“Me, debate again? You crazy?”

Posted on September 13, 2024 by Joe Weber

Trump can’t afford another disaster, but the first may make little difference

Of course, he won’t debate her a second time.

For the benefit of his followers and his ego, Donald J. Trump declared that he bested Kamala Harris in a debate that even conservatives – smart ones anyway – declared was a hands-down disaster for him.

“Kamala Harris baited Trump with surgical precision, triggering his insecurities — about his crowd sizes, his wealth, his racism, his criminal record — while giving him full scope to wallow in his delusions. In the 90-minute debate, she exposed Donald Trump and broke him,” Charlie Sykes wrote on Substack. “Trump was undisciplined, unprepared, and easily goaded into his signature tantrums of grievance, which were as incoherent as they were divorced from reality … Tens of millions of voters watched a live reality television show in which a bitter, confused, and diminished old man was falling apart in front of their eyes.”

Another conservative, David Frum, weighed in in The Atlantic: “He repeated crazy stories about immigrants eating cats and dogs, and was backwards-looking, personal, emotional, defensive, and frequently incomprehensible. Harris hit pain point after pain point: Trump’s bankruptcies, the disdain of generals who had served with him, the boredom and early exits of crowds at his shrinking rallies. Every hit was followed by an ouch.”

Certainly, much of the public appeared to agree that Vice-President Harris mopped the floor with Trump. Shortly after the Sept. 10 fracas, a CNN poll showed Harris winning 63% to 37% among debate-watchers and a YouGov poll showed her winning 54% to 31% among registered voters who watched at least some of the melee, with 14% unsure, according to The Washington Post.

So, with his animalistic smarts, Trump is wise to avoid a second debate. How could he possibly want a second round of his angry squinting, venting and waxing irrational and conspiratorial? By contrast, when he controls the stage and speaks to true believers in his rallies, he’s the master of his own domain (reference intentional), the TV-savvy demagogue who can appear slick and poised (despite many slips).

For Harris backers, however, the problem is that the debate may not have moved the needle much with the few undecided folks out there. The latest polls barely budged, with Harris ahead of Trump by just 2.8 points, at 47.1% to Trump’s 44.3%.

Despite Harris’s national lead, the model that polls expert Nate Silver uses still gives Trump a higher chance of winning the necessary 270 Electoral College votes in November, as Newsweek reported. It shows Trump taking the critical battleground states of Arizona, Georgia, Pennsylvania, Nevada and North Carolina. The other swing states, Wisconsin and Michigan, are a toss-up.

How can this be? How can such an inarticulate boor, a proven criminal and business and political failure, still have the slightest bit of credibility? After his disastrous performance, how can his party still rally around him, unlike the Democrats and President Biden?

The answer is complicated. But I suggest it starts, paradoxically, with the fact that Harris won the debate. In her triumph, she is many things that Trump’s followers can’t abide: smart, young, female and Black.

On the smart point, Trump has long been popular with undereducated voters. In 2016, only 29% of Trump voters had college degrees, compared with 43% of Hillary Clinton’s voters. And while non-college whites made up a majority of Trump’s voters (63%), they constituted only about a quarter of Clinton’s (26%). As Trump famously said after winning a Nevada primary in 2016, “I love the poorly educated.”

Did many of them even watch the debate? Some 67.1 million Americans tuned in, more than the 53.1 million who watched Biden self-destruct in the June 27 faceoff with Trump, but less than the 73 million who watched the first Trump-Biden match in 2020 and far less than the 84 million who watched Clinton and Trump battle the first time in 2016.

And let’s remember that Clinton was widely pronounced the winner in her three debates with Trump back then. Only some 32% of those polled pronounced him the winner in his best performance in the second debate. Just 24% judged him favorably in his first outing with Clinton.

With both Clinton and Harris, I submit, the fact that both women ran circles around Trump intellectually was a negative with much of the undereducated electorate. Recall that such folks likely spent much of their time in school resenting the smart kids, so they likely would give Clinton and Harris little credit for their debating savvy.

Second, Harris at 59 is relatively young, especially compared with the 78-year-old Trump. Middle-aged voters tend to support Trump, while those over 65 are split evenly, and are up for grabs. Thus, we see Harris pounding away on the Biden Administration’s efforts to cut insulin costs, its moves to let Medicare negotiate with drugmakers and its $2,000 cap on out-of-pocket drug costs. We also see Trump’s plan to exempt Social Security payments from income taxes.

A lot of the older folks turned away from President Biden after his debate debacle. Will the Trumpers among them do so now after the former president’s poor performance? Will they see the signs of cognitive decline that have long been evident to mental health professionals?

Psychiatrist Richard A. Friedman, source: Weill Cornell Medical College

“If a patient presented to me with the verbal incoherence, tangential thinking, and repetitive speech that Trump now regularly demonstrates, I would almost certainly refer them for a rigorous neuropsychiatric evaluation to rule out a cognitive illness,” Weill Cornell Medical College professor and psychiatrist Richard A. Friedman wrote in The Atlantic. “A condition such as vascular dementia or Alzheimer’s disease would not be out of the ordinary for a 78-year-old.”

Still, let’s not forget the potent impact of identity politics. For all her brilliance, her achievements and her skills, Harris is female and Black, guaranteeing an uphill fight. According to the latest Pew Research Center polling, most Harris supporters say Trump’s race will help him (59%), as will his being male (56%). Most Trump supporters, by contrast, say the former president’s race and gender will not make much of difference (66% say this about Trump’s race, 61% say the same of his gender), but the latter numbers are hardly encouraging in a tight race.

Another element in Trump’s favor is the weariness many voters feel about the race, a sentiment the non-stop headline-grabbing nonsense and divisiveness from Trump has fueled. Some Trump supporters in my family, for instance, are just tired of it all and want the election behind them. They don’t want to hear criticisms of their golden boy, no matter how valid. As Harris has noted, even Trump rally-goers drift out of his gatherings early out of exhaustion and boredom.

Finally, there’s the matter of faulty memories. Despite such evidence as the Covid-induced rise in unemployment to 14.8% in 2020 and the 6.4% rate Trump left to Biden, Trump claims his tenure produced the greatest economy in the history of the world. That is simply false, and yet his repetition of the claim appears to have lulled Trumpers into believing it.

“In the U.S., average annual GDP growth during the past eight years has been almost constant in real terms, except for the Covid period (2020 and 2021): 2.6% in 2017-2019 and 2.3% since 2022,” economist Enrico Colombatto wrote in August.

When Biden took office in January 2021, the unemployment rate was 6.4%, Colombatto added. The rate gradually declined to the low of 3.4% in early 2023 before climbing to 4.2% under an inflation-fighting economic slowdown engineered by the high interest rates set by the Federal Reserve.

Let’s recall, moreover, that presidents can influence economies but they don’t control them. The Fed has far more to do with inflation – admittedly very high under Biden – than a president does. And lately it appears that the Fed will move to lower interest rates.

Back in 2016, Trump’s demagoguery and stagey anger proved remarkably effective. But is the sequel playing badly now? It’s possible that Harris’s efforts to paint an optimistic future, with programs to help housing get on track and tax credits for parents of young children – “the opportunity economy,” as she calls it – will sell better than Trump’s rage. So, too, may her plans for reviving a border-fixing bill that Trump quashed early this year so he could run on that troubling issue.

Nonetheless, given all the possible pitfalls in coming weeks and the shortcomings of polling, it would seem the election remains either candidate’s to win. It may prove to be a matter of voter turnout, which could rest on which candidate can generate more enthusiasm. It may be a matter of knocking on doors, the key for Barack Obama’s victories. So far, Trump’s “ground game” seems weak, as he relies on rallies and headlines.

Certainly, Democrats have been winning the dynamism race ever since Biden yielded to Harris. Can Harris sustain that? Can she convince voters that the exhausting politics of division and the chaos that Trump tends to sow are better left behind rather than repeated for another four years? The questions remain open.

Taking his marbles and going home

Posted on September 9, 2024 by Joe Weber

A Brown trustee’s resignation doesn’t help the fight against antisemitism

Brown students discuss divestment; source: Brown Daily Herald

Hedge fund manager Joseph Edelman has made a lot of good decisions in his career. Forbes pegs his net worth at $2.5 billion.

But this week he made a bad choice with respect to Brown University, where he served as a trustee from 2019 until now. He quit the board, angry that it will hold a vote on whether the school should divest itself of securities related to Israel.

Brown President Christina H. Paxson agreed last April 30 to consider divestment after anti-Israel protests erupted at the school, as they did on many campuses.

“I find it morally reprehensible that holding a divestment vote was even considered, much less that it will be held—especially in the wake of the deadliest assault on the Jewish people since the Holocaust,” Edelman wrote in a Sept. 8 Wall Street Journal op-ed. “The university leadership has for some reason chosen to reward, rather than punish, the activists for disrupting campus life, breaking school rules, and promoting violence and antisemitism at Brown.”

He added: “I consider the willingness to hold this vote a stunning failure of moral leadership at Brown University. I am unwilling to lend my name or give my time to a body that lacks basic moral judgment.”

Edelman’s stance, in my view, is principled, understandable and wrong.

There should be a trustee vote, as is expected on Oct. 17-18; fittingly, that is within two weeks of the anniversary of Hamas’s animalistic savagery in Israel. And that vote should be preceded by a full-throated, campus-wide discussion of the issues involved. After all, isn’t education all about discussing the big things?

And aren’t the 120 or so Brown students who set up an encampment to protest the war in Gaza last spring sorely in need of education, in dire need of learning some big things? Shouldn’t those who are pressing anew for divestment be taught why the idea is so damn wrong?

That discussion, if it occurs, needs to be based on facts. It should begin, for instance, with some history about Israel and Jews:

For starters, the discussion should explore how long Jews have been in the land. The oldest Hebrew text ever found was discovered at the ancient Israelite settlement, near modern-day Beit Shemesh, that dates to between 1050 and 970 BCE. The academic consensus, based on archeological and other evidence, is that a United Kingdom of Israel existed in the 10th and 9th centuries BCE.

Of course, Jews moved in and out of what is now Israel over many centuries since then. Exiles followed the two destructions of the Temple in Jerusalem, in 586 BCE by the Babylonians and in 70 CE, when the Romans sacked the place. But, even through those events, Jews remained, keeping a consistent presence, as scholars have long noted.

As Cornell University Prof. Barry Strauss has written, for instance, in a piece detailing that continuous presence: “To sum up, the Jews have an ancient history in Palestine going back three thousand years. Their yearning for Zion goes back well more than two thousand years. Jews are indigenous to Palestine.”

So, in other words, the oft-shouted argument that Israel is a colonial project is hogwash. Brown students and many others need to learn that.

Second, the discussion should deal with the number of times Arabs have refused deals that could have settled the century-long fighting between them and Jews in the region. Palestinian rejectionism dates back at least to 1937, when the Jerusalem Mufti Hajj Amin Husseini suggested to the British that Jews should be deported. He went so far as to make his case against the Jews with a soulmate, Adolf Hitler, in 1941:

The Grand Mufti and Hitler in 1941; source: Bundesarchiv, Bild 146-1987-004-09A / Heinrich Hoffmann, CC BY-SA

A few years later, the Jerusalem Arab leader rejected a UN partition plan to create two states. A long string of Palestinian leaders has echoed that rejection of various deals since. Their intransigence gave rise to the often-noted comment by Israeli diplomat Abba Eban in 1973: “The Arabs never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity.”

Hamas, of course, has squandered many opportunities. Among others, in its effort to build tunnels and its war machine, it blew the chance to turn Gaza into something like a Singapore on the Mediterranean over the last couple decades. Instead of using millions of global aid dollars to develop an economy, it created a subterranean fortress, and it repeated its rejectionism of coexistence publicly as recently as 2017:

“Palestine, which extends from the River Jordan in the east to the Mediterranean in the west and from Ras al-Naqurah in the north to Umm al-Rashrash in the south, is an integral territorial unit,” Hamas asserted. “It is the land and the home of the Palestinian people. The expulsion and banishment of the Palestinian people from their land and the establishment of the Zionist entity therein do not annul the right of the Palestinian people to their entire land and do not entrench any rights therein for the usurping Zionist entity.”

Hamas at that point declared null and void the Balfour Declaration, the British Mandate Document, the UN Palestine Partition Resolution “and whatever resolutions and measures that derive from them or are similar to them.” It rejected the Oslo Accords, signed by the PLO in 1993 and 1995.

Third, turning to current issues, the discussion should detail how rape and savagery were the means that Hamas used on Oct. 7^th to kill some 1,200 Jews, as verified by the United Nations, among others. The discussion should include video evidence of those crimes that students should be required to watch. They should appreciate the monstrousness of the group some of them are championing, should understand what the popular “by any means necessary” placards really mean.

The discussion should include details about the more than 240 hostages the group took, many of whom are now dead. Some, of course, were wantonly slaughtered recently, within days of rescue. It should address how Hamas released videos of the murdered afterward in bids to torment their families and pressure Israel into a bad deal that would assure Hamas’s rearmament and continued existence.

Fourth, it should include information about how in Israel Muslims are free to pray on the Temple Mount, how Arabs in the country have the right to vote and have elected representatives, and about how the charge of “apartheid” falls apart in the face of such rights and the peaceful coexistence of Israelis of many colors and religions in the land.

Yes, the discussion should also explore the areas where Israel has fallen short. Its treatment of Palestinians in the West Bank and other areas needs to be examined, as does the country’s right-wing settler policies. Many of those are opposed by Israelis, though Palestinians in the territories hardly help their cause by allying with Hamas. The state isn’t perfect and its problems need to be fully aired, as well.

But there’s no excuse for the ignorance that gives prominence to those problems and not to other more compelling realities. For instance, the discussion should elaborate on the meaning of the oft-chanted phrase “from the river to the sea.” The slogan refers, of course, to purging the land between the Jordan and the Mediterranean of Jews and replacing them with Muslims, as described in the Hamas documents; that would be a real genocide.

Once that sort of discussion takes place at Brown, there should be a vote on divestment. The trustees, of course, should oppose it unanimously.

If most of Brown’s 38 trustees vote otherwise, Edelman might then have been morally obligated to quit – as other dissenting trustees might then be, as well. But they would have had the chance to make their case based on the points above. And they could then feel assured that the antisemites simply outnumber sensible people at the school — a sign that, maybe, sensible folks of any persuasion or creed should avoid Brown for good.

Taking one’s marbles and going home before the game is done, however, doesn’t solve the problems of antisemitism, nor does it remedy the historical and political ignorance that plague many American campuses, especially the elite ones. Academics at schools such as Brown should know better than to propagate the ahistorical anti-Zionist nonsense that too many students appear to be swallowing.

And, if they don’t, trustees and administrators need to install academics who do.

Universities exist to educate. As proven in last year’s national turmoil, they need to do a far better job of that. In their ignorance, students last year broke university rules at Brown, albeit for a relatively short time (less than a week). One idea is that during this term, those students should be required to take and pass coursework that explores the matters raised above, taught by professors who do know their stuff.

As for trustees and administrators, their job is fix the problems. Unless Edelman was pretty sure the problems are irreparable at Brown, he should have stuck around and cast his vote. It would have helped.

As Fall approaches

Posted on September 8, 2024 by Joe Weber

A few thoughts, sobering, uplifting, reminding …

Emily Brontë

Fall, leaves, fall; die, flowers, away;
Lengthen night and shorten day;
Every leaf speaks bliss to me
Fluttering from the autumn tree.
I shall smile when wreaths of snow
Blossom where the rose should grow;
I shall sing when night’s decay
Ushers in a drearier day.

John Keats

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,
   Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;
Conspiring with him how to load and bless
   With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run;
To bend with apples the moss’d cottage-trees,
   And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;
      To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells
   With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,
And still more, later flowers for the bees,
Until they think warm days will never cease,
      For summer has o’er-brimm’d their clammy cells.

Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?
   Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find
Thee sitting careless on a granary floor,
   Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;
Or on a half-reap’d furrow sound asleep,
   Drows’d with the fume of poppies, while thy hook
      Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers:
And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep
   Steady thy laden head across a brook;
   Or by a cyder-press, with patient look,
      Thou watchest the last oozings hours by hours.

Where are the songs of spring? Ay, Where are they?
   Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,—
While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day,
   And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue;
Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn
   Among the river sallows, borne aloft
      Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;
And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;
   Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft
   The red-breast whistles from a garden-croft;
      And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.

**Sonnet 73 (‘That time of year thou mayst in me behold’)**

William Shakespeare

That time of year thou mayst in me behold
When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,
Bare ruin’d choirs where late the sweet birds sang.
In me thou seest the twilight of such day
As after sunset fadeth in the west,
Which by and by black night doth take away,
Death’s second self, that seals up all in rest.
In me thou seest the glowing of such fire
That on the ashes of his youth doth lie,
As the death-bed whereon it must expire,
Consum’d by that which it was nourished by.
This thou perceiv’st which makes thy love more strong,
To love that well which thou must leave ere long.

Robert Louis Stevenson

In the other gardens
And all up in the vale,
From the autumn bonfires
See the smoke trail!

Pleasant summer over,
And all the summer flowers,
The red fire blazes,
The grey smoke towers.

Sing a song of seasons!
Something bright in all!
Flowers in the summer,
Fires in the fall!

Robert Frost

Nature’s first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf’s a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.

John Clare

The rustling of leaves under the feet in woods and under
hedges;
The crumpling of cat-ice and snow down wood-rides,
narrow lanes and every street causeway;
Rustling through a wood or rather rushing, while the wind
halloos in the oak-toop like thunder;
The rustle of birds’ wings startled from their nests or flying
unseen into the bushes;
The whizzing of larger birds overhead in a wood, such as
crows, puddocks, buzzards;
The trample of robins and woodlarks on the brown leaves.
and the patter of squirrels on the green moss;
The fall of an acorn on the ground, the pattering of nuts on
the hazel branches as they fall from ripeness;
The flirt of the groundlark’s wing from the stubbles –
how sweet such pictures on dewy mornings, when the
dew flashes from its brown feathers.

Katherine Towers

into the coppery halls
of beech and intricate oak
to be close to the trees
as they whisper together
let fall their leaves,
and we die for the winter

When You Are Old

William Butler Yeats

When you are old and grey and full of sleep,

And nodding by the fire, take down this book,

And slowly read, and dream of the soft look

Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;

How many loved your moments of glad grace,

And loved your beauty with love false or true,

But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,

And loved the sorrows of your changing face;

And bending down beside the glowing bars,

Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled

And paced upon the mountains overhead

And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.

The poems here can be found at Twelve Autumn Poems.

The Philadelphi Corridor

Posted on September 6, 2024 by Joe Weber

Can we ever have peace if Hamas can rearm?

From top left: Hersh Goldberg-Polin, Ori Danino, Eden Yerushalmi; from bottom left, Almog Sarusi, Alexander Lobanov, and Carmel Gat. Source: The Hostages Families Forum via AP/Times of Israel

We know them by a few bare facts. We know them by photos, snapshots that reflected their warmth, their enthusiasm for life. We know them by headlines that flew across the world. We know them by the grief that engulfed anyone with simple human feelings, Jews and non-Jews alike.

They were: Carmel Gat, 40, a yoga instructor who helped other hostages cope with nearly 11 months of imprisonment by practicing her craft with them; Alex Lobanov, 32, who left behind two children, one born while he was held captive; Ori Danino, 25, who escaped the Nova music festival, but returned to help save others and was captured.

Also, Almog Sarusi, 27, who attended the festival with his girlfriend whom terrorists murdered there; Eden Yerushalmi, 24, who attended the festival with friends; and Hersh Goldberg-Polin, 23, an American-Israeli citizen who lost part of an arm in the assault, and whose parents spoke at the Democratic National Convention and met with the president and the pope.

These six hostages were among more than 240 taken by Hamas and its allies nearly a year ago, on Oct. 7th. They were kept in tunnels by terrorists committed to killing Jews like them. And those terrorists did just that with these six, shooting them multiple times at close range between only days before their likely rescue by Israeli soldiers.

Part of “the Gaza metro;” source: The New York Times

Then, of course, the murderers slunk off like cowards, no doubt hoping to kill again. Recall that their job, as Hamas fighters, is not to respect life, but to take it, brutally, if possible. Their job — and their hope, if they’ve imbibed all the pabulum that their perverse grasp of Islam tells them — is to be martyrs, though not when it would require actually facing their armed enemies.

They are much better at killing unarmed innocents, much like those who commit suicide bombings.

Hamas’s leaders have taught their legions that Jews must be eliminated from the land, that is their religious duty to purge them. As Hamas declared in its “Covenant” of 1988, “Resisting and quelling the enemy become the individual duty of every Muslim, male or female.” It also declared: “Israel will exist and will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it, just as it obliterated others before it.”

In 2017, Hamas restated and reaffirmed its principles. Among them: “Resisting the occupation with all means and methods is a legitimate right guaranteed by divine laws and by international norms and laws. At the heart of these lies armed resistance, which is regarded as the strategic choice for protecting the principles and the rights of the Palestinian people.”

The documents pound home four themes, as explained by Georgetown University Prof. Bruce Hoffman:

— The complete destruction of Israel as an essential condition for the liberation of Palestine and the establishment of a theocratic state based on Islamic law (Sharia),

— The need for both unrestrained and unceasing holy war (jihad) to attain the above objective,

— The deliberate disdain for, and dismissal of, any negotiated resolution or political settlement of Jewish and Muslim claims to the Holy Land, and

— The reinforcement of historical anti-Semitic tropes and calumnies married to sinister conspiracy theories.

For years leading up to Oct. 7th, moreover, the leaders of Hamas have steeped their devotees — and their families for that matter — in hatred. They have idealized “the virtue of death-for-Allah,” as counterterrorism expert Matthew Levitt put it in a talk 17 years ago.

Levitt told of a suicide bomber’s mother who instilled in her son the desire for martyrdom and “brought them [her sons] up to become martyrs, to be martyrs for the name of Allah.” Her “martyred” son Muhammad’s old bedroom was adorned with posters of “martyred” Palestinians. The mother, the late Miriam Farhat, was elected to the Palestinian Legislative Council on the Hamas ticket in January 2006. She claimed to be proud that three of her sons were killed in attacks on Israelis.

And yet many say Israel must seek a deal with such leaders. The country must agree to a ceasefire or other hostages — perhaps more than 60 still alive — will be murdered, as the six were. Israelis by the thousands have marched in protest of their government’s refusal — or inability — to make a deal for their release. Nonetheless, nearly three-quarters of Jewish Israelis think a deal is unlikely, according to an August survey by the Israel Democracy Institute.

But can or should Israelis deal with the terrorists? Can they deal with people who refuse even after 76 years to recognize the “Zionist entity,” who insist that “no part of the land of Palestine shall be compromised or conceded, irrespective of the causes, the circumstances and the pressures and no matter how long the occupation lasts,” who reject “any alternative to the full and complete liberation of Palestine, from the river to the sea.”?

Yes, Hamas has traded some of the more than 240 hostages it took for Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails. About 109 were released as of the end of last November, as The Wall Street Journal reported. But another 70 died that day or since (in addition to the 1,200 killed in Israel), and Israeli officials believe 34 or more are dead. This leaves about 60 who may be alive in captivity.

In theory, Israel could trade more prisoners for the remaining hostages and the bodies of those being kept. But, so far, neither side has accepted terms that have been floated for such a trade — and it’s hard to see how the gulf can be bridged.

As suggested by the United States, the terms include a permanent end to hostilities and removal of Israeli troops from in or near Gaza. Hamas, for its part, has rejected any Israeli presence in the so-called Philadelphi corridor, an 8.7-mile strip of land on the Gaza-Egypt border, while Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has insisted that Israel will not leave the corridor free for Hamas. To him, the tunnel-pocked corridor is a transit point for Hamas to rearm.

For his part, Netanyahu has been unmovable on the point that Hamas must be eliminated. In a recent speech, the prime minister repeated that Israel’s war goals are “to destroy Hamas, to bring back all of our hostages, to ensure that Gaza will no longer present a threat to Israel, and to safely return the residents of the northern border.” He also said “three of those war goals go through one place: the Philadelphi Corridor. That is Hamas’s pipeline for oxygen and rearmament.”

Is it unreasonable for Israel to insist that Hamas, an implacable foe that will never accept coexistence, must be destroyed? Can the group ever be trusted to not resume its fight, should a ceasefire be reached? Can a group that wantonly executes six innocents in cold blood — not to mention 1,200 earlier — really be trusted to live up to any commitments?

Hamas’s network of tunnels, some hundreds of miles long, allows terrorists such as the murderers of the six to escape and hide. Israel in mid-August destroyed some 50 such tunnels in a single week, some in the Philadelphi Corridor. Won’t the Hamas fighters just hold out in that network until they can emerge anew and threaten Israel? Will the group ever accept its own demise in a negotiated deal?

In theory, Israel could get back at least some of the hostages by agreeing to those terms and then, after a time, it could return to fight anew with Hamas. That would, of course, spare the lives of however many hostages could be released. But as Hamas trickled out those captives — and, no doubt, it would do so over months, if not years — it would rearm and Israel would be back in Gaza, fighting anew again. Moreover, little could prevent Hamas from trying to capture more hostages.

As New York Times columnist Bret Stephens put it in a piece headlined “A Hostage Deal is a Poison Pill for Israel”: “Whatever one thinks of Netanyahu, the weight of outrage should fall not on him but on Hamas. It released a video of a hostage it later murdered — 24-year-old Eden Yerushalmi, telling her family how much she loved them — on Monday, the day after her funeral. It’s another act of cynical, grotesque and unadulterated sadism by the group that pretends to speak in the name of all Palestinians. It does not deserve a cease-fire so that it can regain its strength. It deserves the same ash heap of history on which, in our better moments, we deposited the Nazis, Al Qaeda and the Islamic State.”

Israel faces a classic Hobson’s Choice. There really is only one way to proceed, and that is to render Hamas incapable of ever attacking again.

The larger question, though, is what vanquishing Hamas would look like. Certainly, it would involve the death of the murderous leader, Yahya Sinwar, and his top ranks — with or without trial. But would it also involve thousands of fighters parading out of tunnels with white flags, renouncing the group they dedicated their lives to? Would that really happen, given their passion for martyrdom?

We may lack adequate models here. For Hamas to be defeated, its soldiers must be permanently disarmed or killed, but more that than, its ideals must be shattered. Gazans and Palestinians in general would have to renounce its aims and methods, much as Germans did with Nazism after World War II.

As many as 8.8 million Germans died in that war, including perhaps 3.27 million civilians, in a total population of 80 million. The population was subsequently impoverished, the German economy crushed. Will proportionately similar numbers of Gazans have to die for Hamas’s philosophy to be eradicated?

It seems like a monstrous idea. Some 2.3 million people live in Gaza, and 10% of them equals 230,000 people, men, women and children. Must that ghastly number be reached? As decent human beings, we must hope not.

And would it really change hearts and minds, much as German attitudes changed after the war? Would the economic rebuilding envisioned by the U.S. plan, in conjunction with Gaza’s Arab neighbors, give people hope, much as the Marshall Plan famously did for Germans? Can we root out the pernicious ideals that people like Farhat espoused, and how can we do so?

Tragically for the Palestinian people, thousands have died already in Gaza. They are also victims of Hamas. How long will it take for those who survive to realize that, even if the weapons that wreaked those horrors were Israeli? How many more must die for the survivors to put the blame where it belongs? Will we see the day when Palestinians disgusted by Hamas lead Israeli soldiers to the group’s redoubts, turning them in in hopes of achieving peace?

There are straws in the wind that suggest progress. A Palestinian on the West Bank, for instance, wrote a letter published by The Free Press.

“ For me, all lives are sacred,” he wrote. “I cried for Hersh and the other hostages just as deeply as I do for innocent Palestinians whose lives have been destroyed by this war. That some people react to the deaths of hostages with celebration or satisfaction is simply beyond my comprehension. It’s something I can’t digest or accept. But I also know how it happens: Kids here are taught from an early age to hate Israelis, to view them as enemies, as occupiers who shouldn’t be anywhere in this land. They live their entire lives with this hate and do not know anything else. I was lucky to have experiences in my life with Jews and Israelis that gave me a radically different understanding.

“I can’t speak for my people any more than a single Israeli can speak for all of you, but still I feel compelled to say: I’m sorry. Please accept my sincere apologies. I regret that we have failed you. I regret that my people have failed you. I may be just one voice but it’s important for me to say as a Palestinian, I mourn with you and stand by your side.”

Soon, the Jewish holidays will be upon us. People will pray for peace. For my part, I will pray for the destruction of Hamas, Islamic Jihad and their ilk, as well as for peace. Can one have the latter without the former? The morally repulsive killings of the six hostages — and so many others — argues for nothing less.

The sacred and the profane

Posted on September 1, 2024 by Joe Weber

Donald Trump doesn’t seem to know the differencE

For 24 hours a day, seven days a week, soldiers from the 3^rd U.S. Infantry Regiment stand guard at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier at Arlington National Cemetery. Every hour or every half hour, depending on the season, the guard is changed in an elaborate ceremony.

Along with the reverential hush that marks the resting places at Arlington of more than 400,000 veterans and their dependents, this is one of the ways America acknowledges an unpayable debt to those lost in every war the country has fought. Each Memorial Day, presidents lay wreaths at the unknown soldiers’s tomb as members of the military stand watch.

The watchwords in this hallowed place are somber, reflective and sober.

So, how is it that Donald J. Trump could show up at the cemetery, grinning and sporting a thumbs-up sign over a grave with rows of graves behind him? How is that he could release a campaign TikTok video of his visit, exploiting the tragedy of American military deaths in Afghanistan in a bid to embarrass Kamala Harris?

It is, of course, illegal for candidates to use this cemetery as a campaign prop. A staffer made that clear to the Trump team, only to be shoved aside and later to have her mental health questioned. The U.S. Army quickly defended the staffer, reminding everyone in an unusual rebuke to Trump that “federal laws, Army regulations and DOD policies … clearly prohibit political activities on cemetery grounds.”

The Army added that the cemetery “is a national shrine to the honored dead of the Armed Forces, and its dedicated staff will continue to ensure public ceremonies are conducted with the dignity and respect the nation’s fallen deserve,”

But, even if it weren’t illegal, wouldn’t simple civility, a sense of decorum and respect for the dead keep a former president from behaving so badly, even if he is desperate to halt his slide in the polls. Wouldn’t a modest amount of good taste prevent him from marketing himself on the graves of the fallen?

Really, how low can the man and his team sink?

Indeed, not only are Trump and his team plumbing new depths, but they do so ignorantly. A top campaign adviser, criticizing the staffer who was pushed aside by a pair of Trump staff bullies, didn’t even grasp the difference between “hollowed” and “hallowed” in a statement he issued.

“For a despicable individual to physically prevent President Trump’s team from accompanying him to this solemn event is a disgrace and does not deserve to represent the hollowed grounds of Arlington National Cemetery,” the adviser said in a written statement provided to The Associated Press, as reported by the Military Times. He insisted that the ex-president and his team “conducted themselves with the utmost respect and dignity.”

Really, are grinning and offering a thumbs-up over a soldier’s grave dignifying and respectful? Perhaps in Trump World, but in any other realm?

Digging in, a top Trump campaign aide later attacked the Army for its rebuke of Trump. He wrote on X: “Reposting this hoping to trigger the hacks at @SecArmy.” He tagged the account used by Army Secretary Christine E. Wormuth in what The Washington Post called an apparent bid to escalate the Trump campaign’s feud with the Pentagon.

Not surprisingly, Trump appears to have made few friends among veterans with his action. “What kind of creep uses a national military cemetery to film a political hit ad?,” the group Veterans for Responsible Leadership asked. It said he violated both the “sanctity of Arlington” as well as the “code of conduct for national military cemeteries.”

“Trump only cares about the fallen when he can exploit their sacrifice for his own gain,” the progressive organization VoteVets said, as reported by the Daily Beast and yahoo!news. “To him, they’re just ‘suckers and losers.’ He’s proven time and again that respect and honor mean nothing to him.”

The reference to “suckers” and “losers,” of course, is to terms Trump, as president, used in referring to American soldiers killed in combat, as The New York Times reported. Last year, John F. Kelly, Trump’s former chief of staff and a former Marine Corps general, confirmed reporting that Trump had used the words.

The context is noteworthy. On a trip to France in 2018, Trump declined a scheduled visit to the Aisne-Marne American Cemetery, where more than 2,200 U.S. service members are buried, as noted by a veteran of Afghanistan and Iraq, Brandon Friedman. “Why should I go to that cemetery?” Trump asked staff members. “It’s filled with losers.” It was in another conversation on the same trip that Trump called Marines who died at Belleau Wood, a major WWI battle site, “suckers” for getting killed.

Denying the reporting at the time, Trump also lashed out at Kelly, calling him “one of the dumbest people” he’d ever met. Of course, that hadn’t prevented him from having Kelly serve as his staff chief for 17 months and earlier as his Secretary of Homeland Security. Before that, Kelly was commander of the U.S. Southern Command. Kelly’s son, Robert, was killed in Afghanistan in 2010 and is buried at Arlington.

Others panned Trump’s vulgar grandstanding, as well.

Former Rep. Max Rose (D-NY), who serves as an adviser for the VoteVets group, condemned the events as “sick and tragic.” And Retired Maj. General Paul Eaton, another VoteVets adviser, told USA Today he “truly cannot think of something more repugnant than starting a political fracas on land where Gold Star families mourn. Someone who would do that should never be Commander in Chief.”

But Trump is consistent. He has a long history of demeaning military people. He belittled the parents of a slain Muslim soldier who had spoken at the Democratic National Convention in 2016, as the Times reported. The next year, he told the widow of a soldier killed in Niger that her husband “knew what he signed up for.” In 2020, he speculated that veterans and their families visiting the White House had infected him with the coronavirus.

Early in his 2016 campaign, Trump suggested that a critic, former GOP presidential candidate John McCain, was not a war hero because he had been shot down over Vietnam and had become a prisoner of war. (“I like people who weren’t captured,” Trump said.) Trump received five draft deferments during the Vietnam War — one for a diagnosis of bone spurs in his heels that led to a medical exemption, as the paper reported.

Trump also labeled as a “moron” retired U.S. Army General Mark A. Milley, a Princeton graduate and the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. This came after Milley said in an address at a military base: “We don’t take an oath a king or queen or a tyrant or dictator. We don’t take an oath to a wannabe dictator. We don’t take an oath to an individual. We take an oath to the Constitution.”

Milley had told The Atlantic that when he invited a wounded, wheelchair-bound soldier to sing “God Bless America” at his 2019 welcoming ceremony as the Joint Chiefs chairman, Trump admonished him. “Why do you bring people like that here?” Trump asked, as noted by the former Army infantry officer, Friedman. “No one wants to see that, the wounded.”

More recently, Trump said that the Medal of Freedom, a civilian award he’d given to a Republican donor, was “much better” than the military Medal of Honor. Trump said that’s because Medal of Honor recipients are “either in very bad shape because they’ve been hit so many times by bullets or they are dead.”

As Friedman argued in a commentary for MSNBC: “These are not one-off statements by a rhetorically reckless buffoon. This man harbors deep resentment toward the military and those who’ve sacrificed in service. Even when he poses with a family — as he did at Arlington this week — he only does so to enhance his campaign or his political prospects. Trump’s use for the military and our dead extends only as far as it suits him.”

The former president is, of course, chiefly a marketer, a real-estate huckster, and he has previously not shrunk from using sacred symbols to sell himself. In mid-2020, he posed holding a Bible in front of a Washington church, displaying it for the cameras (including holding it upside-down at times). Known as the Church of the Presidents because many have attended there, the church had been damaged in demonstrations against police brutality and had been boarded up. Trump’s photo-op was designed to counter the protestors.

Perhaps as a result of decades of manipulating the press, Trump may be relishing the attention the Arlington visit has garnered. He may believe, as P.T. Barnum is often reported as saying, that any publicity is good publicity. Indeed, he’s certainly not backing away from his campaign’s use of the cemetery as a prop and has touted supportive comments by members of deceased soldiers’s families.

Now, will most Americans see his stunt for the self-aggrandizing shameful display it was? Trump is exceptionally skilled at bending reality in ways his diehard backers seem to enjoy. Will even some of them blanch at this episode, though? If many don’t, that may be a sorry statement not only about Trump, but about how low some Americans have slipped in the Trump era.

Tom Lehrer got it right

Posted on August 30, 2024 by Joe Weber

But will Kamala Harris show how all that can be overcome?

“Oh, the white folks hate the black folks
And the black folks hate the white folks
To hate all but the right folks
Is an old established rule …

“Oh, the poor folks hate the rich folks
And the rich folks hate the poor folks
All of my folks hate all of your folks
It’s American as apple pie”

Tom Lehrer, Copenhagen 1967, source: PBS

In the mid-1960s, the brilliant Tom Lehrer wrote “National Brotherhood Week,” his insightful riff on the hypocrisy about race in America. How can it be that nearly 60 years later, the satirical lyrics above still speak to us?

And yet they do. Race remains our country’s unfinished business, and reminders of it abound — sometimes in peculiar ways.

Take, for instance, Kamala Harris’s refusal to be drawn into a discussion of race in her conversation with CNN’s Dana Bash. The anchor asked about Donald J. Trump’s bizarre claim that Harris had only recently “happened to turn Black.”

Harris’s response was terse: “Same old, tired playbook. Next question, please.”

Of course, she was declining to rise to the bait Trump had set out for her. By getting her to focus on race, he hopes to carve off voters who might take exception to such an emphasis. Instead, Harris wants people to focus on her ample professional strengths and by implication to see Trump’s yawning depth of shortcomings.

Harris is a former prosecutor, state attorney general, senator and vice president. Trump’s resume, though it includes the title “president,” is far thinner and includes the titles “felon” and “failed businessman.”

Harris’s approach was entirely reasonable. A short interview on TV is not the best forum for a discussion of race, much less one during a heated presidential campaign. And voters should see her, first and foremost, for her professional qualifications.

But that doesn’t mean that we as a country are not in sad need of such discussions.

Indeed, aside from Trump’s foul bid to inject the issue into this campaign, racial matters have flared up in prior presidential contests. Recall Trump’s “birtherism” efforts against Barack Obama. Some astute observers say the 2016 election of Trump, in fact, was a predictable reaction to the two prior elections of President Obama.

“There were so many Black journalists who saw exactly what was coming in 2016,” Errin Haines said during a panel discussion at the International Symposium on Online Journalism last May in Austin, Texas.

“I remember after Barack Obama was elected in 2008, the conversation was about the myth that we were finally post-racial in this country, which I knew could not have been further from the truth,” the editor at large for The 19^th said. “A lot of Black people in this country, a lot of Black journalists, understood that, if anything, we were about to be hyper-racial.”

In other words, as relayed by writer James Breiner in a smart discussion of the subject, white voters were going to express their dissatisfaction with having a Black president by choosing his opposite.

“If you know anything about the history of race in this country, there is no racial progress without racial backlash; 2016 was the logical destination after a Barack Obama presidency,” Haines added. “A lot of Black journalists saw it coming.”

Just as slavery remains our nation’s original sin, so our inability to deal with its ongoing effects – our racial polarization – remains an unmet challenge. Some tip-toe around the issue, contending, for instance, that it’s obvious that Harris is Black so there’s no need to discuss that.

Others, such as Republicans who’ve been extraordinarily successful in destroying Diversity, Equity and Inclusion initiatives at universities, would ignore the topic altogether. The Chronicle of Higher Education is monitoring attacks on DEI at 196 colleges in 29 states so far, and they’ve ranged from complete legislatively mandated shutdowns of DEI offices and mergers of such offices with other functions to the elimination of diversity statements in hiring and to simple renamings.

At the campus where I taught for 14 years, the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, Chancellor Rodney D. Bennett recently marked his first anniversary in the job by announcing he will shut down the Office of Diversity and Inclusion and fire the vice chancellor heading it. He cited his “considerable reflection and a thorough review of both the national landscape and the specific needs of our institution” in ordering the closure.

Of course, what Bennett could have cited was pressure from political overseers such as Gov. Jim Pillen. The move was baked in the cake from the time the university regents hired Bennett, ironically a Black man, from the University of Southern Mississippi.

Pillen, as a regent and gubernatorial candidate in 2021, sought unsuccessfully to ban any curricular use of critical race theory from the campus. And his predecessor and mentor, former Gov. Pete Ricketts, had driven out Bennett’s predecessor, Ronnie D. Green, a white man, over an anti-racism plan UNL adopted.

Nationally, anti-CRT efforts were a warm-up for anti-DEI assaults. As analysts for The Brookings Institution reported, “critical race theory (CRT) has become a new bogeyman for people unwilling to acknowledge our country’s racist history and how it impacts the present.” CRT, a theory dating back to the late 1970s, holds that racism is not merely a matter of individual prejudice, but is embedded in legal systems and policies.

Not surprisingly, Pillen is now happy to see DEI disappear at UNL.

“Although that office should never have been established in the first place, it takes courage for a leader to recognize a mistake and chart a new direction,” Pillen said. “The work of eliminating DEI and critical race theory from our public institutions is not complete with the elimination of one bureaucratic office, though. We must continue the work of keeping our university curriculum, programming and its mission free of discrimination or racial preferences in any form.”

Perhaps hypocritically, that view is a new stance for Pillen, though. He became a convert to the nationwide anti-CRT and anti-DEI effort only in recent years, as the GOP rallied nationwide against such initiatives. As a Nebraska regent in 2018, Pillen had supported the DEI office, voting to hire its vice chancellor.

Does his flip-flop reek just a bit of political opportunism? Well, when the bandwagon is rolling their way, politicians often find it convenient to hop on board.

To be sure, some criticisms of DEI programs have merit. A recent piece by a couple Stanford academics in The New York Times notes that such programs sometimes consist of “online or off-the-shelf trainings that are more suitable for airline safety briefings than exploring the complexities of interracial relations, and ideological workshops that inculcate theories of social justice as if there were no plausible alternatives.”

The Stanford academics, who were appointed to the school’s Subcommittee on Antisemitism and Anti-Israeli Bias in the wake of the Oct. 7 attacks, were especially troubled about how Jews had been treated in DEI programming. Jewish staff members a few years ago had been assigned to a “whiteness accountability” group, and some later complained that they were shot down when they tried to raise concerns about antisemitism, the academics wrote.

“The former D.E.I. director at a Bay Area community college described D.E.I. as based on the premises ‘that the world is divided into two groups of people: the oppressors and the oppressed,’” they wrote. “She was also told by colleagues and campus leaders that “Jews are ‘white oppressors,’” and her task was to ‘decenter whiteness.’”

As it happens, the program now slated to be axed at UNL includes 27 “learning groups,” places for “students, staff, faculty, alumni, and community members to engage in dynamic dialogue, reflection, and offer support to one another.” One such group focuses on antisemitism and Islamophobia on college campuses.

Stanford University, source: the Cultural Landscape Foundation

The Stanford academics don’t call for eliminating DEI programs, but rather providing an alternative to the ones they call “ideological.” They argue that campuses, in fact, need programs that foster a sense of belonging and engagement for students of diverse backgrounds, religious beliefs and political views.

They call for a “pluralistic vision.” This would involve “facilitated conversations among participants with diverse identities, religious beliefs and political ideologies, but without a predetermined list of favored identities or a preconceived framework of power, privilege and oppression.” Students would learn how to tell stories about their own identities, values and experiences, while listening to others, acknowledging differences and looking for commonalities.

Though such dialoguing may not be what DEI opponents have in mind, that seems like a useful approach. In our college DEI efforts, I found the most compelling part was an atiracism book club in which we read interesting work and discussed it. Along the way, we discussed our prejudices and backgrounds, sharing things that wouldn’t have come up in other settings.

Also, I found another prong of DEI efforts on campus useful. I served on hiring committees in which we reviewed candidates for various faculty and administrative posts. Being mindful of the need for a diverse faculty – something that is helpful to students, faculty and staff alike – at times meant giving an edge to qualified minority applicants. That’s not a bad thing in an overwhelmingly white faculty group.

We don’t have many places to discuss race in our society. But, for students and faculty alike, universities should be safe spaces for that. Conversations in them can break down walls and educate us. Education, after all, is what universities are about.

Whether folks in the GOP believe it or not, we don’t live in a “post-racial” society. We are not color-blind and, in some respects, should not be, at least not if we want to assure diversity in our schools and workplaces.

Indeed, that diversity is in grave danger in some places now. Declines in Black new-student enrollment at such schools as MIT, Amherst, Tufts and the University of Virginia — perhaps a result of the Supreme Court’s ruling against affirmative action in admissions — may just be straws in the wind. Or they could portend problems for minority social mobility and opportunity.

As for the coming election, Harris is wise to stay clear of the topic now. Let her appearance and, for that matter, her gender, speak for themselves. Despite, the racist bait Trump is tossing out, she should stay well clear of his bottom-fishing.

Harris, of course, is eminently qualified for another four years in the White House, this time behind the Resolute Desk. Her multi-racial background and gender should be pluses and, to thoughtful and reasonable voters, they will be. Will there be enough such voters? November 5 will tell.

Why is Israel an American obsession?

Posted on August 28, 2024 by Joe Weber

College students could have plenty of other places to worry about

In his cleverly titled book, “The Arc of a Covenant,” Wall Street Journal columnist Walter Russell Mead wrote of a special concern Americans have with Israel. As he put it: “The state of Israel is a speck on the map of the world; it occupies a continent in the American mind.”

Likewise, over a decade ago, in a Foreign Policy piece headlined “America’s Israel Obsession: Why are Americans so preoccupied with my country?,” Tel Aviv-based writer and editor Shmuel Rosner wrote : “The overrepresentation of Israel in the American public square is at times a headache and at times a cause for celebration.”

And, as so distressingly demonstrated by the anti-Israel demonstrations on campuses last spring, this “overrepresentation” is particularly acute at universities. “The State of Israel is an obsession of today’s university, a linchpin around which an extraordinary volume of discourse, pedagogy, and politics revolves,” scholar Rachel Fish wrote presciently in 2022 in a piece for Sapir headlined “Can the Academy be Saved from Anti-Zionism?”

So, as Kamala Harris and Donald Trump prepare for a debate likely to at least touch on the Israel-Gaza war, and as students gather on campuses anew – with some surely planning to mount a new round of disruption – it’s worth speculating on why so many conflicts generate far less of a storm in the U.S. Some have been far bloodier.

New York Times columnist Bret Stephens was helpful on the point in “Can We Be a Little Less Selective in Our Moral Outrage?”

Consider Sudan, Stephens writes. “In Sudan’s case, the humanitarian group Operation Broken Silence estimates that at least 65,000 people have died of violence or starvation since fighting broke out last year, and nearly 11 million people have been turned into refugees.”

And Ethiopia, he adds. “In Ethiopia, Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed — possibly history’s least deserving recipient of a Nobel Peace Prize — first turned his guns on ethnic Tigrayans in one of the world’s bloodiest recent wars, with a death toll estimated as high as 600,000. Now the government is waging war against former allies in the Amhara region, even as the Biden administration last year lifted restrictions on aid owing to its abuse of human rights. How many college protests has this elicited?”

Moreover, what of the suffering of various peoples in other places? “There are also Rohingya in Myanmar, Uyghurs in China, Christians in Nigeria and ethnic minorities in Russia, to name a few,” Stephens notes.

In the face of such horrors, why should a war in a distant nation just a bit larger than New Jersey bring students and others out to march, pitch tents, occupy buildings and otherwise protest? Yes, the numbers of people killed in Gaza are high, even if the Hamas-reported total of 40,500 is inflated — with maybe 17,000 of the dead being combatants who were pledged to the destruction of Israel. But aren’t such figures dwarfed by those in other wars raging about the globe?

Where is the outrage for the other 109 or so wars the Geneva Academy says are now sullying the world? Why are there no demonstrations about the tens of thousands killed in the Russia-Ukraine war? Perhaps more than 150,000 have died so far in that grinding war, which is the result of an unjustified invasion. By contrast, of course, Israel’s actions in Gaza came in response to an invasion of its territory last Oct. 7 and the ensuing massacre and hostage-taking by Hamas and allied groups.

Deaths in war are awful. Civilian deaths, in particular, are horrific. And it’s especially repugnant in Gaza that Hamas treats the deaths of fellow Palestinians — innocents — as “necessary sacrifices.” The great moral tragedy for Israelis is that they’ve been drawn into pulling the triggers in Hamas’s murderous efforts against its own people.

Of course, the moral tragedy on U.S. campuses is that protestors aren’t massing to condemn Hamas. Really, is it not the instigator and true perpetrator here?

On or off campuses, Americans have a host of reasons for their intense focus on Israel. Experts cite the special relationship between the countries ever since Harry S. Truman became the first world leader to recognize Israel as a Jewish state in 1948, only 11 minutes after its creation. Many Christians in the U.S., moreover, have long been preoccupied with Israel, both with the Biblical nation and the modern one. And going back, at least, to President Jimmy Carter in the 1970s, American leaders have tried to broker peace between Israel and its neighbors. Also, the U.S. remains the leading foreign supplier of weapons to the country.

But there is something different about the attention Israel gets on campuses, especially regarding the Gaza bloodshed. First, Palestinians and Arabs generally have been building their presence on many campuses for decades, both among students and faculty.

At my graduate alma mater, Columbia, for instance, the Middle East Institute dates back to 1954. It has set itself apart with such centers as one for the Study of Muslim Societies and another for Palestine Studies. At best, a handful of faculty members associated with the MEI specialize in Israel studies, which is not surprising since the MEI has been funded well by Arab countries and interests. Indeed, Arab interests have been funding some schools quite well:

The Institute for Israel and Jewish Studies on Columbia’s campus is far smaller. But, to its credit, the university does also maintain a dual-degree program with Tel Aviv University. Protestors, of course, want to do away with that five-year-old effort as they try to crush Israel’s relationships with U.S. institutions.

While it’s not clear how many Arab Americans are enrolled in U.S. universities, their numbers are substantial enough to merit attention by researchers. In all, there are believed to be about 3.7 million Arab Americans in the U.S., compared with 7.5 million Jews. Moreover, there are substantial numbers of foreign students from the Middle East studying in U.S. schools.

Given such numbers, anti-Zionist and antisemitic groups such as Students for Justice in Palestine have found ready markets for supporters on some campuses. Elite schools such as Columbia, Harvard and Penn – which have notable Arab student populations – have dominated headlines. But activists set up encampments at more than 100 institutions last spring, as tallied by The Chronicle of Higher Education.

Outside Columbia University last spring; Source: Getty Images/NBC News

And let’s not discount antisemitism, which has been rising sharply in the U.S. College students swim in the same sea as all Americans, so some are sure to share the ugly sentiments of those around them.

Still, the campus activism against Israel may be louder and more visible than the real level of concern among students — the hostility may be more wide than deep. A survey last May found that only 8% of some 1,250 students polled took part in demonstrations. Moreover, those surveyed ranked the war as ninth among issues that concern them in a list headed by healthcare reform and educational funding and access.

In all, three surveys by Intelligent.com, Generation Lab/Axios, and Newsweek/College Pulse last spring found that roughly three in five students were on campuses where pro-Palestinian protests occurred. But the vast majority stayed away from the occupations.

Less encouragingly, a significant portion of students not participating were supportive of the protests, as reported by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression. According to the Intelligent.com survey, support among students for the protests ran as high as 65%.

The dawning academic year will test many things. How prepared are administrators to handle protests? Perhaps more important, how prepared are they to see to it that their students are more knowledgeable than many proved to be last year? Ignorance of the issues involved was astonishing among students, with many protestors unable to even identify which bodies of water they referred to in chanting “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.”

In her insightful work for Sapir, Fish offered some compelling optimism:

“Is it possible to change anti-Zionist ways of thinking in at least those institutions of higher education that claim to welcome critical thinking and value a true liberal arts approach?,” Fish wrote. “I believe so. But it will require faculty who have the moral courage to question the received wisdom, and senior administrators who believe that the university ought to be a marketplace of ideas rather than a place where students imbibe the ‘truths’ of an anti-Western, anti-Zionist monoculture. The greatest challenge of all will be to cultivate within students not only the critical thinking skills that will allow them to arrive at their own conclusions, but also the courage to risk the implication of those conclusions — the willingness not to fit in with the conventional wisdom, which is unsubtly backed up by a small but powerful cadre of students and faculty whose beliefs dominate university discourse today.”

Of course, she wrote that in 2022, well before the year of discontent that was the last academic year. Now, efforts to build a solid education, to provide true and complete information, seem more essential than ever.

Will voters prove to be stubborn again?

Posted on August 25, 2024 by Joe Weber

Trump’s moral and ethical baggage makes for a heavy loaD

As I noted in two recent installments of The Big Picture, I have a sibling who supported Donald J. Trump in 2016 and who appears to be doing so again this year. In a family chat, she listed a clutch of issues that she suggested disqualify Kamala Harris and Tim Walz. Feel free to find discussions of the key issues here and here.

Today, let’s take up another tidbit my sister mentioned. She contended that my two brothers and I don’t “like” Trump.

I don’t entirely dispute this, though the word is an odd one. How can one like a fellow one sees only on TV or in images in news accounts? Indeed, with someone such as Trump, can one be sure we’re not seeing a made-up persona, a manufactured cutout created on a bad TV reality show? That’s the way many American voters of a certain age probably got to “know” and “like” him to begin with.

Who is the real Trump? There is reason to believe, I suggest, that the angry man who vents at length when he goes off-piste, ignoring his Teleprompter, is the real one.

This is the one, you’ll recall, who mocked disabled New York Times reporter Serge Kovaleski, the one who questioned Harris’s racial identity, the one who extolled “good genes” in much the same way some Germans did before WWII, the one who said he would be a dictator for a day, and the one who referred to his supporters as “basement dwellers.” This Trump was also the one who famously called insurrectionists “great patriots,” said he would pardon them, and said “for those who have been wronged and betrayed, I am your retribution.”

I suggest that this is the Trump who seems most animated when indulging his odd sense of grievance, vengeance and anger. But how can such things make one likable? In what world is that so? In what realm, one might ask, do Trumpies exist then? What does that say of their character, as well as of Trump’s?

Lately, some Republicans have sought to move Trump away from such things as his personal attacks on Harris and Walz. Many have advised him to drop the puerile name-calling that, maybe, worked for him in 2016; it now seems only to remind independent voters of what they dislike about him. Some folks, such as Wall Street Journal columnist and former GOP presidential speech-writer Peggy Noonan, keep pushing him to focus on policy differences.

That’s a shift that may be essential for Trump. If the race is about character, how could he possibly win?

Let’s recall that Trump is a thrice-married philandering 34-count felon with a costly history of sexual abuse, defamation, business fraud and business failure. Does that sort of personal character stand up against that of a former state attorney general and San Francisco district attorney who put criminals in jail? Does his being a criminal make him “likable,” and what does that say about a person who then “likes” him?

Let me share some personal history, a tidbit not dissimilar to the experiences of other reporters who followed Trump’s career. In the spring of 1992, I spent some time with him for a story for BusinessWeek. First, an editor and I visited him in his New York office. Then I toured one of his then-bankrupt Atlantic City casinos with him.

In the first visit, my editor, the late Chris Welles, and I told Trump we planned to write about his businesses, intending to give readers an update on where things stood, given the bankruptcies of his three gaming houses. He was prominent in New York then and had an emerging national name and we wanted to assess how his diminished business empire was faring. The meeting was a preliminary one, designed to let him know we were setting out to do this piece, and to see if he would talk with us for it.

Recall that Trump then, and now, was a deal maker. His main question was: would this be a cover story? If we could commit to that, it seemed, he might decide one way; if not, another. (As we told him, we had no idea how the piece would be played, as that sort of decision wouldn’t be made in advance and would depend on whatever else was happening that week.) He wanted to know what we would say in the piece. (Of course, we didn’t know that because we had not done the reporting yet.) Would this be favorable? (See the prior question).

The vibe, however, was clear. It was as if we could see the wheels spinning in his head. Trump wanted to manipulate us, to box us into a corner in which he could trade access for good press and a big spread, a cover he could tack on his wall to feed his needy ego. His approach was so calculating, so slippery, and so unlike that of other business folks I had written about that I recall feeling like I needed a bath afterward.

Despite our refusals to play along with his game, he agreed, nonetheless, to give us access. Then, sometime soon after, he and I visited one of his casinos, a trip that was bizarre. First, he brought along his then-paramour, Marla Maples, with whom he had infamously cheated on his first wife, Ivana. Was she there to impress me somehow? Was she a trophy he enjoyed showcasing? No other CEO of my acquaintance trotted out mistresses like show ponies when I did stories on them.

As we walked through the place, gamblers came up to him, oohing and ahhing, and complimenting Marla, who was a lovely ex-model. One dazzled gamer touched Trump with her slots-playing hand for luck. The experience gave me my first hard realization about Trump – the gulf between the financially ruined businessman and his public image even then was as vast as the Grand Canyon. To anyone familiar with his dealings, he was a failure, but to much of the public, he was nearly god-like, very much like the character Hollywood later created in “The Apprentice.”

Indeed, the character many Americans came to know in that most unreal reality TV show may be the one they support. That decisive, hard-nosed figure bears little resemblance, however, to the real man, as many who know him can attest.

In researching the piece, I visited a couple high-priced New York attorneys representing his creditors. One, a strait-laced button-down guy, told me flat out “Donald Trump is a lying sack of s—.” His partner, a striking woman, told me Trump was constantly trying to get her onto his plane, but she said she’d rather fly coach than be anywhere close to him. His lechery was unmistakable, she suggested, and he repulsed her.

My colleague, Larry Light, and I, of course, followed the facts as we wrote the piece, (which was not a cover story); his prospects, at least in the short run, seemed good, and we wrote that. Largely thanks to Trump’s talented chief financial officer at the time, Stephen F. Bollenbach, the casinos would emerge with a reasonable bet on the future (though only for a few years, as it turned out. Trump later mismanaged his casino company anew and it fell into bankruptcy again eight years later, in 2004). Other Trump businesses also failed at various times, netting him six major failures in all. As such businesses failed, he stuck plenty of subcontractors with unpaid bills.

Quite the smudge on his escutcheon, one might say.

Trump later distinguished afresh himself with my colleague. Light got hold of his financial information and learned that Trump had a negative net worth. As recounted by another colleague, some of Light’s work drove Trump to march into the top editor’s office at BusinessWeek. There, Trump launched into a three-hour tirade that included an anti-Semitic gibe about Light (who informed Trump he was, in fact, Episcopalian). Trump also threatened to sue, but backed off after our lawyer told him his finances would then be opened to public disclosure in court.

Does this all add up to a man of character, a man of integrity, a man of honesty, a man of proven success, a man who should lead our country?

Gen. John Kelly, source: Stars and Stripes

What of the Trump seen by many of those who worked closely with him in his term as president? Former Defense Secretary Mark Esper called him a “threat to democracy.” Former national security adviser John Bolton declared him “unfit to be president.” John Kelly, a former Marine Corps general and Trump’s former chief of staff, called him “a person who admires autocrats and murderous dictators” and “has nothing but contempt for our democratic institutions, our Constitution, and the rule of law.” His own former vice president, Mike Pence, could not endorse him.

Back in 2016, a minority of American voters – less than 46% — elected Trump. That suggests most Americans were onto him even then, though not enough in the states that tilted the Electoral College his way. What will happen this time? Will enough voters feel like this 78-year-old’s shtick has grown tired, as Noonan suggested?

Studies show that many voters are stubborn. Especially in our polarized times, they tend to stick by their choices, no matter how much negative information they are presented with. Some voters also tend to be irrational, sometimes motivated even unconsciously by such factors as racism and fear. (Of course, Trump plays into both those factors, and likely is seen by some voters as the strong white man at a time when some whites can’t handle changing American demographics).

Will voters ignore Trump’s many flaws again, as so many did in 2016? Even more than before, this campaign keeps bringing those shortcomings into sharp relief. Will enough sensible voters see him this time for what he is? Will they have the good sense and the spine to act on that? Perhaps we can hope that enough will not be like that sadly uninformed slots player foolishly touching her false idol so many years ago.

Trumpy matters

Posted on August 23, 2024 by Joe Weber

A bit more about a sib’s concerns about Harris versus her guy

For various reasons, a sibling of mine has long been committed to Donald J. Trump. She points to several areas where she believes the Biden-Harris team has problems, some of which were discussed in a prior edition of The Big Picture. Take a look there, if you like, for a bit of context.

Today, though, let’s take up a few other problem spots my sister has mentioned: electric vehicles, tent cities and riots. All are well worth exploring.

ELECTRIC VEHICLES

Eager to reduce our dependence on climate change-inducing fossil fuels, the Biden Administration has argued that America should cruise into the future on EVs. It has provided an array of incentives, many of which come on top of similar efforts in some states, to make such vehicles affordable for more of us. A federal tax credit of $7,500 is available, based on the make of the vehicle and the income of the buyer. And states such as Colorado match that, so qualified buyers can drive off with quite a bargain.

Helped by such carrots, EV sales have soared since Biden took office. From 0.3 million in 2020, they jumped to 1.6 million last year. The growth continued in the first half of this year, first with a modest 2.6% rise in the first quarter, year over year, then with an 11.3% rise in the second quarter.

It’s rare nowadays to go for a drive and not see an EV. Tesla now has to compete with such new offerings as the BMW i5, Cadillac Lyriq, Honda Prologue, and Kia EV9 SUV, Cox Automotive reports. And the outlet says higher volumes of the Ford Mustang Mach-E and F-150 Lightning are helping Ford hold onto its No. 2 position, behind Tesla, in the EV market.

Publicly available chargers are also multiplying, aided by Biden funds. As of April, the U.S. had more than 168,300 such charging stations across the country, most notably in California with nearly 44,600 public and private outlets. The U.S. has a long road to travel to equal China’s charger network, which in 2022 was estimated to have at least 1.76 million stations. But the Biden Administration is moving on the issue and this year made more than $623 million in grants available for chargers under a $2.5 billion program in the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law.

In recent years, U.S. carmakers rushed to meet heightened EV demand, though some are now taking a breather, scaling back, delaying or tweaking plans. Ford is stepping up its hybrid production, for instance, to attract drivers not fully committed to electric, CNBC reported. GM is continuing to produce hybrids and gas-powered cars after it initially went all in on electrified vehicles.

The carmakers don’t expect demand for EVs to stop growing, only to grow more slowly. U.S. EV sales last year equaled about 7.6% of the overall national market, Cox Automotive estimated, according to CNBC. Analysts still expect that to rise to between 30% and 39% by the end of the decade.

The burning question my sib raised was whether the U.S. energy grid could handle the heightened demand. In this, she is echoing former Fox News fabulist Tucker Carlson, who in 2022 bemoaned “California’s already collapsing energy grid” in the wake of heat wave-induced blackouts that year. As Scientific American reported, however, utilities have been moving to strengthen the grid as a warming climate steps up demand for power for lots of reasons and they are planning for EVs.

In California—the national leader in EVs with more than 1 million plug-in vehicles—EV charging currently accounts for less than 1% of the grid’s total load during peak hours, the newsmagazine reported. In 2030, when the number of EVs in California is expected to surpass 5 million, charging should account for less than 5% of that load, a spokesperson for the California Energy Commission said.

The pull on the grid is expected to rise more from the nation’s move away from climate-damaging fossil fuels in coming decades. So, utilities are aiming to boost their capacity by adding clean energy sources, expanding battery storage and building transmission lines, the magazine reported.

“We’re talking about a pretty gradual transition over the course of the next few decades,” Scientific American quoted Ryan Gallentine, transportation policy director at Advanced Energy Economy, as saying. “It’s well within the utilities’ ability to add that kind of capacity.”

Harris has been a booster of the administration’s EV policy and that’s likely to continue.

For his part, Trump has long ridiculed EVs and promised to end federal supports for them. More recently, as he has gotten closer to Tesla founder Elon Musk, Trump has softened his tone – or just started talking out of both sides of his mouth. It’s an open question whether he’s just pandering to car-industry workers fearful of the change and to Musk at the same time.

“I’m constantly talking about electric vehicles, but I don’t mean I’m against them. I’m totally for them,” he told a crowd in Michigan, as The New York Times reported. Moments later he said, “I’ve driven them, and they are incredible, but they’re not for everybody.”

Source: U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development

TENT CITIES

Homelessness is a national scourge, to be sure. Tent cities have spread across the country, as the numbers of people without homes have climbed in recent years. The total figures – including people who use shelters and those who don’t — were sliding gradually from 2007 until 2016, moving from about 647,000 to about 550,000. Then, after Trump was elected, the count rose anew to about 580,500 in 2020, and it has climbed since to about 653,100.

“The most significant causes are the shortage of affordable homes and the high cost of housing that have left many Americans living paycheck to paycheck and one crisis away from homelessness,” Jeff Olivet, head of the U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness, told The Hill late last year.

Housing prices have soared across the country. In early 2017, at the beginning of the Trump Administration, the median price of a home in the U.S. topped $313,000 for the first time, rising to $338,600 by the end of his term in the final quarter of 2020, according to the St. Louis Fed. Since then, the median figure has climbed to a high of $442,600 in the last quarter of 2022 and, under pressure from high interest rates, it has since dipped slightly to $412,300.

Of course, prices are higher generally in urban areas. Making matters worse, rents have climbed, making that alternative too costly for a record half of those who rent, according to a new Harvard study. Since 2001, inflation-adjusted rents have gone up 10 times faster than renters’s incomes.

“Housing experts say the underlying problem for both buyers and renters is a massive housing shortage that has built up over decades and will take years to remedy,” NPR reported. “Single-family construction has been picking up, and some developers are building slightly smaller, lower-cost homes … But the Harvard report’s authors say this reprieve isn’t likely to last.”

“For one thing, high interest rates and other rising costs — land, labor, insurance — have again slowed down apartment construction,” NPR reported. “And because all those things are so expensive, most of what’s being built is at the higher end of the market. Over the past decade, the U.S. has lost more than 6 million units with rents under $1,000. For extremely low-income renters, the National Low Income Housing Coalition calculates that for every 100 households, there are only 34 places they can afford.”

Harris seems quite mindful of the issue. She is offering plans to incentivize builders to build starter homes. And, to help buyers she is floating the idea of providing $25,000 down payments for qualified buyers. The details are yet to come, but readers can some discussion of the ideas in a prior Big Picture installment.

Minneapolis riot damage, June 2020; source: Star Tribune photo

RIOTS

This concern is, well, ironic. On Jan. 6, 2021, rioters took over the U.S. Capitol after Trump whipped them up, threatened to hang Trump’s sitting vice president, Mike Pence, and assaulted nearly 150 police officers, sending some to the hospital with severe injuries. Four people died. Nearly $3 million in damages were reported.

Trump today calls the rioters patriots and has promised to pardon those convicted of various crimes in connection with the Capitol insurrection.

But my sib isn’t referring to that riot, of course. Rather, she seems to be troubled about the street rage that reigned in 2020 — while Trump was still in office — in places such as Minneapolis. That was the scene of the brutal murder of a Black man, George Floyd, in May 2020. Four policemen were involved in Floyd’s killing.

“Some demonstrators vandalized police vehicles with graffiti and targeted the precinct house where the four officers had been assigned,” The New York Times reported. “Protests also occurred in the city in the subsequent days. Officers used tear gas and fired rubber bullets into crowds. Some businesses, including restaurants and an auto-parts store, were set on fire.”

Floyd’s murder and other incidents of police violence against Black people around the same time in places such as Louisville, Kentucky, and Brunswick, Georgia, spawned still more demonstrations. In all, protests erupted in at least 140 cities across the United States, and the National Guard was activated in at least 21 states in the period.

Three days after Floyd’s murder, then Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz – now the Democratic vice presidential nominee — activated the National Guard. The city sought his help after vandalism and fires broke out during demonstrations.

“Let’s be very clear,” Walz said. “The situation in Minneapolis, is no longer, in any way, about the murder of George Floyd. It is about attacking civil society, instilling fear and disrupting our great cities.”

Nonetheless, Walz was criticized by Republicans for waiting too long to act. As noted by FactCheck.org, there was some ambiguity in what city officials wanted at the time, so it’s not clear that Walz was at fault. Walz did apologize to a Hispanic CNN reporter who was arrested while covering the disturbances, saying he took responsibility for the arrest.

Now that Walz is a political opponent, however, Trump recently revived the criticism. This is a reversal from his stance in the spring of 2020, when he praised Walz for calling in the Guard. An audio recording obtained by ABC News documents Trump telling Walz in a June 1, 2020, call with governors that he was “very happy” with how Walz responded in the days after protests turned violent.

“You called up big numbers and the big numbers knocked them out so fast it was like bowling pins,” Trump said on the call, according to ABC News.

The big question now, of course, is: what would Harris do if confronted with national disorder because of police violence against Blacks? Well, she made her career in law enforcement, prosecuting criminals in San Francisco as district attorney and then statewide as California’s Attorney General. Liberals lambasted her as too tough on crime and as a supporter of policies that fostered mass incarceration.

To serve their ends, Trump and his allies are painting Harris as “dangerously liberal” and soft on crime. “She has plenty of evidence to point to that shows she was, at times, a tough-on-crime prosecutor,” Vox noted. “She also has plenty of evidence that shows she was, at other times, a reformer.”

In politics, as in war, truth can be one of the first casualties. As the Trump folks seek to define Harris and Walz to suit their cartoonish images, they don’t seem to have much regard for the facts.

Who is to blame?

Posted on August 22, 2024 by Joe Weber

A Trumper in the family points the finger at Biden and Harris

Political leaders campaign in poetry, govern in prose, the late New York Gov. Mario Cuomo famously said. After Kamala Harris’s uplifting and extraordinary speech, perhaps a close, hard look at a few things is in order.

A sister of mine who supports Donald J. Trump argued that the Biden-Harris administration is responsible for major problems in recent years. So, she asked that I share information with her on a few biggies.

Since this space, I hope, is one for some clarity, sharing the word more broadly might be useful. For now, let’s look at just three of her issues: border security, taxes and inflation.

1) Biden is to blame, she says, for OPEN BORDERS

Let’s start with an emergency proclamation of last June, when Biden blocked many crossings on the southern border. Homeland Security officials reported that over the following six weeks, the number of border patrol encounters with migrants had plunged by more than 50% thanks to the measure, cutting the seven-day average to below 1,900 a day. DHS also removed and returned more than 50,000 individuals to more than 100 countries.

“Crossings dropped sharply this spring and summer after the Biden administration tightened border controls and closed off migrants’ access to the asylum system,” The Washington Post reported. “Still, apprehensions exceeded 1.3 million during the first nine months of the 2024 fiscal year.”

Biden issued that proclamation because a few months earlier, in February, Republicans in Washington killed a border security bill that would have gone far toward solving the problems. The bill, backed by Biden, was crafted over many months by one of the most conservative GOP officials in Washington, Sen. James Lankford of Oklahoma, by Democratic Sen. Chris Murphy of Connecticut and by independent Sen. Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, a place very much affected by crossings.

As Lankford described it, the bill would have provided funds to build a wall, increase technology at the border, and add more detention beds, more agents, and more deportation flights. It would have ended what Lankford called the abuse of a system that waived in over a million people. And he said it would have dramatically changed ambiguous asylum laws by conducting fast screenings at a higher standard of evidence, limited appeals, and fast deportation.

For its part, the American Immigration Council called the measure “the most sweeping immigration bill of the twenty-first century.” It would have overhauled the asylum-seeking process—and imposed an ‘emergency authority’ that would leave asylum fully out of reach for those crossing between ports of entry for much of the next three years, according to the group. It would have attempted to address issues like work permits and years-long waits for asylum-seekers, and also raised the initial standard a person must pass to access our asylum system.

So, in other words, it would have done most of what GOP leaders wanted done. “I honestly believe that exact bill would have passed in December, but by the time it got into February, it became immediately the major focus in the election, because, as you recall, the Republican primary suddenly got resolved,” Lankford said. “It looked very obvious that President Trump was going to be there, and everything collapsed at that point. If that bill would have gone in December, I think it would have passed.”

What happened? Trump weighed in and told his allies in the Senate and the House to kill the bill. Why? He felt more chaos at the border would help him win reelection.

“I think the border is a very important issue for Donald Trump. And the fact that he would communicate to Republican senators and congresspeople that he doesn’t want us to solve the border problem because he wants to blame Biden for it is … really appalling,” said GOP Sen. Mitt Romney of Utah. “But the reality is that, that we have a crisis at the border, the American people are suffering as a result of what’s happening at the border. And someone running for president not to try and get the problem solved. as opposed to saying, ‘hey, save that problem. Don’t solve it. Let me take credit for solving it later.’”

Trump’s backers in Washington, fearing his wrath and punishment by his followers, did his bidding. They gave him an issue on which he has pounded the Biden-Harris administration ever since, one that could have been largely resolved without his interference.

Now, with the help of a BBC summary and other sources, let’s look back a bit to see how the illegal crossings rose to top 2 million in 2022, more than double that of some prior years. Did Biden, in fact, do nothing while the chaos reigned?

First, from Biden’s first days in office in January 2021 until May 2023, the administration expelled more than two million migrants under a public health measure, Title 42. Trump had first used the law beginning in March 2020 to expel nearly 400,000 in this Covid-inspired action.

Immigration detainees, source; NPR, 2018

Earlier, Trump had also imposed a “zero-tolerance” policy of separating children from their parents and deporting the adults. Between 3,900 and more than 5,000 children were separated from their parents between 2017 and 2021, an effort that perhaps only the most callous Trump supporter could accept. Recall the cages?

When Biden came in, he sought to fix that inhumane policy. However, undoing the cruel damage has proved problematic because of sloppy record-keeping by the Trump administration. Some children have remained stranded. As of the latest accounting, in April 2024, nearly 1,400 children were still waiting.

So there’s no question that border crossings climbed during Biden’s time in office. Still, while he tried to work with GOP officials, he was stymied. For his part, did Trump eliminate crossings, even as he caged children to accomplish that? Nope.

But did Biden and allies in the Congress make efforts to curtail the crossings? Yup. But the biggest of those moves was shot down by Trump in an extraordinarily self-serving election-manipulating way.

Now, might we expect Harris to make efforts similar to Biden’s on the border? As she said in her acceptance speech, Harris promises to bring the Lankford-Murphy-Sinema bill back. Certainly, if Trump loses and his hold on the GOP slips, such a bill could be a slam-dunk.

2) Our current president RAISES TAXES, my sib says, suggesting Harris would, too

As he sought to boost some spending for needed measures like the $108 billion bipartisan infrastructure bill, Biden has needed revenue. But he pledged to avoid hiking taxes on any families making less than $400,000 a year. Harris is sticking with that approach, even as she — like Biden — tries to implement some changes. She wants to significantly raise taxes on the wealthiest Americans and large corporations, as The New York Times reported.

The most recent White House budget, a Biden plan that Harris supported, includes proposals to raise taxes on large corporations. Chief among them is raising the corporate tax rate to 28% from 21%.

For wealthy individuals, Harris would set the top marginal income rate at 39.6%, up from 37%. On top of that, she would also increase the rate on two parallel Medicare surtaxes to 5% from 3.8% for Americans making more than $400,000 and expand the income subject to one of them. Together, the Medicare and income proposals would create a top marginal rate as high as 44.6%

Moreover, the wealthy would see changes in how gains on investments in stocks, bonds, real estate and other assets are taxed, the Times reported. For Americans making more than $1 million a year, investment earnings would be taxed at the same rate as regular income, instead of at the lower rates for capital gains.

On the benefit side, Harris is also suggesting giving tax incentives to builders to make starter homes that would be sold to first-time buyers. As Times economics writer Peter Coy describes them, these would boost the supply of housing. So, too, would her proposed $40 billion innovation fund to “empower local governments to fund local solutions to build housing.”

More homes are badly needed after years of insufficient construction, Coy writes. He quotes Orphe Divounguy, a senior economist at Zillow, who stated in June: “The simple fact is there are not enough homes in this country, and that’s pushing homeownership out of reach for too many families,”

Coy is less keen on Harris’s plan to help first-time buyers to become homeowners by giving them up to $25,000 each toward a down payment. “Sellers surely would take advantage of the increased demand by raising their prices,” the writer suggests. “So a big portion of the taxpayer money that was intended for home buyers would wind up in the pockets of sellers.”

For my part, I’m reminded of the G.I. Bill, the postwar measure that veterans used to buy houses. Between 1944 and 1955, veterans used the bill to take out 4.3 million federally guaranteed low-interest home loans with a total face value of $33 billion. They were responsible for 20% of all new homes built in that period, including massive developments such as the Levittowns. Perhaps that would be a more sensible approach.

Still, Coy is even less enthused about Trump’s plans. “The Harris-Walz agenda for the economy is much better than Donald Trump’s,” he writes. “Trump wants to extend all of the tax cuts in the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, including those benefiting the wealthiest Americans. For years he called for repealing the Affordable Care Act, although lately he has said he’ll keep it unless he can come up with something better and less expensive. His plan for across-the-board tariffs would raise prices for all kinds of imported goods.”

Source: Getty Images North America via NPR

3) Biden caused INFLATION, she suggests

My sib blames Biden for the inflation that has wracked our economy, echoing a common refrain from Trump. There’s no doubt that there has been a lot of it, even though the rate of price hikes has been coming down. The 7% annual rate in 2021 slipped to 6.5% in 2022, to 3.4% in 2023 and to an annualized 2.9% so far in 2024. And that compares to rates of between 1.4% and 2.3% during the Trump years.

But is Biden to blame? Does Trump share culpability?

First, the surge in prices began in the wake of the Covid epidemic, when economies shook off their recessions. Higher demand for all sorts of goods drove up prices — a far more potent effect than any presidential effort could have.

Earlier, Trump in 2020 engineered the Cares Act and Biden in the following year pushed the American Rescue Plan – both of which were designed to keep recession at bay and to keep Americans working and spending. The measures, together with others, pumped some $5 trillion into the economy. The influx was, at worst, a contributing part.

“These programs contributed to strong consumer and business demand, which tightened labor markets (between mid-2021 and early 2022 the ratio of job vacancies to unemployed workers doubled), putting upward pressure on wages and prices,” economists at the National Bureau of Economic Research reported.

Yes, together with the post-Covid global economic resurgence, such actions abetted inflation. But they also kept a recession, which lasted from February until April 2020, from becoming a depression. And they also helped lower unemployment from its Trump-term high of 14.8% in April 2020 to the current 4.3% (after it dipped to a record 3.4% in January and April 2023.

So, could Biden have done more to combat inflation? Probably not.

In fact, presidents don’t control inflation. That job falls to the independent Federal Reserve, which controls interest rates and thus tries to cap inflation. The Fed tries to balance employment and other markers of economic health with the price increases that normally come from a hot economy – if we have too much employment, for instance, we get more inflation; if we have too little employment, we have recession.

As experts have long observed, presidents get way too much credit for good economies and too much blame for bad ones. But they can do a lot of harm. Trump’s plan to impose tariffs on foreign goods, for instance, is sure to stoke inflation, as would his suggested efforts at pressuring the Fed to reduce interest rates.

I hope my sister finds some of the information here helpful. Other issues that she raised — some spoken to by Harris — will be worth a look in the future, too. So, stay tuned.