Sub-headline: Donald Trump’s re-election to a second term on Wednesday, November 6, and the success of the Republican Party, of which he has taken total control, represent a major turning point for the United States.
Published yesterday at 11:15 am (Paris), updated yesterday at 2:50 pm
This time, they made an informed decision. In 2016, when they first entrusted him with the White House, American voters didn’t know what a Donald Trump presidency would be like and were taking a leap into the unknown. In 2024, the situation is different: Not only do Republican voters know their candidate inside out, right down to his least glorious behavior, he’s even more radical than he was eight years ago. Trump’s electorate knows where this president is going to take them, and wants more.
It’s a reality that needs to be examined with eyes wide open. The path on which Trump, strengthened for his second term by his party’s success in the Senate, will take his country diverges fundamentally from the one charted by the United States since the end of the Second World War. It marks the end of an American era, that of an open superpower committed to the world, eager to set itself up as a democratic model. It’s the famous “shining city on a hill,” extolled by President Ronald Reagan. The model had been challenged over the past two decades. Now, Trump’s return is putting a nail in its coffin.
Editor: To call this hyperbolic, and even tinctured in political hysteria, is the describe it with a telling accuracy! American History puts it in perspective : given the fact that in 1968 Richard Nixon was elected to office, the victory of 1972, followed by Watergate, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, Bush The Elder, Bill Clinton, Bush The Younger , Barack Obama , Donald Trump, Joe Biden: These candidates, and then Presidents, represent the very mundane politics, and politicians who have held the American Presidency! Yet Le Monde wants to sound the alarm on Trump, who defeated New Democratic simpleton Kamala Harris, it defies the historical facts aided by that hyperbole and political hysteria.
Editor: I will offer a selection of Le Monde’s ‘arguments’:
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Trump views the world solely through the prism of American national interests. It’s a world of power struggles and trade wars, which scorns multilateralism. A world where transactional diplomacy replaces value-based alliances. A world, ultimately, where the US president reserves his harshest words for his allies but spares the autocrats, who are seen as partners rather than adversaries.
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If, as he threatened during the campaign, Trump ceases military aid to Ukraine and negotiates peace with Vladimir Putin in favor of the invader, the consequences of such an outcome will go far beyond the fate of Ukraine alone. They will affect the continent’s security as a whole.
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This threat is existential for the European Union, and its leaders need to be aware of it and prepared to confront it, without waiting for Trump to take office – they are long overdue.
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Editor: Le Monde ends it’s *Bill of Attainder’:
Trump’s victory at the end of a campaign of unprecedented populist, misogynist and racist virulence also bodes ill for women, immigrants and democracy in general. The 47th American president inherits a system he began to put in place when he was the 45th, one in which the sacrosanct checks and balances, those safeguards supposed to preserve American democratic institutions, are already weakened, and in which the Supreme Court has gone over to his side. He succeeded in downplaying the assault on the Capitol by rioters he encouraged on January 6, 2021. The image of a head of the world’s leading power who calls his opponents “enemies from within,” deems some of them worthy of the firing squad, vilifies dissident media and threatens to send the army to hunt down illegal immigrants in Democratic cities can only encourage illiberal leaders the world over, including in Europe.
Trump’s voters chose him in full consciousness, as did the business and tech leaders who rallied behind him, following in the footsteps of Elon Musk, the iconoclastic CEO turned eminence grise. The rest of the world will suffer.
Newspaper Reader.
*
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Acts of attainder or of pains and penalties were passed by some of the American colonial legislatures until the Constitution forbade them. In applying these prohibitions, the Supreme Court of the United States has expanded the historical conception of attainder. It invoked these clauses in 1867 in Cummings v. Missouri and Ex parte Garland to strike down loyalty oaths passed after the American Civil War to disqualify Confederate sympathizers from practicing certain professions. Similarly, in United States v. Lovett (1946), the court invalidated as a bill of attainder a section of an appropriation bill forbidding the payment of salaries to named government officials who had been accused of being subversive. Later decisions, however, have declined to treat requirements of loyalty oaths as bills of attainder, though they have invalidated such requirements on other grounds.
Nixon v. Administrator of General Services (1977) held that the Presidential Recordings and Materials Preservation Act was not a bill of attainder even though the law referred to President Richard Nixon by name. This law directed the administrator of the General Services Administration to seize tape recordings, papers, and other materials then in Nixon’s possession. The law did not impose a punishment and did not evidence a congressional intent to punish. In light of the fact that Nixon was the only president to resign under threat of impeachment by the House of Representatives, the court held that the “appellant constituted a legitimate class of one.”
Attainder | Definition, History & Effects | Britannica
Of the post-mortem commentaries on the Trump Election, nothing quite compares to Bret Stephens ‘pre-mortem’ on the election, before the results were known:
Dear President-elect, __________,
This column must publish before Tuesday’s results are known, so I’ll have to fill in your name later. Sorry — but no worries. Because, whether it’s Harris or Trump, some pieces of advice will serve either of you equally well.
First point: You owe your victory as much, if not more, to your opponent than you do to yourself. If it’s President-elect Harris, be grateful you didn’t have to face Nikki Haley or some other Republican who was not quite so verbally flatulent and politically toxic as Donald Trump. If it’s President-elect Trump, thank your lucky stars that Kamala Harris was, after Joe Biden, probably the least electable potential Democratic contender. You’d have been toast if your opponent had been Gov. Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania or Gov. Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan.
Put bluntly, outside of your hard-core supporters, many if not most Americans dislike or distrust you and will not easily give you the benefit of the doubt. Which raises the second point: Unlike Barack Obama in 2008, Ronald Reagan in 1980 or Lyndon Johnson in 1964, you do not have a mandate for sweeping change. Even if your victory is larger than the pre-election polls anticipated. Even if you win majorities in Congress. Even if friendly pundits hail you as the Savior of Democracy or the Vanquisher of the Woke or some other quasi-messianic moniker.
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Opinion | To Whom It May Concern – The New York Times Nov. 5, 2024
Editor: Mr. Stephens is a Strussian and like his master, has a penchant for re-writing to political ends, if not as grandiose as the Masters re-write of The History of Philosophy, yet it follows the mendacious Straussian Model. The Reader might wonder that Francis Fukuyama, once Straussian now identifies as a ‘Liberal’.
Stephens even celebrate the 1994 Crime Bill!
But people can get their heads around legislative achievements like the bipartisan 1994 Crime Bill that put 100,000 police officers on the beat — and contributed to long-lasting improvements in public safety.
And who can forget Senator Joe Biden’s racism?
Video: Trump says ‘sources’ tell him Joe Biden repeatedly uses the term ‘Super Predator’ when referring to young black men – despite any evidence Democrat has said it
Joe Biden speaks of potential for ‘predators’ during 1994 Crime Bill speech in the Senate.
November 18, 1993 | Clip Of Senate SessionThis clip, title, and description were not created by C-SPAN.
User Clip: Biden 1993 speech
During a 1993 speech pushing the crime bill, Biden warned of ‘predators on our streets.’
A Party of Prigs and Pontificators Suffers a Humiliating Defeat
The final paragraphs of the Stephens diatribe:
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Today, the Democrats have become the party of priggishness, pontification and pomposity. It may make them feel righteous, but how’s that ever going to be a winning electoral look?
I voted reluctantly for Harris because of my fears for what a second Trump term might bring — in Ukraine, our trade policy, civic life, the moral health of the conservative movement writ large. Right now, my larger fear is that liberals lack the introspection to see where they went wrong, the discipline to do better next time and the humility to change.
Editor: Mr. Stephens last two paragraphs of his diatribe, are an unwitting self-description!
Mr. Finkelstein fails to report that Thedore H. White re-rote his 1972 book, The Making of the President, because of the Watergate Scandal. Though The Reader might find it hard to find the evidence of it, I was aware of the re-write, because it was a bit of a scandal of the time! I voted in my first American Election 1968 and recall it quite vividly! And White’s offered an object lesson to all political commentators?
Title this: Kamala Harris striding toward The Future? Even Alex Shepard can’t quite buy his own political chatter!
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Harris is not a generational politician. As I have written, she is not even a particularly different candidate from the one who crashed and burned in the 2020 primary. She is overcautious and too fond of bromides; her political instincts can be wobbly; it’s still not entirely clear what principles guide her foreign or domestic policy. But she has run about as impressive a campaign as you could expect any Democrat to run given the extraordinary situation that she found herself in—or that, more accurately, Biden put her, his party, and the country in by refusing to drop out of the race earlier.
If Harris loses, pundits will focus on a number of decisions: her choice of running mate, her reluctance to break with Biden, her muddled message to young and Arab American voters disgusted by her administration’s support for Israel’s destructive war in the Middle East, her overcautious approach to both messaging and policy. But the fact remains that Harris gave Democrats a chance they did not have before. That is an accomplishment in and of itself, no matter the outcome of the election.
Headline: Our £1.5 trillion state will mean nothing without innovation
Sub-headline: Kemi Badenoch beware, there is no guarantee that voters will return to the blue team after being brutalised by Labour
Sunday November 03 2024, 12.01am GMT, The Sunday Times
What might The Reader make of this report from The Times of November 3, 2024
Headline: Rachel Reeves: It was wrong to promise I wouldn’t raise taxes
Sub-headline: The chancellor defends her budget and denies it was motivated by class or ideology
Sunday November 03 2024, 12.25pm GMT, The Times
Reeves was asked whether her decision to raise taxes on private schools, users of private jets and multi-million pound farming estates was motivated by class.
“It wasn’t an ideological budget,” she told the BBC’s Sunday With Laura Kuenssberg. “It was a budget where we had to raise £40 billion to put our public finances on a firm footing and also to ensure our state schools, our NHS are properly funded and that we can build the homes and indeed invest in those long-term investment opportunities … to grow our economy and bring good jobs paying decent wages.”
Following a backlash from farmers, Reeves defended her changes to inheritance tax on agricultural estates and said they would only affect the wealthiest landowners.
Notwithstanding Mr. Colvile’s lack of knowledge of Rachiel Reeves statement:
Labour thinks budget is a success — yet concerns mount over what’s next
The chancellor told an admiring Labour Party that they had ‘made our choices’, but the public reception to her far-reaching reforms remains highly uncertain
Friday November 01 2024, 10.10pm GMT, The Times
November 03, 2024, 12.25pm GMT, The Times
A few years ago my colleagues at the Centre for Policy Studies think tank noticed something extraordinary. Boris Johnson’s government was poised to become the first in British history to spend a trillion pounds — not just on Covid firefighting, but every single year.
Last week they noticed something else. Thanks to Rachel Reeves’s budget, that figure has risen. Substantially. In fact, by the end of this decade “total managed expenditure” will top £1.5 trillion.
It is hard to get a handle on how large this number is. By my estimate, if you gave away a £10 note every second, spending £1.5 trillion would take you more than 4,750 years. Lay those tenners end to end and you’d get to the moon and back, 25 times over.
Now, I may have got those calculations slightly wrong. There were a lot of zeroes. But by any metric, this is an absolutely staggering amount of spending — whose growth rate is completely unsupported by the economy that is paying for it.
And this is the underlying truth of the budget — what is behind the record-breaking tax rises, and the extra borrowing too. We are entering the age not so much of the big state but the super-state, the mega-state. As a result of Labour’s decisions, both taxes and spending will hit levels — as a percentage of our GDP — that have never been reached in peacetime, or, in the case of the tax take, in wartime either.
Editor: Mr. Colevile’s above paragraphs, uses the vehicle of Boris Johnson, to act as a rhetorical bridge to a critique of Rachel Reeves’ budget. And the appearance of the rhetorical phantoms of the not just the big state but the super-state, the mega-state. The Regular reader of Mr. Colvile confronts his panic about The State as anathema to the Thatcherite Hayekian civic/political romance!
Reader there are 887 words left of Colevle’s essay yet nowhere to be found is the actual fact, evidence of Tory financial profligacy, incompetence:
Headline: The lost decade: The Tories spent all the money
Sub-headline: The party’s programm of austerity has choked the economy, harmed public services and doubled the national debt.
Since the Tories came into power in 2010, the national debt has more than doubled. It now stands at more than £2 trillion. They have increased the national debt more than every Labour Government combined.
At the last Conservative Party Conference, Boris Johnson applauded the Tories for having “tackled the debt and the deficit” left by the last Labour Government. But, the truth is that the Conservatives have created a huge national debt. The Tories are the real culprits of ‘spending all the money’ rather than the disingenuous phrase of “Labour spent all the money” – which is one of the biggest myths in UK politics. What is also conveniently forgotten is that the Labour Government ran a surplus between 1998-2002 – an achievement almost unparalleled in modern history in the UK.
In 1997-1998, public sector debt as a percentage of GDP was 40.4 per cent; in 2007-2008 it was 36.4 per cent; in 2010-2011 it was 60.0 per cent; and in December 2019 it was 82.9 per cent.
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Colvile ends his essay here, yet The Reader finds these paragraphs maladroitly comic, tinged with mendacity!
Politically, the great challenge for the government is to show that all this spending actually works — that this great swollen state can actually deliver. For its opponents, the scenario is manna from heaven. If you were trying to come up with the perfect recipe to reconcile the Tories with their electoral base, it would involve stripping benefits from the elderly, a massive tax raid on business, rising gilt yields, hikes in inheritance tax, furious farmers and a general sense that Labour promised the earth to get elected and then instantly reverted to type.
Yet the Tories’ new leader should not be complacent. There is no guarantee that voters brutalised by Labour will return to the blue team, especially given its record in office.
More to the point, even if Kemi Badenoch can pull the Conservatives back into contention, any future Tory prime minister will face the same awful situation. A state for which that £1.5 trillion figure is just a starting point; which despite those huge inputs is still failing to deliver the services its citizens expect, or the growth; which is taxing and spending at rates never before seen.
In short, the challenge for the Tories over the coming decades will be the same as for all Britain’s politicians: wrestling with Leviathan.
Can Joanna Coles and Ben Sherwood revive the once-buzzy news site and reclaim their perches atop the New York media world? Their own staff isn’t sure.
Ben Sherwood and Joanna Coles took over leadership of The Daily Beast in April with the task of turning the money-losing site around. Credit…Gili Benita for The New York Times
On a sunny morning in early October, Joanna Coles, clad in a stylish tomato-red coat, and Ben Sherwood, dressed more demurely in a corduroy jacket, convened at their regular breakfast spot, the no-frills Star on 18 diner on Manhattan’s Far West Side.
The two veteran media executives were talking about their ambitious plans for The Daily Beast, the 16-year-old money-losing news website, in which they jointly acquired a minority stake in April.
But along with the predictable optimism about the mission they are taking on and enthusiasm about early signs of audience uptick and subscriber growth, Ms. Coles, a former chief content officer of Hearst Magazines, and Mr. Sherwood, a onetime president of ABC News and Disney TV chief, also conveyed a sense of frustration.
Frustration that they weren’t greeted by the staff they inherited as warmly as they expected. Frustration that the site’s tech problems meant they’ve had to buy multiple subscriptions just to log in. Frustration that convincing the newsroom of their editorial vision has been an uphill climb.
Less than three weeks after the pair’s takeover, New York magazine published a detailed report on the friction between reporters and Ms. Coles over story suggestions that they deemed ridiculous, including an investigation into whether former President Donald J. Trump was having stress-induced flatulence during his criminal trial and a list of the most obese members of Congress. (Neither article ran.)
It was clear that many of the sources for the report were inside the organization, with one unnamed staff member bluntly criticizing the new owners’ “warped vision” of the news site.
“This thing came within a day of being sold to the private equity knacker’s yard, where it would have been stripped,” Ms. Coles said later in an interview at The Beast’s offices in Chelsea, using a British term for a slaughterhouse. “In what way is it helpful to tape our conversations and to proudly boast that you are not going to even attempt to look at the stories that your new bosses are asking you to look at?”
“To me, that’s just, like, ‘No wonder the place is going out of business,’” she added.
For his part, Mr. Sherwood was aghast that Beast journalists had anonymously complained about a Daily Beast article on plans by Barron Trump, Mr. Trump’s youngest son, to attend New York University. The article relied on a source of Ms. Coles and was published without a byline.
“That happens to be something that she knew stone cold — her source was solid,” Mr. Sherwood said. “The organization went into a convulsion over this because Joanna did not reveal her source and no one could stand this up with any of their sources.”
Myra: while WWIII simmers, under the hand of The Netanyahu, backed by senile Old Joe, a bought and paid for House and Senate, and a complicit Corporate Media, Katie Robertson provides an amuse-bouche, for those Sunday morning readers of The Paper of Record!
Editor: Mr. Ganesh begins his essay with this ‘The paragraph that follows is the most reluctantly written of my career.’: what might The Reader make of this ‘confession’ of a sort? Could it be hyperbolic? Or just a feint?
Donald Trump qualifies as a titanic success in politics. And not because he got himself elected to the world’s highest office. Someone does that every leap year. It is because he achieved the hardest thing in government, which is to bind one’s successors. He moved the consensus on a big issue — trade — until the next president couldn’t go back, or didn’t want to. Hence the tariffs and subsidies of Bidenomics. Hence the spread of protectionism elsewhere in the world. Most leaders who change the “common sense of the age” need consecutive terms (Reagan) or a crisis (Thatcher) or both (FDR). Trump needed neither to turn an apostasy into an orthodoxy.
Whatever happens next week, we will be living in Trumpland for decades. Yes, I’ll manage, thanks. Besides some marginal trimming of restaurant wine lists, it is odd how little an era of global economic fragmentation incommodes a man. But “we” also encompasses the unknown millions who won’t now be elevated out of low income through trade, as so many Chinese were in the decades either side of the millennium. It includes the political class of Europe, too, which must decide whether to match the American fence. Trump could lose on Tuesday and still untie the west over time via his protectionist successors.
Editor: The Reader might wonder at focus on trade? Is its very remoteness from the usual Anti-Trump propaganda, that makes Ganesh’s essay so appealing? Ganesh just doesn’t shift his argument but expands it both exponentially, and prescriptively in the following.
Rather than mope, wonder how he did it. How does profound and lasting change happen? How does one leave a mark?
On YouTube, videos abound of Trump from the 1980s. He is measured, even soft-spoken, until the subject of trade comes up On YouTube, videos abound of Trump from the 1980s. He is measured, even soft-spoken, until the subject of trade comes up. At that point, a new edge enters the voice and a hint of a snarl contorts the face. Japan is the main target (“They come over here, they sell their cars, their VCRs”) but Kuwait gets some too. And this is on things like Oprah. In temporal terms, we are almost as far from this footage as it was from D-Day. But he still says the same things now about the same subject with the same vehemence.
Editor: Ganesh fails to see that Trump by nature, by design is rabble-rouser: he baits his audience with reports of bad actors.
Editor: Some Ganesh Snapshots:
This is almost all he cares about. (Immigration is a distant second.)
We can mock the primitivity of the economics.
The secret to leaving a legacy is monomania.
Editor: Bill Clinton, a sublime generalist: ornate Oxbridger dreck.
If there is a counter-Trump, it is Bill Clinton, a sublime generalist, his own wonk on most issues, an intelligent tinkerer of tax credits here and diplomatic relations there, but also one of the more forgettable two-term presidents.
Editor: Ganesh ignores the Clintons political romance with The Neo-Liberal Swindle that collapsed in 2007-2008!
In the end, Clinton just didn’t have a paramount obsession.
Editor: Ganesh uses Isaiah Berlin for almost a full paragraph. Although not mentioning the very elastic standards demonstrated by Berlin’s academic politicking!
‘Isaac and Isaiah: The Covert Punishment of a Cold War Heretic
by David Caute
Two high-voltage scholars engage in a bitter conflict in this irresistible tale of principle and politics in the Cold War years
Rancorous and highly public disagreements between Isaiah Berlin and Isaac Deutscher escalated to the point of cruel betrayal in the mid-1960s, yet surprisingly the details of the episode have escaped historians’ scrutiny. In this gripping account of the ideological clash between two of the most influential scholars of Cold War politics, David Caute uncovers a hidden story of passionate beliefs, unresolved antagonism, and the high cost of reprisal to both victim and perpetrator.
Though Deutscher (1907–1967) and Berlin (1909–1997) had much in common—each arrived in England in flight from totalitarian violence, quickly mastered English, and found entry into the Anglo-American intellectual world of the 1950s—Berlin became one of the presiding voices of Anglo-American liberalism, while Deutscher remained faithful to his Leninist heritage, resolutely defending Soviet conduct despite his rejection of Stalin’s tyranny. Caute combines vivid biographical detail with an acute analysis of the issues that divided these two icons of Cold War politics, and brings to light for the first time the full severity of Berlin’s action against Deutscher.
Editor: The final Ganesh paragraph is unsurprising, yet the very nature of Trump, since his Apprentice Circus, is his wayward attention span and volatility. Mr. Ganesh fails to even consider what role Elon Musk might play in the next Trump Administration!
Well, for a reason. It clarifies a lot. *Leaders glamorized as “change-makers” are often bores who grind away at one groove: rolling back the state, or joining the European project (Ted Heath was an immense hedgehog) or leaving it. Watch Trump fulminate about trade in the 1980s, and again 40 years later. The narrowness of his concerns would invite a chuckle, if they hadn’t prevailed.
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