DESANTISLAND TOO

Two hurricanes stir up voter backlash to Florida Republicans’ climate denialism

Richard Luscombe in Miami
Sun 27 October 2024 

Hurricane-damaged homes on Manasota Key in Florida in October.Photograph: Dirk Shadd/Tampa Bay Times/ZUMA Press Wire/REX/Shutterstock


The climate emergency was already a hot-button political issue in Florida long before devastating back-to-back hurricanes named Helene and Milton barreled into the state in recent weeks.

Ron DeSantis, the Republican governor who considers global warming “leftwing stuff”, angered environmental advocates by signing a bill in May scrubbing the words “climate change” from state statutes and in effect committing Florida to a fossil fuel-burning future.

They saw his comments and actions as merely the latest acts of an extended period of climate denialism by state leaders – including Rick Scott, his predecessor as governor who is seeking re-election as US senator next month in a tight race with the Democrat Debbie Mucarsel-Powell.


Scott also censored talk of the climate crisis. Nicknamed “Red Tide Rick” by opponents for slashing $700m in water management funding intended to fight toxic algae blooms, Scott “systematically” disassembled “the environmental agencies of this state”, according to the Democratic former senator Bill Nelson.

Related: How the ‘climate voter’ might matter in a down-to-the-wire US election

Now, as weary Floridians head for the polls next month, many in areas still devastated by the deadly storm surge and high intensity winds from two hurricanes, there is evidence that the twin disasters are fueling something of a backlash.

DeSantis is not on the ballot, but Scott is, and so are many among the Republican supermajority in the state house and senate who have been blindly loyal to both governors’ agendas.

Some voters say climate issues have become uppermost in their minds, having experienced or witnessed the wrath of Helene and Milton, as well as other recent Florida cyclones, and frustration over the long history of inaction or denial in the face of rising sea levels and record ocean heat that experts say is powering ever-stronger storms.

The movement is pronounced among younger and first-time voters, whom advocates say have been registering and voting early in unprecedented numbers.

Jayden D’Onofrio, chair of Florida Future Leaders, said canvassing efforts by his group and others have spurred “record-breaking early turnout” on several campuses including Florida State University, Florida Atlantic University and the University of Miami, with students fired up by the climate debate.

“There was a video of a meteorologist in south Florida who ended up crying on air. A number of my friends, who are not political, sent me that video saying, like, ‘Hey, pretty insane dude. What the hell is going on over here?’” he said.

“So if something like that resonates with youth voters who just generally are out of the political sphere, that says a lot, and that’s why we are hammering hard on that issue. We’re distributing over 175,000 pieces of literature all across the state, and 40,000 are on climate change.”

D’Onofrio said his group was deliberately targeting politicians for their records.

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“Rick Scott is the worst of the worst on climate, so we’ve sent thousands of text messages to youth reminding them about climate change and how the Republicans have voted on the issue, especially Scott,” he said.

“You have all these Republican congressmen that voted no on Fema [Federal Emergency Management Agency] funding. When we’re campaigning in these districts that have those congresspeople it’s an easy thing for us to bring up: ‘Hey, your congressman voted no on federal funding for Fema and emergency supplies in your county, which just got absolutely hit by a hurricane. What do you think about that?’

“Of course, the answer is like, ‘What the hell is wrong with that guy or girl or whoever it is?’ It really is so simple.”

Tatiana Bell, 20, a third-year student studying business administration at the Tampa campus of the historically Black Florida A&M University (Famu), said the hurricanes were a “stressful” time, with both Helene and Milton at one point forecast to make a direct hit on the city.

“They’re like, ‘OK, all students can stay in their dormitories,’ then like a couple hours later they’re like, ‘OK, students have to leave campus, you have to go to shelters or simply go home,” said Bell, a campus representative for DoSomething, a youth-centered service and activism group.

“People were very anxious, trying to find out if you can go home. Not every student is fortunate enough to be able to get on a plane or do different things to find safety in a situation like this.”

Bell said that anxiety and threat to their personal safety from severe weather events had made many students even more cognizant of the climate emergency as an election issue.

“Honestly, it’s like top two, just after funding for our universities. It shouldn’t be like this, [you start] the fall semester and next thing you know hurricanes are coming,” she said.

Related: What's at stake in the US election? The climate for the next million years | Bill McKibben

Ben Groenevelt, a resident of Coral Springs, relocated to south Florida from Wisconsin with his family in 2009, and has become increasingly concerned by changes to the environment. Last year, he won election to the board of a local water management district and helped save thousands of trees it wanted to fell so they would not be a threat during hurricanes.

“Since we moved, I’ve been seeing more powerful hurricanes, more issues with rising sea levels, flooding, and things like that,” he said.

“It’s such a big issue here, and we need more awareness of what is going on. On a personal level, I think that to deny it, especially being a leader in the state of Florida, I just don’t think that’s an appropriate position they have.”

Groenevelt will vote for Democratic candidates on 5 November. His middle daughter of three, Whitney, has just turned 18 and will be voting for the first time.

“We have conversations, and there’s definitely a concern when they’re talking and thinking about their own futures, and what it’ll be like, you know, is there going to be snow or no snow? Will it be too hot? Or too cold? These things come up,” he said.

D’Onofrio said it would be younger voters, such as Groenevelt’s daughters and the students he has been working with on campuses, who will drive a generational change in climate politics, which is why he said the work of groups such as Florida Future Leaders was so important.

“One thing people always say is that youth voters don’t turn out, but my answer is always it’s not that they don’t care, it’s that they’ve never felt seen, or heard, or talked to,” he said.

“What’s different now is because we are all youth talking to youth, we understand our generation, we know how to talk to them. You don’t want an 80-year-old talking to a 20-year-old about climate change, or any issue. It just doesn’t work. We’re all 20-year-olds talking to 20-year-olds. We understand it, so it resonates.”




Florida Democrat Blasts Republican Sen. Rick Scott Over State's Home Insurance Crisis

Alexander C. Kaufman
Sun 27 October 2024


Wetter, more destructive hurricanes, like the back-to-back storms that pummeled Florida this fall, are pushing the state’s homeowners insurance market to the brink of collapse.

When asked by Florida Atlantic University pollsters in June who was most responsible for the high cost of insurance in the state, the largest share of surveyed voters blamed Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis. But it was his Republican predecessor, Rick Scott, now a U.S. senator, who lured low-quality insurance companies to the state and left Florida’s publicly owned insurer-of-last-resort agency struggling to provide for more homeowners as private insurers went bust or refused to renew policies in hurricane-prone areas.

Now Scott’s Democratic challenger for Senate, former Rep. Debbie Mucarsel-Powell, is hoping voters can make the connection between Scott’s eight years as governor and the financial squeeze caused as insurers increasingly fail to pay to repair properties damaged in hurricanes Helene and Milton.

As part of a years-long crusade to force more Floridians into the private insurance market, Scott raised premiums and rescinded discounts from the Citizens Property Insurance Corp., the government-backed nonprofit insurer, all while giving private companies extra incentives and protections to operate in the state.

Now that warming-fueled storms are routinely causing billions of dollars in damage across Florida, private insurers are fleeing the state, forcing customers back to Citizens. But now the deals the public insurer offers come with higher premiums and worse coverage.

During her two years in Congress representing a district stretching west of Miami, Mucarsel-Powell helped net $200 million for Everglades restoration. She’s tried since the start of her Senate campaign to highlight the contrast between her own urgent concerns over climate change and Scott’s rejection of basic climate science and his votes to eliminate regulations to curb planet-heating pollution.

Former Rep. Debbie Mucarsel-Powell, the Democratic rival of Republican Sen. Rick Scott, speaks Aug. 28 at a campaign event in Miami before launching a 75-stop tour across Florida. Lynne Sladky/Associated Press

But Mucarsel-Powell said campaigning this month in parts of Florida where hurricane winds scattered tree branches and refuse and tornadoes leveled entire homes opened her eyes to how desperate the situation is becoming for homeowners.

“What these storms did is… really woke up people to the fact that we’re experiencing more and more severe weather events,” Mucarsel-Powell told HuffPost by phone while driving between campaign stops.

“It has raised the alarm to the fact that the climate is changing and no one has done anything to bring down the impacts,” she said. “Politicians have been lying to so many Floridians by not giving them the right information and by selling them on fraudulent policies through some of these insurance companies they’ve brought here.”

She said Scott’s administration failed to oversee insurers by inspecting whether companies kept enough funds available to pay out large numbers of claims after big disasters, leaving them effectively “unregulated.”

Once voters draw the link between the devastation and the inability to get affordable coverage, “you’re going to see people here in the state push back very, very strongly against these electeds that have been here and done nothing,” she said.

“It’s borderline criminal,” she added. “People are so angry, frustrated and exhausted. Helene brought flooding. Then Milton made everything worse.”

A spokesperson for the Scott campaign did not respond to a request for comment.

Scott has faced blowback over environmental issues before.

Scott slashed environmental regulations and cut funding for Florida’s water management agency by $700 million, setting the stage for a toxic algae bloom that decimated fisheries and the coastal tourism business in 2018. Scott’s critics skewered him with the nickname “red tide Rick,” and the issue hurt the Republican in the polls. That same disregard for the effects of climate change, Mucarsel-Powell said, was on display when Scott attracted speculative private insurers to a state where coastal living was getting riskier.

“He was ‘red tide Rick’... People living in Florida for a very long time know him very well,” Mucarsel-Powell said.

Following Hurricane Milton, Joseph Guindi on Oct. 12 inspects the damage to the two-story beachfront home his family has owned for two decades on Manasota Key, Florida. via Associated Press

“The homeowners insurance crisis that we’re facing right now started under Rick Scott,” she said.

Just after taking office in 2011, Scott signed legislation eliminating Citizens’ caps on premium increases, causing the cost of coverage to skyrocket.

Citizens then launched a campaign to re-audit homes that state-sanctioned inspectors had already deemed ready for a major storm as part of a process to qualify for an insurance discount. Of the more than 250,000 homeowners Citizens double-checked, three out of four lost discounts, the Tampa Bay Times reported in 2012.

The Scott administration then created extra incentives for private insurers to take on Citizens’ customers. The governor went as far as to allow certain insurers to hand-select the least risky plans in Citizens’ portfolio and veto the legislation unanimously passed in the Florida Legislature to allow homeowners to return to Citizens if private rates went too high.

More than half of the 25 companies that state records show were approved to take on Citizens customers from 2013 to 2018 either left Florida, cut back on services or folded, the Miami Herald found in a new analysis that concluded Scott’s efforts “did not help create a stable insurance market.”

Of the 14 companies put under state receivership and liquidated over the past decade, Florida government data shows, all are insurance companies, and six went bust in just the last two years.

Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.), shown here at a Sept. 3 campaign event for Donald Trump in Braselton, Georgia, is facing blame in his reelection campaign for the homeowners insurance crisis in Florida. Mike Stewart via Associated Press

During that time, some of the nation’s largest insurers either pulled out of Florida or declined to renew tens if not hundreds of thousands of policies at a time. That forced homeowners to return in large numbers to Citizens, but this time with higher rates and worse coverage.

“I think most people know Citizens has not been solvent,” DeSantis said at a news conference in March last year. “If you did have a major hurricane hit with a lot of Citizens property holders, it would not have a lot to pay out.”

In December, the U.S. Senate Banking Committee opened an investigation into whether Citizens has enough money on hand to pay out claims in future disasters.

Citizens told CNN at the time that, if it were to pay out all reserves and reinsurance after a major storm, “it is required by Florida law to levy surcharges and assessments on its policyholders and all Florida insurance consumers until any deficit is eliminated.”

In 2021, Citizens announced that a 1-in-100-year storm could put Florida insurance holders “on the hook for $24 billion in assessments tacked onto monthly premiums for years.” But as more homeowners turn to Citizens after private insurers leave, reinsurance companies projected the number could be as high as $162 billion, CNN reported.

The Miami Herald noted that major factors in the rise in insurance costs were outside Scott’s control, including post-COVID inflation driving up housing costs and the steady growth of expensive properties in areas prone to worsening hurricanes.

In August, Scott proposed a bill to allow homeowners to deduct as much as $10,000 in home insurance expenses from federal taxes. Mucarsel-Powell, meanwhile, backed a proposal from Rep. Jared Moskowitz (D-Fla.) to reduce how much reinsurance insurers need to buy, a cost that gets passed on to homeowners buying policies.

She also pledged to advocate for stronger building codes. The Biden administration has made more than $1 billion available to states to help raise building codes on new homes and make houses and apartments more energy efficient and capable of withstanding extreme weather. But the DeSantis administration refused to accept the funding last year. And Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) introduced a bill last year to block the federal government from modernizing the building codes it uses as a benchmark for home loans.

If elected, Mucarsel-Powell said, she would try “to sit down with Marco Rubio” and “work together to provide solutions.” But she said that stronger building codes are just part of the issue and that the federal government should stop providing financing to property developers building in areas that are forecast to face more flooding as seas rise.

“We need to be responsible in providing mortgage loans for new homes or loans to developers that are building knowing they’re building in areas that would be susceptible to flooding and building in a state where we know we have experienced severe hurricanes,” she said. “That should have already been changed years ago.”

To start, she said, Florida could elect a senator who will show up at hearings investigating Citizens’ finances and vote for policies that crack down on companies she said are taking advantage of the market.
“There has to be oversight,” Mucarsel-Powell said. “And it’s absolutely not going to happen under Rick Scott.”

DESANTISLAND

State alien land laws drive some China-born US citizens to rethink their politics

TERRY TANG and DIDI TANG
Sat, October 26, 2024 

Diana Xue poses for a photo at her home Monday, Oct. 21, 2024, in Orlando, Fla. Xue is a naturalized U.S. citizen born in China who used to vote more Republican but has changed her mind after Florida passed the alien land law. (AP Photo/John Raoux)

Diana Xue poses for a photo at her home Monday, Oct. 21, 2024, in Orlando, Fla. Xue is a naturalized U.S. citizen born in China who used to vote more Republican but has changed her mind after Florida passed the alien land law. (AP Photo/John Raoux)ASSOCIATED PRESS


Naturalized Citizens China Land Laws
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Diana Xue poses for a photo at her home Monday, Oct. 21, 2024, in Orlando, Fla. Xue is a naturalized U.S. citizen born in China who used to vote more Republican but has changed her mind after Florida passed the alien land law. (AP Photo/John Raoux)ASSOCIATED PRESSMore
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Diana Xue has always followed the politics of her husband, friends and neighbors in Orlando, Florida, and voted Republican.

This Election Day, she'll break that pattern.

When Florida's GOP-dominated Legislature and Republican governor enacted a law last year banning Chinese nationals without permanent U.S. residency from buying property or land, Xue, who became a U.S. citizen about a decade after coming from China for college, had an “awakening.” She felt then that the Sunshine State had, more or less, legalized discrimination against Chinese people.

Florida has proved reliably Republican in recent years, but Xue said, “Because of this law, I will start to help out, flip every seat I can.”

At least two dozen states have passed or proposed “alien land laws” targeting Chinese nationals and companies from purchasing property or land because of China's status as a foreign adversary. Other countries are mentioned, but experts say China is the constant focus in political discussions.

Mostly Republican legislators have pushed the land laws amid growing fears of intelligence and economic threats from China. At the time of the Florida law’s signing, Gov. Ron DeSantis called China the “greatest geopolitical threat” to the U.S. and said the law was taking a stand against the Chinese Communist Party.

Some China-born people with American citizenship are now feeling alienated by the laws to the point that they are leaning Democratic. Many are afraid of being treated wrongly because of their ethnicity.


U.S.-China tensions hit a fever pitch in February 2023 after a suspected Chinese spy balloon was spotted over Montana. Shortly after, GOP-leaning states like Missouri, Texas and Tennessee introduced similar land ownership measures.

The measures all involved restrictions on businesses or people from China and other foreign adversaries, including not buying land within a certain distance from military installations or “critical infrastructure.” Under some of the laws, very narrow exceptions were made for non-tourist visa holders and people who have been granted asylum.

The National Agricultural Law Center now estimates 24 states ban or limit foreigners without residency and foreign businesses or governments from owning private farmland. Interest in farmland ownership restrictions emerged after a Chinese billionaire bought more than 130,000 acres (52,600 hectares) near a U.S. Air Force base in Texas, and Chinese company Fufeng Group sought to build a corn plant near an Air Force base on 300 acres (120 hectares) in North Dakota.

Liu Pengyu, the spokesperson for the Chinese Embassy in Washington, raised concerns that such laws not only counter market economy principles and international trade rules, but “further fuel hostility towards the Asian and Chinese community in the U.S., intensify racial discrimination, and seriously undermine the values that the U.S. claims to hold.”

State laws banning Chinese nationals from owning land discourage Chinese investors and spook other foreign investors who would otherwise help the U.S. to rebuild its industrial base, said John Ling, who has worked for decades to attract international, especially Chinese, manufacturing projects to the U.S.

The laws have also thrown off real estate agents and brokers. Angela Hsu, a commercial real estate attorney in Atlanta, said it's been confusing to navigate a law Georgia's governor signed in April restricting land sales to some Chinese citizens.

“The brokers I’ve talked to, they’re just trying to figure out what they can do safely,” Hsu said.

On the federal level, the House in September approved a bill that would flag as “reportable” farmland sales involving citizens from China, North Korea, Russia and Iran. The odds for it to win approval from the Senate, however, are slim.

China “has been quietly purchasing American agricultural land at an alarming rate, and this bill is a crucial step towards reversing that trend,” said Rep. Dan Newhouse, a Republican from Washington state.

Democratic Rep. Maxine Waters, of California, joined multiple Asian American organizations in opposing the bill, arguing its “broad-brush approach” of targeting people from specific countries amounted to racial profiling.

China owns less than 1% of total foreign-owned farmland in the U.S., far behind Canada, the Netherlands, Italy, the U.K., Germany or Portugal.

After Florida's land law was signed in May 2023, four Chinese nationals filed a lawsuit. In April, an American Civil Liberties Union attorney representing them asked a federal appeals court to block it.

The saga sparked the Chinese diaspora in Florida to mobilize. Some formed the Florida Asian American Justice Alliance. Among them was Xue. She became interested studying the Legislature and lobbying. She found that only Democrats like state Rep. Anna Eskamani, who is Iranian American, agreed the law was xenophobic.

“She said, 'This is discrimination. I’ll stand with you, and I’ll fight with you,'" Xue said.

Hua Wang, board chair of another civic engagement group, United Chinese Americans, said more people are becoming aware that these laws are directly “affecting each one of us.”

“There are people in both Texas and Florida who say for the first time they are becoming interested and they become organized,” Wang said.

Land laws passed in the name of national security echo a pattern from World War II, when the U.S. saw Japanese people as threats, said Chris Suh, a professor of Asian American history at Emory University. It's difficult to argue the laws are unconstitutional if on paper they are citizenship-based and other countries are named, Suh said.

Anti-Chinese sentiment has shaped policies going back over 150 years. Among these was the Page Act of 1875, which strategically limited the entry of Chinese women to the U.S., and the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, the first broad race-based immigration law.

Policies targeting foreigners hurt the bottom line of all Americans, Suh said, noting that excluding Chinese laborers from railroad work or Japanese immigrants from buying homes didn't benefit U.S. railroad tycoons and landowners.

“That's something to keep in today's context as well," Suh said. “One of the key allies of the the people who are trying to overturn the alien land law in Florida are the people who are going to lose money if they lose the potential buyers of their land.”

The law makes Chinese immigrants who achieved citizenship worry about things like racism or accusations of being a spy in their own home, Xue said.

“You think it’s nothing to do with you, but people look at you — how you look, how your last name is,” Xue said. “They are not going to ask you are you a U.S. citizen or not.”

___

Terry Tang reported from Phoenix. Didi Tang reported from Washington.

Michigan's election fate will depend on laborers. A Democrat and Republican outline what those workers are looking for.

Juliana Kaplan
Sun 27 October 2024 
Business Insider

Polls show Michigan is still in a tight race ahead of the election.


Lt. Gov. Garlin Gilchrist II is campaigning for Harris, while Macomb County GOP Chair Mark Forton door-knocks for Trump.


Both told BI they're targeting the powerful union vote. It has historically gone Democratic but is more in flux this cycle.

With the election clock ticking, all eyes are on Michigan.

Polls in the state are still tight. Former President Donald Trump won by a narrow margin in 2016; it swung back to Biden in 2020.

Lieutenant Governor Garlin Gilchrist II is campaigning for the Harris-Walz ticket. Mark Forton, the GOP chair in Macomb County and former United Auto Workers union member, is out door-knocking for Trump.

Both told Business Insider they are especially targeting union workers whose votes have proved decisive in the last few elections. Though historically blue, their vote is not a lock for either party this time. Gilchrist and Forton say high prices and who voters can trust are top of mind.

"Michigan was always going to be close in this election," Gilchrist said.

Michigan Lieutenant Governor Garlin Gilchrist II has been out campaigning for the Harris-Walz campaign.Adam J. Dewey/Anadolu via Getty Images

Harris has an uphill battle in Macomb County, where Forton said he's been going door-to-door and is confident about Republicans' chances. The county represents a shift to the right in working-class sentiment — in 2016, it was pivotal in flipping Michigan from blue to red. As The Detroit News reports, Macomb has been the most populous county in the state to back Trump in 2016 and 2020.

"I think we're going to do very, very well in Macomb County," Forton said. "Macomb County carried the state in 2016," he said, adding of 2024, "we have to do it again."

Gilchrist recalls a recent visit to UAW local 651 in Flint; three different workers — he's not sure if they knew each other — came up to him to say that this election is an inflection point for the future of workers.

"This is really a turning point," he said, paraphrasing what the workers told him. "And when I turn this corner, I want to have somebody who's got my back with me around the corner."
Workers in Michigan are shifting right and citing high prices as a major concern this election cycle

Unions, which have been reliable Democratic stalwarts for decades, are seeing some members shift their alliances. The powerful Teamsters union, which represents over 1 million workers across a slew of industries nationwide, for instance, issued no endorsement at all — their first time not endorsing a Democrat since 1996, as the Washington Post reported.

Across the US, working-class Americans are gravitating right. That's been true in Michigan, too, according to a poll of 600 Michigan voters from October 7 to October 11 by PR firm Marketing Research Group; Trump claimed 11% more union voters from their last polling in the spring, bringing his support to 42% among Michigan union voters.

In Macomb County, a previous Democratic stronghold, Forton said that Democrats are thinking beyond their political traditions. These are "family people whose family history has been voting for Democrats for decades," Forton said. "Well, they came out and they voted for Ronald Reagan big time twice, and they voted for Trump big time twice. And they're going to do it this time even bigger yet."

Gretchen Whitmer, the state's popular Democratic governor, warned in September that polling generally showing Harris far ahead was not true — the race will be tighter than that. And in a state where Biden won by just over 150,000 votes in 2020, Michigan's 564,000 union members could prove to be particularly consequential.

"Those labor union members talking to one another and talking about what's at stake is often what has made the difference in election after election after election," Gilchrist said.

The UAW — one of Michigan's most prominent unions — has endorsed Harris, along with the Michigan Teamsters local. The union vote isn't a monolith, something both Gilchrist and Forton are seeing.

"There's always been people from all sorts of political parties and persuasions who've been members of labor unions," Gilchrist said. "It's never not been true. Labor unions wouldn't be effective if they were not representative."

Forton, who worked as a UAW auto worker for 35 years, said he's been hearing that internal political conflict firsthand.

"They're coming in the office all the time. They're saying that their union is wrong, that there's 70% voting for Trump, that everybody they know is voting for Trump," Forton said.

Mark Forton out campaigning.Courtesy of Mark Forton

When it comes to what workers want out of this election, both Gilchrist and Forton said that prices are looming large for workers they've spoken to. Inflation soared in the wake of the pandemic, only recently reaching levels last seen in February 2021.

Working families are out paying for groceries and food, and then coming home for dinner "and they're listening to this individual saying that Bidenomics works when their plants are closing down, their factories are closing down again, layoffs everywhere," Forton said. He added: "These aren't stupid people. We realize that this Democrat, Republican thing, we're Americans, we're all affected by the same things."

Gilchrist said that workers are looking for someone who can not only deliver lower prices but someone who they feel they can trust. At that same UAW local, he saw some workers who were both nervous and excited for the future.

"They want their kids to do better than they did. They're nervous because they know that that hasn't been true for everyone," he said. "But they also know that Kamala Harris cares about their kids."

As a parent, the same concerns are on his mind.

"I think about who's the president that's going to actually look at creating a pathway to health and wealth for my kids," Gilchrist said. "And that's the same thing that they were asking me about."

If Trump wins the election, freedom of the press will be under threat

Margaret Sullivan

THE GUARDIAN
Sun 27 October 2024 

Back in early 2016, as Donald Trump ran for president, he issued a warning that sent a chill down the spines of journalists and press advocates.

After ranting about the New York Times and the Washington Post at a Texas campaign rally, Trump predicted that traditional news organizations would have big problems if he were elected. He planned to “open up” the libel laws, so that “when they write purposely negative and horrible and false articles, we can sue them and win lots of money”.

As with many of Trump’s threats, that one didn’t come to fruition. More than eight years later, the law still stands that public figures can only win a lawsuit against a news outlet if it can be proved that the outlet published information knowing it was entirely false or had a “reckless disregard” for the truth. The 1964 supreme court case, New York Times Co v Sullivan, which established this press-protecting precedent, hasn’t been overturned.

But a lot has changed since 2016 – including the increasingly conservative bent of the US supreme court after three Trump appointees. If Trump is elected in November, the laws that protect news organizations might crumble or be weakened.

And while Trump did not get his wish about changing the libel laws, he nevertheless has done a great deal to damage press rights in America.

As president for four years – and as a candidate both before and after that term – Trump has continually waged war with the mainstream press while he used the rightwing press for his political purposes.

As recently as this month, Trump demanded that CBS News be stripped of its broadcast licence as punishment for airing an edited answer of an interview with his Democratic rival, Kamala Harris and he threatened that other broadcasters ought to suffer the same fate.

For years, he stirred up hatred of reporters by calling them the “enemy of the people” – an echo of the language of fascist dictators. He frequently referred to legitimate journalism as “fake news”, and publicly insulted individual reporters.

Famously, in 2018, the Trump White House revoked a CNN reporter’s press pass as retaliation for persistent questions at a press conference. Trump called that reporter, Jim Acosta, a “terrible person”.

“This is something I’ve never seen since I started covering the White House in 1996,” wrote the New York Times correspondent Peter Baker. “Other presidents did not fear tough questioning.”

Trump made a point of disparaging reporters, particularly women of color, and of questioning their intelligence or integrity.

Over the course of one week in late 2018, he berated three Black women reporters – Yamiche Alcindor of PBS, April Ryan of American Urban Radio Networks and Abby Phillip of CNN.

“You talk about someone who’s a loser,” he said of Ryan. “She doesn’t know what the hell she’s doing.”

Trump’s enmity took many forms, including lawsuits. In 2022, he sued the Pulitzer prize board after they defended their awards to the New York Times and the Washington Post. Both newspapers had won Pulitzer prizes for investigating Trump’s ties to Russia.

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More recently, Trump sued ABC News and George Stephanopoulos for defamation over the way the anchor characterized the verdict in E Jean Carroll’s sexual misconduct case against him. Each of those cases is wending its way through the courts.

There is nothing to suggest that Trump would soften his approach in a second term. If anything, we can expect even more aggression.

Consider what one of Trump’s most loyal lieutenants, Kash Patel, has said.

“We’re going to come after the people in the media who lied about American citizens, who helped Joe Biden rig presidential elections,” Patel threatened during a podcast with Steve Bannon. “Whether it’s criminally or civilly, we’ll figure that out.”

Patel, a former federal prosecutor who was Trump’s counterterrorism adviser on the national security council, has been mentioned as Trump’s pick for FBI director or attorney general.

It’s this kind of rhetoric, combined with Trump’s past behavior, that caused one Washington-based science writer to express his concerns in a piece titled “Will Journalism Be a Crime in a Second Trump Administration?”

Environmental journalists “are used to worrying about things that are endangered”, wrote Joseph A Davis in the journal of the Society of Environmental Journalists.

“So we think it’s time to add press freedom and democracy to the endangered list.”

In addition, consider Project 2025. The blueprint for a second term from Trump’s allies is a press-rights nightmare.

Under Project 2025, seizing journalists’ emails and phone records would get easier. The editorial independence of Voice of America would be sharply curtailed; in fact, the global organization might be shut down altogether. Former officials who talk to reporters would be punished. Funding for NPR, PBS and public broadcasting would dry up.

“A pretty grim picture,” was the conclusion of Joshua Benton of Harvard University after analyzing Project 2025 from the perspective of press rights.

“The first time around, there was at least a modicum of uncertainty about what a Trump administration would actually do,” Benton wrote in Nieman Lab. “The second time, voters knew better, and they rejected it. The third time? Well, no one can say it’ll come as a surprise.”

As for Kamala Harris’s attitude toward press rights, we don’t know a great deal, except that she’s doing things in the normal, pre-Trump way.

Her web site’s policy section trumpets her defense of “fundamental freedoms”, stressing reproductive rights and voting rights, but not freedom of the press.

In a new report on press freedom and the election, the Committee to Protect Journalists reports that neither presidential candidate responded to their request to pledge clear support for press freedom.

The CPJ report found that Trump’s antipathy for journalists has left lasting harm, from the local to the global level, harm that was not adequately repaired during the Biden years.

“The hostile media climate fostered during Donald Trump’s presidency has continued to fester, with members of the press confronting challenges – including violence, lawsuits, online harassment, and police attacks – that could shape the global media environment for decades,” according to the report.

“The stakes of this election are incredibly high,” the report’s author, Katherine Jacobsen, told me.

After Joe Biden passed Harris the torch over the summer, the vice-president came under fire for not quickly sitting down for an interview or doing a press conference.

She promised to do an in-depth interview by the end of August – and met her self-imposed deadline.

That first was with CNN’s Dana Bash, certainly a mainstream choice. Harris has since fielded questions from members of the National Association of Black Journalists at WHYY, the public radio station in Philadelphia. And she sat down in September to discuss her economic policy plans with MSNBC’s Stephanie Ruhle.

There’s little to suggest that she’ll try to portray the press as the enemy of the people or start prosecuting journalists under the Espionage Act. Such prosecution did happen under Trump. (It also did under Barack Obama, though that has been largely forgotten in the chaos of the last eight years.)

Trump’s justice department seized the phone and email records of a New York Times reporter, Ali Watkins, and used the Espionage Act to jail a journalistic source, Reality Winner, for leaking a classified document about Russian interference in the 2016 election.

Trump’s affinity for autocratic leaders adds another layer of concern.

Writing in the Washington Post, the publisher of the New York Times, AG Sulzberger, raised an alarm about who Trump looks up to.

“If Trump follows through on promises to continue [his anti-press] campaign in a second term,” Sulzberger wrote, “his efforts would likely be informed by his open admiration for the ruthlessly effective playbook of authoritarians,” such as the Hungarian leader, Viktor Orbán.

Sulzberger, though, also wrote that he had no intention of allowing these concerns to affect his paper’s straight-news coverage: “I disagree with those who have suggested that the risk Trump poses to the free press is so high that news organizations such as mine should cast aside neutrality and directly oppose his reelection.” In its opinion pages, however, the Times’s editorial board has called Trump unfit to lead and strongly endorsed Harris, calling her “the only patriotic choice for president”.

It would be heartening to hear Kamala Harris publicly express her support for the essential role of the press in a free society, something to be protected and even celebrated. That may never come to pass.

Still, it’s probably reasonable to assume Harris will treat the press as many Oval Office dwellers have in the past, as something of a burr under the presidential saddle.

By contrast, Donald Trump poses a clear threat to journalists, to news organizations and to press freedom in the US and around the world.

Trust in the media may be low, and American citizens may not be fans of journalists or their work.

But they ought to know that just as longstanding reproductive rights have collapsed in recent years, press rights – already reeling – could suffer the same fate.

Margaret Sullivan is a Guardian US columnist writing on media, politics and culture

NON ENDORSEMENTS ENDORSE TRUMP

The Washington Post and L.A. Times face subscriber cancellations and staff resignations for not endorsing a presidential candidate. Here's a closer look at the controversy.

As major newspapers abandon candidate endorsements, some journalists are calling it a betrayal of democratic responsibility.

David Artavia
·Reporter
Updated Sun, October 27, 2024 

The Los Angeles Times newspaper headquarters in El Segundo, Calif. (Damian Dovarganes/AP Photo)


The Washington Post and Los Angeles Times sparked intense debate this week by announcing they will not endorse a presidential candidate for the 2024 election, marking a significant departure from long-standing tradition.

The Post’s publisher, Will Lewis, framed the decision as a return to the paper’s roots as an independent voice — though the editorial board says it had drafted an endorsement of Vice President Kamala Harris that was allegedly blocked by owner Jeff Bezos (a claim Lewis denies). The Post editor-at-large Robert Kagan and opinion columnist Michele Norris publicly resigned in response to the non-endorsement, and a wave of subscription cancellations followed.

At the L.A. Times, owner Patrick Soon-Shiong defended the decision not to endorse, stating he was merely respecting a decision made by his paper’s editorial board. However, several board members openly disputed this, asserting they had prepared an endorsement for Harris that was ultimately blocked by Soon-Shiong. The fallout was swift, with multiple staffers issuing their resignations and readers declaring that they would cancel their subscriptions, prompting the union that represents many Times employees to issue a statement urging them not to do so.


The L.A. Times had endorsed a presidential candidate each cycle since 2004, while the Post’s presidential endorsements date back to 1988. The move by both papers to opt out of backing a candidate in the coming presidential election follows a trend that has been building among newspapers in recent years, as organizations have become wary of alienating subscribers and deepening political divides.

Here’s a closer look at the evolution of such endorsements and the debate over whether newspapers should continue to make them.
Newspaper endorsements are wavering

Historically, newspaper endorsements — from presidential races to local elections — served as a guide, offering readers insight into candidates’ qualifications through the publication’s editorial lens.

In today’s polarized climate, however, endorsements have turned into a double-edged sword. Critics contend that they can amplify perceptions of bias and partisanship, potentially alienating segments of a paper’s readership.

As a result, many publications have opted out of endorsements entirely.

In 2022, for example, over 200 outlets owned by hedge fund Alden Global Capital, including the Chicago Tribune and Denver Post, announced they would cease endorsing major political candidates, citing public discourse and the prevalence of “culture wars.”

Similarly, the New York Times stated earlier this year that it would stop endorsing candidates in state races, although it would continue backing U.S. presidential candidates. The Minnesota Star Tribune followed suit in August, choosing not to endorse candidates or causes in 2024, pledging instead to offer robust analysis to help readers make informed decisions.
Post and L.A. Times staffers resign in protest

The decisions by the Post and L.A. Times not to endorse a presidential candidate led to multiple resignations. The timing of that choice — less than two weeks before the election — was particularly concerning for some editors.

Former Post executive editor Marty Baron described the move as “cowardice, with democracy as its casualty.”

L.A. Times editorials editor Mariel Garza wrote in her resignation letter, “People will justifiably wonder if each endorsement was a decision made by a group of journalists after extensive research and discussion, or through decree by the owner,” according to The Wrap.

According to the Washington Post, L.A. Times journalists Robert Greene and Karin Klein also stepped down in protest, with Greene sharing a statement with the Columbia Journalism Review explaining that the paper’s decision “hurt particularly because one of the candidates, Donald Trump, has demonstrated such hostility to principles that are central to journalism — respect for the truth and reverence for democracy.”

In a statement shared on Facebook, Klein stressed that Soon-Shiong “blocked our voice” when he decided to scrap the editorial team’s endorsement of Harris.
Cancellations are mounting

The guild that represents many L.A. Times employees acknowledged that readers have threatened to cancel their subscriptions, while pleading with them not to abandon the publication that pays their salaries.

“Before you hit the ‘cancel’ button: That subscription underwrites the salaries of hundreds of journalists in our newsroom,” the statement said. “Our member-journalists work every day to keep readers informed during these tumultuous times. A healthy democracy is an informed democracy.”

Meanwhile, former Republican Rep. from Wyoming Liz Cheney and author Stephen King announced they’ve canceled their subscriptions to the Post. Thousands of other readers have reportedly followed suit.
Former editors blame billionaire owners

Some journalists argue that these non-endorsements prioritize the interests of the papers’ billionaire owners — Jeff Bezos and Patrick Soon-Shiong — over their readers, suggesting they are motivated by a desire to avoid backlash from Donald Trump if he wins the presidency.

Kagan highlighted this perceived conflict of interest in an interview with CNN.

“This is obviously an effort by Jeff Bezos to curry favor with Donald Trump,” he said. “Trump has threatened to go after Bezos’ business. Bezos runs one of the largest companies in America. They have tremendously intricate relations with the federal government. They depend on the federal government.”

As of Sunday, Oct. 27, Bezos has yet to respond publicly to the outcry.
Which papers have endorsed Harris or Trump?

While some papers have stepped back from the practice, others remain committed to endorsing candidates.

As of Sunday, Oct. 27, the New York Times, Boston Globe, Seattle Times, Las Vegas Sun and the New Yorker have endorsed Harris.

Meanwhile, Trump has received backing from the New York Post, the Washington Times and the Las Vegas Review-Journal.

Bezos faces criticism after executives met with Trump on day of Post’s non-endorsement

Michael Sainato
Sun 27 October 2024 

Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos.Photograph: Mandel Ngan/AFP/Getty Images


The multi-billionaire owner of the Washington Post, Jeff Bezos, continued facing criticism throughout the weekend because executives from his aerospace company met with Donald Trump on the same day the newspaper prevented its editorial team from publishing an endorsement of his opponent in the US presidential election.

Senior news and opinion leaders at the Washington Post flew to Miami in late September 2024 to meet with Bezos, who had reservations about the paper issuing an endorsement in the 5 November election, the New York Times reported.

Amazon and the space exploration company Blue Origin are among Bezos-owned business that still compete for lucrative federal government contracts.


And the Post on Friday announced it would not endorse a candidate in the 5 November election after its editorial board had already drafted its endorsement of Kamala Harris.

Friday’s announcement did not mention Amazon or Blue Origin. But within hours, high-ranking officials of the latter company briefly met with Trump after a campaign speech in Austin, Texas, as the Republican nominee seeks a second presidency.

Trump met with Blue Origin chief executive officer David Limp and vice-president of government relations Megan Mitchell, the Associated Press reported.

Meanwhile, CNN reported that the Amazon CEO, Andy Jassy, had also recently reached out to speak with the former president by phone.

Those reported overtures were eviscerated by Washington Post editor-at-large and longtime columnist Robert Kagan, who resigned on Friday. On Saturday, he argued that the meeting Blue Origin executives had with Trump would not have taken place if the Post had endorsed the Democratic vice-president as it planned.

“Trump waited to make sure that Bezos did what he said he was going to do – and then met with the Blue Origin people,” Kagan told the Daily Beast on Saturday. “Which tells us that there was an actual deal made, meaning that Bezos communicated, or through his people, communicated directly with Trump, and they set up this quid pro quo.”

The Post’s publisher Will Lewis, hired by Bezos in January, defended the paper’s owner by claiming the decision to spike the Harris endorsement was his. But that has done little to defuse criticism from within the newspaper’s ranks as well as the wave of subscription cancelations that has met the institution.

Eighteen opinion columnists at the Washington Post signed a dissenting column against the decision, calling it “a terrible mistake”. The paper has already made endorsements this election cycle, including in a US senate seat race in Maryland. The Washington Post endorsed Hillary Clinton when Trump won the presidency in 2016. It endorsed Joe Biden when Trump lost in 2020, despite Trump’s pledges to retaliate against anyone who opposed him.

In their criticism of the Post’s decision on Friday, former and current employees cite the dangers to democracy posed by Trump, who has openly expressed his admiration for authoritarian rule amid his appeals for voters to return him to office.

The former Washington Post journalists Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward, who broke the Watergate story, called the decision “disappointing, especially this late in the electoral process”.

The former Washington Post executive editor Marty Baron said in a post on X, “This is cowardice with democracy as its casualty”.

The cartoon team at the paper published a dark formless image protesting against the non-endorsement decision, playing on the “democracy dies in darkness” slogan that the Post adopted in 2017, five years after its purchase by Bezos.

High-profile readers, including author bestselling author Stephen King as well as former congresswoman and vocal Trump critic Liz Cheney, announced the cancellation of their Washington Post subscriptions with many others in protest.

The Post’s non-endorsement came shortly after the billionaire owner of the Los Angeles Times, Patrick Soon-Shiong, refused to allow the editorial board publish an endorsement of Harris.

Many pointed out how the stances from the Post and the LA Times seems to fit the definition of “anticipatory obedience” as spelled out in On Tyranny, Tim Snyder’s bestselling guide to authoritarianism. Snyder defines the term as “giving over your power to the aspiring authoritarian” before the authoritarian is in position to compel that handover.

Bezos is the second wealthiest person in the world behind Elon Musk, who has become a prominent supporter of Trump’s campaign for a second presidency. He bought the Washington Post in 2013 for $250m.

In 2021, Bezos stepped down as CEO of Amazon, claiming during a podcast interview that he intended to devote more time to Blue Origin.

The New York Times reported Bezos had begun to get more involved in the paper in 2023 as it faced significant financial losses, a stream of employee departures and low morale.

His pick of Lewis as publisher in January seemingly did little to help morale at the paper. Employees and devotees of the paper were worried that Lewis was brought on to the Post despite allegations that he “fraudulently obtained phone and company records in newspaper articles” as a journalist in London, as the New York Times reported.

Nonetheless, in a memo to newsroom leaders in June 2024, Bezos wrote, “The journalistic standards and ethics at the Post will not change.”

The Washington Post is in deep turmoil as Bezos remains silent on non-endorsement

Hadas Gold
Updated Sun 27 October 2024 


One day after The Washington Post announced it would not endorse a presidential candidate in this year’s election or in the future, its billionaire owner remains silent as the newspaper’s staff are in turmoil.

Jeff Bezos has so far declined to comment on the situation, even as his own paper’s journalists reported that it was Bezos who ultimately spiked the planned endorsement. A source with knowledge told CNN on Friday that an endorsement of Vice President Kamala Harris had been drafted before it was squashed.

In the last 24 hours, at least one editor has resigned, and high-profile Post staffers have publicly expressed their dismay as many in the paper’s Opinion section are furious over how the situation was handled.

For many current and former staffers of the venerable newspaper, the timing of the announcement was highly suspect and has led them to believe Bezos’s business interests influenced the decision.

Former Post executive editor Marty Baron, who led the paper under Bezos during the first Trump administration called the decision an act of “cowardice.”

“To declare a moment of high principle, only 11 days before the election that is just highly suspect that is just not to be believed that this was a matter of principle at this point,” Baron told CNN’s Michael Smerconish on Saturday morning.

Trump has threatened Bezos “continually,” Baron noted. But when Baron was in charge of the newspaper, Bezos “resisted that pressure” and he was “proud” and “grateful” for that leadership.

“Bezos has other commercial interests, a big stake and Amazon, he has a space company called Blue Origin,” Baron said. “Trump has threatened to pursue his political enemies and he rewards his friends and he punishes his perceived political and think there’s no other explanation for what’s happening right now.”

Baron said Post publisher Will Lewis’s defense of the non-endorsement was “laughable,” noting that the Post has endorsed in other races.

“If their philosophy is readers can make up their own minds on the big issues that they face in this democracy, then don’t run any editorials,” Baron said. “But the fact is they only decided not to run an editorial in this one instance 11 days before the election.”

In a statement to CNN on Saturday, Lewis pushed back on reports about Bezos’s role in the endorsement decision.

“Reporting around the role of The Washington Post owner and the decision not to publish a presidential endorsement has been inaccurate,” Lewis said. “He was not sent, did not read and did not opine on any draft. As Publisher, I do not believe in presidential endorsements. We are an independent newspaper and should support our readers’ ability to make up their own minds.”

Several current Post journalists told CNN they have no problem with the editorial board not endorsing in any situation, with some actively agreeing with the decision. But they all found the timing of the announcement extremely troubling.

“Deciding that now, right before an election, puts us in a lose-lose position: cowards for caving, or whining over not endorsing Harris, which the Trump campaign is already trying to use to undermine us,” one Post journalist told CNN. Another told CNN that “people are angry and feel like senior managers are undermining the journalism.”

Others expressed deep concern that a wave of readers reacting to the news have cancelled their subscriptions, something that will directly impact the newsroom’s ability to function.

Robert Kagan, a Post columnist and opinion editor-at-large who had been with the paper for 25 years, publicly resigned on Friday as a direct result of the non-endorsement.

“This is obviously an effort by Jeff Bezos to curry favor with Donald Trump in the anticipation of his possible victory,” Kagan told CNN’s Erin Burnett OutFront on Friday. “Trump has threatened to go after Bezos’ business. Bezos runs one of the largest companies in America. They have tremendously intricate relations with federal government. They depend on the federal government.”

On Friday, Trump met with executives from Blue Origin, the space exploration company owned by Bezos, hours after the Post announced its decision Friday. The company has a $3.4 billion contract with the federal government to build a new spacecraft to transport astronauts to and from the moon’s surface.

Trump advisers and supporters have been crowing since both the Post and the Los Angeles Times’ billionaire owners stepped in to prevent their papers from endorsing Harris.

A post on X by a Post reporter noting that Trump met with Blue Origin executives the same day the Post declined to endorse Harris was reposted by Trump spokesman Steven Cheung along with multiple “love” emojis.

Trump senior adviser Stephen Miller also pounced on the non-endorsement, writing: “You know the Kamala campaign is sinking when even the Washington Post refuses to endorse.”

Earlier in the week, the Trump campaign used the Los Angeles Times’ non-endorsement in a fundraising email, calling it a “humiliating blow” for Harris.

Other staffers said the decision not to endorse will ultimately harm American democracy, even though Lewis claimed in his note to readers that the move should not be seen as a “tacit endorsement of one candidate, or as a condemnation of another.”

In a joint statement, legendary Post journalists Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein of Watergate fame called the decision “surprising and disappointing,” noting the timing of the announcement “ignores the Washington Post’s own overwhelming reportorial evidence on the threat Donald Trump poses to democracy.”

A group of 17 Post opinion columnists also published a statement Friday evening, criticizing their own newspaper’s decision not to endorse a candidate in the presidential election as a “terrible mistake.”

“The Washington Post’s decision not to make an endorsement in the presidential campaign is a terrible mistake,” they wrote. “It represents an abandonment of the fundamental editorial convictions of the newspaper that we love, and for which we have worked a combined 218 years.”

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Washington Post Erupts in Civil War As Jeff Bezos Censors Its Kamala Harris Endorsement

Corbin Bolies
Fri 25 October 2024 

Jeff Bezos and Democratic presidential nominee, Vice President Kamala Harris.


The Washington Post was in turmoil Friday after its owner Jeff Bezos ordered its journalists to censor its endorsement of Kamala Harris.

His move was revealed by the newspaper’s own reporters—as one of its star writers, policy expert Robert Kagan, quit and its legendary former editor Marty Baron erupted in rage.

The billionaire Amazon founder stopped the publication of an endorsement of the Democratic candidate which its editorial board had already written, the paper reported.

Within hours Kagan, a veteran editor-at-large quit in disgust, Semafor reported. The dramatic move was called “cowardice” by its Pulitzer Prize-winning ex-editor, Baron. One of the paper’s star reporters, Ashley Parker, called it “a new type of October Surprise.”

The sudden move 11 days before the election caused shockwaves, and came despite the paper endorsing local candidates. It plunges The Washington Post into the same kind of civil war which is already engulfing The Los Angeles Times whose billionaire owner also stopped a Harris endorsement.

Jeff Bezos directly intervened to stop The Washington Post publishing an endorsement of Kamala Harris, the paper's own reporters revealed Friday.

The paper’s CEO Will Lewis—not its owner, Bezos—announced the endorsement ban in a note to readers, saying it was an attempt to “provide through the newsroom non-partisan news for all Americans, and thought-provoking, reported views from our opinion team to help our readers make up their own minds.”

“We see it as consistent with the values The Post has always stood for and what we hope for in a leader: character and courage in service to the American ethic, veneration for the rule of law, and respect for human freedom in all its aspects.”

It came days after The Los Angeles Times’ editorial board was blocked from endorsing Vice President Kamala Harris by its billionaire CEO Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong, plunging the newsroom into chaos over its owner’s meddling in its editorial affairs.

In D.C., Lewis said the paper was “returning to our roots of not endorsing presidential candidates,” citing the paper’s distant past, which it abstained from presidential endorsements.

But that era ended in 1976 when it endorsed Democrat Jimmy Carter for president, which Lewis said was for “understandable reasons.” “But we had it right before that, and this is what we are going back to,” Lewis wrote. (The Post last abstained from endorsing a presidential candidate in 1988, saying at the time it could not reach “a threshold of confidence in and commitment” in a candidate that year.)

Lewis' note set off an explosive reaction, led by Baron, the highest-profile living former leader of the paper of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein.

“This is cowardice, a moment of darkness that will leave democracy as a casualty,” Baron, who shepherded the paper during Donald Trump’s first presidency wrote on X. “Donald Trump will celebrate this as an invitation to further intimidate The Post’s owner, Jeff Bezos (and other media owners). History will mark a disturbing chapter of spinelessness at an institution famed for courage.”

According to NPR, which first broke the news of the Post’s decision, opinion editor David Shipley informed staff on Friday morning about the decision. Opinion among staff, according to NPR, was “uniformly negative.”

“The message from our chief executive, Will Lewis—not from the Editorial Board itself—makes us concerned that management interfered with the work of our members in Editorial,” the Post’s union leadership said in a statement.

“According to our own reporters and Guild members, an endorsement for Harris was already drafted, and the decision to not to publish was made by The Post’s owner, Jeff Bezos. We are already seeing cancellations from once loyal readers. This decision undercuts the work of our members at a time when we should be building our readers’ trust, not losing it.”


CEO Will Lewis says The Washington Post will not endorse a presidential candidate.

Lewis’ nearly yearlong tenure at the Post has been marred by controversy after controversy. Initially welcomed by Post employees as an affable changemaker with ambitions to reinvent the paper, the staff turned on him after he booted the paper’s executive editor, Sally Buzbee, for two former colleagues; reportedly tried to block the paper from reporting on his alleged role in covering up a U.K. phone-hacking scandal; insinuated the paper’s editorial staff was responsible for its business failings; and nearly installed a former U.K. colleague whose ethically questionable reporting practices eventually came to light.

Lewis’ decision came days after Soon-Shiong blocked the Times’ impending endorsement of Harris. Soon-Shiong claimed he allowed the paper to present analyses of the “POSITIVE AND NEGATIVE policies by EACH candidate” to present “clear and non-partisan information to its readers,” but the editorial board refused.

Soon-Shiong seemed to revel in Lewis’ decision, posting a screenshot of the NPR story that showed Lewis following his lead without any comment.

Ex-WaPo Editor: This Is a Straight Bezos-Trump ‘Quid Pro Quo’

Lily Mae Lazarus
Sat 26 October 2024 


Robert Kagan, Donald Trump and Jeff Bezos


The Washington Post’s outgoing editor-at-large and longtime columnist has made explosive claims that its owner Jeff Bezos struck a deal with Donald Trump in order to kill the newspaper’s endorsement of Kamala Harris.

Robert Kagan, who resigned from his position on Friday after more than two decades at the publication, told the Daily Beast that Trump’s meeting with executives of Bezos’ Blue Origin space company the same day that the Amazon founder killed a plan to support Harris was proof of the backroom deal.

“Trump waited to make sure that Bezos did what he said he was going to do, and then met with the Blue Origin people,” he said on Saturday. “Which tells us that there was an actual deal made, meaning that Bezos communicated, or through his people, communicated directly with Trump, and they set up this quid pro quo.”

Robert Kagan (R).

The alleged collusion between Bezos and Trump, Kagan says, “is just the beginning,” adding that if the former president wins a second term, there will be “a lot of self censorship [in the media] and a lot of changing course just to be sure that they’re not going to be punished.”

Kagan became a vocal anti-Trump voice in 2016, writing about the dangers of authoritarianism in the event of a second Trump presidency, and about how the former president could jeopardize American democracy.

In 2023, Kagan warned about Trump’s potential influence on the media, saying, “Media owners will discover that a hostile and unbridled president can make their lives unpleasant in all sorts of ways.”

Bezos knows first hand the consequences of criticizing the former president. The Post’s 2016 endorsement of Hillary Clinton is widely thought to have led to him losing out on a $10 billion cloud computing defense contract awarded by the Trump administration. And, throughout the former president’s first term, he repeatedly attacked Bezos and Amazon, accusing them of scamming the United States Postal Service.

“This is what we have to look forward to,” Kagan said. “All Trump has to do is threaten the corporate chiefs who run these organizations with real financial loss, and they will bend the knee.”

Donald Trump speaks with Satya Nadella, Chief Executive Officer of Microsoft, and Jeff Bezos, Chief Executive Officer of Amazon.

While the billionaire tech mogul did not buckle to Trump’s threats in years past, Kagan said that Bezos’ shock decision to pull the Harris endorsement had “obviously been in the works for some time,” describing his formerly hands-off approach to owning the Post as “a lot of Kabuki.”

“We now know what Bezos’ intention was, therefore we now know why he hired Will Lewis,” he continued. “We were the ones who were naive in thinking that there was anything else going on here.”

Lewis, who is the newspaper’s publisher, claimed that the Post’s last-minute nixing of its endorsement had nothing to do with its owner, and was instead because, “I do not believe in presidential endorsements.” His claim contradicts reports from sources that Lewis “fought tooth and nail” to keep the endorsement.

According to Kagan, “all the facts” lead in the direction of Bezos attempting to transform the Post into something akin to The Wall Street Journal, a center right “anti-anti-Trump editorial slant,” with Lewis by his side.

“Some journalists will stick around for that. Some will leave. If they leave, they can be replaced,” he said.

SEE

Donald Trump Practically Demands Joe Rogan To Endorse Him

LA Times Owner Patrick Soon-Shiong ‘Has No Regrets’ About Harris Endorsement Uproar After Staff Protests

‘We have to blow it up’: can never-Trumpers retake the Republican party?

JOIN WALL ST. DEMOCRATS & FORM A NEW CENTRE RIGHT PARTY

Martin Pengelly in Washington
Sun 27 October 2024 

Liz Cheney at an event in Pennsylvania with Kamala Harris last week.

Photograph: Leah Millis/Reuters

The former Wyoming congresswoman Liz Cheney “hopes to be able to rebuild” the Republican party after Donald Trump leaves the political stage. Mitt Romney, the retiring Utah senator and former presidential nominee, reportedly hopes so too.

Among other prominent Republicans who refuse to bow the knee, the former Maryland governor Larry Hogan is running for a US Senate seat in a party led by Trump but insists he can be part of a post-Trump GOP.

Related: ‘He’s lying’: Ohio Senate candidate blames staffers and family for errors


“I think there are a lot of people that are very frustrated with the direction of the party and some of them are giving up,” Hogan told the Guardian. “I think we’ve got to stand up and try to take the Republican party back and eventually get us back on track to a bigger tent, more [Ronald] Reagan’s party, that can win elections again.”

Michael Steele, the former Republican National Committee chair turned MSNBC host, advocated more dramatic action: “We have to blow this crazy-ass party up and have it regain its senses, or something else will be born out of it. There are only two options here. Hogan will be a key player in whatever happens. Liz Cheney, [former congressmen] Adam Kinzinger and Joe Walsh – all of us who have been pushed aside and fortunately were not infected with Maga, we will have something to say about what happens on 6 November.”

That’s the day after election day, when Trump will face Kamala Harris. If Trump wins, all bets will be off. If he loses, the never-Trumpers could try to reclaim their party. Few are under any illusions about the size of the task.

“It’s going to take somewhere between six, eight, 10 years to defeat the Maga piece of the party resoundingly and definitively,” said Reed Galen, son of the late GOP stalwart Rich Galen. Galen is an adviser to George W Bush and John McCain, a co-founder of the anti-Trump Lincoln Project, and now running Join the Union, a coalition of pro-democracy groups.

“If you think about it, 85% of Republican primary voters this year voted for Trump. Now, is that bad for somebody who owns the party and is a former president? Yeah, electorally, it could be. But it also says that the people who actually choose nominees are Maga, right?

“Do I think there will be some erosion if Trump loses? Yeah, but I don’t think it’s going to be below 50% and I don’t think that anybody who considers themselves a diehard Republican or a Maga Republican is looking to go back to the days of George W Bush, John McCain, or Mitt Romney, or even Nikki Haley.

“If the establishment, such as it is, wants its party back, then it’s going to have to do some pretty serious work to destroy the parts of it that are anti-democratic and fundamentally dangerous to the country. I don’t know, based on their track record, whether they’re willing to do that. Frankly, I don’t think they are. I think they’re going to try and figure out how to survive long enough that maybe the thing burns itself out on its own.”

Among elected or formerly elected Republicans with national profiles, Cheney has gone furthest, campaigning for Harris in battleground states. Romney has stayed quiet. He might thus seem better positioned to shape a post-Trump party but Sarah Longwell, a Republican strategist turned publisher of the Bulwark, an anti-Trump conservative outlet, recently called his stance “genuinely insane”.

She said: “‘I can’t come out and endorse Kamala Harris because I have to maintain some juice to help rebuild the Republican party?’ No.”

Trump and Trumpists’ grip on Romney’s party is too strong, Longwell said, to allow for such passivity.

Cheney has hinted at interest in building a new rightwing party, telling an audience in Wisconsin that “it may well be [necessary] because … so much of the Republican party today has allowed itself to become a tool for this really unstable man”. But starting afresh would be tremendously difficult, not least because rightwing donors and advocacy groups have so successfully capitalized on Trump’s capture of the GOP, achieving epochal policy wins, not least the removal of the federal right to abortion.

Galen said: “All of the people who built all of these front groups, whether the Heritage Foundation [originator of the controversial Project 2025 plan for a second Trump term] or the Conservative Partnership Institute, or [the dark money impresario] Leonard Leo, all these people have spent decades and billions of dollars building out this stuff. It’s not like they’re simply going to fold up their tent and say, ‘You guys in the establishment, take your party back.’ These people are true believers.”

So are the younger donors, strategists and elected officials now led by JD Vance, the 40-year-old Ohio senator who once opposed Trump but became his vice-presidential pick with backing from billionaires like Peter Thiel and Elon Musk.

“The worst kept secret in the world is that JD Vance or [Texas senator] Ted Cruz or [Missouri senator] Josh Hawley all desperately want Trump to lose, because they want their shot,” Galen said. “Trump is [nearly] 80. They’re in their 40s, maybe early 50s, and they want him to go the hell away.

Related: The Maga legal networks that could topple Planned Parenthood and gut women’s healthcare

“But even if he loses, they can’t separate themselves from them him completely. They they may try but the truth is we’re talking not just about the Republican party, but the American body politic. This a decade-long program, at least, to get this thing back into some sort of healthy state.

“Beating Donald Trump is like surviving a car crash. It doesn’t mean you’re not in the hospital, and it doesn’t mean you’re OK. It just means that they got the jaws of life out and they yanked you out of the car.”

•••

To Galen, wondering if the Republican establishment can take back its party is ultimately a waste of time – with the emphasis on “time”. Cheney is 58, Hogan 68, Romney will be 78 next year. Mike Pence, the vice-president Trump abandoned to the mob on January 6 but who stays quiet, is 65 himself.

“They’re the dinosaurs of the Republican party,” Galen said. “The comet has hit, the cloud has covered, it’s just a matter of accepting your fate.”

In his late 40s, Galen professes energy for the fight to come. Nonetheless, he describes a sobering recent experience in London, when he sat with “Mehdi Hasan on Al Jazeera, and he was battering some Trump spokesperson in a debate”. That was fun, but Galen had a confrontation of his own. One of the panel participants, a younger Trump supporter, leaned over and told him: “You know, we killed your party, and we couldn’t be happier about it.”

“The Republican party is a nationalist, nativist party,” Galen said. “All of this stuff that I grew up with as far as the party was concerned, the idea of moral and muscular foreign policy, fiscal responsibility, individual liberty?

“All that stuff’s gone. It’s gone.”