.

It was Nov. 5, 2020, two days after the election, and things werent looking good for the incumbent as states continued to count ballots. Trump was eager to seed a different narrative, one with no grounding in reality: If you count the legal votes, I easily win, he said from the lectern of the White House Briefing Room. If you count the illegal votes, they can try to steal the election from us.

The speech was so dangerously dishonest that within a few minutes, all three broadcast television networks spontaneously stopped airing it. And at his home in Branford, Conn., the iPhone belonging to the Yale School of Management professor Jeffrey Sonnenfeld began to buzz with calls and texts from some of the nations most powerful tycoons.

The CEOs of leading media, financial, pharmaceutical, retail and consulting firms all wanted to talk. By the time Tom Rogers, the founder of CNBC, got to Sonnenfeld, he had clearly gotten dozens of calls, Rogers says. We were saying, This is realTrump is trying to overturn the election. Something had to happen fast.

Read more: The Secret History of the Shadow Campaign That Saved the 2020 Election

For decades, Sonnenfeld has been bringing business leaders together for well-attended seminars on the challenges of leadership, earning a reputation as a CEO whisperer. A committed capitalist and self-described centrist, he has informally advised Presidents of both parties and spoke at Senate GOP leader Mitch McConnells wedding. Now he suggested the callers get together to make a public statement, perhaps through their normal political channels, D.C. industry lobbies such as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the Business Roundtable (BRT). But the CEOs wanted Sonnenfeld to do it; the trade groups, they fretted, were too risk-averse and bureaucratic. And they wanted to do it right away: when Sonnenfeld, who issues invitations for his summits eight months in advance in order to secure a slot on CEOs busy calendars, suggested a Zoom call the following week, they said that might be too late.

The group of 45 CEOs who assembled less than 12 hours later, at 7 a.m. on Nov. 6, represented nearly one-third of Fortunes 100 largest companies: Walmart and Cowen Inc., Johnson & Johnson and Comcast, Blackstone Group and American Airlines. Disneys Bob Iger rolled out of bed at 4 a.m. Pacific time to join, accompanied by a large mug of coffee. (Sonnenfeld, who promised the participants confidentiality, declined to disclose or confirm their names, but TIME spoke with more than a dozen people on the call, who confirmed their and others participation.)

The meeting began with a presentation from Sonnenfelds Yale colleague Timothy Snyder, the prominent historian of authoritarianism and author of On Tyranny. Snyder did not beat around the bush. What they were witnessing, he said, was the beginning of a coup attempt.

I went through it point by point, in a methodical way, recalls Snyder, who has never previously discussed the episode. Historically speaking, democracies are usually overthrown from the inside, and it is very common for an election to be the trigger for a head of state or government to declare some kind of emergency in which the normal rules do not apply. This is a pattern we know, and the name for this is a coup dtat. What was crucial, Snyder said, was for civil society to respond quickly and clearly. And business leaders, he noted, have been among the most important groups in determining whether such attempts succeeded in other countries. If you are going to defeat a coup, you have to move right away, he says. The timing and the clarity of response are very, very important.

A lively discussion ensued. Some of the more conservative executives, such as Blackstone CEO Stephen Schwarzman, wondered if the threat was being overstated, or echoed Trumps view that late ballots in Pennsylvania seemed suspicious. Yet others corrected them, pointing out that COVID-19 had led to a flood of mail-in ballots that by law could not be counted until the polls closed. By the end of the hour, the group had come to agreement that their normal political goalslower taxes, less regulationwerent worth much without a stable democracy underpinning them. The market economy works because of the bedrock foundation of the rule of law, the peaceful succession of power and the reserve currency of the U.S. dollar, and all of these things were potentially at risk, former Thomson Reuters CEO Tom Glocer tells TIME. CEOs are normally hesitant to get involved in political issues, but I would argue that this was a fundamental business issue.

A business council convened by Trump, pictured in February 2017, broke up within months. From left: Michael Dell, Dell; Phebe Novakovic, General Dynamics; Juan Luciano, Archer Daniels Midland; Jared Kushner; Donald Trump; Kenneth Frazier, Merck; Mark Fields, Ford; Denise Morrison, Campbell Soup; Greg Hayes, United Technologies.

Olivier DoulieryBloomberg/Getty Images

The group agreed on the elements of a statement to be released as soon as media organizations called the election. It would congratulate the winner and laud the unprecedented voter turnout; call for any disputes to be based on evidence and brought through the normal channels; observe that no such evidence had emerged; and insist on an orderly transition. Midday on Nov. 7, when the election was finally called, the BRT immediately released a version of the statement formulated on Zoom. It was followed quickly by other trade groups, corporations and political leaders around the world, all echoing the same clear and decisive language confirming the election result.

Sonnenfeld thought the hastily convened Business Leaders for National Unity, as hed grandly dubbed the 7 a.m. call, would be a one-off. But Trumps effort to overturn the election persisted. So in the ensuing weeks, the professor called the executives together again and again, to address Trumps attempt to interfere with Georgias vote count and the Jan. 6 Capitol insurrection. This was an event which violated those rituals of America and created a visceral reaction, Nick Pinchuk, CEO of the Kenosha, Wis.based toolmaker Snap-on, tells TIME. Talking about this, it kind of transformed from the realm of politics to the realm of civic duty. CEOs wanted to speak out about this, and Jeff gave us a way to do that.

To Sonnenfeld, the effortmuch of which has not been previously reportedunderlined a generational shift taking place in the collective civic attitudes of the CEO class. Its effects are evident in Washington, where Big Businesss longtime alliance with the Republican Party is foundering. Congressional Republicans have divorced the Chamber of Commerce; the GOPs corporate fundraising is diminished; Fox News anchors and conservative firebrands rant about woke capital and call for punitive, anti-free-market policies in retaliation. Many of the companies and business groups that implacably resisted Barack Obama have proved surprisingly friendly to Biden, backing portions of his big-spending domestic agenda and supporting his COVID-19 mandates for private companies. Political observers of both parties have tended to attribute these developments to the pressures companies face, whether externally from consumers or internally from their employees. But Sonnenfeld, who is in a position to know, argues that just as much of it comes from the changing views of the CEOs themselves.

Read more: How Trumps Effort to Steal the Election Tore Apart the GOPand the Country

Snyder, the scholar of authoritarianism, believes the CEOs intervention was crucial in ensuring Trump left office on schedule, if not bloodlessly. If business leaders had just drifted along in that moment, or if a few had broken ranks, it might have gone very differently, he says. They chose in that moment to see themselves as part of civil society, acting in the defense of democracy for its own sake.

It was perhaps inevitable that Trump, the corporate-showman President, would force the private sector to reconsider its duty to societyand that Sonnenfeld would be the one to force the issue. For 2020 was not the two mens first confrontation. Back in the moguls reality TV days, the business guru was a harsh criticbefore burying the hatchet and giving Trump the idea for Celebrity Apprentice.

A Philadelphia native, Sonnenfeld, 67, was drawn from an early age to the human side of business. He was always irrepressible, uninhibitedjust a barrel of monkeys, recalls the public relations guru Richard Edelman, who rowed crew with Sonnenfeld at Harvard. You always knew he would be either a politician or a professor, not one of the gray-suited soldiers coming out of Harvard Business School.

Sonnenfeld authored several scholarly publications before his 1988 book, The Heros Farewell: What Happens When CEOs Retire, became a surprise best seller. CEOs sought his counsel, and he realized they were starving for such insights: surrounded by subordinates and yes-men, powerful executives had plenty of opportunities to pontificate but few venues for learning from their peers. Yet Sonnenfelds interest in leadership psychology was unfashionable in an M.B.A. field focused on the technical workings of companies and markets. Denied tenure at Harvard, he started his CEO College at Emory University in 1989. After a decade, he moved it to Yale, where his Chief Executive Leadership Institute helped put its School of Management on the map. Today, Sonnenfelds executive seminars have many imitators, including CEO summits put on by Forbes, Fortune, Bloomberg and the New York Times.

Sonnenfeld with Trump in 2016

Courtesy Jeffrey Sonnenfeld/Yale school of Management

When The Apprentice premiered in 2004, Sonnenfeld reviewed it for the Wall Street Journal. The show, he wrote, was teaching aspiring leaders precisely the wrong lessons while fueling public disdain for business. The selection process resembles a game of musical chairs at a Hooters restaurant, he wrote. No new goods or services are created, no business innovations surface, and no societal problems are solved. A real-life leader who tried to run a business that way would quickly fail, he added.

Read more: How The Apprentice Shaped Donald Trumps Presidential Campaign

Trump fired back, insulting Sonnenfeld as a know-nothing academic. But he also tried to win him over, offering Sonnenfeld the presidency of Trump University, which he turned down, and an invitation to his Westchester golf club, which he accepted. Over lunch, Sonnenfeld said hed stop criticizing the show if the players were cranky B-list celebrities instead of earnest young strivers. Trump liked the idea, and the following season he transitioned to an all-celebrity cast.

Sonnenfeld finally gave in to Trumps pestering and invited him to one of his CEO summits at New Yorks Waldorf Astoria hotel. You would have thought it was the Pope, people were so amazed, Sonnenfeld recalls. But at the same time, the top tier of CEOs told me, When he walks in, were walking out. And they did. After Trump won the presidency, Sonnenfeld paid him a visit at Trump Tower and reminded him of the incident. Funny thing about that, Jeff, Trump said, theyre all coming by here now.

Over the course of the 2016 campaign, Sonnenfelds surveys of his seminar participants found that although around 75% identified as Republicans, 75% to 80% supported Hillary Clinton, he says. And while many were optimistic about Trumps pro-business Administration, their enthusiasm soon dimmed. It wasnt just the chaotic way he operated; he seemed determined to pit them against one another. I started hearing from the CEOs of Lockheed and Boeing, saying, Wait, hes trying, over chocolate cake at Mar-a-Lago, to get a fight going between us over the cost of a fighter jet, Sonnenfeld recalls. It was the same with Ford vs. GM, Pfizer vs. Merck.

Sonnenfeld realized Trump was repeating the tactics from The Apprentice, the same zero-sum mentality that had buoyed him to political success: divide and conquer. Trumps whole modus operandi, his one trick his whole life, is to break collective action, Sonnenfeld says. The whole NAFTA battle was pitting Canada against Mexico. He constantly tried to divide France and Germany, the U.K. vs. the E.U., Russia vs. China. He tried to build up Bernie vs. Hillary, just like he did with the Republican primary candidates. As pathetically puerile a device as it is, with the GOP it worked magnificently well.

But business leaders, unlike the Republicans, banded together to resist. In August 2017, when Trump opined that there were very fine people on both sides of the deadly white-supremacist march in Charlottesville, Va., Merck CEO Kenneth Frazier, who is Black, announced that he would step down from Trumps American Manufacturing Council. Otherssome prodded by Sonnenfeld behind the scenesquickly followed. Within a few days, that council, along with another business advisory group, had disbanded. It was, Sonnenfeld says, the first time in history that the business community turned its back on a Presidents call to service.

He lost the business community in Charlottesville, says Matthias Berninger, who heads public affairs for Bayer. Ken leaving his council, that was the starting point of everything that followed. Deregulatory actions Trump expected Big Business to appreciate were rebuffed: oil and gas companies publicly opposed his repeal of methane regulations, and many utilities shrugged off his rollback of CO limits. The auto industry united against Trumps attempt to eliminate mileage standards, only to be investigated by the Department of Justice.

Trumps antagonism to immigration and free trade ran counter to businesss interests, says the D.C. corporate fixer and former GOP strategist Juleanna Glover. Many corporations and CEOs had an abiding fear of being attacked in a Trump tweet, so staying out of Washington was a good risk-mitigation strategy, she says. The Republicans have largely abandoned their pro-business values, and its hard to negotiate in good faith when one of the parties is seen as continuing to undermine democratic values.

Sonnenfeld with Biden in 2018

Courtesy Jeffrey Sonnenfeld/Yale school of Management

Trump may have been the catalyst. But the recent shift of the corporate class is only the latest in the long history of Big Businesss dance with Washington.

While many remember the robber barons of the Gilded Age, the same era produced a generation of innovative entrepreneurs (Thomas Edison, Luther Burbank) who were folk heroes. The business leaders of the early to mid-1900s were the original progressives, Sonnenfeld says. They were for infrastructure, sustainability, safe workplaces, urban beautification, immigration. Midcentury CEOs saw themselves as patriotic industrialists, allies of government and builders of society. During- the World Wars, they famously answered the call to contribute. Republican President Dwight Eisenhower appointed three sitting CEOs to his Cabinet.

By the 1970s, pollution and price-fixing scandals had tanked Big Businesss image. A few CEOs decided to break with the conservative politics of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the National Association of Manufacturers and came together to found the BRT. But the succeeding generation, in Sonnenfelds view, didnt live up to the BRTs original promise of civic virtue, focusing instead on attacking government interference and avoiding taxation. It wasnt that we had a few bad apples, Sonnenfeld says. Theres something wrong with the whole orchard in that period.

The tech bust, corporate scandals such as Enron and the 2008 financial crisis pushed Americans esteem of business to historic lows. When the Obama Administration tried to get health care companies on board with the Affordable Care Act, not a single member of the industry came to the table. They were like little kids throwing stones and hiding in the hedges, Sonnenfeld says. The business community was not trying to solve problems.

But over the past decade, Sonnenfeld believes, a new generation of leaders has stepped into the public sphere to do well by doing good. In 2015, opposition from corporations like Eli Lilly and Anthem helped kill a proposed Indiana state law that would have allowed businesses to refuse to serve gay people. The following year, American Airlines, Microsoft and GE were among the companies protesting a North Carolina ordinance barring transgender people from using their preferred bathrooms. Similar bills were defeated in Texas and Arkansas. The business leaders who thwarted these efforts werent just stereotypically liberal corporate behemoths like Apple, Starbucks and Nike, Sonnenfeld notes. It was the bedrock of traditional American industry in the heartland: UPS, Walmart, AT&T. Theyre the ones who led the charge, saying, This is not America. We dont want our workforces divided over this.

Today, Wall Street firms grade companies on their climate and diversity initiatives as well as their balance sheets. In the wake of the 2018 mass shooting in Parkland, Fla., both Dicks Sporting Goods and Walmart announced they would no longer sell assault weapons or ammunition. Dozens of companies cut ties with the NRA. In 2019, the BRT revised its charter to redefine the purpose of a corporation, saying companies should be accountable not only to their shareholders but also to the wider array of stakeholders, including customers, employees, suppliers and communities.

Read More: A Better Economy Is Possible. But We Need to Reimagine Capitalism to Do It

The role of the CEO has changed, and I dont think anyone can sit on the sidelines, says Paul Polman, the London-based former CEO of the consumer-goods giant Unilever, whose new book, Net Positive, argues that sustainability can go hand in hand with profitone of a raft of recent do-gooder tomes by CEOs (including Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, the co-owner of TIME). Under Polmans leadership, Unilever set ambitious climate goals and sought to improve its human-rights record, lobbying against the death penalty for gay people in Uganda and deforestation in Brazil. Smart CEOs realize that their business cannot function in societies that dont function, Polman tells TIME. We have to be responsible and speak up, not just lobby in our own self-interest.

Skeptics on the left see this kind of talk as cynical posturing. Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren denounced the BRTs stakeholder announcement as an empty gesture, and former Labor Secretary Robert Reich called it a con. Many of the statements signatories, liberals note, still preside over abysmal working conditions, environmental violations and racially segregated workplaces, while employing armies of lobbyists to resist government attempts to hold them accountable.

The right has revolted as well. GOP Senator Marco Rubio decries woke corporate hypocrites, while Trump has taken up the slogan Go woke, go broke! In the new book Woke, Inc., Vivek Ramaswamy, a tech entrepreneur turned self-styled class traitor, decries corporate Americas game of pretending to care about justice in order to make money.

The public, too, appears skeptical. In recent research conducted by Edelman, 44% of Americans say they trust CEOs to do the right thing, about on par with government leaders (42%) but lagging behind clergy (49%) and journalists (50%). A far greater share, nearly three-quarters of employees, trust the CEO of the company they work for.

In the spring of 2020, as the spread of COVID and Trumps attempt to undermine the vote began to raise fears of an election meltdown, Sonnenfeld began privately raising the issue with prominent CEOs. He urged them to promote political participation to their employees and customers. For the first time, thousands of companies gave millions of workers paid time off to vote and volunteer at the polls. By October 2020, you could scarcely visit a retailer or open a mobile app without encountering a pro-voting, nonpartisan corporate message.

After the CEOs Nov. 7 statement, manyincluding Sonnenfeldassumed their work was done. Despite Trumps refusal to concede, dozens of courts rejected his challenges, all 50 states certified their electoral votes, and the presidential transition began. But on Jan. 3, the Washington Post published a recording of Trumps phone call to Georgia secretary of state Brad Raffensperger, in which he cajoled and berated the election official to find the nearly 12,000 votes it would take to reverse his loss of the state.

So on Jan. 5, Sonnenfeld reconvened his executives. This Zoom was better attended than the first, with nearly 60 CEOsand more concerned. Nobody quibbled with the coup terminology this time. There were CEOs Sonnenfeld had never met who had demanded invites after hearing about the November call. There were right-wing executives and former Obama and Bush Cabinet secretaries. The group voted unanimously to suspend donations to the GOP members of Congress who contested the election.

The next day, Jan. 6, validated their fears. In the aftermath of the Capitol riot, the group met again, and this time, 100% of the CEOs favored impeachment, Sonnenfeld says. The National Association of Manufacturers, known as the most conservative of the major trade lobbies, subsequently called for impeachment publicly, to the political worlds astonishment. Nearly a year later, 78% of the companies that pledged to withhold donations have kept true to their word, according to Sonnenfelds analysis of the latest campaign-finance data. One D.C.-based fundraiser for Republican candidates tells TIME she has virtually given up seeking money from corporate PACs as a result.

Sonnenfelds efforts didnt end with Bidens Inauguration. He was particularly disturbed by the election law the Georgia legislature began considering in the spring, one of many GOP-backed measures to make it harder to vote and easier to interfere with vote counting in future elections. In 1964, it was the former president of Coca-Cola who publicly shamed the white Atlanta business community into honoring Martin Luther King Jr. after he won the Nobel Peace Prize. Now Georgias 34 Fortune 1000 companies were largely silent in the face of a modern civil rights issue. In late March, Sonnenfeld and a former UPS executive penned a joint Newsweek op-ed calling out their cowardice.

On a subsequent Zoom, two leading Black executives, Mercks Frazier and Kenneth Chenault of American Express, got more than 100 fellow CEOs to sign on to a statement opposing the Georgia voting law, which was published as a full-page ad in the New York Times and Washington Post. The people who signed the letter did so because they didnt see it as a partisan issue, Frazier tells TIME. They felt, as business leaders, that they shouldnt stand on the sideline when our fundamental rights as Americans are at stake.

But these moves also sparked a political backlash. Executives who had interceded during the elections aftermath began to fall away from the group, leery of liberal activists seeking to apply similar pressure on other issues, like Texas new abortion law. The coalition that rallied with such alacrity to defend American democracy now appears splintered, unsure of the extent of the continuing threat or how to confront it.

I really thought Jan. 6 was a turning point, a tipping point, but now I think maybe it was just an inflection point, says Mia Mends, the Houston-based CEO of Impact Ventures at global foodservices giant Sodexo. Companies including hers that spoke out against voting restrictions in Texas faced threats of retaliation from state GOP officials. When that day of reckoning comes, on what side will you be? On what side were you?

There have been no more pop-up Zooms. Sonnenfeld is back to his old grind, gathering CEOs and nudging them toward public-spiritedness. On a recent Tuesday in New Haven, he led a frenetic virtual discussion with the leaders of Starbucks, United, Xerox, Dell, Pepsi, Kelloggs, Duke Energy and others, along with members of Congress and current and former Administration officials from both parties. Adam Aron, the CEO of AMC Entertainment, dialed in from his bedroom, looking disheveled, only to be hit with an aggressive Sonnenfeld question about whether the tech-stock mania that had sent his companys value skyrocketing was really a scam.

Sonnenfeld understands that the CEOs feel whipsawed by the political chaos. Theyre being pelted with so many different causes, he tells me after the Zoom, his town car speeding to the airport so he can make a board meeting in Miami. But he is scathing in his contempt for financiers who have ostentatiously embraced socially conscious investing while failing to speak up on voting and democracy issues. The sheer, screaming cowardice of these institutional investorsthey own 80% of corporate America, and they never miss a stage to proclaim their commitments to [environmental and social justice], he says. Where are they now? Why are they the last to take a stand?

Yet Sonnenfeld has no doubt that having stepped up for democracy at a crucial time, the CEOs would do it again. The GOP has created these wedge issues to divide society, and the business community is saying, Wait a minute, thats not us, those are not our interests, he says. That doesnt mean theyre going to rush off and support Bernie Sanders and the Democratic Party. But theyre trying to break free and find their own way.

With reporting by Simmone Shah and Julia Zorthian

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Write to Molly Ball at molly.ball@time.com.

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How Big Business Dumped Trump and Got "Woke" - TIME