Jonathan P. Baird

During election campaigns, many wild and hyperbolic things get said. One comment that pushed my buttons was Donald Trump’s statement that Jews would bear much of the responsibility if he loses the election. The logic is twisted but Trump’s assertion unmistakably evokes Jewish history.

Trump has said Jews supporting Vice-President Kamala Harris “should have their head examined”. He said 40% of American Jews support him (actually the number is closer to 30%). He went on:

“That means you got 60% voting for somebody that hates Israel. It’s only because of the Democrat hold or curse on you. You can’t let that happen – 40% is not acceptable because we have an election to win.”

Previously Trump has said that Jewish voters who support Democrats “should be ashamed of themselves” over their lack of loyalty to him and he has said such voters “hate their religion”. He says he is Israel’s “best friend” and he points to relocating the American embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, recognizing Israel’s control of the Golan Heights and brokering the Abraham Accords.

All these statements demand a response. Jews make up 2.4% of the American population. Of that 2.4%, 1.8% are voting age adults. Assuming 75% of those eligible vote, you are down to 1.3% of voters. About one-quarter of Jewish voters live in New York, a state Trump has no chance to win and another 20% live in California, another state where Trump is not contending.

Pennsylvania does have 300,000 Jewish voters (there are 8.8 million registered voters in the state). It is a state where Jews have a presence but how do you conclude that Jews bear much of the responsibility if Trump loses? The facts don’t support that. Jewish voting numbers are not that consequential in the other battleground states that will decide the Electoral College vote. You can just as easily and more persuasively argue the electoral importance of African-Americans, Hispanics, Muslims or young people.

Trump is trying to scare Jewish voters into voting for him saying bad things will happen if he loses, including the total annihilation of Israel. Of course, this is consistent with his doom-and-gloom message about the state of everything if he loses. No doubt he has his own criminal cases in mind and the possibility of future jail time.

Blaming the Jews for his possible electoral loss is fundamentally about scapegoating. He is demonizing Jews who vote for Democrats. His words are putting American Jews into the crosshairs of his many conspiracy-minded supporters. MAGA extremists have shown impressive capability in harassment. Trump’s words can sic a mob.

Many on the far right fear a Great Replacement where minorities, allegedly manipulated by Jews, replace the white majority. From Tucker Carlson to Nick Fuentes, that is a mantra.That was the thinking of the shooter at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh in 2018. There is a pattern of mass shooters posting manifestos online citing Great Replacement as justification.

Trump’s blaming words evoke Germany’s “stab in the back” history. German nationalists and Nazis argued Germany lost World War 1 because they had been stabbed in the back by an international Jewish conspiracy. This slander contributed to the growing antisemitism in Germany in the 1920’s and 1930’s. Trump singling out Jews is dangerous since antisemitism has regained more of a foothold in America. Antisemitism can be increasingly found on the American right.

In discussing the reasons why Trump believes Jews should vote for him, Israel is central. He makes no appeal based on American political issues. He treats American Jews like they are Israelis and appeals to them based on his slavish support for Netanyahu’s government. In 2019 at a Republican Jewish Coalition meting, he called Netanyahu “your Prime Minister”.

Trump is calling out a second antisemitic trope that has plagued Jews over time.That is dual loyalty, the notion that Jews are more loyal to Israel than to the United States. That trope has an ancient history and it has been employed against Jews in contexts like Dreyfuss’s France and in the former Soviet Union. The message is that Jews are foreign guests in their home country, not true citizens. That is the kind of thinking that inspires Jew hatred from people who fear the other.

The irony is that Netanyahu’s extremist and bellicose government is doing more to promote antisemitism through its actions than anything else. Israel has become a rogue state violating international law with impunity. Trump’s support for Netanyahu is actually endangering Jews in Israel and around the world. Netanyahu and his allies like Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich have fanned the flames of hatred and they have created a new generation of people who will hate Israel.

Only diplomacy, a ceasefire and return of the hostages can lead to a lessening of the chances of a regional war which is in the common interest of humanity. A ceasefire, not more war, will help reduce antisemitism.

Last week Sen. Bernie Sanders introduced a resolution to force a vote in Congress to block billions of dollars in offensive American weapons sales to Israel. That may be the only leverage the United States has over Netanyahu. Blindly supporting Netanyahu and his racist government doesn’t fight antisemitism. It does the opposite.

We are in a new period where old thinking about how to fight antisemitism doesn’t apply. American Jews largely oppose MAGA because we recognize that movement is a fascist threat. It is a movement that supports self-professed Nazis like Mark Robinson. Maintaining our democracy offers the best protection against antisemitism.

Earlier this month, I was fortunate enough to go on a newly designed civil rights tour of the South organized by the Nation Magazine, I had been on an earlier civil rights trip in 2023. This trip started in New Orleans and went to Selma, Tuskegee, Montgomery, Savannah and Charleston. The theme of the trip was “From Slavery to Civil Rights”. We had a chance to meet with some older civil rights heroes and some younger activists fighting environmental racism.

New Orleans has a reputation for Mardi Gras, jazz, gumbo and the Saints. Lost is the city’s history and its role in the slave trade. The trade of human beings from Africa to Louisiana began in 1718 with the first slave ships arriving in 1719. The trade continued through French, Spanish and American rule.

After Congress outlawed the international slave trade in 1808, for the next 57 years New Orleans was a center of the slave trade in the United States. The city had more than fifty documented slave trade sites. Enslaved people were sold from slave pens, public squares, government buildings, church properties, city taverns, private residences, auction blocks and ballrooms of luxury hotels.

During the first half of the 19th century, the slave traders trafficked two million men, women and children inside the United States. Most of the enslaved were brought from the Upper South to the Lower South via overland and water routes. Before the trek, the slave traders ruthlessly separated families.

After the Civil War and the defeat of Reconstruction, segregation ruled in America. Lynchings, the Klan, and voter suppression particularly reinforced white supremacy in the South. From 1896 to 1954, the U.S. Supreme Court blessed racial segregation in the case of Plessy v Ferguson which dictated separate but supposedly equal.

Opponents of racism and segregation faced an almost frozen social order but that did not stop the NAACP and other activists from opposing the status quo. In 1952, Thurgood Marshall and the NAACP filed a lawsuit on behalf of some Black parents challenging the constitutionality of racial segregation in New Orleans schools.

On our trip, our group met with Leona Tate who had been one of the children who integrated the New Orleans schools in 1960. She and the other two, Tessie Prevost and Gail Etienne, were first graders then. Six years after the Brown v Board of Education case they entered McDonogh 19 Public School pursuant to a court order issued by Federal Judge J. Skelly Wright. Another little girl, Ruby Bridges, was also integrating a different New Orleans public school at the same time.

The Louisiana power structure left no stone unturned in their efforts to stop integration and to maintain white supremacy. Although Brown ordered desegregation with “all deliberate speed”, delaying forever was the game plan.

Because school officials did not want integration, they had designed an approval process that most children couldn’t pass. It included arbitrary and whitewashed standards of intelligence and behavior. The parents of 137 black first graders had applied to have their children transferred to all-white schools. Only five were selected. Tate, Prevost and Etienne, later dubbed the McDonogh 3, were selected. They had excelled.

Leona Tate described the absolutely toxic environment they faced. On November 14, 1960, the three girls were escorted to the school by federal marshals.because of racist mobs that protested outside the school. The federal marshals stayed for the whole school year. For 18 months white parents and younger people came to protest. Within a few days after the three girls entered school, all the white students left McDonogh 19.

The girls didn’t see much of the protest outside the school because classroom windows were covered with brown paper. They had to play inside during recess. They ate lunch under the protection of a stairwell. They were the first black children to enter previously all-white schools since 1877.

The families of the girls who were selected experienced harassment. They received death threats on the phone. People drove a funeral hearse up and down their street. Gail Etienne’s father received a package containing a dead bird. The local police sat in squad cars at night outside the girls’ homes.

For the entire first grade year, the three girls were the only students at McDonogh 19. In January 1961, a white family tried to send two sons to McDonogh but they ended up attending for only a few days. The family was harassed so badly they had to leave the city.

In second grade, the three girls remained the only students at McDonogh. After Christmas that year, things started changing. Twenty-five new students arrived, including two white students. Tensions lessened a bit. The U.S. Marshals left and the windows at school were uncovered.

In third grade, the school district sent the three girls to a different school, Thomas J. Semmes Elementary. Other black students were also sent to Semmes. There were no U.S. Marshals there and white students did not leave the school. Many of the white students remained hostile to the girls.

Tate now calls her experience at Semmes “a house of horror”. The black children were punched, shoved, kicked, tripped and spat on. The school authorities, even knowing what was going on, looked the other way and did nothing to protect the children but the three girls made it through.

Notably, two years after the integration of New Orleans schools, Tulane University also de-segregated. It was the most prestigious institution of higher learning in the area and it had been segregated for 129 years. The integration of the public schools paved the way for the integration of universities as well as buses, parks, sporting events and voting rolls.

Judge Wright made many enemies when he authored his desegregation opinion. He was ostracized and isolated from New Orleans society life. He was considered the most hated man in Louisiana and he was referred to as “Judas” Wright and Judge J. Scalawag Wright. He also required full-time protection by U.S. Marshals and New Orleans police. Judge Wright’s order in the New Orleans case was the first post-Brown desegregation order issued by a judge in the Deep South.

Looking back, it is no exaggeration to say Leona Tate, Tessie Prevost and Gail Etienne opened the door to school equality in the United States. Their heroism has been insufficiently appreciated and acknowledged. After generations of injustice, they stepped up at a pivotal moment.

Tate still lives in New Orleans’ Lower Ninth Ward which was devastated by Hurricane Katrina. She acquired what had become the abandoned McDonogh 19 building, had it registered as a National Historic Landmark and she re-opened the school as the Tate Etienne Prevost (TEP) Interpretive Center. The Center’s mission is “to teach, exhibit and engage visitors in New Orleans civil rights history”. She continues to work in efforts to reconstruct and improve the community.

Most political coverage of the presidential election has treated the contest as a horse race between two conventional candidates. I would suggest that framing doesn’t do justice to the Harris-Trump match-up. We are not talking about two candidates who support democracy.

Donald Trump has shown himself to be a dire threat to democracy. He showed that again in his debate with Vice-President Kamala Harris when he once again denied that he lost the 2020 election. Election denialism in the form of the Big Lie is incompatible with democracy. Democracy requires that losers accept results of the popular will which Trump has not done. Any election he loses is falsely and automatically attacked as “rigged”.

Election denialism is hardly the only oddity of the Trump candidacy. Observers have been trying to define how Trump’s candidacy is different from Republicans of the past.The best analysis I have seen comes from Federico Finchelstein in his book, The Wannabe Fascists. Finchelstein says Trump represents a new breed of politician who aspires to destroy democratic institutions for short-term personal gain.

He calls such politicians “wannabe fascists”. He says they lack the ideological fervor and extremism of a Hitler or Mussolini. They are weaker and more incompetent than the classical fascists although Finchelstein sees them as potentially highly dangerous since they are angling to be dictators.

Along with Trump in this category, he places such other leaders as Jair Bolsanaro of Brazil, Nayib Bukele of El Salvador, Narendra Modi of India, and Viktor Orban of Hungary. Finchelstein says these leaders, when in power, have not entirely destroyed the legal system in their countries nor have they unleashed violence at the level of classical German or Italian fascism but they welcome violence. Think of Trump at the Capitol on January 6 saying “we fight like hell and if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country any more”.

In making his case, Finchelstein offers some important distinctions about the fascist project. He writes:

“The primary aim of fascism was to destroy democracy from within in order to create a modern dictatorship from above. Fascists proposed a totalitarian state in which plurality and civil society would be silenced and there would be few distinctions between the public and the private, or between the state and its citizens. Fascist regimes shut down the independent press and destroyed the rule of law.”

Trump talks up violence and revenge against his opponents. He has promised to use military tribunals against President Obama and House committee members who investigated January 6. He has suggested General Mark Milley, the former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, deserves execution for alleged treason. Trump has repeatedly tweeted about locking up President Biden and Hillary Clinton, among others. He says if he wins the election, his planned mass deportations will be “bloody”.

Violence and the embrace of violence are central to the fascist project. Being out of power, Trump currently lacks the resources to inflict mass violence but his attitude towards those convicted of January 6-related crimes is illuminating. He cozies up to Proud Boys, Oath Keepers and others who might be his future storm troopers. He explicitly talks about pardoning the convicted January 6 defendants.

If he regains state power, he has been open about using the Insurrection Act against protesters and those opposing him. Whether he would resort to concentration camps and to the mass killing stage of fascism is an open question. There is a historical pattern where the early acts of fascists are jailing and killing those perceived to be their enemy, including leftists, social democrats and Jews. Trump talks about Marxists as “vermin”.

This talk is a first step in the dehumanization process to justify repression. If you see your opponents as sub-human monsters, you grease the path to concentration camps and executions.

Classical fascism has thrived on relentless propaganda and lies. Trump’s cult of personality follows that tradition. In his first term, the Washington Post fact checker team catalogued over 30,000 false or misleading statements Trump made. And that pattern has continued. I think Trump spreading outrageous racist lies about Haitian immigrants eating pets represents a new low.

Trump self-describes as a person of “extraordinary genius” although it is doubtful he has ever read a book. The writer Michael Wolff says he doesn’t even skim. His past aides have said he barely reads bullet points. Wolff quotes economic advisor Gary Cohn who says “It’s worse than you can imagine…Trump won’t read anything – not one-page memos, not the brief policy papers, nothing”. Finchelstein writes;

“To defend democracy, it is necessary to put a stop to the attacks on history that attempt to redefine our present with fantasies about the past. Many actors on the extreme right want to turn history into a myth and then use it as a model to distort the present.”

Trump’s motto of Make America Great Again is about myth creation. When was this golden age Trump is harkening back to? He is talking about a time that never existed. How does Trump square Make America Great Again with the American history of genocide against Native Americans and slavery against African Americans? He doesn’t.

Fascism defines itself against enemies. Instead of accepting differences of opinion, Trumpism aligns against immigrants, LGBTQ people and leftists. Fascists also have a problem with women who refuse to subordinate. They see the role of women as passive wife and mother, limited to the private sphere. Trump’s anti-abortion views remove agency from women. As an adjudicated sexual abuser and as an individual accused of sexual impropriety by over 20 women, his actions have reflected fascism’s misogyny.

Classical fascism used democracy to gain power. After they gained power, they ruthlessly repressed all opposition. They used the mechanisms of democracy to strangle it. They had no use for any democratic institutions after they seized power. Trump says he plans to be a dictator on “day one”. What dictator has ever relinquished power on day two or after? It doesn’t happen.

The mainstream media has performed a profound disservice by its efforts to normalize this race. Seeing the fascism performs the useful service of raising the stakes. Nothing about this election is normal.

When it is election season, political parties typically pose to be seen as a friend to the working class. Nowhere is that more true than in the case of the Republican Party. No matter how anti-labor the party actually is, they will pretend to be on the side of the worker.

J.D. Vance, the vice-presidential candidate, is a perfect incarnation of the Republicans’ seeming embrace of workers. Born into the working class, he expresses a degree of empathy for the hardships people experience. Vance claims to represent heartland values rather than those of coastal elites. He will talk a good game about how the ruling class has betrayed America’s workers.

But Vance has come a very long way from the Appalachia of Hillbilly Elegy, his memoir steeped in blaming poor people for their poverty. A Yale Law graduate, Vance ditched the working class for the big bucks available to those willing to do the bidding of tech billionaires like Peter Thiel, his patron. Thiel made Vance a viable U.S. Senate candidate in Ohio by dropping $10 million into his campaign. Without that $10 million, Vance would have been an also-ran, not a U.S. Senator.

Whatever his class origins, Vance now represents the political interests of the tech sector which hatched him. Money like that always has strings attached. That is why the billionaires around Trump lobbied so hard to make him the vice-presidential choice. He is their man.

At the same time, Vance can point to a couple populist positions he has taken. He teamed up with Sen. Elizabeth Warren on legislation that would crack down on big banks and he joined with Sen. Sherrod Brown to introduce a Rail Safety Act after the train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio. He has voiced support for Lina Khan, the embattled FTC Chair who has been aggressively anti-trust but all these positions are not reflective of more than lip service. Vance has opposed the Protecting the Right to Organize (PRO) Act which would expand protections for workers seeking to unionize.

Scratching beneath the surface, the Republicans’ actual attitude toward labor, especially organized labor, remains hostile. As noted with Vance, Republicans do not look favorably on union organizing. Ever since President Reagan busted PATCO, the air traffic controllers’ union, in 1981, Republicans have been uniformly opposed to union organizing and have worked to make union successes a rare event. It is no accident that since the 1980’s, the number of American workers in unions has dramatically declined.

There was no better indication that this has not changed than Donald Trump’s livestream discussion with Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, in August. Trump lavished praise on Musk for firing striking workers. Trump’s admiration for Musk’s anti-worker stance could not have been more palpable. They were both laughing it up about how great it was to fire strikers.

After the interview, the UAW filed federal labor charges at the NLRB against Trump and Musk for threatening and intimidating workers. Under federal law, workers cannot be fired for going on strike and threatening to do so is illegal under the National Labor Relations Act.

While Trump has been desperately trying to distance himself from Project 2025 because he worries that association will lose him votes, I think the Project remains a good source to look to as far as Republican plans for a second Trump administration. They have an extensive section on labor. It includes these points:

• Banning unions for public service workers
• Firing thousands of civil service workers and replacing them with pro-Trump anti-union loyalists
• Letting bosses eliminate unions mid-contract
• Letting companies stop paying overtime and allowing states to opt out of federal overtime and minimum wage laws
• Eliminating child labor protections
• Firing “on day one” Jennifer Abruzzo, the NLRB’s strongly pro-union general counsel
• Reversing diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) efforts in the workplace
• Weakening OSHA enforcement against small businesses

I think the section in Project 2025 about expanding child labor is telling. The Project recommends that the Department of Labor should amend its regulations to let teenagers “work in more dangerous occupations”. Under federal law, age 18 is the floor. If you are 16 or 17, you are currently not allowed to work in dangerous jobs.

Project 2025 is responding to the employer community which is struggling to find enough workers. The Project wants child labor but remains oblivious to the obvious risk. There has been a national surge in child labor. In 2023, the U.S. Department of Labor pursued 955 cases and found 5,792 minors employed in violation of labor law. 196 of the violations involved hazardous occupations.

Relaxing child labor laws is a form of child abuse. We need a new Charles Dickens to write about it. There is a noticeable silence about this child abuse to real children from a party dedicated to protecting the unborn. In 2023, a 16 year old was killed on the job at a slaughterhouse in Mississippi, another 16 year old was killed working at a sawmill in Wisconsin and a third 16 year old died in Missouri working at a landfill when he was pinned between a tractor trailer rig and its trailer.

The Republican Party has not changed. They have never tried to use the government to help working people and it is the height of naivete to expect that would change now. Republican legislators, judges and presidents work to help corporate America evade or overturn any law that helps the working class. In 2024 we can expect more of the same.

(In the interests of full disclosure I would note that I am a union member and belong to the International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers (IFPTE) which is an AFL-CIO union)

For all the words written about Donald Trump, not much effort has been made to place him in historical context. There is a demagoguery tradition in America that Trump fits in. The tradition goes far beyond boldness in lying. It is about playing to popular prejudices and fears, scapegoating out-groups and making empty promises.

Some names come to mind: Andrew Jackson, Nathan Bedford Forrest, Theodore Bilbo, Henry Ford and Father Charles Coughlin. They reflect an ultra-right tradition drenched in white supremacy and support for authoritarianism. Antisemitism also sometimes figures in. Trump is an inheritor of a long line.

America has always had its quota of demagogues. Trump is hardly the first politician to threaten democracy but in the last 75 years there is only one other person who rivals Trump as a national level demagogue. That person is Senator Joe McCarthy (R-Wi).

I had not thought that much about the parallels between Trump and McCarthy until I listened to Rachel Maddow’s podcast, Ultra. In her second season, she does a deep dive into McCarthyism and shows aspects of McCarthy that have been obscured.

McCarthy has mostly been known for falsely ranting about communist infiltration of the federal government. He famously claimed to have a list of 205 communists who worked in the U.S. State Department but he never produced a single name. He paraded hundreds of innocent people before a Senate subcommittee, trampling their constitutional rights and often ruining their livelihoods.

Maddow shows McCarthy’s connection to a group of Republican senators and representatives who believed America had been on the wrong side in World War 2. The group transitioned from being supporters of the America First movement to being Nazi supporters. They participated in a conspiracy to push Nazi propaganda through Congress and distribute it to the American people. They also actually opposed the Nuremberg war crimes trials.

McCarthy called the Nuremberg trials a “sorry spectacle”. As a new senator, McCarthy took up the cause of the Nazi defendants in the Malmedy massacre case. Little-remembered now, in December 1944, American soldiers were ambushed by Waffen-SS troops in Malmedy, Belgium. After being captured and taken as POWs, a group of 120 Americans were machine-gunned and slaughtered. A few POWs played dead and escaped to tell the story. After the war, the Nazis were put on trial, convicted and sentenced.

In an effort to reverse the convictions, the Nazi defendants and their lawyers manufactured a false story that they had been tortured and horribly mistreated by Jewish investigators and interrogators employed by the American military. McCarthy took up the cause of the Malmedy defendants. He and North Dakota Senator William Langer forced a Senate investigation of the baseless allegation of Jewish torture of the Nazis.

There were a number of investigations of Malmedy and multiple sentences of the defendants were reduced even though their argument was a farce. Originally the war crime tribunal at Dachau sentenced 43 Nazis to death for their role in Malmedy but none of the death sentences were ever carried out.

McCarthy used the investigation as a launch pad toward national name recognition. His behavior mirrored the same hysterical bullying for which he would later become famous. He echoed Nazi propaganda, arguing Jewish mistreatment of the Malmedy defendants was worse than what the Nazis did.

Both McCarthy and Trump have shared an obsession with being a center of attention.They were both schooled by disbarred lawyer/fixer Roy Cohn who advised them about how to dominate the news cycle. Cohn always advised punching back hard. He was a merciless bomb thrower. McCarthy hired Cohn as his chief counsel for his senate subcommittee. Trump retained Cohn when the government sued him and his father for race discrimination in housing rentals.

While both McCarthy and Trump cozied up to the far right neither was ever a true believer. Neither ever had explicit fascist principles. Both allied with the far right but it is impossible to see them as ideologues. They were both about advancing themselves. Trump’s recent maneuvering on abortion is a perfect example. He would sell out any side if he thought it would politically help him.

Both McCarthy and Trump have been masters of the Big Lie. With McCarthy it was seeing communists under every bed. With Trump it has been his election fraud nonsense. Both have been opportunists. Neither actually believed their narrative as much as they pretended to. They spun conspiracies and ceaselessly attacked their critics, always acting aggrieved.

To its everlasting discredit, the Republican Party enabled both of them, never morally critiquing them, opposing them or even trying to rein them in.

I think Trump learned from the Joe McCarthy/Roy Cohn playbook. And he has proven to be far more dangerous as a demagogue as Trump again stands at the threshold of power. No one knows how extreme Trump would be in a second term and anyone who says otherwise is lying.

In considering why America has not made more progress in moving toward multiracial democracy, I would cite our tradition of demagogues like Joe McCarthy and Donald Trump. They advance selfishness, hate and a retrograde vision of an America that has never existed. Both McCarthy and Trump are devoid of any moral compass. They specialize in manipulating fear and promoting ruthless self-aggrandizement.

McCarthy died of alcoholism at 48, being in the limelight for a short period of five years. Trump is now 78. His tenure in the limelight has been longer lasting. The voters must now determine whether they have had enough of the Trump show. The demagoguery of both these men is a lasting stain on our nation’s history.

In her novel, The Nightingale, Kristin Hannah vividly recreates the mass deportation of Jews from France by the German Nazi occupiers during World War 2. The brutality, violence and misery of the enterprise are captured. Reading it, you feel what it must have felt like to be there.

Now, this election season, we have the Republican Party calling for the fascist idea of mass deportations. At the Republican National Convention, Donald Trump promised:

“As soon as I take the oath of office, we will begin the largest deportation operation in the history of our country.”

Trump has vowed to deport 15 to 20 million undocumented immigrants even though the Department of Homeland Security estimates that there are 11 million in the country. We saw the Mass Deportations Now signs at the RNC. Influential MAGA leaders like Stephen Miller, Trump’s immigration go-to person, insist MAGA can work around legal and logistical roadblocks to complete the operation.

For such a prominent idea in the Trump universe, there has been little analytical rigor in evaluating the mass deportation project. Trump has offered few specifics. The potential for things to go awry could not be more apparent. We have a poorly thought through idea that is not feasible..

I would suggest the legal, financial and practical challenges to such an endeavor would be enormous. The costs of radically expanding the deportation system would be astronomical and the adverse economic consequences would be catastrophic to the American public. Not surprisingly, Trump has brushed over these dimensions of his plan, as much of it as he has revealed.

The deportation process is multi-part. There is the rounding-up of immigrants, housing and feeding them, medical care, alternatives to detention where possible, court hearings and judicial process. All these come before removal. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) doesn’t simply arrest people and fly them out of the country immediately,

Those detained have a constitutional right to due process under our legal system although it would appear Trump wants to take that due process right away just as he would like to do with birthright citizenship. Those rights still exist though. Trump would likely try and remove the right to appear before a judge as part of the deportation process. His scheme is about fast-tracking an exodus.

During Trump’s presidency it took years for the government to secure an additional 15,000 detention beds. Now Trump is talking about deporting millions. Just the cost of deporting a million people would run into tens of billions of dollars. Congress would have to allocate the money and both Houses would have to approve. That is hardly a given.

The ACLU and other legal challengers won’t be silent. Nor will the millions of Americans who would oppose the scheme. The Nazis were able to remove the Jews from France because of their military control and terror tactics. The American scene is drastically different with far more opportunity for opposition through litigation and direct action.

Many cities have passed laws restricting cooperation with ICE. Chicago, Denver, Los Angeles, and Philadelphia have refused to cooperate. Most of the 11 million undocumented are long-term residents in the U.S. with established roots. More than a million Americans are married to an undocumented person and many of the undocumented have children who are U.S. citizens. They are spread out all over the country.

Trump talks about using the National Guard for his deportation operation but legal questions abound. The Posse Comitatus Act doesn’t allow the use of the military to enforce laws within the U.S. except in “cases and under circumstances expressly authorized by the Constitution or Act of Congress”. Trump would need to get Congress on board with any plan.

Stephen Miller has talked about building large-scale staging areas near the Southern border but building such detention camps would be a recipe for disaster. Imagine the scenario. Adam Isacson from the Washington Office on Latin America, nails it:

“Every community in the U.S. would see people they know and love put on buses. You’d have some very painful images on TV of crying children and families. All of that is incredibly bad press. It’s family separation on steroids.”

The Trump plan fails to consider how integral undocumented immigrants are to our economy. Realization of mass deportations would lead to a dire shortage of low wage workers. Certain industries like fruit and vegetable harvesting, cleaning and housekeeping, child and elder care and construction would be especially hard hit. These are not jobs that American workers have been clamoring to do.

The undocumented pay billions in taxes, including Social Security taxes, even though they are not eligible for benefits. Contrary to the Trump fantasy, mass deportation is likely to harm the economy. America would need food imports because we would lack the labor force to produce and pick all the food we need.

Trump often cites the racist Operation Wetback from the 1954 Eisenhower era as a model of how government can do a mass deportation. An estimated 1.3 million Mexicans, mostly single men, were put on buses, planes and boats and were deported. Trump doesn’t mention that many U.S. citizens were wrongly racially profiled and deported. Nor does he explain that the operation was a racial terror campaign designed to prompt people to self-deport.

Advocating mass deportation is a shameful publicity stunt based in racism and xenophobia. It is a scapegoating exercise meant to appeal to the worst in people. It is about finding a group to hate on. History shows how mass deportations invariably go wrong.

In the annals of American history there have been some truly horrible Supreme Court decisions. I have always thought Dred Scott v Sandford was the worst. Saying African Americans had no claim to freedom or citizenship was a disgrace and humiliated the Court.

But there are other cases that are contenders for the worst. Plessy v Ferguson, the 1896 separate but equal decision and Korematsu v United States that upheld the internment of Japanese Americans during World War 2 are in the running. So is Buck v Bell, a 1927 decision that permitted compulsory sterilization of those deemed unfit, “imbeciles” and others considered undesirable..

I would also include Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the 2022 abortion decision that overturned Roe v Wade. What other case has taken away a constitutional right? What kind of court strips people of their rights?

Still, in the mix, is a new contender – United States v Trump, the presidential immunity decision, decided on the last day of the Court’s last term. That case may be the new worst. Not only did the Court do Donald Trump a huge political favor of delay, the Court majority essentially decided that none of his illegal schemes mattered. Trump wanted no more of his cases heard before the election this fall and the Court majority could not have been more cooperative. They delayed to the last possible minute.

The majority opinion was written by Chief Justice John Roberts. While he had previously been described as a moderate institutionalist, this opinion clarified and cemented that he is as much a hardcore reactionary as the other far right justices.

In writing a decision “for the ages”, it insured that if Trump wins a second term, he will be able to exercise dictatorial power without fear of consequences. To quote from Justice Sotomayor’s dissent:

“The relationship between the President and the people he serves has shifted irrevocably. In every use of official power the President is now a king above the law.”

Justice Sotomayor says the Court majority “invents an atextual, ahistorical and unjustifiable immunity that puts the President above the law”. Article II in the Constitution doesn’t mention immunity. The doctrine is entirely court-created. Justice Sotomayor notes the majority’s expansive view of presidential immunity was never recognized by the Framers.

Lost in the majority opinion is the understanding that the Framers went to the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia in 1787 determined not to replicate the British monarchy they had fought so hard to defeat. They may have disagreed about the relative power of different branches of government but the Framers had a deep antipathy and distrust of executive power.

It was abuse by Great Britain’s King George III and his royal governors that lit the fire of the American revolution. The Framers all agreed that the President’s power should be limited. Key participants in the Constitution’s ratification debates emphasized that the President would remain subject to criminal prosecution. The historical record demonstrates intense anti-monarchical sentiment and a heavy presumption against presidential immunity.

James Madison warned a chief executive “might pervert his administration into a scheme of peculation or oppression”. He said a President’s corruption “might be fatal to the Republic”.

What makes United States v Trump so bad is that the Court majority is recreating, to again quote Madison, “another runaway monarchy”. If Trump wins again, he will dismiss the Federal Court cases filed against him and figure out a way to do crimes within his official duties. Juries won’t be able to consider evidence of his official acts or inquire into his motives.

The crime of which Trump stands accused, conspiracy to thwart the peaceful transfer of power following the 2020 election, is exactly the lawlessness the Founders feared most. They warned about conspiracies to maintain power, disregarding the popular vote. This is the ultimate crime against the people.

No decision of the Supreme Court has ever cut more against the American ideal of democracy and popular rule than United States v Trump. It was designed to make criminal prosecution of a President impossible and it sent a green light message to Trump. In a second term, he could use the Department of Justice or the military as he wishes. The Court won’t interfere.

The Court majority said there is less protection for unofficial, private acts but they wrote the decision in a way that renders unofficial acts a nullity. Justice Sotomayor highlights the “law-free zone around the President” and lays out nightmare scenarios that could play out as a result of the decision.

“When he uses his official powers in any way, under the majority’s reasoning, he will now be insulated from criminal prosecution. Orders the Navy’s Seal Team 6 to assassinate a political rival? Immune. Organize a military coup to hold onto power? Immune. Takes a bribe in exchange for a pardon? Immune. Immune, immune, immune.”

Democrats have been slow to recognize the gravity of United States v Trump. If Trump wins in November, this case is a license for dictatorship. It is hard to imagine how a case could be worse.

After the death of George Floyd and the movement it provoked, it looked like there might be a serious national effort to address racial bias in policing. It also looked like there might be a genuine dialogue about the appropriate use of force by police in their encounters with the public. Neither happened and both debates were short-circuited.

The July 6 police shooting of 36 year old Sonya Massey, an African-American woman from Springfield, Illinois, is the most prominent example of where lack of progress around police reform has led – an absolutely senseless death at the hands of an out-of-control policeman. This was a shooting that the police could not defend. The local sheriff, Jack Campbell, fired the shooter who was subsequently charged with first degree murder. Campbell said:

“Sonya Massey lost her life due to one unjustifiable and reckless decision from Deputy Sean Grayson. Grayson had other options available that he should have used. His actions were inexcusable and do not reflect the values or training of our office.”

Massey had called 911 because she thought there was an intruder in her house. She had been having mental health issues. She had admitted herself into a 30 day in-patient program in St. Louis but inexplicably she left the program after two days and returned home.

Massey’s mother had called 911 on July 5 to report her daughter was having a mental breakdown. The police were unaware of that call. When they arrived at the Massey residence on July 6, they asked Massey to identify herself to them. Massey went to search for identification but then she went into the kitchen to her stove to turn off a pot of boiling water. One deputy asked her to turn the hot water off.

While she handled the pot, a deputy said he was moving “away from your hot steaming water”. Massey answered “I rebuke you in the name of Jesus”.

The deputy said “Huh?” Massey repeated the rebuke comment and said “I’m sorry”. She then ducked behind a breakfast bar. It appeared she was trying to shield herself. Grayson told her “Drop the f—— pot!” and almost simultaneously fired three shots at Massey’s head, fatally wounding her.

The cops had only been at Massey’s residence for less than three minutes when Grayson fired the shots. After he essentially executed Massey, Grayson made no effort to administer medical care to Massey.

Grayson’s body-worn camera was not operating until after he shot Massey but the other deputy at the scene did have his body-cam rolling. It is likely Grayson thought he could get away with the shooting because he had his body-cam off.

The other body-cam contradicted Grayson’s story. Grayson said Massey came at him with boiling water but that is not what the body-cam showed. In the first dispatch audio, the police told hospital staff Sonya Massey died by suicide. They said “self-inflicted “. The police didn’t take the time to get their story straight.

How many times have we seen this story? In the New York Times, Charles Blow wrote:

“This kind of devastation has happened so often, to so many families, that it has become a motif of Black existence in this country, an enduring injury, a simmering sadness, an ambient terror.”

Even before the Massey killing, Grayson had a checkered history. He had been discharged from the Army for serious misconduct. He had been charged with two DUIs. Since 2020 he had been employed by six law enforcement agencies.

He is an example of what has been called “wandering officers” who drift from police department to police department after being let go under unclear but seemingly unfavorable circumstances. New hires don’t get properly vetted. There are 18,000 law enforcement agencies across the U.S. and there is no national database for tracking and weeding out rogue officers.

Nothing stops someone like Grayson from hiding past misdeeds when they move on to a new police job. According to CNN, there is a police misconduct registry, the National Decertification Index which lists about 55,000 officers who had their law enforcement certificate or license revoked due to misconduct but its coverage is “spotty”. Grayson had never been decertified.

Before he murdered George Floyd, Derek Chauvin had 18 prior complaints filed against him with the Minneapolis Internal Affairs.

Campaign Zero, an organization that studies police violence, found that 2023 was the deadliest year for police violence. There has been no improvement since George Floyd died. Police killed 1,329 people in 2023. Black and brown individuals were disproportionately affected. These 2023 numbers happened even though there has been a national decline in homicides and other violent crimes.

Fewer than 2% of officer-involved shootings are ever prosecuted and less than 1% result in guilty pleas or convictions. Donald Trump, a convicted felon, has been calling for immunity for the police for their “official acts”, something that has been de facto already happening. I would suggest the perception of likely immunity was one factor that propelled Grayson.

The Massey case has led to new calls to revive the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act, federal legislation which was drafted to address police brutality and racial profiling. The bill previously passed the House in 2021 but stalled in the Senate.

It is little-remembered that the site of the Massey crime, Springfield, Illinois, the hometown of Abraham Lincoln, was the scene of a race riot and lynchings in 1908. A large white mob lynched two Black men, killed and wounded scores more, destroyed the homes and businesses of Black and Jewish residents and drove thousands from the city. Following in that tradition, Sonya Massey was the victim of a modern-day lynching.

After the coup attempt on January 6, 2021 and considering Donald Trump’s refusal to recognize the results of the 2020 election, it is hard not to worry about election schemes Trump might have up his sleeve. Sometimes paranoia is justified. John Lennon once said, “Paranoia is just a heightened sense of awareness.”

Many political commentators have remarked on Trump’s often-made statements to his fans about how they don’t have to vote. At a Christian summit, he told attendees that they would never need to vote if he becomes President again. He said, “get out and vote, just this time”. He went on “you won’t have to do it anymore. Four more years, you know what? It’ll be fixed, it’ll be fine, you won’t have to vote any more, my beautiful Christians”.

Predictably, Democrats lost their minds. This was a typical ambiguous Trump statement that could be interpreted differently. Statements like this always allow Trump plausible deniability when he is accused of wanting to cancel future elections.

When he went on Laura Ingraham’s FOX show, Ingraham gave Trump many opportunities to clarify the “you won’t have to vote again” comment. He gave a less-than-clear answer mostly saying how much Christians support him and how Jewish people who don’t support him “should have their head examined”.

Trump has been saying “we don’t need the votes. I have so many votes”. This is not a one-off comment. He has repeatedly been telling audiences he doesn’t need the votes which is weird even for a candidate who talks excessively about Hannibal Lector, sharks and electrocution. I cannot recall any presidential candidate saying anything comparable in an election year.

I would suggest a different thing to worry about than the cancelling of future elections. I am wondering why Trump is saying he doesn’t need votes now. There is a reason why Trump is saying this. Given his history, the likelihood is that he is saying this because he has another strategy in mind besides getting the most votes and winning the election. If he was serious about winning the vote tally, he would be fighting hard for every vote and he would never discount the importance of voting.

In an important article in the July 29 Rolling Stone, the magazine raised a concern around certification of the 2024 presidential election. They quote Democratic election lawyer Marc Elias:

“I think we are going to see mass refusals to certify the election in November. Everything we are seeing about this election is that the other side is more organized, more ruthless and more prepared.”

Much of the Republican Party remains stuck in conspiracy theories and election denialism. Trump has maintained the fiction that he was cheated in the 2020 presidential race. That belief remains alive and widespread among Republicans including among Republican election officials.

Rolling Stone compiled a list of election officials by culling media reporting about officials who refused to certify results. They write that 70 pro-Trump election deniers ( who they identify by name) are working as local election officials in at least 16 counties across six key battleground states. They go on to say that examination of thousands of posts from hundreds of election officials show unapologetic belief in Trump’s election lies. Elias goes on:

“..Republicans are counting on not just that they can discredit the election in big counties but they are counting on the fact that if they don’t certify in several small counties, you cannot certify these statewide results.”

It is entirely possible that if Trump believes he would lose in the Electoral College, he would opt for other routes to power. Certification disputes could land in court or even the House of Representatives where he probably likes the odds better. The Republicans still have a margin in the House. More House state delegations are controlled by Republicans. In that form of voting, Republicans could have enough power to win in the House and decide the presidency for Trump.

Trump believes the House will hand him the presidency even if the voters pick Harris. He will again cry voter fraud. He probably also thinks that a Supreme Court which has treated him as a king will bend to his wishes..

At the least, certification disputes could result in delay and confusion. The chaos could undermine perception of a free and fair election.

Trump might be hoping this could be a vehicle for him to overturn the popular will. Having a criminal mentality, Trump has no loyalty to democracy and any principled notion that the voters should decide. He is about winning at all cost since that is the surest way for him to avoid jail time. The fact that so many Republicans including their standard bearer remain election deniers means a repeat of post-election irregularities are likely again this year.

The Republican battle plan is increasingly clear. It is a multi-pronged strategy that includes mass voter challenges by Republican lawyers to the eligibility of likely Democratic voters and voter roll maintenance to purge as many likely Democratic voters as possible.
Republicans have amassed an army of lawyers both to make it harder for people to vote and to have their vote counted. Trump has promised lawyers at “every poll booth”.

Voter ID disqualification, challenges to mail ballots and gerrymandering are all favorite tactics. Republican-controlled state legislatures have been laboratories for voter suppression. This is in addition to disputing certification.

Lawsuits are part of the groundwork for laying the claim an election was stolen. Danielle Alvarez, a senior advisor to the RNC and the Trump campaign has said that lawsuits were one of the RNC’s main priorities this year. She has said, “This is something that’s very important to President Trump”.

I think Democrats have been slow to see the Trump game plan and why he says he doesn’t need votes because as he says “we got plenty of votes”. Democrats are underestimating how conniving their opponent is. Too many Democrats still seem to expect normal.

If Trump starts falling behind in the polls, expect his talk about a stolen election will increase. Past history may be the best predictor of what will happen between November 2024-January 2025. Desperation on the Republican side is not likely to produce moderation. It is hard to imagine another January 6 given Biden control of the Executive Branch but violence is certainly a possibility for die-hard Trump supporters who won’t accept election results.

In a genuinely fair election, only the voters decide. That must not change.

President Joe Biden’s withdrawal from the presidential race obliterated the prevailing political narrative. Instead of old-age Biden versus old-age Trump, we had the emergence of not-old Kamala Harris. The reaction on the Republican side has been both panicked and telling.

About Harris, Wyoming Rep. Harriet Hageman (the one who beat Liz Cheney) said:

“Intellectually, just really kind of the bottom of the barrel. I think she was a DEI hire.”

Hageman’s comment was echoed by Tennessee Republican Rep. Tim Burchett who suggested Biden picked Harris as Vice-President solely because she is Black. “One hundred percent she is a DEI hire,” Burchett said, referring to diversity, equity and inclusion. He went on. “When you go down that route, you take mediocrity and that’s what they have right now”.

Sebastian Gorka, a TV host on far right Newsmax, said Harris was going to be the nominee “because she’s female and her skin color is the correct DEI color”. He also said she “cackles like an insane woman”. Megyn Kelly accused Harris of sleeping her way to the top of California politics.

While House Speaker Mike Johnson has cautioned Republicans about criticizing her ethnicity or her gender, it is a certainty much of the critique of Harris will be around the DEI hire theme. Republicans can’t use the N-word now but the diversity hire theme is the same gist. Unless it is Candace Owens or her equivalent, for conservatives, no Black woman candidate would be considered qualified.

Republicans seem stuck in a time warp. For much of American history only white men could even be considered for high political office. Women and people of color were not part of the equation. They were, per se, ruled out. Republicans appear to long for the good old days of white and male supremacy. Normal for them is having, except for tokens, black women on the bottom rung of powerlessness. This is a party that entertains the great replacement theory.

Part of the racist and sexist attack on Harris is that she is mediocre, intellectually inferior, or somehow unqualified. By any objective standard that is a crazy assertion.

Harris has had a long record of accomplishment. For many years she worked as a prosecutor where she prosecuted homicide, burglary, robbery and sexual assault cases. She got elected twice to serve as District Attorney in San Francisco. She then got elected again two times to serve as Attorney General of California. In 2016 she won her race for the U.S. Senate and in 2020 she was elected Vice-President.

The accusations of mediocrity and intellectual inferiority are absurd. For someone who is so allegedly incompetent, she had a knack for consistently winning. Prosecuting is not exactly an easy job. You have to convince beyond a reasonable doubt. To be effective and persuasive requires strong writing and oral advocacy skills. Saying she is mediocre is essentially a meaningless ad hominem attack. There is no specificity in the allegation. They are trying to erase her impressive credentials.

Conservatives are using the diversity hire theme to discredit Harris. They think only straight white men are qualified. Last year, DEI got blamed for the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank, for Boeing’s safety crisis and for the Baltimore Bridge falling down. It is scapegoating.

There are many shallow critiques of racism and sexism. To appreciate what is most offensive about the critique of Harris as a diversity hire, it is necessary to situate the 2024 presidential election inside the broader context of U.S. history. Discrimination was historically baked into America from the beginning. With roots in slavery, black women faced occupational segregation as they were concentrated in jobs that paid lower wages and offered limited upward mobility.

In most of American history, the system quarantined black women in the lowest paying jobs. Legal restrictions kept all women out of high paying jobs that were reserved exclusively for men. The changes around that are relatively recent.

While some real progress has been made, America has never seriously grappled with our structural racism and sexism. Racist and sexist comments about a candidate reflect and reinforce prevailing power dynamics. Any woman or person of color who rises to higher office is still often a first. That is true with Kamala Harris who was the first black woman elected in her state to her various roles over the last couple decades. Being first is anything but mediocre.

Conservatives can’t say all black women should be domestic workers, agricultural workers, care-takers or service workers even if they think that because it is too explicitly racist. So they create the attacks on DEI and wokeness. The purpose is the same: to keep people of color and women in their place at the bottom of the hierarchy. They are creating a new rationale to justify the status quo.

Not surprisingly, racist and sexist attacks on Harris have skyrocketed online since she announced her candidacy. The Global Project Against Hate and Extremism has catalogued a spike in truly ugly racism and misogyny. Much of it is based on the slander that she used sex to advance her career.This has been showing up in far right sites like Truth Social, Gab, Telegram, 4Chan and Rumble.

In the last week or two, we have seen neo-nazis parading in Nashville Tennessee and Howell Michigan, wearing shirts that say “pro-white” while carrying swastika flags. When it comes to racism and sexism, denialism still rules in America. This is not a reassuring sight. One can only hope for a new national willingness to honestly look at and rectify our racial and sexual dark side.

Kamala Harris and Democrats have to contend with the perception that America would never elect a black woman president. Maybe that is one ultimate form racism and sexism take now.