Abbreviated Pundit Roundup is a long-running series published every morning that collects essential political discussion and analysis around the internet.
We begin today with Heather Cox Richardson writing for her “Letters of an American” Substack and asking if the shoe salesman is stupid enough to really ask the American electorate, “are you better off than you were four years ago”?
It seems to me that the news tends to be slow on weekends during the Biden administration, while Mondays are a firehose. (In contrast, Trump’s people tended to dump news in the middle of the night, after Fox News Channel personality Sean Hannity’s show was over, which may or may not have been a coincidence.)
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Former president Trump, who is now the presumptive Republican presidential nominee...tried to spark attacks on President Joe Biden by asking on social media if people feel better off now than they were four years ago. This was perhaps a mistaken message, since four years ago we were in the early days of the coronavirus pandemic. Supermarket shelves were empty, toilet paper was hard to find, healthcare professionals were wearing garbage bags and reusing masks because the Trump administration had permitted the strategic stockpile to run low, deaths were mounting, the stock market had crashed, and the economy had ground to a halt.
On this day four years ago, I recorded that “more than 80 national security professionals broke with their tradition of non-partisanship to endorse former Vice President Joe Biden for president, saying that while they were from all parties and disagreed with each other about pretty much everything else, they had come together to stand against Trump.”
I found Richardson’s observations about news “tendencies” to be interesting.
Aaron Blake of The Washington Post writes about “the context” of Saturday’s “bloodbath” rhetoric.
Regardless, a focus on the one word misses the point. It’s not that this isolated comment is particularly egregious; it’s that it is merely the latest example of this kind of rhetoric. And the rhetoric is often more direct:
- Trump in 2016 said that if he were denied the presidential nomination at the GOP convention, “I think you’d have riots.”
- Trump in November 2020 responded to an adverse ruling by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court by saying it would “induce violence in the streets.” (Trump later expanded, saying, “Bad things will happen, and bad things lead to other type things. It’s a very dangerous thing for our country.”)
- Trump warned last March of “potential death & destruction” if he were charged by the Manhattan district attorney. He also mocked those who urged his supporters to stay peaceful, saying, “OUR COUNTRY IS BEING DESTROYED, AS THEY TELL US TO BE PEACEFUL!”
- Trump warned in August, after the search of his Mar-a-Lago estate, that “terrible things are going to happen.” He later promoted a comment from Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) that there would be “riots in the streets” if Trump were charged.
- Trump in January warned of “bedlam in the country” if the criminal charges against him succeeded. Days earlier, he targeted efforts to remove him from the ballot using the 14th Amendment, saying: “Because if we don’t [get treated fairly], our country’s in big, big trouble. Does everybody understand what I’m saying? I think so.”
Given the incendiary nature of Trump’s latest rhetoric, Jon Allsop of the Columbia Journalism Review reviews the seemingly eternal debate of how the media should handle it.
The to-do over Trump’s remark can be seen as the latest installment in the debate (which we’ve covered often here at CJR) as to how the media ought to handle his rhetoric, given its frequent violence and dishonesty. Nearly a decade after Trump rode down the escalator, it is a debate that media outlets have still yet to resolve. Even before the Ohio rally, it reared its head again last week. Various media critics took CNBC to task for hosting a rambling phone-in interview with Trump without sufficiently pushing back on his talking points. (Watching the interview, CNN’s Oliver Darcy felt transported “to 2015, back when news outlets allowed Trump to phone in to news shows and deliver a drive-by of lies to their audiences.”) The New Yorker’s Susan B. Glasser, meanwhile, took the media as a whole to task for failing to devote sufficient coverage to a prior, equally unhinged Trump rally in Georgia, arguing that his “flood of lies and BS” is now “seen as old news from a candidate whose greatest political success has been to acclimate a large swath of the population to his ever more dangerous alternate reality.”
Such discourse, and the fallout from the Ohio rally in particular, is illustrative not only of the changing contours of the debate over how to handle Trump’s speech, but also of its persistent unsolvability and the muddle that inevitably follows. It demonstrates how well-intentioned observers, united in wanting to get the truth about Trump across to the public, still differ on how to do so. And it shows that how we choose to frame Trump’s words continues to matter, even if some among us would seemingly prefer they speak for themselves.
The debate over how to handle Trump’s speech has fairly closely tracked my time covering the US media. To oversimplify grotesquely, the dominant approach to the question, as I perceive it, has evolved through different phases. There was the phase when news networks gleefully carried Trump’s rallies live, even if (or perhaps because) they thought he had no shot of being president—he was a curiosity, a gimmick; above all he was a ratings draw. (We might call this the “damn good for CBS” phase.) Then there was the phase of treating his rallies as a form of anthropology, a key to unlocking his suddenly very real mass appeal. Then there was the phase of seeing it as irresponsible to broadcast Trump live (at least without some form of real-time fact-checking-by-chyron) due to the information pollution streaming perpetually in his wake—a phase that arguably reached its zenith with Trump’s COVID briefings in 2020, and their associated exhortations to inject bleach.
Devlin Barrett of The Washington Post reports about yet another outrageous ruling by U.S. District Court Judge Aileen Cannon, the judge overseeing the classified documents case against Trump.
U.S. District Court Judge Aileen M. Cannon instructed lawyers to file proposed jury instructions by April 2 on two topics that are related to defense motions to have the indictment dismissed outright.
Cannon, a relatively inexperienced judge who was nominated by Trump and has been on the bench since late 2020, listened to arguments about the two defense motions last week.
In that hearing, she sounded skeptical that Trump’s attack on the Espionage Act, or his embrace of the Presidential Records Act, were strong enough to save the former president and likely 2024 Republican White House nominee from a criminal trial. At the same time, she suggested that aspects of Trump’s arguments might be valid enough to come into play during jury instructions.
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Her two-page order, however, also suggests an openness to some of the defense’s claims that the Presidential Records Act allows Trump or other presidents to declare highly classified documents to be their own personal property. National security law experts say that is not what the law says, or how it has been interpreted over decades by the courts, particularly given the other laws that govern national security secrets.
Chris Geidner writes on his “Law Dork” Substack about the confusion surrounding the extension of the stay on Texas law SB4, a state law regarding immigration enforcement.
At 5:04 p.m., however, reporters received word that Alito had extended the stay“ pending further order of the undersigned or of the Court.”
So, S.B. 4 remains on hold.
As of now, I don’t know what happened. I don’t know if the stay lapsed for a few minutes, as is what appears to have happened, or if there was a delay informing the press and public of an order that came from Alito just before 5 p.m.
Despite the significant confusion caused by the timing, no one was saying on Monday night when Alito’s order was issued or when the parties were informed. Neither Texas Solicitor General Aaron Nielson nor the Supreme Court’s Public Information Office responded to requests seeking information about when the order was received or entered, respectively. A spokesperson in the U.S. Justice Department’s Office of Public Affairs emailed that they were “not able to confirm” when DOJ was informed of Alito’s order.
Now, it is possible that there were behind-the-scenes goings-on at the Supreme Court that led to this strangeness. Maybe Alito didn’t want to extend the stay, but Chief Justice John Roberts or others convinced him to do so. (As I posited at dinner, perhaps he was told that a majority of the full court would do it if he wouldn’t. Who knows? Not me!)
Ian Millhiser of Vox writes about the Justices Elena Kagan-Brett Kavanaugh alliance that stood out during oral arguments of Murthy v. Missouri, the U.S. Supreme Court case involving permissible communications between the government and private social media entities.
Justices Elena Kagan and Kavanaugh seemed especially frustrated with the Fifth Circuit’s attempt to shut down communication between the government and the platforms, and for the same reason. Both Kagan and Kavanaugh worked in high-level White House jobs — Kagan as deputy domestic policy adviser to President Bill Clinton, and Kavanaugh as staff secretary to President George W. Bush — and both recoiled at the suggestion that the White House can’t try to persuade the media to change what it publishes.
Kavanaugh, a Republican appointed by Donald Trump, even rose to the government’s defense after Justice Samuel Alito attacked Biden administration officials who, Alito claimed, were too demanding toward the platforms.
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Similarly, Kagan admitted that “like Justice Kavanaugh, I’ve had experience encouraging people to suppress their own speech” after a journalist published a bad editorial or a piece with a factual error. But this sort of routine back-and-forth between White House officials and reporters is not a First Amendment violation unless there is some kind of threat or coercion. Why should the rule be any different for social media companies?
So Benjamin Aguiñaga, the lawyer trying to defend the Fifth Circuit’s order, arrived at the Court this morning facing an already skeptical bench. And his disastrous response to a hypothetical from Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson only dug him deeper into a hole.
Paige Oamek and Rohan Montgomery of The Nation write about the cruelty of a proposed Kentucky law that will, for one, allow property owners to shoot homeless people under some conditions.
On March 14, the Kentucky Senate Judiciary Committee voted to approve HB 5, the “Safer Kentucky Act.” The legislation will now head to the Senate floor for a vote, and it will almost certainly pass. The 78-page bill criminalizes homelessness—and decriminalizes the use of deadly force against individuals engaging in “unlawful camping.” Under this law, if a property owner believes an unhoused trespasser is attempting to commit a felony or attempting to “dispossess” them, they can shoot the homeless person.
That’s not all. “Really, this is like 20 bills packed into one,” Kaylee Raymer, a criminal-justice policy analyst at the Kentucky Center for Economic Policy, told us. A slew of “tough on crime” policies would create or enhance penalties for sleeping in your car, damaging your apartment while moving out, or fleeing from police. It will institute a three-strike rule, where the third strike is either a mandatory life sentence or execution. The result will be more people in prison for a longer time. The bill is a rewind to the failed policies of the 1990s.
More than a hundred advocacy groups in Kentucky oppose the bill, but they face a veto-proof supermajority of Republicans animated by fears of a nonexistent crime wave, driven by a desire to control Democratic cities, and backed by a conservative think tank pushing similar legislation across the country. HB 5 is the most extreme anti-homeless, tough-on-crime bill introduced in a state legislature this year—and copies of HB 5 could soon start popping up across the country.
Brenda Goodman of CNN reports that the CDC has issued a health alert about the worldwide spread of measles.
The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued a health alert to doctors on Monday to increase awareness of the international spread of measles, and urged them to vaccinate infants a few months ahead of the typical schedule if families are planning to go abroad.
The warning comes ahead of the busy spring and summer travel season. Many countries, including Austria, Philippines, Romania and the United Kingdom–destinations frequented by American tourists–are experiencing measles outbreaks, the CDC noted.
The CDC also warned about lagging vaccination rates in 36 US states where fewer than 95% of kindergarteners have been vaccinated against measles, putting them below the herd immunity threshold. Herd immunity is the portion of the population that must be immunized against an infection to prevent its spread through the community.
Even so, vaccination rates against measles in the U.S. are “pretty strong,” said Dr. Nirav Shah, CDC’s principal deputy director, so this isn’t a situation like Covid, where everyone is susceptible.
Thomas Friedman of The New York Times goes over what U.S. Sen. Chuck Schumer and President Joe Biden got right in their very public criticism of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
… I want to be very clear about one thing that Schumer and Biden have also made clear: The war in Gaza was forced on Israel by a vicious attack by Hamas on Israeli border communities, populated by the most dovish Israelis in the country’s political spectrum (emphasis is mine-ck). If you are calling for a “cease-fire now” in Gaza and not a “cease-fire and hostage release now,” it’s making the problem worse. Because it just feeds Israelis’ fears that the world is against them, no matter what they do.
People protesting Israel’s war in Gaza and the many civilian casualties there also have a responsibility to call out Hamas — as Schumer did. It is a murderous organization that has brought death and destruction, and despair for the people of Gaza, and has done as much since the 1980s to destroy the possibility of a two-state solution as any actor in the region.
Back to the argument: Why has Netanyahu become such a problem for the U.S. and Biden geopolitically and politically?
The short answer is that America’s entire Middle East strategy right now — and, I would argue, Israel’s long-term interests — depends on Israel partnering with the non-Hamas Palestinian Authority based in Ramallah, in the West Bank, on the long-term development needs of Palestinians and, ultimately, on a two-state solution. And Netanyahu has expressly ruled that out, along with any other fully formed plan for the morning after in Gaza.
Monika Bollinger, Thore Schröder, and Christoph Schult of Der Spiegel do an in-depth investigation into allegations that the UN relief agency UNRWA was also a nest of members of Hamas and other terrorist groups.
The Palestinian aid organization UNRWA, short for United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East, was founded by the General Assembly in 1949 after the first Arab-Israeli war. It is a unique organization, responsible for the education and health care of 5.9 million Palestinian refugees and descendants of refugees in the Palestinian Territories as well as Jordan, Syria and Lebanon. In the absence of a Palestinian state, UNRWA guarantees a minimum level of stability in a region in permanent crisis. And it is by far the most important relief organization in the Gaza war.
But no small number of people in Israel have long seen UNRWA as being part of the problem. They would like to see it abolished, its tasks transferred to other organizations. Critics argue that UNRWA prevents the integration of Palestinians from outside Israel's borders, thus ensuring the continuation of the conflict. Part of the agency's mandate is to also register subsequent generations as refugees. That's why the number of Palestinian refugees has risen from around 750,000 to just under 6 million. The aid organization's mandate is to provide care for these people until the conflict has ended. UNRWA is also committed to neutrality, and finding a political solution is not among its mandates. [...]
"UNRWA is part of the social fabric in Gaza," Philippe Lazzarini says in his office in East Jerusalem. This, he says, is why he can't rule out the possibility that individual employees are active with Hamas or the Palestinian Jihad. "But of course that would be a terrible betrayal – of our organization and of the Palestinians."
Pablo Ferri of El País in English writes about the difficulties of reaching a resolution to the chaos in Haiti.
The last two weeks in Port-au-Prince have been particularly violent. Criminal gangs virtually cut off the city. On February 29 and the following days, groups of armed gangs jointly attacked the airport and the National Penitentiary, freeing nearly all the prisoners — more than 3,500. Nine National Police facilities were also targeted. Six agents were killed when gang members raided their station. The gunmen posted videos of themselves mocking the officers’ bodies on social media.
Emboldened by the power they have gained in the past few years, armed gangs responded violently — and with rare unity — to Henry’s initiative to crack down on crime. The attacks began after the prime minister traveled to Kenya to sign an agreement to send 1,000 police officers to the Caribbean country, with the backing of the United Nations and with U.S. funding. The gangs wanted to stop the efforts to reinforce Haiti’s dwindling police force: with 11 million inhabitants, Haiti has fewer than 10,000 officers.
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Also of concern is the fact that some members of the council are backed by political parties that have been accused of supporting criminal gangs, such as the PHTK, the party of former president Moïse and his predecessor, Michel Martelly. Not surprisingly, one of the criminal leaders who has made the most headlines — Jimmy “Barbeque” Chérizier — supported the PHTK in the past. Human rights organizations have accused Chérizier and the PHTK of working together to repress the opposition protests in 2018.
Finally today, Brian C.H. Fong of The Diplomat writes about the fall of Hong Kong as a geopolitical “neutral zone.”
In recent years, many people have talked about the fall of Hong Kong. But different pundits have quite different focuses. The first perspective attributes the fall of Hong Kong to the erosion of its political freedom, highlighting the backsliding of its freedoms of speech, press, and protest. The second perspective perceives the fall of Hong Kong as a breakdown of its autonomy, focusing on China’s absorption of its government, economy, and society into mainland systems. The last perspective sees the fall of Hong Kong as a decay of its status as an international financial center, indicating its exodus of capital and talents.
All these perspectives have their own intrinsic logic. Yet, the loss of freedom, autonomy, and prosperity are symptoms — rather than causes — of Hong Kong’s downfall. Fundamentally, the fall of Hong Kong is caused by its demise as a “geopolitical neutral zone” between China and the United States.
From the Cold War to the post-Cold War, Hong Kong’s geopolitical neutrality not only attracted tremendous inflows of capital and talents, but it also enabled the city to be developed into a semi-democratic autonomy. But now it’s all over. For Hong Kong, the unfolding of China-U.S. New Cold War means that the city has lost the magic wand that has created its previous freedom, autonomy, and prosperity.
Everyone try to have the best possible day!