Pope Francis urges genocide probe of Israel's war on Gaza
Brett Wilkins,
In a new book set to be released this week, Pope Francis I endorsed a genocide investigation into Israel's war on Gaza—which has killed or maimed more than 150,000 Palestinians and forcibly displaced, starved, or sickened millions more over the past 13 months.
"In the Middle East, where the open doors of nations like Jordan or Lebanon continue to be a salvation for millions of people fleeing conflicts in the region: I am thinking above all of those who leave Gaza in the midst of the famine that has struck their Palestinian brothers and sisters given the difficulty of getting food and aid into their territory," the pontiff wrote in his latest book, which goes on sale in some countries on November 19.
"According to some experts, what is happening in Gaza has the characteristics of a genocide," the Pope added. "It should be carefully investigated to determine whether it fits into the technical definition formulated by jurists and international bodies.
The Pope's words echo last week's finding by a United Nations expert panel that Israel's annihilation of Gaza is "consistent with the characteristics of genocide."
The International Court of Justice—a U.N. organ—is currently weighing a South Africa-led genocide case against Israel backed by more than 30 nations and regional blocs as well as hundreds of groups and experts around the world.
Meanwhile, the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court is seeking arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Israel Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, as well as three former Hamas leaders assassinated by Israel, for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity, including extermination.
Many jurists, scholars, and other experts—including some of Israel's leading Holocaust historians—have called Israel's policies and actions in Gaza genocide. Early in the war, Raz Segal—an Israeli historian and professor of Holocaust and genocide studies at Stockton University in New Jersey—called Israel's Gaza onslaught "a textbook case of genocide."
Numerous world leaders and other international officials, artists, entertainers, and others—including half of Democratic voters in the United States surveyed in May—also agree that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza.
Many Palestinian Christians have been killed, injured, or otherwise harmed by Israeli forces during the bombardment, invasion, and siege of Gaza. With just 800 to 1,000 people believed remaining in Gaza, members of the world's oldest Christian community warned early in the war that they were "under threat of extinction."
In their most infamous attack on Gaza Christians, Israeli forces bombed the 12th century Saint Porphyrius Greek Orthodox Church, Gaza's oldest, in October 2023, killing 18 Palestinians including numerous children. Among the victims were two women and an infant related to former Republican U.S. Congressman Justin Amash of Michigan.
After an Israeli sniper fatally shot an elderly woman and her daughter on the grounds of a Catholic church in Gaza City last December, Pope Francis condemned what he called an act of "terrorism."
Amid the death and destruction wrought by Israel's assault on Gaza, last December's Christmas celebrations were canceled in Bethlehem, the purported birthplace of Jesus Christ.
"How can we celebrate when we feel this war—this genocide—that is taking place could resume at any moment?" asked Palestinian Lutheran pastor Munther Isaac at the time.
WSJ editorial warns Elon Musk’s 'blow-it-all-up' ideas will devastate U.S. economy
Alex Henderson, AlterNet
November 18, 2024 12:59PM ET
Tesla CEO and X owner Elon Musk speaks as Republican presidential nominee and former U.S. president Donald Trump looks on during a rally at the site of the July assassination attempt against Trump, in Butler, Pennsylvania, U.S., October 5, 2024. REUTERS/Carlos Barria TPX IMAGES OF THE DAY
President-elect Donald Trump ally Elon Musk is telling him that the person he nominates for U.S. Treasury secretary should not be someone who favors "business as usual."
The advice has sent shock waves through the conservative Wall Street Journal.
The newspaper’seditorial board on Sunday emphasized that "disruption" at the U.S. Treasury Department could be risky and dangerous for the country's economy.
The board argued, "Our concern isn't personalities so much as Mr. Musk's apparent belief in economic-policy disruption for its own sake. Treasury isn't the Education Department, or Defense, and financial markets don't want to trade one form of policy uncertainty for another. Steady and knowledgeable economic policy hands are needed if Mr. Trump wants to succeed."
READ MORE:Republican says 'colored people' wouldn't have basketball if not for Abraham Lincoln
In the months ahead, the WSJ editorial board stressed, the U.S. economy will "require careful judgment, not blow-it-all-up rhetoric."
"One risk ahead is the tax bill that needs to pass next year to extend the 2017 tax reform," the WSJ board writes. "With narrow GOP majorities in Congress, that won't be easy. All the more so because Mr. Trump campaigned on new tax cuts, on tips, overtime, Social Security benefits, that will be impossible to afford unless Republicans want to sign up for an even larger deficit blowout than under President Biden."
The next U.S. treasury secretary, the WSJ board stressed, "needs an understanding of financial markets, which nowadays are global."
"A blowup in the foreign-exchange markets somewhere can affect the U.S. economy, and new financial investments like crypto need careful watching," the board argued.
"Mr. Trump has promised to ease political control over these markets, but no one should think they are risk-free. Blowups somewhere are inevitable, and a treasury secretary needs the experience to deal with the fallout in a way that reassures markets."
The Department of Government Efficiency Is Inefficient
Elon Musk evinces no understanding of how government works.
by Timi Iwayemi
November 18, 2024
The American Prospect
Alex Brandon/AP Photo
Elon Musk and Donald Trump at a campaign event in Butler, Pennsylvania, October 5, 2024
The Revolving Door Project, a Prospect partner, scrutinizes the executive branch and presidential power. Follow them at therevolvingdoorproject.org.
Last week, Donald Trump announced that self-christened first buddy Elon Musk will head a newly established Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) alongside Vivek Ramaswamy. The assignment is an obvious reward for Musk’s extensive support of the president-elect’s campaign, deepening the world’s richest man’s already considerable influence over the federal government. As The New York Times notes, Musk’s companies were promised $3 billion after inking nearly 100 different contracts with 17 federal agencies last year.
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It’s safe to assume that these contracts will be exempt from the initiative’s mission to “dismantle government bureaucracy, slash excess regulations, cut wasteful expenditures, and restructure federal agencies”—supposedly a long-held goal of conservatives and their private-sector allies. While targeting the jobs of career public servants, Musk aims to staff the initiative with “super high-IQ small-government revolutionaries willing to work 80+ hours per week on unglamorous cost-cutting.”
It’s similarly reasonable to suspect that Musk is a large holder of the cryptocurrency Dogecoin, which he regularly hypes; hence the decision to name the initiative DOGE to keep the coin in the news cycle for the next couple of years. Considering the irrational nature of meme coins and Musk’s promise of affiliated merchandise, the attention from the appointment alone could easily net a relatively modest wealth increase; the price of Dogecoin is already growing.
Read more from the Revolving Door Project
While details of the enterprise are still vague, Musk and Ramaswamy have made a number of pledges that would be disastrous for almost every American. These include Musk’s vow to cut $2 trillion in federal spending over an amorphous time frame, and Ramaswamy’s call to eliminate allocations to programs with expired authorizations such as veterans’ health care, which lapsed in 1998.
One wonders if Musk and Ramaswamy have even a passing familiarity with the federal budget. The only possible way to achieve Musk’s cost-cutting goals would be to take a wrecking ball to entitlement programs, particularly Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. The budget for federal discretionary spending, which is determined annually in the congressional appropriations process, was $1.6 trillion in fiscal year 2024, or about 26 percent of spending. Even if that figure were zeroed out—fully abolishing, for instance, the FDA, EPA, USDA, NPS, HHS, DOJ, FAA, DOE, and NASA—Musk would be well short of his goal. A further 13 percent (around $800 billion) of the federal budget went toward interest payments on the country’s debt, which would be economic suicide to stop paying. Mandatory outlays, in the form of automatic spending for Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, military pensions, and income security programs like the Earned Income Tax Credit, take up 61 percent (around $4 trillion).
Musk presumably does not actually want to delete agencies that give him multibillion-dollar contracts. The only way to make the cuts he’s talking about would be to gore Medicare and Social Security. What’s most likely to happen is Musk and Ramaswamy will leverage Twitter/X to deceive the public into believing that disastrous cuts to important but trivial federal expenditures are emblematic of widespread government waste.
Musk’s Government-Squeezing Predecessors
Trump’s administration is not the first to bring private-sector cost-cutting strategies to bear on the federal bureaucracy, despite the ends of the federal government being decidedly different from the profit-seeking pursuit of corporations.
Back in 1982, then-President Ronald Reagan instructed industrialist Peter Grace to recommend ways to eliminate government inefficiency. Grace helmed the president’s Private Sector Survey on Cost Control, aka the Grace Commission, which was established by executive order to “identify opportunities for increased efficiency and reduced costs by executive action.” The commission was motivated by the wrongheaded belief that the federal government needed to adopt the private sector’s strategies for survival and success. Grace assembled 161 top executives, organizing them into 36 task forces to either examine specific agencies or study overlapping functions such as personnel management and data processing. The task force leaders met with agency heads, and staff were stationed at agency offices.
The commission produced over 2,000 recommendations, which it claimed would have reduced government spending by enough to eliminate federal deficits at the time (around $400 billion in 1983 dollars). However, public management expert Steven Kelman’s analysis of the headline recommendations found that most of the projected savings reflected either a misunderstanding of the federal government’s processes or gross exaggerations of specific outlays, à la Musk.
Now, there are some ways in which the American government is extremely inefficient—namely through policy complexity and means-testing. While Nordic-style universalist social democracy is simple and therefore cheap to administer, American programs typically have elaborate eligibility rules, requiring an expensive bureaucratic apparatus. Medicaid, food stamps, WIC, EITC, and so forth all spend a lot of money and time making sure applicants are eligible, while many who are eligible fail to fill out the right forms and lose out on benefits. But neither previous efficiency reports nor Musk’s DOGE plan show any awareness of this problem.
Musk may also use the new efficiency initiative as a vehicle for vengeance.
Additionally, as consumer protection advocate Ralph Nader contended following the commission’s report, task force members regularly waded into sensitive policy efforts where they had potential conflicts of interest despite the mandate to focus on operational measures. This is another dynamic Musk is likely to recreate, considering his deep involvement with numerous federal agencies. So even in situations where cuts are off the table, Musk and his allies would glean information on agencies’ internal deliberations as it pertains to regulations, enforcement, and procurement. In practice, insider knowledge like this could privilege Musk’s SpaceX over competitors such as Boeing in future dealings with NASA, for example. What’s more, if there are insufficient firewalls, he could learn more about the multiple investigations into his companies. An obvious example is the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration’s probes of Tesla for various complaints, including Tesla vehicles’ unexpected braking and loss of steering control.
Musk may also use the new efficiency initiative as a vehicle for vengeance. Seeing how deeply Musk has ingratiated himself with Trump—and the president-elect’s obsession with loyalty—a plausible outcome is regulators putting the kibosh on any investigations or regulations that would trouble Musk’s business interests out of fear of retribution. Clearly, the sprawling nature of Musk’s contracts with the federal government should preclude him from DOGE’s wide-ranging assignment. While there are laws prohibiting outside advisers from engaging in matters affecting their financial interests, enforcement has been inconsistent, so it’s a hurdle Musk could scale with relative ease.
Following in Reagan’s footsteps, the Clinton-Gore administration’s National Performance Review also sought to introduce private-sector techniques to the federal government’s operations. The project, which was led by a rotating cast of federal employees, proposed 1,200 changes to improve federal services. More than half of the changes were implemented, generating $136 billion in savings. Some recommendations, such as electronic filing of tax returns, agency performance targets, and utilization of the internet to provide federal information, were impressive reforms. However, an enduring element of the Review was the decision to cut just over 420,000 federal jobs, pushing core governmental functions into the hands of contractors.
This hollowing out of government capacity is an area in which Musk, Ramaswamy, and Trump are likely to find common ground with the Clinton-Gore project. When Trump first entered office, he instituted a 79-day federal government hiring freeze as part of a similar mission to reorganize agencies in a more efficient manner. This freeze exacerbated already-present gaps in the federal bureaucracy and ultimately resulted in workforce cuts in all departments other than Homeland Security, Veterans Affairs, and Defense. At the agency level, only the Small Business Administration and National Science Foundation were spared from the Trump administration’s downsizing.
Trump’s attack on civil servants also took the form of three executive orders aimed at checking the power of federal employee unions. Taken together, these orders shortened the window for collective bargaining, reduced use of work hours for union activities, and significantly weakened workers’ protections during disciplinary proceedings. In addition to this, the Trump administration also created by executive order a new classification for federal workers—Schedule F—which would have stripped workers’ protections and allowed Trump to fire them for being insufficiently loyal. The Biden administration reversed this EO and instituted a rule clarifying the application of merit system principles to the federal civil service.
DOGE is a new weapon in Trump’s ongoing war against the administrative state. But it’s important to remain clear-eyed about the value federal civil servants provide. These individuals help ensure the safety of our food, medicine, transportation, air, and water. They are also the backbone of our education, health care, and financial regulatory systems. There is no doubt that many Americans feel burned by their recent interactions with these systems, but federal employees are the wrong targets of their ire. If we want a government that is readily equipped to challenge the corporate villains who are committed to padding their bottom line regardless of the consequences to ordinary Americans, then protecting civil servants and government services must remain top of the agenda.
Timi Iwayemi is a research director at the Revolving Door Project.
Tesla’s Bid to Pull Up the EV Ladder
The rumored end to the $7,500 federal rebate for electric vehicles sounds like it would hurt the nation’s biggest EV maker. Quite the opposite, actually.
by David Dayen
November 18, 2024
The American Prospect
David Zalubowski/AP Photo
The Treasury Department announced in June that it had paid about $1 billion in EV rebates in the first six months of the year.
The $7,500 federal electric-vehicle rebate was always likely to be the most endangered of the Biden administration’s clean-energy investments. Tax breaks for building factories at least creates jobs and, perhaps more important, corporate stakeholders. But the EV rebates benefit consumers whose lifestyle choices are coded as liberal. States that didn’t vote for Trump lead the way on EV adoption. This fits with the “punish my enemies” imperative of the Trump administration.
But there was a hitch here: Elon Musk decided to become Donald Trump’s biggest and wealthiest fan. For a moment, you could see the EV rebates sticking around. After all, nobody has thrived more off those rebates, including the ones in place before the Inflation Reduction Act, than Tesla.
Unfortunately, that is not the logic of the would-be monopolist. You look around at you and your competition and wonder who would be hurt the most by a government action, and if it’s everybody else, you endorse it. That’s the logic behind Tesla’s apparent support for eliminating the rebate: essentially pulling up the ladder after climbing it themselves.
More from David Dayen
Reuters was the first to report that the EV rebates would be on the way out, and that Tesla has told the Trump energy transition team—which includes none other than oil billionaire Harold Hamm—that it would be OK with that. Ending the rebates would position Trump on the side of Big Oil, but it also helps, in a small way, to solve a burgeoning fiscal problem.
Trump and the Republicans want to extend tax cuts that were massively tilted toward the rich, and add on about a dozen other tax cuts Trump gave away like candy during the campaign. This is going to bust the budget, which has already got fiscal conservatives breaking out in hives. One way out of the hard choices to follow is to find “offsets” that will either raise revenue or bring back savings. That’s kind of the purpose of Tesla CEO Musk’s other effort, the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).
The Treasury Department announced in June that it had paid about $1 billion in EV rebates in the first six months of the year. Multiply that out over a decade and you have $20 billion. Even if it were twice that, it would be a drop in the bucket compared to the trillions of dollars in red ink that extending and expanding the Trump tax cuts would create. But Republicans will be desperate for just about any offset once they get hit with the recognition that tariffs and fake DOGE charts about government waste aren’t going to fill that budget crater.
So what is Tesla’s calculus? As Musk himself said on an earnings call in July, Tesla was the first mover in the EV transition in the U.S., and is simply better positioned to do away with the EV incentives, after making good use of them for many years.
Tesla was the first mover in the EV transition in the U.S., and is simply better positioned to do away with the EV incentives.
Tesla has dropped from an 80 percent share of EV sales in 2020 to less than 50 percent last quarter. But it still has so much more EV manufacturing experience that it can better manage the loss of the subsidy. Ford and General Motors and other legacy automakers, on the other hand, need those subsidies to make their vehicles more affordable and bridge the gap to getting their production chains in place, as do startups that are trying to gain a foothold in the market.
Despite the hype over the waning EV transition, these legacy automakers were actually ramping up sales, particularly GM, which is now the second-largest American EV maker. But as they build out their factories, the losses have been high. Not even GM has reached EV profitability yet. And now it’ll be harder to sell those vehicles, leading to more losses. A National Bureau of Economic Research paper from October estimates that eliminating the rebates will reduce EV registrations by about 300,000 per year.
Combined with the elimination of the tax incentives for sales is the regulatory structure that was newly instituted by the Biden administration, putting in place strict emissions standards. That is almost certain to go, meaning that automakers would have no carrot or stick to build EVs. You could expect the more established firms to sink back to internal combustion engine vehicles, especially if they don’t have stringent tailpipe emissions limitations.
Tesla is getting battered in China and is simply not keeping up with global competition. All domestic automakers would be damaged in an industry that’s clearly going electric. Other countries are spending heavily to keep pace with Chinese subsidies, and Biden’s previous U.S. investments. But Trump is planning to continue a holdover policy from the Biden administration and close off the U.S. to foreign EVs. Tesla is effectively retrenching, trying to increase its relative position in the U.S., even through policies that would hurt the company globally. The result will be a cramped, puny U.S. auto industry that isn’t all that exportable.
Importantly, the $7,500 rebate was reserved for vehicles that shifted their supply chains to the U.S., including batteries and critical mineral components. Without that incentive, auto companies could pivot back to sourcing materials from China, which will be likely hit with high tariffs. So no matter what companies do, making electric vehicles will get more expensive, and amid that uncertainty, the one company that has their supply chain mostly in place will benefit: Tesla.
Is there going to be any internal resistance to a dramatic reversal for the EV transition and the reduction of fossil fuel pollution? I would watch the two Republican senators from Tennessee, Marsha Blackburn and Bill Hagerty. Volkswagen has a big EV factory in Chattanooga (recently organized by the United Auto Workers) and other proposals from GM and Ford in the state. If they aren’t going to defend the EV rebate, nobody will. Other Republican lawmakers in Indiana, North Carolina, and South Carolina will have to decide whether to stand with Trump or their own constituents’ jobs.
There are certainly coalitions and trade groups that will want to save the EV tax credits, but there’s a bit of mystery to them. There are actually two sets of tax credits, one for sales (the consumer rebate) and one for the production of EV and battery facilities. The reports I’ve seen about mobilizing to save the tax credits seem more focused on the latter. But of course they are connected; if demand suffers from losing the $7,500 rebate, it doesn’t matter if the factory can be built more easily.
The sunk cost of existing investment means that auto companies won’t pull out of making EVs entirely. But it will be more of a niche market, likely with substandard infrastructure for charging, especially on long trips. (The Biden administration provided federal money for EV chargers; that could also go away.) Tesla has an advantage there too with its Supercharger network, and with Elon Musk sitting at the feet of the president, that’s sure to be official policy across the auto space.
Whether the EV industry will be strangled, as it was in the 1990s, or not might depend on whether there’s a surge of demand in the final weeks of the year. A strong quarter could give all automakers a renewed push to defend an EV transition that’s working. Otherwise, you may have only one option to go electric in the future, and if you don’t like how the Cybertruck looks, tough.
David Dayen is the Prospect’s executive editor. His work has appeared in The Intercept, The New Republic, HuffPost, The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and more. His most recent book is ‘Monopolized: Life in the Age of Corporate Power.’
FAA has proposed large fines for Musk — and he may soon hold power over them: report
RAW STORY
November 18, 2024
A battle could be looming between SpaceX CEO Elon Musk and the Federal Aviation Administration, which handles, among other things, air traffic as planes fly through U.S. airspace.
Musk faced proposed fines last year of about $633,000 over SpaceX violations, Politico reported, including over the company's unauthorized rocket firing.
When a rocket launch is scheduled, airplanes need to know to stay away from the air space.
Musk was furious that his rocket was delayed "for months because of a pending Fish and Wildlife Service review" and he deployed a "scorched earth" tactic, according to Politico.
"He’s used his social media megaphone to threaten to sue the agency for 'regulatory overreach,' accused it of 'politically motivated behavior,' taunted the FAA with crude humor and poked at the agency’s rules, which he says move too slowly to meet his goal of getting human civilization to Mars. He has also called for the resignation of FAA leader Mike Whitaker — who has four years left on the job, assuming he serves out his term," according to the report.
Trump said he plans to appoint Musk and one-time opponent Vivek Ramaswamy to run a largely symbolic agency known as the "Department of Government Efficiency."
Rep. Rick Crawford (R-AR) has been floated as Trump's appointment to head the Department of Transportation, which oversees the FAA. Politico reports he's indicated a willingness to overhaul space regulations.
“There’s definitely some changes that need to be made,” Crawford told POLITICO last week, also echoing Musk's complaints that the FAA is too slow.
Republicans have complained in the past that they can't compete against China in the Mars race while complying with government safety regulations.
Read the full report here.
Farmers panic that Trump policy could cause 'catastrophic nightmare': reportRAW STORY
Trucks on farmland. (Emily Marie Wilson/Shutterstock)
Farmers are panicking about President-elect Donald Trump's return to the White House in 2025, according to a new report.
Trump's promise to enact mass deportations could result in a "massive loss of revenue" for farmers who rely on immigrant labor to stay afloat, Newsweek reported Monday.
"The idea of mass deportations is frightening and scary, just on a humane level," dairy farmer Jennifer Tilton Flood reportedly said. "With regards to our community, mass deportations could affect our entire dairy industry throughout the U.S."
About 950,000, or nearly 45 percent, out of an estimated 2.2 million farm laborers in the U.S. are undocumented immigrants, Newsweek reported.
Flood argued businesses and churches should expect a "catastrophic nightmare" to come as U.S. Customs and Border Protection came under Trump's control.
"There is a great chance for families to be broken apart," said Flood. "A lot of my team are raising Americans at home, and so it's tough. There is a lot of concern and there's a lot of panic."
Karoline Leavitt, the Trump campaign national press secretary, has reportedly said her boss' administration will dedicate itself to "the largest deportation operation of illegal criminals, drug dealers and human traffickers in American history."
Experts warn such a mass deportation effort could come with a hefty price tag of up to $315 billion, according to the report.
Restaurant owners say they're afraid of the cost to their businesses.
"If these workers are deported, restaurants will close, leading to massive losses in revenue and a significant downturn in the economy," Sam Sanchez, a National Restaurant Association board member, told Newsweek.
"Many of these individuals are good, law-abiding citizens who worked tirelessly throughout the pandemic but were ineligible for unemployment benefits," Sanchez added. "We need policies that ensure these essential workers can stay and continue contributing to our economy."
Legal experts knock down New York Times' reassurance that Trump can't have third term
RAW STORY
November 18, 2024
A New York Times columnist was criticized as being naive after he wrote a fact-check claiming recent suggestions Donald Trump might stay in power after his next term as president are impossible.
Writing Monday, Neil Vigdor wrote Trump "cannot run for re-election again," citing constitutionally set two-term limits.
Trump made a comment to the House Republican Conference last week suggesting he would stay in office if they could "figure something out."
His campaign said that the statement was nothing more than "a joke."
However, two former federal prosecutors pointed out that the Times' writer doesn't take into consideration that Trump has violated the Constitution before with no consequences.
Also Read: A mysterious group of Republicans is secretly rewriting the Constitution
"The Constitution also says he requires the 'advise and consent' of the Senate to approve his nominations," said Joyce Vance on Blue Sky.
She was referencing the Trump team teasing that they might push through some Cabinet appointments without Senate confirmation by calling for recess appointments.
Jill Wine-Banks, known for her participation in the legal team that prosecuted the Watergate cases, agreed with Vance, pointing to other times Trump ignored the rules outlined in the Constitution.
"Joyce is right to be skeptical. Criminals find ways around inconvenient laws, and in Trump’s case, the Constitution," Wine-Banks posted on Blue Sky.
"He violated the Emoluments Clause with no consequences," she pointed out. "He’s getting away with violating criminal laws because of SCOTUS. But this is even worse because if he gets away with recess appointments, it destroys the foundation of our democracy."
'No real solutions': Trans rep-elect hits back at 'extremists' for Capitol bathroom ban
RAW STORY
Nancy Mace (photo by Saul Loeb for AFP)The first trans woman elected to Congress issued a forceful response over a Republican lawmaker's reported plans to try to ban trans women from using female bathrooms at the Capitol.Rep. Nancy Mace (R-SC) plans to introduce a resolution that would ban trans women from using the bathroom corresponding to their gender identity at the Capitol, Fox News reported Monday. The move comes just before Congress swears in Rep.-elect Sarah McBride (D-DE)."The sanctity of protecting women and standing up against the Left’s systematic erasure of biological women starts here in the nation’s Capitol," Mace told Fox. The measure calls for "prohibiting Members, officers, and employees of the House from using single-sex facilities other than those corresponding to their biological sex, and for other purposes," and would task the Sergeant-at-Arms with enforcing the rule.The specification of "Members" would at the moment apply to just one person: Rep. Sarah McBride (D-DE), who was elected this month as the first openly transgender person to serve in Congress.McBride said Monday that Mace's resolution is a distraction."Every day Americans go to work with people who have life journeys different than their own and engage with them respectfully, I hope members of Congress can muster that same kindness," she wrote on X.McBride added: "This is a blatant attempt from far right-wing extremists to distract from the fact that they have no real solutions to what Americans are facing. We should be focused on bringing down the cost of housing, health care, and child care, not manufacturing culture wars. Delawareans sent me here to make the American dream more affordable and accessible and that’s what I’m focused on."When asked whether she planned to talk to McBride, Mace said: “No, Sarah McBride doesn’t get a say," Politico reported.
GOP Rep seeks to ban trans women from Capitol's female bathrooms after trans woman electedMatthew ChapmanNovember 18, 2024 RAW STORY
Rep. Nancy Mace (R-SC) -- (Photo of Mace via Shutterstock)Rep. Nancy Mace (R-SC) plans to introduce a resolution that would ban transgender individuals from the bathroom corresponding to their gender identity at the Capitol, Fox News reported Monday — and it comes just before Congress swears in its first-ever transgender congresswoman."The sanctity of protecting women and standing up against the Left’s systematic erasure of biological women starts here in the nation’s Capitol," Mace told Fox. The measure calls for "prohibiting Members, officers, and employees of the House from using single-sex facilities other than those corresponding to their biological sex, and for other purposes," and would task the Sergeant-at-Arms with enforcing the rule.The specification of "Members" would at the moment apply to just one person: Rep. Sarah McBride (D-DE), who was elected this month as the first openly transgender person to serve in Congress.Republicans have used trans issues as a divisive tool to influence voters. Historically, many of these attempts have been unsuccessful, such as the North Carolina GOP's effort in 2016 to pass a statewide bathroom measure. Donald Trump's campaign bombarded the airwaves with attacks on Harris for supporting trans rights in various capacities, and his team believes these ads proved effective this year.Mace is a Trump loyalist who was part of the cohort that threw former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) out of office. She has faced controversy after staffers came out and described her as a toxic boss focused on securing TV air time.
Following the election, she proclaimed that voters gave Trump a mandate to "protect women" even as Trump was found liable for sexual abuse by a jury in New York. 
MAGA allies eye drastic Medicaid and food stamp cuts to fund tax breaks for rich: report
Matthew Chapman
November 18, 2024
Republican presidential nominee and former U.S. President Donald Trump holds a campaign rally in Reno, Nevada, U.S. October 11, 2024. REUTERS/Fred Greaves
Donald Trump and his allies are floating the idea of major cuts to Medicaid and the food stamp program in order to offset some of the budget deficits created by their desired new round of tax cuts for the rich, reported The Washington Post on Monday.
The new tax cuts are a huge priority for Trump and his allies — in particular extending the provisions of a 2017 tax cut bill that are set to expire. The corporate tax cuts in that bill were made permanent, aside from some subsequent tweaks to corporate taxes made under the Biden administration, but the individual income tax cuts are set to run out at the end of next year.
Republicans and their strategists, according to the report, are discussing "new work requirements and spending caps for the programs, according to seven people familiar with the talks, many of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly. Those conversations have included some economic officials on Trump’s transition team, the people said."
However, these sources said the ideas are "preliminary" and Trump's allies are concerned about "the political downsides of such cuts, which would affect programs that provide support for at least 70 million low-income Americans."
The previous Trump administration allowed states to add work requirements to Medicaid coverage in a series of pilot programs. Experts widely consider these experimental programs to be a failure, as they threw tens of thousands of low-income people off of health coverage without making any noticeable change to employment figures. The Biden administration later rescinded authorization for these programs.
Despite the track record, House Republicans again tried to force a nationwide inclusion of work requirements on these programs during a budget standoff in 2023, as a condition for authorizing a debt ceiling increase and preventing a default on U.S. credit. Ultimately, Republicans backed down from this and settled for more modest reforms.
It's time for Democrats to declare class warfare
ALTERNET
If my hypothesis from yesterday — that Democrats best way to win elections and regain political power is to engage in class warfare against the GOP and the billionaires that fund it — the immediate question is, “How?”
The last century has seen two presidents engage in class warfare in a big and direct way that not only won them multiple elections but also altered the electoral map of America: Franklin D. Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan. There are multiple lessons to learn from both.
When FDR came into power in March of 1933, the nation was in shambles because of a decade of Republican mishandling of the economy. In the early 1920s, Republican President Warren Harding dropped the top income tax rate from 91% down to 25% and loosened oversight of Wall Street.
The short-term result was an explosion of riches at the top, referred to as “The Roaring 20s,” and violent actions against attempts to form labor unions. The longer-term result was the infamous Black Tuesday of October 29, 1929 which kicked off the Republican Great Depression.
President Roosevelt correctly identified America’s morbidly rich, who’d seized control of the GOP after the end of the Taft presidency in 1913, as the cause of the financial disaster and proclaimed that they and their captive Republicans had declared class war against average working class Americans.
ALSO READ: Trump finds a new lawman is who even more lawless than he is
“For out of this modern civilization,” Roosevelt told America, “economic royalists carved new dynasties. New kingdoms were built upon concentration of control over material things. … It was natural and perhaps human that the privileged princes of these new economic dynasties, thirsting for power, reached out for control over Government itself.”
He used the language of class warfare; as with all wars, the first step is to identify the enemy. For FDR it was the morbidly rich of his era who weren’t content to just run their businesses and make money but also lusted for the political power they’d been given during the 1920s by Republican presidents Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover.
“These economic royalists complain that we seek to overthrow the institutions of America,” Roosevelt proclaimed. “What they really complain of is that we seek to take away their power.”
He paused for a moment, then thundered, “Our allegiance to American institutions requires the overthrow of this kind of power!”
The crowd at Madison Square Garden roared when he said that. They knew that Republican politicians had worked hand-in-glove with wealthy industrialists to suppress unions, evade taxes, and accumulate fortunes beyond anything ever seen in America. That the GOP had been running an often-violent class war against them for at least the past decade.
And they were over it. Over the greed, over the theft, and over the self-righteous proclamations that the Constitution protected their avarice. Average working people knew these “economic royalists” weren’t patriots; they were looters, vandals, and political arsonists. FDR gave voice to their anger, disillusionment, and disgust.
“In vain,” Roosevelt said, “they seek to hide behind the Flag and the Constitution. In their blindness they forget what the Flag and the Constitution stand for. Now, as always, they stand for democracy, not tyranny; for freedom, not subjection; and against a dictatorship by mob rule and the over-privileged alike.”
Republicans had declared class warfare; FDR, like he would later do with the Japanese and Germans, led the charge to fight back and defeat them.
And defeat them he did (even in the face of an assassination attempt); by the end of his presidency, American oligarchs had gone back to doing business and getting rich, largely avoiding politics and keeping their noses clean.
Until, that is, President Nixon put Lewis Powell on the Supreme Court and Powell began the process — from the bench — of turning America back into a full-blown oligarchy like Hoover had done in the 1920s.
The Powell Memo and the Court’s Bellotti decision (written by Powell) set the stage and outline the battle plan for the Reagan Revolution, an all-out declaration of class war against average Americans and the Democrats who’d historically defended them.
In the 1980s, Reagan cut the top income tax rate from 74 percent down to 27 percent (while repeatedly raising taxes on working-class people’s wages, tips, and Social Security), kicking off an explosion of billionaires. He and other Republican presidents and members of the Supreme Court followed up by:
— Ending enforcement of our anti-trust laws and gutting our environmental regulations.
— Killing off our media guardrails like the Fairness Doctrine and Equal Time Rule, along with ending ownership limits on newspapers, radio stations, and TV stations and networks.
— Fighting every effort to reduce or end student debt.
— Opposing every program proposed to broaden access to healthcare coverage.
— Attacking our right to vote.
— Privatizing Medicare with the Medicare Advantage scam (Social Security is next).
— Assailing environmental regulations that protect us and our children from cancer and other diseases.
— Going to the mat to defend hundreds of billions in annual subsidies for the fossil fuel industry and its oligarchs.
— Deregulating social media (Section 230), now taken over by rightwing billionaires.
— Packing our courts with reliable toadies for giant corporations and the wealthy.
— Stripping over $50 trillion from the working class since 1981, handing that money to the morbidly rich to stash in their offshore money bins.
— Rejecting every effort to raise the national minimum wage.
— Most recently, Trump congratulated Musk on his union-busting success.
Through this entire period, Democrats have refrained from employing FDR’s class war rhetoric to fight back. Instead, they’ve worked hard to make life better for working class people when in power and tried to limit the damage from Republican proposals and policies when they’re out of power.
This is why Vice President Harris’ claims that Democrats are here for the average person while Republicans want more tax cuts and deregulation failed to catch fire during this past election; there was no rhetoric of warfare. Instead, astonishingly, Harris campaigned with Liz Cheney and kept saying that she’d give Republicans “a seat at the table.”
As billionaire Warren Buffett famously confessed:
“There’s class warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.”
It’s far past time to take the gloves off and start punching.
Democrats have become so rusty, so wary of class warfare, that they haven’t even identified a term or metaphor to describe the rightwing billionaires for whom the GOP fronts.
From Democratic President Grover Cleveland in the 1880s saying the rich had working people under their “Iron heel” to the early 20th century when they were called Robber Barons, Democrats have had names for Republicans and the billionaires who own them.
FDR called them economic royalists. Teddy Roosevelt called them fat cats, malefactors of great wealth, parasites, and plutocrats. I’ve been calling them the morbidly rich, but there’s almost certainly a more evocative phrase out there that could be applied to greedy billionaires by this generation of progressives.
After all, elite conservatives and billionaires haven’t hesitated to use “othering” language in their war against Democrats.
Reagan and Republicans since have called us pointy-headed intellectuals, ivory tower elites, eggheads, limousine liberals, champagne socialists, latte liberals, the wine and cheese crowd, coastal elites, tax and spend liberals, bleeding hearts, do-gooders, tree huggers, environmental wackos, libtards, communists, and even feminazis.
And how do Democrats describe Republicans? “Our friends on the other side of the aisle.”
Screw that. It’s time to declare war.
And war requires a clear delineation between our side and their side, between the good guys and the enemy. Nobody is going to rush to the ramparts against somebody we’re “happy to work with on a bipartisan basis”: as Newt Gingrich taught Republicans in the 1990s and they’ve held to with a religious fervor, there can be no quarter against the other side if you want to take and hold power.
Class war sounds ugly, but it’s exactly what Republicans and their billionaire backers have been waging against working class Americans for 43 years now. It’s damn well time to fight back by declaring a class war of our own.
In an authoritarian regime it’s important to control the news — and here we goALTERNET
Kash Patel (Photo via AFP)
— Is changing the Democratic Party the way to remake our Democracy?
Donald Trump only got about a million more votes than he did in 2020, but Kamala Harris appears to have received somewhere between 6 and 10 million fewer votes than Joe Biden did that year. For the over two decades that I’ve been writing and on the radio and TV, I’ve argued that when Bill Clinton embraced Reagan’s neoliberalism in 1992 (and Obama maintained that position) the Democratic Party had taken a fatal turn to the right. I’ve written two books that cover it, in part, as well: The Hidden History of Neoliberalism: How Reaganism Gutted America
and The Hidden History of the American Dream. It appears that millions of voters essentially said, “I’m not going to vote for that nutcase Trump, but Harris isn’t speaking to the explosion in my cost-of-living expenses so to hell with her, too.” Joe Biden campaigned with Bernie Sanders and won; Kamala Harris campaigned with Liz Cheney and repeatedly said she wanted to give Republicans “a seat at the table,” which may well have been a fatal error. She thought she could pick up moderate Republicans, but there’s apparently not such a thing anymore since Fox “News” and the massive rightwing media ecosystem has come to dominate the American news and opinion landscape.
Bernie Sanders, Robert Reich, Sherrod Brown, and many other longtime Democrats have been pointing to this pre-1992 truth: if the Democratic Party is to win, it has to go back to its FDR/LBJ roots and become the party of the bottom 90 percent, instead of embracing those with a college education, movie and rock stars, and progressive billionaires like Mark Cuban. God bless them all, but Dems really need to reinvent themselves as the blue-collar party and repudiate much of the Clinton/Obama agenda of low taxes, free trade, and private/public partnerships (like Obamacare).
Amazingly, even The New York Times’ conservative columnist David Brooks agrees, writing: “The Democratic Party has one job: to combat inequality. Here was a great chasm of inequality right before their noses and somehow many Democrats didn’t see it. Many on the left focused on racial inequality, gender inequality and L.G.B.T.Q. inequality. [This is actually an untrue GOP talking point.] … As the left veered toward identitarian performance art, Donald Trump jumped into the class war with both feet. His Queens-born resentment of the Manhattan elites dovetailed magically with the class animosity being felt by rural people across the country. His message was simple: These people have betrayed you, and they are morons to boot.” Amen. Finally, check out this troubling article from data scientist Stephen Spoonamore raising questions about manipulation of vote totals in the swing states in a way that doesn’t appear in the non-swing states. I’m agnostic on this for the moment, but it’s worth reading; he’ll be on my program Monday.
— In an authoritarian regime it’s important to cow and control the news, and here we go. Kash Patel, widely rumored to be Trump’s main pick for FBI director, has a message for reporters and opinion writers who insist on continuing to call Trump a fascist or otherwise slander/defame him and his followers: “We will go out and find the conspirators, not just in government but in the media. Yes, we’re going to come after the people in the media who lied about American citizens, who helped Joe Biden rig presidential elections – we’re going to come after you... Whether it’s criminally or civilly, we’ll figure that out. But yeah, we’re putting you all on notice.”
According to The Columbia Journalism Review, Trump has already sued The New York Times (naming reporters Peter Baker, Michael S. Schmidt, Susanne Craig, and Russ Buettner) and Penguin Random House (one of my publishers) and CBS’s 60 Minutes show for $10 billion each.
As I predicted, he appears to be following the Putin/Orbán strategy of bankrupting media outlets and reporters (rather than using cops and billy-clubs), presumably both to cow others into submission and to make the media properties available to be purchased by his allies (sort of like what just happened with The Onion buying Infowars out of bankruptcy).
Steve Bannon added his thoughts, essentially threatening or warning the journalists at MSNBC: “Weissman, you were on TV with MSNBC and all the producers, MSNBC. Preserve your documents. Ari Melber and all you hosts. Preserve your documents. All of it. You better be worried. You better lawyer up. Some of you young producers, you better call mom and dad tonight. Mom and dad, ‘You know a good lawyer?’ Lawyer up. Lawyer up.”
This is a dangerous time for anybody writing about politics. Orbán and Putin even go after random citizens who criticize them on social media; will Trump go that far? And will progressives shut up in the face of this kind of intimidation? Stay tuned…
— Speaking of authoritarianism, Texas Republicans want to outlaw websites that discuss how to get an abortion. Jessica Valenti tells the story at Abortion, Every Dayon Substack about the Republican lawmakers in Texas (and around the country) who are trying to pass legislation that would imprison people who put up websites that can be viewed in Texas (including hers) with information on abortion. They argue that abortion information is not free speech protected by the Constitution. I’d add that if the Comstock Act is enforced by the new Attorney General (as JD Vance has demanded) next year, all sorts of information about abortion will become criminalized, in addition to the devices and drugs that can be used for both abortion and birth control.
— Sarah Hurst’s Russia Report on Tulsi Gabbard will make your toes curl. I’ll let you click on it and read it yourself; it’s all about her repeated embraces of Russia and Putin. Which makes some people wonder out loud why Trump would push such objectionable candidates; surely the Senate will protect us from such people, right?
But if Trump really wants to pull a Hitler and seize absolute control of the nation within a matter of a few months, his first move would be to either negotiate or force a recess of the Senate and simply “recess appoint” all of his cabinet nominees. No hearings, no tough questions, no FBI or other background checks, no Democratic politicians’ input. He has this authority under Article II, Section 3 of the Constitution: if there’s a disagreement between John Thune and Mike Johnson about when to adjourn, “...and in Case of Disagreement between them, with Respect to the Time of Adjournment, he [the president] may adjourn them to such Time as he shall think proper.”
They could agree to disagree; that way they could both evade responsibility. On the other hand, if Thune simply gives in to Trump’s recent demand for recess appointments (as he told reporters yesterday he was considering), Thune can simply adjourn the Senate, something that hasn’t happened in decades; Trump can then simply do his own recess appointments (it could be done in a single hour) under the Constitution’s provision: “The President shall have Power to fill up all Vacancies that may happen during the Recess of the Senate, by granting Commissions which shall expire at the End of their next Session.” or he could just appoint them as “acting“ officials.
He did that during the last year of his presidency, and went way beyond the legal time limit for several; he flagrantly broke the law last time with over 15 cabinet members and Republicans were unwilling to call him on it, although he never started that way. This will be our first clue that the nation is no longer a constitutional republic with anything resembling checks and balances, but has become an oligarchic dictatorship like Hungary.
— Blueprint of destruction: Is Trump following Orbán’s and Putin’s road to power? M. Gessen, an expert on authoritarianism, writes in The New York Times: “When Orban was re-elected, he carried out what Magyar calls an ‘autocratic breakthrough,’ changing laws and practices so that he could not be dislodged again. It helped that he had a supermajority in parliament. Trump, similarly, spent four years attacking the Biden administration, and the vote that brought it to the White House, as fraudulent, and positioning himself as the only true voice of the people. He is also returning with a power trifecta — the presidency and both houses of Congress. He too can quickly reshape American government in his image. … Kamala Harris’s campaign, of course, tried to warn Americans about this and a lot more, labeling Trump a fascist. … It’s not just what the autocrats do to stage their breakthrough, it’s how they do it: passing legislation (or signing executive orders) fast, without any discussion, sometimes late at night, in batches, all the while denigrating and delegitimizing any opposition.”
The article is definitely worth a read, chilling as it is. Gessen even gets into the role of Project 2025 in facilitating the transformation of our American form of government into one with a single strongman president at its pinnacle. This does not bode well for America.
— Former Trump administration officials who turned on him are preparing to flee the country. The Washington Post is reporting: “A retired U.S. Army officer who clashed with senior officials in Donald Trump’s first White House looked into acquiring Italian citizenship in the run-up to this month’s election but wasn’t eligible and instead packeda ‘go bag’ with cash and a list of emergency numbers in case he needs to flee. A member of Trump’s first administration who publicly denounced him is applying for foreign citizenship and weighing whether to watch and wait or leave the country before the Jan. 20 inauguration. And a former U.S. official who signed a notorious October 2020 letter suggesting that emails purportedly taken from a laptop belonging to Hunter Biden could be part of a ‘Russian information operation’is seeking a passport from a European country, uncertain about whether the getaway will prove necessary but concluding, ‘You don’t want to have to scramble.’”
Reports (like this one from the Post) suggest that Trump has an “enemies list” of at least 600 people, much like Nixon’s, and he intends to go after everybody on the list on day one. Will he, like Nixon, just harass people with IRS audits? It seems more likely based on his own words that he’ll launch criminal and civil actions to jail or bankrupt his perceived enemies and those who have written or said things that have offended him.
Along those same lines, Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene wants “justice” against health officials: “Dr. [Anthony] Fauci lied to the American people, abusing his power and position and role, a very powerful role paid for by the American tax people. He lied, and many, many people died. … People that perpetuated and continue to perpetuate these crimes need to be prosecuted, and that needs to be starting in the next administration, and I’m pretty sure our next attorney general will do that, and I look forward to seeing that happen.”
Washington, DC is very, very much on edge right now; I got a call Friday morning at 5:30 in the morning from the CEO of a major DC-based progressive media outlet who’d just gotten off the phone with a Clinton colleague; both are considering leaving the country. This is getting real very, very fast.
— Are Republicans coming for healthcare for both retired and working people?Millions of people signed up for Affordable Care Act insurance policies over the past three years because of hefty subsidies contained in Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act.
Those subsidies expire at the end of this year, and Republicans are signaling that they won’t be renewed, meaning that premiums could go from $200 a month to as much as $2400 a month. Meanwhile, Project 2025 has called for private corporate Medicare Advantage plans to become the default option for people turning 65 and signing up for Medicare. Once a critical threshold is hit (currently more than half of seniors are on the Advantage plans) it’ll be fairly easy for a Republican congress and president to end legacy Medicare; once that happens, Advantage plans, no longer having competition from real Medicare, will almost certainly become more expensive and offer less coverage.
Meanwhile, Raw Story is reporting: “Rep. Jodey Arrington (R-Texas), chairman of the House Budget Committee, told reporters earlier this week that the GOP is looking to use the filibuster-evading reconciliation process to pursue cuts to ‘mandatory programs’—a category that includes Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security.” Republicans have been talking about this since the ReaganRevolution, but never actually tried (other than Reagan raising the retirement age from 65 to 67). Get ready.
— State-level authoritarians fall in line with Trump. Oklahoma’s Channel 4 (KFOR) TV News reports: “Oklahoma State Superintendent Ryan Walters emailed leaders in Oklahoma school districts on Thursday telling them they would be required to play their students and parents a video showing Walters blaming the ‘radical left’ and ‘woke teachers unions’ for ‘attacking’ religious liberty, then inviting students to join him as he prays for President-elect Donald Trump.” Walters also reportedly purchased five hundred Trump Bibles for Oklahoma schools. Welcome to the Brave New World. Compounding a religious grift with a financial one; breathtaking.
FASCISM COMES TO AMERIKA
Trump confirms plan to use military for mass deportationVIOLATION OF POSSE COMMITATUS LAWBy AFPNovember 18, 2024
Part of the border wall built under Donald Trump's administration is seen at the US-Medican border east of Douglas, Arizona - Copyright AFP/File Olivier Touron
President-elect Donald Trump confirmed Monday that he plans to declare a national emergency on border security and use the US military to carry out a mass deportation of undocumented migrants.
Immigration was a top issue in the election campaign, and Trump has promised to deport millions and stabilize the border with Mexico after record numbers of migrants crossed illegally during President Joe Biden’s administration.
On his social media platform Truth Social, Trump amplified a recent post by a conservative activist that said the president-elect was “prepared to declare a national emergency and will use military assets to reverse the Biden invasion through a mass deportation program.”
Alongside the repost, Trump commented, “True!”
Trump sealed a remarkable comeback to the presidency in his November 5 defeat of Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris.
He has been announcing a cabinet featuring immigration hardliners, naming former Immigration and Customs Enforcement acting chief Tom Homan as his “border czar.”
US President-elect Donald Trump has been announcing a cabinet featuring immigration hardliners – Copyright AFP Laurent THOMET
Homan appeared at the Republican National Convention in July, telling supporters: “I got a message to the millions of illegal immigrants that Joe Biden’s released in our country: You better start packing now.”
Authorities estimate that some 11 million people are living in the United States illegally. Trump’s deportation plan is expected directly to impact around 20 million families.
While the US government has struggled for years to manage its southern border with Mexico, Trump has super-charged concerns by claiming an “invasion” is underway by migrants he says will rape and murder Americans.
During his campaign, Trump repeatedly railed against undocumented immigrants, employing incendiary rhetoric about foreigners who “poison the blood” of the United States and misleading his audiences about immigration statistics and policy.
Trump has not elaborated on his immigration crackdown in any detail but during his election campaign repeatedly vowed to invoke the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to speed up deportations.
Critics say the law is outdated and point to its most recent use during World War II to hold Japanese-Americans in internment camps without due process.
The number of US border patrol encounters with migrants crossing from Mexico illegally is now about the same as in 2020, the last year of Trump’s first term, after peaking at a record 250,000 for the month of December 2023.
'True!' Trump says he'll declare national emergency and use military for mass deportations
David Badash, The New Civil Rights Movement
November 18, 2024
Donald Trump kicked off the week by taking the focus off his highly criticized Cabinet nominees and moving it to his highly controversial deportation plan. The President-elect acknowledged early Monday he is prepared to declare a national emergency and use "military assets" in his mass deportation program.
Trump campaign spokesperson Karoline Leavitt, who was named last week White House Press Secretary for Trump's second term, had announced the day after the election that Trump would deport "millions" starting on day one.
“The American people delivered a resounding victory for President Trump, and it gives him a mandate to govern as he campaigned, to deliver on the promises that he made,” Leavitt had said. “Which include, on Day 1, launching the largest mass deportation operation of illegal immigrants that Kamala Harris has allowed into this country.”
Leavitt also said that the “mass deportation operation” would include “millions of undocumented immigrants.”
Trump has called immigrants “animals,” “monsters,” and “murderers,” and said they are “poisoning the blood of our country.” He falsely claimed they are responsible for a “surge in crime,” because “it’s in their genes,” and claimed they’re “eating the pets.”
Back in 2018, Trump "complained about 'having all these people from shithole countries come here' — and singled out Haiti, El Salvador and Africa as examples — he also added that, 'we should have more people from Norway'," NPR reported at the time.
Just past 4 AM ET on Monday, Trump on his Truth Social website reposted a statement from right-wing anti-immigrant activist Tom Fitton, the president of Judicial Watch and a senior member of the secretive organization the Council for National Policy. (CNP has been called the "scariest Christian nationalist group you've never heard of," and "probably the most dangerous," by Americans United.)
Fitton had written on November 8: "GOOD NEWS: Reports are the incoming @RealDonaldTrump administration prepared to declare a national emergency and will use military assets to reverse the Biden invasion through a mass deportation program."
Trump responded: "TRUE!!!"
Attorney and immigration expert Aaron Reichlin-Melnick urged "caution" on Monday:
"I want to again emphasize caution here. Fitton mashed together two different things (the border and mass deportations). There is no National Emergency Act authority to use the military for deportations, while we know Trump used the [NEA] in the past for border wall construction."
READ MORE: Backlash as Trump Skips FBI Background Checks — One Nominee Called ‘Likely Russian Asset’
Leavitt's claim that Trump had been given a mandate has been deemed false by political experts, with one pundit calling it a "lie."
According to the Cook Political Report, while winning the popular vote, Trump did not win a majority. He beat Vice President Harris by just over 1.6 million votes, or just 1.7%, with nearly 800,000 more votes in California alone still to be counted.
CNN's Harry Enten on Monday confirmed Trump's margin over Haris ranks just 44th out of 51, and called it "weak, weak, weak."
Watch the videos above or at this link.
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