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President Biden says he’s in close contact with Kyiv amid stalled military aid
President Biden says he’s in close contact with Kyiv amid stalled military aid – CBS News
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A Sex Scandal. A Conservative Power Network. And Moms for Liberty.
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The ugly news broke during the last week of November: A Florida woman alleged that the chair of the state Republican Party had raped her at her home. The assault had occurred after he and his wife had planned, according to police, to meet her for a three-way sexual rendezvous, as they had previously.
These were stunning claims given the power couple involved: The GOP chair, Christian Ziegler, who has denied the assault and said the encounter was consensual, is a prominent state political consultant. His Republican-activist wife, Bridget Ziegler, is a founder of Moms for Liberty, the conservative political organization whose members have made school-board meetings partisan battlegrounds across America for the past two years.
The allegations have sparked a fusillade of condemnations, complaints of hypocrisy, and “Moms for Libertines” jokes. But the situation has also provided a window into the machinations of the movement that helped make the Zieglers so significant in Republican politics—thanks especially to the rapid rise of Moms for Liberty as a national organization.
Bridget Ziegler started Moms for Liberty with Tina Descovich and Tiffany Justice in January 2021, but she was soon wooed away. Within months, she was hired to help run school-board-campaign trainings at the Leadership Institute, an obscure but influential nonprofit.
The institute was founded in 1979 by Morton Blackwell, a longtime GOP activist—so longtime that in 1964, he was the youngest elected delegate for Barry Goldwater in his run for the Republican nomination. Blackwell’s participation in the emerging New Right made him a crucial figure in the Reagan Revolution, Richard Meagher, a political-science professor at Randolph-Macon College, told me. Now 84, Blackwell still serves as president of the Leadership Institute, and is the Virginia GOP’s national committeeman.
The mission of Blackwell’s institute is to recruit and train conservative activists for positions of influence in politics and the media. Its website lists dozens of classes about get-out-the-vote strategies, digital campaigning, and fundraising tips, but its true value, Meagher told me, lies in its connections. “The Leadership Institute trains people and then plugs them into various networks, whether it’s think tanks or in Congress, in nonprofit groups or advocacy groups,” he said.
The institute claims to have tutored more than a quarter of a million conservative operatives over the past five decades, including Karl Rove, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, and former Vice President Mike Pence. Newly elected House Speaker Mike Johnson has also credited Blackwell for his career in Congress. And few people in Florida were as plugged-in as the Zieglers. But many institute alums are relatively unheralded political players, experts told me. These activists might be the technologists behind campaigns and nonprofits, the staffers for senators, or the drafters of policy.
When the coronavirus pandemic prompted school administrators to keep kids at home, the institute developed new programs for training suburban women to wage school-board campaigns to keep schools open and masks off—a development that led to the recruitment of Bridget Ziegler, the tall, blond face of this new public arena of conservative activism. (Ziegler did not respond to requests for comment for this story.)
The Leadership Institute exists alongside dozens of similar but better-known groups, such as the Heritage Foundation, a think tank; Turning Point USA, a youth organization; and the Family Research Council, a social-conservative group. Many of these organizations and their leaders are members of a conservative umbrella organization called the Council for National Policy, of which Blackwell was a founding member. The CNP is a secretive, invitation-only group that gathers conservative activists to coordinate political strategy, Anne Nelson, the author of Shadow Network, told me. Think the Conservative Political Action Conference, but less performative.
The CNP’s purpose is to “bring fellow travelers together” to coordinate strategy and messaging, Meagher said. Hillary Clinton popularized the phrase “vast right-wing conspiracy,” but “it’s not a conspiracy—it’s all out in the open,” Meagher said. “They are very well connected, and there’s lots of crossover between different institutions.” The Democratic Party, of course, has similar resources for training progressive candidates and furthering policy goals. But, Meagher said, the Democratic-aligned constellation is not nearly as ideologically coherent or disciplined as the groups that make up the CNP: “There is no analogy to that on the left.”
This interlocking structure of funding, training, and schmoozing is key to understanding the quick success of Moms for Liberty in American politics.
According to Ziegler and her colleagues, the organization was initially launched to address concerns that parents had about school closures and mask policies during the pandemic. But Moms for Liberty was quickly absorbed into the conservative movement’s broader network. Within days of its creation, Moms for Liberty was featured on Rush Limbaugh’s radio show. By June 2021, the group was hosting the political commentator Megyn Kelly for a “fireside chat” at Cape Canaveral, Florida. This early success and financial capability suggest that the group “had a lot of resources available that just are not available to other grassroots groups,” Maurice T. Cunningham, the chair of the political-science department at the University of Massachusetts at Boston, told me.
Now, after only two years in existence, the group has become a mandatory campaign stop for Republican political candidates. At Moms for Liberty’s summit this year in Philadelphia—only its second-ever national gathering—every major presidential-primary candidate stopped by to speak to the crowd, including Donald Trump.
“It might’ve been for five minutes that the moms were selling T-shirts and having bake sales,” Joshua Cowen, an education-policy professor at Michigan State University, told me. “But it was very quickly, within months, that they scaled up to the right-wing avatar they are today.” Recently, the group’s focus has shifted toward advocating against the teaching of gender, sexuality, and race in school curricula, and banning from school libraries certain books that mention those themes. This new front in the group’s campaigning has placed the allegations of sexual impropriety against the Zieglers in sharp relief. (“Never, ever apologize,” Christian Ziegler said during a presentation on dealing with the media at this year’s Mom’s for Liberty summit. “Apologizing makes you look weak.“)
The Leadership Institute has been an integral sponsor of both of Moms for Liberty’s annual summits—donating at least $50,000 in 2022 and serving again as a lead sponsor of the event in 2023—and it has provided training sessions to members. In short, Cunningham told me, “if there’s no Leadership Institute, there’s no Moms for Liberty.” Every year, the group awards a “liberty sword” for parents’-rights advocacy; this year in Philadelphia, Blackwell got the sword.
That recognition now appears unreciprocated. In the past three weeks, Bridget Ziegler seems to have been scrubbed, Soviet-style, from the Leadership Institute; her name has disappeared from the online staff directory. (As of Friday morning, the Leadership Institute had not responded to a request for comment.) Ziegler has also been asked to resign from the Sarasota School Board.
There’s no question that her reputation in conservative politics has taken a hit. Even Moms for Liberty’s influence may have peaked for now, given some recent failures in school-board elections. But “what isn’t waning,” Cowen said, “is the influence of the groups behind them.”
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Elaine Godfrey
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China’s Xi says reunification with Taiwan ‘inevitable,’ ahead of crucial vote on island
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Chinese President Xi Jinping said the country’s reunification with Taiwan was “inevitable” in his New Year’s address on Sunday, just weeks before the self-ruled island holds elections that could reshape relations between the two.
“The reunification of the motherland is a historical inevitability,” Xi said; “China will surely be reunified,” according to the official translation of his speech.
“All Chinese on both sides of the Taiwan Strait should be bound by a common sense of purpose and share in the glory of the rejuvenation of the Chinese nation,” the text adds.
Though Taiwan split from China amid civil war in 1949, Beijing considers the self-ruled island of 23 million its “sacred territory” and hasn’t ruled out the use of force in bringing the island under its control.
China has increasingly ramped up its rhetoric around Taiwan and increased military pressure on the island with regular drills in recent months, while lashing out at the U.S. for approving $300 million in military aid to Taiwan earlier this month. Washington is legally obliged to provide the island with the weapons it needs to defend itself.
Xi’s comments come ahead of Taiwan’s presidential and parliamentary elections on January 13.
The tight race pits Lai Ching-te from the ruling and more independence-leaning Democratic Party against Hou Yu-ih from the opposition Kuomintang, which has historically favored closer ties with China. Lai currently leads in the polls, but both candidates have so far attempted to emphasize peaceful relations with Beijing during the campaign.
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Victor Jack
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Donald Trump’s titanic triumph
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Donald Trump could be on the verge of a major immigration policy win; the White House is considering reintroducing some of his administration’s policies in a bid to reduce pressure on the southern border and unlock funding for Ukraine.
Under President Joe Biden, the number of suspected illegal migrants detained after crossing the U.S.-Mexico border has surged to a record high, with the figure hitting 2.4 million in the 2023 fiscal year that ended in September.
One leading political scientist told Newsweek the Biden administration’s “wholly inadequate” policies have left the president “staggeringly vulnerable to Trump’s more hardline immigration rhetoric.” It comes less than a year before the two men could potentially face off in the November 2024 presidential election.
Newsweek has contacted the White House press office and a Donald Trump spokesperson for comment by email.
However, a tightening of restrictions risks angering the Democrats progressive base; many are already smarting from the president’s strong backing for Israel during the nation’s ongoing offensive against Hamas. House Republicans are demanding major concessions on immigration, in return for the passage of a $106 billion package providing additional support to both Ukraine and Israel.
Earlier this week, political news outlet Politico said Biden is thinking about creating a new version of Title 42. This was a measure introduced by the Trump administration in 2020 during the coronavirus pandemic and only lifted in May 2023. It allowed the swift expulsion from the U.S. of migrants coming from countries where infectious disease was present.
Former president Donald Trump speaks at a campaign event at the Hyatt Hotel on December 13, 2023 in Coralville, Iowa. Joe Biden is reportedly considering reintroducing a number of Trump-era migration measures in a bid to reduce pressure on the southern border.
Scott Olson/GETTY
The White House is reportedly also considering expanding the “expedited removal” of undocumented migrants who either fail their initial asylum screenings, or don’t request asylum, without a full hearing. In a further tightening of existing regulations, migrants could be held in detention while waiting for their U.S. court dates, which can take months or even years.
In October, the Biden administration committed to building 20 miles of border wall in Starr County, Texas, despite it previously releasing a declaration that such a wall “is not a serious policy solution.” The funding was authorized under Trump, and Biden admitted to reporters that he doubts the wall will actually work. This sparked an angry response from Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador. He said the construction is “contrary” to what Biden had previously promised, adding: “I understand there is strong pressure from extreme right-wing political groups in the United States.”
The immigration surge has put a number of Democratic-controlled cities under intense pressure, with New York Mayor Eric Adams warning the issue “will destroy New York City” unless action is taken. Texas Governor Greg Abbott has organized for buses to take tens of thousands of migrants from his state to Democratic-run ‘sanctuary cities.’
Thomas Gift, a political scientist who heads the Centre on U.S. Politics at University College London, told Newsweek that reports the Biden administration is considering concessions on migration demonstrate its policies have failed.
Gift said: “Biden’s capitulations reflect growing concern, particularly among the center-left, at what a disaster U.S. immigration policy remains.
“It’s too strong to say that the White House is surrendering to Trump-era demands, and Biden is by no means entirely culpable for the current crisis. But it is a recognition that the administration’s efforts to deal with the problem at the U.S.-Mexico border have been wholly inadequate,” Gift added.
“Unless the White House can make some changes to show it recognizes the scale of the problem, it leaves Biden staggeringly vulnerable to Trump’s more hardline immigration rhetoric.”
Uncommon Knowledge
Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
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What Does the Working Class Really Want?
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This article was featured in the One Story to Read Today newsletter. Sign up for it here.
Political partisans are always dreaming of final victories. Each election raises the hope of realignment—a convergence of issues and demographics and personalities that will deliver a lock on power to one side or the other. In my lifetime, at least five “permanent” majorities have come and gone. President Lyndon B. Johnson’s landslide triumph over Barry Goldwater in 1964 seemed to ratify the postwar liberal consensus and doom the Republican Party to irrelevance—until, four years later, Richard Nixon’s narrow win augured an “emerging Republican majority” (the title of a book by his adviser Kevin Phillips) based in the white, suburban Sun Belt. In 1976, Jimmy Carter heralded a winning interracial politics called “the Carter coalition,” which proved even shorter-lived than his presidency. With Ronald Reagan, the conservative ascendancy really did seem perpetual. After the Republican victory in the 2002 midterm elections, George W. Bush’s operative Karl Rove floated the idea of a majority lasting a generation or two.
But around the same time, the writers John B. Judis and Ruy Teixeira published The Emerging Democratic Majority, which predicted a decades-long advantage for the party of educated professionals, single women, younger voters, and the coming minority majority. The embodiment of their thesis soon appeared in Barack Obama—only to be followed by Donald Trump and the revenge of the white working class, a large plurality that has refused to fade away.
Recent American history has been hard on would-be realigners. The two parties are playing one of the longest deuce games since the founding. Even with the structural distortion of the Senate and the Electoral College favoring Republicans, the American people remain closely divided. The Democratic presidential candidate has won seven of the last eight popular votes, while the national vote for the House of Representatives keeps swinging back and forth between the parties. Stymied by a sense of stalemate, both now indulge in a form of magical thinking.
Neither side believes in the legitimacy of the other; each assumes that the voters agree and will soon sweep it into power. So the result of every election comes as a shock to the loser, who settles on explanations that have nothing to do with the popular will: foreign interference, fraudulent ballots, viral disinformation, a widespread conspiracy to cheat. The Republican Party tries to hold on to power by antidemocratic means: the Electoral College, the filibuster, grotesquely gerrymandered legislatures, even violence. The Democratic Party pursues a majority by demography, targeting an array of identity groups and assuming that their positions on issues will be predictably monolithic. The latter is a mistake; the former is a threat to democracy. Both are ways to escape the long, hard grind of organized persuasion that is politics.
Two other jarring features define our age of deadlock. One is a radical shift in the two parties’ center of gravity. The signature of elections today is the class divide called education polarization: In 2020, Joe Biden won by claiming a majority of college-educated white voters, the backbone of the old Republican Party. Trump, with a lock on the white working class, lost despite making gains among nonwhite, non-college-educated voters, yesterday’s most reliable Democrats. Meanwhile, on the political stage, cultural and social issues have eclipsed economic issues—even as every facet of American life, whether income or mortality rates, grows less equal and more divided by class.
These two trends are obviously related, and they have a history. From the late 1970s until very recently, the brains and dollars behind both parties supported versions of neoliberal economics: one hard-edged and friendly to old-line corporate interests such as the oil industry, the other gentler and oriented toward the financial and technology sectors. This consensus left the battleground open to cultural warfare. The educated professionals who dominate the country’s progressive party have long cared less about unions, wages, and monopoly power than about race, gender, and the environment. In the summer of 2020, millions of young people did not come out of isolation to protest the plight of meatpackers laboring in COVID-ridden processing plants. They were outraged by a police killing, and they called for a “racial reckoning”—a revolution in consciousness that ended up having little effect on the lives of the poor and oppressed.
For their part, Republicans have spoken the traditionalist language of the working class ever since Nixon’s “silent majority”; Trump dropped the mantra of low taxes and deregulation that used to excite the party when it was more upscale, and directed his message to a base that votes on issues such as crime, immigration, and what it means to be an American. More recently, Republican candidates have turned to anti-“woke” rhetoric. In losing its voice as the champion of workers, the Democratic Party lost many of the workers themselves, and during the past half century, the two parties have nearly switched electorates.
This remapping helps explain the outpouring of new books that pay political attention to those overlooked Americans of all races who lack a college degree, many employed in jobs that pay by the hour—factory workers, home health aides, delivery drivers, preschool teachers, hairdressers, restaurant servers, farm laborers, cashiers. During the pandemic, they were called “essential workers.” Now they’ve been discovered to hold the key to power, giving rise to yet another round of partisan dreaming of realignment, this time hinging on the working class. But these Americans won’t benefit from their new status as essential voters until the parties spend less effort coming up with what they think the working class wants to hear, and more effort actually delivering what it wants and needs.
The economic decline and political migration of the American working class receive the most compelling treatment in Ours Was the Shining Future: The Story of the American Dream, by the New York Times writer David Leonhardt. He describes the rise and fall, from the New Deal to the present, of what he calls “democratic capitalism”—not a neutral phrase, but a positive term for a mixed economy that benefits the many, not just the few. By now, the story of growing inequality and declining mobility is familiar from the work of Thomas Piketty, Gary Gerstle, Raj Chetty, and other scholars. Leonhardt has a gift for synthesizing complex trends and data in straightforward language and persuasive arguments whose rationality doesn’t fully mute an undertone of indignation. He appreciates the power of stories and weaves obscure but telling events and people into his larger narrative: a 1934 strike in the Minneapolis coal yards that showed the political potential of worker solidarity; the mid-century businessman Paul Hoffman, who argued to members of his own class that they would benefit from a prosperous working class; the pioneering computer programmer and Navy officer Grace Hopper, who saw the economic benefits of military spending on technological research.
An economy that gives most people the chance for a decent life doesn’t arise by accident or through impersonal forces. It has to be created, and Leonhardt identifies three agents: political action, such as union organizing, that gives power to the have-nots; a civic ethos that restrains the greed of the haves; and public spending on people, infrastructure, and ideas—“a form of short-term sacrifice, an optimistic bet on what the future can bring.”
All three—power, culture, and investment—combined in the postwar decades to transform the American working class into the largest and richest middle class in history. Black Americans, even while enduring official discrimination and racist violence, closed the gap in pay and life expectancy with white Americans—progress, Leonhardt writes, that “reflected class-based changes more than explicitly race-based changes.” In other words, the right of workers to form unions, an increased and expanded federal minimum wage, and a steeply progressive tax code that funded good schools all reduced racial inequality by reducing economic inequality. But after the 1960s, the economy’s growth slowed, and the balance of power among the classes grew lopsided. American life became stratified. Wealth flowed upward to the few, unions withered, and public goods such as schools starved. In their rush to cash in, elites knocked over taboos that had once restrained the worst extremes of greed. Metropoles prospered and industrial regions decayed. Despite the end of Jim Crow and the growth of a Black professional class, the gap between Black and white Americans began to widen again as the country’s top 10 percent pulled away from the rest.
This economic analysis comes with a political argument that will not be welcomed by many progressives. Leonhardt places blame for the decline of the American dream where it belongs: on free-market intellectuals, right-wing politicians, corporate money. But he also points to the shortsighted complacency of union leaders, and, even more, the changing values and interests of well-educated, comfortable Democrats. Beginning in the early ’70s, they dropped concern about bread-and-butter issues for more compelling causes: the environment, peace, consumer protection, abortion, identity-group rights. The labor movement lost interest in social justice, and progressive politicians lost interest in the working class. Neither George Meany nor George McGovern sang from the New Deal songbook. After the ’60s, “the country no longer had a mass movement centered on lifting most Americans’ living standards.”
Why did the white working class abandon the party that had been its champion? “In the standard progressive telling,” Leonhardt writes, “the explanation for this political shift is race.” Race had a lot to do with it, and Leonhardt affirms that Democrats’ embrace of the Black freedom movement in the ’60s, followed by white backlash (exploited by Republicans with their “southern strategy”) and persistent racism, is a major cause. But the progressive telling falls short on three counts. It’s morally self-flattering and self-exonerating; it’s politically self-defeating (accusing voters of racism, even if deserved, is not the way to convince them of anything); and it fails to explain too many recent political trends. For example, nearly all-white West Virginia remained mostly Democratic decades after the passage of the Civil Rights Act and only turned indelibly red in 2000. According to one estimate, almost a quarter of the working-class white voters who gave Trump the presidency in 2016 had voted for a Black president only a few years earlier. The stark polarization of the current college-educated and non-college-educated white electorate shows the key role of class. And what are we to make of an openly bigoted president running for a second term and increasing his share of the Black and Latino vote?
Leonhardt’s subtler account is rooted in the working class’s growing cultural and economic alienation from a Democratic Party ever more dominated by elites and activists, and out of touch on the issues that hurt less affluent Americans most, especially crime, trade, and immigration. The financial crisis of 2008 was a pivotal event, leaving large numbers of Americans with the sense that the country’s upper classes were playing a dirty game at the expense of the rest.
That fall, I reported on the presidential campaign in a dying coal town in Appalachian Ohio. To my surprise, its white residents were giving Obama a close hearing, and he ended up doing better in the region than John Kerry had. But at a local party gathering, an older white man told me that neither party had done anything to reverse the decline of his town, and that he would no longer vote Democratic, for one reason: illegal immigration. I listened politely and discounted his grievance—I didn’t see any undocumented immigrants in Glouster, Ohio. Why did he care so much?
Leonhardt provides an answer. In a comprehensive analysis, he shows that the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act, which liberal politicians sold as nondiscriminatory but still restrictive, opened the gates to mass immigration. The result put downward pressure on wages at the lower end of the economy. Again, racial resentment partly explains hostility to large-scale immigration, but Leonhardt shows that rapid demographic change can erode the social bonds that make collective efforts for greater equality possible: “Low immigration numbers in the mid-1900s improved the lives of recent immigrants by fostering a stronger safety net for everybody.” As Democrats were reminded in 2022’s midterms, immigration is less popular among working-class Americans of all races than among college graduates. The mayor of my very progressive city, a son of the Black working class, recently sounded like that working-class white ex-Democrat in Ohio when he warned that the arrival of more than 100,000 migrants “will destroy New York.”
These positions reflect class differences in approaches to morality. Drawing on social-science research, Leonhardt distinguishes between “universal” values such as fairness and compassion, which matter more among educated professionals, and “communal” values such as order, tradition, and loyalty, which count more lower down the class ladder. It shouldn’t be surprising that working-class Americans of color sympathize with migrants but don’t necessarily want an open border, that they fear crime at least as much as police misconduct. But their views confound progressives, who see these issues through the almost metaphysical lens of group identity—the belief that we think inside lines of race, gender, and sexuality, that these accidental and immutable traits dictate our politics.
Illustration by Mike McQuade. Sources: Brooks Kraft / Corbis / Getty; Leif Skoogfors / Getty; Cynthia Johnson / Getty; Bettmann / Getty. This worldview provided a sense of meaning to a generation that came of age after 2008, amid upheaval and disillusionment. Because the new progressivism flourished among younger, educated Americans who lived online, its cultural reach was disproportionate, making rapid inroads in universities, schools, media, the arts, philanthropy. But its believers badly overplayed their hand, giving Republicans easy wins and driving away ordinary Democrats. Americans remain a wildly diverse, individualistic, aspirational people, with rising rates of mixed marriage, residential integration, and immigration from all over the world. Any rigid politics of identity—whether the left’s obsession with “marginalized communities,” or its sinister opposite in the reactionary paranoia of “white replacement theory”—is bound to shatter against the realities of American life.
Identity politics has been a feverish interlude following the demise of the neoliberal consensus that prevailed from Reagan to Obama. What will take its place? Leonhardt hopes for a Democratic Party that learns how not to alienate the nearly two-thirds of Americans without a college degree. He believes that education can be a force for upward mobility, but that the current version of meritocracy—built-in advantage at the top, underfunding below—has created a highly educated aristocracy. He advises a renewed emphasis on economic populism, a hard line on equal rights for all but reasonable compromise on other controversial social issues, and a general attitude of respect. His hero is the martyred Robert F. Kennedy, whose 1968 presidential campaign was the last to unite working-class Americans of all colors.
A version of the same argument, with less historical depth and feeling but more charts and polemics, can be found in John B. Judis and Ruy Teixeira’s Where Have All the Democrats Gone? The Soul of the Party in the Age of Extremes. Judis and Teixeira have been explaining their earlier book’s thesis for two decades even as the majority of its title kept failing to emerge. Now they diagnose their error: “What began happening in the last decade is a defection, pure and simple, of working-class voters. That’s something that we really didn’t anticipate.” Like Leonhardt, they call on Democrats to embrace New Deal–style “economic liberalism” (but not Green New Deal–style socialism) and to reject “today’s post-sixties version of social liberalism, which is tantamount to cultural radicalism.” In a series of scathing chapters, Judis and Teixeira show how far left the Democrats’ “shadow party” of activists, donors, and journalists has moved in the past 20 years on immigration, race, gender, and climate.
By John B. Judis and Ruy Teixeira
The authors want a return to the party’s cultural centrism of the ’90s. Instead of decriminalizing the border, which most 2020 Democratic presidential candidates advocated, they call for tighter border security, enforcement of laws that prohibit hiring undocumented immigrants, and a way for those already here to become citizens. They show that middle-ground policies like these and others—the pursuit of racial equality that focuses on expanding opportunity for individuals, not equity of group outcomes; support for equal rights for trans Americans without insisting on a gender ideology that denies biological sex—remain majority views, including among nonwhite Americans. Judis and Teixeira are less persuasive on climate change: Although their gradualism might be politically helpful to Democrats, the country and the planet will be at the mercy of extreme weather that’s indifferent to such messaging.
Joshua Green’s fast-paced, sober, yet hopeful The Rebels: Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and the Struggle for a New American Politics argues that a Democratic renewal is already under way. Like Leonhardt, Judis, and Teixeira, Green traces the Democrats’ estrangement from working Americans back to the ’70s; he begins his story with a moment in 1978, when Jimmy Carter abandoned unions for Wall Street. The narrative reaches a climax in 2008, when the financial crisis destroyed home values and retirement savings while taxpayer dollars rescued the banks that had triggered it, convincing large numbers of Americans that the system was rigged by financiers and politicians. Because of policy choices by the Obama administration—Democrats’ last spasm of neoliberalism—much of the blame fell on the former party of the common people.
Yet out of the wreckage rose a new group of Democratic stars who sounded like their New Deal predecessors, many of whom were every bit as radical. Taking aim at corporate elites, Green’s protagonists want to increase economic equality through worker power and state intervention. Though Sanders and Warren failed as presidential candidates, Green argues that their populism transformed the party, including the formerly moderate Joe Biden, who has pushed a remarkably ambitious legislative agenda with working-class interests at its center.
Green is a first-rate journalist, but his book suffers from a blind spot: It ignores the role of culture in the party’s struggles with the working class. His analysis omits half the story until the 2016 election, when, he acknowledges, Trump “reshuffled Democratic priorities. As he moved cultural issues to the center of national political conflict, race, gender, and immigration eclipsed populist economics as the focus of the liberal insurgency.” In the face of Trump’s bigotry, Democrats felt compelled to adopt the “maximalist” positions of activists, assuming that these would align the party with “the groups on the receiving end of Trump’s ugliest barbs,” such as Latino immigrants. Instead, the party’s working-class losses began to extend beyond white voters. Green’s answer is to double down on economic populism: “Rather than fear the Republicans’ culture wars—or respond to them by racializing policies that benefit everyone—Democrats should take the opportunity to reestablish the party as serving the interests of working people of every race and ethnicity.”
None of these books offers a shortcut to a new Democratic majority. The erosion of working-class support is too old and too severe to be easily reversed. In fact, it’s the Republican pollster Patrick Ruffini, in Party of the People: Inside the Multiracial Populist Coalition Remaking the GOP, who imagines a coming realignment—for Republicans. Ruffini can’t resist making the case that, in addition to transforming the party, this coalition could become the next permanent majority. To do so, he breezes through some of the same history, and reaches a similar conclusion: Democrats have fallen into a “cosmopolitan trap,” losing their hold on a key constituency in the process.
Ruffini’s most original contribution is to apply close statistical analysis to the past few election cycles as he builds his case for a Republican multiracial coalition. He supplies strong evidence of the moderate social views of most Black, Latino, and Asian American voters. On that basis, Ruffini doesn’t think Democrats can win back their lost supporters just by changing the subject to class. “Democrats may calculate that, simply by focusing on economic issues, they can keep cultural issues from eating into their base,” but they’re wrong, he writes. “When voters’ economic views and social views are in conflict, one’s social stances more often drive voting behavior … Cultural divides are what voters vote on even if politicians don’t talk about them.” Ruffini offers no data to support this conclusion, but it underpins his counsel for a politician like Biden. Never mind his legislative accomplishments that benefit the working class; what he really needs, Ruffini advises in political-operative mode, is a “hard pivot against the cultural left”—he seems to have in mind a Sister Souljah moment—to neutralize Republican attacks.
Though Ruffini doesn’t spend much time on economic policy, it’s worth noting that a few high-profile Republicans have recently discovered that monopolistic corporations can be oppressors, that capitalism tears communities apart. Senators Josh Hawley of Missouri and Marco Rubio of Florida, as well as other politicians, limit this insight to their partisan enemies in Silicon Valley, but a few conservative writers, such as Sohrab Ahmari, the author of Tyranny, Inc.: How Private Power Crushed American Liberty—And What to Do About It, are open to ideas of social democracy. This internal party battle between the old libertarians and the new egalitarians doesn’t seem to interest Ruffini; oddly, given his populist ambitions, he remains unmoved by the anti-corporate critique. Nor does he have much to say about the Republican Party’s descent with Trump into authoritarian nihilism.
Ruffini’s formative years as a professional Republican came during the George W. Bush presidency, and his thinking hasn’t kept up with the America of fentanyl and Matt Gaetz. The populist future of Ruffini’s desires is a wholesome mixture of culturally conservative, “pro-capitalist” families and low taxes. His “commonsense majority” would combine white people who didn’t graduate from college and nonwhite people of all classes, because “the education divide makes a much bigger difference in the attitudes of whites than it does among nonwhites.” It sounds like a twist on the Judis-Teixeira emerging majority of two decades ago. Demography as destiny seduces realigners on both sides.
Ruffini recognizes that Republicans are a long way from attracting enough nonwhite voters to achieve his majority. But, he argues, if the party battles job discrimination based on a college degree, makes voting Republican socially acceptable among Black Americans, and apologizes for the southern strategy, his goal could be realized by 2036. By then, the Democratic Party would presumably be a pious rump of overeducated white people demanding open borders and anti-racist math.
These writers are all trying to solve a puzzle: One party supports unions, the child tax credit, and some form of universal health care, while the other party does everything in its power to defeat them. One president passed major legislation to renew manufacturing and rebuild infrastructure, while his predecessor cut taxes on the rich and corporations. Yet polls since 2016 have shown Republicans closing the gap with Democrats on which party is perceived to care more about poor Americans, middle-class Americans, and “people like me.” During these years, the energy on the left has been fueled by an identity politics that resisted Trump and became the orthodoxy of educated progressives, with its own daunting lexicon. Many Democrats fell silent, out of fear or shame or confusion.
Now, encouraged perhaps by the excesses and failures of a professional-class social-justice movement, and by the relative success of Biden’s pro-worker agenda, they seem to be finding their voice. Judis and Teixeira cite polling data from Wisconsin and Massachusetts as evidence that Americans are less divided on cultural issues than activists on both sides, who benefit by stoking division, would like: “If you look at the country’s voters, and put aside the culture wars, what you find are genuine differences between the parties’ voters over economic issues.” The real disagreements have to do with taxation, regulation, health care, and the larger problem of inequality. Democrats’ way forward seems obvious: emphasize differences on economics by turning left; mute differences on culture by tacking to the middle. If the party can free itself from the moneyed interests of Wall Street and Silicon Valley, and the cultural radicalism of campus and social media, it might start to win in red states.
I want Leonhardt, Judis, Teixeira, and Green to be right. Having long held the same views, I’m an ideal audience for these books and other new ones making related arguments, such as Yascha Mounk’s The Identity Trap: A Story of Ideas and Power in Our Time, Susan Neiman’s Left Is Not Woke, and Fredrik deBoer’s How Elites Ate the Social Justice Movement. Yet the solutions that some of them propose for the Democrats’ working-class problem leave me with a worrying skepticism. In an age of shredded social bonds and deep distrust of institutions, especially the federal government, we can’t go back to New Deal economics. If Ruffini is right, the culture wars aren’t easily put aside. “Guns and religion,” in Obama’s unfortunate phrase, are genuinely held values, not just proxies for economic grievance; conservative politicians manipulate them, but they aren’t inauthentic. Race and gender are more important categories than class for millions of Americans, especially younger ones. Illegal immigration legitimately vexes citizens living precarious lives. Social issues aren’t manufactured by power-hungry politicians to divide the masses. They matter—that’s why they’re so polarizing.
The working class is immense, varied, and not all that amenable to being led. It’s more atomized, more independent-minded, more conspiracy-minded and cynical than it was a couple of generations ago. Although unions are gaining popularity and energy, only a tenth of workers belong to one. Abandoned to an unfair economy while the rich freely break the rules, bombarded with images of fame and wealth, awash in drugs, working-class Americans are less likely to identify with underdogs like Rocky and Norma Rae or the defeated heroes of Springsteen songs than to admire celebrities who pursue power for its own sake—none more so than Trump.
The argument over which matters more, economics or culture, may obsess the political class, but Americans living paycheck to paycheck, ill-served by decades of financial neglect and polarizing culture wars, can’t easily separate the two. All of it—wages, migrants, police, guns, classrooms, trade, the price of gas, the meaning of the flag—can be a source of chaos or of dignity. The real question is this: Can our politics, in its current state, deliver hard-pressed Americans greater stability and independence, or will it only inflict more disruption and pain? The working class isn’t a puzzle whose solution comes with a prize—it isn’t a means to the end of realignment and long-term power. It is a constituency comprising half the country, whose thriving is necessary for the good of the whole.
This article appears in the January/February 2024 print edition with the headline “What Does the Working Class Really Want?”
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George Packer
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Third-Party Candidate Promises To Fill Whatever Void Still Left Between Centrist Democrats, Centrist Republicans
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ST. LOUIS—Vowing to provide what could technically be considered an alternative, third-party candidate Patrick Laine promised Monday to fill whatever void was still left between centrist Democrats and centrist Republicans. “Americans deserve choice, which is why I’m running on a platform of whatever extremely narrow ideology sits between moderate Republicans and moderate Democrats,” said Laine, explaining that as president he would find compromise between the extreme centrists on both sides of the aisle. “Whether it’s on issues of immigration, gun rights, or abortion, I promise to find even more milquetoast opinions than anyone else. With so much animosity among centrists of all stripes, I believe people are desperately looking for someone who embodies the tiny sliver of space separating the most middle-of-the-road views.” At press time, Laine was attacked as too radical.
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JPMorgan boss Jamie Dimon wants Americans on both sides of the political fence to unite to keep Trump out of office—but warns against sneering at MAGA supporters
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America has failed its least wealthy citizens—and “insulting” those with opposing political views isn’t going to make things better, according to JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon.
Speaking at the New York Times DealBook Summit on Wednesday, the Wall Street veteran called on people of all ideological views to do what they can to prevent another Donald Trump presidency.
“If you’re a very liberal Democrat, I urge you: help Nikki Haley,” he said. “Get a choice on the Republican side that might be better than Trump.”
Asked whether he believed the best outcome for the election was “anyone but Trump,” Dimon responded: “I would never say that.”
“He might be the president, I have to deal with that too,” he joked—but he noted that he didn’t mind criticizing whoever ends up in the Oval Office.
Stop slamming MAGA movement, Dimon says
While he made it clear he wasn’t the biggest fan of Trump returning to office, Dimon urged Americans on Wednesday to put aside some of their ideological differences and look for the nuance in others’ political beliefs.
“We should stop talking about ultra-MAGA,” he insisted. “I think you’re insulting a large group of people, and making this assumption, scapegoating—which the press is pretty good at too—that these people believe in Trump’s family values and are supporting the personal person. I don’t think that’s true.”
A lot of the support for Trump’s so-called MAGA (“Make America Great Again”) campaign, Dimon argued, came from specific things he had called out or achieved during his presidency.
“I think what [supporters are] looking at is the economy was pretty good—the Black community had the lowest unemployment rate ever in his last year,” he said. “He wasn’t wrong about China. He wasn’t wrong about NATO. He was wrong about the misuse of the military. So that’s why—they’re looking at that.”
He called on people to do what they can to consider why people take opposing views. For Democrats, he suggested reading the work of conservative columnist George Will, while he said Republicans ought to look up the work of Pulitzer winning columnist Thomas Friedman.
“We should get out of this [idea that] it’s one way or the other,” he said. “I’m not mad at people who are anti-abortion. If you believe in God and that conception starts at the moment of birth, you are not a bad person. I think people need to stop denigrating each other all the time because people take a point of view that is slightly different than yours. We’re a democracy—people should vote and solve some of these issues, and they won’t always be what you want.”
‘What the hell have we done?’
While there has been some speculation that Dimon himself may some day run for office, he’s denied having any political ambitions for now.
However, he made it clear on Wednesday what he would have done differently to former president Trump or incumbent candidate Joe Biden.
“We’ve done a terrible job taking care of our bottom 30% of earners,” he said, telling the audience: “You all are wealthy and have money, but their average, their average wages are [low].”
“They’re the ones who lost their job in COVID,” he added. “They’re the ones who are dying five or six years younger than the rest of us. They’re the ones who don’t have medical insurance. They’re the ones whose schools don’t work, and they’re the ones dealing with crime. What the hell have we done as a nation?”
Insisting that “we need to fix it,” the JPMorgan chief said the U.S. needed better immigration, education and infrastructure policies—and he pledged to do what he could to help make that a reality.
“Whoever’s president, I’m going to try to help do the best job possible,” he said, before sharing an anecdote about his wife and daughters criticizing him for going to the White House years ago to meet with then-president Trump.
“I will walk into that oval office trying to help whoever is the president of the United States to do a better job for our people,” he added. “I don’t agree with a lot of things [Trump] does… [but] I couldn’t imagine saying ‘I’m not going to go into the White House because of who’s there.’”
Tax the rich, help the poor
During the DealBook Summit talks, Business Insider reported that Dimon was also asked by audience member and billionaire hedge funder Bill Ackman—who once urged the JPMorgan CEO to run for president—what he would hypothetically do if he were to be elected president of the United States.
He said he would start by building a cabinet of “really smart, talented brainy people” that included both Republicans and Democrats, before tackling education, immigration and “doubling down on diplomacy.”
Dimon—who has a personal net worth of $1.8 billion, according to Forbes—also said presidents should have an economic growth strategy that included “proper taxation” policies, adding that he would double the earned income tax credit for low earners “tomorrow.”
“I’d make people like you pay a little bit more,” he also told Ackman. “This carried interest stuff would be gone the day I got in office because it is unfair.”
The carried interest loophole—which Ackman has previously slammed as a “stain on the tax code”—allows private equity and hedge fund managers to lower their tax bill on profits from fund investments.
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Chloe Taylor
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NATO front-runner Mark Rutte faces flak over low Dutch defense spending
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BRUSSELS — Outgoing Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte is emerging as the front-runner to be the new NATO chief, but faces resistance in Washington from lawmakers who accuse the Netherlands of underspending on defense on his watch, and from others who think it’s time for a woman at the top.
In what’s shaping up to be at least a three-person race, Rutte is considered a strong favorite, according to two European officials and a diplomat granted anonymity to talk about internal deliberations.
“He’s certainly a heavyweight, he’s a very good candidate,” Poland’s Ambassador to NATO Tomasz Szatkowski said at an event hosted by POLITICO Pro Defense on Tuesday.
One of the officials said the longtime Dutch leader had won the support of “senior U.S. and German officials.”
France, another crucial decision-maker, is also favoring Rutte, driven primarily by his personal rapport with President Emmanuel Macron, who was one of Rutte’s earliest cheerleaders in his quest for the NATO top job.
“That Macron and Rutte appreciate each other is no secret,” said a French diplomat.
However, some American lawmakers adamantly oppose Rutte, as the Netherlands has consistently failed to meet NATO’s defense spending target of 2 percent of gross domestic product.
That pits him unfavorably against Estonian Prime Minister Kaja Kallas, who signaled interest in the NATO job while in Washington last week. Her government agreed to raise defence spending to 3 percent of GDP for 2024-2027, from 2.85 percent this year. Tallinn has also been an outsize supporter of Ukraine in terms of weaponry.
The underdog is Latvia’s Foreign Minister Krišjānis Kariņš, whose announcement on Sunday that he was running was even a surprise to some in Riga, according to a diplomat.
The candidacies of Kallas and Kariņš ruffle some Western European feathers — still smarting from the intense criticism they faced from Baltic nations that they are insufficiently supportive of Ukraine and too fearful to challenge Russia.
The White House was coy when asked whether U.S. President Joe Biden prefers Rutte.
“We’re not going to get into internal deliberations over the next secretary general,” said National Security Council spokesperson Adrienne Watson. “We look forward to working closely with allies to identify a secretary general who can lead the alliance at this critical time for transatlantic security.”
Penny-pincher
For some, though, the record of burden sharing in a secretary-general candidate’s home country does matter politically, and Washington is scrutinizing that closely.
U.S. Senator Dan Sullivan, a Republican from Alaska and senior of member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said Rutte “should be unequivocally disqualified” over his country’s record on NATO burden sharing. He said there is “deep bipartisan frustration in the U.S. about NATO members not pulling their weight.”
Estonian Prime Minister Kaja Kallas signaled interest in the NATO job while in Washington last week | Leon Neal/Getty Images The Netherlands has a poor track record. In 2014 it spent only 1.15 percent of its GDP on defense, while the alliance has a 2 percent spending goal. This year, The Hague will spend 1.7 percent of GDP and has agreed to spend 2.03 percent in 2024 and 2.01 percent in 2025.
Ahead of July’s NATO summit in Vilnius, Sullivan led a bipartisan group of 35 senators in writing a letter to Biden urging him to ensure NATO countries meet their defense spending commitments. That tally — which amounts to more than a third of the U.S. Senate — hints at the potent politics of burden sharing in Washington.
Congress’ ongoing negotiations over its annual defense legislation include a provision from Sullivan that would require the Pentagon to prioritize NATO members that hit the 2 percent target when making decisions about U.S. military basing, training, and exercises.
Some in Biden’s own Democratic Party also believe it’s time for a woman to run NATO.
“I’ve long thought it was time the allies appoint the first woman NATO secretary general,” Senate NATO Observer Group Co-Chair Jeanne Shaheen, a Democrat from New Hampshire, said in a statement.
“That said, it’s critical that support for NATO remains strong and bipartisan in the Senate and for that to happen, the successor for this important position should hail from a country that is meeting the 2 percent defense spending commitment, or has a robust plan in place to meet that goal, which was agreed to by all allies in Vilnius,” she added.
With NATO helping coordinate members’ efforts to help Ukraine fight Russia, there are also calls for someone from the eastern flank of the alliance to become the next leader.
“Maybe at some point it is also [the] right time for the alliance to look at the region of Eastern Europe,” Ukraine’s Ambassador to NATO Natalia Galibarenko told POLITICO. “So my preference … would be at some point to see [a] secretary-general representing Eastern Europe.”
Such as Kallas?
“Why not?” said the Ukrainian envoy.
With additional reporting from Clea Caulcutt. and Joshua Posaner. Joe Gould and Alexander Ward reported from Washington.
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Stuart Lau, Alexander Ward and Joe Gould
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Outrage against Univision grows after Trump interview
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Univision has found itself at the center of a growing controversy after a recent interview with former President Trump that critics have blasted as too friendly.
The interview that aired Nov. 9 was noticeably warm, and Trump received little pushback as he gave false or misleading statements on border security and immigration policies he instituted as president.
Backlash from certain corners of the Latino community was swift, including calls for more balanced reporting and an outright boycott of the television network ahead of the 2024 election.
Latinos are considered a crucial voting bloc — and largely up for grabs — in next year’s election, likely to be a rematch between Trump and President Biden. Although Latino voters have historically favored Democrats, the Republican Party in recent years has made significant progress in courting their votes.
The exclusive interview with Trump therefore raised significant alarms within the Democratic Party and its allies that the leading Republican candidate was making unchecked claims to important swing voters.
Actor John Leguizamo posted a video to his 1 million Instagram followers Thursday criticizing the Spanish-language media company for “softballing Trump” and reportedly canceling ads for Biden. He said the television network has become “MAGA-vision.”
He implored fellow entertainers, athletes, activists and politicians to join him in boycotting the network until it reinstated “parity, and equality and equity” between the presidential candidates. The television network has also requested an interview with Biden, according to the Washington Post.
The more-than-hourlong interview with Trump was conducted by Enrique Acevedo, an anchor from Mexican network Televisa who is not a Univision journalist. The two media groups merged last year. Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner reportedly helped organize the interview.
“All you have to do is look at the owners of Univision,” Trump said in the first few minutes of the interview when asked about Latino voters and recent polls showing him defeating Biden in 2024. “They’re unbelievable entrepreneurial people, and they like me.”
“They want to see security,” Trump added. “They want to have a border.”
During the interview, Trump made questionable claims that the partial wall built along the southern border was made possible by Mexico providing thousands of soldiers “free of charge,” and that former President Obama laid the groundwork for the controversial policy at the border to deter illegal crossings that became known as the family-separation crisis. Acevedo did not push back on either claim.
“It wasn’t just a friendly interview. It was an embarrassing 1-hour puff-piece with lots of smiles and no pushback with a guy who relished in attacking, belittling and otherizing Latinos and Latin American immigrants,” Ana Navarro-Cárdenas, a prominent Nicaraguan American political strategist and commentator, said on the platform X, the company formerly known as Twitter.
León Krauze, a veteran news anchor for Univision, has since resigned from the network. He did not provide a reason for his departure.
State Sen. Susan Rubio (D-Baldwin Park), a member of the California Latino Legislative Caucus who is running for Congress, said she knew many other Latino leaders who were “personally upset” about the interview.
Rubio said she was “appalled” at how the former president “was allowed to just continue to spew lies and go unchecked” during the conversation. She called the interview “an insult to our entire Latino community.”
The network is “absolutely influential” in households like hers, she said, describing it as a news source she and her Spanish-speaking parents view as trusted and unbiased.
“Our community relies on this information to be truthful. They rely on this source that has been trusted by the Latino community for many, many generations,” she said. “They should have done a better job of making sure that our community is not lied to.”
The Congressional Hispanic Caucus plans to send a letter to the television network requesting a meeting with its chief executive, Wade Davis, and calling for stronger guardrails against disinformation, according to a draft copy of the letter reviewed by The Times.
More than 70 organizations — including prominent Latino groups such as the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, America’s Voice and the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights — signed an open letter to Davis and other TelevisaUnivision executives, sharply criticizing the interview.
The letter, first reported by the Post, asks that the network “conduct a thorough internal review, take corrective measures, and reaffirm its commitment to unbiased reporting and to keeping the Latino community informed and up-to-date with facts and truth,” according to a copy reviewed by The Times.
The controversy is more complicated than what it seems, said Mike Madrid, a GOP political consultant who has a forthcoming book called “The Latino Century: How America’s Largest Minority is Shaping Our Democracy.”
Madrid, who is a vocal critic of Trump, said the objections to the interview are reflective of how the Democratic Party and other left-leaning organizations have taken Latino voters for granted — and relied on the television network to promote their candidates and policies for decades.
Since the late 1980s, Democrats have banked on Latino voters to win elections, Madrid said. But over the last decade, Democrats have begun “hemorrhaging” second- and third-generation Latino voters who are U.S.-born and English-dominant speakers.
Madrid doesn’t dispute that the interview with Trump may have been biased or too cozy, but he said it demonstrates the media company’s shift toward the middle and, therefore, a new Latino audience.
“Where were they for the past 30 years when the Democratic Party was getting softball interviews? The Democrats have taken this base vote for granted. They assumed it was there and Univision would always be in their corner, would always be championing them and advocating for their candidates and policies,” he said. “When you’ve been the beneficiary of media bias, objectivity sounds like betrayal. That’s what’s going on.”
Instead of promoting a boycott of the network, which Madrid called “absolute madness,” Democrats should adjust their strategy and start courting Latino voters on a variety of issues, such as the economy and jobs, rather than just immigration.
“The Democrats have to figure this out very quick that going to war is not in their best interest,” he said. “They are going to have to learn to fight for this vote, when they haven’t for decades. … And they have less than a year to figure this out.”
Times staff writer Stephen Battaglio contributed to this report.
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Hannah Wiley, Julia Wick
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Senator Joe Manchin Slams Biden as “Extreme Left” As He Mulls Presidential Bid
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Wasting no time after announcing his retirement from the US Senate, Joe Manchin is going after President Joe Biden as he embarks on a quest to mobilize the “radical middle” and potentially run for president.
“Joe Biden has been pulled so far to the left, the extreme left,” Manchin told conservative billionaire and radio host John Catsimatidis Sunday. “Makes no sense at all, it’s not the person we thought was gonna bring the country together.”
The West Virginia Democrat added that he thinks former president and current GOP frontrunner Donald Trump “normalized this visceral hatred. He wants to … weaponize [the presidency] for revenge. He believes the only fair election is the one he won [in 2016].” Manchin previously stated that a second Trump presidency would “destroy democracy in America.”
“Washington wants you and I to be divided, and the rest of America to be divided because it’s a better business model for ’em,” Manchin added Sunday. “I’ve decided to go around to see if I can mobilize the radical middle – the radical, moderate, sensible, reasonable, middle, modern part of this country,” he said.”
In a video announcing his retirement from Congress, Manchin said he’d be “traveling the country and speaking out to see if there is an interest in creating a movement to mobilize the middle and bring Americans together,” spurring speculation that he’d jump into the 2024 presidential race.
Manchin recently told NBC’s “Meet the Press” host Kristen Welker that he would “absolutely” consider running for president. “I will do anything I can to help my country, and you’re saying, ‘Does that mean you would consider it?’ Absolutely. Every American should consider it if they’re in a position to help save the country,” he said. Manchin told Welker that he hadn’t spoken with the president since announcing his decision not to seek reelection.
For months, Manchin has been flirting with No Labels, a nonprofit political organization fueled by dark money and focused on fielding a “centrist” third-party ticket for president in 2024. In a statement, the group greeted Manchin’s retirement by calling him a “tireless voice for America’s commonsense majority and a longtime ally of the No Labels movement.” The group said they would “make a decision by early 2024 about whether we will nominate a Unity presidential ticket and who will be on it.”
Speaking on Fox News last week, No Labels leader and former Democratic Senator Joe Lieberman of Connecticut said, “Joe Manchin deserves the most serious consideration if we get to that point.” Lieberman has strenuously denied that a No Labels ticket would help Trump, claiming that the group’s internal polling shows that a “unity” ticket wouldn’t play spoiler.
Manchin, too, has denied that an independent run for president would help Trump win. “I don’t buy that scenario,” Manchin told CBS News’ Norah O’Donnell after announcing his decision not to seek reelection. “I’ve never been a spoiler in anything…I compete to win, okay? And I’m gonna work right now to try to win the middle back.”
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Jack McCordick
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House Votes To Censure 66% Of Americans For Antisemitic Support Of Ceasefire
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WASHINGTON—Pushing through the measure in response to recent nationwide opinion polls, the U.S. House of Representatives voted Thursday to censure 66% of Americans for their antisemitic support of a ceasefire in Gaza. “Today, this censure sends a clear message that our Congress will not tolerate the dangerous calls for peace perpetrated by 80% of Democrats, 57% of independents, and 56% of Republicans,” said House Speaker Mike Johnson, who further added that elected officials could not continue to turn a blind eye to the roughly 225 million out of 340 million Americans who expressed the bigoted view that Israel’s attacks on Palestinian civilians should end. “In a clear vote of 234-188, Democrats and Republicans stand united in our belief that the vast majority of Americans cannot continue to spread hate by acknowledging that a war that has claimed the lives of over 10,000 Gazans, most of them women and children, might be bad. While we believe in free speech, this time, an overwhelming number of U.S. voters have taken it too far.” At press time, Johnson could be heard admonishing Americans and warning that if they continued their antisemitic calls for ceasefire they would all be expelled from the country forever.
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Biden’s Primary Challenger Unleashes Bizarre Claim On Why He’s Running For President
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Rep. Dean Phillips (D-Minn.), who is challenging Joe Biden for the Democratic presidential nomination, told NBC News’ Kristen Welker that he’s not running against the president before the “Meet the Press NOW” host checked him on the assertion Friday.
“I’m not running against Joe Biden. I’m not running against President Biden. I’m running for the future. Yes, we have some policy differences, but I’m a proud Democrat,” said Phillips after Welker asked if he has “any major policy critiques” for the Biden administration due to how he seemingly always votes with the president.
Phillips, a distillery heir and one of Congress’ wealthiest members who launched his 2024 presidential bid Thursday, went on to criticize the cost of living in the U.S. before Welker reminded him who he’s running against.
“Congressman, respectfully, you are literally running against President Biden. So, can you tell voters, what is your major point of difference with President Biden?” asked Welker before Phillips reiterated his “running” remark.
“I’m not running against President Biden. I’m running for the majority of Americans, who want somebody different. I woke up the morning after the 2016 –,” he said before Welker interjected.
“But you just announced you’re running for president, aren’t you? That means you’re running against President Biden. That’s literally the definition of what that means,” Welker noted before the congressman said he’s running “because America deserves to have someone listen to them.”
Phillips, who has expressed concerns about Biden’s age ahead of his campaign announcement this week, has sparked criticism among Democrats who fear the run serves as a means to promote himself.
The congressman, who has promised to rally behind the eventual Democratic nominee, told Welker that lawmakers “aren’t listening” to Americans who “want change.”
″So when I hear people in Washington say that this is a mistake or this is nuts, that is exactly the evidence that everybody needs watching right now that something is terribly wrong,” he said.
“We are the exhausted majority of this nonsense. People who are so much more focused on preserving and protecting their power than they are protecting American people.”
You can check out more of Welker’s interview with Phillips in the clip below.
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Dean Phillips Has a Warning for Democrats
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This article was featured in One Story to Read Today, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a single must-read from The Atlantic, Monday through Friday. Sign up for it here.
To spend time around Dean Phillips, as I have since his first campaign for Congress in 2018, is to encounter someone so earnest as to be utterly suspicious. He speaks constantly of joy and beauty and inspiration, beaming at the prospect of entertaining some new perspective. He allows himself to be interrupted often—by friends, family, staffers—but rarely interrupts them, listening patiently with a politeness that almost feels aggravating. With the practiced manners of one raised with great privilege—boasting a net worth he estimates at $50 million—the gentleman from Minnesota is exactly that.
But that courtly disposition cracks, I’ve noticed, when he’s convinced that someone is lying. Maybe it’s because at six months old he lost his father in a helicopter crash that his family believes the military covered up, in a war in Vietnam that was sold to the public with tricks and subterfuge. I can hear the anger in his voice as he talks about the treachery that led to January 6, recalling his frantic search for some sort of weapon—he found only a sharpened pencil—with which to defend himself against the violent masses who were sacking the U.S. Capitol. I can see it in his eyes when Phillips, who is Jewish, remarks that some of his Democratic colleagues have recently spread falsehoods about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and others in the party have refused to condemn blatant anti-Semitism.
Deception is a part of politics. Phillips acknowledges that. But some deceptions are more insidious than others. On the third Saturday of October, as we sat inside the small, sun-drenched living room of his rural-Virginia farmhouse, Phillips told me he was about to do something out of character: He was going to upset some people. He was going to upset some people because he was going to run for president. And he was going to run for president, Phillips explained, because there is one deception he can no longer perpetuate.
“My grave concern,” the congressman said, “is I just don’t think President Biden will beat Donald Trump next November.”
This isn’t some fringe viewpoint within the Democratic Party. In a year’s worth of conversations with other party leaders, Phillips told me, “everybody, without exception,” shares his fear about Joe Biden’s fragility—political and otherwise—as he seeks a second term. This might be hyperbole, but not by much: In my own recent conversations with party officials, it was hard to find anyone who wasn’t jittery about Biden. Phillips’s problem is that they refuse to say so on the record. Democrats claim to view Trump as a singular threat to the republic, the congressman complains, but for reasons of protocol and self-preservation they have been unwilling to go public with their concerns about Biden, making it all the more likely, in Phillips’s view, that the former president will return to office.
Phillips spent the past 15 months trying to head off such a calamity. He has noisily implored Biden, who turns 81 next month—and would be 86 at the end of a second term—to “pass the torch,” while openly attempting to recruit prominent young Democrats to challenge the president in 2024. He name-dropped some Democratic governors on television and made personal calls to others, urging someone, anyone, to jump into the Democratic race. What he encountered, he thought, was a dangerous dissonance: Some of the president’s allies would tell him, in private conversations, to keep agitating, to keep recruiting, that Biden had no business running in 2024—but that they weren’t in a position to do anything about it.
What made this duplicity especially maddening to Phillips, he told me, is that Democrats have seen its pernicious effects on the other side of the political aisle. For four years during Trump’s presidency, Democrats watched their Republican colleagues belittle Trump behind closed doors, then praise him to their base, creating a mirage of support that ultimately made them captives to the cult of Trumpism. Phillips stresses that there is no equivalence between Trump and Biden. Still, having been elected in 2018 alongside a class of idealistic young Democrats—“the Watergate babies of the Trump era,” Phillips said—he always took great encouragement in the belief that his party would never fall into the trap of elevating people over principles.
“We don’t have time to make this about any one individual. This is about a mission to stop Donald Trump,” Phillips, who is 54, told me. “I’m just so frustrated—I’m growing appalled—by the silence from people whose job it is to be loud.”
Phillips tried to make peace with this. As recently as eight weeks ago, he had quietly resigned himself to Biden’s nomination. The difference now, he said—the reason for his own buzzer-beating run for the presidency—is that Biden’s numbers have gone from bad to awful. Surveys taken since late summer show the president’s approval ratings hovering at or below 40 percent, Trump pulling ahead in the horse race, and sizable majorities of voters, including Democratic voters, wishing the president would step aside. These findings are apparent in district-level survey data collected by Phillips’s colleagues in the House, and have been the source of frenzied intraparty discussion since the August recess. And yet Democrats’ reaction to them, Phillips said, has been to grimace, shrug, and say it’s too late for anything to be done.
“There’s no such thing as too late,” Phillips told me, “until Donald Trump is in the White House again.”
In recent weeks, Phillips has reached out to a wide assortment of party elders. He did this, in part, as a check on his own sanity. He was becoming panicked at the prospect of Trump’s probable return to office. He halfway hoped to be told that he was losing his grip on reality, that Trump Derangement Syndrome had gotten to him. He wanted someone to tell him that everything was going to be fine. Instead, in phone call after phone call, his fears were only exacerbated.
“I’m looking at polling data, and I’m looking at all of it. The president’s numbers are just not good—and they’re not getting any better,” James Carville, the Democratic strategist, told me, summarizing his recent conversations with Phillips. “I talk to a lot of people who do a lot of congressional-level polling and state polling, and they’re all saying the same thing. There’s not an outlier; there’s not another opinion … The question is, has the country made up its mind?”
Jim Messina, who ran Barack Obama’s 2012 campaign, told me the answer is no. “This is exactly where we were at this stage of that election cycle,” Messina said. He pointed to the November 6, 2011, issue of The New York Times Magazine, the cover of which read, “So, Is Obama Toast?” Messina called the current situation just another case of bedwetting. “If there was real concern, then you’d have real politicians running,” he said. “I’d never heard of Dean Phillips until a few weeks ago.”
The bottom line, Messina said, is that “Biden’s already beaten Trump once. He’s the one guy who can beat him again.”
Carville struggles with this logic. The White House, he said, “operates with what I call this doctrine of strategic certainty,” arguing that Biden is on the same slow-but-steady trajectory he followed in 2020. “Joe Biden has been counted out by the Beltway insiders, pundits, DC media, and anonymous Washington sources time and time again,” the Biden campaign wrote in a statement. “Time and time again, they have been wrong.” The problem is that 2024 bears little resemblance to 2020: Biden is even older, there is a proliferation of third-party and independent candidates, and the Democratic base, which turned out in record numbers in the last presidential election, appears deflated. (“The most under-covered story in contemporary American politics,” Carville said, “is that Black turnout has been miserable everywhere since 2020.”) Carville added that in his own discussions with leading Democrats, when he argues that Biden’s prospects for reelection have grown bleak, “Nobody is saying, ‘James, you’re wrong,’” he told me. “They’re saying, ‘James, you can’t say that.’”
Hence his fondness for Phillips. “Remember when the Roman Catholic Church convicted Galileo of heresy for saying that the Earth moves around the sun? He said, ‘And yet, it still moves,’” Carville told me, cackling in his Cajun drawl. The truth is, Carville said, Biden’s numbers aren’t moving—and whoever points that out is bound to be treated like a heretic in Democratic circles.
Phillips knows that he’s making a permanent enemy of the party establishment. He realizes that he’s likely throwing away a promising career in Congress; already, a Democratic National Committee member from Minnesota has announced a primary challenge and enlisted the help of leading firms in the St. Paul area to take Phillips out. He told me how, after the news of his impending launch leaked to the press, “a colleague from New Hampshire”—the congressman grinned, as that description narrowed it down to just two people—told him that his candidacy was “not serious” and “offensive” to the state’s voters. In the run-up to his launch, Phillips tried to speak with the president—to convey his respect before entering the race. On Thursday night, he said, the White House got back to him: Biden would not be talking to Phillips.
Cedric Richmond, the onetime Louisiana congressman who is now co-chair of Biden’s reelection campaign, told me Phillips doesn’t “give a crap” about the party and is pursuing “a vanity project” that could result in another Trump presidency. “History tells us when the sitting president faces a primary challenge, it weakens him for the general election,” Richmond said. “No party has ever survived that.”
But Phillips insists—and his friends, even those who think he’s making a crushing mistake, attest—that he is doing this out of genuine conviction. Standing up and leaning across a coffee table inside his living room, Phillips pulled out his phone and recited data from recent surveys. One showed 70 percent of Democrats under 35 wanting a different nominee; another showed swing-state voters siding with Trump over Biden on a majority of policy issues, and independents roundly rejecting “Bidenomics,” the White House branding for the president’s handling of the economy. “These are not numbers that you can massage,” Phillips said. “Look, just because he’s old, that’s not a disqualifier. But being old, in decline, and having numbers that are clearly moving in the wrong direction? It’s getting to red-alert kind of stuff.”
Phillips sat back down. “Someone had to do this,” the congressman told me. “It just was so self-evident.”
If the need to challenge the president is so self-evident, I asked, then why is a third-term congressman from Minnesota the only one willing to do it?
“I think about that every day,” Phillips replied, shaking his head. “If the data is correct, over 50 percent of Democrats want a different nominee—and yet there’s only one out of 260 Democrats in the Congress saying the same thing?”
Phillips no longer wonders whether there’s something wrong with him. He believes there’s something wrong with the Democratic Party—a “disease” that discourages competition and shuts down dialogue and crushes dissent. Phillips said his campaign for president won’t simply be about the “generational schism” that pits clinging-to-power Baby Boomers against the rest of the country. If he’s running, the congressman said, he’s running on all the schisms that divide the Democrats: cultural and ideological, economic and geographic. He intends to tell some “hard truths” about a party that, in its attempt to turn the page on Trump, he argued, has done things to help move him back into the Oval Office. He sounded at times less like a man who wants to win the presidency, and more like someone who wants to draw attention to the decaying state of our body politic.
Over the course of a weekend on Phillips’s farm, we spent hours discussing the twisted incentive structures of America’s governing institutions. He talked about loyalties and blind spots, about how truth takes a back seat to narrative, about how we tell ourselves stories to ignore uncomfortable realities. Time and again, I pressed Phillips on the most uncomfortable reality of all: By running against Biden—by litigating the president’s age and fitness for office in months of town-hall meetings across New Hampshire—isn’t he likely to make a weak incumbent that much weaker, thereby making another Trump presidency all the more likely?
“I want to strengthen him. If it’s not me, I want to strengthen him. I won’t quit until I strengthen him. I mean it,” Phillips said of Biden. “I do not intend to undermine him, demean him, diminish him, attack him, or embarrass him.”
Phillips’s friends tell me his intentions are pure. But they fear that what makes him special—his guileless, romantic approach to politics—could in this case be ruinous for the country. They have warned him about the primary campaigns against George H. W. Bush in 1992 and Jimmy Carter in 1980, both of whom lost in the general election.
Phillips insisted to me that he wouldn’t be running against Biden. Rather, he would be campaigning for the future of the Democratic Party. There was no scenario, he said, in which his candidacy would result in Trump winning back the White House.
And in that moment, it was Dean Phillips who was telling himself a story.
He didn’t see the question coming—but he didn’t try to duck it, either.
It was July of last year. Phillips was doing a regular spot on WCCO radio, a news-talk station in his district, when host Chad Hartman asked the congressman if he wanted Biden to run for reelection in 2024. “No. I don’t,” Phillips replied, while making sure to voice his admiration for the president. “I think the country would be well served by a new generation of compelling, well-prepared, dynamic Democrats to step up.”
Phillips didn’t think much about the comment. After all, he’d run for Congress in 2018 promising not to vote for Nancy Pelosi as speaker of the House (though he ultimately did support her as part of a deal that codified the end of her time in leadership). While he has been a reliable vote in the Democratic caucus—almost always siding with Biden on the House floor—Phillips has simultaneously been a squeaky wheel. He’s a centrist unhappy with what he sees as the party’s coddling of the far left. He’s a Gen Xer convinced that the party’s aging leadership is out of step with the country. He’s an industrialist worried about the party’s hostility toward Big Business. (When he was 3 years old, his mother married the heir of a distilling empire; Phillips took it over in his early 30s, then made his own fortune with the gelato company Talenti.)
When the blowback to the radio interview arrived—party donors, activists, and officials in both Minnesota and Washington rebuked him as disloyal—Phillips was puzzled. Hadn’t Biden himself said, while campaigning in 2020, that he would be a “bridge” to the future of the Democratic Party? Hadn’t he made that remark flanked by Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer on one side and future Vice President Kamala Harris on the other? Hadn’t he all but promised that his campaign was about removing Trump from power, not staying in power himself?
Phillips had never seriously entertained the notion that Biden would seek reelection. Neither had many of his Democratic colleagues. In fact, several House Democrats told me—on the condition of anonymity, as not one of them would speak on the record for this article—that in their conversations with Biden’s inner circle throughout the summer and fall of 2022, the question was never if the president would announce his decision to forgo a second term, but when he would make that announcement.
Figuring that he’d dealt with the worst of the recoil—and still very much certain that Biden would ultimately step aside—Phillips grew more vocal. He spent the balance of 2022, while campaigning for his own reelection, arguing that both Biden and Pelosi should make way for younger Democratic leaders to emerge. He was relieved when, after Republicans recaptured the House of Representatives that fall, Pelosi allowed Hakeem Jeffries, a friend of Phillips’s, to succeed her atop the caucus.
But that relief soon gave way to worry: As the calendar turned to 2023, there were rumblings coming from the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue that Biden might run for reelection after all. In February, Phillips irked his colleagues on Capitol Hill when he gave an extensive interview to the Politico columnist Jonathan Martin shaming Democrats for suppressing their concerns about Biden. At that point, his friends in the caucus still believed that Phillips was picking a fight for no reason. When Biden announced his candidacy two months later, several people recalled to me, some congressional Democrats were stunned.
“Many actually felt, I think, personally offended,” Phillips said. “They felt he had made a promise—either implicitly, if not explicitly.”
Around the time Biden was launching his reelection campaign, Phillips was returning to the United States from an emotional journey to Vietnam. He had traveled to the country, for the first time, in search of the place where his father and seven other Americans died in a 1969 helicopter crash. (Military officials initially told his mother that the Huey was shot down; only later, Phillips says, did they admit that the accident was weather related.) After a local man volunteered to lead Phillips to the crash site, the congressman broke down in tears, running his hands over the ground where his father perished, reflecting, he told me, on “the magnificence and the consequence of the power of the American presidency.”
Phillips left Vietnam with renewed certainty of his mission—not to seek the White House himself, but to recruit a Democrat who stood a better chance than Biden of defeating Donald Trump.
Back in Washington, Phillips began asking House Democratic colleagues for the personal phone numbers of governors in their states. Some obliged him; others ignored the request or refused it. Phillips tried repeatedly to get in touch with these governors. Only two got back to him—Whitmer in Michigan, and J. B. Pritzker in Illinois—but neither one would speak to the congressman directly. “They had their staff take the call,” Phillips told me. “They wouldn’t take the call.”
With a wry grin, he added: “Gretchen Whitmer’s aide was very thoughtful … J. B. Pritzker’s delegate was somewhat unfriendly.”
By this point, Phillips was getting impatient. Trump’s numbers were improving. One third-party candidate, Cornel West, was already siphoning support away from Biden, and Phillips suspected that Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who had declared his candidacy as a Democrat, would eventually switch to run as an independent. (That suspicion proved correct earlier this month.) As a member of the elected House Democratic leadership, Phillips could sense the anxiety mounting within the upper echelons of the party. He and other Democratic officials wondered what, exactly, the White House would do to counter the obvious loss of momentum. The answer: Biden’s super PAC dropped eight figures on an advertising blitz around Bidenomics, a branding exercise that Phillips told me was viewed as “a joke” within the House Democratic caucus.
“Completely disconnected from what we were hearing,” Phillips said of the slogan, “which is people getting frustrated that the administration was telling them that everything is great.”
Everything was not great—but it didn’t seem terrible, either. The RealClearPolitics average of polls, as of late spring, showed Biden and Trump running virtually even. As the summer wore on, however, there were signs of trouble. When Phillips and certain purple-district colleagues would compare notes on happenings back home, the readouts were the same. Polling indicated that more and more independents were drifting from the Democratic ranks. Field operations confirmed that young people and minorities were dangerously disengaged. Town-hall questions and donor meetings began and ended with questions about Biden’s fitness to run against Trump.
Phillips decided that he needed to push even harder. Before embarking on a new, more aggressive phase of his mission—he began booking national-TV appearances with the explicit purpose of lobbying a contender to join the Democratic race—he spoke to Jeffries, the House Democratic leader, to share his plans. He also said he called the White House and spoke to Biden’s chief of staff, Jeff Zients, to offer a heads-up. Phillips wanted both men to know that he would be proceeding with respect—but proceeding all the same.
In August, as Phillips dialed up the pressure, he suddenly began to feel the pressure himself. He had spent portions of the previous year cultivating relationships with powerful donors, from Silicon Valley to Wall Street, who had offered their assistance in recruiting a challenger to Biden. Now, with those efforts seemingly doomed, the donors began asking Phillips if he would consider running. He laughed off the question at first. Phillips knew that it would take someone with greater name identification, and a far larger campaign infrastructure, to vie for the party’s presidential nomination. Besides, the folks he’d met with wanted someone like Whitmer or California Governor Gavin Newsom or Georgia Senator Raphael Warnock, not a barely known congressman from the Minneapolis suburbs.
In fact, Phillips had already considered—and rejected—the idea of running. After speaking to a packed D.C.-area ballroom of Gold Star families earlier this year, and receiving an ovation for his appeals to brotherhood and bipartisanship, he talked with his wife and his mother about the prospect of doing what no other Democrat was willing to do. But he concluded, quickly, that it was a nonstarter. He didn’t have the experience to run a national campaign, let alone a strategy of any sort.
Phillips told his suitors he wasn’t their guy. Flying back to Washington after the summer recess, he resolved to keep his head down. The congressman didn’t regret his efforts, but he knew they had estranged him from the party. Now, with primary filing deadlines approaching and no serious challengers to the president in sight, he would fall in line and do everything possible to help Biden keep Trump from reclaiming the White House.
No sooner had Phillips taken this vow than two things happened. First, as Congress reconvened during the first week of September, Phillips was blitzed by Democratic colleagues who shared the grim tidings from their districts around the country. He had long been viewed as the caucus outcast for his public defiance of the White House; now he was the party’s unofficial release valve, the member whom everyone sought out to vent their fears and frustrations. That same week, several major polls dropped, the collective upshot of which proved more worrisome than anything Phillips had witnessed to date. One survey, from The Wall Street Journal, showed Trump and Biden essentially tied, but reported that 73 percent of registered voters considered Biden “too old” to run for president, with only 47 percent saying the same about Trump, who is just three and a half years younger. Another poll, conducted for CNN, showed that 67 percent of Democratic voters wanted someone other than Biden as the party’s nominee.
Phillips felt helpless. He made a few last-ditch phone calls, pleading and praying that someone might step forward. No one did. After a weekend of nail-biting, Phillips logged on to X, formerly Twitter, on Monday, September 11, to write a remembrance on the anniversary of America coming under attack. That’s when he noticed a direct message. It was from a man he’d never met but whose name he knew well: Steve Schmidt.
“Some of the greatest acts of cowardice in the history of this country have played out in the last 10 years,” Schmidt told me, picking at a piece of coconut cream pie.
“Agreed,” Phillips said, nodding his head. “Agreed.”
The three of us, plus the congressman’s wife, Annalise, were talking late into the night around a long, rustic table in the farmhouse dining room. Never, not even in the juicy, adapted-to-TV novels about presidential campaigns, has there been a stranger pairing than Dean Phillips and Steve Schmidt. One is a genteel, carefully groomed midwesterner who trafficks in dad jokes and neighborly aphorisms, the other a swaggering, bald-headed, battle-hardened product of New Jersey who specializes in ad hominem takedowns. What unites them is a near-manic obsession with keeping Trump out of the White House—and a conviction that Biden cannot beat him next November.
“The modern era of political campaigning began in 1896,” Schmidt told us, holding forth a bit on William McKinley’s defeat of William Jennings Bryan. “There has never been a bigger off-the-line mistake by any presidential campaign—ever—than labeling this economy ‘Bidenomics.’ The result of that is going to be to reelect Donald Trump, which will be catastrophic.”
Schmidt added: “A fair reading of the polls is that if the election were tomorrow, Donald Trump would be the 47th president of the United States.”
Schmidt, who is perhaps most famous for his work leading John McCain’s 2008 presidential campaign—and, specifically, for recommending Sarah Palin as a surprise vice-presidential pick—likes to claim some credit for stopping Trump in the last election. The super PAC he co-founded in 2019, the Lincoln Project, combined quick-twitch instincts with devastating viral content, hounding Trump with over-the-top ads about everything from his business acumen to his mental stability. Schmidt became something of a cult hero to the left, a onetime conservative brawler who had mastered the art and science of exposing Republican duplicity in the Trump era. Before long, however, the Lincoln Project imploded due to cascading scandals. Schmidt resigned, apologizing for his missteps and swearing to himself that he was done with politics for good.
He couldn’t have imagined that inviting Phillips onto his podcast, via direct message, would result in the near-overnight upending of both of their lives. After taping the podcast on September 22, Schmidt told Phillips how impressed he was by his sincerity and conviction. Two days later, Schmidt called Phillips to tell him that he’d shared the audio of their conversation with some trusted political friends, and the response was unanimous: This guy needs to run for president. Before Phillips could respond, Schmidt advised the congressman to talk with his family about it. It happened to be the eve of Yom Kippur: Phillips spent the next several days with his wife and his adult daughters, who expressed enthusiasm about the idea. Phillips called Schmidt back and told him that, despite his family’s support, he had no idea how to run a presidential campaign—much less one that would have to launch within weeks, given filing deadlines in key states.
“Listen,” Schmidt told him, “if you’re willing to jump in, then I’m willing to jump in with you.”
Phillips needed some time to think—and to assess Schmidt. Politics is a tough business, but even by that standard his would-be partner had made lots of enemies. The more the two men talked, however, the more Phillips came to view Schmidt as a kindred spirit. They shared not just a singular adversary in Trump but also a common revulsion at the conformist tactics of a political class that refuses to level with the public. (“People talk about misinformation on Twitter, misinformation in the media,” Schmidt told me. “But how is it not misinformation when our political leaders have one conversation with each other, then turn around and tell the American people exactly the opposite?”) Schmidt had relished working for heterodox dissenters like McCain and California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. Listening to Schmidt narrate his struggles to prevent the Republican Party’s demise, Phillips felt a strange parallel to his own situation.
Back on January 6, 2021, as he’d crawled for cover inside the House gallery—listening to the sounds of broken glass and the gunshot that killed the Trump supporter Ashli Babbitt, overhearing his weeping colleagues make goodbye calls to loved ones—Phillips believed that he was going to die. Later that night, reflecting on his survival, the congressman vowed that he would give every last measure to the cause of opposing Trump. And now, just a couple of years later, with Trump’s recapturing of power appearing more likely by the day, he was supposed to do nothing—just to keep the Democratic Party honchos happy?
“My colleagues, we all endured that, and you’d think that we would be very intentional and objective and resolute about the singular objective to ensure he does not return to the White House,” Phillips said. “We need to recognize the consequences of this silence.”
On the first weekend of October, Phillips welcomed Schmidt to his D.C. townhome. They were joined by six others: the congressman’s wife and sister; his campaign manager and one of her daughters; Bill Fletcher, a Tennessee-based consultant; and a Democratic strategist whom I later met at the Virginia farm—one whose identity I agreed to keep off the record because he said his career would be over if he was found to be helping Phillips. Commanding the room with a whiteboard and marker, Schmidt outlined his approach. There would be no org chart, no job titles—only three groups with overlapping responsibilities. The first group, “Headquarters,” would deal with day-to-day operations. The second, “Maneuver,” would handle the mobile logistics of the campaign. The third, “Content,” would be prolific in its production of advertisements, web videos, and social-media posts. This last group would be essential to Phillips’s effort, Schmidt explained: They would contract talent to work across six time zones, from Manhattan to Honolulu, seizing on every opening in the news cycle and putting Biden’s campaign on the defensive all day, every day.
When the weekend wrapped, Phillips sat alone with his thoughts. The idea of challenging his party’s leader suddenly felt real. He knew the arguments being made by his Democratic friends and did his best to consider them without prejudice. Was it likely, Phillips asked himself, that his candidacy might achieve exactly the outcome he wanted to avoid—electing Trump president?
Phillips decided the answer was no.
Running in the Democratic primary carried some risk of hurting the party in 2024, Phillips figured, but not as much risk as letting Biden and his campaign sleepwalk into next summer, only to discover in the fall how disengaged and disaffected millions of Democratic voters truly are.
“If it’s not gonna be me, and this is a way to elevate the need to listen to people who are struggling and connect it to people in Washington, that to me is a blessing for the eventual nominee,” Phillips said. “If it’s Joe Biden—if he kicks my tuchus in the opening states—he looks strong, and that makes him stronger.”
It sounds fine in theory, I told Phillips. But that’s not usually how primary campaigns work.
He let out an exaggerated sigh. “I understand why conventional wisdom says that’s threatening,” Phillips said. “But my gosh, if it’s threatening to go out and listen to people and talk publicly about what’s on people’s minds, and that’s something we should be protecting against, we have bigger problems than I ever thought.”
It was two weeks after that meeting in D.C. that Phillips welcomed me to his Virginia farmhouse. He’d been staying there, a 90-minute drive from the Capitol, since far-right rebels deposed House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, sparking a furious three-week search for his replacement. The irony, Phillips explained as he showed me around the 38-acre parcel of pastureland, is that he and Schmidt couldn’t possibly have organized a campaign during this season had Congress been doing its job. The GOP’s dysfunctional detour provided an unexpected opportunity, and Phillips determined that it was his destiny to take advantage.
With Congress adjourned for the weekend as Republicans sought a reset in their leadership scramble, Phillips reconvened the kitchen cabinet from his D.C. summit, plus a Tulsa-based film production crew. Content was the chief priority. Phillips would launch his campaign on Friday, October 27—the deadline for making the New Hampshire ballot—at the state capitol in Concord. From there, he would embark on a series of 120 planned town-hall meetings, breaking McCain’s long-standing Granite State record, touring in a massive DEAN-stamped bus wrapped with a slogan sure to infuriate the White House: “Make America Affordable Again.”
The strategy, Schmidt explained as we watched his candidate ad-lib for the roving cameras—shooting all manner of unscripted, stream-of-consciousness, turn-up-the-authenticity footage that would dovetail with the campaign’s policy of no polling or focus grouping—was to win New Hampshire outright. The president had made a massive tactical error, Schmidt said, by siding with the Democratic National Committee over New Hampshire in a procedural squabble that will leave the first-in-the-nation primary winner with zero delegates. Biden had declined to file his candidacy there, instead counting on loyal Democratic voters to write him onto the primary ballot. But now Phillips was preparing to spend the next three months blanketing the state, drawing an unflattering juxtaposition with the absentee president and maybe, just maybe, earning enough votes to defeat him. If that happens, Schmidt said, the media narrative will be what matters—not the delegate math. Americans would wake up to the news of two winners in the nation’s first primary elections: Trump on the Republican side, and Dean Phillips—wait, who?—yes, Dean Phillips on the Democratic side. The slingshot of coverage would be forceful enough to make Phillips competitive in South Carolina, then Michigan. By the time the campaign reached Super Tuesday, Schmidt said, Phillips would have worn the incumbent down—and won over the millions of Democrats who’ve been begging for an alternative.
At least, that’s the strategy. Fanciful? Yes. The mechanical hurdles alone, starting with collecting enough signatures to qualify for key primary ballots, could prove insurmountable. (He has already missed the deadline in Nevada.) That said, in an age of asymmetrical political disruption, Phillips might not be the million-to-one candidate some will dismiss him as. He’s seeding the campaign with enough money to build out a legitimate operation, and has influential donors poised to enter the fray on his behalf. (One tech mogul, who spoke with Phillips throughout the week preceding the launch, was readying to endorse him on Friday.) He has high-profile friends—such as the actor Woody Harrelson—whom he’ll enlist to hit the trail with him and help draw a crowd. Perhaps most consequentially, his campaign is being helped by Billy Shaheen, a longtime kingmaker in New Hampshire presidential politics and the husband of the state’s senior U.S. senator, Jeanne Shaheen. “I think the people here deserve to hear what Dean has to say,” Billy Shaheen told me. If nothing else, with Schmidt at the helm, Phillips’s campaign will be energetic and highly entertaining.
Yet the more time I spent with him at the farm, the less energized Phillips seemed by the idea of dethroning Biden. He insisted that his first ad-making session focus on saluting the president, singing his opponent’s praises into the cameras in ways that defy all known methods of campaigning. He told me, unsolicited, that his “red line” is March 6, the day after Super Tuesday, at which point he will “wrap it up” and “get behind the president in a very big way” if his candidacy fails to gain traction. He repeatedly drifted back to the notion that he might unwittingly assist Trump’s victory next fall.
Whereas he once spoke with absolute certainty on the subject—shrugging off the comparisons to Pat Buchanan in 1992 or Ted Kennedy in 1980—I could sense by the end of our time together that it was weighing on him. Understandably so: During the course of our interviews—perhaps five or six hours spent on the record—Phillips had directly criticized Biden for what he described as a detachment from the country’s economic concerns, his recent in-person visit to Israel (unnecessarily provocative to Arab nations, Phillips said), and his lack of concrete initiatives to help heal the country the way he promised in 2020. Phillips also ripped Hunter Biden’s “appalling” behavior and argued that the president—who was acting “heroically” by showing such devotion to his troubled son—was now perceived by the public to be just as corrupt as Trump.
All of this from a few hours of conversation. If you’re running the Biden campaign, it’s fair to worry: What will come of Phillips taking thousands of questions across scores of town-hall meetings in New Hampshire?
At one point, under the dimmed lights at his dinner table, Phillips told me he possessed no fear of undermining the eventual Democratic nominee. Then, seconds later, he told me he was worried about the legacy he’d be leaving for his two daughters.
“Because of pundits attaching that to me—” Phillips suddenly paused. “If, for some circumstance, Trump still won …” He trailed off.
Schmidt had spent the weekend talking about Dean Phillips making history. And yet, in this moment, the gentleman from Minnesota—the soon-to-be Democratic candidate for president in 2024—seemed eager to avoid the history books altogether.
“In other words, if you’re remembered for helping Trump get elected—” I began.
He nodded slowly. “There are two paths.”
Phillips knows what path some Democrats think he’s following: that he’s selfish, maybe even insane, recklessly doing something that might result in another Trump presidency. The way Phillips sees it, he’s on exactly the opposite path: He is the last sane man in the Democratic Party, acting selflessly to ensure that Trump cannot reclaim the White House.
“Two paths,” Phillips repeated. “There’s nothing in the middle.”
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Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Promises to Spoil the Election
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Three words told the story. Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s campaign had billed this afternoon’s event in Philadelphia as a “much-anticipated announcement.” Of course, that specific phrase may have been more true than intended.
Ever since Kennedy entered the Democratic presidential primary race in the spring, observers had been anticipating that he’d one day announce his honest intentions as a 2024 candidate. Given Kennedy’s rhetoric, his positions, and his support from conservative operatives, was he really running as a Democrat? A couple thousand people—supporters, journalists, campaign volunteers, people with nothing to do—trekked to Philly to find out.
The candidate was nothing if not on message. Standing in front of a backdrop that read DECLARE YOUR INDEPENDENCE, Kennedy looked out at Independence Hall as he spoke of “a new declaration of independence for our entire nation.” He rattled off a list of everything we’d soon be independent from: cynical elites, the mainstream media, wealthy donors. (Though, presumably, not the same wealthy donors who recently raised more than $2 million for him and his super PAC at a private estate in Brentwood, California, with help from his friend Eric Clapton). Onstage, Kennedy formally declared his independence “from the Democratic Party and all other political parties”—perhaps an unsubtle way to shoot down speculation that he might change his mind and run as a Libertarian, or even a Republican. As his wife, Cheryl Hines, said a bit cryptically before her husband took the stage: “Are you really ready for Bobby Kennedy?”
Kennedy, whom many came to know as a Boomer environmentalist, was the star of this mellow show with a distinct ’60s campus vibe. At one table, attendees were invited to literally sketch their vision of the future on blank sheets of paper with colored pens. Throngs gathered on the grass in front of the National Constitution Center and were led in a Native American tribal dance, followed by the inoffensive piano stylings of Tim Hockenberry, who covered “Jersey Girl” in a Springsteen growl. Outside the entrance, enterprising vendors sold an array of Kennedy memorabilia: buttons that read RESIST INSANITY, RAGE AGAINST THE PROPAGANDA MACHINE, and FIT TO BE PRESIDENT, featuring a photo of a buff, shirtless Kennedy. One attendee waved a giant black-and-white flag with a message for their fellow Kennedy-heads: WE ARE THE CONTROL GROUP. Many people wore fedoras.
They came from all over. Michael Schroth, 69, and his wife, Luz, had taken a 4:30 a.m. bus down from Boston. Schroth told me he voted for Barack Obama twice, but also voted for the third-party candidate Ralph Nader twice, as well as Jill Stein in 2016. “I look for the best candidate, and I don’t care if they’re going to win or not. It’s getting the idea out,” he said. Chris Devol, 56, from Phoenixville, Pennsylvania, was wearing a Philadelphia Eagles hoodie and smiling ear to ear as he awaited Kennedy’s arrival. Devol told me he had voted for the third-party candidate Ross Perot in 1992, and that although he wasn’t sure whether he’d support Kennedy next November, he “100 percent” supported the idea of him competing in the Democratic primary. An elderly woman named Barbara (last name withheld), a retired teacher from Lansdowne, Pennsylvania, told me she believed that President Joe Biden wasn’t doing anything to address the nation’s drug problem. She said a bag of fentanyl was recently found on the steps of her local church, then asked me if I was familiar with the Boxer Rebellion.
Prior to Kennedy’s address, Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, one of the opening speakers, asked for a moment of silence to honor the violence of this past weekend. Someone in the crowd yelled out “Warmonger!” Another screamed, “Free the Palestinians!” Boteach acknowledged neither individual, and said he greatly respects Kennedy, who has been accused of anti-Semitism, as a man of faith. Later, Kennedy said he had arrived at a place where he was serving only his conscience, his creator, and “you”—the voters.
This afternoon marked the culmination of what he described as a “very painful” decision. He noted his long-standing ties to the Democrats, the party of his family, which he casually referred to as a dynasty, before tearing into the tyranny of the two-party system. For weeks, Kennedy had been attacking the Democratic National Committee for “rigging” the primary process. (The DNC has refused to hold primary debates, as is custom when a party’s incumbents are running for reelection.) Kennedy has been polling in the double digits against Biden, but his support hasn’t grown meaningfully since he launched his campaign. As of last Friday, according to the FiveThirtyEight average, Kennedy was polling at 16.4 percent compared with Biden’s 61.2 percent. Four of his siblings—Kerry Kennedy, Rory Kennedy, Joseph P. Kennedy II, and Kathleen Kennedy Townsend—issued a statement today denouncing their brother’s newly independent candidacy, calling his decision “perilous for our country.” Kennedy acknowledged the challenge ahead of him. “There have been independent candidates in this country before,” he said. “But this time it’s going to be different.”
Kennedy is the second candidate in as many weeks to go rogue. Cornel West dropped his Green Party affiliation in favor of an independent bid, telling The New York Times, “I am a jazz man in politics and the life of the mind who refuses to play only in a party band!” Though neither Democrats nor Republicans seem particularly worried about the candidacies of West or Marianne Williamson, Kennedy is different. “The Democrats are frightened that I’m going to spoil the election for President Biden, and the Republicans are frightened that I’m going to spoil the election for President Trump,” Kennedy said. He waited for a strategic beat. “The truth is, they’re both right.”
All year long, mainstream Democrats have tried to pretend that Kennedy simply doesn’t exist, with mixed results. Both the Biden campaign and the DNC declined to comment today on Kennedy’s switch. The RNC, for its part, blasted out a list of “23 Reasons to Oppose RFK Jr.,” and reports have been circulating that Trump’s allies are preparing to pummel Kennedy with opposition research. Last week, the election analyst Nate Silver argued that Kennedy’s independent run won’t necessarily hurt Biden, and it might even help him. David Axelrod, the chief strategist of Barack Obama’s campaigns, took a different view. “I think anything that lowers the threshold for winning helps Trump, who has a high floor and low ceiling [of support,]” Axelrod told me.
Kennedy tantalized the crowd with nuggets that purport to make the case for his electability: “I have seen the polls that they won’t show you.” He pointed out that 63 percent of Americans want an independent to run for president. Though he didn’t cite the origin of this statistic, it aligns with recent Gallup polling, which also showed that 58 percent of Republicans endorse a third U.S. political party, up from 45 percent last year.
Kennedy has built his candidacy, and his career as a lawyer and writer more broadly, on the idea that there are lots of things “they won’t show you.” As I wrote in a profile of Kennedy this summer, he has promoted a theory that Wi-Fi radiation causes cancer and “leaky brain,” saying it “opens your blood-brain barrier.” He has suggested that antidepressants might have contributed to the rise in mass shootings. He told me he believes that Ukraine is engaged in a “proxy” war and that Russia’s invasion, although “illegal,” would not have taken place if the United States “didn’t want it to.”
“He’s drawing from many of those Trump voters—the two-time Obama, onetime Trump—that are still disaffected, want change, and maybe haven’t found a permanent home in the Trump movement,” Steve Bannon told me as I was reporting the profile. “Populist left, populist right, and where that Venn diagram overlaps—he’s talking to those people.”
The reality is that Kennedy will have an extremely hard time even getting his name on the ballot. The GOP “dirty trickster” Roger Stone, who earlier this year was accused of being among those propping up Kennedy’s candidacy (something he has repeatedly denied), told me in a text message that Kennedy faces a “Herculean task” with “50 different state laws written by Republicans and Democrats working together to make ballot access as difficult as possible.” Even if Kennedy is right and voters are looking for a true alternative to Trump and Biden, mathematically, Kennedy’s path to 270 electoral votes is almost incomprehensible.
Nevertheless, he said he believes that he is at the start of a new American moment. “Something is stirring in us that says, It doesn’t have to be this way,” Kennedy said onstage. He nodded to Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop” speech from the eve of his assassination and quoted Abraham Lincoln quoting Jesus Christ: “A house divided cannot stand.” He said that the left and the right had become “all mixed up.” He said that he was proud to count those on both sides of the abortion debate among his supporters, in addition to “climate activists” and “climate skeptics,” and, of course, the “vaccinated” and the “unvaccinated.” Perhaps saying the quiet part out loud, Kennedy said it would be very hard for people to tell “whether my administration is left or right.” He had no shortage of curious metaphors. He promised not just to “take the wheel,” but to “reboot the GPS.” The nation’s two-party system? “A two-headed monster that leads us over a cliff.” And, in case it wasn’t clear: “At the bottom of that cliff is the destruction of our country.”
When I interviewed Kennedy for the profile, I asked him what he thought would be more dangerous for the country: four more years of Biden, or another Trump term. “I can’t answer that,” he said.
Around that time, I asked his campaign manager, Dennis Kucinich, if Kennedy was committed to running solely as a Democratic candidate.
“He’s running in the Democratic primary,” Kucinich responded.
“So, no chance of a third party?”
“He’s running in the Democratic primary.”
“Gotcha. And nothing could change that?”
“He’s running in the Democratic primary.”
Today, after Kennedy finished speaking, Kucinich briefly seized the mic and led the crowd in a building, dramatic chant:
“I declare my independence!”
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John Hendrickson
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How Dianne Feinstein led San Francisco through the AIDS epidemic
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How Dianne Feinstein led San Francisco through the AIDS epidemic – CBS News
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“Stop this effort Now”: Democratic Party officials urge leaders to denounce No Labels in internal email
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Regional Democratic Party officials quietly circulated what they said were instructions from the Democratic National Committee, along with suggestions about how local party officials could help try to thwart efforts by the group No Labels to mount a third-party 2024 presidential bid, new records obtained by CBS News show.
“We need to do everything we can to stop this effort NOW, and not wait until they name a ticket and this becomes a runaway train,” a Democratic Party official in Utah said in an email obtained by CBS News. “And right now is the moment to act, while the conventional wisdom on this hasn’t hardened yet and we have the opportunity to shape it.”
When reached for comment, the official provided another phone number but then did not respond to subsequent calls.
The email urged local leaders to “go on the record denouncing a [No Labels] third party presidential ticket effort—issue a statement on social media, put out an open letter, use media appearances.”
It cited DNC instructions and included talking points for local and state party officials to use in their efforts to knock down the third-party movement.
A DNC official declined to comment but noted that the talking points outlined in the email were not its own. According to an email obtained by CBS News, the DNC simply forwarded information prepared by the center-left think tank Third Way.
Third Way did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The documents offer a glimpse into the jitters inside some quarters of the Democratic Party about the implications of a third-party movement, given voters’ concerns about President Biden’s poll numbers, as well as his age and health.
Democrats have been voicing anxiety that the No Labels effort will only benefit former President Trump, who is the Republican frontrunner, by splitting the vote if he becomes the GOP nominee in the 2024 presidential contest. No Labels has qualified for the ballot in 11 states and is working on gathering signatures in dozens more. The group has raised almost $70 million dollars for its ballot access initiative.
West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin, a Democrat who is aligned with No Labels, has indicated he’s considering leaving the party and running on a unity ticket if Trump and Joe Biden are their respective party’s nominees.
The state Democratic official’s email reads, “The DNC has asked for state and county parties not to make any public statements right now about No Labels (although they are okay with elected officials speaking out publicly against them).”
It goes on to list talking points like this one: “The effort by the No Labels Party is a direct threat to our democracy and opens a clear path for Donald Trump’s reelection. Plus, history and data show that there is no actual scenario where No Labels can win with their third-party ticket.”
No Labels founding chair and former Connecticut Sen. Joe Lieberman and former Missouri Gov. Jay Nixon, the head of No Labels’ ballot integrity initiative, sent a joint statement to CBS News expressing concerns about any effort to derail their work.
“The attempt to shut down No Labels is not an attack on the organization. It’s an attack on America’s democracy,” Lieberman and Nixon’s joint statement says. “American voters decide who goes on their ballot and they are the ones signing No Labels petitions in states nationwide. That’s why we ask the Democratic National Committee – who has claimed to champion free and fair elections – to stand down and stop all efforts to limit the voters’ choices in this, or any, election.”
The Utah Democratic official’s email also seeks information about whether local party officials may have been contacted by the independent group.
“Let us know what you’re hearing,” the email reads. “Has anyone from No Labels reached out to you?”
The email also advises party officials to “come out strongly against NL potential presidential and vice-presidential candidates and their pathetic policy positions.”
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House GOP holds first Biden impeachment proceeding
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Germany’s far-right ‘firewall’ cracks
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BERLIN — The political maneuver shaking Germany’s postwar democratic order involves a piece of legislation that is about as mundane as it gets.
Center-right legislators in the eastern German state of Thuringia wanted to cut a local property tax by a small amount — and did so with the support of the far-right Alternative for Germany, or AfD.
The move broke with years of tradition in which mainstream parties have vowed to maintain a Brandmauer, or firewall, between themselves and the AfD, a party many in a country alert to the legacy of Nazism see as a dire threat to democracy. Even accepting the party’s support, the thinking goes, would legitimize far-right forces or make them salonfähig — socially acceptable.
And so, when parliamentarians from the conservative Christian Democratic Union, or CDU, passed the tax reduction on a late afternoon in September with AfD votes, it sent tremors across the country’s political landscape that still are reverberating.
“For me, a taboo has been broken,” Katrin Göring-Eckardt, a leader of the Greens who hails from Thuringia, said after the vote. “It shows me not only that the firewall is gone, but that there is open collaboration.”
For mainstream parties, and the CDU in particular, the question of how to handle the growing presence of far-right radicals in governing bodies from federal and state parliaments to local councils is likely to grow only more vexing.
That especially is the case in the states of the former East Germany, where the AfD now leads in polls at around 28 percent. Next year, the eastern states of Thuringia, Saxony and Brandenburg will all hold parliamentary elections. Polls show the party leading in all three states.
The AfD is likely to expand its presence in the parliaments of Bavaria and Hesse when those states vote on Sunday. In Hesse, the AfD is coming close to overtaking German Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s center-left Social Democratic Party, according to the latest polls.
The dilemma facing mainstream parties is clear. To work with the AfD means to normalize a party that many believe seeks to subvert the republic from within. But to ostracize the party only alienates its many voters.
The firewall also serves as an unintended political gift, allowing the AfD to depict itself — at a time of high dissatisfaction with mainstream parties — as the clear choice for those who want to send a burn-it-down message to the country’s political establishment.
At the same time, the controversy over the latest vote in Thuringia seems to have played into the AfD’s hands, allowing the party to depict itself as seeking to uphold rather than undermine democracy.
The “‘firewall’ is history — and Thuringia is just the beginning,” AfD party leader Alice Weidel posted on X, formerly Twitter, after the vote. “It’s time to respond to the democratic will of citizens everywhere in Germany.”
Historic fears
Germany’s political leaders are all too aware that the Nazi seizure of power began with democratic electoral success. In fact, it was in Thuringia where, in 1930, the Nazi party first took real governing power in coalition with conservative parties.
The “‘firewall’ is history — and Thuringia is just the beginning,” AfD party leader Alice Weidel posted on X, formerly Twitter, after the vote. “It’s time to respond to the democratic will of citizens everywhere in Germany” | Christof Stache/AFP via Getty Images That fact was not lost on the CDU’s opponents.
“German conservatism has already been a stirrup holder of fascism,” Janine Wissler, a head of the Left party, told the German Press Agency after the vote. “Back then, too, it started in Thuringia,” she added. “Instead of having learned from that, the CDU is going down a path that’s as dangerous as fire.”
CDU leaders in Thuringia deny the vote on the tax reduction means the firewall is crumbling. They say there was no cooperation with the AfD ahead of the vote (though AfD members say there were discussions between lawmakers).
“I cannot make good, important decisions for the state that provide relief for families and the economy dependent on the fact that the wrong people might agree,” Mario Voigt, the head of the CDU in Thuringia said after the vote.
Friedrich Merz, the national leader of the CDU, has sent mixed signals on the firewall — or at least on what exactly the firewall means. Merz says the CDU will not form coalitions with the AfD but he’s been less clear on whether the CDU will work with the party in other ways.
In a television interview over the summer, he seemed to suggest working with the AfD on the local level was all but inevitable.
Friedrich Merz, the national leader of the CDU, has sent mixed signals on the firewall | Tobias Schwarz/AFP via Getty Images “We are of course obliged to accept democratic elections,” he said. “And if a district administrator, a mayor is elected there who belongs to the AfD, it’s natural that you look for ways to then continue to work in this city.”
After an uproar ensued, Merz walked back the comment. “There will be no cooperation between the CDU and the AfD at the municipal level either,” he posted on X, formerly Twitter.
After the vote in Thuringia, Merz stood by the CDU leadership of the state. “We don’t go by who agrees, we go by what we think is right in the matter,” he said on German television.
Even some within his own party do not see things that way. Daniel Günther, the CDU premier of the northern state of Schleswig-Holstein, sharply criticized his party colleagues in Thuringia. “As a conservative, I must be able to say plainly and simply the sentence, ‘I do not form majorities with extremists,’” Günther said.
‘Cordon sanitaire’
It’s not the first time Thuringia has been at the center of a controversy over the firewall. In 2020, a little-known politician in the pro-business Free Democratic Party, Thomas Kemmerich, was elected state premier with the support of the CDU and AfD. Then-Chancellor Angela Merkel weighed in to call the vote “unforgivable.”
In the furor that followed, Kemmerich resigned as did the then-head of the CDU faction in the state. But given the AfD’s large presence in the local parliament, the issue was bound to resurface.
It’s not the first time Thuringia has been at the center of a controversy over the firewall | Christof Stache/AFP via Getty Images The problem is far from Germany’s alone. Mainstream parties are under growing pressure due to the rise of the radical right across Europe.
In France, parties from across the political spectrum have formed a cordon sanitaire, or sanitary cordon, to keep Marine Le Pen, a leader of the far-right National Rally, out of the presidency. But with Le Pen’s party now the biggest opposition group in the National Assembly, the cordon is getting harder to maintain.
In the European Parliament, where a similar cordon has been erected, the center-right European People’s Party has been openly courting the European Conservatives and Reformists, home to Poland’s nationalist Law and Justice party and Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s far-right Brothers of Italy party.
In Thuringia, the stakes are even higher as the local branch of the AfD contains some of the party’s most extreme members. State-level intelligence authorities tasked with surveilling anti-constitutional groups have characterized the party’s local branch as extremist.
The leader of the AfD in Thuringia is Björn Höcke, who is set to face trial for using banned Nazi rhetoric. (In 2021, he closed a speech with the phrase “Alles für Deutschland!” or “Everything for Germany!” — a slogan used by Nazi stormtroopers.)
Höcke railed against Holocaust remembrance in Germany and warned of “Volkstod,” the death of the Volk, through “population replacement.” For such views, German courts have ruled that Höcke could justifiably be referred to as a fascist or Nazi.
GERMANY NATIONAL PARLIAMENT ELECTION POLL OF POLLS
For more polling data from across Europe visit POLITICO Poll of Polls.
After the vote on the property tax in Thuringia, Höcke clearly was pleased, claiming the AfD had helped enact a pragmatic policy.
“It’s simply a good day for Thuringia,” he said.
Peter Wilke contributed reporting.
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James Angelos
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Dam Breaks For Bob Menendez: Senate Democrats Pile On In Calls For Resignation
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The dam broke open Tuesday morning as several Senate Democrats urged their colleague Sen. Bob Menendez (D-N.J.) to resign.
Most notably, a trio of vulnerable Democratic senators joined the calls for Menendez to go, a sign that their indicted colleague is already becoming a liability for their 2024 reelection campaigns.
Within the span of an hour, Democratic Sens. Jon Tester (Mont.), Tammy Baldwin (Wis.) and Bob Casey (Pa.) separately released statements saying Menendez needs to step down as he faces federal corruption charges.
“I’ve read the detailed charges against Senator Menendez and find them deeply disturbing,” Tester tweeted. “While he deserves a fair trial like every other American, I believe Senator Menendez should resign for the sake of the public’s faith in the U.S. Senate.”
Minutes earlier, Baldwin tweeted a similar message about Menendez, who was indicted Friday on charges that he and his wife took bribes ― including $100,000 in gold bars, $480,000 in cash and a Mercedes-Benz ― in exchange for favors that aided an Egyptian American businessman and others.
“The indictment spells out deeply troubling allegations against Senator Menendez that breach the American people’s trust and compromise his ability to effectively represent his constituents,” Baldwin said. “While Senator Menendez enjoys the presumption of innocence until proven guilty and will have his day in court to defend himself, I believe it’s best for his constituents, the American people, and our national security for the Senator to step down.”
Casey issued a statement saying that the allegations against Menendez indicated that repeatedly violated the public’s trust.
“While he is entitled to the presumption of innocence, serving in public office is a privilege that demands a higher standard of conduct,” said the Pennsylvania Democrat. “Senator Menendez should resign.”
Tester, Baldwin and Casey join a fast-growing number of Senate Democrats urging Menendez to go. The others are Sens. John Fetterman (Pa.), Peter Welch (Vt.), Sherrod Brown (Ohio), Elizabeth Warren (Mass.) and Jacky Rosen (Nev.), who is also up for reelection in 2024.
What’s clear about this particular group of senators speaking up is that the New Jersey Democrat’s refusal to resign is becoming a problem for the party. The National Republican Senatorial Committee on Monday issued a statement tying vulnerable Democrats up for reelection in 2024 to “crooked” Menendez.
“You’d think it would be a no-brainer to say someone who took gold bars from foreign businessmen to rig US foreign policy is unfit to serve in the Senate, but apparently Senate Democrats disagree,” NRSC spokesman Philip Letsou said in the statement. “Democrats have made clear they will tolerate Bob Menendez’s comical levels of corruption as long as he continues to back their extreme agenda.”
Which Democrats did the NRSC single out? Tester, Baldwin, Brown and Casey.
Some Democratic senators are still reluctant to pile on. During a Tuesday interview on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” Sen. Debbie Stabenow (D-Mich.) was asked if she thinks Menendez needs to go.
“As far as I’m concerned, we will let this move forward this week and we’ll see what happens,” Stabenow said.
“So, not yet for you,” said the show host.
“Not yet,” Stabenow replied.
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