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> > > The discourse of the Trump era has been dominated by a conceit that the two major parties have swapped economic identities. The Democrats have supposedly abandoned their historical role as spokespeople for the working class to represent the neoliberal global elite, while the Republicans have been transmuted into scruffy populists. On the left, a mood of self-flagellating agony has prevailed, even as the party has won several elections in a row. On the right, the Republicans’ populist credibility has intensified their long-standing paranoia, “proving” that everything from the culture wars to Donald Trump’s endless crime spree is in fact a plot by the powerful to control them. > > > > Yet, funnily enough, the two parties remain stubbornly attached to their traditional distributive goals. The Democrats still want to tax the rich and spend on the non-rich. Republicans still want very badly to do the opposite. > > > > The Washington Post reports that Donald Trump’s campaign brain trust is working on a new economic plan to anchor his campaign. The leading idea is to pass another huge tax cut for the wealthy (a cut in corporate tax rates), paired with a tax increase on the middle class (a 10 percent tariff). > > > > Trump’s brain trust believes current economic conditions indicate the U.S. economy is being harmed by excessively progressive taxes. To be sure, they have consistently believed this for more than 30 years through every conceivable combination of economic circumstances: high inflation, low inflation, recession, boom, war and peace, > > > > Supply-side economics is a religion masquerading as an economic theory, and Trump’s brain trust, as it were, is a collection of the high priests of the supply-side cult: Arthur Laffer (who first began promoting supply-side economics nearly 50 years ago), Stephen Moore, Lawrence Kudlow, and Newt Gingrich. > > > > The same crew wormed its way into Trump’s inner circle in 2016, probably because most legitimate Republican economists were too grossed out by Trump. Despite intermittently promising to make rich people pay higher taxes, Trump’s first-term accomplishment centered on passing a tax cut that disproportionately benefited the rich: > > > > The putative goal of cutting taxes for business owners was to incentivize them to plow more money into domestic investment. That did not happen. However, the Trump tax cuts also didn’t have any obvious or immediate costs. At the time, interest rates were very low and the labor market had not yet fully recovered from the 2008 recession. A deficit-financed tax cut, combined with a general spending spree, injected more demand into the economy and helped produce full employment and rising incomes until the pandemic struck. > > > > The economic situation Trump would inherit in 2025 would be very different. Higher deficits and interest rates mean that borrowing money to fund a regressive tax cut would have an immediate economic cost. That’s why his advisers are planning to pair the next Trump tax cut for the rich with a 10 percent tariff, the revenue from which would, presumably, offset the cost. > > > > The political trouble with this plan is that it exposes rather than hides the trade-offs inherent in giving rich people a huge tax cut. (Consumers would pay higher prices for a lot of goods right away.) The long-standing Republican formula, one employed by Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush, and Trump, is to pair huge tax cuts for the rich with small tax cuts for everybody else. Democrats complain the rich are getting a disproportionate share, Republicans lie about it and then make a lot of noise about some other, more easily digestible wedge issue (the war on terror, gay marriage, the caravan, etc.). > > > > The supply-siders are not concerned about this cost because they really, really care about the issue. To them, cutting taxes for the rich is the main purpose of politics. They’re not doing it to get elected; they’re trying to get elected to do this, and they are willing to bear whatever cost comes along with pursuing their central objective. The sheer depth of their commitment is, in a way, admirable, if you overlook both the total objective failure of their economic model and their promiscuous dishonesty about it. > > > > But where that leaves the rest of the party is another matter. The supply-side wing’s strangehold on the Republican policymaking apparatus is a historical marvel, one I studied in my first book two decades ago. The party’s voters don’t share this priority at all. Increasingly, Republican-aligned intellectuals also reject it. Trump has allowed the conservative intelligentsia to develop a deep fantasy in which they represent a barefoot movement of the soil. Many of them truly seem to believe their own pseudo-populist rhetoric; they are motivated by team loyalty more than any specific policy, to which they generally pay little attention. > > > > But Trump is a crook, not an enemy of the rich. And the next Trump term, should there be one, will be even more oligarchic than the last. > >

> > > The Trump campaign has accused advocates of the legal theory of 'stretching the law beyond recognition' > > > > A longshot legal bid to disqualify and remove Donald Trump from the 2024 US presidential ballot has been gaining traction. > > > > Initially heralded by liberal activists, the theory has burst to the fore in recent weeks as prominent conservatives embrace the effort. > > > > But critics warn that, if it moves forward, it risks robbing voters of the right to deliver their own verdict on whether the former president should return to the White House. > > > > The untested legal gambit is a last-ditch bid of sorts against an ex-president who remains popular with his base. Its ultimate arbiter could be the conservative Supreme Court he helped shape - if it even gets that far. > > > > On Wednesday, a Washington-based watchdog group sued to block Mr Trump from the Republican primary in the state of Colorado - likely the first of several lawsuits of its kind. > > > > The Trump campaign quickly shot back that the legal challenge is "stretching the law beyond recognition" and has no basis "except in the minds of those who are pushing it". > > > > "Joe Biden, Democrats, and Never Trumpers are scared to death because they see polls showing President Trump winning in the general election," spokesman Steven Cheung told the BBC's US partner CBS News. > > > > Despite his mounting legal troubles, Mr Trump remains the dominant frontrunner for the Republican nomination and is polling neck-and-neck with President Joe Biden ahead of their expected rematch. > > > > The strategy to bar him from the primary ballot invokes a rarely used provision of the US Constitution - Section Three of the 14th Amendment - that bars those who have "engaged in insurrection or rebellion" against the country from holding federal office. > > > > The 14th Amendment was ratified after the Civil War, and Section 3 was deployed to bar secessionists from returning to previous government posts once southern states re-joined the Union. > > > > It was used against people like Confederate president Jefferson Davis and his vice-president Alexander Stephens, both of whom had served in Congress, but it has seldom been invoked since. > > > > Yet it has re-emerged as a political flashpoint in the wake of Mr Trump's sprawling effort to overturn his 2020 election defeat, which culminated in the riot at the US Capitol in January 2021. > > > > In the attack's aftermath, the US House of Representatives impeached the then-president on a charge of "incitement of insurrection". > > > > Had the US Senate voted to convict him on that charge, it would have had the option to take a second, simple-majority vote to bar him from ever serving in office again, on the basis of the 14th Amendment. > > > > But that never happened: the Senate failed to reach the two-thirds majority required to convict Mr Trump, so the second vote never happened. > > > > Two and a half years later, with Mr Trump's third bid for the presidency remarkably buoyant, the 14th Amendment is once again the talk of Washington. > > > > At the vanguard of the effort is Free Speech For People, a self-described non-partisan advocacy group that last year filed challenges against Trump-backing lawmakers it labelled "insurrectionists". > > > > The 14th Amendment was not written solely to apply to the post-Civil War era, but also to future insurrections, argues Ron Fein, the organisation's legal director. > > > > He told the BBC the US Capitol riot succeeded "in delaying the peaceful transfer of power for the first time in our nation's history, which is further than the Confederates ever got". > > > > "The particular candidates we challenged in 2022 had participated or assisted in the efforts that led up to the insurrection," Mr Fein said. > > > > And, he added, their cases established important legal precedents that can be applied to show "Trump is the chief insurrectionist". > > > > Free Speech For People intends to seek disqualification in multiple states. It is also separately petitioning the top election officials in at least nine states to unilaterally excise Mr Trump from the primary ballot. > > > > Either move will inevitably draw an objection from the candidate himself, triggering a process that could ultimately place his fate in the hands of the US Supreme Court. > > > > The legal strategy has picked up considerable steam since August, when Mr Trump was accused of election subversion in two separate criminal cases. > > > > That same month, conservative legal scholars William Baude and Michael Stokes Paulsen wrote in a law review paper that Section 3 is "self-executing, operating as an immediate disqualification from office, without the need for additional action by Congress". > > > > Mr Trump could therefore be rendered ineligible for the ballot "by every official, state or federal, who judges qualifications", the pair concluded. > > > > Mr Baude and Mr Paulsen are members of the Federalist Society, a highly influential, conservative advocacy group. > > > > They adhere to the view that the Constitution must be interpreted as its authors intended at the time, and their stance has since been backed by other legal experts with conservative credentials. > > > > Even the Supreme Court, with its conservative majority and trio of Trump-appointed judges, may be receptive to their argument, said Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, a dean at the Yale School of Management who supports the Baude-Paulsen perspective. > > > > "All that is needed is that one of 50 state election officials has to find him ineligible," he told the BBC. > > > > "Just one will send it to a state court review, which will be appealed by either side and sent to the US Supreme Court for a speedy resolution." > > > > With voters heading to the polls early next year, the case will be decided quickly, he predicted. > > > > But the effort is not without its detractors, who question the theory's viability and whether it should even be implemented in a highly partisan America. > > > > In an opinion piece for Bloomberg, liberal professor Noah Feldman wrote: "Donald Trump is manifestly unfit to be president. But it's up to voters to block him. Magic words from the past won't save us." > > > > "To make a tortured legalistic logic to try to stop people from voting for who they want to vote for is a Soviet-style, banana republic argument," said New Hampshire Republican Party chairman Chris Ager. > > > > "I'm not a Trump supporter. I'm neutral. But this whole attempt is bad for the country." > > > > Even Brad Raffensperger, the top elections official in Georgia and a target of Mr Trump's ire, rejected the move as "merely the newest way of attempting to short-circuit the ballot box". > > > > But at least two of his counterparts elsewhere have said the matter is under consideration. > > > > Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson, a Democrat, told MSNBC she was "taking it seriously" and would confer with colleagues in other key states like Pennsylvania and Georgia. > > > > And in a joint statement last week, New Hampshire's attorney general and secretary of state - both Republicans - said they were "carefully reviewing the legal issues involved". > > > > The latter is particularly notable, as their state holds the distinction of being the first in the nation to vote in the Republican primary. > > > > The New Hampshire challenge is notably being touted by Bryant "Corky" Messner, a top Republican attorney who ran for the US Senate in 2020 with Mr Trump's endorsement. > > > > Mr Messner, who intends to finance any 14th Amendment challenges to Mr Trump in his state, wants the courts to deliver their verdict before he can decide on whether to support Mr Trump. > > > > "To me, it's purely about the Constitution," he said. "The US Constitution is more important than any one individual, be it Donald Trump or anyone else." > > > > "If he ends up being the nominee of the Republican Party and he's not disqualified, I'll vote for him." > >

> > > ATLANTA – Republicans have quietly been coming to grips with the likelihood that Donald Trump will keep winning the Republican nomination until he dies if he doesn’t retake the White House next year — and either outcome could cost the GOP down-ballot. > > > > It’s a grim sort of arrested development for Republicans, with Trump positioned as a modern-day Adlai Stevenson, Democrats’ losing nominee in 1952 and 1956. The worry is that Trump’s baggage and bombast will disincentivize center-right and independent voters from participating in general elections, with repercussions down the ballot — reversing the old coattails rule of politics, which holds that a strong name at the top of the ticket lifts all boats in the party. > > > > But in the inverted world operatives are bracing for, it’s Trump’s name forever sinking their boats in statewide battles by depressing voter turnout. “’24, ’28, ’32. Probably until he dies,” said one veteran Republican strategist, bearing a glum look. > > > > Polls have repeatedly shown that a majority of voters don’t want either Trump or President Joe Biden to run in 2024. Sixty percent of respondents to a July Harris-Messenger poll said they didn’t want Trump to run, as did 70% of respondents (and 44% of Republicans) in an April poll by the Associated Press and the University of Chicago NORC. > > > > Pollsters are still exploring this enthusiasm gap. But Mark McKinnon – a veteran of George W. Bush and John McCain’s White House bids – has identified what he called the new Trump “ghost voters” in Iowa. While Republicans in 2016 were afraid to announce their support for Trump because he was too untoward, they are now afraid to say they don’t support him for fear of being chastised in the new Trump-loyal GOP. > > > > “There’s a lot unknown,” said one veteran conservative activist who is supporting Trump, but also has a keen sense of Trump’s weaknesses. “It’s all going to be a question of turnout.” > > > > The veteran activist cited the ritzy suburb of Atlanta, Johns Creek, as one example where otherwise solid Republicans who soured on Trump after January 6th will probably just stay home this election. “They voted for Biden and (Georgia Gov. Brian) Kemp. They don’t like Biden, but he is less icky (than Trump). But if they don’t have Kemp (on the ballot) maybe they don’t turn out at all.” > > > > Conversely, the veteran conservative strategist said, Biden could suffer from a lack of fervor from his own base of supporters. Where MAGA-diehards will always show up for Trump, Biden doesn’t have a similar “fan base” on the left at his disposal. > > > > ATLANTA, GEORGIA – AUGUST 24: Former U.S. President Donald Trump arrives to depart at Atlanta Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport after being booked at the Fulton County jail on August 24, 2023 in Atlanta, Georgia. Trump was booked on multiple charges related to an alleged plan to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election in Georgia. […]Joe Raedle/Getty Images > Looking for cash to fill the gap > > > > Conservatives and veteran Republican strategists are trying to combat this expected dip in Republican turnout by quietly pushing mega-donors who have sat out the presidential race to engage in Senate and governor’s races across the country. Their hope is to create a buttress against what they expect to be another four years of President Joe Biden, according to more than a dozen Republican operatives who spoke with The Messenger over the past month. They include people who support Trump but worry about his effects on down-ballot races. > > > > In a side meeting at a “cattle call” of Republican candidates in Atlanta last month, one conservative leader described gathering with other top activists discussing the 2024 playing field. At the outset, nobody mentioned the name of the former president, but once one person did, the worries poured forth: Trump will depress the suburban vote for Republicans. Women will stick with Democrats. Trump’s fired-up base of diehards and populists will keep carrying him over the line in Republican primaries and “normie” Republicans will keep staying home — they won’t vote for Democrats, but they won’t vote Trump either. > > > > All of which could crush other Republicans running, these conservative operatives say. > > > > “We’re worried about Cruz’s re-election chances,” the conservative leader told The Messenger. Texas Sen. Ted Cruz will appear on the ballot the same as Trump (most likely) in Texas. The group that gathered in Georgia is concerned that swaths of moderate and center-right voters in the state’s expansive suburbs will take a powder, leaving Cruz and other Texas Republicans hanging. > > > > It’s the same problem Republican veterans stared down seven years ago when it became clear Trump would be their nominee — movement conservatives and quieter Midwestern evangelicals, unlike their fiery Southern Baptist cousins, wouldn’t vote for Clinton, but they wouldn’t vote for Trump either. The falloff in support would have hurt GOP chances across the board, trying to win control of the House and Senate and governor’s races across the country. > > > > To avert that pending disaster — which many pollsters at the time saw as imminent as a Hillary Clinton win — then-campaign manager Paul Manafort and then-RNC Chairman Reince Priebus pushed Mike Pence onto the ticket. The move helped drive turnout in 2016 and produce better than expected results. > > > > But ever since then Republicans have underperformed expectations three elections in a row now. > > > > A “blue wave” of support in 2018 carried Democrats to power in the House, leading to Trump’s first impeachment. Two years later, just a day before Trump’s supporters sacked the Capitol in an attempt to overthrow the 2020 election results, a pair of Republican senators lost in Georgia, handing control of the chamber to Senate Democrats. And in 2022, support for Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis built fast after Trump’s handpicked candidates lost heavily in critical swing states like Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, and Pennsylvania. > > > > Republicans who held their breath while Trump was in office have become increasingly exasperated, but there doesn’t seem to be any way of stopping him from winning. Trump’s strong plurality of MAGA voters appears unbeatable, and Trump’s tight-knit campaign team has been quietly rewriting the party rules in the states to make it even harder to challenge him. > > > > “It’s a perpetual Ponzi scheme using the GOP,” said one Republican strategist working on an opposing campaign. > Glass half-full? > > > > But not every Republican is sold on the fatalism which seems to have gripped at least half the party. > > > > “Anyone worrying about anything but the coming cycle should get their priorities in order,” said Sean Spicer, Trump’s first White House press secretary and a veteran campaign operative who helped run the RNC’s 2016 operations before joining the White House. > > > > He pointed to hyperbole and hand-wringing ahead of the 2016 election and how Republicans did far better than expected. He also noted that Democrats have a commensurate problem with depressed support from Black voters, which could just as easily offset the voter depression on the right. > > > > And even as Trump himself continues pushing baseless claims that he didn’t lose in 2020 and attacks on prosecutors, judges and possible witnesses, his well-disciplined juggernaut of a 2024 campaign is pushing a concurrent message claiming the economy was better when the former president was in office (LINK). > > > > Yet the nonstop drama of the Trump era of politics seems to have whittled away at general interest in anything remotely political. Spotify podcast star Joe Rogan rebuffed Trump’s entreaties to appear on his top-rated show, even though they share many of the same views. The author behind the viral populist ballad, “Rich men north of Richmond”, hit back at Republicans after he was featured in the first Republican debate. > > > > Donors and professional operatives have been eyeing a staid and safe alternative to Trump, Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin, with his aw-gosh delivery which sounds remarkably like Owen Wilson and his Silicon Valley zip-up vests, as a last-minute savior who can win back center-right voters in the suburbs. > > > > But their white knight increasingly looks like someone who couldn’t win the nomination. > > > > A recent poll found Youngkin trailing Trump handily in a hypothetical matchup in his own state. And Youngkin told Fox News recently that he would miss a number of filing deadlines to appear on the ballot in early voting states if he did jump in near the end of the year. > Follow the (small) money > > > > The day after Trump was arrested in Georgia and the first criminal mugshot of a former president was posted online – which Trump’s team said they then used to raise $7.1 million from their supporters – Erick Erickson, a veteran conservative radio host and Trump critic on the right, said Trump detracts from the party’s chances writ large. > > > > “Sure, there’s a political agenda against him with these prosecutions, but also to help him secure the Republican nomination,” Erickson wrote in his newsletter. “The Democrats know for him to win, Republicans must spend money that could otherwise be spent to secure the Senate and save the House. The return on investment to get Trump across the finish line could be so high that we can’t take the Senate or hold the House. That, then, would cost us more.” > > > > The proxy for these concerns has been a drying up of small-dollar donations to candidates not named Trump. > > > > The Republican National Committee has seen a downturn. Other campaigns have been unable to turn on the spigot of digital donations which used to flow like milk and honey but now has turned into a desperate trickle. And infighting in state Republican parties between Trump loyalists and veteran party members across the country has undercut efforts to win back offices in critical battleground states from Arizona to Michigan. > > > > When the GOP suffered sweeping losses in Obama’s 2012 re-election, it commissioned an “autopsy” with recommendations for how the party could get back in the business of winning. Much attention was paid to the longterm need for the GOP to win over conservative Latino voters, but the party also built a voter-turnout juggernaut which overhauled the way Republicans got their supporters to show up at the polls. > > > > A decade later, after Trump’s handpicked candidates lost big to Democrats in critical battleground states, the RNC commissioned another “autopsy” — but this time the report was never released publicly and didn’t mention the name of its most powerful player, Trump. > > > > "As the party becomes Trump-ified, you see it almost like a sun when it goes nova,” Matthew Continetti, a historian of the American right, said on MTP Now Thursday. “It collapses in on itself.” > >

> > > While some ­on the right portray accountability for the Jan. 6 Capitol riot as just another partisan dispute, two prominent conservative legal scholars have made the case that the Constitution disqualifies former President Trump from public office. > > > > Last week, law professors William Baude of the University of Chicago and Michael Stokes Paulsen of the University of St. Thomas — both members of the conservative Federalist Society — argued in a law review article that Trump is already constitutionally forbidden from serving in public office because of Section Three of the 14th Amendment. > > > > This section, also known as the Disqualification Clause, bars from office any government officer who takes an oath to defend the Constitution and then engages in or aids an insurrection against the United States. Only a two-thirds majority of both houses of Congress can act to remove such disability. > > > > It should not come as a surprise that Trump meets this standard. All three branches of the government have identified the attack on the Capitol as an insurrection, with multiple federal judges, bipartisan majorities in the House and Senate, as well as the bipartisan Jan. 6 House select committee, citing Trump as its central cause. > > > > As Baude and Paulsen note, “Section Three requires no prior criminal-law conviction, for treason or any other defined crime, as a prerequisite for its disqualification to apply.” Trump’s indictment by special counsel Jack Smith for election-related crimes only further bolsters the case for his constitutional disqualification. > > > > Those federal criminal charges include conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding, obstruction of and attempt to obstruct an official proceeding, and conspiracy against rights by attempting to “oppress, threaten or intimidate” people in their free exercise and enjoyment of their right to vote. > > > > Although Trump’s role in fomenting the attack on the Capitol has been well documented, Baude and Paulsen argue that the “full legal consequences” of Section Three “have not been appreciated or enforced.” As they explain, the Disqualification Clause is “an enforceable part of the Constitution, not limited to the Civil War, and not effectively repealed by nineteenth century amnesty legislation.” > > > > The provision is also “self-executing … without the need for additional action by Congress.” As the professors note, Section Three “can and should be enforced by every official, state or federal, who judges qualifications.” > > > > Last September, three New Mexico residents represented by my organization, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, won the first case in more than 150 years removing an elected official from office based on participation in an insurrection. The court ruled that then-New Mexico County Commissioner Couy Griffin had violated Section Three of the 14th Amendment by recruiting men for battle to join Trump’s “wild” effort to overturn the election Jan. 6, normalized violence and breached police barriers as part of the weaponized mob that allowed others to overwhelm law enforcement and storm the Capitol. Griffin’s removal marked the first case at the federal or state level concluding that what occurred Jan. 6 was an insurrection. > > > > In Griffin’s case, the court found that disqualifying officials under Section Three of the 14th Amendment does not conflict with the First Amendment right to protest. It also rebuffed attempts by Griffin to conflate Jan. 6 with Black Lives Matter protests. > > > > In their article, Baude and Paulsen explain that “to the extent of any conflict with prior constitutional rules, Section Three repeals, supersedes, or simply satisfies them,” including “the free speech principles of the First Amendment.” > > > > Most importantly, the authors conclude that Section Three covers a “broad range of conduct against the authority of the constitutional order” and “a broad range of former offices, including the presidency.” They state explicitly that Section Three “disqualifies former President Donald Trump, and potentially many others, because of their participation in the attempted overthrow of the 2020 presidential election.” > > > > Every president, regardless of party, takes an oath to preserve and defend the Constitution of the United States. Enforcing the Disqualification Clause against an official who violated that oath is an act of patriotism, not partisanship. As Baude and Paulsen correctly state, “Officials must enforce the Constitution because it is law … Section Three has legal force already.” > > > > The Disqualification Clause has already been used successfully to promote accountability for the insurrection, and, in the coming months, it will be used again to prevent Trump and others from serving in public office. > >