Tag: biden
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Donald Glover Confirms Barron Trump Will Be Writing On ‘Swarm’ Season 2
LOS ANGELES—Stating that his latest hire was sure to take the storyline in fascinating new directions, Donald Glover confirmed Friday that Barron Trump would be a writer on the second season of Swarm. “Barron brings a lot to the table, and we’re sure he’ll be an indispensable presence in our writers room next season,” said Glover, explaining that he and his co-creator Janine Nabers were blown away after reading the former president’s son’s Atlanta spec script. “I think the unique life experience Barron has had will give him a lot of insight into the mind of a young Houston woman who has endured a series of dead-end jobs, maxed out her credit cards, and worked as an exotic dancer. It’s honestly a complete coincidence that his father is Donald Trump; he was hands-down the best working professional writer we could find anywhere.” At press time, Glover confirmed that he had hired Hunter Biden to do joke punch-ups on the show.
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Biden Approves Controversial Oil Drilling Project In Alaska
The Biden administration approved a massive $8 billion drilling project in Alaska for oil company ConocoPhillips, drawing objections from environmental groups who say it will speed up the climate breakdown and undermine food security. What do you think?
“This is the kind of bipartisan destruction people wanted when they voted for Biden.”
Buck Gallizeau, Unemployed
“If protesters have a better idea to speed up our climate breakdown, I’m sure the government is all ears.”
Daniel Mello, Blackjack Dealer
“Okay, but let’s start fresh with stopping climate change tomorrow.”
Kim Lytie, Plan Consultant
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Xi says U.S. is trying to hinder China in its quest for global influence
BEIJING (AP) — Is the United States out to sabotage China? Chinese leaders think so.
President Xi Jinping has accused Washington this week of trying to isolate his country and hold back its development. That reflects the ruling Communist Party’s growing frustration that its pursuit of prosperity and global influence is threatened by U.S. restrictions on access to technology, its support for Taiwan and other moves seen by Beijing as hostile.
Xi, China’s most powerful leader in decades, tries to appear to be above problems and usually makes blandly positive public comments. That made his complaint Monday all the more striking. Xi said a U.S.-led campaign of “containment and suppression” of China has “brought unprecedented, severe challenges.” He called on the public to “dare to fight.”
“ In the five months since U.S. President Joe Biden met with Chinese leader Xi Jinping in Indonesia, Washington has approved more weapons sales to Taiwan, criticized Beijing’s stance on Ukraine and put more Chinese companies on export watchlists. ”
On Tuesday, Foreign Minister Qin Gang sharpened the warning, saying Washington faces possible “conflict and confrontation” if it fails to change course.
“The foreign minister is speaking on behalf of a widely held view that the United States is coming after China and they have to defend themselves,” said John Delury, an international relations specialist at Yonsei University in Seoul.
See: China’s foreign minister warns of conflict unless U.S. changes course
China is hardly the only government to fume at Washington’s dominance of global strategic and economic affairs. But Chinese leaders see the United States as making extra effort to thwart Beijing as a challenger for regional and possibly global leadership.
The ruling party wants to restore China’s historic role as a political and cultural leader, raise incomes by transforming the country into an inventor of technology, and unite what it considers the Chinese motherland by taking control of Taiwan, the self-ruled island democracy that Beijing claims as part of its territory.
Beijing sees those as positive goals, but American officials see them as threats. They say Chinese development plans are based at least in part on stealing or pressuring foreign companies to hand over technology. Some warn Chinese competition might erode U.S. industrial dominance and incomes.
Washington has set back Beijing’s plans by putting Chinese companies including its first global tech brand, Huawei, on a blacklist that limits access to processor chips and other technology. That crippled Huawei’s smartphone brand, once one of the world’s biggest. American officials are lobbying European and other allies to avoid Huawei equipment when they upgrade phone networks.
Washington cites security fears, but Beijing says that is an excuse to hurt its fledgling competitors.
The two governments have the world’s biggest trading relationship and common interests in combating climate change and other problems. But relations are strained over Taiwan, Beijing’s treatment of Hong Kong and mostly Muslim ethnic minorities, and its refusal to criticize or isolate Russia for its invasion of Ukraine.
The official Chinese view has soured following an uptick when Xi met U.S. President Joe Biden in November in Indonesia, said Shi Yinhong, an international-relations specialist at Renmin University in Beijing. He noted that in the five months since then, Washington approved more weapons sales to Taiwan, criticized Beijing’s stance on Ukraine and put more Chinese companies on export watchlists, all of which China saw as hostile.
Xi and Qin spoke in a “dramatic way” this week, but “the essence of what they said is China’s long-term stance,” Shi said. The leadership believes “the United States has implemented almost all around, drastic and desperate containment of China in all respects, especially in strategic and military fields.”
“The risk of military conflict between China and the United States is getting bigger,” Shi said.
See: U.S. warns China against overt Kremlin backing as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine nears 1-year mark
A State Department spokesperson, Ned Price, said Washington wants to “coexist responsibly” within the global trade and political system and denied the U.S. government wants to suppress China.
“This is not about containing China. This is not about suppressing China. This is not about holding China back,” Price said in Washington. “We want to have that constructive competition that is fair” and “doesn’t veer into that conflict.”
“ ‘This is not about containing China. This is not about suppressing China. This is not about holding China back.’”
The United States formed a strategic group, the Quad, with Japan, Australia and India in response to concern about China and its claim to vast tracts of sea that are busy shipping lanes. They insist the group doesn’t focus on any one country, but its official statements are about territorial claims and other issues on which they have disputes with Beijing.
The latest change in tone follows acrimonious exchanges over a Chinese balloon that was shot down after passing over North America. Its electronics and other equipment are being examined by the FBI.
See: U.S. prepares new rules on investment in China
Qin, the foreign minister is “trying to position China as a global force for moderation and for peace” in front of foreign audiences and say “it’s the Americans who are blowing things out of proportion,” Delury said.
Xi’s government is especially irritated by displays of support by American and other Western legislators for Taiwan, which split with China in 1949 after a civil war.
Taiwan never has been part of the People’s Republic of China, but the Communist Party says the island of 22 million people must unite with the mainland, by force if necessary.
Washington is obligated by federal law to see that Taiwan has the weapons to defend itself and has sold it fighter jets and missiles. Chinese leaders complain that encourages Taiwanese politicians who might want to resist unification and possibly declare formal independence, a step Beijing says would lead to war.
Premier Li Keqiang, who is due to step down as China’s No. 2 leader this month, called on Sunday for “peaceful reunification.” But Xi’s government also has stepped up efforts to intimidate the island by flying fighter jets and firing missiles into the sea nearby.
The latest downturn is “testament to the real degradation” of U.S.-Chinese relations, which “never had much trust,” said Drew Thompson, a fellow at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy at the National University of Singapore.
Chinese leaders “consider any sort of discussion on strategic issues as sensitive and out of bounds,” which leads to “heightened risk of miscalculation,” Thompson said.
“They believe the U.S. is a hegemon that seeks to undermine the Communist Party and its legitimacy, and they have ample evidence of that,” he said. “But should perceptions and the balance of interests change, they could just as easily believe the U.S. is a partner for achieving the party’s objectives.”
More about China and the West:
Germany’s Scholz warns of ‘consequences’ if China sends arms to Russia
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The Topic Biden Keeps Dodging
President Joe Biden is following a strategy of asymmetrical warfare as the 2024 presidential race takes shape.
Through the early maneuvering, the leading Republican candidates, particularly former President Donald Trump and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis are trying to ignite a procession of culture-war firefights against what DeSantis calls “the woke mind virus.”
With the exception of abortion rights, Biden, by contrast, is working to downplay or defuse almost all cultural issues. Instead Biden is targeting his communication with the public almost exclusively on delivering tangible economic benefits to working-class families, such as lower costs for insulin, the protection of Social Security and Medicare, and the creation of more manufacturing jobs.
While the leading Republican presidential contenders are effectively asking voters “Who shares your values?” or, in the harshest versions, “Who shares your resentments?,” Biden wants voters to ask “Who is on your side?”
The distinction is not absolute. Trump, DeSantis, and the other Republicans circling the 2024 race argue that Biden’s spending programs have triggered inflation, and insist that lower taxes, budget cuts, and more domestic energy production would spur more growth. And in addition to their unwavering defense of abortion rights, Biden and his aides have also occasionally criticized some of the other Republican cultural initiatives, such as DeSantis’s “Don’t Say Gay” bill banning discussion of sexual orientation in early grades.
But the difference in emphasis is real, and the contrast illuminates the core of Biden’s vision about how to sustain a national majority for Democrats. He’s betting that the non-college-educated workers, especially those who are white, who constitute the principal audience for the Republican cultural offensive will prove less receptive to those divisive messages if they feel more economically secure.
“We need to reforge that identity as the party that gives a damn about people who feel forgotten, who have really tough lives right now,” says the Democratic strategist Mike Lux, who recently released a study of political attitudes in mostly blue-collar, midsize “factory towns” across the Midwest. “That’s the central mission. And that’s why I think Biden is right to be focusing on those economic issues first.”
But other Democrats worry that Biden’s economy-first approach risks allowing Republicans such as DeSantis to define themselves as championing parents while advancing an agenda that civil-rights advocates believe promotes exclusion and bigotry. They also fear that Biden’s reluctance to engage more directly with Republicans over the rollback of rights raging through red states risks dispiriting the core Democratic constituencies, including Black Americans and the LGBTQ community, that face the most direct consequences from restrictions on how teachers and professors can talk about race or bans on gender-affirming care for minors. These Democrats have grown even more uneasy as Biden lately has moved toward Republican positions on immigration (with new restrictions on asylum seekers) and crime (by indicating that he would not block congressional efforts to reverse a reform-oriented overhaul of Washington, D.C.’s criminal code.)
“Not engaging in culture wars does not mean that Democrats win: It means that we forfeit,” says Terrance Woodbury, chief executive officer and founding partner of HIT Strategies, a Democratic consulting firm that focuses on young and minority voters. The group’s polling, Woodbury told me, shows that “not only do Democratic voters expect Democratic leaders to do more to advance social and racial justice” but that “they will punish Democrats that do not.”
My conversations with Democrats familiar with White House thinking, however, suggest that Biden and those around him don’t share that perspective. In that inner circle, I’m told, the dominant view is that the best way to respond to the culture-war onslaught from Republicans is to engage with it as little as possible. Those around Biden do not believe that the positions Republicans are adopting on questions such as classroom censorship, book bans, LGBTQ rights, and allowing people to carry firearms without a permit, much less restricting or banning abortion, will prove popular with voters beyond the core conservative states.
More fundamentally, Biden’s circle believes that voters don’t want to be subjected to fights about such polarizing cultural issues and would prefer that elected officials focus more on daily economic concerns such as inflation, jobs, and health care. Those around Biden largely share the view expressed by the Democratic pollster Guy Molyneux, who studied public attitudes about key GOP educational proposals in two national surveys last year. “People don’t really want either side of these culture wars to win; they want to just stop having these culture wars,” Molyneux told me. “They really see a lot of this as a diversion.” A national survey released this week by Navigator, a Democratic polling consortium, supports Molyneux’s point: When asked to identify their top priorities in education, far more voters cited reducing gun violence and ensuring that kids learn skills that will help them succeed than picked “preventing them from being exposed to woke ideas about race and gender.”
Biden hasn’t completely sidestepped the culture wars. After mostly avoiding the issue earlier in his presidency, he’s been relentless in his defense of abortion rights since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade last summer. (Earlier this year, Vice President Kamala Harris commemorated what would have been the 50th anniversary of Roe with a speech in Tallahassee, Florida, where she targeted DeSantis’s signing of legislation banning abortion there after 15 weeks.) When DeSantis signed the “Don’t Say Gay” bill last year, the White House also criticized him. And most recently in Selma, Alabama, Biden has also issued tough criticisms of the red-state laws erecting new hurdles to voting.
Yet the Biden administration, and especially the president himself, has mostly kept its distance from the surging tide of bills advancing in Florida and other red states rolling back a broad range of civil rights and liberties. Tellingly, when Biden traveled to Florida last month, it was not to condemn DeSantis’s agenda of restrictions on classroom teachers or transgender minors, but to defend Social Security, Medicare, and the Affordable Care Act; the only time he mentioned DeSantis by name was to criticize him for refusing to expand eligibility for Medicaid health coverage under the ACA.
Since the midterm elections, Biden has centered his public appearances on cutting ribbons for infrastructure projects and new clean-energy or semiconductor plants funded by the troika of massive public-investment bills he signed during his first two years; defending Social Security and Medicare; highlighting lower drug prices from the legislation he passed allowing Medicare to bargain for better deals with pharmaceutical companies; and combatting “junk fees” from airlines, hotels, and other companies. In his State of the Union address last month, Biden spoke at length about those economic plans and what he calls his “blue-collar blueprint to rebuild America” before he mentioned any social issues, such as police reform, gun control, and abortion. The budget Biden will release today advances these themes by proposing to extend the solvency of Medicare by raising taxes on the affluent.
The emphasis was very different in marquee appearances last weekend from Trump and DeSantis. Trump, in his long monologue on Saturday at CPAC, accused Biden of exacerbating inflation and promised to pursue an all-out trade war with China. But those comments came deep into a nearly two-hour speech in which Trump blurred the boundary between calling on his supporters to engage in a culture war and an actual civil war, when he promised to be their “retribution” against elites and “woke tyranny.”
When DeSantis spoke at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, northwest of Los Angeles, last Sunday, he delivered more of an economic message, attributing Florida’s robust population growth in part to its low taxes and low spending. But he drew a much more passionate reaction from his audience later when he denounced the “woke mind virus,” recounted his stand during the coronavirus pandemic against “the biomedical security state,” and pledged to “empower parents” against the educational establishment. DeSantis received his only standing ovation when he declared that schools “should not be teaching a second grader that they can choose their gender.”
To some extent, the heavy reliance by Trump and DeSantis on these cultural confrontations reflects their belief that GOP primary voters are much more energized now by social rather than economic issues. Yet it also represents the widespread GOP belief that distaste for liberal positions on cultural issues remains an insuperable barrier for Democrats with most working-class voters, including a growing number of Latino men. “Blue-collar voters don’t separate cultural concerns from economic fears,” the GOP strategist Brad Todd, a co-author of The Great Revolt, told me in an email. “They think big global companies are in cahoots with the left on culture, and they don’t put pocketbook concerns ahead of way-of-life concerns.”
Todd thinks Biden’s attempt to define himself mostly around economic rather than cultural commitments represents his desire “to jump in a time machine and go back to the Democratic Party of the ’80s.” Indeed, Biden, who was first elected to the Senate in 1972, came of age politically in an era when Republicans repeatedly used racially infused “wedge issues” to pry away working-class white voters who had mostly supported Democrats on economic grounds over the previous generation. Some Democrats see Biden’s recent moves to adopt more right-leaning policies on immigration and crime as a resurgence of that era’s widespread Democratic belief that the party needed to neutralize cultural issues, typically by conceding ground to conservative positions.
Like others I spoke with, Jenifer Fernandez Ancona, the vice president and chief strategy officer at Way to Win, believes that focusing primarily on economic issues makes sense for Biden now, but that he will eventually be forced to address the GOP’s cultural arguments more directly. Sublimating those issues, she argues, isn’t sustainable, because it is “hurting the very people” Democrats now rely on to win and because the Republican cultural arguments, left unaddressed, could prove very persuasive to not only working-class white voters but also Hispanic and even Black men. Ultimately, Fernandez said, Biden and other Democrats must link the two fronts by convincing working-class voters that Republicans are picking cultural fights to distract them from an economic agenda that mostly benefits the rich. “We have to put to bed this idea [that] we can have an economic message that doesn’t address the racial grievance and fear of change that is at the center of all this culture-war stuff,” argued Fernandez, whose group funds candidates and organizations focused on building a multiracial electoral coalition.
The debate among Democrats ultimately comes down to whether Biden is skillfully controlling the electoral battlefield or trying to resurrect a coalition that no longer exists (centered on working-class families) at the expense of dividing or demoralizing the coalition the party actually relies on today (revolving around young people, college-educated white voters, and racial minority voters). Several Democratic strategists told me that one obvious challenge with Biden’s trying to define the election around the question of which party can deliver the best economic results for working-class families is that polls throughout his presidency have found that more Americans would pick the GOP. “People still think that Trump economics was better for them than Biden or Obama economics,” Celinda Lake, who served as one of Biden’s lead campaign pollsters in 2020, told me.
To Lake, that’s an argument for Biden’s strategy of stressing kitchen-table concerns, because she believes the party cannot win unless it narrows the GOP advantage on the economy. But other Democrats believe today’s party is less likely to persuade a national majority that it is better than Republicans for their finances than it is to convince them that the Trump-era GOP constitutes a threat to their rights, values, and democracy itself. Biden’s response to the Republican initiatives censoring teachers, rolling back abortion access, and threatening LGBTQ rights “simply cannot be ‘more jobs,’” Woodbury said. “If Democrats insist on fighting exclusively on economic terms, every poll in America shows they will lose.”
Ronald Brownstein
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Town Using $20K Of Covid Relief Cash On TMNT Manhole Covers
Photo: Paul Natkin (Getty Images) Northampton, Massachusets officials have greenlit a plan to create and install four Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle-themed manhole covers to celebrate the fact that the massive franchise was originally created there. And to pay for it, the town is using funds intended to help rebuild towns and businesses affected by the Covid-19 pandemic.
The pandemic (which is still a thing, even if a lot of people are trying to pretend otherwise) devastated cities and businesses across the United States starting in March 2020. So in 2021, congress passed the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 aka ARPA. This was a nearly $2 trillion economic stimulus package that was designed to help the country recover faster from the various effects of the pandemic as well as to try to deal with the ongoing recession. After barely passing in congress, President Biden signed it on March 11, 2021. As a result, Northampton, Massachusets received $4 million that the town and its officials could put toward its Covid-19 recovery efforts.
And that’s, I guess, how we ended up here: With a city spending $20,000 on TMNT-themed manhole covers.
WCVB As reported by WCVB, the four manhole covers will be located along Main Street and each one will represent a different turtle. This isn’t just a random choice, as the city was the original home of Mirage Studios, the place where the TMNT franchise was born. Since their creation in 1984, the turtles have expanded beyond comics into movies, cartoons, games, toys, you name it. So, I get it. TMNT is a big deal to the town. But it still seems odd.
According to the city’s breakdown of where all the ARPA money is going, the idea behind the custom manhole covers is to “invigorate downtown arts” via a “public art tribute to the Northampton-born Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.” That’s all well and good and checking the list of other grants, it’s clear more important projects are getting far more resources from the city. But I can’t help but wonder if that $20,000 could be better spent on helping more people directly. Or creating a tribute to a far superior show, Disney’s Gargoyles.
Zack Zwiezen
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The Case for a Primary Challenge to Joe Biden
Joe Biden seems like he’s running again, God love him.
He will most likely make this official in the next couple of months, and with the support of nearly every elected Democrat in range of a microphone. That is how things are typically done in Washington: The White House shall make you primary-proof. The gods of groupthink have decreed as much.
Unless some freethinking Democrat comes along and chooses to ignore the groupthink.
In private, of course, many elected Democrats say Biden is too old to run again and that they wish he’d step away—which aligns with what large majorities of Democrats and independents have been telling pollsters for months. The public silence around the president’s predicament has become tiresome and potentially catastrophic for the Democratic Party. Somebody should make a refreshing nuisance of themselves and involve the voters in this decision.
Yes, this would be a radical move, and would anger a bunch of Democrats inside the various power terrariums of D.C., starting with the biggest one of all, at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. There would be immediate blowback from donors, the Democratic National Committee, and other party institutions. But do it anyway. Preferably before Biden makes his final decision, while there’s an opening. If approached deftly, the gambit could benefit the president, the party, and even the challenger’s own standing, win or lose.
There has to be one good Challenger X out there from the party’s supposed “deep bench,” right? Someone who is compelling, formidable, and younger than, say, 65. Someone who is not Marianne Williamson. Someone who would be unfailingly gracious to Biden and reverential of his career—even while trying to end it.
Before we start tossing out names, let’s establish a big to be sure. To be sure, primaries can be very bad for presidents seeking reelection. There is good reason no incumbent has been subjected to a serious intraparty challenge in more than three decades—not since the Republican Pat Buchanan launched a populist incursion against President George H. W. Bush in 1992. A dozen years earlier, President Jimmy Carter had endured an acrid primary challenge from Senator Edward Kennedy. Both Carter and Bush managed to hold off their challengers, but they came away battered and wound up losing their general elections.
Biden, however, is a special case, for two reasons. The first concerns the disconnect between how affectionately most Democrats view him versus their desire to move on from him. Recent surveys show that 60 percent of Democrats don’t want Biden to run again. These spigots of cold water in the polls have been accompanied by icy buckets of liberal commentary and chilly assessments from (mostly) anonymous elected Democrats in the press. By contrast, large majorities of Republicans wanted Donald Trump to seek reelection in 2020, and an overwhelming consensus of Democrats wanted Barack Obama to run again in 2012. Same with Republicans and George W. Bush in 2004, and Democrats and Bill Clinton in 1996.
Why should Biden not enjoy the same coronation? He’s done a good job in the eyes of the people who voted for him in 2020. His party overperformed in the midterms. He seems to be humming along fine—feisty State of the Union here, muscular visit to Ukraine there, and endless jokers to the right. He has achieved important things, has clearly enjoyed the gig, and appears quite eager for more. The difference in Biden’s case, of course, goes directly to the second reason for his special predicament. It begins with an 8.
Allow me to point out, as if you don’t already know this, that Biden is old. He is 80 now, will be 82 on Inauguration Day 2025, and will hit 86 if he makes it all the way through a second term. He was born during the Roosevelt administration (Franklin, not Teddy, but still).
The Delaware Corvette has flipped through the odometer a time or two. I’ve pointed this out before, in this publication. The White House did not like that story. But it was true then, and it’s truer now—by eight months, and a lot more Democrats are getting a lot more anxious.
“This is not a knock on Joe Biden, just a wish for competition,” says Representative Dean Phillips of Minnesota, one of a tiny number of elected Democrats who have expressed on-the-record trepidation about Biden’s plans. Phillips couches the absurdity of this in terms of free enterprise. “In the business world, if the dominant brand in a category had favorability ratings like the current president does, you would see a number of established brands jump into that category,” Phillips told me. “Believe me, there are literally hundreds in Congress who would say the same thing,” he said. “But they simply won’t fucking say a word.”
Here’s the deal, as Biden would say. No one wants to be accused of messing around with established practices when the alternative—very possibly Donald Trump—is so terrifying. But just as Trump has intimidated so many Republicans into submission, he also has paralyzed Democrats into extreme risk aversion. This has fostered an unhealthy capitulation to musty assumptions. And if you believe groupthink can’t be horribly wrong, I’ve got some weapons of mass destruction to show you in Iraq, not to mention a Black man who will never be elected president and, for that matter, a reality-TV star who won’t either.
The big riddle is: Who? Let’s assess an (extremely) hypothetical primary field. First, eliminate Vice President Kamala Harris, Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg, and any other member of Biden’s administration from consideration. Such an uprising against the boss would represent an irreparably disloyal and unseemly act and simply would not happen. Let’s also eliminate Senator Bernie Sanders from consideration, because been there, done that (twice), and he’s actually Biden’s senior by a year.
Otherwise, indulge me in a bit of mentioning. Here is a hodgepodge of possible primary nuisances: Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer; Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey; Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut; Senator Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota; former Representative Tim Ryan of Ohio; Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York; California Governor Gavin Newsom; Maryland Governor Wes Moore. This is a noncomprehensive list.
Let’s take the first Challenger X on the list, the newly reelected Whitmer, who, for the record, says she will not be running in 2024, regardless of what Biden does. She declared as much after her double-digit crushing of Republican Tudor Dixon in November. “Gov. Gretchen Whitmer says she is committed to a full second term,” reads the report in Bridge Michigan, the local publication to which she revealed her plans. The article refers to the 46th president as “aging Democratic incumbent Joe Biden.”
What might it look like if Whitmer did make a run at said “aging Democratic incumbent”? The how dare you types would be unpleasantly aroused. Words like ingrate, disloyal, and opportunist would be hurled in her face. She would be blamed for creating a turbulent situation for the self-styled “party of grown-ups,” and at a time when they can credibly portray Republicans as an irresponsible brigade of nutbags, cranks, and chaos agents. Whitmer would also, implicitly, be accused of not “waiting her turn.” Just as Obama was in 2008, when he opted to skip the line and sought the Democratic nomination, even though the groupthink memo at the time stipulated that it was Hillary Clinton’s turn.
But perhaps the pushback would not be as rough as Challenger X expected. In all likelihood, it would occur mostly in private or anonymously. Biden would be somewhat obliged to project calm and indifference in public. “The more the merrier,” the president and his surrogates would say through tight smiles. Nobody would benefit from any appearance of resentment.
Challenger X could earn goodwill by campaigning with class and expressing unrelenting gratitude to Biden. She could simply nod and shrug in response to the various admonitions. Emphasize her own credentials and the grave threat posed by Trump, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, or any other Republican. Say repeatedly that she would do whatever was necessary to help and support the president if primary voters nominated him again.
For any Challenger X, the main selling point would fall into the general classification of representing “new blood,” a “fresh start,” or some such. These terms would serve as polite stand-ins for the age issue rather than smears about Biden’s mental capacity. Another thematic argument would involve popular American ideals such as “choice” and “freedom.” As in: Democrats deserve a “choice” and should enjoy the “freedom” to vote for someone other than the oldest president in history—the guy well over half of you don’t want to run.
Challenger X would almost certainly receive tons of press coverage—probably good coverage, too, given that the media are predisposed to favor maverick-y candidates who inject unforeseen conflict into the process. When the voting starts, maybe this upstart would overperform—grabbing 35 percent or so in the early states, say. Maybe they wouldn’t surpass Biden, but could still reap the good coverage, gracefully drop out, and gain an immediate advantage for 2028. Or maybe Biden would take the hint, step away on his own, and let Democrats get on with picking their next class of national leaders. To some degree, the party has been putting this off since Obama was elected.
Quite obviously, Democrats today have a strong craving for someone other than the sitting president. (Also obvious: That someone is not the current vice president.) Many voters viewed Biden’s candidacy in 2020 as a one-term proposition. He suggested as much. “Look, I view myself as a bridge, not as anything else,” Biden said nearly three years ago at a campaign event in Michigan, where he appeared with Harris, Booker, and Whitmer. “There’s an entire generation of leaders you saw stand behind me. They are the future of this country.”
Some mischief-maker should give Democrats a path to that future starting now. Voters bought the bridge in 2020. But when does it become a bridge too far?
Mark Leibovich
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White House defends response to toxic train derailment | Long Island Business News
The Biden administration on Friday defended its response to a freight train derailment in Ohio that left toxic chemicals spilled or burned off, even as local leaders and members of Congress demanded that more be done.
The administration said it has “mobilized a robust, multi-agency effort to support the people of East Palestine, Ohio,” since the Feb. 3 derailment. Michael Regan, head of the Environmental Protection Agency, visited the site Thursday, walking along a creek that still reeks of chemicals as he sought to reassure skeptical residents that the water is fit for drinking and the air safe to breathe.
No other Cabinet member has visited the rural village, where about 5,000 people live near the Pennsylvania line. But administration officials insisted that their response has been immediate and effective.
Within hours of the Norfolk Southern train derailment, the EPA deployed a team to East Palestine to support state and local emergency and environmental response efforts, the White House said. Officials from the Transportation Department also arrived to investigate what led to the derailment, and the Federal Emergency Management Agency has been coordinating with the state emergency operations center and other partners, the White House said.
President Joe Biden has offered federal assistance to Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine and Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, officials said.
In response to a request from DeWine and Ohio’s congressional delegation, the Health and Human Department and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are sending a team of medical personnel and toxicologists to conduct public health testing and assessments.
The team will support federal, state and local officials already on the ground to evaluate people who were exposed or potentially exposed to chemicals, officials said.
Senior administration officials vowed to hold Norfolk Southern accountable. The company will be required to pay for cleanup of the spill and related fire under the federal Superfund law for cleanup of toxic sites, a senior administration official said.
But the White House insisted that officials on a call with the media not be identified.
Since the derailment, residents have complained about headaches and irritated eyes and finding their cars and lawns covered in soot. The hazardous chemicals that spilled from the train killed thousands of fish, and residents have talked about finding dying or sick pets and wildlife.
Residents also are frustrated by what they say is incomplete and vague information about the lasting effects from the disaster, which prompted evacuations.
Regan said Thursday that anyone who is fearful of being in their home should seek testing from the government.
“People have been unnerved,” he said. “They’ve been asked to leave their homes.” He said that if he lived there, he would be willing to move his family back into the area as long as the testing shows it’s safe.
Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., said he was glad that Regan visited the site, but it was “unacceptable that it took nearly two weeks for a senior administration official to show up” in Ohio.
He urged Biden, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg and other officials to provide a complete picture of the damage done and “a comprehensive plan to ensure the community is supported in the weeks, months and years to come..’
“It’s past time for those responsible to step up to the plate,” Manchin said.
Rep. Bill Johnson, R-Ohio, who toured the site with Regan on Thursday, sent a letter Friday asking EPA to provide detailed information about the federal government’s response to the derailment, including the controlled burn conducted last week and testing plans for air and water quality.
“The community must be able to trust their air, water, and soil is not a threat to their health following this train derailment,” Johnson said.
The Associated Press
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What To Know About The Train Derailment And Toxic Chemicals In Ohio
On Feb. 3, trains carrying toxic chemicals including butyl acrylate and vinyl chloride derailed in East Palestine, OH, leading to a chain of events that have been scrutinized for their impact on theenvironment and local residents. The Onion tells you everything you need to know about the train derailment and toxic chemicals in Ohio.
Q: Where is East Palestine?
A: Hop on I-76 and keep driving till you hit the permanent smoke cloud, you can’t miss it.Q: What caused the derailment?
A: Officials are reportedly investigating whether the train was drunk.Q: What is butyl acrylate?
A: A sweet-smelling, colorless liquid that shouldn’t be inhaled, ingested, or federally acknowledged.Q: What is vinyl chloride?
A: A type of chloride popular in the ’60s and ’70s that has made a recent comeback among chloride snobs.Q: Didn’t railroad workers want to strike last year to improve things like train-inspection conditions, but President Biden blocked them to protect corporate interests?
A: Well, sure, but it made railway shareholder dividends go up.Q: This won’t delay my shipments of cheap consumer goods, will it?
A: God no, this is America!Q: How are government officials helping the people of East Palestine?
A: By collaborating on a series of pamphlets highlighting the benefits of cancer.Q: How can Norfolk Southern Railway rebound from this fiasco?
A: They’ll certainly need to consider layoffs.Q: What is being done for employees impacted by the derailment?
A: Biden has urged any affected railroad workers to give themselves time to recover using their ample paid time off.Q: What will the long-term effects of this disaster be?
A: A golden age of class-action lawsuit commercials in 10 to 15 years. -
Biden, Yellen warn of ‘catastrophe’ if debt limit not raised | Long Island Business News
President Joe Biden and Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen warned Tuesday of a potential economic crisis if a deal isn’t reached to increase the federal debt ceiling.
They raised the alarm during speeches to the National Association of Counties, which was holding a conference in Washington.
Biden said many local governments have recovered from the pandemic, but “some in Congress are putting that progress at risk by threatening to have America default on its debt, which would be catastrophic for counties and the country. Even coming close to default would raise borrowing costs, making it harder to finance key projects in your communities.”
The concern over the debt ceiling is the result of a political showdown between House Republicans, who are demanding spending cuts, and the Democratic president, who insists on raising the limit without conditions.
Yellen similarly warned of a “catastrophe” in her own speech.
“In the longer term, a default would raise the cost of borrowing into perpetuity. Future investments, including public investments, would become substantially more costly,” she said.
“Household payments on mortgages, auto loans, and credit cards would rise, and American businesses would see credit markets deteriorate,” she said. “On top of that, it is unlikely that the federal government would be able to issue payments to millions of Americans, including our military families and seniors who rely on Social Security.”
Yellen notified Congress last month that the U.S. Treasury Department has resorted to “extraordinary measures” to avoid default on the nation’s $31.4 trillion borrowing authority. But the extraordinary measures would likely run out — and put the U.S. at risk of default — sometime around early June.
In a Jan. 13 letter to House and Senate leaders, Yellen said her actions will buy time until Congress can pass legislation that will either raise or suspend the limit, but she said it’s “critical that Congress act in a timely manner.”
Biden and Republican House Speaker Kevin McCarthy met at the White House this month to discuss the issue. McCarthy told the president he would not raise the debt ceiling without concessions from Democrats.
“No agreement, no promises except we will continue this conversation,” McCarthy told reporters outside the White House after the meeting.
During his State of the Union address last week, Biden chided Republicans over the debt ceiling — suggesting that Republicans want to slash Medicare and Social Security.
Yellen’s comments come ahead of the Congressional Budget Office’s projections to be released Wednesday, which updates the office’s expectation about when Treasury will no longer be able to pay its obligations fully if the debt limit is not raised.
“Let’s not wait until the last minute,” Yellen said. ”I believe it is a basic responsibility of our nation’s leaders to get this done.”
The Associated Press
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Biden Delivers State Of The Union
President Biden, two years into his term and facing a Republican-led House for the first time, delivered his State of the Union address to a joint session of Congress last night. What did you think of the speech?
“There wasn’t enough groveling to me specifically.”
Russ Melendez, Unemployed
“I hope I’m giving State of the Union speeches that good when I’m 80.”
Kelly DiToma, Confection Expert
“He puts on a good show, but everyone knows he’s lip-syncing.”
Griffith Feldman, Clock Resetter
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Feisty Joe Biden Is Back
It was a raucous, interactive, and argumentative State of the Union like no other. And when it was over, President Joe Biden had provided a clear signal of how he plans to contest the 2024 presidential election.
Leaning hard into his populist “Scranton Joe” persona, an energetic and feisty Biden sparred with congressional Republicans heckling him from the audience as he previewed what will likely be key themes of the reelection campaign that he’s expected to announce within months, if not weeks.
Biden’s speech showed him continuing to formulate an economically focused alternative to the cultural backlash that Donald Trump has stressed throughout his political career—and which Trump’s former White House press secretary, Arkansas Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders, revived in her bellicose GOP response. Whereas Sanders summoned “normal” Americans to rise up against a “woke mob” allegedly erasing American values and traditions, Biden called for national unity around shared goals, particularly delivering economic benefits to working families.
It’s easy to view those sharply contrasting messages as a preview of the 2024 election. Almost any GOP nominee—but particularly Trump or Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, the two early front-runners in polls for the nomination—is likely to stress the cultural notes that Sanders hit in hopes of maximizing turnout among the GOP’s core constituencies of older, noncollege, and nonurban white voters and expanding the party’s 2020 beachhead among culturally conservative nonwhite voters, especially Latino men.
Biden’s emphasis on economic concerns reflects his belief that the best way to counter that strategy is to downplay culture-war fights while defining himself primarily around a practical agenda to lift average families.
Well into the speech, Biden delivered an unflinching pledge to veto any GOP effort to ban abortion nationwide (which has no chance of passing the Senate anyway). Near the beginning and end of his remarks, he also pointedly alluded to the threats to American democracy unleashed by Trump and the insurrection on January 6, 2021.
But given how important both of those issues proved to the unexpectedly strong Democratic performance in the 2022 midterms (particularly among white-collar suburbanites), Biden gave them only passing attention.
The difference in emphasis between Biden and Sanders was unmistakable. Cultural concerns dominated Sanders’s speech. She painted a dark vision of the “radical left’s America,” where “our children are taught to hate one another on account of their race,” “violent criminals roam free while law-abiding families live in fear,” and “normal” Americans “are under attack” from a “woke mob” pursuing “a left-wing culture war that we didn’t start and never wanted to fight.” Her remarks showed again how the fear of cultural and racial displacement in an America that is inexorably growing more diverse, secular, and urbanized remains the most powerful motivator for what I’ve called the Republican “coalition of restoration.”
By contrast, the core of Biden’s speech was his pledge to both create good-paying jobs for working-class families and provide them with tangible economic help, such as by reducing drug prices and fighting surprise airline and hotel fees. As he often has before, Biden called his agenda a “blue-collar blueprint to rebuild America” and stressed how many jobs that do not require college degrees would be created by the troika of major bills passed during his first two years: legislation promoting clean-energy industries, more domestic manufacturing of semiconductors, and infrastructure construction projects nationwide. He delivered repeated populist jabs against big corporations and billionaires paying lower tax rates “than a nurse.”
It was telling that the most extended of the several remarkable back-and-forth exchanges with Republicans came not from abortion or any social issue, but Social Security and Medicare. Echoing the “you lie” cry from a GOP representative during a 2009 Barack Obama speech, several Republicans apparently called out “liar” when Biden noted, correctly, that some Republicans (specifically Senator Rick Scott of Florida whom he did not name) have proposed to sunset all federal programs every five years, including Social Security and Medicare. What the exchange made clear above all is how comfortable Biden is creating a contrast that Hubert Humphrey would recognize, with Democrats claiming their historical ground of protecting the social safety net.
Polling during the midterm election, and right through the days before last night’s speech, revealed that Biden has not yet convinced most Americans that his economic agenda will benefit them. Most Americans continue to express downbeat views about the economy, and in an ABC/Washington Post national survey released this week, more than three-fifths of Americans said Biden had accomplished not much or nothing at all.
After hosting a focus group of voters who watched last night’s speech, Bryan Bennett, the senior director of polling and analytics at the Hub Project, a Democratic polling consortium, told me in an email that although their reactions suggested that Biden “was successful in telling a positive story about how the economy has improved over the last two years … the issues of inflation and spending remain deep pain points that he and his administration will have to continue to work on.” Yesterday’s speech showed that Biden similarly believes (rightly or wrongly) that his fate will be decided more by voters’ assessment of his impact on their financial situation than by whether they share his values on the kind of cultural issues Sanders hammered.
The other thematic pillar of Biden’s presidency has been his promise to unify America and work across party lines. But Biden’s speech continued a recalibration of that message that began last fall.
In the midterm campaign, Biden differentiated between “mainstream” Republicans who were willing to reach bipartisan agreements and what he called the “extreme MAGA” forces that represented a radical threat to democracy and individual freedoms. In the State of the Union, he offered a variation on that theme. He began by congratulating the new House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, and stressed how during his first two years as president, “time and again, Democrats and Republicans came together” to pass big legislation, such as the bipartisan infrastructure bill.
But as the speech progressed, Biden pivoted from where he thought he could deal with Republicans to where he insisted he would resist them. Biden forcefully called on Republicans to pass a “clean” increase in the nation’s debt ceiling, without any conditions, and pledged to veto any effort to undo the provisions in the Inflation Reduction Act that reduce drug prices, any legislation imposing a national ban on abortion, and any efforts to cut Social Security and Medicare. He touted his commitment to a wide array of priorities, including expanded preschool and an assault-weapons ban, that he knows have no chance of passing a Republican-controlled House.
All of that notably departed from the tone that his two Democratic predecessors struck in their first State of the Union immediately after losing unified control of Congress, as Biden also did this past fall. Both Bill Clinton, in his 1995 State of the Union speech, and Obama, in his 2011 address, were elaborately conciliatory, even contrite, as they addressed the new GOP majorities. Both men drew some lines of contrast, but mostly focused on issues they believed would appeal to Republicans, such as reducing the federal deficit and streamlining government. Although Biden similarly nodded toward more cooperation at the outset of his speech, overall he was much more confrontational.
That was partly because Biden had less to be contrite about: Democrats performed much better in last year’s midterm than they did when Obama and Clinton suffered their first-term reversals. Democrats lost more than 50 House seats in Clinton’s first midterm, and more than 60 in Obama’s, but they surrendered only 10 in Biden’s—and actually gained a Senate seat, in contrast to the substantial Senate losses under his two predecessors. After those losses, both Clinton and Obama felt enormous pressure to signal to voters that they were making a course correction toward the center; Biden last night betrayed no hint that he felt any need to change direction. As Dan Pfeiffer, Obama’s White House communications director, recently told me, last November’s results were “quite different” from the “shellacking” that both Obama and Clinton had suffered. “This election cannot be read as a repudiation of Biden and his agenda,” Pfeiffer said.
Equally important, though, the gulf between the parties is even greater than it was under Clinton or Obama, which leaves very few realistic opportunities for Biden to pursue bipartisan agreements with the GOP-controlled House. That distance was vividly demonstrated by the repeated catcalls from Republicans—a display that obliterated any traditional notions of decorum during the State of the Union and underscored the zealotry of the conservative vanguard in the House GOP that McCarthy empowered in order to win the speakership.
Last night, Biden gave voters a spirited preview of his 2024 message and strategy. Sanders and the militant House Republicans simultaneously provided voters with a preview of the alternative they may hear next year. The most revealing measure of the night came not so much in the messages sent by either side, but in the distance between them.
Ronald Brownstein
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Second Camera Shows Surprise Guest Xi Jinping Backstage Reacting To Everything Biden Saying
WASHINGTON—Showing the Chinese president grow visibly enraged as he listened to his American counterpart bad-mouth him behind his back, a backstage camera revealed surprise guest Xi Jinping’s reactions to everything President Biden said during Tuesday night’s State of the Union address. “You have a problem with me you can’t say to my face, you fake bitch?” said Xi, appearing on a behind-the-scenes feed featuring the chyron “Called U.S. President ‘Lying Hussie’,” where he could be seen breaking down in tears, smashing a mirror in the green room as aides held him back, and then rushing out to confront Biden as Congress whooped in applause. “Oh, so you can say you don’t like my spy balloon on national TV, but you don’t mention the trillion bucks you owe me, you broke-ass ho? Hey, get back here so I can beat your ass. Or run away, like you run from all our problems!” At press time, Biden had reportedly managed to calm Xi down by offering the weeping leader a box of tissues and agreeing to joint custody of Taiwan.
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Debris-recovery effort underway after U.S. fighter jets pursue and shoot down Chinese balloon off Carolina coast
President Joe Biden said on Saturday that he ordered U.S. officials to shoot down the suspected Chinese spy balloon earlier this week and that national-security leaders decided the best time for the operation was when the the object was over water.
“They successfully took it down, and I want to compliment our aviators who did it,” Biden said after getting off Air Force One en route to Camp David.
Fighter jets shot down the giant white balloon off the Carolina coast after it apparently traversed sensitive military sites across North America, prompting the postponement of a high-level U.S. diplomatic trip to China and becoming the latest flashpoint in the prevailing tense tone between Washington and Beijing.
“ In preparation for the operation, the Federal Aviation Administration temporarily closed airspace over the Carolina coastline, including the Charleston and Myrtle Beach airports in South Carolina and the Wilmington airport in North Carolina. ”
Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said in a statement that Biden approved the shoot-down on Wednesday, saying it should be done “as soon as the mission could be accomplished without undue risk to American lives under the balloon’s path.”
Austin said that, due to the size and altitude of the balloon, which was floating at an altitude of about 60,000 feet, the military had determined that taking it down over land would pose an undue risk to people on the ground.
The balloon was observed Saturday morning over the Carolinas as it approached the Atlantic coast.
In preparation for the operation, the Federal Aviation Administration temporarily closed airspace over the Carolina coastline, including the Charleston and Myrtle Beach airports in South Carolina and the Wilmington airport in North Carolina. The FAA rerouted air traffic from the area and warned of delays as a result of the flight restrictions.
An operation was underway in U.S. territorial waters in the Atlantic Ocean to recover debris from the balloon, which had been estimated to be about the size of three school buses. CNN reported that, according to a senior military source, Navy divers and unmanned vessels were among the assets deployed for the recovery effort, primarily, according to the source, in 47-foot-deep water.
The balloon was downed by Air Force fighter aircraft, according to two officials who were not authorized to publicly discuss the matter and spoke on condition of anonymity. CNN reported having been informed that a single missile fired by one of the U.S. jets had brought the balloon down.
Television footage showed a small explosion, followed by the balloon descending toward the water. U.S. military jets were seen flying in the vicinity and ships were deployed in the water to mount the recovery operation.
A South Carolina man posted video that appeared to capture the event as it unfolded. He told CNN he was a social-studies teacher and that his fiancée had recommended he point his camera at the object in advance of its downing.
Officials were aiming to time the operation so they could recover as much of the debris as possible before it sinks into the ocean. The Pentagon had previously estimated that any debris field would be substantial.
The balloon was first spotted over Montana, which is home to one of America’s three nuclear-missile silo fields at Malmstrom Air Force Base.
Biden had explored ordering the downing of the balloon over land when he was first briefed on it Tuesday, but Pentagon officials advised against that course of action, warning that the potential risk to people on the ground outweighed an assessment of potential Chinese intelligence gains.
The public disclosure of the balloon’s travels this week prompted the cancellation of a visit by U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken to Beijing that had been scheduled for Sunday for talks aimed at reducing U.S.-China tensions.
The Chinese government on Saturday sought to play down that cancellation. “In actuality, the U.S. and China have never announced any visit, the U.S. making any such announcement is their own business, and we respect that,” China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs said in a statement Saturday morning.
China has continued to claim that the balloon was merely a weather research “airship” that had been blown off course. The Pentagon rejected that claim out of hand — as well as China’s contention that it was not being used for surveillance and had only limited navigational ability.
The Pentagon also acknowledged reports of a second balloon flying over Latin America. “We now assess it is another Chinese surveillance balloon,” Brig. Gen. Pat Ryder, Pentagon press secretary, said in a statement. China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs did not immediately respond to a question about the second balloon.
Blinken, who had been due to depart Washington for Beijing late Friday, said he had told senior Chinese diplomat Wang Yi in a phone call that sending the balloon over the U.S. was “an irresponsible act and that [China’s] decision to take this action on the eve of my visit is detrimental to the substantive discussions that we were prepared to have.”
Uncensored reactions on the Chinese internet mirrored the official government stance that the U.S. was overhyping the situation. Some used it as a chance to poke fun at U.S. defenses, saying it couldn’t even defend against a balloon, and nationalist influencers leapt to use the news to mock the U.S.
Republican politicians in the U.S. sought to characterize Biden’s and the Pentagon’s decision to monitor the balloon until it reached a location where it could be safely targeted militarily as kowtowing to the Chinese.
China has denied any claims of spying and said it was a civilian-use balloon intended for meteorology research. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs emphasized that the balloon’s journey was out of its control and urged the U.S. not to “smear” it based on an isolated balloon incident.
MarketWatch contributed.
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A Rare Reprieve From the Permanent Presidential Campaign
Does anyone want to be president?
Typically, by the time a president delivers the State of the Union address at the start of his third year in office, as Joe Biden will on Tuesday, at least half a dozen rivals are already gunning for his job. When Donald Trump began his annual speech to Congress in 2019, four of the Democrats staring back at him inside the House chamber had already declared their presidential candidacies.
Not so this year. The only Republican (or Democrat, for that matter) officially trying to oust Biden is the former president he defeated in 2020. Trump announced his third White House run in November and then barely bothered to campaign for the next two months before holding relatively small-scale events in New Hampshire and South Carolina in January. Trump will finally get some company next week, when Nikki Haley, the former South Carolina governor and United Nations ambassador, plans to kick off her campaign in Charleston. More Republicans could soon jump into the presidential pool. But the 2024 campaign has gotten off to a decidedly slow start, and the first weeks of 2023 have brought a rare reprieve from what has become known—with some derision—as the permanent campaign. This pause is not the result of some collective cease-fire; it’s what happens when you have a former president who lost reelection but still inspires fear in his party, along with a Democratic incumbent—the oldest to ever serve—who is not exactly itching to campaign.
Even New Hampshire—normally one of the first states to welcome would-be presidents—has been subdued. “Other than Trump, I can’t think of a leading person being here for the last couple of months,” Raymond Buckley, the longtime chair of the state’s Democratic Party, told me. He said he’s used the lull to prioritize party building, “instead of constantly focusing on one Republican senator or governor after another.”
The same is true in Iowa, that other presidential proving ground with a year-round appetite for stump speeches. “It’s pretty quiet on the western front,” David Oman, a Republican strategist and former co-chair of the Iowa state GOP, told me. As my colleague McKay Coppins recently reported, most of the Republicans who want the party to nominate someone other than Trump are, once again, reluctant to actually do anything about it. Trump’s potential GOP rivals have been similarly shy about taking him on; until Haley put out word about her announcement last week, no one in the emerging field—which could include Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, former Vice President Mike Pence, and former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, among others—was willing to be the first target of the barrage of insults and invective Trump would surely hurl their way.
The momentary quietude has dampened any pressure for Biden to shift back into campaign mode, and he’s in no rush anyway. Tuesday’s State of the Union address will likely yield even more performance reviews than usual, as pundits and viewers alike judge the toll that Biden’s advancing age has taken on his oratory. As for the substance of his speech, White House officials told me Biden will continue the project he began months ago: promoting the accomplishments of his first two years in office, especially his bipartisan infrastructure law and the Democrats’ Inflation Reduction Act that he signed last summer.
In the absence of a fully formed GOP presidential field, Biden has been content to use the new House Republican majority as a foil—adopting a strategy that Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama employed after Democrats lost power in Congress during their first terms. Biden has vowed to protect programs such as Medicare and Social Security from GOP budget cuts; refused to negotiate over the debt ceiling (although the White House said last week he’d entertain “separate” conversations on deficit reduction); and eagerly highlighted ill-fated GOP proposals to replace the federal income tax with a 30 percent national sales tax.
Yet with Speaker Kevin McCarthy seated behind the president on the House rostrum for the first time, Biden is expected to stress conciliation over confrontation. “The president will once again amplify his belief that Democrats and Republicans can work together,” a White House official told me, speaking anonymously to preview a speech that hasn’t been finalized, “as they did in the last two years and as he is committed to doing with this new Congress to get big things done on behalf of the American people.”
Biden allies expect the president to formally announce his reelection bid sometime after the State of the Union, but they note that could still be months away. Such a wait isn’t unusual for incumbents, who don’t need to introduce themselves to the electorate and generally want to be seen as focused on governing. But no president since Ronald Reagan has faced as much uncertainty about whether he would seek a second term. (Then the oldest president, Reagan was eight years younger in 1983 than the 80-year-old Biden is now.) Outgoing Chief of Staff Ron Klain pointedly referenced a reelection bid as he departed the White House last week, telling Biden he looked forward to supporting him “when you run for president in 2024.” But other White House officials routinely affix the qualifier “if he runs” to discussions about a potential campaign, suggesting it remains less than a sure thing.
Aiding Biden is the fact that no Democrats of note (besides Marianne Williamson) have made any moves to challenge him for the nomination, and the president’s allies are operating under the assumption that he will have the field to himself. “I would be shocked at this point if this becomes a competitive primary,” Amanda Loveday, a senior adviser to the pro-Biden super PAC Unite the Country, told me.
The bigger question is how many Republicans will challenge Biden knowing they’ll have to get through Trump first—and when they’ll see fit to jump in. GOP officials told me they expect Haley’s announcement to prompt others to enter the race soon. But Trump clearly froze the field for a while. All through 2021 and most of 2022, Buckley told me, “rarely a week went by without a major visit” to New Hampshire from a White House aspirant. “It all came to a grinding halt once Trump announced,” he said. Jeff Kaufmann, the Republican Party chair in Iowa, told me that the first months of 2021—the brief period after January 6 when Trump’s political future was in doubt—were busier for GOP hopefuls than this past January, just a year before the caucuses.
For most of American history, the observation that barely anyone was campaigning more than a year and a half before the election would be entirely unremarkable. Only in this century has a two-year campaign for a four-year term in the White House become the norm. (As recently as 1992, the governor of a small southern state declared his candidacy only 14 months before the election, and he did just fine.)
For most of the country, this respite from presidential politics is probably welcome, especially for voters who were inundated with nonstop campaign ads leading up to the midterm election. The view is a bit different, however, in Iowa and New Hampshire, where the quadrennial pilgrimage of politicos brings welcome attention and a sizable economic boost. Republicans in both states want to ensure that the GOP does not follow the Democrats in trying to leave them behind. Kaufmann told me he wasn’t worried; Senator Tim Scott would be coming out to Iowa in a few weeks, and others were calling to schedule events, perhaps preparing their launches. By March, he assured me, all would be back to normal. This extended presidential halftime will be over, and America’s never-ending campaign will resume in full.
Russell Berman
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Jobs report is proof that ‘the state of our economy is strong,’ Biden says
President Joe Biden on Friday hailed stronger-than-expected job creation in January and called the robust reading proof that the U.S. economy is showing strength. Biden said in a statement at the White House: “I’m happy to report that the state of our union, and the state of our economy, is strong.” Biden spoke after the U.S. reported that the number of new jobs created in January rose by 517,000, marking the biggest gain in six months. The unemployment rate slid to a 54-year low of 3.4% from 3.5%, the government reported. That’s the lowest level since 1969. The stronger-than-expected jobs figures come as Biden is preparing to deliver a State of the Union speech before a joint session of Congress. on Tuesday night. The address is expected to focus on the debt-limit standoff and recession worries, among other topics. One caveat to the jobs report, meanwhile, is that the government’s formula to adjust for seasonal swings in hiring sometimes exaggerates employment levels in January. It’s unclear whether that was the case last month. Employment grew even faster in the waning months of 2022 than previously reported, indicating the labor market was still quite robust.
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The Obama Legacy Shaping Biden’s Most Important Decision
President Joe Biden has already made the most important domestic-policy decision he’ll likely face this year. Biden and his top advisers have repeatedly indicated that they will reject demands from the new GOP majority in the House of Representatives to link increasing the debt ceiling with cutting federal spending. Instead, Biden is insisting that Congress pass a clean debt-ceiling increase, with no conditions attached.
Biden’s refusal to negotiate with Republicans now is rooted in the Obama administration’s experiences in 2011–15 of trying to navigate increases in the debt ceiling through the same political configuration present today: a Democratic Senate and a Republican House. While Biden says he won’t negotiate a budget deal tied to a debt-ceiling increase, then-President Obama did just that in 2011. Those negotiations not only failed but proved so disruptive to financial markets, and so personally scarring, that Obama and his team emerged from the ordeal determined never to repeat it. And when House Republicans came back in 2013 asking for more concessions in exchange for raising the debt ceiling again, Obama declined to negotiate with them; eventually the GOP raised the debt ceiling without conditions.
To understand the choices Obama made about debt-ceiling negotiations, and how they are shaping Biden’s approach today, I spoke with multiple officials from the Obama era: several Cabinet secretaries, as well as top aides from the White House, executive-branch departments, and Capitol Hill. Most chose to speak without attribution to candidly discuss Obama’s deliberations. What’s clear from these conversations is that almost none of the conditions that led Obama to negotiate in 2011 are present today. This helps explain why Biden is rejecting Republican demands, but also why the risk of a cataclysmic default is even greater now than it was then.
When Congress raises the debt ceiling it does not authorize any new spending; it permits the Treasury to pay the debts the U.S. has incurred from earlier fiscal-policy decisions. A failure to raise the debt ceiling would lead to the federal government defaulting, something that has never happened, and which could crater the stock market, spike interest rates, and disrupt payments to the millions of Americans who rely on federal checks.
In some ways, Biden’s staunch refusal to link fiscal negotiations to a debt-ceiling increase is out of character for a politician who spent nearly four decades in the Senate and has prided himself on his ability to reach agreements across party lines. Even now, administration officials make clear that Biden is not precluding negotiations with House Republicans over fiscal policy. What Biden is saying is that he won’t allow Republicans to link fiscal negotiations to the threat of not raising the debt ceiling. That resolve flows directly from the Obama administration’s experiences.
The dynamics that prompted Obama to negotiate with Republicans in 2011 had started coalescing before the GOP won control of the House in the 2010 midterm election. After taking office in 2009, Obama’s first major legislative victory was the passage of a roughly $800 billion stimulus plan to help the economy recover from the 2008 financial collapse. Obama devoted the rest of 2009 to steering the landmark Affordable Care Act through Congress.
After Congress approved those expensive initiatives, Obama faced pressure from not only congressional Republicans but also a core of centrist Senate Democrats (including Senate Budget Committee Chair Kent Conrad of North Dakota) to develop some plan for reducing the federal deficit. Under prodding from Conrad, in February 2010 Obama appointed the bipartisan Simpson-Bowles commission to recommend a deficit-reduction plan. Throughout that year, “there was an awful lot of ‘grand bargain, let’s have a historic compromise’ in the air” in Washington, Jason Furman, the then– deputy director of the White House National Economic Council, told me.
Before the House changed hands in December 2010, Obama agreed with congressional Republicans on a major package to extend the tax cuts that had been passed under George W. Bush and to also temporarily reduce payroll taxes. Then, in April 2011, the Obama administration and Representative John Boehner, the new Republican House speaker, settled on a plan to fund the federal government through the remainder of the fiscal year.
So when Boehner and other Republicans put forward their demands to tie any debt-ceiling increase to cuts in federal spending, the Obama administration did not initially view the prospect of negotiations with horror, multiple former officials told me. Obama shared the belief that a “grand bargain” to control the long-term debt was a worthwhile goal. Furman said the former president considered it an “exciting opportunity.”
Jack Lew, who served as Obama’s director of the Office of Management of Budget (OMB) during the 2011 confrontation and as Treasury secretary in 2013, told me about another factor that contributed to the Obama administration’s willingness to engage: Negotiations that previous presidents Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton had had with Congress about the debt ceiling had not proved that disruptive. Debt-ceiling negotiations “up until 2011 had a different character than after 2011,” said Lew, who served as House Democratic aide in the 1980s and in the OMB for Clinton in the 1990s.
Armed with these convictions, the Obama team didn’t blanch, even when the new speaker went to New York in May 2011 to lay down what became known as the “Boehner Rule”: Republicans would demand one dollar in spending cuts for each dollar increase in the debt limit that they authorized. The two sides launched fiscal negotiations in talks led by Biden for the administration and Representative Eric Cantor for the House GOP.
As these negotiations unfolded, Boehner framed the talks as the Republicans and Obama equally benefiting from the stipulations. But the White House, including Biden, never saw things that way. The White House didn’t view the debt-ceiling increase primarily as a bargaining chip—they viewed it as the eventual legislative vehicle for moving through Congress whatever agreement the fiscal negotiation produced.
Even with that difference, the talks were serious and, for a while, productive. Biden praised Cantor and Cantor reciprocated. But in late June, the effort collapsed when it hit a familiar rock: The Republicans involved refused to consider raising taxes and Democrats would not agree to spending cuts unless they did.
Over the next few weeks, the speaker and the president, joined by only a few aides, then met for a series of secret negotiations to pursue a “grand bargain” on the deficit. The two men came close to an agreement. But their negotiations ultimately foundered when Obama and Boehner could not agree on the balance between tax increases and spending cuts. Like the Biden-Cantor talks earlier, the Obama-Boehner talks crashed in late July.
Only days before August 2, when the nation would face an unprecedented default, Obama, Biden and the congressional leaders in both parties gathered in the White House for a frantic final weekend of negotiations. The two sides were trying to avoid calamity in an environment of “pure acrimony,” Furman told me. “I think if you look at the photographs that [the White House photographer] Pete Souza took over the course of that weekend, you can look at our faces and you don’t need to hear any words,” Lew said. “If you ask President Obama about the two or three most gut-wrenching moments as president I have no doubt this would be on the list.”
Pete Souza / The White House Even though the “grand bargain” evaporated, the two sides (with Biden and Mitch McConnell at the center of the negotiations) reached a complex deal over that weekend. In the first stage, Obama got an $900 billion increase in the debt ceiling coupled with $900 billion in spending cuts. The deal linked up to another $1.5 trillion increase in debt to the creation of a congressional “super committee” that would be guaranteed a floor vote on a plan to cut the deficit an equivalent amount. If the committee deadlocked, automatic spending cuts in defense and non-defense discretionary spending—what became known as sequestration—would be triggered. Though default was averted, months of these talks had led to a nearly universal recoil among the Obama team. There was no single meeting or moment when the president and his top advisers said, “Never again.” Instead, participants told me that that conclusion emerged organically. “I think the team around Obama really had a bad taste in their mouth after the 2011 episode and they really wanted to change the terms and dynamics of the debate, and that’s why they all embraced the idea that we can’t do this anymore,” Mark Patterson, the chief of staff at the time for Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, told me.
The White House frustration deepened in November 2011. The deficit reduction “super committee” was created in July but deadlocked on the same issue that had stymied previous bipartisan negotiation: the unwillingness of enough Republicans to accept tax increases that Democrats considered sufficient to justify big cuts in programs like Medicare and Medicaid. That stalemate triggered the severe sequestration reductions in discretionary spending—a squeeze that left Democrats fuming over the domestic cuts and Republicans incensed about the defense reductions.
All of that was the backdrop when House Republicans returned in 2013 with a new set of demands for raising the debt ceiling, which included unraveling Obama’s greatest legislative achievement, the Affordable Care Act. This time Obama declined to talk with Republicans. “In 2013, it was a very fresh memory that we got closer than anyone had ever come to defaulting,” Lew, who had by then become Treasury secretary, told me. From Obama on down, he said, there was a very strong sense that “we can’t ever be in [that] position again.”
House Republicans eventually conceded, passing an increase in the debt ceiling without any conditions in October 2013 and again the following year. In October 2015, Boehner, as his final act after announcing his intent to resign from Congress and vacate the speakership, engineered another extension that raised the debt ceiling through the remainder of Obama’s presidency while also loosening the sequestration cuts on both defense and domestic spending. Those three votes represented a sweeping victory for Obama’s new no-conditions approach to the debt ceiling.
Though Biden was among the most enthusiastic proponents of negotiations during Obama’s first term, no former officials recall him dissenting from the general rejection of that approach in Obama’s second. Notably, then–Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid (who died in 2021) took no chances: As the 2013 debt-ceiling fight approached, he personally told Obama to sideline Biden from any talks, because he considered the vice president too willing to make concessions to his frequent negotiating partner, McConnell.
On every front, most experts consider the environment even less hospitable today than it was during Obama’s presidency for the kind of budget deal that House Republicans are now demanding in order to raise the debt ceiling. Although Obama’s team and many congressional Democrats genuinely believed that a big long-term deficit-reduction plan was both good politics and good economics, Biden, as well as most congressional Democrats today, are much more skeptical of that proposition. And though Republicans could at least formulate specific spending-cut demands back then, they are far less likely to reach consensus today on a meaningful deficit-reduction plan. That’s largely because more of them have come to recognize that their political base, centered on older white voters, is just fine with government spending targeted toward them—particularly Social Security, Medicare, and even Medicaid and the ACA, which Republicans in the Obama era considered the bull’s-eye for their deficit-reduction plans. Moreover, House Speaker Kevin McCarthy has less control over his fractious conference than Boehner did, and McCarthy is even less willing than his predecessor to cross his most conservative membersBut though these factors argue against a big deficit deal, especially one linked to a debt-ceiling increase, Biden must find some way to authorize more debt. He’s already facing calls from Democratic Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia to establish another special deficit-reduction committee.
For now, the White House, while indicating that Biden is open to talking with Republicans about the budget on other tracks, is digging in against linking anything to the debt ceiling. A former Obama official familiar with the Biden team’s strategy told me the White House believes that approach “is a matter of principle.”
Biden and his team have taken from the Obama years the lesson that if they don’t negotiate against the debt limit, a sufficient number of Republicans will eventually back down because the economic consequences of default would be so catastrophic. Biden may expect, for instance, that enough House Republicans will join House Democrats in advancing a “discharge petition” that would allow an increase to pass the House without support from the GOP leadership. Biden may be right in that calculation. But Obama’s no-negotiating posture on the debt ceiling worked mostly because enough congressional Republicans back then were unwilling to plunge over the cliff into default. The White House and financial markets around the world are certain to face many white-knuckled moments before they learn whether that is still true today.
Ronald Brownstein
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Biden’s Blue-Collar Bet
When President Joe Biden visited Kentucky yesterday to tout a new bridge project, most media attention focused on his embrace of bipartisanship. And indeed Biden, against the backdrop of the GOP chaos in the House of Representatives, signaled how aggressively he would claim that reach-across-the-aisle mantle. He appeared onstage with not only Ohio’s Republican governor, Mike DeWine, but also GOP Senate Leader Mitch McConnell, a perennial bête noire for Democrats.
But Biden also touched on another theme that will likely become an even more central component of his economic and political strategy over the next two years: He repeatedly noted how many of the jobs created by his economic agenda are not expected to require a four-year college degree.
Throughout his presidency, with little media attention, Biden has consistently stressed this point. When he appeared in September at the groundbreaking for a sprawling Intel semiconductor plant near Columbus, Ohio, he declared, “What you’ll see in this field of dreams” is “Ph.D. engineers and scientists alongside community-college graduates … people of all ages, races, backgrounds with advanced degrees or no degrees, working side by side.” At a Baltimore event in November touting the infrastructure bill, he said, “The vast majority of these jobs … that we’re going to create don’t require a college degree.” Appearing in Arizona in December, he bragged that a plant producing batteries for electric vehicles would “create thousands of good manufacturing jobs, 90 percent of which won’t require a college degree, and yet you get a good wage.”
Economically, this message separates Biden from the past two Democratic presidents, Barack Obama and Bill Clinton. Both of those men, as I’ve written, centered their economic agendas on training more Americans for higher-paying jobs in advanced industries (and opening markets for those industries through free-trade agreements), largely because they believed that automation and global economic competition would doom many jobs considered “low skill.”
Although Biden also supports an ambitious assortment of initiatives to expand access to higher education, he has placed relatively more emphasis than his predecessors did on improving conditions for workers in jobs that don’t require advanced credentials. That approach is rooted in his belief that the economy can’t function without much work traditionally deemed low-skill, such as home health care and meat-packing, a conviction underscored by the coronavirus pandemic. “One of the things that has really become apparent to all of us is how important to our nation’s economic resiliency many of these jobs are that don’t require college degrees,” Heather Boushey, a member of Biden’s Council of Economic Advisers, told me this week.
Politically, improving economic conditions for workers without advanced degrees is the centerpiece of Biden’s plan to reverse the generation-long Democratic erosion among white voters who don’t hold a college degree—and the party’s more recent slippage among non-college-educated voters of color, particularly Latino men. Biden and his aides are betting that they can reel back in some of the non-college-educated voters drawn to Republican cultural and racial messages if they can improve their material circumstances with the huge public and private investments already flowing from the key economic bills passed during his first two years.
Biden’s hopes of boosting the prospects of workers without college degrees, who make up about two-thirds of the total workforce, rest on a three-legged legislative stool. One bill, passed with bipartisan support, allocates about $75 billion in direct federal aid and tax credits to revive domestic production of semiconductors. An infrastructure bill, also passed with bipartisan support, allocates about $850 billion in new spending over 10 years for the kind of projects Biden celebrated yesterday—roads, bridges, airports, water systems—as well as a national network of charging stations for electric vehicles and expanded access to high-speed internet. The third component, passed on a party-line vote as part of the Inflation Reduction Act, provides nearly $370 billion in federal support to promote renewable electricity production, accelerate the transition to electric vehicles, and retrofit homes and businesses to improve energy conservation.
All of these measures are projected to trigger huge flows of private-sector investment. The Semiconductor Industry Association reports that since the legislation promoting the industry was first introduced, in 2020, companies have already announced $200 billion in investments across 40 projects in 16 states. The investment bank Credit Suisse projects that the Inflation Reduction Act’s clean-energy provisions could ultimately spur $1.7 trillion in total investment (in part because it believes that the legislation’s open-ended provisions will produce something closer to $800 billion in federal spending). And economists have long demonstrated that each public dollar spent on infrastructure spurs additional private investment, which could swell the total economic impact of the new package to $1.5 trillion to $2 trillion, the administration estimates.
Taken together, the three bills constitute a level of federal investment in targeted economic sectors probably unprecedented in recent U.S. history. “The kind of money we are going to see going into these sectors is just unheard-of,” Janelle Jones, a former chief economist at the Department of Labor under Biden, told me. Though rarely framed as such, these three bills—reinforced by other Biden policies, such as his sweeping “buy American” procurement requirements—amount to an aggressive form of industrial policy meant to bolster the nation’s capacity to build more things at home, including bridges and roads, semiconductors, and batteries for electric vehicles. “This is a president that is taking seriously the need for a modern American industrial strategy,” Boushey said.
These measures are likely to open significant opportunities for workers without a college degree. Some analysts have projected that the infrastructure bill alone could generate as many as 800,000 jobs annually. Adam Hersh, a senior economist at the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute, estimated that about four-fifths of the jobs created under an earlier version of the Inflation Reduction Act passed in the House would not require a college degree, and he told me he believes the distribution is roughly the same in the final package. A Georgetown University institute projected an even higher percentage for the infrastructure bill. More of the jobs associated with semiconductor manufacturing require advanced education, but even that bill may generate a significant number of blue-collar opportunities in the construction phase of the many new plants opening across the country. (The industry is also pursuing partnerships with community colleges to provide workers who don’t have a four-year degree with the technical training to handle more work in the heavily automated facilities.)
Yet even if these programs fulfill those projections, it remains unclear whether they will reach the scale to improve the uncertain economic trajectory for the broad mass of workers without advanced education. These three bills mostly promote employment in manufacturing and construction, and together those industries account for only about one-eighth of the workforce (roughly 21 million workers in all), according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Total construction employment peaked in 2006, manufacturing in 1979. Far more workers, including those without degrees, are now employed in service industries not as directly affected by these bills.
What’s more, both of those occupations remain dominated by men. And largely because of resistance from Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia, Congress didn’t pass Biden’s companion proposals to bolster wages and working conditions for the preponderantly non-college-educated, nonwhite, female employees in the low-paid “care” industries such as home health care and child care. “We can’t [ignore] these millions and millions of care workers, particularly Black and brown women,” said Jones, now the chief economist and policy director for the Service Employees International Union.
Another complication for Biden is that his plans are colliding with the Federal Reserve Board’s drive to tame inflation. Spending on his big three bills is ramping up in 2023, which could increase the demand for—and bargaining power of—workers without college degrees. But the Fed’s push to slow the economy may neutralize that effect by increasing unemployment. “They are undercutting the job creation that we are supposed to be incentivizing,” Hersh said.
The list of further projects tied to these three bills is almost endless. The White House calculates that firms have announced some $290 billion in manufacturing investments since Biden took office; the Congressional Budget Office projects that spending from the infrastructure bill could be more than twice as high in 2023 as last year and then increase again by half in 2024.
That pipeline means Biden could be cutting ribbons every week through the 2024 presidential campaign—which would probably be fine with him. Biden rarely seems happier than when he’s around freshly poured concrete, especially if he’s on a podium with local business and labor leaders and elected officials from both parties, all of whom he introduces as enthusiastically (and elaborately) as if he’s toasting the new couple at a wedding. At his core, he remains something like a pre-1970s Democrat, who is most comfortable with a party focused less on cultural crusades than on delivering kitchen-table benefits to people who work with their hands. In his instincts and priorities, Biden is closer to Hubert Humphrey or Henry Jackson than to George McGovern or Obama.
Less clear is whether that throwback approach—the formula that defined the Democratic Party during Biden’s youth—still works politically. Over the course of Biden’s career, the parties have experienced what I’ve called a “class inversion”: Democrats have performed better among college-educated voters while Republicans have grown dominant among white voters without a college degree and more recently have established a beachhead among nonwhite, non-college-educated workers. For most of these voters, the evidence suggests that cultural attitudes have exerted more influence on their political allegiance than their economic circumstance has.
Biden, with his “Scranton Joe” persona, held out great hopes in the 2020 campaign of reversing that decline with working-class white voters, but he improved only slightly above Hillary Clinton’s historically weak 2016 showing, attracting about one-third of their votes. In 2022, exit polls showed that Democrats remained stuck at that meager level in the national vote for the House of Representatives. In such key swing states as Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Arizona, winning Democratic Senate and gubernatorial candidates ran slightly better than that, as Biden did while carrying those states in 2020. But, again like Biden then, the exit polls found that none of them won much more than two-fifths of non-college-educated white voters, even against candidates as extreme as Doug Mastriano or Kari Lake, the GOP governor nominees in Pennsylvania and Arizona, respectively.
The Democratic pollster Molly Murphy told me she’s relatively optimistic that Biden’s focus on creating more opportunity for workers without a college degree can bolster the party’s position with them. She said the key is not only improving living standards, but “validating that this is real work … not the consolation prize to a job that a college degree gets you.” No matter how many jobs Biden’s initiatives create, she said, “if you are treating them as lesser jobs, we are still going to have our problems from the cultural side of things.” Biden has certainly heard (or intuited) such advice. In his speeches, he commonly declares that an apprenticeship as an electrician or pipe fitter is as demanding as a college degree.
Yet Murphy’s expectations remain limited. “Just based on the negative arc of the last several cycles,” she said, merely maintaining the party’s current modest level of support with working-class white voters and avoiding further losses would be “a win.” Matt Morrison, the executive director of Working America, an AFL-CIO-affiliated group that focuses on political outreach to nonunion working-class families, holds similarly restrained views, though he told me that economic gains could help the party more with nonwhite blue-collar voters, who are generally less invested in Republican cultural and racial appeals. No matter how strong the job market, Murphy added, Democrats are unlikely to improve much with non-college-educated workers unless inflation recedes by 2024.
What’s already clear now is how much Biden has bet, both economically and politically, on bolstering the economic circumstances of workers without advanced education by investing literally trillions of federal dollars in forging an economy that again builds more things in America. “I don’t know whether the angry white people in Ohio, Michigan, and Wisconsin are less angry if we get them 120,000 more manufacturing jobs,” a senior White House official told me, speaking anonymously in order to be candid. “But we are going to run that experiment.”
Ronald Brownstein
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Trump Declared In Presidential Debate He Shut Down Chinese Bank Account. He Didn’t.
Donald Trump insisted in response to a question during a 2020 presidential debate with Joe Biden that he closed down his bank account in China before his first campaign. But six years of Trump’s tax records released Friday reveal that wasn’t true.
“I had an account open, and I closed it,” Trump said with some irritation to moderator Kristen Welker, NBC White House correspondent, in the final debate of the campaign in October that year. “I closed it before I even ran for president, let alone became president.”
Representative-elect Daniel Goldman (D-N.Y.), who served as the Democrats’ lead counsel in the first impeachment inquiry into Trump, noted that the former president had bank accounts in China until 2018, from 2015 to 2017, according to his tax records.
“Generally, you only have bank accounts in a foreign country if you are doing transactions in that country’s currency. What business was Trump doing in China while he was President?” he asked Friday in a tweet.
Trump, who had accounts in a number of countries and also collected income from more than a dozen foreign nations while in office, paid more in taxes in 2020 to the Chinese government than he did in American federal income tax that year, his returns revealed.
Trump also lied a month earlier to then-Fox News commentator Chris Wallace, who pointedly asked him during the first presidential debate in 2020 if he paid only $750 in federal income taxes in 2016 and 2017, as The New York Times had reported (which Trump immediately blasted as “fake news”).
Trump angrily responded — twice — that he had paid “millions of dollars.” His returns revealed that indeed he had paid just $750 in federal income taxes in each of those years. Trump and his wife Melania paid no federal income tax in 2020, the last full year he was in office, according to the tax records.
Trump also didn’t annually donate his $400,000 presidential salary to charity, as he has claimed. He declared no charitable contributions of any kind on his 2020 returns.
Among the early revelations emerging in Trump’s tax records, some of the most troubling are his financial entanglement abroad while he was president,
“highlighting a string of potential conflicts of interest,” Politico noted.Trump had multiple bank accounts in a number of foreign countries, and collected millions of dollars in income from more than a dozen nations, including Panama, the Philippines — whose dictator President Rodrigo Duterte he praised — and the United Arab Emirates during the Trump administration.
While presidents routinely place assets in blind trusts while they’re in office, Trump’s eldest sons continued to openly operate the Trump Organization and forged deals around the world with nations impacted by the Trump administration’s policies and expenditures.
Trump’s returns reveal hefty financial losses in the two years before he became president, some of which he carried forward to reduce tax bills.
He enjoyed an adjusted gross income of $15.8 million during his first three years in office. Trump paid $642,000 in federal income tax in 2015, $750 in 2016 and in 2017, just under $1 million in 2018, $133,000 in 2019 and nothing in 2020.
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Our Favorite Childhood Holiday Gifts, Video Game Edition
Space Quest IV: Carolyn Petit and the Time Rippers Screenshot: Sierra Entertainment It must have been Christmas of 1991 that I found Space Quest IV: Roger Wilco and the Time Rippers under the tree, and got the gift of seeing exciting new possibilities in games.
I was a fan of adventure games, sure, having played a few games in Sierra’s King’s Quest series, not to mention Lucasfilm’s brilliant and bizarre early titles like Maniac Mansion and The Secret of Monkey Island. But this was my first experience with Space Quest, Sierra’s comedic sci-fi series starring Roger Wilco, the hapless space-janitor who finds himself thrust into one cosmic misadventure after another.
To be honest, I don’t remember much about the quality of Space Quest IV’s puzzles. What I do remember is how varied and vibrant its universe seemed, with harsh alien worlds, moody cantinas, and glitzy space-malls. But what really knocked my socks off about the game was how meta it was. After progressing a bit through Space Quest IV: Roger Wilco and the Time Rippers itself, poor Roger finds himself flung into (the non-existent) Space Quest XII: Vohaul’s Revenge II.
Screenshot: Sierra Entertainment Today, it’s not so uncommon for games to break the fourth wall and wink knowingly at the player about being video games, to play with conventions in ways both tired and inspired. But wow, was this exciting for me in 1991! The game also sees you venturing into Space Quest X: Latex Babes of Estros (an obvious riff on the 1986 Infocom adventure Leather Goddesses of Phobos) and all the way back to the original Space Quest, which already looked humorously primitive and pixelated compared to 1991’s state-of-the-art graphics, making high(er)-definition Roger Wilco all the more conspicuous.
Screenshot: Sierra Entertainment Space Quest IV may or may not be a great game, I honestly don’t remember well enough to say. I just remember sitting there on my Christmas break, awestruck by the clever meta-ness of it all, and having my mind expanded about the possibilities of what video game storytelling and structure could do.
Carolyn Petit, Managing Editor
Alyssa Mercante
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