About Joe Weber

Now the Jerry and Karla Huse Professor Emeritus at the University of Nebraska's College of Journalism and Mass Communications, I worked 35 years in magazines and newspapers. I spent most of that time, 22 years, at BUSINESS WEEK Magazine, leaving in August 2009 as chief of correspondents. So far, I have worked in central New Jersey, New York City, Denver, Dallas, Philadelphia, Toronto, Chicago, Beijing, Shanghai and Lincoln, Nebraska. The adventure continues.

If editorialists had their way …

… things would have been far different

Jeff Bezos, source: New York Post

Jeff Bezos is half right. Newspaper endorsements don’t sway elections. If they did, Donald J. Trump would not have won in 2016.

Eight years ago, the gap between editorialists and the public made the Grand Canyon look like a roadside ditch. Only two of the nation’s top 100 newspapers – the Las Vegas Review-Journal and The Florida Times-Union – supported Trump for president. Fifty-seven editorialized for Hillary Clinton, while 31 (perhaps surprisingly) didn’t endorse anyone, four supported others and three just opposed Trump, according to The American Presidency Project.

“Presidential endorsements do nothing to tip the scales of an election,” Bezos, the owner of The Washington Post, tells us in explaining why he has taken the paper out of the endorsement business. “No undecided voters in Pennsylvania are going to say, ‘I’m going with Newspaper A’s endorsement.’ None.”

Clearly, Trump wasn’t the choice of the smart set in 2016. Enough Americans thumbed their noses at editorial writers that Trump could plant his ample bottom behind the Resolute Desk the following January. Yes, it’s true that more voters lined up behind Clinton (48.2 percent) instead of Trump (46.2 percent), but the GOP candidate, nonetheless, swept the Electoral College vote by 56 percent.

So, does this mean that more newspaper opinion writers should go the way of Bezos’s Post? Will the lack of an editorial page thumbs-up make any difference to readers?

Editorial writers at a number of major papers say no on the first point. With Election Day a week away, The New York Times, The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Houston Chronicle, the Seattle Times, The Boston Globe and the Las Vegas Sun have weighed in for Harris. Stumping for Trump so far are the New York Post, The Washington Times and the Las Vegas Review-Journal.

But the endorsers are among a shrinking number of papers advising voters on how to cast their ballots. As recently as 2008, 92 of the nation’s 100 largest newspapers endorsed either Democrat Barack Obama or Republican John McCain for president, according to the Associated Press. But by 2020, only 54 made a choice between Trump and Joe Biden, AP reported, citing the presidency project (47 went for Biden, seven for Trump and 44 took no stance).

Some publishers and editors may side with the Amazon billionaire, who bought the Post in 2013, and who argues that the only thing presidential endorsements do is “create a perception of bias. A perception of non-independence.” Readers, he implies, don’t distinguish between editorial pages, which are devoted to opinion, and news pages, ideally devoted to unbiased reporting.

Source: Gallup

That, he suggests, is at the root of widespread public mistrust of the media. Such mistrust, of course, has been growing for decades. Indeed, Trump capitalizes on it with his incessant attacks on “fake news” and, worse, his latest threats to punish media that offend him.

“We must be accurate, and we must be believed to be accurate,” Bezos maintains. “It’s a bitter pill to swallow, but we are failing on the second requirement. Most people believe the media is biased. Anyone who doesn’t see this is paying scant attention to reality, and those who fight reality lose. Reality is an undefeated champion.”

But does it follow that withholding endorsements will help change that view of bias? Even Bezos equivocates: “By itself, declining to endorse presidential candidates is not enough to move us very far up the trust scale, but it’s a meaningful step in the right direction,” he writes.

His argument raises a host of questions. Would newspaper readers be more likely to believe what they read on the front pages because of the absence of calls to action by editorial boards? Do they now disbelieve those front pages just because of opinionated material on the inside of the papers?

Well, consider some recent headlines from the news section of The Washington Post. On the paper’s website, we find “On Elon Musk’s X, Republicans go viral as Democrats disappear,” “Poop artist strikes again with neo-Nazi tiki torch statue for Trump,” “Trump to speak in Florida amid fallout from comedian’s Puerto Rico insult,” and “Autocracy and ‘enemy from within’ are thrust to center of campaign’s final days,” to name a few.

Certainly, Trump supporters would scarcely warm to such pieces. Would such readers believe the outlet to be impartial? Or would they – when fed a steady diet of such headlines over time – just turn away from the paper, deeming it unfair to their golden boy?

Would they, instead, turn to Fox News? There, they could find “news” pieces headed “Momentum shifts against Kamala Harris just days before election and here’s why,” “Harris caught on hot mic admitting her campaign is struggling with male voters,”  and “Trump merchandise outsells pro-Harris by striking margin, as Election Day draws near.”

Bezos is demonstrably correct that editorialists – and columnists, for that matter – don’t make much of a difference in elections, at least once perceptions are set. More than that, though – and far more troublingly — it seems news coverage doesn’t make all that much of a difference.

Citizens nowadays either find media that suits their biases or they just disregard whatever discomfits them, regardless of whether the information is opinionated. Some of my Trump-backing relatives simply dismiss news coverage, either unaware of journalistic ethics of impartiality or blinded by cable TV so much that they argue that all media outlets have agendas. Thus, none are trustworthy.

Source: AIB

But where Bezos may be wrong is in implying that viewpoint-oriented material isn’t important, that it can’t change minds. Support for the Vietnam War waned on newspaper editorial pages (and on network TV, for that matter) long before widespread public support did, for instance, but eventually the public came round.

The editorialists just got there early.

More recently, editorialists in places such as The New York Times urged withdrawal from Afghanistan as far back at least as 2019. This was while Trump was in office and long before the Biden Administration drove its poorly executed abandonment of the 20-year war in 2021. Even then, at the time of the withdrawal, a substantial minority of Americans – 29 percent – did not think the war was a failure. And a surprisingly low 62 percent thought the war wasn’t worth fighting.

Truth be told, some of us who have worked in both straight news and in viewpoint-oriented journalism don’t look on editorials (or op-eds and other commentaries) as all that useful in changing minds on elections. Partisan loyalties and personalities often dictate there. But the edits are vehicles where insights are distilled, where the flood of facts that hit us daily can be sifted, put in context, and, yes, where smart analysis can lead to judgments.

Indeed, Bezos is not barring opinion writers from the Post pages. There, one nowadays still finds “Only care about your pocketbook? Trump is still the wrong choice,” “The U.S. can learn from other countries’ encounters with fascism,” “The Black vote will signal a change, but what kind?: A turn toward nativism among Black voters would send America in the wrong direction,” and more such hardly Trumpian views.

Moreover, he is not barring editorialists from criticizing candidates. On the same day that he explained his rationale in his owner’s note, Oct. 28, the Post’s editorial board lambasted Trump anew and praised Harris in “The right place to make the best case against Trump.” This was in an editorial, an “official” stance of the paper:

“Vice President Kamala Harris will deliver her closing argument in a speech Tuesday at the Ellipse in D.C.,” the editorialists wrote. “This location, where President Donald Trump incited a mob to ransack the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, is fitting and proper. Mr. Trump’s unprecedented efforts to overturn his defeat in the 2020 election, combined with promises to pardon supporters convicted of crimes committed that day, represent Ms. Harris’s strongest argument for why voters shouldn’t return him to the White House. Mr. Trump has shown no contrition for what happened during the worst assault on the Capitol since the British set it ablaze in 1814. Instead, he’s attempted to rewrite history.”

Is that not a condemnation of Trump, if not an endorsement of Harris?

In fairness to Bezos, a longstanding industry view about editorials (and news coverage) suggests that outlets should not get too far ahead of their readers on controversial matters or they simply will lose them. But that doesn’t mean they can’t lead the crowd or try to.

If Denis Morton or Jenn Sherman push too hard or too fast, Peloton riders will just avoid them, as exercise fans know. But riders do expect to be nudged a bit out of their comfort zones.

Back in the day, my editors at BusinessWeek bristled at the idea of letting focus groups of readers determine our editorial content. The argument was that such readers might not know what they want until they see it, and it was up to writers and editors to provide that. Journalists brought judgment that readers needed.

Similarly, when editors at The Wall Street Journal a few decades ago were asked whom they were editing the paper for, they answered “for ourselves.” Of course, that view seems to have changed under editor Emma Tucker, who has remade the paper. Our user-friendly choice-filled days seem to make such responsiveness necessary.

As it happens, both the BusinessWeek I worked for and the Journal long declined to make election endorsements. At BW, the non-stance stance had to do with whether such an endorsement would reflect the views of then-owner McGraw-Hill and the McGraw family or the editors of the magazine – which would likely differ. In the case of the WSJ, the paper hasn’t endorsed a candidate since 1928 (embarrassingly, it backed Hoover). The Journal did say in a recent editorial, though, that it wished that the GOP had chosen someone other than Trump as its nominee for 2024.

“His rhetoric is often coarse and divisive,” the journal wrote. “His praise for the likes of Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping is offensive, and betrays his view that he can by force of personality cut favorable deals with them. He indulges mediocrities who flatter him, and his attempt to overturn the 2020 election was disgraceful. These columns preferred any other Republican nominee.”

Hardly warm praise for Trump, whom the writers called “flawed.” But this fell short of an endorsement of Harris.

For its part, The Washington Post until 1976 had mostly avoided endorsements. Even in the critical 1972 election of Richard Nixon, the editorial board stayed neutral.

“In talking about the choice of a President of the United States, what is a newspaper’s proper role?,” the Post board wrote then, as noted recently by current publisher William Lewis. “Our own answer is that we are, as our masthead proclaims, an independent newspaper, and that with one exception (our support of President Eisenhower in 1952), it has not been our tradition to bestow formal endorsement upon presidential candidates. We can think of no reason to depart from that tradition this year.”

Source: The Atlantic

But, given the starkly different options today and the high stakes of this election, is there not reason to think that some smart judgment in an editorial would be useful? The editors at The Atlantic this year decided, for only the fifth time in the magazine’s history, to make an endorsement. Calling Trump “one of the most personally malignant and politically dangerous candidates in American history,” it backed his opponents in 2016 and 2020.

“This year, Trump is even more vicious and erratic than in the past, and the ideas of his closest advisers are more extreme,” the editors wrote. “Trump has made clear that he would use a second term to consolidate unprecedented power in his own hands, punishing adversaries and pursuing a far-right agenda that most Americans don’t want. ‘We believe that this election is a turning-point in our history,’ the magazine prophesied correctly when it endorsed Abraham Lincoln in 1860. This year’s election is another.”

Bezos, along with peers at papers including the Los Angeles Times, the Minnesota Star Tribune, USA Today, The Tampa Bay Times and the Gannett, McClatchy and Alden chains, have taken a different course. Gannett argued that “readers don’t want us to tell them what to think,” as a Poynter Institute analyst reported. The others offered variations on the same theme.

An editor whose paper, The Oregonian, took a different route suggested to Poynter that trying to stay above the fray sometimes doesn’t play well with readers. “Our decision to endorse in this race reverses our policy in 2012 and 2016,” Therese Bottomly said in explaining her paper’s Harris support. “We heard the community’s disappointment over our past non-endorsements loud and clear. Particularly at this precipitous moment, we recognize both the privilege and obligation we have to advocate for the candidate who can best lead our country forward.”

Plenty of folks have been disappointed with Bezos’s decision to sit on the fence this year, with many suggesting he was feeling cowed by ever-increasing threats by Trump to punish his critics. Bezos drew heat from within and without.

Eighteen columnists signed a dissenting column against his choice, calling it “a terrible mistake.” Watergate reporters Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward called the move “disappointing, especially this late in the electoral process.” And former Washington Post executive editor Marty Baron said in a post on X: “This is cowardice with democracy as its casualty.”

As The Guardian reported, the cartoon team at the paper even published a dark image protesting the non-endorsement decision. This was a play on the “democracy dies in darkness” slogan that the Post adopted in 2017, five years after Bezos bought the paper. Author Stephen King and former congresswoman and Trump critic Liz Cheney announced they were cancelling their Post subscriptions, just as more than 200,000 digital subscribers reportedly have.

In the end, this contretemps may amount to just another painful blow to a declining industry. But it could also be a distressing harbinger of the rising threat America faces if the public makes the wrong choice next Tuesday.

Sound and fury

But, rather than signifying nothing, it is most revealinG

Macbeth, a general in one of Shakespeare’s more famous armies, offers a profound insight in Act V of his renowned play. “It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing,” he says.

As the presidential election race tightens, we are hearing many such furious tales from Donald J. Trump.

Consider his “wildly false personal attacks” on the vice president, as The New York Times put it. Trump labeled Harris a “low IQ individual” and suggested baselessly that she has a drinking problem and may be abusing drugs. In a typical case of what the psychologists call projection, he said she was not “mentally or physically able” to be president. He said the sitting VP, former senator and former California State Attorney General was “lazy as hell.”

Will these racist dog-whistles play well with his base? Will the billionaires atop Trumpworld and the white working class and rural folks on the bottom cheer him on for them, seeing them as more evidence that Trump is the ultimate anti-politician? That he speaks like they do?

There’s no doubt that some part of Trump’s base warms to the canards he hurls at Harris, especially since he has so little else to attack her for. But deeply ingrained racism and sexism can’t be the whole story that underlay some 46.3 percent of the electorate’s sentiments.

There’s likely something even more insidious and troubling at play.

Prof. Emeritus John Hibbing, source: The Daily Nebraskan

A well-regarded political scientist who recently retired from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln sheds some light on what animates Trumpers. Prof. John Hibbing, author of The Securitarian Personality: What Really Motivates Trump’s Base and Why It Matters for the Post-Trump Era, points to fundamental splits that divide American voters.

For Trumpers, the key issues are immigration, gun rights, the death penalty and defense spending. For Harris supporters, they are racial justice, healthcare, women’s rights and income inequality.

Hibbing developed this taxonomy from his observations, his work with focus groups and from a national survey that included more than 1,000 Trump backers. He argues that those in the Trump base crave a particular form of security that revolves around their key issues. Trump plays to their longings brilliantly.

Trumpers, Hibbing contends, feel threatened by those they regard as outsiders, groups that include welfare cheats, unpatriotic athletes, norm violators, non-English speakers, religious and racial minorities, and people from other countries. Their key aim – which allows them to disregard Trump’s immorality, dishonesty and corruption – is to elect someone they believe will shield them, their families and their dominant cultural group from these “outsider” threats.

If Hibbing’s framework is correct, what Trumpers crave is a strongman. And Trump’s well-honed image as an alpha male checks most of the boxes for them. Perverse as it may be, moreover, his prolific sexual history (including assaults) and his recent bizarre comments about Arnold Palmer’s genitals may only reinforce that macho image.

John F. Kelly, source: The New York Times

Indeed, one can only wonder whether recent comments about whether Trump is a “fascist” play well to the Trumpers Hibbing describes — that such claims may be counterproductive to those making them. Trump’s former White House chief of staff John F. Kelly, a retired Marine general, told The New York Times that Trump’s desire for power fits the fascist label.

And Mark T. Esper, who served as Trump’s secretary of defense, amplified that. On CNN, he said that “it’s hard to say” Trump does not fall into the category of a fascist. Moreover, as The Washington Post reported, that followed a warning from retired Gen. Mark A. Milley, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, in a new book that the former president is “fascist to the core.”

Such sentiments give credence to the recent report in The Atlantic about Trump’s dissatisfaction with generals who bridled at his dictatorial impulses. “I need the kind of generals that Hitler had,” Trump said in a private conversation in the White House, the magazine reported.

But will enough Americans be alarmed by such comments, troubled by such judgments by people once close to Trump? Will most see Trump’s seeming “strength” as dangerous, unlike some Trumpers? And, more to the point, will they see Harris as a better alternative?

Of course, some may just play down or ignore such sentiments. Consider the apologists at The Wall Street Journal, who seem oblivious to Trump’s tsarist ambitions. The editorialists there invoke American checks and balances to suggest he would be reined in. By contrast, The New York Times warns that Trump’s “inner circle has been purged of people who say no. In a second Trump term, the secretary of state would not come from Exxon, and the secretary of the Treasury would not come from Goldman Sachs. The smart — and courageous — people have left the room.”

Certainly, some will warm to Trump’s tyrannical inclinations and his latest barbs. But this last-dash sound and fury could also cost him. Sensible voters may respond to Harris’s arguments that Trump’s vileness – the scorching and divisive language and lies that come so naturally to him – should be put well behind us. After all, does anyone really want more of this for the next four years?

Still, with most voters likely to have cemented their impressions of both candidates — and with many having already voted — it’s unclear how much difference the closing-days rhetoric will matter. Each candidate now wants mainly to mobilize their bases and, perhaps, chip away at the support of the other.

For her part, Harris aims to undermine Trump’s strongman image. Thus, her attack on him for being “weak.” Harris challenged Trump recently for refusing to release a report on his health, sit for a “60 Minutes” interview and commit to another presidential debate – all of which she did.

“It makes you wonder: Why does his staff want him to hide away?” she asked the crowd at a rally in Greenville, N.C. “One must question: Are they afraid that people will see that he is too weak and unstable to lead America?”

And she has embraced the “fascist” label for him. “We must take very seriously those folks who knew him best,” she said in a CNN town hall, referring to the numerous former Trump advisers who have broken with him.

“Do you think Donald Trump is a fascist?” host Anderson Cooper asked Harris. “Yes, I do. Yes, I do,” she replied.

She added that voters care about “not having a president of the United States who admires dictators and is a fascist.”

Strong charges, of course. But Harris is also waving a red flag about Trump’s mental acuity. And, given his increasingly erratic speech, her criticisms may carry weight with some voters still mulling over their choice.

Source: The Conversation

Trump’s mental fitness has long been in doubt and, at 78, it’s as reasonable to question that as it was to question President Biden’s sharpness. Lately, Trump has served himself ill in this regard with the meandering talks he calls his “weave.”

He infamously cut off questions at a recent town hall outside Philadelphia and instead swayed to music on stage for 30 minutes. He bobbed his head through the Village People’s “Y.M.C.A.,” swayed to Rufus Wainwright’s “Hallelujah,” watched a Sinead O’Connor video, rocked along to Elvis, watched the crowd during “Rich Men North of Richmond” and then, finally, left the stage to shake hands on his way out.

More recently, his campaign canceled at a virtual town hall he was scheduled to take part in, suggesting he is tiring. Reporters have noted that his energy is flagging at some events, and he’s lost his way verbally – never his strength anyway.

He discussed the porosity of limestone in Washington, D.C., as he complained about vandalism. He referred to his so-called Front Row Joes — devoted superfans he often points out during his rallies — as Front Row Jacks, then corrected himself by calling them “the Front Row Jacks and Joes.” He got Harris’s gender wrong in a comment about vice presidential nominee Tim Walz. And, at a McDonald’s, he couldn’t recall the word “fryer.”

 “Those French fries were good. They were right out of the, uh — they were right out of whatever the hell they make them out of,” Trump said.

As The New York Times reported on Oct. 17, Trump described mail-in ballots as “so corrupt,” reviving one of his false attacks on the 2020 election results. Then, he shared his thoughts about when he watched SpaceX, Elon Musk’s spaceflight company, fly a rocket back onto its launch site.

Such bizarre off-script comments gain attention, for sure. These “flashes of controversy and oddity,” as The Wall Street Journal described them, have spawned headlines and airtime. Perhaps his followers simply disregard them, choosing instead to hear about how much he plans to deport immigrants and otherwise protect them from various threats.

But one has to wonder, do we really want a president who has trouble finishing thoughts as he practices “the weave?” And might geriatricians have other descriptions for such rambling, with characterizations that are more medical and psychological? One must ask: how would incoherence — especially when it’s vicious, racist and vindictive — serve us for the next four years?

The vulgarian strikes anew

Donald Trump plumbs new depths in taSTELESSNESS

Trump and Arnold Palmer, source: People Magazine

In 1988, the cofounders of the now-defunct Spy magazine came up with a memorable description for Donald J. Trump. He long hated the moniker they had for him:  “short-fingered vulgarian.”

But the label stuck. Veterans of the 2016 campaign will recall how the epithet figured into that race. Marco Rubio even criticized Trump’s small hands, saying: “And you know what they say about guys with small hands.”

Crude? No doubt. But Rubio was just descending to Trump’s level – it was his response to Trump’s “little Rubio” crack. And it is all part of a coarse style of politics that Trump has pioneered and perfected, and that he is repeating.

After a Saturday rally in the Pennsylvania hometown of golf great Arnold Palmer, for instance, Trump once again dominated the headlines and the airwaves by making a crude comment about the deceased champion’s genitals.

“Arnold Palmer was all man, and I say that in all due respect to women,” Trump said at the Latrobe gathering. “This is a guy that was all man…. When he took the showers with other pros, they came out of there. They said, ‘Oh my God. That’s unbelievable,’” Trump said with a laugh. “I had to say. We have women that are highly sophisticated here, but they used to look at Arnold as a man.”

You gotta hand it to Trump for that seemingly idle spur-of-the-moment crack. Not only did it garner attention – at which Trump is a master – but it confirmed the views of many of Trump’s devotees about their guy. To them, he is a) refreshingly as blunt and coarse as they are, b) virile enough to salute another’s machismo, and c) the kind of man’s man they want in the White House.

Harris, source: The Appeal

Was this an indirect dig at the idea of a woman as president? A sexist statement that suggests Vice President Kamala Harris could not, as chief executive, command the levers of power as well as the macho Trump could? Well, when a narcissist talks, he generally talks about himself one way or another, and with Trump, a passionate golfer, it’s not a stretch to believe that he wanted to bask in the reflected glory of Palmer, to have voters think of him in the same boorish way.

Ironically, Palmer, who died in September 2016, found Trump appalling. Palmer’s daughter, Peg Palmer, in 2018 recalled a moment when her father saw Trump on television during the 2016 presidential campaign, as The Palm Beach Post reported.

“My dad and I were at home in Latrobe. He died in September, so this was before the election,” she said in a conversation with author Thomas Hauser. “The television was on. Trump was talking. And my dad made a sound of disgust — like ‘uck’ or ‘ugg’ — like he couldn’t believe the arrogance and crudeness of this man who was the nominee of the political party that he believed in. Then he said, ‘He’s not as smart as we thought he was’ and walked out of the room. What would my dad think of Donald Trump today? I think he’d cringe.”

Palmer, she said, “had no patience for people who are dishonest and cheat. My dad was disciplined. He wanted to be a good role model. He was appalled by Trump’s lack of civility and what he began to see as Trump’s lack of character.”

Trump’s focus on manhood is hardly new, though. He has long been preoccupied with genital matters.

As Jezebel reported, when Trump’s former aide Stephanie Grisham wrote in her 2021 book, “I’ll Take Your Questions Now,”  that porn star Stormy Daniels said in an interview that Trump’s penis looked like a “toadstool,” the former president called Grisham “to assure her that his penis was, in fact, not shaped like a toadstool or small.”

Rubio, source: AP via Politico

Indeed, in 2016, he defended his endowment against Rubio’s comments during a primary presidential debate. “Look at those hands, are they small hands?” Trump said at the time, raising them for the audience to evaluate. “And, he referred to my hands – ‘if they’re small, something else must be small.’ I guarantee you there’s no problem. I guarantee.”

Of course, it’s an open question whether Trump’s continuing coarseness will deepen his problems with women voters. No doubt, many of his followers – male and female – will warm to his crudeness or dismiss it as Trump being Trump. But, for more thoughtful women, his vulgarity may confirm anew their worst senses about the man.

Many may recall that the thrice-married often philandering felon is on the hook for more than $90 million after juries found him liable for sexually abusing and defaming writer E. Jean Carroll, for instance. Indeed, Trump’s vileness may remind some that at least 26 women have accused Trump of sexual misconduct, including assault, since the 1970s. His late ex-wife, Ivana, even accused him in a divorce deposition of raping her in a 1989 fit of rage (though she later amended her comment to suggest she felt “violated,” but not criminally raped).

Trump’s problems with women go beyond a sense of decency and his having the “morals of an alley cat,” as President Joe Biden memorably suggested in their debate.

An October New York Times/Siena College national poll found Harris ahead with 56 percent of the likely vote among women now, with Trump getting just 40 percent. That is similar to the breakdown of the final vote in 2020, when Biden garnered 57 percent of the female vote to Trump’s 42 percent, according to exit polls, though Trump appears to have captured a slender majority of the white-woman vote that year.

Indeed, his overall gender gap has driven Trump recently to reach out to women. He appeared in an all-woman town hall in Georgia aired on Fox last week, where he declared himself to be the “father of IVF,” praised Alabama Sen. Katie Britt as a “fantastically attractive person,” and parried a sharp question about his abortion stance: “Why is the government involved in women’s basic rights?”

As the BBC reported, Trump replied by walking the tightrope he has maintained for much of the campaign, taking credit for ending nationwide abortion rights, while also saying abortion policy should be left to the states. Democrats have hammered away at the idea that a patchwork of policies could emerge from such an approach, forcing women to travel for abortions.

At times, Trump has sounded at best as condescending to women. Consider his remarks at a September gathering in Pennsylvania: “You will no longer be abandoned, lonely or scared. You will no longer be in danger. … You will no longer have anxiety from all of the problems our country has today,” Trump said. “You will be protected, and I will be your protector.”

He added that “Women will be healthy, happy, confident and free. You will no longer be thinking about abortion.”

For some women quizzed by the Associated Press about his comments, Trump hit just the wrong notes in that session.

Debbie Walsh, source: NJ Monthly

“This notion that women need to be protected, that women are somehow weak or vulnerable — this sort of protectionist, patronizing tone … I think for a lot of women will just add to that sense of he doesn’t understand their lives, that he doesn’t understand where they are on a whole host of issues,” said Debbie Walsh, the director of the Center for American Women and Politics at the Eagleton Institute of Politics at Rutgers University.

And Jennifer Lawless, chair of the politics department at the University of Virginia, added: “This kind of language is just more evidence that Donald Trump is out of touch with American women… Not only is the sentiment paternalistic, but the fact that he uttered these words while simultaneously berating women for caring about reproductive rights is stunning.”

To be sure, Trump’s latest bawdiness may just be lost over time, replaced in coming days by new and fresh rambling vulgarity. At the same rally where he saluted Palmer, he called Harris a “shit vice president,” as his crowd roared its approval. If he goes still further down the low road he’s been on, who knows what sort of denigration he might come up with?

The bigger question is: when will Americans wake up to just how perverse – in almost all ways – this candidate is? When will they be as revolted as Palmer was?

When doing the right thing goes tragically awry

Sinwar’s survival led to much death. Will his death do the opposite?

Yuval Bitton holds a poster of his deceased nephew; source: allisraelnews

Dr. Yuval Bitton, an Israeli dentist, was working in the Nafcha Prison in 2004 when an inmate complained to him about neck pain and balance issues. Bitton thought the prisoner was suffering from a stroke, so he and a colleague took him to an Israeli hospital, where the man was diagnosed with a brain abscess and quickly operated on.

The prisoner, Yahya Sinwar, was serving four life sentences for murder after killing at least four Palestinians he believed were collaborators. But, after 22 years in prison, he and more than 1,000 others were released in 2011 in a deal for Hamas to free an Israeli soldier, Gilad Shalit, after five years as a captive. Sinwar promised to repay Bitton for saving his life.

Sinwar, a psychopath who killed some of his victims with his own hands and was known among Palestinians as the Butcher of Khan Younis, found a perverse way to thank Bitton and Israel. He masterminded the terrorist attacks that killed some 1,200 in southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, including Bitton’s 38-year-old nephew, Tamir Adar, and the capture of more than 240 hostages.

Of course, Sinwar now is dead, killed by Israeli soldiers in a gun battle in Rafah in southern Gaza. Does this mark the beginning of the end in at least one of Israel’s battlegrounds?

Source: ABC News

“To the Hamas terrorists I say: your leaders are fleeing, and they will be eliminated,” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in a televised address. Speaking to Palestinians in Gaza, he added: “Hamas will no longer rule Gaza. This is the beginning of the day after Hamas, and this is an opportunity for you, the residents of Gaza, to finally break free from its tyranny.”

But will Gazans take heed? Will they now turn on the rudderless remnant of Hamas hiding among them? Will Palestinian mothers beg their sons to desert? After tens of thousands have been killed, will the nearly 2 million remaining Gazans find ways to seek peace?

As Israeli soldiers comb through the wreckage that is Gaza, will residents disgusted by Hamas tyranny guide them to the many miles of tunnels where, perhaps, thousands of remaining Hamas terrorists hide? Will Gazans guide Israelis to the places where, perhaps, some hostages from the Oct. 7th attacks still survive? Some 97 remain unaccounted for.

Some Gazans have at least turned gunmen away from schools and other shelter areas, according to The New York Times. “We will quickly kick anyone who has a gun or a rifle out of this school,” said Saleh al-Kafarneh, 62, who lives at another government school in Deir al Balah and said he locked the gates at night. “We don’t allow anyone to ruin life here, or cause any strike against those civilians and families.”

As the newspaper reported, Israel has increased the rate of its airstrikes on schools turned shelters to target what it calls Hamas command-and-control centers. It says militants have “cynically exploited” these sensitive sites, including UN areas, as locations for planning operations.

Source: The Washington Institute for Near East Policy

Embedding its fighters in such areas – and thus spawning killings of civilians in scenes broadcast around the world —  fits Sinwar’s sadomasochistic and sociopathic vision. As The Wall Street Journal reported, the terrorist leader infamously pointed to civilian losses as “necessary sacrifices,” mentioning national-liberation conflicts in places such as Algeria, where hundreds of thousands of people died fighting for independence from France.

In an April 11 letter to the now-dead Hamas political leader Ismail Haniyeh after three of Haniyeh’s adult sons were killed by an Israeli airstrike, Sinwar wrote that their deaths and those of other Palestinians would “infuse life into the veins of this nation, prompting it to rise to its glory and honor.”

One has only to watch cable news coverage – and read much of global print coverage – to see how Sinwar’s views of turning his people into martyrs has turned Israel into a pariah in many quarters. No doubt, the carnage that has taken so many Gazan lives has cost Israel much of the world’s sympathy, with at least 14 condemnatory votes in the UN last year alone. And demonstrators on lots of college campuses, like useful idiots, have fallen in line behind Sinwar’s lead.

In addition to isolating Israel in much of the world, Sinwar triggered a seven-front war with his invasion of the country. Months ago, Netanyahu listed the battlegrounds as IranHamas in GazaHezbollah in Lebanon, the Houthis in Yemen, Shia militants in Iraq, militant groups in Syria as well as Palestinian fighters in the West Bank.

This monstrous figure’s legacy is astonishing. But the bloodshed surely will not end with his death alone. Indeed, Netanyahu made this clear in his address:

“The mass murderer who murdered thousands of Israelis and kidnapped hundreds of our citizens was eliminated today by our heroic soldiers,” he said. “And today, as we promised to do, we came to account with him. Today, evil has suffered a heavy blow, but the task before us is not yet complete.” Netanyahu added that the war “is not over yet.”

Certainly, beheading the snake marks a major turn. It could hasten an end to some of the worst fighting — or so some optimists are arguing.

Source: The Boston Globe

“This moment gives us an opportunity to finally end the war in Gaza, and it must end such that Israel is secure, the hostages are released, the suffering in Gaza ends, and the Palestinian people can realize their right to dignity, security, freedom, and self-determination,” Vice President Kamala Harris said. “And it is time for the day after to begin without Hamas in power.”

Just how long this “opportunity” will take to realize, however, is fraught. Much turns now on how Israel and its neighbors react.

“Sinwar’s elimination could provide the Israeli government with several off-ramps and openings to start to end the war in Gaza,” argues Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib, a resident senior fellow with the Scowcroft Middle East Security Initiative at the Atlantic Council’s Middle East Programs. “The chaos within Hamas following Sinwar’s death may provide a chance to exploit uncertainties and divisions to expedite the release of the remaining Israeli hostages and the implementation of a general stand-down and demobilization within Hamas.”

Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib, source: The Times of Israel

Alkhatib, who grew up in Gaza City and advocates coexistence, offers a few suggestions:

“Israel, Arab nations, and the United States should now offer mass amnesty for remaining Hamas members who lay down their arms and stop fighting. They should also offer financial rewards to those who either turn in Israeli hostages or provide information leading to the whereabouts of remaining abductees,” he contends. “Israel should make clear its intention to pull out of Gaza and avoid the reoccupation of the Strip in the immediate future. And Gaza should be opened up for Arab, international, and Palestinian Authority figures and professionals to come in and begin stabilizing the war-torn Strip to initiate the ‘day after.’”

But he also raises troubling questions, such as: Who can Israel and Arab nations negotiate with when it comes to Gaza and Hamas’s future role (should there be one)? Who within Hamas in Gaza will control the issue of Israeli hostages, and who could command enough authority to make the group’s rank-and-file members release the hostages? Will Hamas splinter into small, disconnected cells inside Gaza, or can an interim leader emerge to keep the organization together?

For now, Sinwar’s death prompted some scattered celebrations in Israel. “Beachgoers in Tel Aviv erupted in cheers,” The Washington Post reported. “Families of soldiers killed in Gaza posted videos of themselves dancing with pictures of their lost relatives. Flag-waving celebrants filled a traffic circle in Carmel.”

But no real celebration can emerge until surviving hostages come home and the fighting ends. Most Israelis crave nothing more than peace and the lengths they go to to save lives are extraordinary at times — both of their countrymen (see Shalit) and of others.

Bitton, the dentist most responsible for saving Sinwar, has said he doesn’t regret saving the former prisoner, even if his death years ago may have spared Israel of so much agony since. Part of that has to do with the obligations every doctor has to save lives, he said.

“Second, these are our values both as Jews and Israelis. We aren’t taught to hate our enemies,” Bitton said. “We don’t desire vengeance. We know the righteousness of our path, why we are here and what we need to do in order to survive.”

He harked back to a visit to Israel by Egyptian President Anwar Sadat in 1979.

“I was a 13-year-old boy,” Bitton said. “I stood by the side of the road waving the Israeli and Egyptian flags together with my entire school. We cheered the person who up until then had been our greatest enemy. This was the man who had said that he was ready to sacrifice a million Egyptian soldiers to destroy Israel. But when he spoke to us in the language of peace, we responded in kind.”

Over several years, Bitton spent hundreds of hours talking with Sinwar. The terrorist used his time in prison to study Israel in depth, often taking courses in areas such as history through an open-studies program. The conversations gave Bitton exceptional insights into the thinking in terrorist groups.

In 2007, Bitton joined the prison service’s intelligence branch.

“I became the intelligence officer of Ketziot Prison, where 3,000 terrorists were being held. The entirety of the Hamas leadership in Yehudah and Shomron was in Ketziot at the time,” Bitton said. “After that, I had a number of other positions including as head of the terror department. I was responsible for the intelligence that was collected from the 12,000 security prisoners in the system. “

In 2015, he was promoted to head the entire intelligence division, a position he held for four and a half years. He left the service in 2022.

 “So, although we don’t hate our enemies, we also know who they are and what they are capable of,” Bitton said.

Sinwar, of course, was capable of astonishing savagery as well as indifference to the sufferings of his own people. He was part of a culture of martydom that has long hobbled Palestinian efforts toward coexistence.

Tragically, Sinwar’s life made an enormous and awful difference. Surely, his death will have a substantial impact. But until and unless his culture’s glorification of death is shattered, his horrific legacy will live on.

Foul language, debasement and politics

Just how far down can we go?

Source: Forward Kentucky

When the sketch comedy show “In Living Color” debuted on Fox in 1990, it introduced America to a wonderful phrase, “Clutch the pearls.” And, as our culture has continued to descend toward some unfathomable bottom, pearl-clutching has become ubiquitous, moving beyond shocked high-society ladies.

So, gentle reader, kindly indulge me while I engage in a bit of it (though I own no pearls).

Actor Sam Elliott, known for portraying cowboys and other men’s men, has just broken some new ground in this area in a fresh ad for Kamala Harris, available here:

In his deep, sonorous tones, Elliott says the vice president has “more courage, more honor, more guts” than Donald J. Trump has ever had. And he tells the bros — presumably the targets of the ad — to shake off anything holding them back. “If it’s the woman thing, it’s time to get over that … it’s time to be a man and vote for a woman.”

Will it work? Who knows? It takes a lot to cut through the clutter, especially with young male voters. Some 36 percent of likely male voters between 18 and 29 favor Trump, compared with only 23 percent of young women, according to the Harvard Youth Poll. While such results suggest that Harris enjoys a commanding lead among young people of both sexes, chipping away at Trump’s support among the bros can only help her.

But one thing about the ad is a bit unsettling — and here comes my pearl-clutching. “Are we really going back down that same f—-ing broken road or are we moving forward …?,” Elliott asks. So, unless there’s some editing, that ad — produced by a Republican anti-Trump group, The Lincoln Project — will not run on network TV.

Perhaps the language — including a word many of us have been known to use at times — is just fine, given the places on social media where the ad runs. That’s where the target demographic is, after all.

Howard Stern and Harris, source: Rolling Stone

Indeed, such demographics and all others are being keenly pursued by Harris and her vice presidential nominee. Tim Walz. That’s why Harris has appeared in such media as Howard Stern’s satellite radio show, “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert” and the Call Her Daddy podcast and Walz opted for “Jimmy Kimmel Live.” To be sure, Harris has also sought out the older demographics by sitting for a “60 Minutes” interview, but she wants the younger folks, too.

Still, the unsettling thing about the Elliott ad is that it’s part of a continuing debasement of political culture. Coarse language is just a part of that, a symbol of it.

Sadly, we can lay the blame for this squarely on Trump. This process began, of course, in 2016 with Trump’s juvenile nicknaming of his opponents — Crazy Hillary, Birdbrain for Nikki Haley, Pocahontas for Elizabeth Warren, etc. And that has continued with Crazy Kamala, Comrade Kamala and Tampon Tim. Trump is also known for his coarseness in his rallies, dropping f-bombs with regularity. “Let’s indict the motherf—-er,” he infamously said of Biden at a California GOP meeting last year.

To be sure, some Democrats have aired once-private vulgarities in public, too. In 2019, then newly elected Michigan Rep. Rashida Tlaib in vowed to “impeach the motherf—-er,” referring to Trump, in a meeting of the liberal group MoveOn.org.

And, as reported by The Washington Post, Harris has been known to be proud of her proficiency in profanity in private — but rarely in public. Last May, though, she bluntly described her thoughts about breaking barriers in a conversation at the Asian Pacific American Institute for Congressional Studies.

“We have to know that sometimes people will open the door for you and leave it open,” Harris said. “Sometimes they won’t, and then you need to kick that f—ing door down.”

But Trump and his followers degrade language in public on a regular basis. As president, he referred to African nations as “s—holes” and called Joe Biden a “son of a b—-” and, earlier, famously boasted of grabbing women “by the p—-,” of course. His supporters have gleefully echoed his vileness at rallies, wearing T-shirts that say “Biden sucks, Kamala swallows.” Trump’s crowds seem to exult in the freedom he gives them to act, well, like a “basket of deplorables,” as Hillary Clinton memorably put it.

Source: NPR

As the Post pointed out, there is a long history of presidents swearing in private, and maybe a growing level of acceptance for public profanity from leaders. But now Americans are hearing a woman in Harris’s position using unbecoming language, an unfamiliar reality, according to presidential historian Tevi Troy.

“There’s the question of whether it’s appropriate for a president to be cussing. Then there’s the second question of whether it’s considered ladylike to be cussing,” said Troy, who has studied presidents and profanity. “So she’s operating in both spheres, and we’re in uncharted territory.”

Serge Kovaleski, Trump; source: KTLA

This goes beyond public language, though. After all, using decent language — in any setting — is just a matter of showing respect for others. And Trump is a master of disrespect. Recall how he mocked a disabled reporter, Serge Kovaleski, by mimicking his physical challenges.

Trump seems to delight his crowds by waxing profane about many people— Blacks, gays, immigrants, non-Christians of all sorts. In her criticism, Clinton derided Trump followers as racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic and Islamaphobic, and those labels likely still apply to many of them. The attacks work for Trump.

Trump and his running mate, JD Vance, have displayed extraordinary disrespect for legal Haitian immigrants, for instance, in their attacks on residents of Springfield, Ohio. Their demonization and villainization works to whip up fear and racism among his white followers, as it confirms their sense of superiority by invoking tropes such as the eating of household pets.

“The power of such baseless accusations by Trump and Vance lies not in their factual basis, but in their resonance with long-standing racial fears about Black and brown people,” Princeton Prof. Aisha M. Beliso-De Jesús writes in Time Magazine. “These anxieties transcend the specific moment of misinformation. Rather they tap into a fears rooted in Christian bias and cultural stigma and then perpetuated by law enforcement, animal rights groups, politicians, and white communities who see non-white immigrants as existential threats to the purity of American neighborhoods.”

Source: Black Agenda Report

Ever since Trump derided southern border-crossers as criminals and rapists in 2016, he has found a ready market among fearful white followers. One hears of people in lily-white areas rushing out to buy guns to protect themselves from the invading hordes Trump has described.

“Fear, like hope, can be very motivating and is not inherently bad. The challenge is to identify when fear is being used deceptively,” Dolores Albarracin, a professor of psychology, business, and medicine at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, said in an American Psychological Association piece in 2020. “For example, intentional distortion of evidence is within the realm of disinformation and often foments fear for political purposes.”

Certainly, the denigration of Haitian immigrants falls into the latter category. Trump campaign lies about the pets were denied by Republican Gov. Mike DeWine and local Springfield, Ohio, officials, but Trump followers breezed right on by the facts. “Bomb threats, school closings, rallies, and more have come at the cost of misinformation and baseless claims,” the Columbus Dispatch reported. “Associating eating pets with immigrants is often considered a longstanding trope that exposes racism and discrimination.”

Such cultural debasement by Trump extends to the media and other institutions, as well, of course. The former president has long excoriated the media and his recent refusal to appear on “60 Minutes,” for fear that his misstatements would be called out by fact-checkers, just underscores that.

He has also demeaned the legal system (and not exclusively over his 34 felony convictions, as well as the $88 million in judgments he must pay a woman he raped, E. Jean Carroll). And he has similarly discredited the FBI, intelligence agencies and the military.

Of course, if Trump wins on Nov. 5, we can expect more of the same. If he loses — and if the GOP consigns him to the political dustbin — perhaps we can hobble back to a culture of normalcy. The Elliott video for Harris is not an official campaign ad and it’s highly unlikely Harris would greenlight such language in forthcoming ads. We could also expect that a President Harris would likely keep her salty language behind closed doors.

Celebrating the best of American culture is a lot of what Harris is about. Trump is all about something else entirely.

Catching the antisemitism of the day

Ta-Nehisi Coates comes up short after his visit to Israel

Shylock, source: Smithsonian Magazine

In 1596, Shakespeare caught the antisemitic spirit of the age with “The Merchant of Venice.” His Shylock lends money to a Christian, Antonio, on the condition that the moneylender can slice off a pound of Antonio’s flesh if he defaults. When Antonio fails to pay, he’s spared the knife only because another character argues that the security was about flesh, not blood, and thus Shylock couldn’t collect.

Still, Shylock comes up even shorter. He is charged with conspiring against a Venetian citizen and his fortune is seized. He gets to keep half his estate by converting to Christianity – something his daughter separately does when she runs off with a Christian man.

The Nazis loved the play. More than 50 productions were mounted in Germany between 1933 and 1939, Smithsonian Magazine reported.

Ta Nehisi Coates, source: CBS

Today, we see a similar phenomenon with a celebrated modern author, Ta-Nehisi Coates. Though his work is nowhere near as distinguished as The Bard’s, Coates reflects today’s widespread antisemitic sensibility with his latest offering, “The Message.” And, like Shakespeare, his work is generating a lot of heat. The book “is a masterpiece of warped arguments and moral confusion,” argues one critical writer, Coleman Hughes. Others differ, of course.

Coates offers a central chapter in the book about his visit in the summer of 2023 to the West Bank. There, he writes, he saw cisterns on the roofs of Palestinian homes that collected rainwater that the householders depend on. He contrasted the primitive plumbing with Israeli settlements on the West Bank where “you can find country clubs furnished with large swimming pools.”

To Coates, the different systems smacked of the segregated South. “On seeing these cisterns, it occurred to me that Israel had advanced beyond the Jim Crow South and segregated not just the pools and fountains but the water itself,” he wrote. “And more, it occurred to me that there was still one place on the planet—­under American patronage—that resembled the world that my parents were born into.” 

His writing offers what a reviewer in The New Yorker called Coates’s version of moral clarity. It seeks to join the struggles of brown Palestinians with Black Americans, echoing views that have long been interlaced with antisemitism.

Jay Caspian Kang, source: Character Media

“Palestinians and Black Americans share a profound connection, and it is the duty of people of conscience who would oppose Jim Crow to oppose the oppression of Palestinians,” reviewer Jay Caspian Kang writes. “The struggles cannot be disentangled and written off as foreign or complicated.”

Indeed, Coates seeks to simplify the long pained Middle Eastern conflict. And he gives the century-old tensions an odd – and strained — racial cast. Coates “is casting off what he sees as the white standards of writing and its addiction to ‘complexity’ and stating, instead, his version of moral clarity,” Kang writes.

Really now — “white standards of writing”? Where might one find such things?

For his part, Coates describes his book as an effort to debunk the complexities he claims that journalists invoke to obscure Israel’s occupation, as The Free Press reports. The writer complained in an interview with New York magazine that the argument that the conflict was “complicated” was “horseshit.” That was just how defenders of slavery and segregation described these plagues a century ago. “It’s complicated,” he said, “when you want to take something from somebody.”

Never mind how much Palestinian terrorists have sought – over decades and by the bloodiest means possible – to obliterate an entire state. Never mind that just a year ago, such terrorists raped, murdered and pillaged, demonstrating a savagery far exceeding the treatments West Bank residents get, even in the admittedly lopsided Israeli military courts.

In fairness, Coates visited months before the ghoulish violence of Oct. 7th last year, and before the Gaza and Lebanese wars. His 10-day trip was his first in-depth encounter with the conflict. As The Jerusalem Post reports, half of the trip was guided by writers associated with the Palestine Festival of Literature, or Palfest, and the other half was led by Israeli left-wing activists associated with the anti-occupation group Breaking the Silence.

Clearly, he was not deeply immersed in the area and that showed. But, even given his shallow — and perhaps heavily propagandized — acquaintance with the issues, one has to wonder how he could be so blind to the reasons Israelis fenced off the Palestinian territories. Was he that ignorant of the Intifadas of 1987 and 2000, when thousands on both sides died?

Was he that unaware of the infamous Passover Massacre of 2002, when terrorists killed 30 people in the Israeli city of Netanya. Did he not know that this spurred the reoccupation of the West Bank and spawned the fences? Was he blind to the very many peace deals that Palestinians walked away from?

Simplicity and simple-mindedness are two different things. A journalist – and Coates is foremost a reporter – needs to bring a basic understanding of history to his work. Just looking around doesn’t cut it. But Coates seems to prefer simple-mindedness.

Tony Dokoupil, source: CBS

Since his book came out, the press has been filled with a good bit of argument over sharp questions that a CBS journalist, Tony Dokoupil, posed to Coates on Sept. 30 on the usually light-fare CBS Mornings show. The reporter challenged Coates’s one-sided view, mainly for its gaps:

 “Why leave out that Israel is surrounded by countries that want to eliminate it?,” Dokoupil asked. “Why leave out that Israel is surrounded by countries that want to eliminate it? Why not detail anything of the First and the Second Intifada, the cafe bombings, the bus bombings, the little kids blown to bits? And is it because you just don’t believe that Israel in any condition has a right to exist?”

Coates responded that there is “no shortage in American media” of reporting about such matters. He is most concerned, he argued, with “those who don’t have voice.” Further, he said he is offended by states built on the idea of “ethnocracy.” He claimed there are two tiers of citizenship in Israel, one for Jews and one for Palestinians.

Never mind that coverage on CNN and other outlets overwhelmingly deals with the sufferings of Gazans and West Bank residents, paying relatively little mind to the displacement and deaths among Israelis. Never mind that those allegedly lacking a voice have found plenty on American campuses. Never mind, too, that Israeli Jews include people of a crazyquilt of ethnicities and that the single largest group, in fact, are brown peoples of Sephardi backgrounds. Never mind that Palestinian Israelis vote and have had elected representatives in the Knesset since the founding of the state.

Really, Coates, how can you omit so much?

For Dokoupil’s probing questions in a fairly short exchange, he was criticized by a top executive at CBS, Adrienne Roark, who was reportedly seconded by network chief Wendy McMahon. In a staff meeting on Oct. 7, of all dates, Roark argued the interview was not in line with the network’s commitment to neutrality and did not uphold the network’s standards. Without elaborating on the punishment for Dokoupil, if there was one, she said the matter had been addressed internally.

To be sure, Dokoupil, who has written about his conversion to Judaism, did bring some passion to his questions. That’s perhaps not surprising because his ex-wife lives in Israel along with their two children. Indeed, he said that the book “would not be out of place in the backpack of an extremist,” given its characterization of Israel. He said the book “delegitimizes the pillars of Israel.”

Still, the journalist didn’t raise his voice. And he did what a good journalist does – he elicited answers from Coates that shed light on the author’s views.

Jan Crawford, source:Yahoo!

And Dokoupil’s questions were defended by the network’s chief legal correspondent, Jan Crawford. “I thought our commitment was to truth,” Crawford said, according to an audio recording of the meeting published by the Free Press. “And when someone comes on our air with a one-sided account of a very complex situation, as Coates himself acknowledges that he has, it’s my understanding that as journalists we are obligated to challenge that worldview so that our viewers can have that access to the truth or a fuller account, a more balanced account. And, to me, that is what Tony did.”

At least one other journalist touched on the same ground days before the network host did.

Daniel Bergner, source: his website

In a piece for The Atlantic, author Daniel Bergner wrote: “The more relentless Coates becomes in his prosecution of Israel, the more he loses his way. His habitual unwillingness just to recognize conflicting perspectives and evidence, even if only to subject them to counterarguments, undermines his case. Might it have been worth noting that Israel is surrounded by Arab states and populations committed to its annihilation? That to a great degree, Palestinian leadership as well as many Palestinian people share this eliminationist view, which might help explain the forbidden roads and onerous checkpoints? That Baruch Goldstein’s unforgivable mass murder came on the heels of others, by Muslims of Jews, near the same sacred tomb? That, some would argue, the Palestinians have rejected two-state proposals running back to the late 1930s, when the British put forth a plan that would have granted the Jewish people only about 20 percent of the land that is now controlled by Israel?”

Regrettably, Coates’s views are not out of line with those of many in the progressive ranks. One Black writer on X said Dokoupil’s approach reflected “his Jewishness, his feelings, his knee-jerk Zionist defense mechanisms – but what’s also present is a very white, very American thing: his white supremacy.” The Palestinian-Italian comedian Dean Obeidallah claimed the journalist “repeatedly attacks and smears Ta-Nehisi Coates for daring to discuss Palestinian humanity in his new book.”

There’s no doubt that Coates is remarkably talented. His candor about his tortures at the hands of an abusive father and his fear of other Black people in Baltimore, described in Between the World and Me, is exceptional (he ultimately sees his mishandling as a product of white racism). And his imaginative flights in The Water Dancer are entrancing and powerful.

But his lack of a basic understanding about the Middle East reveals a huge gap in his knowledge. He lacks the substance of a Thomas Friedman, who has written eloquently and fairly about the region, for instance, or any number of other journalistic observers who’ve spent a lot longer than 10 days in the area.

Do his generalizations and simplifications add up to antisemitism? If not, they come awfully close. They echo much of what Americans have heard in coarser form from such figures as Louis Farrakhan and even the Rev. Jesse Jackson.

Certainly, the pathology can be surprisingly subtle. Even today, scholars debate whether Shakespeare was indulging in antisemitism or merely exploring it. After all, the playwright gives Shylock one of the more moving monologues in the play:

“Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions? Fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer as a Christian is? If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die? And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge? If we are like you in the rest, we will resemble you in that.”

Shakespeare appeared to offer some human fellowship and even sympathy for Jews in that monologue, at least. Coates, for his part, showed little understanding even in a visit to Yad Vashem, where he saw a row of soldiers there “safeguarding nothing less than the evil of the Jewish state,” Bergner wrote. Coates saw an evil barely obscured by the “moral badge of the Holocaust.”

It’s extraordinary how a person who can see so many other things so clearly can be so blinded.

Dickens would have been proud

JD Vance’s performance on the debate stage was quite Dawkins-like

Source: Getty via Variety

In 1838, Charles Dickens gave us a most memorable character in Oliver Twist. His Jack Dawkins is a masterful pickpocket, a marvel at skillful deception. He’s known as the Artful Dodger.

JD Vance makes the fictional character look like a piker.

To be sure, Yale Law School can point to the GOP vice presidential nominee as a superbly trained graduate. He’s articulate, can be gentlemanly and can master complex facts well.

Consider what another grad of the school had to say about him:

“At our shared alma mater Yale Law School, I used to have to debate people like JD Vance all the time— phony strivers who will lie and say anything to get ahead,” former Obama Administration aide and CNN commentator Anthony Kapel “Van” Jones tweeted before last night’s debate. “They are hard to beat. Coach Walz will be constrained by his decency. Let’s see if a good, big hearted man can beat a pretender with a high IQ, but low integrity.”

Vance told a lot of whoppers, but give some thought to his biggest dodge of the night. When Gov. Tim Walz, the Democratic nominee for vice president, pressed him on whether Donald J. Trump lost the 2020 election, Vance ducked. He was unwilling to contradict or offend his senior running mate, who still maintains he won. “Tim, I’m focused on the future,” he said. Walz’s retort: “That is a damning, that is a damning non-answer.”          

As for his focus on the future, Walz pushed on Trump’s efforts to lay the groundwork for the public to not accept a Trump-Vance loss. Vance’s flagrantly dishonest answer was that Trump “peacefully gave over power on January the 20th.” Huh, did he forget Jan. 6, 2021, as so many Republicans seem eager to do?

Source: Notre Dame News

As The Wall Street Journal recounted, “JD Vance deflected when asked about comments he made after Jan. 6, 2021, saying that he would have allowed Congress to entertain alternative slates of electors from key swing states, a power that the U.S. Constitution and federal law don’t grant to the vice president.”

But Walz, to his credit, hammered home the point.

“He lost the election,” Walz said. “This is not a debate. It’s not anything anywhere other than in Donald Trump’s world, because, look, when Mike Pence made that decision to certify that election, that’s why Mike Pence isn’t on this stage. What I’m concerned about is where is the firewall with Donald Trump? Where is the firewall if he knows he could do anything, including taking an election and his vice president’s not going to stand to it. That’s what we’re asking you, America. Will you stand up? Will you keep your oath of office even if the president doesn’t?”

Yes, Walz often came across as fuzzy, even inarticulate. Until he was pressed, for instance, he didn’t own up to misspeaking about being in Hong Kong during China’s suppression of the Tiananmen Square demonstrations in 1989. He had, in fact, been to China soon afterward and, mostly on school trips, visited some 30 times later. Walz also botched a reference to Iran, instead garbling his words and saying: “But the expansion of Israel and its proxies is an absolute, fundamental necessity for the United States to have the steady leadership there.”

Chalk that sort of thing up to nervousness and, as some commentators have suggested, to his and Kamala Harris’s refusals to grant more major new outlet interviews. Such interviews can be great opportunities to hone answers to difficult questions. Mark it down, too, to a congressman and governor who spent most of his career teaching high school kids and serving in the Army National Guard, not polishing untruths at the likes of Yale.

By contrast, consider Vance’s tapdancing on abortion, a major challenge for Republicans who crave the independent non-evangelical women’s vote. Vance denied his documented past support for a national ban on abortion, insisting he sought only to set “a minimum national standard” – whatever that means.

And consider his dodge on choice, as he insisted that abortion should be a states’ rights matter, with different states free to set different policies – no matter whether that forces women to travel to find such care (which caused the death of one such Georgia woman, as Walz noted). Vance also repeated the anti-abortion movement’s saccharine and insincere arguments about giving women other choices:

“I want us, as a Republican Party, to be pro-family in the fullest sense of the word. I want us to support fertility treatments,” Vance said.” I want us to make it easier for moms to afford to have babies. I want it to make it easier for young families to afford a home so they can afford a place to raise that family. And I think there’s so much that we can do on the public-policy front just to give women more options.”

There were many more such examples in Vance’s too-smooth-by-half presentation.

“Vance repeatedly stretched, twisted and abandoned the facts (e.g., minimizing climate change as ‘crazy weather patterns,’ denying increased manufacturing under the Biden-Harris administration, claiming the administration ‘lost’ more than 300,000 children, misrepresenting his own position on abortion, claiming Trump saved the Affordable Care Act), or simply ducked the question (e.g., deporting children, seizing federal lands for housing, refusing to certify the 2020 election),” Jennifer Rubin of The Washington Post put it in her newsletter.

For his part, she wrote, “Walz landed jabs on Vance’s extremism and went after felon and former president Donald Trump for ‘fickle’ and irresponsible leadership (e.g., brushing off traumatic brain injuries inflicted on soldiers by Iran as ‘headaches,’ calling climate change a ‘hoax’).”

Source: Rolling Stone

Rubin also gave the Democrat high marks for a couple scorching lines: On gun violence: “Sometimes it is just the guns,” Walz said. And on abortion rights: “How can we as a nation say that your life and your rights, as basic as the right to control your own body, is determined on geography?”

She argued that “Vance came across as slick, rude (interrupting the moderators and whining about being fact-checked) and preprogrammed.” By comparison, she argued that Walz was a “happy warrior.”

Maybe, maybe not. But some of the best assessments of the night came from opinion-writers for The New York Times, most of whom gave the debating victory to Vance – but only on style points. Consider their left-handed compliments:

“Vance did an excellent job of impersonating a decent man,” Farah Stockman said. And Binyamin Applebaum added: “He made Trumpism sound polite, calm and coherent.” Maybe the most trenchant view came from Jamelle Bouie, who said: “Vance won this debate. It’s not hard to see why. He has spent most of his adult life selling himself to the wealthy, the powerful and the influential. He is as smooth and practiced as they come. He has no regard for the truth. He lies as easily as he breathes.”

Some voters may make up their minds based solely on these debate performances. And, if they read the fact-checks, that may be enough for them to see Vance for who he is, not who he cast himself as. Certainly, they ought to look past the hail-fellow-well-met façade that Vance presented, paying mind instead to the Vance who feeds red meat to the mobs at Trump campaign events.

“Less obvious is the disconnect between the Vance we saw last night and the Vance who’s been stoking fear with tales of pet-eating immigrants and problematic elections on the campaign trail,” Fortune’s Diane Brady wrote.

In the end, few voters will make their choice based on the No. 2 men on the tickets. Surely, Trump and Harris will stand at the fore on Nov. 5.

Hulu’s The Artful Dodger, source: The Michigan Daily

Still, the artful dodger did show up his boss in one major respect. Trump’s lies are often easy to read, sometimes given away by his capo-like rage-filled body language (and dutifully recorded by legions of fact-checkers). Vance tells his at times with a doe-eyed ease and conviction that almost masks an Ivy League sneer.

“I cannot imagine many voters would switch sides based on this outing,” Rubin wrote. “But perhaps some voters will conclude that someone as condescending and nasty as Vance should not be a heartbeat from the presidency.”

Marketing can move from silly to dangerous

Trump’s badly timed opportunism is anything but PresidentiaL

Source: Marketoonist

On a recent Southwest flight, the attendant gave out little bags of pretzels bearing some peculiar language. “My mom and I created Stellar Snacks in 2019 with a dream of crafting pretzels infused with passion,” the writing on the bag said. “It’s not just a pretzel … it’s a labor of love.”

Oh, really now.

Yes, marketing is important. And yes, it’s normal for marketers to stretch the truth just a bit to sell their wares.

Source: WhoWhatWhy

But there are times when we must call BS for what it is. That’s kinda the way it is in our presidential election race now, too.

There’s an extraordinary amount of BS out there as we get closer to Nov. 5. Today, for instance, Donald J. Trump offered this reaction to the missile attack by Iran on Israel:

“Under ‘President Trump,’ we had NO WAR in the Middle East, NO WAR in Europe, and Harmony in Asia, No Inflation, No Afghanistan Catastrophe,” Trump posted on his Truth Social outlet. “Instead, we had PEACE. Now, War or the threat of War, is raging everywhere, and the two Incompetents running this Country are leading us to the brink of World War III. You wouldn’t trust Joe or Kamala to run a lemonade stand, let alone lead the Free World.”

Never mind that in 2018 Trump pulled the U.S. out of a U.S.-Iran nuclear deal, ratcheting up hostilities between the countries. Ignore the fact that an Iran-backed group then, in December 2019, launched rockets at an Iraqi military base, killing a U.S. contractor and wounding our soldiers and others, and provoking retaliatory strikes in Iraq and Syria by the U.S. Never mind that in the following month, the U.S. killed the head of Iran’s elite Quds Force, triggering missile attacks on U.S. forces and killing some of them.

This was peace?

The truth – as opposed to the marketing – is that tensions between Israel and Iran, as well as between Iran and the U.S. have been a constant for many years. They are erupting now, all in the wake of the October 7, 2023, invasion in Israel by Iran-backed Hamas. That triggered Israel’s Gaza invasion and led to increasing rocket attacks on Israel by Hezbollah. And that, in turn, set off the Israeli reaction in Lebanon that has led us to today’s missile attacks by Iran.

But none of those historical facts deter Trump from arguing that these eruptions — and others — would never have happened had he been in the White House again.

“If I was in charge, October 7th never happens, Russia/Ukraine never happens, Afghanistan Botched Withdrawal never happens, and Inflation never happens,” Trump claimed. “If I win, we will have peace in the World again. If Kamala gets 4 more years, the World goes up in smoke.”

His claims sound wonderful. They are also ahistorical nonsense.

A Hamas tunnel in 2016, source: NPR

How would Trump have halted Hamas, whose members built extraordinary tunnel networks in Gaza for years, including during his term? What could he have done to deter the group that he hadn’t done before, as it burrowed beneath Gaza? The terrorist group’s timing likely had more to do with it seeing a chance to take advantage of tumult in Israel over Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s domestic problems. Indeed, Hamas’s war-triggering actions likely had even more to do with the threat it saw in then-growing Saudi-Israel rapprochement and diminishing support in Gaza for the group.

As for Russia and Ukraine, the latest war’s roots go back at least to 2014, a couple years before Trump’s ascension to power. Back then, Russian paramilitaries took over Ukraine’s Donetsk and Luhansk areas and Russia then invaded Crimea, taking control of the region. Thousands of Russian soldiers flooded in over the next several years and fierce fighting raged between 2017 and 2019, during Trump’s term. Did Trump do anything to toss Russia out? Despite a peace agreement, Russia then began its fullscale invasion in early 2022. It was all of a piece.

And, as for Afghanistan, one can only wonder why Trump maintained U.S. troops there during his entire term. It was clear for many years that the U.S. had won nothing enduring in the country since 2001. So why did Trump leave the withdrawal from one of America’s longest and least successful wars to his successor? Why were American soldiers still dying there on his watch?

Source: Amazon

Trying to rewrite history in the self-serving way Trump is doing may fool some of his backers. After all, they likely see him as a strongman who can set the world aright and cure domestic and foreign ills. In his rhetoric, Trump offers strength, harmony and peace.

But was there really harmony and peace during his tenure – at home or overseas? Recall that George Floyd, a Black man, was killed by police in May 2020, in Minnesota, during Trump’s last year in office. The event triggered protests nationwide, with disturbances in well over 100 cities. As for peaceful relations overseas, recall the coronavirus tensions with China in 2020 and Beijing’s clampdown on Hong Kong, as tensions between the U.S. and China grew. Were these times of tranquility?

For all of his business failures – which include six bankruptcies – Trump is a clever marketer. “The Apprentice” turned him from a struggling developer with a bad rep in New York into a national emblem of tough-minded leadership, never mind that the show was a venue in which facts never mattered.

Now, Trump’s efforts to rewrite history will likely con some of his devotees just as the “reality” show did. Perhaps they are the sort of folks who can believe that pretzels can be “infused with passion.”

But will he fool anyone with a passing acquaintance with facts? Anyone who has some understanding of history?

What is happening now in the Middle East is extraordinarily dangerous. Keeping full scale war at bay will require delicate diplomacy, and even with that a far greater explosion may well be unavoidable. If Trump were a decent leader, he would keep his mouth shut about that and, maybe, even support President Biden’s efforts.

Source: Google Finance

But then, this is a man who sells sneakers, Bibles and even a picture book bearing a cover with the image of him raising his fist after being grazed by a bullet. You can get Trump’s signature on the book for $499. This is a man who brought public a social media company, Trump Media & Technology Group, through a shady offering, only to have it fall from its March 2022 high of $97.54 a share to the current $16 (no doubt, with many of his followers taking the hit).

The would-be president’s marketing is shameless. Now, at a time of global peril, it’s also dangerous.

When is cancellation warranted?

A Connecticut teacher faces heat over refusing to share a stage with a Jewish autho

Aisha Abdel Gawad, source: her website

When I attended an all-boys prep school in New Jersey many decades ago, one of my history teachers was a chapter leader in the John Birch Society. He routinely spouted bizarre Communist-infiltration theories, had us read conspiracy-oriented books and tried to recruit students to sell for Amway.

He lost his job at the school.

Should that happen now to Aisha Abdel Gawad at the prestigious all-girls Greenwich Academy in Connecticut? Should parents at the K-12 school think twice about sending their daughters there, as an alum of the school suggests in The Wall Street Journal?

Gawad is the writer who refused last weekend to appear on a literary panel discussion at an Albany book festival with a Jewish writer, Elisa Albert, who supports Israel. The festival director cancelled the session, saying Gawad and another writer didn’t want to share the stage with a Zionist.

Never mind that the panel had nothing to do with Zionism or Judaism. It was about “Girls, Coming of Age.”

Elisa Albert, source: her website

And never mind that, to Gawad, Albert’s unpardonable sin was to write a piece lambasting those who defended Hamas after it murdered some 1,200 people and carried off a couple hundred hostages nearly a year ago.

Never mind that Albert’s piece, “An Open Letter to Hamas’ Defenders” in Tablet magazine expressed sympathy for Palestinians, even as it condemned their terrorist oppressors. “We weep for the plight of the Palestinian people and for the ignorance and naïveté of so many who believe that anyone but Hamas is responsible for their current suffering,” Albert wrote.

To Gawad, Albert’s criticism of Hamas and its supporters “mocked anyone who expressed grief over Palestinian life.” To be sure, Albert used sarcasm to make her point, as she began with “Hi terror apologist!” That was enough for Gawad to say that sharing the dais with such an outspoken Jew “did not feel like a safe forum.”

What would Albert have done, one wonders? Would she have pulled out an Uzi? Would she have strapped on a suicide vest? Would she have kidnapped Gawad and taken her off to a tunnel for 11 months?

More likely, Albert would have discussed her latest book of essays, “The Snarling Girl.” Her collection of 16 essays deal with feminism, childbirth, medicine, life in Los Angeles and Albany and, yes, her Judaism. The last includes things such as the stress of being a ​“per­fect host­ess, per­fect Jew­ess” at a Passover seder, the lega­cy of Philip Roth, a vis­it to a mik­vah, and anti­se­mit­ic com­ments she’d received.

Still more likely, Albert would have sought to bridge the gulf between her and Gawad.

In fact, in a new Tablet post, Albert invites Gawad to her Shabbos table, offering to break bread and talk to one another. Albert writes “… the last thing on earth anyone needs is more anger, more resentment, more fighting, more hatred, more blood, more violence, heads to roll. Haven’t we had enough, yet, of anger, fear, suspicion, hatred, fighting, bloodshed?”

In that same piece, Albert defends Zionism. To her, it “is the belief that the State of Israel has the right to exist. Zionism is the belief that the Jewish people (literally aka ‘Israel’) has the right to self-determination, peace, and safety in our ancestral homeland.”

And, as a proponent of a two-state solution, she adds: “Zionism precludes no other peaceful nationalist ambitions or aspirations.”

Would that sort of conciliation be enough for Gawad? Would she join Albert in sharing challah so they could civilly air their disagreements?

Probably not.

Source: AZ Mirror

Gawad’s refusal to share a platform with Albert is a new wrinkle on the longstanding Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions effort. That’s the 18-year-old drive that blacklists Jews, especially Israelis in academic institutions and others. The aim is to pressure Israel to accept, among other things, a right for Palestinians who fled in 1948 to return to their homes. That, of course, would destroy Israel. It would make it impossible demographically for the Jewish state to exist.

Indeed, BDS co-founder Omar Barghouti has said “we oppose a Jewish state in any part of Palestine. No Palestinian, rational Palestinian, not a sell-out Palestinian, will ever accept a Jewish state in Palestine.”

Gawad’s decision to boycott a panel that would include Albert is of a piece with some of the more bizarre BDS efforts. Backers sought to boycott McDonald’s because a franchise in Israel offered free meals to Israeli soldiers. And BDS called for a boycott of an upcoming Disney movie that that features an Israeli superhero, Sabra, a fictional member of spy-agency Mossad. And some have called on supporters to shun Disney altogether.

Over the last few years, BDS backers have risen to the fore in several academic organizations. They won a vote for a resolution last May in the American Sociological Association, by a 58.8 percent margin, condemning Israel’s actions in Gaza and criticizing “Zionist occupation.” For all of its fury over the deaths in Gaza, however, there was no condemnation of Hamas in the resolution — its murderousness, apparently, wasn’t worth noting.

More recently, in August, BDS backers succeeded in getting the American Association of University Professors to support academic boycotts, rescinding its longstanding opposition to them. In a case of Orwellian logic, the AAUP argued that “when faculty members choose to support academic boycotts, they can legitimately seek to protect and advance academic freedom.”

So, should Gawad continue to teach at the Greenwich Academy? Should she be shunned for her refusal to sit next to a Zionist? Should her boycott of Albert lead to the school, in effect, boycotting her?

Well, Emma Osman, an editor at The Wall Street Journal and a graduate of the academy, puts the matter in terms of how some of Gawad’s students may be affected. She wonders what things might be like for some of them now.

“I imagine myself back in school, seated around Ms. Gawad’s table,” she writes. “Would I feel my voice was ‘heard and valued’? Would I feel comfortable raising a view that I knew Ms. Gawad disagreed with? Could she grade my essay objectively knowing it was written by someone she might label a ‘Zionist’?”

The head of the school, Margaret Hazlett, defended Gawad initially. But, as pressures have grown, she more recently said that the teacher’s actions “showed a lack of judgment” and “reflected poorly on GA.”

Indeed, Gawad has already lost another prestigious gig as a result of her action. The Wilton Library terminated her as its first writer in residence, a $30,000 position. In explaining the move, officials there write: “We continue to be passionate about the free exchange of ideas. We remain dedicated to our mission to ‘inform, enrich, connect, and inspire our community,’ and to maintain an environment where everyone is made to feel safe and welcome.”

So, should she be fired from Greenwich Academy, as well, because it’s entirely possible some students will now feel unsafe and unwelcome in her classroom? Under intense fire now, Gawad claims that she, in fact, opposes all forms of discrimination and hatred.

“I oppose anti-Semitism and have dedicated my professional and personal life to not only fighting anti-Semitism, but also racism, Islamophobia, and hatred of all kinds,” Gawad wrote in a response to press inquiries. “I find it deeply hurtful and saddening that the festival chose to make public my private choice.”

But does she oppose the venomous hatred that led a terrorist group to murder hundreds of innocents? To rape and kill wantonly? There’s been no word from her on that, at least not publicly. Not a hint of criticism from her of Hamas and its ilk.

My former history teacher’s wrong-headed, at-times vicious and certainly ill-informed views made many of us in the classroom pretty uncomfortable. His attacks on some of us over our opposition to the Vietnam War at times got quite personal. And, in the end, his intellectual and emotional shortcomings and attitudes did him in.

Ultimately, that teacher’s position was untenable, his views were just too noxious. Gawad’s antisemitic act — whether she sees it as that or not — may in the end have the same effect.

Easy fixes sometimes are anything but

Contrasting the Trump and Harris economic planS

Source: Directors & Boards

Politicians like easy-sounding solutions to complex problems, particularly on the economic front. Their fixes often are aimed at pleasing voters who know little or nothing of economics. At times, their efforts smack of pandering and might even be harmless.

But, at other times, they can be quite dangerous — as seems likely with the plans of Donald J. Trump. Just mull over what 16 Nobel laureate economists have to say:

“The outcome of this election will have economic repercussions for years, and possibly decades, to come,” warns a letter signed by Columbia Prof. Joseph Stiglitz, former chief economist at the World Bank; Harvard Prof. Claudia Goldin, former director of the Development of the American Economy program at the prestigious National Bureau of Economic Research, and 14 other Nobelists. “We believe that a second Trump term would have a negative impact on the U.S.’s economic standing in the world and a destabilizing effect on the U.S.’s domestic economy.”

They caution that Trump’s plans, including his goal to impose tariffs of 10 percent to 20 percent on foreign goods and 60 percent on Chinese-made products, will do exactly the opposite of what he’s been promising as he has attacked the Biden-Harris administration for inflation. Just as inflation rates are coming down, those duties would kickstart a price-spiral anew.

Source: Dividend Power

“Many Americans are concerned about inflation, which has come down remarkably fast,” the economists argue. “There is rightly a worry that Donald Trump will reignite this inflation, with his fiscally irresponsible budgets. Nonpartisan researchers, including at Evercore, Allianz, Oxford Economics, and the Peterson Institute, predict that if Donald Trump successfully enacts his agenda, it will increase inflation.”

And listen to some of those folks, who’ve crunched the numbers on Trump’s plans:

The Peterson Institute for International Economics think-tank in Washington calculates that 20 per cent across-the-board tariffs combined with a 60 per cent tariff on China would trigger a rise of up to $2,600 a year in what the average household spends on goods,” reports the Financial Times. “They say that the tariffs would disproportionately hit the low-income households that Trump claims his economic policies help protect.”

And the Peterson Institute is hardly alone. The Tax Policy Center, concurs, albeit with slightly different figures because Trump has floated both 20 percent and 10 percent global tariffs.

“A worldwide 10 percent tariff and a 60 percent tariff on Chinese goods proposed by Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump would lower average after-tax incomes of US households in 2025 by about $1,800, or 1.8 percent,” writes center senior fellow Howard Gleckman, a former BusinessWeek colleague. “They’d reduce imports into the US by about $5.5 trillion, or 15 percent, from 2025–2034.”

The consensus among the experts is that Trump’s plan would hit consumers hard. The effect would show up not only in finished goods made overseas, but in anything manufactured in the U.S. with foreign-made components, as the higher costs would filter through the system. Thus, there would be no escaping the higher prices.

Beyond just ratcheting up inflation, Trump’s plans could drive down gross domestic product and employment.

“Candidate Trump has proposed significant tariff hikes as part of his presidential campaign; we estimate that if imposed, his proposed tariff increases would hike taxes by another $524 billion annually and shrink GDP by at least 0.8 percent, the capital stock by 0.7 percent, and employment by 684,000 full-time equivalent jobs,” says another nonpartisan group, the Tax Foundation.

The kick in the teeth that Trump could deliver to the nation may also come at a tough time, as the economy slows under the Federal Reserve’s so-called “soft-landing” approach. The Fed, the independent group that has the job of reining in inflation, recently lowered interest rates by a substantial half-point in the federal funds rate. That’s because its leaders believe that inflation is moving toward a sustainable 2 percent annual rate, the Fed’s target, without driving unemployment up to unacceptable levels.

The Federal Reserve, source: Investopedia

As the Fed tries to balance employment and inflation, it is no doubt mindful that the national jobless rate recently rose to 4.2 percent after dipping as low as 3.4 percent, a 54-year-low, earlier in the year. The Fed is following classic economic theory: when the jobless rate is too low, higher wages kick up inflation; when unemployment is too high, of course, that’s a red light for the economy.

In time, the lower interest rates that the Fed has engineered should deliver an upward jolt to the economy. That will set the stage for the next president – whoever that is – to bask in the glow of sustainably low unemployment with reasonable inflation. But that president’s policies, if they are inflationary, could tip the balance.

As the experts see it, the outlook under a Trump presidency is hardly cheerful, particularly if his tariffs trigger an all-out global trade war. “The last time we were in a trade war under Trump, the global manufacturing cycle went into a recession,” Julia Coronado, a former Fed economist who now runs the MacroPolicy Perspectives consultancy, told the Financial Times.

Recall that, during Trump’s term, the economy slipped into recession from February to April 2020, a few months before his tour in the White House ended. Covid drove that downturn, which was marked by a jobless rate of 14.8 percent in April of 2020. When Trump left office, the jobless rate had fallen to 6.4 percent and it fell substantially after that, in part thanks to the infrastructure-spending policies of President Joe Biden.

Source: Bloomberg

Contrast Trump’s plan with Harris’s blueprint for stimulating housing construction, particularly for the middle class. She wants to boost housing supply by expanding the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit, providing incentives for state and local investment in housing and creating a $40 billion tax credit to make affordable projects feasible for builders. Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s, and Jim Parrott, a housing adviser under the Obama administration, estimate that America has a shortfall of three million homes right now, and Harris aims to close that gap. The two are advising her campaign on these plans.

Ben Harris of the Brookings Institution, a former chief economist of the U.S. Treasury, concurs that the plan is sound. “Critics assail the high cost of subsidies to developers, but they are the best tool the federal government has to incentivize homebuilding,” he writes. “We desperately need more affordable homes in America – millions of them – and the only practical way to boost supply quickly and meaningfully is to offer financial incentives to local governments to expand zoning for affordable housing and to developers to build it. The vice president proposes to do both.”

To be sure, Harris’s plan to provide $25,000 to first-time homebuyers is drawing less praise.

Calling that “a really bad idea,” Michael Strain, an economist at the American Enterprise Institute, says: “The ultimate beneficiary of that credit is not going to be first-time home buyers. It’s going to be people selling homes.” Economics writer Peter Coy of The New York Times echoes that, saying the plan would do nothing to boost housing stock, but only demand. “Sellers surely would take advantage of the increased demand by raising their prices,” Coy writes. “So a big portion of the taxpayer money that was intended for home buyers would wind up in the pockets of sellers.”

But it’s far from clear how the construction stimulation efforts and the aid to homebuyers would offset one another. A rush of homebuilding in theory should lead to lower prices, and the numbers of people likely to be involved in her $25,000 support effort seem relatively small.

Moody’s estimates that Harris’s down-payment plan would help some 11.7 million more first-time homebuyers, including 2.75 million first-time Black and Latino homeowners. This is just 3.2 million more first-time homebuyers and 1 million more Black and Latino first-time homebuyers than would take place without her plan.

For her part, Harris is doing some pandering by proposing to attack alleged price-gouging, particularly in grocery costs. Quoting a campaign statement, The Washington Post reported that Harris wants to implement “the first-ever federal ban on price gouging on food and groceries — setting clear rules of the road to make clear that big corporations can’t unfairly exploit consumers to run up excessive corporate profits on food and groceries.”

The details were not clear, the Post reported. But it said Harris would aim to enact the ban within her first 100 days, in part by directing the Federal Trade Commission to impose harsh penalties on firms that break new limits on so-called gouging. The statement did not define gouging or excessive profits.

As Alexander Henke, an economics professor at Howard University, told the school newspaper, Harris’s “vague” plan appears to be more like a political economy move than an economic one, tapping into popular sentiment against price gouging by delivering poll-tested messaging. And Harris should know better — she studied economics at Howard and her father, Donald, is a retired Stanford University economics professor.

What’s more, this horse long ago left the barn. Most of the inflation is now behind us, suggesting that the economy is resolving the inflation on its own and there would be few prosecutions.

Just look at the numbers. Prices for food overall rose 9.9 percent in 2022, faster than in any year since 1979, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The hike was especially sharp in so-called food-at-home prices, up 11.4 percent. But the rises have slowed since then, climbing last year by 5.8 percent overall and by 5 percent for food-at-home. This year, the department expects prices for all food to increase 2.3 percent, with food-at-home prices rising just 1.2 percent.

What drove up prices in prior years? Were greedy corporations taking advantage of consumers? Were nefarious or misguided Biden-Harris policies driving up the price of eggs (something VP nominee JD Vance embarrassingly got wrong in a Pennsylvania grocery store photo-op)?

Not according to experts at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. They point to post-Covid volatility in global commodity prices and a sharp rise in wages for grocery-store workers (likely related to a shortage of such workers). When such “input” costs rise, everyone in the production and retail chain tries to sustain their profit margins. As it happened, foodmakers showed no margin gain in recent years, while retailers showed only a modest uptick in already-thin margins.

Other key elements of the plans of both candidates suggest far different approaches — Trump would take a largely top-down tack while Harris, as she puts it, aims to build the economy from the middle class out. She hit hard on this theme in a Sept. 25 address on the economy and her idea are spelled out on her website.

Source: The New York Times

Harris would boost the corporate tax rate from 21 percent to 28 percent and she has promised not to raise taxes on people making less than $400,000 per year. She wants to restore and expand the earned income tax credit and the child tax credit, including a $6,000 child tax credit for the first year of a newborn’s life. She would also increase the tax deduction for start-up businesses from $5,000 to $50,000, a move she argues would stimulate innovation among all-important small businesses.

By contrast, Trump wants to reduce the corporate tax rate from 21 percent to 15 percent for companies that make their products in the U.S. He already cut the rate from 35 percent during his 2017-2021 presidency. It’s long been known that such moves deplete government revenues. Trump also said he would end taxes on overtime pay and on tips (the tips idea is one Harris also suggests). And Trump also aims to exempt Social Security income from taxes, unmindful apparently of how the Social Security system, even under the current system, will likely be insolvent by 2035 unless policymakers impose a fix.

Trump also wants to extend individual tax cuts he pushed through Congress in 2017, including for the wealthiest Americans. Experts estimate that would reduce revenue over a decade by about $3.3 trillion to $4 trillion.

Harris has also proposed hiking taxes on high-income earners. Americans earning below about $100,000 annually would continue to pay no taxes on long-term capital gains and higher-income families earning up to $1 million would continue paying up to a maximum rate of 20 percent. But those who earn $1 million a year or more would see a rise in the tax rate on their long-term capital gains to 28 percent.

Whether soaking the rich a bit, as Harris proposes, is good or bad economically, it may sell politically. And, if nothing else, it’s likely to do far less harm than Trump’s tariffs would.