| It has been quite a quarter in our World as we present our first 2nd Quarter 2024 edition of our "Virtual Route 66" as we look forward to the continued privilege to serve:
On Tuesday morning, on his social media outlet, former president Trump encouraged his supporters to buy a “God Bless The USA” Bible for $59.99. The Bible is my “favorite book,” he said in a promotional video, and said he owns “many.” This Bible includes the U.S. Constitution, the Bill of Rights, the Declaration of Independence, and the Pledge of Allegiance. It also includes the chorus of country music singer Lee Greenwood’s song “God Bless the USA,” likely because it is a retread of a 2021 Bible Greenwood pushed to commemorate the twentieth anniversary of 9-11. That story meant less coverage for the news from last Monday, March 25, in which Trump shared on his social media platform a message comparing him to Jesus Christ, with a reference to Psalm 109, which calls on God to destroy one’s enemies. This jumped out to me because Trump is not the first president to compare himself to Jesus Christ. In 1866, President Andrew Johnson famously did, too. While there is a financial component to Trump’s comparison that was not there for Johnson, the two presidents had similar political reasons for claiming a link to divine power. Johnson was born into poverty in North Carolina, then became a tailor in Tennessee, where he rose through politics to the U.S. House of Representatives and then the Senate. In 1861, when Tennessee left the Union, Johnson was the only sitting senator from a Confederate state who remained loyal to the United States. This stand threw him into prominence. In 1862, President Abraham Lincoln named him the military governor of Tennessee. Then, in 1864, the Republican Party renamed itself the Union Party to attract northern Democrats to its standard. To help that effort, party leaders chose a different vice president, replacing a staunch Republican—Hannibal Hamlin of Maine—with the Democrat Johnson. Although he was elected on what was essentially a Republican ticket, Johnson was a Democrat at heart. He loathed the elite southern enslavers he thought had become oligarchs in the years before the Civil War, shutting out poorer men like him from prosperity, but he was a fervent racist who enslaved people himself until 1863. Johnson opposed the new active government the Republicans had built during the war, and he certainly didn’t want it to enforce racial equality. He expected that the end of the war would mean a return to the United States of 1860, minus the system of enslavement that concentrated wealth upward. Johnson was badly out of step with the Republicans, but a quirk of timing gave him exclusive control of the reconstruction of the United States from April 15, 1865, when he took the oath of office less than three hours after Lincoln breathed his last, until early December. Congress had adjourned for the summer on March 4, expecting that Lincoln would call the members back together if there were an emergency, as he had in summer 1861. It was not due to reconvene until early December. Members of Congress rushed back to Washington, D.C., after Lincoln’s assassination, but Johnson insisted on acting alone. Over the course of summer 1865, Johnson set out to resuscitate the prewar system dominated by the Democratic Party, with himself at its head. He pardoned all but about 1,500 former Confederates, either by proclamation or by presidential pardon, putting them back into power in southern society. He did not object when southern state legislatures developed a series of state laws, called Black Codes, remanding Black Americans into subservience. When Congress returned to work on December 4, 1865, Johnson greeted the members with the happy news that he had “restored” the Union. Leaving soldiers in the South would have cost tax money, he said, and would have “envenomed hatred” among southerners. His exclusion of Black southerners from his calculus, although they were the most firmly loyal population in the South, showed how determined he was to restore prewar white supremacy, made possible by keeping power in the states. All Republican congressmen had to do, he said, was to swear in the southern senators and representatives now back in Washington, D.C., and the country would be “restored.” Republicans wanted no part of his “restoration.” Not only did it return to power the same men who had been shooting at Republicans’ constituents eight months before and push northerners’ Black fellow soldiers to a form of quasi-enslavement, but also the 1870 census would count Black Americans as whole people rather than three fifths of a person, giving former Confederates more national political power after the war than they had had before it. Victory on the battlefields would be overturned by control of Congress. Congressional Republicans rejected Johnson’s plan for reconstruction. Instead, they passed the Fourteenth Amendment in June 1866 and required the former Confederate states to ratify it before they could be readmitted to the United States. The Fourteenth Amendment put the strength of the national government behind the idea that Black Americans would be considered citizens—as the Supreme Court’s 1857 Dred Scott decision had denied. Then it declared that states could neither discriminate against citizens nor take away a citizen’s rights without due process of the law. To make sure that the 1870 census would not increase the power of former Confederates, it declared that if any state kept men over 21 from voting, its representation in Congress would be reduced proportionally. Johnson hated the Fourteenth Amendment. He hated its broad definition of citizenship; he hated its move toward racial equality; he hated its undermining of the southern leaders he backed; he hated its assertion of national power; he hated that it offered a moderate route to reunification that most Americans would support. If states ratified it, he wouldn’t be able to rebuild the Democratic Party with himself at its head. So he told southern politicians to ignore Congress’s order to ratify the Fourteenth Amendment, calling Congress an illegal body because it had not seated representatives from the southern states. He promised white southerners that the Democrats would win the 1866 midterm elections. Once back in power, he said, Democrats would repudiate the Republicans’ “radicalism” and put his plan back into place. As he asserted his vision for the country, Johnson egged on white supremacist violence. In July, white mobs attacked a Unionist convention in New Orleans where delegates had called for taking the vote away from ex-Confederates and giving it to loyal Black men. The rioters killed 37 Black people and 3 white delegates to the convention. By then, Johnson had become as unpopular as his policies. Increasingly isolated, he defended his plan for the nation as the only true course. In late August he broke tradition to campaign in person, an act at the time considered beneath the dignity of a president. He set off on a railroad tour, known as the “Swing Around the Circle,” to whip up support for the Democrats before the election. Speaking from the same set of notes as the train stopped at different towns and cities from Washington, D.C., to New York, to Chicago, to St. Louis, and back to Washington, D.C., Johnson complained bitterly about the opposition to his reconstruction policies, attacked specific members of Congress as traitors and called for them to be hanged, and described himself as a martyr like Lincoln. And, noting the mercy of his reconstruction policies, he compared himself to Jesus. It was all too much for voters. The white supremacist violence across the South horrified them, returning power to southern whites infuriated them, the reduction of Black soldiers to quasi-slaves enraged them, and Johnson’s attacks on Congress alarmed them. Johnson seemed determined to hand the country over to its former enemies to recreate the antebellum world that northerners had just poured more than 350,000 lives and $5 billion into destroying, no matter what voters wanted. Johnson’s extremism and his supporters’ violence created a backlash. Northerners were not willing to hand the country back to the Democrats who were rioting in the South and to a president who compared himself to Jesus. Rather than turning against the Republicans in the 1866 elections, voters repudiated Johnson. They gave Republicans a two-thirds majority of Congress, enabling them to override any policy Johnson proposed. And, in 1868, the states ratified the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, launching a new era in the history of the United States. A Tectonic Shift in US-Israel Relations is UnderwaySenate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer's recent speech is just the biggest signal of a generational change.
It’s been a week since I got back from my trip to Israel/Palestine and I’m still processing the experience, which is challenging. Sometimes I feel as though this conflict is like a black hole. You approach the event horizon at your peril, and if you get too close, you will be sucked in, unable to ever escape. Even worse, no light emerges from inside this black hole, just deadly radiation. But that’s an overly dark metaphor, if you’ll forgive the pun. Light is emerging; you just need to know where to look for it. I’m reminded of a story my dear friend Josh Yarden shared with me as we ate dinner together on my last night before my flight home. Josh teaches anthropology at the Givat Haviva International School, where Israeli citizens, both Jews and Palestinians/Arabs study and live on campus, together with students from dozens of other countries. (He’s also the poet I quoted a few issues back). In a recent class discussion about minority-majority relations, Josh told me a Jewish student said there are no tensions between Jews and Arabs in the mixed city where his family lives. (In fact, there have been instances of violence there in the past, as well as some robust Jewish-Arab “shared society” programs.) An Arab/Palestinian girl whose uncle was killed in the violence in another mixed city in 2021, quickly pointed out, ‘Just because you don’t see it doesn’t mean it’s not there. The Arabs won’t necessarily share what they’re thinking with you.’ The boy immediately said he was confident she was wrong. Josh pointed out to him that we often cannot know the truth of each other’s lived experience, and that this was an opportunity to listen and learn. Later that week, in another class discussion that touched on the concept of “competitive victimhood,” the same Jewish student said, ‘The Holocaust doesn’t matter here. In order to find the solution for an ongoing conflict, people should not address the past in order to prove their victimhood.’ The same Arab student perked up and said, ‘That’s very ironic of you to say. I would expect you to bring up the Holocaust.’ This time, Josh asked her to listen to the boy who had contradicted her the other day. He went on to say, ‘The people who suffered and the people who caused their sufferings in the past are now all dead and arguing about who was right and who was wrong back then will not get us anywhere in the conflict resolution. Just as for me the Holocaust is not a reason to hate Germans, the events of 1948 should not be a reason for Palestinians to fight or hate Jews.’ Then, he paused the action and asked the class to put both of the exchanges from that week into perspective, to see how hard it can be to understand each other’s viewpoints when they contradict our expectations. It was a classic “teachable moment,” and the lesson perhaps sank in more than usual. “So there is hope,” I said over dinner, after hearing this story. Josh lamented that this happened in the rare context of an integrated classroom. He said, “We have some sort of impact, and we can hope that the ripple effects will lead to positive changes, but most arguments in society take place without a teacher who can freeze a moment to help both sides see past their initial assumptions.” He’s right, but I tell him this is why teaching at a high school like Givat Haviva is so important. Now consider, by contrast, what happens when someone with national standing in our political discourse tries to put his arms around the whole mess that is Israel/Palestine, encompassing much of its complexity and contradictions, sums up the moment and speaks some hard truths. He gets whacked from all sides. I’m speaking of Chuck Schumer, the Democrat who is the Senate Majority Leader and probably the most powerful Jewish elected official in America. In 2022, New Yorkers re-elected him by a comfortable 57%-43% margin, which means he’s politically quite secure. He got 3.3 million votes in that election, and just for argument’s sake, if Jews make up 15% of the overall New York electorate but vote for Democrats by a 70-30 margin, one might estimate that Schumer got the vote of about 700,000 Jews—which would put him not far from the 1.1 million votes Netanyahu’s Likud party got in the last Israeli election. Schumer certainly represents more American Jews (there are 1.8 million in New York) than any other politician, and probably also more American Arabs than any other (there are 400,000 in New York). In 2022, Schumer was the Senate’s #1 recipient of campaign donations from pro-Israel donors, according to OpenSecrets.org. I’ve met Senator Schumer a few times, though not one-on-one. He is smart, chummy, and very good at charming a crowd; when he wants to he can turn on the borsch-belt shtick with ease. He is also known in many quarters as a consummate transactional politician. That is, he is very good at sussing out who has power and how much, and then to what degree they need to be wooed or placated. Here’s an example I saw up close: Back in early 2012, when Hollywood and the copyright cartel thought they had a permanent lock on Congress and they tried to push through the Stop Online Piracy Act and the Protect IP Act, Schumer—who was a co-sponsor of the legislation—took immediate note of the uprising in the tech community. At the height of the fight over the legislation, several thousand tech workers rallied outside his midtown office during the lunch hour, insisting that the bills would not only hobble the Internet, they’d kill lots of jobs. Until then Schumer hadn’t really paid much attention to the tech sector, but he quickly recalibrated his position. Within days he was on the phone to the leaders of the New York Tech Meetup, which organized the rally, listening to their concerns and working to build them into his power base.
So, when Schumer shifts from embracing Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu (as he did quite cravenly a year ago, shown above, during the pro-democracy protests, leading pundit Thomas Friedman to call him Bibi’s “useful idiot”) to declaring on the Senate floor that Bibi is one of four “major obstacles” to peace, that’s no small change. (The other three obstacles, according to Schumer, are “Hamas, and the Palestinians who support and tolerate their evil ways, radical right-wing Israelis in government and society, [and] Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas.”) Schumer’s words about Netanyahu are worth quoting in full:
Schumer concludes by calling for new elections in Israel. But he also warns that if the current governing coalition remains in power, “and continues to pursue dangerous and inflammatory policies that test existing U.S. standards for assistance, then the United States will have no choice but to play a more active role in shaping Israeli policy by using our leverage to change present course.” This is a tectonic shift in the heart of the Democratic party. It comes alongside additional moves by senior Democrats in both the House and Senate, including a new letter from six top House Democrats to President Biden urging him to restrict additional military aid to Israel because of its failure to allow humanitarian aid to flow more freely into Gaza. In no uncertain words, these Democrats warn of an imminent famine in Gaza, noting that “despite [the Biden Administration’s] efforts to ensure that life-saving humanitarian assistance reaches civilians in need, the Israeli government has repeatedly obstructed the delivery of U.S.-funded and supported humanitarian aid.” They argue that Israel is violating the Humanitarian Aid Corridor Act, a provision of the larger Foreign Assistance Act, and is therefore “ineligible to receive continued US weapons.” Last week, 19 US Senators, a substantial portion of the Democratic caucus, sent Biden a letter urging US recognition of the state of Palestine in the context of a regional peace initiative. Schumer’s shift was a shock to many in the so-called pro-Israel establishment in America. (I say so-called because organizations that prop up the rejectionist/annexationist goals of the rightwing coalition behind Netanyahu are actually doing great harm to Israel.) The Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, which tilts to the right, issued a statement expressing “deep reservations” about the speech and arguing “it is not a time for public criticisms that serve only to empower the detractors of Israel, and which foster greater divisiveness.” AIPAC criticized Schumer for calling for new elections, instead declaring that “Israel is an independent democracy that decides for itself when elections are held and chooses its own leaders.” On the left, Schumer was criticized by the likes of If Not Now for not going far enough; they demanded that he "call for a lasting ceasefire, reverse course on weapons transfers, and push for Israel to dismantle its systems of occupation and apartheid over Palestinians." The truth is Schumer is much closer to solid ground than the so-called pro-Israel crowd, and not just because American public opinion has become more critical of Israel since the war began. Schumer is quite in tune with most Israelis. Since October 7, a consistent majority of Israeli voters have told the aChord Center’s pollsters that they want Netanyahu out of office. Back in mid-October, 23% said they wanted him to resign immediately with another 49% saying he should resign after the war. Now, facing a quagmire, fierce international criticism, a rupture with the US and the still unresolved nightmare of 134 hostages in Hamas’ hands, those numbers have hardened. Forty percent of Israelis want Bibi to resign now, with another 35% saying he should resign once the war is over.
One final observation about what this all means. Two groupings to the left of the so-called pro-Israel establishment helped make this shift happen—progressive Zionists and the anti- or non-Zionists further to their left. For months, the latter group—centered on Jewish Voice for Peace and If Not Now as well as numerous Palestinian and Arab-American groups—has gotten the lion’s share of the headlines with mediagenic and disruptive rallies demanding a cease-fire and an end to “genocide.” Their efforts were later transmuted very effectively into the “Uncommitted” campaign in several early primary states, that succeeded in tamping down the most anti-Israel side of this movement and funneled its passions into sending a clear message to Biden as he runs unopposed for the Democratic presidential nomination. I’ve been critical of these groups in a lot of my writing since October 7 for how they helped open the discourse to unvarnished nonsense about Hamas’ “legitimate resistance” and other ideological formulations, but respect is also due—these groups have moved the needle. Credit is also due to Netanyahu and his corrupt, messianic, annexationist and racist governing coalition, which is a gift that will keep on giving as long as Bibi can stay in office by prolonging the war. At the same time, less confrontational organizations grounded inside the broad American Jewish community with solid ties to a majority of Democratic members of Congress like J Street and Americans for Peace Now have kept up a strong inside game, steadily advancing arguments critical of Israel’s rightwing government that are now clearly in the mainstream of the Democratic party. The Biden Administration’s decision Monday to stop wielding its veto in the UN Security Council—something J Street called for back in December—is a clear sign that this strategy is also bearing fruit. If you want to put this in historical perspective, what is going on now in American Jewish politics is a bit like the push-me/pull-you dynamics between the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee during the heyday of the civil rights movement, with the more radical groups pushing the envelope, making room for the more moderate groups to make headway. I don’t think we’ve seen the end of this process. Yesterday, J Street and seventeen US Senators called on the White House to decertify Israel for not being in full compliance with international law not only around the humanitarian aid crisis, but also its conduct of the war in Gaza and unlawful expansion of West Bank settlements. Netanyahu, meanwhile, is just digging in his heels. So something previously unthinkable in US-Israel relations is about to happen: the Biden Administration is, in my humble opinion, about to suspend offensive military aid to its longtime ally. That will be an earthquake, but the cracks in US-Israel alliance may finally allow some light to get in. We shall see. Other Reading—While Netanyahu complains about Schumer interfering in Israel’s internal politics, Haaretz’s Omer Benjakob reports that disinformation researchers at the Israeli organization Fake Reporter have uncovered an Israeli influence operation that has used hundreds of coordinated fake social media accounts to target American politicians, primarily Democrats of color, to amplify pro-war and anti-Hamas messages. —Rabbi Sharon Brous of IKAR in Los Angeles was a bellwether of progressive Jewish leadership before October 7, and her weekly sermons are all worth reading. This one, titled “The Last Bulwark Against Authoritarianism,” which she gave two weeks ago, is important for what it says about the rising expressions of antisemitism coming not just from the right in America but also the left. —That said, a lot of Jews in Hollywood seems to have lost their minds over Jonathan Glazer’s brave call at the Oscars for an end to the dehumanization of Palestinians. —And in the wake of a bunch of performative resignations at Guernica magazine over an essay written by Israeli journalist and translator Joanna Chen, Mike Tomasky of The New Republic walks Chen through the lessons of the experience. “I believe the heart is capable of grieving for two peoples at once,” she tells him. Amen. —Theo Baker reports for The Atlantic (gift link) on the polarized environment at Stanford in the wake of October 7. The kids are not all right. —Also in the “have people lost their minds” department, I enjoyed this local story about a Hasidic rabbi who is suing the town of Ramapo, NY, for its unconstitutional display of the Israeli flag over town hall. Other local towns have been challenged for doing the same thing, but it’s hard to argue with a rabbi, even if he is an anti-Zionist one. —As usual, Peter Beinart makes some trenchant points about what is, and what isn’t, antisemitism in the debate about Israel and Gaza. —RIP Hal Malchow, the Democratic digital strategist who almost single-handedly invented voter targeting, and who late in life came to argue that too much campaign money is being spent on individual races rather than building up party identification. Sasha Issenberg has the inside story on his brave last days. —If you thought the collapse of Sam Bankman-Fried’s company and imprisonment marked the end of crypto’s political influence, think again—the industry lobby is still wielding cash and twisting arms in Washington, as Henry Burke of the Revolving Door Project reports. —
Donald Trump, COVID-19, And The FrancisScott Key Bridge CalamityIf he becomes president again, he'll extort Maryland and Baltimore rather thanbe president for all Americans—just like last time.
Four years ago this week, it became clear that Donald Trump would husband emergency pandemic resources like ventilators and personal protective equipment for Republican-run states. Or rather, Trump made it clear. Blue-state leaders would get to see their residents die gasping for air unless they feigned fulsome praise for his pandemic response in public. “If they don’t treat you right, I don’t call,” he declared. Three days ago this morning, an enormous cargo ship lost power and drifted into a pillar holding up the Francis Scott Key bridge, which collapsed instantly into the Patapsco River in Baltimore, MD. If early reports are accurate, the catastrophe in Maryland has shined a light on the very best of public service: With just two minutes to act between the distress call and the collision, police were able to block access quickly, such that the final vehicle to pass the point of no return had crossed safely before the bridge disintegrated. Officials even attempted to save a crew of eight construction workers filling potholes, but could not alert them in time. Six of them died. On Tuesday, President Biden promised the federal government would prioritize rebuilding the bridge and reopening the port as quickly and frictionlessly as possible. “It’s my intention that federal government will pay for the entire cost of reconstructing that bridge,” Biden said, “and I expect Congress to support my effort.” Already the contrast with Trump’s response to COVID-19, devoid as it was of common humanity, is stark. But its not just the contrast that looms large in my mind. It’s also the recognition that the Baltimore rescue might still be underway seven months from now when voters cast their ballots for president. And we know from Trump’s response to COVID, and to a number of other disasters that struck non-Republican states and territories during his single term, that if he inherits the effort to rebuild after this disaster, he will likely sabotage it or hold it hostage until the leaders of Baltimore and Maryland offer him political favors or concessions. It’s a reminder in microcosm of one of Trump’s most disqualifying abuses of power, and why it’s critical for real reporters to press him for a response to the Key bridge calamity—whether he intends to resume using federal disaster resources as a tool to extort his political enemies. KEY TO THE KINGDOMAs of this writing, Trump has said nothing at all about the Key bridge collapse. And why would he? It can not after all be blamed on the Democratic mayor of Baltimore, or the Democratic governor of Maryland, or the Democratic president of the United States. The men killed in the accident were immigrants, rather than blue-collar white men. So as far as Trump is concerned, it merits no comment. No condolences to the families of the dead; no assurances to the affected communities that he intends to be their president, too. Left to his own devices, Trump will either continue to ignore the incident, or he’ll respond only when prompted by an ally in right-wing media. Extrapolating from his response to every other tragedy, he might assert monomaniacally that the accident simply wouldn’t have happened if he’d been president. He’ll almost certainly assert that if he were president, the bridge would be rebuilt in a matter of weeks instead of months, notwithstanding his famously abysmal failure to build anything of significance during his presidency. But unless cornered, he won’t say whether the government should foot the bill for the recovery or whether he’d attach conditions to it like he did with ventilators and PPE. Reporters should be intent on pressing him for a response anyhow, but President Biden and Democrats should do their part, too. For starters, they should begin to make good on Biden’s rebuilding commitment by introducing supplemental legislation to fund the project as soon as possible, and see whether Trump—either directly or through his sock puppet Mike Johnson—supports it, or tries to take it hostage. COCKS, DEISince the earliest days of the Biden presidency I’ve encouraged him—all Democrats, really, but in this matter him specifically—to treat natural and man-made emergencies as occasions to remind Americans that the Trump-era days of playing partisan favorites with disaster victims were over. That his predecessor would let Americans of all persuasions suffer if he held a grudge against their elected representatives, and that Republicans in Congress happily played along. It’s admittedly a close call, but of Trump’s myriad corrupt acts and abuses of power prior to the January 6 insurrection, I found this tendency most infuriating. Unlike most of his antics, this one carried murderously evil intent. Trump could steal federal dollars to play golf, or accept payments from foreign governments, or shake down allies, and while all those things were corrosive and reflective of his contempt for the public interest, they didn’t amount to hateful vengeance against his own citizens. His response to disasters was morally disqualifying conduct, and worth denouncing repeatedly, if only as a matter of civic education. Americans should know that it’s not acceptable conduct for leaders of democracies, and incompatible with the ideal of a free and equal citizenry. But I’ve always believed it would be a politically potent attack, too. Your readership and support makes free Friday editions of Off Message possible. Please consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. There are about as many Republican voters in Maryland as there are adults of any political persuasion in the state of New Hampshire. The states Trump most completely abandoned to COVID-19 are home to tens of millions of Americans, and while most of them are Democrats, a huge minority are Republicans. Trump imagines most MAGA voters will thrill to the idea of abandoning the Americans they most hate in moments of distress, even if they happen to be collateral damage. And there surely are some Republicans so in thrall to Trump that they cheered along as he blamed California for its wildfires even as their homes were surrounded by kindling. But not all! The most reliable force driving people out of the Leopards Eating People’s Faces Party is the realization that the leopards will come for their faces, too, eventually. That’s the most direct angle. Make it clear to Republican-leaning voters in Wisconsin and Michigan and elsewhere that Trump will hurt them because of where they live. But here’s another: Ask why. Why, beyond petty vendettas and a lust for dominance does Trump single out places like Baltimore. Or Puerto Rico. Why does he think there’s a political edge for him in kicking them when they’re down? I know why! Republicans see it as an opportunity, like so many others, to pander to bigots under the cover of some other excuse. Trump would notionally pretend that the places he shook down “horribly run” and thus undeserving of government largesse—at least that’s what Trump would have you believe. But the racists know: it’s because they’re filled with non-white people. There are obvious moral problems with GOP race politics. But the biggest practical one is that, under Trump, the swapping out of dog whistles for train whistles means Republicans can no longer pander to reactionaries without kicking open the door to the most vile of bigots.
Trump’s supporters have filled his void of silence just as you’d expect. They’ve blamed “DEI” for the accident, because the political leadership of the city and state is black. They’ve fanned antisemitic conspiracy theories and conspiracy theories about terrorism and immigrants because a) that’s what bigots do, and b) if they have no legitimate basis to blame bad news on their perceived enemies, they can always be counted on to fabricate one. If you squint at the polls just so, you can find Republicans on the majoritarian side of narrow “DEI” controversies, just as you can find them on the majoritarian side of the narrow issue of trans high-school sports athletes. But Republicans plainly have no first-principles commitments on either matter. They dredged them up for the purposes of anti-black and anti-trans pandering. And so there’s no principle limiting the political appeals to the narrower issues. They aren’t really fixed solely on the merits of white-guilt seminars or the tiny number of trans girls outcompeting cis girls. And so, by picking these fights, they made it open season on whole races and genders. Americans might have nuanced misgivings about this or that—who has to make wedding cakes for whom, for instance—but given a choice between siding with a tolerant faction or a bigoted one, most will flock to the former. Even some of the right-wing operatives responsible for igniting the initial culture wars seem to grasp this
For three years, Biden has chosen not to force a reckoning with this facet of the Trump presidency—the one that screamed, you don’t get a ventilator if your governor if a Democrat, and who cares anyhow, since most of you aren’t even white. I’m surprised that even now, when the “four years ago” comparisons are insanely favorable to Biden, how thin and uncoordinated the Democratic effort is to remind the public just how badly COVID-19 exposed the bankruptcy of MAGA politics. It should not be left to a rapid-response Twitter account and a passing speech. We can not go back, and if you can’t bring yourself to reflect on the pandemic to understand why, a nightmarish reminder now protrudes from the Patapsco River. The government needs to rebuild the Key bridge without punishing the people who need it. And voters deserve to know: Will Trump do what’s right? Or is Baltimore too black to be worthy of federal help?
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We do not know what the end of the Israel-Hamas conflict will look like. Netanyahu remains committed to the full destruction of Hamas (however unlikely that may be.) Washington wants a reformed Palestinian Authority in charge (however unlikely that may be.) One idea floating in the ether is to deploy a multinational peacekeeping force (however unlikely that may be.) Meanwhile, some extremist elements in Israeli politics want to simply take the land as a spoil of war.
But even as the so-called “day after” is unclear, one thing is becoming apparent: it will not include UNRWA, the 75-year-old UN agency tasked with supporting the health and welfare of Palestinians.
In January, the Biden administration suspended funding for UNRWA following Israeli allegations that 12 (out of 13,000) staff took part in the October 7 attack. It now appears more likely than not that this temporary “pause” may last indefinitely. On Tuesday, the State Department suggested as much. “We have to plan for the fact that Congress may make that pause permanent,” State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller told reporters.
This would represent a major shift in US policy and politics around UNRWA.
In my nearly twenty years of covering the United Nations, UNRWA has always been at least mildly politically controversial in the United States. But UNRWA has nonetheless generally received support from both Democrats and Republicans. It was seen as a necessity. In Lebanon, Jordan, Palestine, and Syria, the agency provided humanitarian relief and social services, like schools and hospitals, where the state was too weak or ill-equipped to do so itself. Supporting UNRWA was considered an investment in stability in an otherwise volatile region. After Hamas took control in Gaza in 2005, UNRWA was seen as an alternative to a terrorist group. Better to have the secular UNRWA run schools than the Islamist Hamas, or so the thinking went.
To be sure, UNRWA sometimes incited controversy in US political circles. But by and large, there was a bipartisan consensus that funding UNRWA was a better bet than the alternative.
That consensus began to unravel in the Trump years — specifically, during Nikki Haley’s tenure as US Ambassador to the United Nations...
As Israel launches a propaganda campaign against the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), millions of Palestinians continue to rely on the agency’s critical support when it comes to healthcare, education, and food.
In this latest DEBUNKED!, we refute the top 7 Israeli lies about UNRWA.
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The House races that tell a bigger story
Reliably Democratic Illinois is nobody’s idea of a swing state. But three heated House primaries in the Land of Lincoln next week illustrate the broader vulnerabilities of both major political parties going into the general election: age, extremism and immigration. In today’s newsletter, I’m going to tell you about some fascinating primary races that will shed light on some broader trends in U.S. politics. Let’s start with Illinois’s 12th Congressional District, in the southern part of the state. Mike Bost, a Republican and Marine Corps veteran, was first elected to the House in 2014. Democrats tried to tar him as “Meltdown Mike,” highlighting his angry outbursts in the State Legislature and warning, “He’d make Washington worse.” Well, those were simpler times. A decade later, Bost is what passes for an establishment Republican. He is the chairman of the House Committee on Veterans’ Affairs and sits on the committees on agriculture and transportation, from which he can steer money and projects to the largely rural district that stretches across the bottom third of the state. His primary opponent, Darren Bailey, is proving that in the era of Donald J. Trump, there may be no limits to the G.O.P.’s rightward drift. Bailey, as you might recall, was the ardent, pro-Trump Republican whom Illinois’s Democratic governor, J.B. Pritzker, spent big money to elevate in the Republican primary for governor in 2022, figuring he’d be easy to beat — which he was. Pritzker won by nearly 13 percentage points. Bailey is calling Bost “Amnesty Mike,” an insufficient apostle of Trump’s “America First” agenda. But Bost has Trump’s endorsement. And to make matters even more interesting, Bailey has been endorsed by Matt Gaetz, a high-profile Trump ally and firebrand, who has had heated run-ins with Bost. It’s all enough to spin heads. Don’t say ‘age’Democrats have their own issues that are captured in races in their stronghold of greater Chicago. Let’s start with age: Danny Davis has represented a swath of Chicagoland stretching from Lake Michigan to the western suburbs for nearly 28 years, and at 82, he’s determined to stay in Washington. Chicago’s treasurer, Melissa Conyears-Ervin, and a youthful community organizer, Kina Collins, would like to send him to a well-deserved retirement on Tuesday. But to the Democratic establishment, “age” is a word not spoken aloud, not with President Biden in the White House. Davis is a year older than the president, and the Democratic elite, including Pritzker, have rallied around him once again. The governor cited Davis’s “steadfast commitment to serving the people of Illinois with integrity, compassion and dedication.” In an interview with The Chicago Tribune, even Conyears-Ervin took pains not to question Davis’s age. “It’s the energy, it’s the vision, it’s the relevance,” she said.
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Rami Khouri on Israeli Attacks in Lebanon, Suffering in Gaza & "Amateurish" U.S. Foreign Policy:
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