Tuesday, October 29, 2024
Why Major Newspapers Won’t Endorse Kamala Harris - The Atlantic
Why Major Newspapers Won’t Endorse Kamala Harris
Democracy dies in broad daylight.
"In this extremely tight presidential race, the big surprise of the fall campaign has turned out to be the failure of two major newspapers to deliver expected endorsements of Kamala Harris and against Donald Trump. With voting well under way in many states, the Los Angeles Times’ owner and The Washington Post’s publisher made inexcusably late announcements that they had become suddenly disenchanted with the entire notion of endorsing presidential candidates.
Withholding support for Harris after everything that both newspapers have reported about Trump’s manifest unfitness for office looks to me like plain cowardice. Although I served on the Los Angeles Times’ editorial board for 18 years, I believe one can reasonably question the value of endorsements. Still, the timing here invites speculation that these papers are preparing for a possible Trump victory by signaling a willingness to accommodate the coming administration rather than resist it.
At each paper, the editorial board had readied a draft or outline of a Harris endorsement and was waiting (and waiting and waiting) for final approval. On Wednesday, the L.A. Timeseditorials editor, Mariel Garza, told her team, including me, that the owner, Patrick Soon-Shiong, would not permit any endorsement to run. She then resigned in protest.
As thousands of angry Times readers canceled their subscriptions, Soon-Shiong publicly claimed on X to have asked the editorial board to write an analysis of “all the POSITIVE AND NEGATIVE policies by EACH candidate” during their respective White House tenures. But he said the board “chose to remain silent.”
Nonsense. We made no such choice. We were ready to endorse Harris, and Soon-Shiong’s post on X was the first time I or my fellow editorial writers had heard anything about a side-by-side analysis. Having been so casually thrown under the bus, I resigned Thursday. My colleague Karin Klein also announced that she would step down.
On Friday, the Post publisher and CEO, William Lewis, published a statement that his paper, too, would not endorse in the presidential race, now or ever again. A member of the Posteditorial board resigned. Subscribers canceled.
Read: Don’t cancel The Washington Post. Cancel Amazon Prime.
Remember, this is the same news organization that, during the first Trump administration, adopted the slogan “Democracy dies in darkness.” It can also die in broad daylight. In this year’s race, a non-choice ignores Trump’s singular unfitness for office, demonstrated time and again through his dishonesty, his false claims to have won the 2020 election, his criminal convictions, his impeachable offenses, his race-baiting, his threats of retaliation against his opponents, and many other features that make him a danger to the nation.
Lewis and Soon-Shiong both explained that they wanted to let voters make their own decisions.
I hear some version of that irritating statement every four years, although it typically comes from readers who ask why editorial boards don’t just deliver the facts, the way news stories are supposed to, leaving judgment up to readers. Publishers and newspaper owners ought to know better.
Editorials express a newspaper’s institutional viewpoint, based on a clearly articulated set of values and expressed by logical (and sometimes emotional) arguments supported by evidence. In a process unique in journalism, they are shaped by daily back-and-forth discussions among editorial writers. The editorial board is separate from the newsroom, where reporters are supposed to keep their opinions to themselves.
Endorsements and other editorials are a lot like a lawyer’s closing argument to a jury after a long trial with numerous witnesses and exhibits. They remind readers of everything they’ve read, seen, and heard, and then they assemble it all in a persuasive presentation. They make a case. And then readers decide.
The Times editorial board went more than three decades without endorsing in presidential races, largely because readers and the newsroom were so outraged by the endorsement of Richard Nixon for reelection in 1972 that publishers were too cautious (or rather, too chicken) to again take a stand. But soon after I arrived at the Times, the editorial board promised to start endorsing for president again in the 2008 primary. We argued—in an editorial, of course—that if we purported to support transparency, voter engagement, and civic participation, then we had an obligation to make a decision and vigorously defend our choice.
In a pre-endorsement series of editorials, we invited readers to examine a set of foundational ideas such as “liberty” and “the pursuit of happiness,” and to question how those and other principles expressed in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution applied to current challenges. Then we measured the primary candidates against those values, and made our case for the relatively unknown Barack Obama.
Some critics argue that editorials don’t change anyone’s vote, but that’s not the point. Even voters who already have made up their mind often look for a well-reasoned explanation of why their choice is the right one. And let’s not be so certain that a strong argument on an editorial page, even one from California or the District of Columbia, won’t affect the outcome of a close race that could be won or lost by just a few votes in one precinct in Pennsylvania.
Paul Farhi: Is American journalism headed toward an ‘extinction-level event’?
Soon-Shiong’s alternative, a non-choice pro-and-con matrix, wouldn’t be an editorial. It would be as if an attorney decided not to bother with a closing argument and said instead, “Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, here are some reasons you should rule for my client, and also a bunch of reasons to rule against him.” Nor does the proposed side-by-side analysis of Trump’s and Harris’s policies make much sense on its own terms. Trump as president was the top policy maker during his time in office. Harris, as vice president, has not been a policy maker at all, so the comparison would be inapt. An editorial board would identify that flaw immediately. Soon-Shiong may have missed it, but I find myself wondering whether he wanted to direct the outcome of the endorsement.
In short-circuiting the Times editorial board, Soon-Shiong’s message has become only more incoherent. He said Thursday that his goal was to avoid political division. But his adult daughter, Nika Soon-Shiong, said in a series of X posts and in a Saturday New York Timesstory that the family met and collectively decided against endorsing Harris to protest the vice president’s support for Israel. Not true, Patrick Soon-Shiong told the Los Angeles Times on Saturday.
“Nika speaks in her own personal capacity regarding her opinion,” but not for the Times, he said.
Instead of a forthright, well-argued editorial, readers are left with an indecipherable message and journalistic failure. Someone ought to write about it. It might make a good editorial.
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Opinion | Jeff Bezos killed an endorsement. That’s his right. - The Washington Post
Opinion Bezos was within his rights to screw this up
"It turns out editorial writers don’t like having their work spiked.
Los Angeles Times Editorials Editor Mariel Garza — and others — resigned last week, after owner Patrick Soon-Shiong blocked an endorsement of Vice President Kamala Harris. A parallel process is underway at The Post following the Friday announcement by publisher William Lewis that committed the paper to a policy of presidential non-endorsements, starting right away.
Poof went a pending Post endorsement of Harris.
Two columnists have left The Post, and editorial writers David E. Hoffman and Molly Roberts have both stepped down from their positions on the Editorial Board. “I find it untenable and unconscionable that we have lost our voice,” wrote Hoffman in a letter to David Shipley, who leads the paper’s Opinions section. The turmoil here on K Street is a slow-moving plume, in part because many staffers didn’t foresee this turn of events, myself very much included. In my Oct. 14 media chat, I received a question from D.C. activist and author Peter Rosenstein: Why hasn’t The Post made a presidential endorsement? My response obsessed over the Editorial Board’s likely considerations in timing the piece for maximum impact, never considering the absurd possibility that the endorsement wouldn’t happen.
Well, it didn’t happen. What did I miss and, more important, what now?
Follow Erik Wemple
No aggressive news organization avoids the occasional public crisis over coverage breakdowns and management upheaval. The Post has contributed its share, reaching back to the Janet Cooke scandal to the Iraq War debacle to the more recent imbroglio over Lewis’s botched transition plan following the departure of former executive editor Sally Buzbee.
Such low points notwithstanding, The Post’s ownership has a decades-long record of taking valiant and principled stands on fundamental journalistic questions. Donald Graham, who led The Post under various titles for decades before the sale to Jeff Bezos in 2013, was famous on Wall Street for abjuring the gospel of short-term profitability. “We don’t do quarters; we don’t do forecasts,” Graham told financial analysts in 2006.
Bezos carried the torch onward. He invested in the newsroom, doubling its head count; he invested in the website; he invested in branding (“Democracy Dies in Darkness”); he proved stalwart when reporter Jason Rezaian was imprisoned in Iran and when Saudi agents assassinated contributing columnist Jamal Khashoggi.
All the while, he avoided foisting his business agenda on the newsroom. “People had a lot of suspicions about Bezos, but the reality is that he never interfered in our coverage in any way, and I was very grateful for that,” former executive editor Martin Baron told the New Yorker. “And he did that despite enormous pressure from Donald Trump, starting when Trump began his campaign for the presidency in 2015.”
Now this. Many others have eloquently described the sudden endorsement outage as a cowardly and unprincipled act. Agreed. I have little to add to the condemnations that have already piled up, other than to say that the decision falls in that column of watershed Post moments. A lot of people would have forgotten about the Harris endorsement slated to run in the newspaper; few will forget about the decision not to publish it.
In a Monday op-ed defending his decision, Bezos fell back on the well-documented decline of trust in the American media, citing Gallup data indicating that our industry has now underperformed even Congress in this category. Although such endorsements don’t move voters, he argues, what they “actually do is create a perception of bias. A perception of non-independence. Ending them is a principled decision, and it’s the right one.” One issue here: Newspapers have been endorsing candidates for centuries; cratering trust is a modern phenomenon. Another issue here: Endorsements are nothing more than an opinion about the central question of a political campaign, just the way other editorials are opinions about a policy debate, a natural disaster or Metro funding.
So is Bezos taking the first step toward banishing opinions altogether from this space? If so, gird for more subscriber defections, catastrophic ones.
A committee of one — Bezos — is the arbiter of all these questions. In a statement on the controversy, the Washington Post Guild said, “The message from our chief executive, Will Lewis — not from the Editorial Board itself — makes us concerned that management interfered with the work of our members in Editorial.” Watch out there, Guild: That’s like accusing an NFL coach of “interfering” with the offensive game plan.
“I think it is within his prerogative to make these kinds of decisions,” Baron said of Bezos in an interview Monday. “He is the owner, owns 100 percent of The Washington Post. I think at other places, frequently the owner or the controlling shareholder or the publisher will get involved in those kinds of decisions. A lot depends on the particular institution.”
Correct: Setups vary, but under long-established and idiosyncratic newspapering practices, editorial board decisions fall under the suzerainty of the owner and publisher. To the extent they see fit, they can tell the board what to say about this or that issue.
Preferably, those orders steer clear of decreeing silence on autocratic creep.
Oligarchs who use their editorial boards to pronounce on the world have injected some whimsy into American history. Consider Robert McCormick, the legendary aristocrat who led the Chicago Tribune from 1925 through 1955. In his book “The Colonel,” Richard Norton Smith wrote that McCormick once issued editorial guidance that garden “weeds are among our principal evils.” What’s more, McCormick mounted a campaign for the reform of rabies laws after a stray dog killed one of his sheep and told his editorialists to debunk the image of Franklin D. Roosevelt as a Hudson Valley farmer. “What he has is a large suburban estate on the Hudson River. His so-called farm is nothing but suburban acreage … held for speculation.” On less weighty matters, McCormick was a committed isolationist.
Does Bezos’s late-in-the-game endorsement policy portend a retrenchment of McCormick’s “era of personal journalism” at The Post? “Absolutely, that’s what it is,” said Andy Rosenthal, a former editorial page editor at the New York Times. “The Post is not hiding the fact that that is what it is.” Rosenthal worked under former New York Times Co. chairman Arthur Sulzberger Jr.; given that title, Sulzberger “could have come in with a list” of imperatives for the editorial board. But that would have been “insane,” said Rosenthal, and instead Sulzberger talked through the issues with the board.
Bezos is fashioning a third model: years and years of exemplary statesmanlike deference and patience, punctuated by an editorially violent and destabilizing fiat. Hey, it’s his paper."
Trump’s Night at the Garden: Racist Campaign Rally Evokes Infamous 1939 Nazi Gathering in NYC | Democracy Now!
Trump’s Night at the Garden: Racist Campaign Rally Evokes Infamous 1939 Nazi Gathering in NYC | Democracy Now!
AMY GOODMAN: I want to bring into this discussion Marshall Curry. Marshall Curry went to the Madison Square Garden event, but he also did an Oscar-nominated film. That film was called A Night at the Garden, about the 1939 Nazi rally at Madison Square Garden. This is a clip.
FRITZ KUHN: Ladies and gentlemen, fellow Americans, American patriots, I am sure I do not come before you tonight as a complete stranger. You all have heard of me through the Jewish-controlled press as a creature with horns, a cloven hoof and a long tail. We, with American ideals, demand that our government shall be returned to the American people who founded it.
If you ask what we are actively fighting for under our charter, first, a social, just, white, gentile-ruled United States. Second, gentile-controlled labor union, free from Jewish, Moscow-directed domination.
AMY GOODMAN: A Night at the Garden. That was an excerpt not of Nazi Germany, but of a Nazi rally at Madison Square Garden in 1939, from the Academy Award-nominated short film directed by Marshall Curry. That voice, explain what we just saw and listened to, and the person, the protester, who came up and was beaten up.
MARSHALL CURRY: Sure. So, in 1939, there was a rally in Madison Square Garden where 20,000 New Yorkers gathered to celebrate the rise of Nazism. And when I first saw that footage, I was completely shocked to see the American flag and George Washington and, you know, hear people singing “The Star-Spangled Banner” and saying the Pledge of Allegiance, and then offering a stiff-armed salute and cheering white supremacy.
So, the man who was speaking was named Fritz Kuhn. He was the head of the German American Bund, which had camps all around the country, had quite a big following and some significant power. The protester who runs out on stage and is beaten up was a man named Isadore Greenbaum, who was a Jewish plumber’s assistant who just went to the rally that night to find out what was going on, and was shocked and appalled by what he saw.
AMY GOODMAN: And you went to Madison Square Garden Sunday?
MARSHALL CURRY: I did. So, I made this film seven years ago out of archival material that we sort of found in the National Archive and UCLA’s archive and Grinberg Archive. And that was, you know, seven years ago, at the beginning of Trump’s administration. I saw some similarities between some of the demagoguery that was happening on stage in 1939 and what Trump was doing at his rallies. And so — but I had never actually seen a Trump rally personally. And so, when I heard that he was going to be at Madison Square Garden, I thought I needed to go and see it for myself.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Marshall Curry, as you mentioned your surprise, many Americans are not aware of how extensive the fascist and Nazi movement was in the U.S. back in those days. Could you talk about that?
MARSHALL CURRY: Sure. I mean, when I grew up, I always learned in school that America took on the fascists and we fought the Nazis and defeated them. And we did, and that’s a great, you know, point of pride for our country. But we were not entirely united. As today, there were people in our midst who were antisemites, who were anti-immigrant.
And I think the thing that struck me the most about seeing that footage was the way that the demagogues in 1939 used the same tactics that we see today. You know, they use this kind of dark humor. They wrap their ideology in the symbols of patriotism, and they go after immigrants and the press and minority religions. And they do it to distract people from the fact that they really want to cut taxes for rich people and take away healthcare and do policies that people wouldn’t support.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And I’d like to ask, Ruth Ben-Ghiat, this Madison Square rally has happened numerous times in U.S. history. People forget that in 1968, when George Wallace, the white supremacist governor, was running for president, he held a rally at Madison Square Garden in October of 1968. And it was filled, as well, with segregationists from right here in New York City. And in fact, the police were picking up people in the streets, anyone who was trying to protest the Wallace rally. I know because I was a young college student at the time trying to get down to Madison Square Garden, was picked up by the police blocks away from Madison Square Garden, and we were held in vans until after the rally was over, hundreds of people. The reality is that filling Madison Square Garden is really not that hard for a political movement. You’re talking about less than — in a metropolitan area of 20 million people, being able to get 20,000 zealots in an arena is basically two-tenths of 1% of the population.
RUTH BEN-GHIAT: Yes. And the other thing is that this rally, all the different strains of it, playing “Dixie,” this Trump rally, you know, Trump has always provided a big tent, from the very beginning, 2015, ’16, for every possible kind of racist and extremist in America. He addressed himself to Southern racists, people who — he addressed himself to Proud Boys, to neo-Nazis, famously, at the Charlottesville rally — every type of person with a grievance, and then enlarged that with espousing great replacement theory, and, of course, in partnership with Fox, with the GOP elite, etc.
And so, all of this was represented at this rally, together with people from the fields of business, like the businessman Grant Cardone, who said, “We have to slaughter these people,” referring to people who aren’t supporting Trump. And you had people from the world of entertainment and from sports. And so, Madison Square Garden, you know, a seat of spectacles and sports spectacles, entertainment spectacles, political spectacles, was the perfect place, actually, for MAGA to show how many people are fitting into its big tent of racism and extremism.
AMY GOODMAN: Ruth Ben-Ghiat, we want to thank you for being with us, expert on fascism and authoritarianism, wrote the book Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present. Her newsletter is called Lucid, on threats to democracy. And we want to thank Marshall Curry, director of the Oscar-nominated short film A Night at the Garden about the Nazi rally at Madison Square Garden in 1939.
When we come back, as billionaire Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos defends his decision to block the paper from endorsing Kamala Harris, we’ll speak with the Pulitzer Prize-winning Post reporter David Hoffman, who’s resigned from the Post editorial board in protest, and with Los Angeles Times editorials editor Mariel Garza. She resigned after the L.A. Times billionaire owner also blocked the board’s endorsement of Harris. Back in 20 seconds."
Trump is promising deportations under the Alien Enemies Act of 1798. What is it?
Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump salutes in Aurora, Colo., on Oct. 11. At that rally and others, he spoke of using a centuries-old act to expedite deportation of certain undocumented migrants.
Former President Donald Trump, whose bid for the White House has been dominated by his increasingly hardline anti-immigration rhetoric, is vowing to use an obscure, centuries-old law to expedite the removal of undocumented migrants from the U.S.
“I will invoke the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to target and dismantle every migrant criminal network operating on American soil,” he said at a recent rally in California, one of several in which he has brought it up.
Trump is promising that, if reelected, he will use the act to initiate a federal effort called “Operation Aurora” — named after the Colorado town that he claims has been taken over by Venezuelan gangs, which residents and local officials dispute— to target undocumented migrant gang members for arrest and deportation.
He has also suggested that the act could be used to end sanctuary cities, which limit cooperation with federal immigration authorities, telling Fox News’ Harris Faulkner that “we can do things in terms of moving people out.”
The Alien Enemies Act is featured in more than just Trump’s stump speech.
It’s also name-checked in the Republican Party’s official 2024 platform, which says it will invoke the law to “remove all known or suspected gang members, drug dealers, or cartel members from the United States, ending the scourge of Illegal Alien gang violence once and for all.”
The act has gotten relatively little attention, let alone use, in the more than 200 years it’s been on the books, as Trump acknowledged.
“Those were the old days, when they had tough politicians,” he told a crowd of supporters in Arizona. “Think of that, 1798. Oh, it’s a powerful act. You couldn’t pass something like that today.”
So what exactly does the act do, and how likely is Trump to be able to use it as promised?
What’s the purpose of the Alien Enemies Act?
The Alien Enemies Act specifically allows the president to detain, relocate, or deport non-citizens from a country considered an enemy of the U.S. during wartime:
“Whenever there shall be a declared war between the United States and any foreign nation or government … and the President of the United States shall make public proclamation of the event, all natives, citizens, denizens, or subjects of the hostile nation or government, being males of the age of fourteen years and upwards, who shall be within the United States, and not actually naturalized, shall be liable to be apprehended, restrained, secured and removed, as alien enemies.”
Congress, with the support of President John Adams, passed the Alien Enemies Act as part of the four Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798 as the U.S. stood on the brink of war with France.
“There was a lot of fear-mongering about French supporters in the United States and about conspiracies to basically get the United States in on France's side,” explains Georgetown University Law Center professor Steve Vladeck.
The controversial group of laws severely curtailed civil liberties, including by tightening restrictions on foreign-born Americans and limiting speech critical of the government.
After President Thomas Jefferson was elected in 1800, he either repealed or allowed most of the acts to expire, except for the Alien Enemies Act, which does not have an expiration date.
It not only remained on the books but continued to expand in scope: Congress amended it in 1918 to include women.
When has the act been used before?
This 1918 photograph shows "enemy aliens" being corralled by Secret Service operatives at Gloucester, N.J., on their way to internment in the South.
The Alien Enemies Act has been used three times in American history, all in connection with major military conflicts.
During the War of 1812, all British nationals living in the U.S. were required to report information including their age, length of time in the country, place of residence, family description and whether they had applied for naturalization.
A century later, during World War I, President Woodrow Wilson invoked it against nationals of the Central Powers: the German Empire, Austria-Hungary, the Ottoman Empire and Bulgaria.
According to the National Archives, U.S. authorities used the law to place over 6,000 “enemy aliens” — many of them Germans — in internment camps, with some remaining in detention up to two years after fighting had ended.
The U.S. Marshals Service says it registered 480,000 German “enemy aliens” and arrested 6,300 between the declaration of war in April 1917 and the armistice in November 1918.
Most recently, President Franklin Roosevelt invoked the act after the attack on Pearl Harbor, designating Japanese, German and Italian nationals as “alien enemies” during World War II.
Roosevelt's proclamation required residents from all three countries to register with the U.S. government and authorized the internment of any alien enemy “deemed potentially dangerous to the peace and security of the US.”
By the end of WWII, over 31,000 suspected enemy aliens and their families — including Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany — had been interned at camps and military facilities across the U.S., according to the National Archives. Several thousand of them were ultimately repatriated to their country of origin, either by choice or by force.
Vladeck says the Alien Enemies Act was used to detain mostly Italian and German nationals. The bulk of the more than 100,000 Japanese Americans who were placed in internment camps during the war were U.S. citizens, detained under different legal grounds.
How strong is Trump’s case?
The act hasn’t been invoked since WWII, which Vladeck says is largely because the nature of war has changed over the last eight decades.
The fine print of the act says the president can only take on this authority once Congress has declared war, and — while the U.S. has been involved in plenty of conflicts over the decades — it hasn’t done so formally since 1942.
“It hasn't been a source of contemporary controversy because we haven't had a declared war,” he explains. “And no one has tried to argue that that invasion or predatory incursion language could be used in any context other than a conventional war.”
Until Trump, that is. The former president — who has a long history of using dehumanizing language against minority groups and political opponents — has repeatedly referred to the influx of migrants to the U.S. as an “invasion” and vowed mass deportations.
But he hasn’t blamed a specific country or conflict that would fall within the scope of the 1798 act, Vladeck says, which is one of the reasons he doesn’t think Trump’s argument will succeed.
Even some anti-immigration advocates in favor of deploying the act acknowledge those key legal challenges.
Defining illegal immigration as an invasion and migrant gangs as foreign nations would be an “uphill climb in federal court,” George Fishman, former deputy general counsel at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security under Trump, wrote last year.
What are some possible outcomes?
Trump doesn’t need the Alien Enemies Act to go after undocumented immigrants, Vladeck says, noting that presidents already have the authority to arrest, detain and remove them.
“The issue that has hamstrung each of the last four presidents, of both parties, has not been legal authority — it’s a lack of resources,” he says. “The federal government doesn’t have the capacity to identify, track down, round up and remove every single one of the 11 million-plus undocumented immigrants in this country.”
One of the primary obstacles is a lack of funding for immigration enforcement, something that lawmakers sought to address in a bipartisan border security billearlier this year. It would have put $20 billion toward border provisions and implemented several policy changes to adjust and expedite the asylum process.
Senate Republicans blocked the bill after pressure from Trump, which Democratic critics say he did so that he could campaign in part on fixing the chaos at the border.
“The irony that Trump is now trotting out this old, anachronistic statute to solve a problem that he could have solved much more directly and much less controversially, I think it ought not to be lost on the folks who are learning about these authorities for the first time,” Vladeck says.
If Trump were reelected and proceeded to invoke these powers — which he could do unilaterally, unless a majority of the House and Senate were to block him — Vladeck thinks he would be challenged in court immediately and have a tough time defending his case.
“The sort of the notion that the courts would look kindly upon using this kind of authority where, one, he doesn't need it, and two, it would really be a stretch in what is already a pretty controversial legal power, I think is pretty far-fetched,” he says.
Katherine Yon Ebright, counsel with the Brennan Center’s Liberty and National Security Program, says it’s unclear whether courts would intervene to stop the Alien Enemies Act from being used in peacetime.
“The last time the Alien Enemies Act was challenged, in Ludecke v. Watkins in 1948, the Supreme Court upheld President Harry S. Truman’s extended reliance on the law three years after the end of World War II,” she wrote in a legal analysis. “The Court reasoned that the question of when a war terminates and wartime authorities expire is too ‘political’ for judicial resolution.”
On the other hand, she says, a lot has changed since then, including contemporary understandings of equal protection and due process.
Courts and the public have rejected the 1944 Korematsu case that upheld Japanese internment. Congress provided reparations to surviving Japanese Americans and formally apologized for the use of the Alien Enemies Act during WWII. If a president invokes the act again, she says, courts might look at those legal challenges differently — “on the merits instead of categorically deferring to the president.”
But the surest way to prevent the act from being abused, Yon Ebright writes, would be for Congress to proactively repeal it.
Some Democratic lawmakers — Rep. Ilhan Omar of Minnesota and Sen. Mazie Hirono of Hawaii — have tried in recent years by introducing the “Neighbors Not Enemies” Act, which would repeal the Alien Enemies Act, but hasn’t gained traction.
Omar has resurfaced her calls for action in light of Trump’s recent comments, writing on X that “it’s past time we put this xenophobic law in the dustbin of history where it belongs.”
Trump Team Fears Damage From Racist Rally Remarks
Trump Team Fears Damage From Racist Rally Remarks
(These were Trump’s hand picked racist speakers speaking a message that i have heard trumpet since the early 1970’s when he and his father were sued for racism in renting apartments to Blacks and Puerto Ricans. Trump and his speakers are savages, plain and simple)
“The Trump campaign issued a rare statement distancing itself from a comedian’s offensive joke about Puerto Rico at his rally on Sunday, a sign that it was concerned about losing crucial votes.
Donald J. Trump and his allies are full of bravado over his chances of victory in the closing days of the 2024 campaign. But there are signs, publicly and privately, that the former president and his team are worried that their opponents’ descriptions of him as a racist and a fascist may be breaking through to segments of voters.
That anxiety was clear after Mr. Trump’s six-hour event at Madison Square Garden in New York City, where the inflammatory speeches on Sunday included an opening act by a comedian known for a history of racist jokes who derided Puerto Rico as “a floating island of garbage” and talked about Black people carving watermelons.
The backlash among Puerto Rican celebrities and performers was instantaneous across social media, prompting the Trump campaign to issue a rare defensive statement distancing themselves from offensive comments. In a tight race, any constituency could be decisive and the sizable Puerto Rican community in the battleground state of Pennsylvania was on the minds of Trump allies.
Danielle Alvarez, a senior adviser to the Trump campaign, said in a statement that the Puerto Rico joke “does not reflect the views of President Trump or the campaign.”
The Trump ethos has generally been to never apologize, never admit error and try to ignore controversy. Ms. Alvarez’s statement was a rare break from that practice, reflecting a new concern that Mr. Trump risks reminding undecided voters of the dark tenor of his political movement in the closing stage of the 2024 race.
Some of Mr. Trump’s Republican allies, seeming to harbor similar misgivings, were quick to criticize the joke and the comedian, Tony Hinchcliffe, who made it.
David Urban, an informal Trump adviser with long ties to Pennsylvania, where there are large numbers of Puerto Rican voters, posted on X: “I thought he was unfunny and unfortunately offended many of our friends from Puerto Rico,” adding the hashtag “#TrumpLovesPR.”
The pushback also came from officials in Florida, where Mr. Trump’s campaign is based and some of his advisers have spent their careers.
Senator Rick Scott of Florida posted on X on Sunday: “It’s not funny and it’s not true.” Representative Maria Elvira Salazar, of South Florida, condemned Mr. Hinchcliffe’s comments and said she was “disgusted,” adding that it did not reflect Republican values.
“Puerto Rico isn’t garbage, it’s home to fellow American citizens who have made tremendous contributions to our country,” Senator Marco Rubio of Florida posted on X on Monday. But he also made a point to note that “those weren’t Trump’s words. They were jokes by an insult comic who offends.”
Beyond the rally backlash, Mr. Trump’s former chief of staff, the retired four-star Marine general John F. Kelly, has brought new attention to Mr. Trump’s past remarks and behavior. He described his former boss as a fascist and claimed that Mr. Trump made complimentary statements about Adolf Hitler.
At the Georgia Tech campus in Atlanta on Monday night, Mr. Trump exaggerated and misstated the criticism, falsely claiming that Vice President Kamala Harris had said that everyone who doesn’t vote for her is “a Nazi.” He talked about his father, Fred Trump, whose parents were German, and claimed his father had told him, “Never use the word Nazi. Never use that word,” and “Never use the word Hitler.”
Mr. Trump, who has accused President Biden of running a “Gestapo administration,” a reference to Nazi Germany’s secret police, added, “I’m not a Nazi. I’m the opposite of a Nazi.” He told the rally crowd on Monday, “She’s a fascist, OK? She’s a fascist.”
Asked to comment on appearing concerned that the attacks on Mr. Trump could sink in with voters, Karoline Leavitt, a spokeswoman for Mr. Trump, did not address the question. Instead, she said, “Due to President Trump’s plans to cut taxes, end inflation, and stop the surge of illegal immigrants at the southern border, he has more support from the Hispanic American community than any Republican in recent history.”
Senator JD Vance of Ohio, Mr. Trump’s running mate, dismissed any concerns. “Maybe it’s a stupid, racist joke, as you said,” he told reporters on Monday. “Maybe it’s not. I haven’t seen it.” But, he added, “we have to stop getting so offended at every little thing in the United States of America.”
Chuck Rocha, a Democratic strategist who has specialized in mobilizing Latino voters, asked publicly on Sunday for $30,000 in small donations to a PAC so he could send the video of the offensive comments to Puerto Rican voters in Pennsylvania.
By Monday morning, he had met the goal and had sent a blitz of 250,000 texts with 15 seconds of the comedian’s set disparaging the island.
“Puerto Ricans have a unique affinity for their homeland,” Mr. Rocha said. “When you attack the island, it cuts so deep with the community.”
Ms. Harris seized on the remarks, telling reporters at Joint Base Andrews on Monday morning that Mr. Trump’s rally at Madison Square Garden offered fresh evidence of the former president’s divisiveness. Mr. Trump, she said, “fans the fuel of hate and division and that’s why people are exhausted with him.”
Ms. Harris, the Democratic nominee, is preparing to deliver a speech at the Ellipse near the White House that’s being cast as the closing argument of her three-month campaign, after she replaced President Biden on the ticket. It is the same spot where Mr. Trump delivered a speech to his supporters on Jan. 6, 2021, calling on Congress to reject President Biden’s electoral college votes. Hundreds of those supporters then marched to the Capitol and violently disrupted the certification.
Mr. Trump’s current extended orbit is a mash-up of longtime political veterans, down-ballot elected officials and operatives who embrace the New Right view that the country is in an existential battle internally and that the ends justify their means for victory.
Most on the Trump team believe the attacks on Mr. Trump over the Jan. 6 Capitol riot and the fighting over whether he is racist cover ground that is already known by an electorate that has become numb to Mr. Trump’s provocations and threats to weaponize government.
His advisers and close allies have marveled privately that nothing has appeared to harm Mr. Trump so far politically, and it has given many a sense of invincibility about what he can get away with. And they think in a fragmented media environment in which nontraditional outlets have enormous sway, such headlines and stories matter less than they once did.
Some of them also view Sunday’s rally as a success, arguing that Mr. Trump’s filling an arena in deep blue Manhattan offered a demonstration of his political strength to voters around the country.
But few of Mr. Trump’s own events contained the kind of overt racism and misogyny the Madison Square Garden rally did.
“She’s a fake — I’m not here to invalidate her — she’s a fake, a fraud, she’s a pretender,” Grant Cardone, a businessman and internet figure, told the crowd. “Her and her pimp handlers will destroy our country.”
And some of Mr. Trump’s own close allies privately expressed concern that the headlines about the event came at a problematic moment, when the small group of persuadable voters across the country is tuning in to the election, and that it was a needless risk when people are already casting ballots during early voting in many states.
There have been other moments suggesting the Trump team has concerns.
While Mr. Trump’s allies often publicly insist that voters have tuned out warnings about Mr. Trump’s authoritarianism, there were clear signs the Trump campaign was concerned about the statements from Mr. Kelly. Mr. Trump and others who worked for him have denied Mr. Kelly’s accusations.
The Trump team mobilized at full force to rebut Mr. Kelly — indicating they feared the attacks could appeal to the roughly five percent of voters they assess as undecided — in the lead-up to the Madison Square Garden rally.
After Ms. Harris called Mr. Trump a fascist, his campaign released a video featuring a Holocaust survivor, Jerry Wartski, who rejected comparisons of Mr. Trump to Hitler and demanded that Ms. Harris apologize. Mr. Wartski also attended Mr. Trump’s rally at Madison Square Garden, where several speakers tackled accusations about his character head on.
Steve Witkoff, a real estate developer and longtime friend, said from the stage that Mr. Trump respected all faiths and that “accusations of extremism, they couldn’t be further from the truth.”
Sid Rosenberg, a New York talk radio host, responded to Hillary Clinton likening Mr. Trump’s event to a pro-Hitler rally from 1939. Mr. Rosenberg joked that it was “out of character for me to speak at a Nazi rally, I was just in Israel.” He said that a vote for Mr. Trump was a vote for an administration “that cares about the Jewish people,” while calling Democrats “Jew-haters.” Hulk Hogan, more simply, looked at the crowd and said, “I don’t see no stinkin’ Nazis in here.”
Mr. Trump himself also tried to signal his strength with diverse groups, citing that Jews, Muslims and Catholics alike were all lining up behind him. “The Republican Party has really become the party of inclusion,” he said.
Perhaps most striking was the joint statement issued days before the rally by House Speaker Mike Johnson and Senator Mitch McConnell, the Republican minority leader, calling on Ms. Harris to stop calling Mr. Trump a fascist. It accused her of inflaming political tensions, ignoring Mr. Trump’s history of demonizing his own opponents.
Mr. McConnell’s presence on that statement was especially notable.
Despite his endorsement of Mr. Trump months ago, Mr. McConnell told his biographer Michael Tackett that he hoped the former president “would pay a price” for his role in connection with the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol. According to Mr. Tackett’s biography, Mr. McConnell called Mr. Trump “erratic” and said that American voters chose wisely in voting him out of office. He also said he viewed Mr. Trump’s actions in connection with Jan. 6 to be “as close to an impeachable offense as you can imagine,” though he did not vote to convict him in an impeachment trial and said the criminal justice system would be the place to address it.
Shane Goldmacher contributed reporting.
Maggie Haberman is a senior political correspondent reporting on the 2024 presidential campaign, down ballot races across the country and the investigations into former President Donald J. Trump. More about Maggie Haberman
Jonathan Swan is a political reporter covering the 2024 presidential election and Donald Trump’s campaign. More about Jonathan Swan
Michael Gold is a political correspondent for The Times covering the campaigns of Donald J. Trump and other candidates in the 2024 presidential elections.More about Michael Gold“