#2016 elections

Li Zhou at HuffPost:

The Justice Department is reportedly probing allegations that Obama officials fabricated evidence of Russian interference during the 2016 election, doubling down on attempts to distract from its controversial handling of the Jeffrey Epstein files. Per reports from CNN and Fox News, Attorney General Pam Bondi has called on prosecutors to initiate a grand jury investigation into these claims – a move that could lead to subpoenas of former officials and even potential indictments.

A DOJ spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Bondi’s decision effectively endorses Trump’s latest baseless conspiracy theory — which has included accusing Obama of treason — and comes as the administration has struggled to move on from the Epstein debacle. In recent weeks, Trump argued that Obama and his team manipulated intelligence to delegitimize his presidency, pointing to an announcement from Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard as proof. [...]

Gabbard’s interpretation distorts past conclusions drawn by members of the intelligence community, who determined that Russia fielded an influence campaign to damage former Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton and boost Trump. That finding was also backed by a bipartisan group of lawmakers in the Senate Intelligence Committee – including now-Secretary of State Marco Rubio.

Authoritarian sicko AG Pam Bondi orders the convening of a grand jury to conduct a phony “investigation” into Obama Administration officials and their assertion that Russia interfered in the 2016 elections in Donald Trump’s favor.

This is all a distraction from the Trump Regime’s coverup of the Epstein Files.

See Also:

NBC News: Pam Bondi orders grand jury probe of Obama administration review of 2016 election

Rob Savillo at MMFA:

Since Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard declassified documents on July 18 that she claimed showed the Obama administration “manufactured and politicized intelligence” about Russia's interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election in a criminal conspiracy against Donald Trump, Fox News has aired 168 segments about the unsubstantiated allegations. Coverage peaked in the middle of last week when the network aired 28 segments on July 23. Over the weekend, Fox's Life, Liberty & Levin and Sunday Morning Futures with Maria Bartiromo devoted their entire programs to the story.

Gabbard has used her “bombshell” claims, as Fox described them, of a “treasonous conspiracy” to call for the criminal prosecution of members of former President Barack Obama’s administration. The new revelations have quickly fallen apart under scrutiny. Prior investigations into Russian activity during the 2016 election — including investigations spearheaded by the Republican-led House and Senate intelligence committees — have concluded that Russia did interfere through social media and hacked documents.

Media Matters reviewed segments from July 18 through July 28 about Gabbard's criminal referral or the contents of the referral. The top shows to cover the story were Hannity, with 16 segments; the network's flagship weekday morning show, Fox & Friends, with 15; America's Newsroom and Fox News Live, with 12 each; America Reports and The Faulkner Focus, with 10 each; and finally Special Report with Bret Baier and Fox & Friends Weekend, with 9 each.

Fox's daily coverage of Gabbard's revisionist claims serves a key purpose for Trump: to redirect Americans' attentions away from the Jeffery Epstein files — something the president has demanded.

Alix Kendall at Daily Kos:

We’re sorry to remind you of this, but it has officially been 10 years since Donald Trump announced his bid for presidency. Of course, he would have made the run a lot sooner if his spiritual adviser, Paula White, hadn’t told him that God thought it was too soon.  But when the now-convicted-felon announced his plans on June 16, 2015, he set in motion a whirlwind of changes to come over the next decade. 

"Quite simply, it is time to bring real leadership to Washington,” Trump’s press release said at the time. “The fact is, the American Dream is dead—but if I win, I will bring it back bigger and better and stronger than ever before. Together we will Make America Great Again!" In his efforts to Make America Great Again, the two-time president—who still might be vying for a third term—has done quite a bit of damage. Over the past ten years, Trump has made America healthy again by pulling out some weird tricks, like suggesting people inject bleach to fight off COVID-19. Then again, he did later appoint an anti-vax fanatic to head the department that oversees the production and promotion of vaccines, so at least he is consistent. 

And while he managed to make enemies out of a chunk of his first-term GOPers, like former Vice President Mike Pence—perhaps for almost getting him killed—he finally got to turn the White House into the reality show he always wanted. From “MTV Road Rules” to “Fox & Friends” the administration has its fair share of TV stars. 

10 years ago yesterday, Donald Trump made infamous escalator ride down to announce his run for President for the 2016 GOP nomination. Most Americans, including those who later supported Trump, dismissed the nomination as an unserious attempt at the time. However, as the campaign season went on, his run was a serious one that cannot be ignored.

Noah Lanard at Mother Jones:

Two weeks after the election, I met Dianela Rosario in Huntington Park, California—an almost entirely Latino city that swung hard to the right this year. A 51-year-old Dominican American shopkeeper, Rosario told me that before this year she had never voted for a Republican presidential candidate. But, in 2024, inflation and the prices of groceries were front of mind. President Joe Biden and Democratic nominee Kamala Harris were not fully responsible for the cost of living crisis, she said, but she still wanted someone new.

“If she’s been vice president and there’s been no change, then I wasn’t sure she was going to be able to change things as president,” Rosario, who identifies as Afro-Latina, explained in Spanish about why she had not voted for Harris. “That’s what influenced me the most—that things might stay the same as they are now.” Earlier that afternoon, a Guatemalan shopkeeper shared a similar perspective. She told me she missed the lower prices of Trump’s first term and that she hoped the incoming president would deport people she saw as causing problems in the area. Unlike Rosario, though, she hadn’t been able to cast a vote. “Soy ilegal,” the shopkeeper explained of her own immigration status. In 2016, stories like these would have been hard to find in cities in Southeast Los Angeles like Huntington Park, where 97 percent of residents are Latino. That year, Trump lost by huge margins. In 2016, Hillary Clinton received 84 percent of votes in the area, compared to only 8 percent for Trump. Sometimes, Trump even came in third; in several precincts, Jill Stein was the runner-up to Clinton.

Eight years later, a Mother Jones analysis of precinct-level voting data shows that Democrats have lost more support in Southeast Los Angeles than any other part of Los Angeles County. Democrats’ combined margin of victory in nine cities in the area, which are more than 90 percent Latino on average, has declined by nearly 40 percent since 2016. Trump has gone from getting less than 10 percent of votes to nearly 30 percent. This is not just a function of Democrats staying home. Trump received more than three times as many votes this year in Southeast Los Angeles than he did during his first presidential run. While the data makes clear that voters in largely working-class Latino areas have moved right, the results do not reveal how individual Latinos who live in more mixed (and often richer) parts of Los Angeles voted. Compared to Southeast Los Angeles, Democrats’ have lost less support since 2016 in more middle-class majority-Latino cities, although those cities remain more conservative overall.

Still, a national trend—working-class Asian and Latino voters shifting to Republicans, and upper-class voters choosing Democrats—can be seen in miniature in Los Angeles County.

The results in Southeast Los Angeles mirror the dramatic drops in Democratic support in heavily Asian and Latino areas across the country, ranging from the border counties of Texas' Rio Grande Valley to the rural towns of California's Central Valley to urban areas of New York and New Jersey. While some of these losses have been offset by gains among affluent college graduates who once voted Republican, it was not enough for Harris to win. The voting records analyzed by Mother Jones include results for roughly 170 communities. Since 2016, Democrats’ margin of victory has dropped by at least 25 points in about 40 of those places, which is well above the countywide shift of about 17 points during the period. In nearly every single community with that large of a drop, Latinos and Asians comprise a majority of residents. The main exception is Beverly Hills, a famously affluent area with a large Jewish population. (Most of the shift in Beverly Hills happened between 2016 and 2020—meaning that it was not primarily a reaction to how Democrats discussed October 7 and Israel's military campaign in Gaza.) Karina Macias, the mayor of Huntington Park, said in a phone interview that the shift to the right among her constituents reflected concerns with issues that voters across the country prioritized: price increases, crime, and immigration. Macias noted a significant uptick in the number of families in Huntington Park who rely on food distributions, including among residents who probably would have never considered seeking help in the past.

“I think a lot of people were looking at their current economic situation, and [were] pissed off about it," Macias said. "Can you blame them? No, right? Especially in a community like Huntington Park, they feel it. They’re paying a lot more for things and are not necessarily being paid a lot more. If they work two jobs, maybe somebody in the household needs to go and get another job, right? We have a lot of families here that are doubling up in an apartment, and that’s how they get by."

The nearly 40-point shift in Southeast Los Angeles is far different from what has happened in some of the wealthier communities in Los Angeles. In the affluent coastal cities of Manhattan Beach, Redondo Beach, and Hermosa Beach, Democrats have maintained or slightly improved their margin of victory since 2016. But these voters did not necessarily back Democratic candidates all the way down the ballot. In 2020, Los Angeles County voters elected George Gascón, a progressive Cuban-American district attorney defeated his more moderate opponent by seven points. After the win, a backlash began almost immediately. This year, Gascón still managed to secure the endorsement of the Los Angeles Times. But he ended up losing to Nathan Hochman, a comparatively tough-on-crime challenger who became an independent after running as a Republican for California attorney general office in 2022. Hochman won by 20 points—a 27 point swing from 2020. Wealthier cities like Manhattan Beach and Santa Monica moved harder against Gascón than most of the county, despite being the areas where Democrats had some of their best results at the top of the ticket. Santa Monica residents went from supporting Gascón by a nearly 2-to-1 margin in 2020 to backing Hochman. In Manhattan Beach, Gascón lost by about 50 points—nearly 40 points worse than he did there four years ago. It meant that there was an almost 80-point gap in the city between Harris and Gascón, even though both are Democrats.

[...] Another dynamic is a belief among some Latino voters that Venezuelans, who crossed the border in record numbers in recent years, and other people arriving today are different from them and their ancestors. Gustavo Arellano, a Los Angeles Times writer who covered the recent political history of Southeast Los Angeles earlier this year, told me before the election about how his cousins objected to "these new immigrants" and were turning Venezuelans into scapegoats. "Venezuelans they get free everything," Arellano said, paraphrasing his cousins. "Our parents, when they came here illegally, didn't get anything at all. They did it on their own." Arellano tells his relatives that "these immigrants are just like our parents" but they insist otherwise. Macias didn't hear this perspective too often, but did recall someone saying about recent arrivals: "They're demanding things, and we work for them." It also doesn't help that Democrats—largely as a result of Republican opposition—have been unable to deliver on their promises to provide legal status to family members of some of the voters now turning against them. An undocumented Salvadoran immigrant named Sam made that clear when we spoke in Huntington Park—even though he was one of the strongest Kamala Harris supporters I interviewed. "The Democrats had the opportunity to help us," Sam explained in Spanish. "They didn't do it. As a result, all the Hispanics that are scattered throughout the United States, who are now citizens, who can now vote, are making them pay."

Hafiz Rashid at TNR (11.18.2024):

Donald Trump and his allies have characterized the 2024 election as an overwhelming victory—and a mandate for shock politics, mass deportations, and the transformation of the country’s foreign and domestic policy. There’s just one problem: They didn’t actually win by much.  CNN’s Harry Enten reports that Trump is now under 50 percent for the popular vote, and his margin is the forty-fourth worst out of 51 presidential elections since 1824. Four Democrats won Senate seats in states that Trump won (Arizona, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Nevada), compared to zero in the 2016 and 2020 elections. And while Republicans held onto their House majority, if results hold, their 221–214 margin will be the smallest majority in the 50-state era.  Trump’s appointments are not going to help with the House’s Republican majority, with many of Trump’s choices being elected GOP members. These include Representatives Elise Stefanik as his U.N. ambassador, Mike Waltz as his national security adviser, and Matt Gaetz (who has already resigned) as his attorney general, among others. 

While Donald Trump won the popular vote narrowly and got a trifecta, he does not have a “mandate”, since he has a threadbare House majority and is set to finish with a popular vote plurality win.

Emily Singer at Daily Kos:

In 2016, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. crapped all over Donald Trump and his supporters, agreeing that they were racist idiots too stupid to succeed, according to a trove of radio clips unearthed by CNN.

CNN reported that Kennedy—Trump’s pick to lead the Department of Health and Human Services—made the comments on his radio show “Ring of Fire,” where he regularly criticized Trump and those who backed him. For example, in an episode that aired in March 2016, Kennedy praised journalist Matt Taibbi’s criticism of Trump and his base. “One of the things that you write so beautifully, and your stuff is so fun to read, but you write about Trump, quote, ‘The way that you build a truly vicious nationalist movement is to wed a relatively small core of belligerent idiots to a much larger group of opportunists and spineless fellow travelers whose primary function is to turn a blind eye to things,’” Kennedy said, quoting Taibbi’s writing. “‘We may not have that many outright Nazis in America, but we have plenty of cowards and bootlickers, and once those fleshy dominoes start tumbling into the Trump camp, the game is up.’” Kennedy went on to say that Trump is a racist demagogue but isn’t smart enough to be effective like Adolf Hitler because Hitler had a "plan" and “was interested in policy,” while Trump is "non compos mentis"—Latin for "of unsound mind."

CNN reported that Kennedy also compared Trump to other past autocrats, like Benito Mussolini and Francisco Franco. “And you can see that every statement that Donald Trump makes is fear-based,” Kennedy said in an episode that aired in December 2016, according to CNN. “Every statement he makes. You know, we have to be fear of the Muslims. We have to be fear of the black people, and particularly the big Black guy Obama, who’s destroying this country, who’s making everybody miserable.” Kennedy went on: “And only one person has the genius and the capacity to solve these things. And I’m not gonna tell you how I’m gonna do it. Just trust in me, vote for me and everything will be great again. And of course, that whole thing is like a carnival barker.” He also called Trump racist and compared him with former Alabama Gov. George Wallace, an infamous segregationist.

“Wallace’s appeal … was to White middle-class men who had experienced the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s as a social demotion, and who found their lives in turmoil,” Kennedy said, according to CNN. “And that kind of insecurity, I think, is the target of the summons that Donald Trump has sent out to the American public.” Of course, Kennedy has now changed his tune, blaming his past comments on—you guessed it—the "mainstream media." “Like many Americans, I allowed myself to believe the mainstream media’s distorted, dystopian portrait of President Trump. I no longer hold this belief and now regret having made those statements,” he told CNN. “There’s apparently nothing that can’t be blamed on the mainstream media, even one’s own very public criticisms,” CNN reporter Jim Sciutto wrote in a post on X. Ultimately, Kennedy is one of a number of people now in Trump's orbit who slammed the president-elect in the past but have since retracted their statements in an effort to amass power.

During a March 2016 appearance on Ring Of Fire, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. gave praise to journalist Matt Taibbi’s blunt criticisms of Donald Trump and his MAGA Cultists by calling them “belligerent idiots.”

Andrew Prokop at Vox:

The left’s hopes for sweeping change from the 2010s have crashed into the reality of the 2020s. The energy of the Bernie Sanders presidential campaigns and the George Floyd protests is a distant memory. Some members of the Squad have moved toward the Democratic mainstream, while others lost primaries. Several of the progressive prosecutors elected in recent years have been ousted from office (by voters or due to scandals) or appear headed that way. In Democrat-dominated spaces — like cities and mainstream media outlets — there’s been growing pushback against the left. Ambitious progressive rallying cries of just a few years ago, such as defunding the police and Medicare-for-all, are now absent from the discourse. Politicians who assiduously cultivated left activists are now increasingly tacking to the center — most notably Vice President Kamala Harris, who has abandoned many of the positions she took while running in the Democrats’ 2020 presidential primary. Altogether, it’s seemed that progressives have moved from being on the offensive to being on the defensive — in both politics and the nation’s culture.

Of course, it’s not as if progressives’ gains over the past 20 years or so have been entirely wiped away. The Democratic Party remains significantly further to the left than it was a decade ago and certainly two decades ago (see, for instance, my recent article about the rise of the New Progressive Economics). Yet, as bloggers Noah Smith and Tyler Cowen have argued, there are growing indications that the leftward drift of the party and of the country’s culture broadly has stopped. On some fronts, there has indeed been a reversal. “No matter who wins, the US is moving to the right,” Semafor’s David Weigel argued last week, citing “immigrant rights, LGBTQ rights, climate change policies, and criminal justice reform” as issues where progressives are on the defensive. Being on the defensive is not new for the left — it’s the historical norm. Bursts of activist energy and successful reform are typically followed by long stretches where either the new status quo persists or a backlash reverses at least some recent change.

[...]

The era of rising progressive ambitions lasted from about 2005 to 2020

Historical periodization is a tricky thing, but here’s a rough attempt at it. From about 1980 to 2005, the left was mostly irrelevant to national politics. The Cold War was over, and capitalism reigned ascendant. The Republican Party moved right, while the Democratic Party moved to the center. The country cracked down on criminals, unauthorized immigrants, and non-working welfare recipients. 9/11 made patriotism mandatory. Same-sex marriage was viewed as politically toxic. But 2005 to 2020 was, broadly, a period where progressives and the left became increasingly influential inside the Democratic Party, in Democrat-dominated spaces, and in the larger culture. Call it the era of rising progressive ambitions. The disasters of George W. Bush’s second term kicked off the shift, discrediting Republican governance. This enabled the election of the nation’s first Black president, Barack Obama, whose agenda was strikingly ambitious and progressive when compared to the Clinton years. Democrats’ leftward shift accelerated in the 2010s, which saw:

The increased cultural influence of the social justice left, which transformed how much of the country thought and spoke about racial and gender issues (“the Great Awokening”)

The launch of viral protest movements like Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter, and Me Too

The nationwide spread and Supreme Court’s protection of same-sex marriage rights, followed by increased advocacy for trans rights

The rise of more economically progressive and even democratic socialist politicians, as seen in the support for Sanders’s campaigns, the Squad’s arrival in Congress, and party leaders’ embrace of some of Elizabeth Warren’s ideas

A leftward move of mainstream Democrats on issues like immigration and criminal justice, where activists had made the case that status quo policies were cruel and harmful

Increased public discussion about causes like Medicare-for-All, the Green New Deal, and student loan forgiveness

Basically, on a host of issues, the “Overton window” — the boundaries of which political and policy ideas are deemed fit for mainstream discussion, rather than fringe or self-evidently absurd — opened far further left. Trump’s election didn’t stop the left’s rising influence. Indeed, it intensified it, raising the stakes of politics and heightening passions. (Trump’s rise simultaneously opened the Overton window further right on some issues, as leading Republicans increasingly embraced bigotry and flouted democratic norms.) The assumption spread among Democrats that the establishment’s approach had failed and that bold new progressive ideas were necessary. During the party’s 2020 presidential primary, most candidates — including Harris — scrambled to the left, wooing activist groups. Joe Biden, the most old-school major contender, won, but rather than a full-on pivot to the center for the general election, he embraced much of the progressive agenda. It was a political necessity for helming the Democratic Party of 2020.

[...]

The backlash and disillusionment of the 2020s

Things feel different in the Biden years. In part that’s due to the constraints and disappointments that always exist when a party tries to turn a bold campaign agenda into governing reality. Narrow congressional majorities limited Democrats’ legislative possibilities (and then they lost the House). The conservative Supreme Court, meanwhile, blocked some Biden actions like student loan forgiveness and rolled back abortion rights protections. But the trend was broader. Democrats in cities disavowed police cuts as they struggled with rising crime and complained they couldn’t handle a migrant influx. Corporations have laid off DEI workers. Mainstream media companies, increasingly influenced by progressive causes (and sensitive to left criticism) in the 2010s, are now more forthrightly asserting their journalistic independence and challenging progressive ideas. Activism in protest of Israel was met with fierce pushback at universities. Commentators started declaring that “wokeness” had peaked as social justice controversies grew less intense and frequent.

[...]

All of this has happened before

Meanwhile, there’s also been a conspicuous decline of energy and intensity among progressive activists. While many certainly remain committed to their longtime causes, others have disengaged or shifted their focus to opposing Israel’s war in Gaza (an issue that bitterly divides the Democratic Party and where Democratic leaders are disinclined to embrace the left). Perhaps if Trump wins, progressive energy would surge again in opposing him — but perhaps too many people are now burned out and apathetic, and the mobilization won’t match the bygone days of Trump’s first term. And a backlash against Trump’s governance would not necessarily spur the Democrats to resume their leftward march. Activists naturally get disappointed and disengaged when major change proves elusive. “Every major social movement of the past 20 years has undergone a significant collapse,” the activist Bill Moyer wrote in 1987, “in which activists believed that their movements had failed, the power institutions were too powerful, and their own efforts were futile.” Fatigue, burnout, and organizational crisis then ensue; some move on to new causes.

Emma Brockes at The Guardian:

There are lots of differences between the presidential candidacies of Kamala Harris and Hillary Clinton, but, rhetorically at least, there’s one disparity that stands out. In 2008, when Clinton lost to Obama in the Democratic primaries, she referred to putting “18 million cracks in the glass ceiling”. Accepting the Democratic nomination in 2016, she said: “We just put the biggest crack in the glass ceiling.” And later that year, when she held what would turn out to be her terrible, deflated election night party, it was at the Jacob K Javits Centre, a convention hall in Manhattan that has, er, a glass ceiling. It’s notable, therefore, that several weeks into Harris’s candidacy, she’s not touching Clinton’s ceiling with a 10ft barge pole.

As a piece of imagery, the glass ceiling got very old very quickly, so that even by the time Clinton had it on heavy rotation, it was already emptied of meaning. Even without the phrase’s “all right, Grandma” vibe, it makes basic political sense for Harris to avoid using an image associated with the failed candidacy of the only other woman to be a major-party nominee for president. What’s curious is the decision her team has apparently made not only to eschew that particular phrase, but to handle with slightly more delicacy the nature of her candidacy. If Harris wins, she will, of course, not only be the first female president, but the first Black female president, and the first president, woman or otherwise, of south Asian descent. Pointing out this fact is not a major rhetorical part of the campaign.

Which isn’t to say that Harris is downplaying any aspect of her background. Trump, in an attack that, miraculously, succeeded in actually embarrassing other Republicans, accused her two weeks ago of changing identities when she “became a black person” – further proof that he’s overdue for a cognitive test. In Harris’s speech at the Democratic convention last month, she went in hard on her own biography, introducing to the American electorate her mother, who, at 19, she said, “crossed the world alone, travelling from India to California with an unshakable dream to be the scientist who would cure breast cancer”, and recalling her dad’s Jamaican heritage. But while the speech was steeped in feminist principle around abortion and punishing abusers – Harris became a prosecutor, she said, because a high school friend was being sexually abused and she grew up wanting to nail the bastard – nowhere was the language expressly feminist or foregrounding of the unique nature of her candidacy.

[...]

Instead, Harris lets the optics do the work for her and wears the various aspects of her identity lightly. “I stood up for women and children against predators who abused them,” she said at the convention, trying to spin her role as a prosecutor away from the cop-like end of the spectrum towards something that sounds more heroic and nurturing. But in general, and in terms of the way she uses her own personal history to engage voters, Harris has emphasised coming from the middle class far more than being a woman; and, for my money, it seems to be working. As for Clinton, God love her, she’s still ploughing on with the glass ceiling thing. At the Democratic convention, she referred to Harris’s candidacy as the “highest, hardest glass ceiling”. And fair play to her. She isn’t wrong, factually, even if politically she may be off base.