Taking on Guardian columnist Margaret Sullivan’s challenge to illuminate “the crucial importance of this election and the dangers of a Trump win,” we begin today with Charlie Savage, Maggie Haberman, and Jonathan Swan of The New York Times and their reporting on Number 45’s immigration plans should he win the 2024 presidential election.
He plans to scour the country for unauthorized immigrants and deport people by the millions per year.
To help speed mass deportations, Mr. Trump is preparing an enormous expansion of a form of removal that does not require due process hearings. To help Immigration and Customs Enforcement carry out sweeping raids, he plans to reassign other federal agents and deputize local police officers and National Guard soldiers voluntarily contributed by Republican-run states.
To ease the strain on ICE detention facilities, Mr. Trump wants to build huge camps to detain people while their cases are processed and they await deportation flights. And to get around any refusal by Congress to appropriate the necessary funds, Mr. Trump would redirect money in the military budget, as he did in his first term to spend more on a border wall than Congress had authorized. [...]
Since Mr. Trump left office, the political environment on immigration has moved in his direction. He is also more capable now of exploiting that environment if he is re-elected than he was when he first won election as an outsider.
Millions per year. Millions.
Also take a look at Dartagnan’s rec list post of Trump’s horrific plans for the future.
Philip Bump of The Washington Post says recent polling shows that, in fact, Americans are more in favor of authoritarianism than they were even two years ago.
Last month, PRRI released the results of its annual American Values Survey. The pollsters asked respondents a slew of questions measuring their views of the country and its politics in the moment. Included among the questions was one that specifically addressed the question of authoritarianism: Did they think that things in the U.S. had gone so far off track that we need a leader who would break rules in order to fix the country’s direction?
About 2 in 5 respondents said they did. That included nearly half of Republicans.
Back in early 2016, political scientist and consultant Matthew MacWilliams identified support for authoritarian tendencies as a key indicator of support for Trump among Republican primary voters. Before the 2020 election, he revisited the idea, noting that “approximately 18 percent of Americans are highly disposed to authoritarianism, according to their answers to four simple survey questions used by social scientists to estimate this disposition.” [...]
Less than half of respondents objected to the idea that we need a strong leader, even if the leader bends existing rules. A plurality of conservatives endorsed that idea. Less than half of respondents similarly expressed concern that the government might want to muffle critical reporting with a plurality of conservatives again expressing a lack of concern about that possibility.
Rich Tenorio of the Guardian profiles Cuban American artist Edel Rodriguez and reviews Rodriguez’s new memoir: “Worm: A Cuban-American Odyssey.”
Rodriguez grew up in the shadow of a different sort of insurgency, the revolution that swept Fidel Castro to power in January 1959. He knew what it was like for a people to lose their freedoms under a dictatorship, and he knew the resulting desire to seek liberty, which he and his family did in the Mariel boatlift in 1980. So after 2016, when Donald Trump won the White House, uncomfortable memories from the not-so-distant past began to surface, never more so than on 6 January 2021.
Now, Rodriguez has put it all down in a graphic-novel memoir, Worm: A Cuban-American Odyssey.
“I don’t think most Americans realize what a coup is, or a coup attempt, how dangerous it is,” he says. [...]
Rodriguez’s depictions of Trump are now famous, making the covers of Time and Der Spiegel. The most striking is up for debate. Is it Trump’s face as a melting blob, which MSNBC likened to the Wicked Witch of the West? Trump holding a bloody knife in one hand and the severed head of the Statue of Liberty in the other, inspired by a picture of an Islamic State terrorist? Trump draped in an American flag, giving the Nazi salute?
“I think he brought a certain kind of extremism to politics in America,” Rodriguez says. “I felt that it needed to be addressed … I’m just not a fan of extremism of any sort.
Mary Ziegler of Slate notes that voter support of abortion rights may still be overcome by conservative state Supreme Courts.
The depth of voter support for abortion rights is impressive, but celebrations of the success of abortion rights ballot initiatives overlook the next step in the conflict over reproductive rights: the war over the state Supreme Court judges charged with interpreting new constitutional amendments.
Consider how state judges could make a difference in the real-world impact of Issue 1, the measure just passed in Ohio. The success of that ballot measure seems to require strict scrutiny of any restriction on “an individual right to one’s own reproductive medical treatment,” including to make decisions on abortion, contraception, fertility treatment, and miscarriage care, before viability—and allows access for when a patient’s health or life is threatened thereafter. In theory, Ohio might have a hard time justifying many of its current restrictions—and outright abortion ban at six weeks—under Issue 1. But the people ultimately interpreting the new constitutional amendment are the judges of the Ohio Supreme Court. Republicans swept three open races for that court last year, giving conservatives a 4–3 edge on the court. When there is any ambiguity at all, expect Ohio’s court to resolve it in favor of abortion opponents—and to sign off on restrictions that seem to conflict with the language voters endorsed. Voters’ only recourse at that point will be to support Democrats when three Supreme Court seats with expiring terms—two currently held by Democratic judges and one by a Republican judge—are on the ballot next year.
In Florida, the state where the next blockbuster fight on abortion is set to unfold, things are even trickier, as the conservative state Supreme Court may stop voters from having a say in the first place. To date, Floridians Protecting Freedom, a reproductive rights group, is on track to collect the required 800,000 signatures needed before February to get an abortion rights ballot initiative before voters, and polling suggests that even with Florida’s 60 percent threshold for ballot measures, the effort stands a real chance of success.
James Surowiecki of The Atlantic cannot understand why Americans simply cannot accept good economic news.
As has been much commented on (including by me), this gloom is striking when contrasted with the actual performance of the U.S. economy, which grew at an annual rate of 4.9 percent in the most recent quarter, and which has seen unemployment holding below 4 percent for more than 18 months. But the downbeat mood is perhaps even more striking when contrasted with the picture offered by the Federal Reserve’s recently released Survey of Consumer Finances.
The survey provides an in-depth analysis of the financial condition of American households, conducted for the Fed by the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago. Published every three years, it’s the proverbial gold standard of household research. The latest survey looked at Americans’ net worth as of mid-to-late 2022 and Americans’ income in 2021, comparing them with equivalent data from three years earlier. It found that despite the severe disruption to the economy caused by the pandemic and the recovery from it, Americans across the spectrum saw their incomes and wealth rise over the survey period. [...]
The picture the survey paints, then, is one of American households not only weathering the pandemic in surprisingly good shape, but ultimately also emerging from it in better financial shape than they were going in. And that, in turn, points to the effect of the U.S. policy response to the crisis: Stimulus payments, enhanced unemployment benefits, the child-care tax credit, and the moratorium on student-loan payments boosted household income and balance sheets, helping people pay down debt and increase their savings. In the process, these policies mildly narrowed inequality.
Omer Bartov writes for The New York Times that absent proof, we should stop characterizing what is now taking place in Gaza as “genocide”—for now.
As a historian of genocide, I believe that there is no proof that genocide is currently taking place in Gaza, although it is very likely that war crimes, and even crimes against humanity, are happening. That means two important things: First, we need to define what it is that we are seeing, and second, we have the chance to stop the situation before it gets worse. We know from history that it is crucial to warn of the potential for genocide before it occurs, rather than belatedly condemn it after it has taken place. I think we still have that time.
It is clear that the daily violence being unleashed on Gaza is both unbearable and untenable. Since the Oct. 7 massacre by Hamas — itself a war crime and a crime against humanity — Israel’s military air and ground assault on Gaza has killed more than 10,500 Palestinians, according to the Gaza Health Ministry, a number that includes thousands of children. That’s well over five times as many people as the more than 1,400 people in Israel murdered by Hamas. In justifying the assault, Israeli leaders and generals have made terrifying pronouncements that indicate a genocidal intent.
Still, the collective horror of what we are watching does not mean that a genocide, according to the international legal definition of the term, is already underway. Because genocide, sometimes called “the crime of all crimes,” is perceived by many to be the most extreme of all crimes, there is often an impulse to describe any instance of mass murder and massacre as genocide. But this urge to label all atrocious events as genocide tends to obfuscate reality rather than explain it.
Finally today, Gorka Rodríguez Olea of El País in English asks us to consider the impacts of food culture on a city.
The impact that food has on a city is easy to see, revealing how food culture is a determining factor in the permanent reinvention of urban space. We see it in the built city: in the layout and names of some streets and squares, and in the tangible heritage embodied by storehouses or food markets. In fact, in Mediterranean cities the markets continue to be the landmarks where one can access quality and seasonal products. We also see this impact in intangible elements such as folklore, popular festivals or traditional gastronomy, as well as other cultural and artistic manifestations like photographs, paintings, novels or music.
Supplying food to cities requires a titanic effort. Currently, with more than half of the planet’s population living in urban areas, the possibility of producing, importing, marketing, preparing, consuming and disposing of food every day for the millions of inhabitants that populate cities around the world is surprising.
This effort has a physical and a social impact on our lives and on the planet, surpassing in magnitude any other activity we do. However, in the West, very few of us are fully aware of this process. Food arrives on our plates as if by magic, and we rarely take a moment to think about how it got to us.
Try to have the best possible day everyone!