All posts tagged: second term

Biden’s Economic Formula to Win 2024

Biden’s Economic Formula to Win 2024

President Joe Biden and Democrats cannot win the debate over the economy without fundamentally reframing the terms of the choice they are offering voters, an extensive new research study by one of the party’s prominent electoral-strategy groups has concluded. The study, scheduled to be released today, seeks to mitigate one of the party’s most glaring vulnerabilities heading into the 2024 election: the consistent finding in surveys that when it comes to managing the national economy or addressing inflation, significantly more voters express confidence in Republicans than in Democrats. To close that gap, the study argues, Biden and Democrats must shift the debate from which party is best equipped to grow the overall economy to which side can help families achieve what the report calls a “better life.” The study argues that Democrats can win that argument with a three-pronged message centered on: delivering tangible kitchen-table economic benefits (such as increased federal subsidies for buying health insurance), confronting powerful special interests (such as major corporations), and pledging to protect key personal liberties and freedoms, led by …

How Trump Will Try to Punish Blue America

How Trump Will Try to Punish Blue America

During his term in the White House, Donald Trump governed as a wartime president—with blue America, rather than any foreign country, as the adversary. He sought to use national authority to achieve factional ends—to impose the priorities of red America onto Democratic-leaning states and cities. The agenda Trump has laid out for a second term makes clear that those bruising and divisive efforts were only preliminary skirmishes. Explore the January/February 2024 Issue Check out more from this issue and find your next story to read. View More Presidents always pursue policies that reflect the priorities of the voters and regions that supported them. But Trump moved in especially aggressive ways to exert control over, or punish, the jurisdictions that resisted him. His 2017 tax bill, otherwise a windfall for taxpayers in the upper brackets, capped the federal deductibility of state and local taxes, a costly shift for wealthy residents of liberal states such as New York and California. He moved, with mixed success, to deny federal law-enforcement grants to so-called sanctuary cities that didn’t fully …

Civil Rights Undone – The Atlantic

Civil Rights Undone – The Atlantic

In late 2020, even as the instigators of insurrection were marshaling their followers to travel to Washington, D.C., another kind of coup—a quieter one—was in the works. On December 21, in one of his departing acts as attorney general, Bill Barr submitted a proposed rule change to the White House. The change would eliminate the venerable standard used by the Justice Department to handle discrimination cases, known as “disparate impact.” The memo was quickly overshadowed by the events of January 6, and, in the chaotic final days of Donald Trump’s presidency, it was never implemented. But Barr’s proposal represented perhaps the most aggressive step the administration took in its effort to dismantle existing civil-rights law. Should Trump return to power, he would surely attempt to see the effort through. Explore the January/February 2024 Issue Check out more from this issue and find your next story to read. View More Since the legislative victories of the civil-rights movement in the 1960s, legal and civil rights for people on the margins have tended to expand. The Civil …

Trump’s Plan to Police Gender

Trump’s Plan to Police Gender

His campaign is promising a more repressive and dangerous America. Matt Huynh December 7, 2023, 6 AM ET Editor’s Note: This article is part of “If Trump Wins,” a project considering what Donald Trump might do if reelected in 2024. After decades of gains in public acceptance, the LGBTQ community is confronting a climate in which political leaders are once again calling them weirdos and predators. Texas Governor Greg Abbott has directed the Department of Family and Protective Services to investigate the parents of transgender children; Governor Ron DeSantis has tried to purge Florida classrooms of books that acknowledge the reality that some people aren’t straight or cisgender; Missouri has imposed rules that limit access to gender-affirming care for trans people of all ages. Donald Trump is promising to nationalize such efforts. He doesn’t just want to surveil, miseducate, and repress children who are exploring their emerging identities. He wants to interfere in the private lives of millions of adults, revoking freedoms that any pluralistic society should protect. Explore the January/February 2024 Issue Check out …

Trump Will Suppress American History

Trump Will Suppress American History

This past fall, in a small southern foundry, Robert E. Lee’s face was placed on a furnace that reached a temperature of more than 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit. As the heat mounted, a haunting orange-red glow appeared across Lee’s severed visage, and the cracks that split his bronze cheeks began to look like streams of dark tears beneath his eyes. Lee’s face was once part of a larger statue of the Confederate general that stood in Charlottesville, Virginia, and was at the center of protests and counterprotests during the infamous “Unite the Right” rally there in 2017. The city had taken the statue down in 2021 and given it to a local Black-history museum. Once melted, the statue’s bronze would be repurposed into a new work of public art. Explore the January/February 2024 Issue Check out more from this issue and find your next story to read. View More As I contemplated Lee’s metal face glowing like a small sun in the dark universe of the workshop, I thought of the statement issued by former President …

Trump’s Corruption Unbound – The Atlantic

Trump’s Corruption Unbound – The Atlantic

In the annals of government ethics, the year 2017 exists in a bygone era. That September, Donald Trump’s secretary of health and human services, Tom Price, resigned in disgrace. His unforgivable sin was chartering private jets funded by taxpayers, when he just as easily could have flown commercial. Compared with the abuses of power in the years that followed, the transgression was relatively picayune. But at that early moment, even Trump felt obliged to join the criticism of Price. During Trump’s first months as president, it wasn’t yet clear how much concentrated corruption the nation, or his own party, would tolerate, which is why Trump was compelled to dispose of the occasional Cabinet secretary. Yet nearly everything about Trump’s history in real estate, where he greased palms and bullied officials, suggested that he regarded the government as a lucrative instrument for his own gain. Explore the January/February 2024 Issue Check out more from this issue and find your next story to read. View More A week and a half before taking office, he held a …

The Atlantic’s Jan/Feb issue: Next Trump presidency

The Atlantic’s Jan/Feb issue: Next Trump presidency

Featuring two dozen Atlantic writers on how a second term could shatter norms with the courts, education, the military, foreign policy, immigration, abortion rights, science, gender December 4, 2023, 7:59 AM ET The next Trump presidency will be worse. A special issue of The Atlantic, launching today, warns of the grave and extreme consequences if former President Trump were to win in 2024––building an overwhelming case, across two dozen essays by Atlantic writers, that both Trump and Trumpism pose an existential threat to America and to the ideas that animate it. With each writer focusing on their subject area of expertise, the issue argues that assuming a second term would mirror the first is a mistake: The threats to democracy will be greater, as will the danger of authoritarianism and corruption. A second Trump presidency, the opening essay states, would mark the turn onto a dark path, one of those rips between “before” and “after” that a society can never reverse. The Atlantic has made covering persistent threats to democracy its top editorial priority. Editor …

A Warning About a Second Trump Term

A Warning About a Second Trump Term

Like many reporters, I’ve been operating in Casaubon mode for much of the past eight years, searching for the key to Donald Trump’s mythologies. No single explanation of Trump is fully satisfactory, although Atlantic staff writer Adam Serwer came closest when he observed that the cruelty is the point. Another person who helped me unscramble the mystery of Trump was his son-in-law Jared Kushner. Early in the Trump presidency, I had lunch with Kushner in his White House office. We were meant to be discussing Middle East peace (more on that another time), but I was particularly curious to hear Kushner talk about his father-in-law’s behavior. I was not inured then—and am not inured even now—to the many rococo manifestations of Trump’s defective character. One of the first moments of real shock for me came in the summer of 2015, when Trump, then an implausible candidate for the Republican presidential nomination, said of Senator John McCain, “He’s not a war hero … I like people who weren’t captured, okay?” Explore the January/February 2024 Issue Check …

Is the Press Ready for a Second Trump Term?

Is the Press Ready for a Second Trump Term?

The relationship between Donald Trump and the news media has always been a little disingenuous, like a pair of fighters trading insults and throwing air punches at a weigh-in. The hostility is real, but the performance benefits both sides. Trump claims to despise the journalists who cover him, calling them “the enemy of the American people,” suing them, and threatening unspecified reprisals for their transgressions against him. But his narcissism craves their constant attention, and as president he gave reporters far more access than his successor has, taking their late-night phone calls, then framing their cover stories in gold. Media organizations, including this one, have warned for years that Trump is a danger to the democracy that makes journalism possible, and that a vigorous press is essential to a free society. At the same time, the media became dependent on his vile words and scandalous deeds for their financial health, squeezing droplets of news from his every tweet even if the public had nothing to learn. Leslie Moonves, the disgraced former TV-network chair, said of …

Trump Will Abandon NATO – The Atlantic

Trump Will Abandon NATO – The Atlantic

“I don’t give a shit about NATO.” Thus did former President Donald Trump once express his feelings about America’s oldest and strongest military alliance. Not that this statement, made in the presence of John Bolton, the national security adviser at the time, came as a surprise. Long before he was a political candidate, Trump questioned the value of American alliances. Of Europeans, he once wrote that “their conflicts are not worth American lives. Pulling back from Europe would save this country millions of dollars annually.” NATO, founded in 1949 and supported for three-quarters of a century by Democrats, Republicans, and independents alike, has long been a particular focus of Trump’s ire. As president, Trump threatened to withdraw from NATO many times—including, infamously, at the 2018 NATO summit. Explore the January/February 2024 Issue Check out more from this issue and find your next story to read. View More But during Trump’s time in office, the withdrawal never happened. That was because someone was always there to talk him out of it. Bolton says he did; Jim …