GOP embrace of extremism began long before Trump
By JAMES ROSEN
HARTFORD COURANT | MAR 09, 2021 

FILE - In this Jan. 6, 2021 file photo insurrectionists loyal to President Donald Trump try to open a door of the U.S. Capitol as they riot in Washington. (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana, File) (Jose Luis Magana/AP)

Decades before Donald Trump’s naked call for lawless revolt, Republican leaders in Washington launched the party’s descent into insane nihilism fueled by a conspiratorial, visceral hatred of government.

I know. I was on the front lines covering it.

Two months after the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, the widely accepted view of the former president persists: He remade the Republican Party in his image and will be a GOP kingmaker long into the future.

The truth is, the GOP started creating the Trump presidency decades before Donald J. Trump assumed office.

The stubborn belief that Trump remade the party is based on a misunderstanding of a fundamental dynamic that has shaped Washington politics for more than a quarter-century since I arrived to cover the national capital in September 1994.

Two months after I came to Washington, the unimaginable happened: Republicans, led by Newt Gingrich, captured control of the House of Representatives. They ended Democratic domination extending back to World War II. Their victory shocked journalists who’d dismissed Gingrich as a flamboyant wild man from the backwoods of Georgia.

Gingrich had long coattails. Across the country, Republicans won governorships, statehouse seats, mayorships and city council posts.

The day after that election, my editor in Raleigh, North Carolina, took me out to lunch. He had summoned me back to Raleigh for an emergency meeting with his other government reporters. The News & Observer had won Pulitzers as the most important political paper in North Carolina. My colleagues in Raleigh covered the governor, legislature and state government agencies, along with the mayors and local governments of Raleigh and a dozen booming suburbs.

In a state with Democratic roots in the Civil War, voters had just elected five Republican representatives to the U.S. House, more than any other state except Washington.

“How did we miss this?” my editor bemoaned over lunch. “Why didn’t we see it coming?”

Fixing his gaze on me, he said: “We’ve been neglecting our conservative readers. I will never let this happen again.”

And so, back in Washington, over the coming months I covered the Republicans’ increasingly radical attempts to cripple the federal government. Intoxicated by his newfound power as House speaker, Gingrich’s ambitions extended far beyond the modest reforms in the “Contract with America,” his savvy campaign-marketing ploy. His acolytes, many of them political outsiders with ignorance of government (something that would become a hallmark of Trumpism), followed his dictates with fanatical fervor (another trait of the ex-president’s current congressional enablers).

They tried to eliminate the Commerce Department but were repulsed by business groups accustomed to billions of dollars in grants and other aid.

They tried to get rid of the Education Department but were defeated by nationwide PTA groups and teachers unions.

Unable to do away with the Environmental Protection Agency, they tried to weaken the two landmark laws that had cleared big cities’ skies and cleaned rural areas’ waters.

Presaging Trump’s purposeful hostility to science, the slogan “junk science” became their rallying cry, a symbol of all the burdensome federal regulations they were trying to roll back.

The Republicans’ efforts to dilute environmental protections failed, as they learned the shocking news that Americans like clear air and clean water.

Unable to accomplish their nutty policy aims, the Republicans turned personal. Funded by an Arkansas billionaire, they demonized Bill and Hillary Clinton. The ostensible foes of government spending wasted boatloads of taxpayer dollars on Soviet-style Senate show hearings about modest real-estate investments the Clintons had made in Little Rock, turning “the Whitewater scandal” into the crime of the century.

Under the next Democratic president, GOP lawmakers and activists became meaner. With the first Black man in the White House, their lies moved from the scientific or political realms to the realm of race. Birther claims about Barack Obama’s origins and thus core legitimacy as president preceded Trump. With his middle name of Hussein and his childhood stay in Indonesia, Obama was mocked as a closet Muslim, his core allegiance to America questioned.

The head of the Orange County Republican Party in California emailed friends a picture of first lady Michelle Obama as an ape. When her crude drawing became public, she was reprimanded – but not removed from her prominent post in one of the country’s most affluent and populous suburban counties.

The violence that appalled the nation at the Capitol in January was on full display as far back as 2009 at dozens of Democratic lawmakers’ town hall meetings with constituents across the country, as fanatics with the new tea party movement barged in, yelled threats and ransacked furniture. Just like Trump’s invading army of misguided rioters, they styled themselves as patriots saving the republic from ruin.

After the 2008-09 financial collapse, only three Republican members of Congress voted for Obama’s stimulus package despite an economy careening toward depression.

A year later, not a single Republican voted for Obama’s landmark health care package. They branded it “socialist medicine” even though Obama settled on a compromise program that maintained private insurance and was modeled on Republican Mitt Romney’s successful plan as Massachusetts governor.

During Obama’s tenure, I covered another extremist GOP lawmaker, Sen. Jim DeMint of South Carolina, for its capital newspaper, The State. A freshman senator who’d been an obscure backbencher in the South Carolina legislature, he catapulted to national fame in Washington by going on the warpath against “earmarks” — funding carve-outs in appropriations bills. Lawmakers fulfilling their constitutional roles as champions of state and district needs were branded as corrupt for procuring aid for local projects. Even funds to fix crumbling roads and repair dangerous bridges became “congressional pork.”

So radical was DeMint, he blocked funding for a prominent vascular surgeon from his own hometown of Greenville, who’d patented a medical device that made dialysis easier for diabetes patients.

It was another South Carolina lawmaker, Rep. Joe Wilson, who caused a scandal by yelling, “You lie!” at Obama as he addressed a joint session of Congress. Wilson had served in the Army Reserves and National Guard. He never tired of reminding others that his four sons had served as well, one in Iraq and another in Afghanistan.

My original take on Wilson’s unprecedented interruption of Obama has not changed: It was beyond rude, a proud military man disrespecting his commander in chief before the world, a bitter slur that he would never have shouted at a white president.

Yet again, the condemnation of Wilson by fellow Republicans was muffled at best.

Despite my occasional successes in exposing the spreading Republican insanity, too much of my reporting aided it.

As difficult as the truth may be, we political journalists facilitated the growing GOP extremism in two ways.

First, following the he-said-she-said model of “objective” journalism, we reported Republican lawmakers’ increasingly false claims side by side with their opponents’ more fact-based assertions:

— Even as scientists came to a near-total consensus about climate change, we reported GOP denials of its existence and then, as the evidence mounted, GOP assertions that it is “part of a natural cycle” rather than a manmade menace.

— Even as President Clinton declared an end to big government and slowed the rate of federal spending, we reported GOP depictions of him as a “typical big-spending Democrat.”

— Even as President George W. Bush amassed record government debt fueled by the war debacles in Iraq and Afghanistan, we ignored the silence of the Republican fiscal hawks who’d warned that debt would bankrupt the country.

— Even as President Obama deported twice as many undocumented workers as Bush had deported, we reported Republican cries of open borders that repeatedly squashed congressional attempts at immigration reform.

— Even as Republican legislators in state after state enacted laws that disenfranchised millions of Black and brown people, we declined to call the laws racist responses to the raw political fact that most black and brown people voted for Democrats.

Second, we focus on government failures that we depict as standard business rather than exceptions. One example was the 2014 reporting of patient wait times at Veterans Administration hospitals. It sparked a national outcry partly by ignoring the herculean work that VA doctors, nurses, and other providers daily perform in a massive and underfunded health care system.

Pulitzers and other major journalism prizes often go to exposes that represent instances of local, state and federal government malfeasance as symptoms of broader corruption. But if you’ve lived as I have in countries with truly corrupt governments, such as Russia and Mexico, you’re skeptical of painting with too broad a brush.

As Romney said in an impassioned late-night speech during the Senate’s presidential election certification, it’s time to tell the truth.

It’s time for journalists to stop covering Republican extremists in Congress as reasonable men and women pursuing reasonable ends.

Here’s the truth: Trump merely stated more loudly and more boldly what Republicans have believed for years. He pushed more brazenly policies they’d pursued for years. He unleashed ugly currents of hatred and racism that Republicans had, if not condoned, failed to condemn.

What’s left is a Republican Party that has finally arrived at the destination to which it’s long been headed: a party with no substantive policy agenda and no real positive beliefs.

Hatred of government is not a policy. Hostility to taxes is not a belief. A melange of grievances real and imagined is not a political platform.

If the current Republican Party has anything else to offer, anything other than its yearslong slide into a full embrace of nihilism, now is the time to show it.


James Rosen is a longtime Washington, D.C., correspondent who has covered Congress, the Pentagon and the White House.

How the GOP Surrendered to Extremism

Sixty years ago, many GOP leaders resisted radicals in their ranks. Now they’re not even trying.

RONALD BROWNSTEIN

FEBRUARY 4, 2021

Nelson Rockefeller and Barry Goldwater at the 1964 Republican National Convention (Francis Miller / The LIFE Picture Collection / Getty)

It’s an image that still shocks in its feral intensity: On July 14, 1964, supporters of Barry Goldwater, the arch-conservative senator from Arizona whom the Republican Party was preparing to crown as its presidential nominee, unleashed a torrent of boos against New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller as he spoke at the party’s national convention in San Francisco.

More than half a century later, Goldwater’s army of conservatives from cookie-cutter Sun Belt subdivisions howling their discontent at Rockefeller—the embodiment of the GOP’s centrist, East Coast establishment—remains a milestone in the right’s conquest of the party. The atmosphere was so heated that Jackie Robinson, who was a Rockefeller supporter, nearly got into a fight on the floor with a Goldwater acolyte from Alabama.

What’s less remembered is why Rockefeller, who had lost the nomination to Goldwater, was standing behind the lectern in the first place: to speak in support of an amendment to the party platform that would condemn political extremism. The resolution repudiated “the efforts of irresponsible extremist organizations,” including the Communist Party, the Ku Klux Klan, and the John Birch Society, a rapidly growing far-right grassroots group obsessed with the alleged communist infiltration of America.

The resolution failed, which testifies to the GOP’s long-standing reluctance to draw a bright line against the extremists who congregate at its fringes. But the fact that such a resolution was debated at all—in such a visible venue, with such high-profile advocates—also says something about Republicans today: In the past, the GOP had a stronger core of resistance to extremism than it’s had in the era of Donald Trump, QAnon, the Proud Boys, and Marjorie Taylor Greene.

“There were a lot more Republican leaders, and their constituents, who attempted to push back then than there are now,” says Matthew Dallek, a political historian at George Washington University and the author of an upcoming history of the John Birch Society. “To a large extent, the people who have inherited the Birch legacy today, I think, are more empowered [and] more visible within the Republican Party. There is much less criticism; there is much less of an effort to drum them out; there is a much greater fear of antagonizing them. They are the so-called Republican base.”

The question of how Republicans deal with the extremists in their ranks is now more urgent than perhaps at any other point since the Birch Society’s heyday in the 1960s. So far, as Dallek notes, the party has done little to uproot them. Representative Kevin McCarthy, the House GOP leader, this week reportedly pressured Greene to apologize for past statements that were racist, anti-Semitic, and encouraged violence, and to relinquish one committee assignment. But ultimately the GOP chose to take no action against her and instead criticized a floor vote Democrats scheduled for today to remove her from all her committees. (By several accounts, many of Greene’s GOP colleagues even gave her a standing ovation after she addressed a caucus meeting yesterday afternoon.) Nor have McCarthy and other GOP leaders shown any interest in acting against the House members who promoted or spoke at Trump’s rally ahead of the January 6 attack on the Capitol. And while GOP Senate Leader Mitch McConnell and some other Senate Republicans have criticized Greene—a relatively easy target—almost all have signaled that they will not vote in Trump’s upcoming impeachment trial to impose any consequences on him for his role in fomenting the attack.

In these accommodating responses, the GOP appears caught on a treadmill. The more the party allows itself to be branded as tolerating (or even welcoming) extremism, the more its support is likely to erode among previously Republican-leaning constituencies, especially white-collar suburbanites. That, in turn, will make the party only more dependent on massive turnout among the most culturally alienated voters who compose the Trump base. And that pressure could further erode any willingness on leaders’ part to isolate people like Greene who push cultural alienation to the point of conspiracy theories, open racism and anti-Semitism, and threats of violence. Greene is hardly alone out there: Polls have found that a significant minority of Republican voters believe the QAnon conspiracy theory (that a cabal of Satan-worshipping pedophiles was leading the opposition to Trump). Surveys have also consistently found that the large majority of rank-and-file Republican voters believe Trump’s equally baseless claims that the election was stolen.

Even during the 1960s, the GOP’s response to the rise of the John Birch Society was not exactly a profile in courage. But while today few Republicans are “taking a stand against QAnon and drawing a clear line in the sand and doing it repeatedly,” at least back then “there was a real range of reactions among Republican elected officials” to the Birchers, Dallek told me. Named after a Christian missionary killed in China immediately after World War II, the society was founded by Robert Welch, a bright but paranoid candy salesman living in Boston. Welch spent the 1950s—the Red Scare era of Joseph McCarthy, the Hollywood blacklist, and the House Un-American Activities Committee—spinning elaborate conspiracy theories about communist infiltration in his many writings. (He once said that Dwight Eisenhower had been “consciously serving the communist conspiracy for all of his adult life.”)

In December 1958, Welch formally launched the John Birch Society with funding from 11 wealthy conservatives, including three past presidents of the National Association of Manufacturers, as the historian Rick Perlstein recounts in his energetic history of Goldwater and the conservative movement, Before the Storm.

Welch was nothing if not a salesman, and he steadily built a national organization. He was an innovator in his organizing strategies, particularly the creation of an alternative media world for his members (who probably numbered about 100,000 at the society’s peak). “They were extremely effective at flooding the zone with their own version of reality,” Dallek said. “They had a Birch Society bulletin, Welch’s monthly American Opinion magazine; they had pamphlets galore; they set up dozens of Birch ‘freedom stores,’ where they sold tracts and stickers and booklets. They weren’t the only ones, but they were certainly part of the innovation of this conservative far-right media.”

Ku Klux Klan members wave signs in support of Barry Goldwater’s presidential nomination at the Republican National Convention in 1964. An African American man tries to push signs back. (Warren K Leffler / PhotoQuest / Getty)

Through those channels, Welch mobilized his members to support an ill-fated attempt to impeach Supreme Court Justice Earl Warren (whom he called a communist dupe), oppose the fluoridation of water (which he considered a communist plot), and resist the civil-rights movement (which he labeled another communist plot). “They were very out in front on prayer in school, on science denialism. They were anti-globalism, anti-UN, and [pro–]local police—they were ardent defenders of police against these ‘communist’ rioters,” Dallek said.

From the start, Republicans were divided over Welch’s movement. They liked the volunteers and donors who emerged from his ranks, but many in the party recoiled from his wilder claims of treason, particularly those directed against Eisenhower. Some leading GOP moderates condemned the movement outright. Richard Nixon, who generally tried to bridge his party’s differences, forcefully criticized the group during his unsuccessful 1962 race for governor in California, where the group had the most support

Nixon’s defeat encapsulated the challenge that the Birchers presented to Republicans, similar to the one they’re facing now. During that 1962 race, California’s Democratic governor, Pat Brown, roundly condemned the Birchers as a threat to democracy. That increased pressure on Nixon to separate from the organization, but he lost members’ votes in the process. After many Birchers sat out the election, Republican operatives concluded that their absence was one reason Nixon lost. Subsequently, many leading conservatives—Goldwater and Ronald Reagan among them—settled on a dodge: They denounced Welch personally (particularly for his accusations against Eisenhower) but avoided criticizing, and sometimes even praised, his followers.

With such equivocation from leading conservatives, the Birchers established a secure beachhead in the Republican Party. Several Birch sympathizers were elected to Congress. But the group’s influence remained bounded because enough party leaders and intellectuals held the line on excluding it from the GOP mainstream.

The key figure in that process was William F. Buckley Jr., the conservative intellectual and founder of National Review, the right’s leading journal at the time. Though Welch had been a friend and financial supporter, Buckley came to view his unbalanced extremism as a threat to conservatism, and over time he wrote a succession of editorials and newspaper columns trying to excommunicate the Birchers from the movement. “Buckley believed [that] before he could make conservatism dominant in the Republican Party, he had to be able to compete on equal terms with the moderates and with respectable liberal opinion,” says Geoffrey Kabaservice, the author of Rule and Ruin, a history of moderate Republicans, and the director of political studies at the libertarian Niskanen Center. “It was really important for him for conservatism to be respectable and not tainted by association with these extremists. Buckley understood there is a price to be paid for tolerating people like that.” Contained, if not directly confronted, by this generation of Republicans, the John Birch Society’s institutional strength declined after the 1960s (though the group still operates today).

The response among conservative media organs and right-leaning intellectuals to GOP extremism is very different now. Compared with the Birch era, thinkers on the right are doing “less policing of the borders” between conservatism and extremism, as Bill Kristol, the longtime conservative political strategist, put it succinctly. Buckley’s successors at National Review have condemned QAnon and Greene (even if they’ve blunted that message by relentlessly insisting that conservatives are being unfairly persecuted for their views, as Kabaservice notes). Right-leaning anti-Trump outlets such as The Bulwark have been unequivocal. But the most powerful voices on the right—Fox News and talk-radio hosts—have done backflips to avoid disowning Greene and other radical voices. Tucker Carlson has suggested that criticism of QAnon’s bizarre beliefs represents a step toward “tyranny … and dictatorship.”

Of course, the biggest difference between now and the Birch era is that today’s far-right extremists are operating under an umbrella of protection from a former president who remains the most popular figure to the GOP’s base. “I love Buckley dealing with the Birch Society, but he was able to repudiate a group that never had the support of any president and was sort of repudiated by Goldwater,” Kristol told me. Now most GOP elected officials have concluded that the risk of pushback from Trump is too high to speak out. “They think that the danger of getting in a fight with Trump and splitting the party is so much greater than a little bit of accommodation with some wackos and a little bit of groveling to the Trump base,” said Kristol, one of the leading voices in the conservative Never Trump movement.

Kevin McCarthy’s half-hearted slap on the wrist for Greene this week was a measure of the GOP’s limited appetite for constructing a clear boundary against extremism. The likelihood that the majority of Senate Republicans will soon vote to exempt Trump from any punishment for the Capitol riot underscores that message. As does the likelihood that the large majority of House Republicans will vote to defend Greene when Democrats try to remove her from her committee assignments.

These choices may carry political consequences: In a recent Public Religion Research Institute survey, nearly two-thirds of all Americans, including one-fourth of Republicans, said Trump encourages white-supremacist groups. The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee last week started running ads tying potentially vulnerable GOP House members to both QAnon’s rising presence and Trump’s role in provoking the riot. Democrats believe that the GOP’s tolerance of extremism, symbolized by its acceptance of Greene, will deepen the party’s retreat in the well-educated suburbs that consistently moved toward Democrats in the Trump era. “They can do QAnon, or they can do college-educated voters. They cannot do both,” Representative Sean Patrick Maloney, the new chair of the DCCC, told Politico this week.

Yet most Republicans appear more comfortable weathering those attacks than confronting what McConnell has called the “cancer” of growing extremist influence in the party. Opening the door to radicals like Greene is part of a much larger shift: As I’ve written before, the GOP is morphing into a quasi-authoritarian party—one that’s becoming more willing to undermine democratic norms to maintain power. Its long-term evolution toward any-means-necessary militance is likely to only intensify as the nation’s growing racial and religious diversity, which triggers so many in the party’s base, unspools through the 2020s. This tug toward conspiracy-theory-laden, often-racist extremism “is in the Republican Party DNA,” Kabaservice told me. “If the party isn’t going to forcefully turn against QAnon and the Proud Boys and the neo-Nazis who invaded the Capitol … then that DNA is going to be passed along in an even more virulent form to the next generation of Republicans.”


RONALD BROWNSTEIN is a senior editor at The Atlantic.

'The disease within the Republican Party': Analyst finds a 2012 report on GOP extremism that looks prophetic

Donald Trump supporters outside the U.S. Capitol Building on January 6, 2021, 

Wikimedia Commons

Alex Henderson May 24, 2021

When President Barack Obama was reelected in 2012 and defeated Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney, pundits offered a variety of explanations for Romney's loss. Some pundits on the far right insisted that Romney wasn't conservative enough — that he lost because he was a RINO: Republican In Name Only. Others, however, argued that Romney's campaign was doomed by wingnuts in his party. Two of the people who warned that extremists were taking over the Republican Party were Thomas E. Mann and Norman J. Ornstein, and according to CNN's John Harwood, their warnings about the GOP of 2012 are still relevant in 2021.

On April 27, 2012 — when the presidential election was still over half a year away — the Washington Post published an op-ed by Mann and Ornstein headlined, "Let's Just Say It: The Republicans Are the Problem." Mann was a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, while Ornstein was a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.

Mann and Ornstein wrote, "The GOP has become an insurgent outlier in American politics. It is ideologically extreme; scornful of compromise; unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition. When one party moves this far from the mainstream, it makes it nearly impossible for the political system to deal constructively with the country's challenges…. It is clear that the center of gravity in the Republican Party has shifted sharply to the right. Its once-legendary moderate and center-right legislators in the House and the Senate — think Bob Michel, Mickey Edwards, John Danforth, Chuck Hagel — are virtually extinct."

That op-ed from nine years ago, according to Harwood, shows that the Republican Party was overrun by extremists long before Donald Trump's 2016 presidential campaign.

Harwood explains, "It didn't mention Marjorie Taylor Greene, the deadly January 6 insurrection or Donald Trump's Big Lie. In fact, the words 'Donald Trump' did not appear at all. Published in 2012, that Washington Post piece demonstrates more than the foresight of its political scientist authors, Tom Mann of the center-left Brookings Institution and Norm Ornstein of the center-right American Enterprise Institute. It shows the disease within the Republican Party had spread long before Trump metastasized it."

One of the Republicans Mann and Ornstein slammed as a kook in their op-ed was then-Rep. Allen West, who claimed that "78 to 81" House Democrats of 2012 were communists. The Bulwark's William Kristol, now a Never Trump conservative, remembers believing that the op-ed exaggerated the influence of extremists in the GOP; Harwood quotes Kristol as saying, "People like me were thinking, 'Yeah, there are some kooky people around, but c'mon.'"

But since 2012, Harwood writes, Kristol has been "slugged by reality." For The Bulwark, Kristol has written countless articles slamming the GOP as a party that has been hijacked by dangerous authoritarians. And in 2020's presidential election, Kristol and his Bulwark colleagues endorsed Joe Biden.

Mann, nine years after that Post op-ed, told Harwood, "I don't get much satisfaction out of being right. A country, and a system, like ours has to have two strong governing parties. The fact is, we only have one." And Ornstein told Harwood, "It's a grim picture for the foreseeable future. We have a serious risk of losing our democracy."

Harwood notes what has happened to the Republicans of 2012. Romney and Rep. Liz Cheney are now pariahs in much of the GOP for rejecting Trumpism, while West now chairs the Texas GOP. And Harwood says of West, "His 2021 successors have grown loonier. Greene won a House seat from Georgia last year after expressing support for bizarre QAnon fantasies, which link Democrats with pedophilia."

According to Harwood, "When Mann and Ornstein wrote their 2012 piece, Tea Party Republicans had menaced the American economy with a debt crisis. But this year's insurrection created physical menace — for Capitol Police, lawmakers of both parties, even then-Vice President Mike Pence. Cheney warns that Trump may incite further violence."

Another person who believed that Mann and Ornstein exaggerated in their 2012 op-ed was former Rep. Charlie Dent of Pennsylvania. But now, Dent (who chaired the House Ethics Committee) finds the GOP's direction to be increasingly disturbing.


"I don't like where we're heading," Dent told Harwood, "but (I) don't think it's inevitable that we get to that terrible place."

Here's why Fox News possesses an 'outsized influence' on the American public

Image via Screengrab.

The Conversation May 24, 2021

Ryan Burge, Eastern Illinois University

Fox News possesses an “outsized influence" on the American public, especially among religious viewers.

That was the conclusion of the nonprofit Public Religion Research Institute in a report released just after the 2020 presidential election. It noted that 15% of Americans cited Fox News as the most trusted source – around the same as NBC, ABC and CBS combined, and four percentage points above rival network CNN. The survey of more than 2,500 American adults also suggested that Fox News viewers trend religious, especially among Republicans watching the show. Just 5% of Republican viewers of the channel identified as being “religiously unaffiliated" – compared to 15% of Republicans who do not watch Fox News and 25% of the wider American public.

To further explore the relationship between different faiths and the TV news they associate with as part of my research on religion data, I analyzed the result of another survey, the Cooperative Election Survey.00:4601:44

The annual survey, which was fielded just before the November 2020 election, with the results released in March, polled a total of 61,000 Americans over a number of topics. One question was on their news consumption habits. It asked what television news networks respondents had watched in the prior 24 hours.

Percentage of respondents who saw TV news in past 24 hours


Ryan Burge/CES

Some very interesting patterns emerged across religious traditions – and the nonreligious – and the type of media being consumed. For instance, of the the big three legacy news operations – ABC, CBS and NBC – there was no strong base of viewership in any tradition.

In most cases, about a third of people from each religious tradition said that they watched one of those legacy networks in the last 24 hours. PBS scored very low among every tradition. In most cases fewer than 15% of respondents reported watching PBS in the time frame.

However, the numbers for the three major cable news networks – CNN, Fox News and MSNBC – were much higher across the board. In eight of the 16 religious and nonreligious traditions categorized in the poll, CNN viewership was at least 50% of the sample. This was led by 71% of Hindus who watched CNN and 63% of Muslims.

The least likely group to watch CNN was clearly white evangelicals, at just 23%. In comparison, MSNBC scored lower nearly across the board. In fact, in none of the 16 classification groups was viewership of MSNBC greater than it was for CNN.

Fox News viewership was higher than that of MSNBC, but was not as widely dispersed as it is for CNN. It's no surprise, given its reputation as a conservative news outlet, that 61% of white evangelicals say that they watch Fox News – in the last election, around 80% of white evangelicals voted for Republican candidate Donald Trump. The other three traditions where viewership was at least 50% are white Catholics, Mormons and members of the Eastern Orthodox Church. It should come as no surprise, as those are three groups that consistently vote for the Republican Party. Just 14% of atheists watched Fox, which is just about in line with the share of white evangelicals who watch MSNBC.

Almost two-thirds of white evangelicals said they watched Fox News at some point over the previous 24 hours

The network was also popular among white Catholics, Mormons and Orthodox Christians. But only 1 in 7 atheists tuned in.

61

42

40

26

50

42

53

56

28

43

30

42

14

23

34

White evangelical

Non-white evangelical

Mainline Protestant

Black Protestant

White Catholic

Non-white Catholic

Mormon

Orthodox Christian

Jewish

Muslim

Buddhist

Hindu

Atheist

Agnostic

Nothing in particular

Chart: The Conversation CC-BY-ND Source: Ryan Burge/CES Get the data

Fracturing right-wing media

But with the fracturing of conservative media sources seeing more competitors vying for viewers among the right, Fox News could see a drop in viewership from the religious right.

In the wake of the 2020 presidential election, Fox News viewership plunged as many Trump supporters believed that the network was not being loyal to their standard-bearer of the GOP.

Given the vast number of news options that people of faith have and the increase in political polarization in the United States, the pressure for networks to deliver the news that people want to hear will only increase as time passes.

[Explore the intersection of faith, politics, arts and culture. Sign up for This Week in Religion.]

Ryan Burge, Assistant Professor of Political Science, Eastern Illinois University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

How enforcement of the USMCA will end a corporate race to the bottom

Official White House Photo by Shealah Craighead

Tom Conway and Independent Media Institute May 24, 2021

Chris Reisinger and his coworkers recently added a third daily shift at the Metal Technologies, Inc. (MTI) Northern Foundry because surging vehicle sales boosted demand for the tow hooks, steering components and other auto parts they produce.

Yet Reisinger knows that jobs at the Hibbing, Minnesota, facility will always hang by a thread—even in really good times—as long as his employer has the option to shift production to poorly paid Mexican workers.

Americans can protect their own livelihoods by ensuring their Mexican counterparts have unfettered, unconditional use of new labor reforms intended to lift them out of poverty and stop employers from exploiting them.

To protect workers on both sides of the border, America's labor community and the U.S. trade representative recently filed the first-ever complaints under the 10-month-old United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA), demanding action against two plants that suppressed Mexican workers' right to unionize.

Swift, significant punishment of these kinds of offenses through the USMCA's innovative "rapid response" enforcement procedures would deliver a major boost to Mexican workers' efforts to form real unions for the first time. And those unions, in turn, would help Mexican workers negotiate better wages, eliminate employers' incentive to move jobs out of the United States and end a corporate race to the bottom that's harmed millions in both countries.

Not only has Reisinger seen a steady stream of U.S. automakers and suppliers send work to Mexico over the years, but his own employer opened a location there about three years ago. Reisinger, who represents about 50 Northern Foundry workers as president of United Steelworkers (USW) Local 21B, doesn't want to see the company open a second just to take further advantage of low wages there.

He's counting on the USMCA to help keep that from happening.

"It's just frustrating to see work going away from American workers," said Reisinger, noting MTI could have expanded the Northern Foundry or its other U.S. locations rather than open the Mexico facility.

Under the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), the previous trade deal in place for 25 years, U.S. corporations relocated about a million good-paying manufacturing jobs south of the border to exploit the abysmal wages, weak labor laws and a lack of environmental safeguards.

These companies made huge profits at the expense of powerless Mexican workers while devastating U.S. manufacturing communities, gutting the nation's industrial capacity and decimating the middle class.

To curb this greed, U.S. labor leaders and their Democratic supporters in Congress successfully battled to enshrine tougher labor standards in the USMCA as well as enforcement mechanisms to hold employers' feet to the fire.

The USMCA, for example, required Mexico to pass laws enabling workers to form democratic unions, select their leaders and negotiate real contracts for the first time.

Those changes empower Mexican workers to kick out the corrupt cabals—masquerading as labor organizations—that for decades collaborated with employers to suppress wages, stifle dissent and even kill those who publicly challenged the status quo. These groups not only denied workers a say on the job but bound them to oppressive contracts that made them the perfect targets for U.S. corporations preying on cheap labor.

Now, Mexican workers can look forward to joining unions that, like Reisinger's, fight not only for better wages but affordable health insurance, retirement plans and safety measures to ensure they return home safely to their families at shift's end.

"It gives you a voice," Reisinger said of the local he's proud to lead. "We have pushed back against the company several times on safety issues."

Eradicating the anti-worker forces entrenched in virtually every Mexican workplace would have been a herculean, time-consuming process even without delays associated with the COVID-19 pandemic.

In December, the Independent Mexico Labor Expert Board, created to monitor the labor reforms, noted that progress had been made with the help of well-intentioned Mexican officials.

However, the board reported that "serious concerns" remained. Most workers still awaited opportunities to form unions and elect leaders, for example, and many continued to face intimidation for organizing efforts.

Those are some of the issues at the heart of the complaints filed recently.

The AFL-CIO, other unions and the activist group Public Citizen alleged that Tridonex, an auto parts maker owned by a Philadelphia company, harassed and fired hundreds of workers trying to organize. Hourly wages at Tridonex range from about $1.80 to $3.30.

In a separate complaint, the U.S. trade representative reported that a phony labor group trying to cling to power at a General Motors plant in northern Mexico destroyed the ballots of workers seeking legitimate representation for the first time. Workers in the GM factory, which makes Chevrolet Silverado and GMC Sierra trucks, start at $1.35 an hour, with a top wage of $4.95 an hour.

Now, these employers face investigations by the Mexican government, special panels set up under the USMCA or both. Punishments for individual plants found to have violated the new labor rights include tariffs or other sanctions, and repeat violators could have their products denied entry to the United States.

Strict enforcement of the USMCA will not only help the oppressed workers at the Tridonex and GM plants but also send the message to other employers that they have to comply with the law as well.

"Otherwise, they're just going to laugh at it," Reisinger said. "You have to have these enforcement mechanisms in place, and you have to utilize them."

Noting his foundry has struggled at times, Reisinger knows a more level playing field under the USMCA can help secure the facility's future, generate even more business and help his coworkers build better lives.

"I think it's important that they remember to share that increase with the workers," he said.

Tom Conway is the international president of the United Steelworkers Union (USW).

This article was produced by the Independent Media Institute.

Robert Reich: There are only 5 ways to become a billionaire — and none of them involve being successful in free market capitalism

Bernie Sanders MSNBC Screengrab
Robert Reich and
Robert Reich's Blog

November 11, 2019


Billionaires are wailing that Elizabeth Warren’s and Bernie Sanders’s wealth tax proposals are attacks on free market capitalism.

Warren “vilifies successful people,” says Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorgan Chase.

Rubbish. There are basically only five ways to accumulate a billion dollars, and none of them has to do with being successful in free market capitalism.

The first way is to exploit a monopoly.

Jamie Dimon is worth $1.6 billion. That’s not because he succeeded in the free market. In 2008 the government bailed out JPMorgan and four other giant Wall Street banks because it considered them “too big to fail.”

That bailout is a hidden insurance policy, still in effect, with an estimated value to the big banks of $83 billion a year. If JPMorgan weren’t so big and was therefore allowed to fail, Dimon would be worth far less than $1.6 billion.

What about America’s much-vaulted entrepreneurs, such as Jeff Bezos, now worth $110 billion? You might say Bezos deserves this because he founded and built Amazon.

But Amazon is a monopolist with nearly 50 percent of all e-commerce retail sales in America, and e-commerce is one of the biggest sectors of retail sales. In addition, Amazon’s business is protected by a slew of patents granted by the U.S. government.

If the government enforced anti-monopoly laws, and didn’t give Amazon such broad patents,Bezos would be worth far less than $110 billion.

A second way to make a billion is to get insider information unavailable to other investors.

Hedge-fund maven Steven A. Cohen, worth $12.8 billion, headed up a hedge fund firm in which, according to a criminal complaint filed by the Justice Department, insider trading was “substantial, pervasive, and on a scale without known precedent in the hedge fund industry.” Nine of Cohen’s present or former employees pleaded guilty or were convicted. Cohen got off with a fine, changed the name of his firm, and apparently is back at the game.

Insider trading is endemic in C-suites, too. SEC researchers have found that corporate executives are twice as likely to sell their stock on the days following their own stock buyback announcements as they are in the days leading up to the announcements.

If government cracked down on insider-trading, hedge-fund mavens and top corporate executives wouldn’t be raking in so much money.

A third way to make a billion is to buy off politicians.

The Trump tax cut is estimated to save Charles and the late David Koch and their Koch Industries an estimated $1 to $1.4 billion a year, not even counting their tax savings on profits stored offshore and a shrunken estate tax. The Kochs and their affiliated groups spent some $20 million lobbying for the Trump tax cut, including political donations. Not a bad return on investment.

If we had tough anti-corruption laws preventing political payoffs, the Kochs and other high-rollers wouldn’t get the special tax breaks and other subsidies that have enlarged their fortunes.

The fourth way to make a billion is to extort big investors.

Adam Neumann conned JP Morgan, SoftBank, and other investors to sink hundreds of millions into WeWork, an office-sharing startup. Neumann used some of the money to buy buildings he leased back to WeWork and to enjoy a lifestyle that included a $60 million private jet. WeWork never made a nickel of profit.

A few months ago, after Neumann was forced to disclose his personal conflicts of interest, WeWork’s initial public offering fell apart and the company’s estimated value plummeted. To salvage what they could, investors paid him over $1 billion to exit the board and give up his voting rights. Most other WeWork employees were left holdingnear-worthless stock options. Thousands were set to be laid off.

If we had tougher anti-fraud laws, Neumann and others like him wouldn’t be billionaires.

The fifth way to be a billionaire is to get the money from rich parents or relatives.

About 60 percent of all the wealth in America today is inherited, according to estimates by economist Thomas Piketty and his colleagues. That’s because, under U.S. tax law – which is itself largely a product of lobbying by the wealthy – the capital gains of one generation are wiped out when those assets are transferred to the next, and the estate tax is so tiny that fewer than 0.2 percent of estates were subject to it last year.

If unearned income were treated the same as earned income under the tax code, America’s non-working rich wouldn’t be billionaires. And if capital gains weren’t eliminated at death, many heirs wouldn’t be, either.

Capitalism doesn’t work well with monopolies, insider-trading, political payoffs, fraud, and large amounts of inherited wealth. Billionaires who don’t like Sanders’s and Warren’s wealth tax should at least support reforms that end these anti-capitalist advantages.

Blowing up the billionaires' con that's strangling America

Image via Shutterstock.
Thom Hartmann May 24, 2021

As we're struggling to recover from Trump's half-million unnecessary Covid deaths here in America, fighting to get a clear picture of how extensive the sedition was among Republicans in Congress around January 6th, and trying to pass legislation to ensure clean and safe elections and put the country back into shape, dark money, foreign oligarchs and rightwing media groups are hard at work tearing this nation apart.

This article was originally published at The Hartmann Report


And they're having considerable success.

About 75 percent of Americans trusted the federal government to "do what is right" when polled during most of the last years of the Eisenhower 1950s administration and early years of Lyndon B. Johnson's 1960s presidency.

In 2019, when the Pew Research Center released its most recent poll of public trust in the government, only 17 percent of Americans trusted their government. It's so bad that throughout 2020 armed protesters showed up nationwide to protest the "tyranny" of having to wear masks during a pandemic, and then stormed the Capitol in an attempt to overturn the election, all cheered on by the then-President of the United States and multiple rightwing media outlets.

This is no accident; it's the result of a five-decades-long campaign by some of America's richest people to tear apart the governing fabric of our nation, formally kicked off by their man, Ronald Reagan, proudly proclaiming at his January 20, 1981, inauguration that, "[G]overnment is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem."

Put yourself in the place of the heirs to a multimillion-dollar fossil fuel empire, a situation akin to the "heroic" brother and sister who inherited a railroad from their dad in Ayn Rand's novel Atlas Shrugged:

If you don't have to pay to dispose of cancer-causing byproducts from your refineries but can simply vent them into the air, and you make more money.

If you can cut wages and threaten employees because they don't have a union, you make more money.

If you can run a pipeline across sacred Native American land atop a major national aquifer with minimal safety oversight, you make more money.

If you can hide your money from the IRS because the agency has had its budget slashed so badly that it can no longer do expensive audits of morbidly rich people, you can keep more of the money you've made.

If you can get the government to cut social programs and public education, thus lowering your taxes, you can keep more of the money you've made.

So how do you pull this off, when every one of these things hurts average Americans?

Easy. Just embark on a 50-year-long campaign, through think tanks, right-wing media, and massive PR efforts to convince average Americans that government is the cause of, not the solution to, their problems. Convince working-class Americans that gutting government is a good thing that will ultimately help them in some mystical, magical way through the incredible "invisible hand" of the marketplace.

Lewis Powell, a lawyer for Big Tobacco, launched the movement to do just this with his infamous memo in 1971, and billionaires have funded and promoted politicians who jump on board the "government is evil" bandwagon ever since.

And it's largely worked, if the "trust in government" statistics compiled by the Pew Research Center since 1958 are accurate.

Years ago I was up late one night watching, as I recall, Bloomberg News on a hotel TV. The American host was interviewing a very wealthy German businessman at a conference in Singapore.

Amidst questions about the business climate and the conference, the host asked the German businessman what tax rate he was "suffering under" in his home country. As I recall, the businessman said, "A bit over 60 percent, when everything is included."

"How can you handle that?" asked the host, incredulous.

The German shrugged his shoulders and moved the conversation to another topic.

A few minutes later, the American reporter, still all wound up by the tax question, again asked the businessman how he could possibly live in a country with such a high tax rate on very wealthy and successful people. Again, the German deferred and changed the subject.

The reporter went for a third try. "Why don't you lead a revolt against those high taxes?" he asked, his tone implying the businessman was badly in need of some good old American rebellion-making.

The German businessman paused for a long moment and then leaned forward, putting his elbows on his knees, his clasped hands in front of him pointing at the reporter as if in prayer.

He stared at the man for another long moment and then, in the tone of voice an adult uses to correct a spoiled child, said simply, "I don't want to be a rich man in a poor country."

There are a few wealthy Americans who understand this. But the billionaires and foreign oligarchs who fund the Republican Party and right-wing media think it's perfectly fine to rip the financial and political guts out of their own nation and turn its people against each other if it makes them a few extra bucks.

They've funded and facilitated movements like the Tea Party and rightwing paramilitaries, media outlets like Fox News and Breitbart, and organizations like the Federalist Society, the Heritage Foundation, and ALEC. They throw piles of money at Republican politicians, so long as they never stray far from the "deregulate, cut, denigrate" line about American government. They sponsor climate denial to increase their own profits.

And over and over again, they've been successfully pulling this off for the past 50 years. The most recent example is the disaster we're seeing in Arizona where the majority of Republicans in the Arizona Senate, totally owned by rightwing billionaires, went along with Trump and started a phony "audit" to further erode Americans' faith in our government. Reaganism has become Trumpism, and it's all pointing toward destroying faith in democracy in America just to make a buck.

Similarly, a Morning Consult poll about saving Americans from the Covid crisis a few months ago had this headline: "With Congressional Stimulus Fight Looming, 76% of Voters Back $1.9 Trillion Plan, Including 60% of Republicans." Yet every single billionaire-owned Republican in Congress opposed it, and now they're opposing President Biden's efforts to rebuild our infrastructure, both hard and soft.

As this nation recovers from a deadly pandemic that — unnecessarily — killed more than 500,000 of our fellow citizens, and struggles with rightwing hate groups that are trying to provoke a second Civil War, let's remember how this all came about. And all for a few extra pieces of gold.

The pandemic reshaped Americans' definition of wealthy
hhoffower@businessinsider.com (Hillary Hoffower) 3 hrs ago

© Provided by Business Insider Americans have lowered the bar for wealth. Edward Berthelot/Getty Images

Americans think $1.9 million is wealth - $700,000 less than what they said pre-pandemic, per a new Charles Schwab report.

They also lowered the bar for the net worth they believe is needed for financial happiness.

The changes are a result of Americans reprioritizing their values during the pandemic.

The bar for being rich isn't as high as it used to be.

Americans have shifted their definition of wealthy in the wake of the pandemic, according to Charles Schwab's 2021 Modern Wealth Survey, which polled 1,000 Americans. Respondents said they believe it takes an average $1.9 million net worth to be considered wealthy - $700,000 less than the $2.6 million that signified wealthy in 2020's pre-pandemic version of the survey.

They also dropped the benchmark for the amount of wealth needed to achieve financial happiness and financial comfort. In their eyes, it now takes an average net worth of $1.1 million to be considered financially happy, compared to $1.75 million a year ago. For comfort, expectations dropped from $934,000 to $624,000.

These changes are part of a larger reevaluation among Americans caused by the pandemic, the survey found.The majority (68%) have reprioritized their values, and 69% feel mental health is more important than before, followed by 57% who are placing new emphasis on relationships. Financial health comes in third on the list, at 54%.



Rob Williams, vice president of financial planning at Charles Schwab, said in the report that while the pandemic caused Americans to place more emphasis on health, the recession also taught many the importance of financial planning.

"The pandemic and the significant impact it had on the economy and stock market also taught us a valuable, and in many cases difficult, lesson about the importance of financial health and preparedness, including the importance of having a plan and emergency savings," he said.

Another recent survey which examined wealth perceptions in the US, by Boston Private, found that affluent millennials were the likeliest wealthy cohort to say the pandemic altered the way they define wealth. More than three-quarters felt this way, compared to less than a quarter of high-net-worth baby boomers and silent generation members.

As the economy shut down, those fortunate not to experience job loss were able to tuck away discretionary savings or invest in a rebounding stock market. Saving has been up across the board during the pandemic, as the US household net worth hit a record high in the fourth quarter, up 5.6% from the third quarter. Americans were sitting on $2.6 trillion in excess savings as of mid-April, per Moody's Analytics.

The rich have gotten richer as the coronavirus recession took on a K-shaped recovery in which the wealthy were doing just fine and the poor continued to struggle. As wealth inequality grows, wealth seems to mean less to some Americans than it previously did.

Perhaps, in a pandemic, people have realized that money can't buy everything.
Read the original article on Business Insider

Erin O'Toole isn't breaking through — and Jason Kenney and Doug Ford aren't helping

Éric Grenier 

CBC 

© Sean Kilpatrick/The Canadian Press The Conservatives under Erin O'Toole have struggled to close the gap on the Liberals, who lead in national polls by an average of six percentage points.

Unable to make any headway in the polls against the Liberals, Conservative Leader Erin O'Toole could use a little help from his friends Alberta Premier Jason Kenney and Ontario Premier Doug Ford.

Basically, he needs Ford and Kenney to avoid doing anything that makes matters worse for him.

Trailing the Liberals by six percentage points nationwide in the CBC's Poll Tracker — an aggregation of all publicly available polling data — the Conservatives are struggling in both Ontario and Alberta, among other places.

But Ontario is a key electoral battleground for the Conservatives, while Alberta is supposed to be their unassailable fortress. It might be no coincidence that O'Toole is having difficulty in these provinces as Kenney and Ford slide in the polls.

Two polls published this week by Campaign Research and Mainstreet Research suggest Ford's Progressive Conservatives still hold a lead in Ontario. But with the party now averaging 34.5 per cent across the two surveys, Ford's PCs have dropped six points since the 2018 provincial election. Only a divided opposition is keeping his party ahead.

Ford's own personal numbers have gotten significantly worse since reaching a peak in May 2020 during the first wave of the pandemic. According to Abacus Data, just 30 per cent of Ontarians now have a positive impression of Ford, down 16 points from last spring. His negative impression score has increased 22 points to 47 per cent.

Things are arguably going much worse for Kenney in Alberta, where he has faced a caucus revolt over the province's pandemic restrictions.

The polls are not looking good for Kenney's United Conservatives, who have trailed the opposition New Democrats by an average margin of 10 points in polls published since December. That represents a combined 30-point swing between the UCP and NDP since the 2019 provincial election.

The pandemic appears to be what's driving these polling trends.

According to a survey by Léger, just 29 per cent of Albertans and 37 per cent of Ontarians are satisfied with the measures put in place by their provincial governments to fight the pandemic — lower levels than those reported anywhere else in the country.

Ontario and Alberta are also the only two provinces where the federal government is receiving higher marks than provincial governments in Léger's survey.

And that's what could be hurting O'Toole — the voters in Alberta and Ontario who believe the federal Liberal government is doing a better job on the pandemic than their Conservative premiers.

Trouble in the Conservative heartland

According to the Poll Tracker, O'Toole's Conservatives have 47 per cent support in Alberta, putting them well above the Liberals and NDP. But that represents a drop of 22 points since the 2019 federal election and about 10 points since the beginning of the pandemic.

Very few seats are at risk for the Conservatives in Alberta, of course — even with this steep drop in support. Of the 33 seats the Conservatives captured in the province in 2019, only two were won by margins of less than 20 points. The Conservatives can afford a swing of 30 points against them before more than a handful of seats are put at risk.

Nevertheless, the Conservatives can't afford to leave any seats on the table — particularly those it normally would win handily. It doesn't help that a recent Angus Reid Institute poll gave the Maverick Party — which advocates for Western autonomy — seven per cent support in Alberta. RETURN OF THE WCC

A drop in support in Alberta doesn't help the national picture for the Conservatives either. A loss of 22 points in Alberta might not put more than a seat or two at risk there, but it does translate into a slide of more than two percentage points at the national level — making the Conservatives appear less competitive against the Liberals.

Ford not helping in Ontario (again)

That's the kind of thing that can have some spillover in Ontario. Many voters like to back the party that looks like a winner.

The Poll Tracker puts the Conservatives at just 30 per cent in Ontario, down three points since 2019. They trail the Liberals there by about 11 points — three points more than in the last election.

Making gains in Ontario is absolutely essential for the Conservatives if they're going to have any chance of forming a government in the future. Ford's unpopularity was an obstacle for Andrew Scheer when he led the federal party in the 2019 election.

But things might be worse for the party now. Even polls that otherwise look good for the Conservatives — such as the most recent polls by Abacus Data and Léger, which had the Conservatives trailing nationally by just two or three points — still had the Liberals ahead by 12 or 13 points in Ontario. That's the electoral ball game.

Vaccines could give premiers a shot in the arm

As the third wave recedes and more vaccines are administered to Albertans and Ontarians, it is possible that voters' negative feelings about Ford and Kenney will recede as well. If that happens, the O'Toole Conservatives may be able to regain some lost ground in those two provinces.

It's also possible that the attacks by Kenney, Ford and O'Toole on the federal government's vaccine procurement efforts will backfire when Canadians find themselves getting their second doses ahead of schedule later this summer.

Either way, it suggests that the Liberals may have an incentive to send voters to the polls sooner rather than later. Any polling improvements for Ford and Kenney could start rubbing off on O'Toole.

At that point, O'Toole's friends might actually start to help him out. And he needs the help: a recent poll by Abacus Data found that just 18 per cent of Canadians have a positive impression of the federal Conservative leader, while 35 per cent have a negative one. ROFLMAO

Those are his worst numbers since he became leader last August. He can't blame Kenney or Ford for all of his troubles — but they aren't making things any easier for him.