Trump went on Fox and Friends to talk about switching the 2020 election to mail-in, and said, that if you allowed everyone to vote, “you’d never have a Republican elected in this country again.”
Jon Queally calls it “Saying the quiet part out loud.”
It’s a pretty consequential slip, though. Trump was discussing the GOPs opposition to providing funding to states to retool for postal voting, which is likely to result in high-stakes litigation. And courtrooms - even ones presided over by GOP appointees - take these frank admissions of intent to heart.
Just look at the weird tale of Thomas Hofeller, creator of REDMAP and architect of the GOP’s nationwide gerrymandering campaign.
Hofeller’s key insight was the redistricting was “an election in reverse” where, “instead of voters choosing their politicians, politicians choose their voters.” He convinced GOP donors that funding state-level gerrymanders was a huge bargain on political influence.
We know what happened next: the US became more antimajoritarian than ever and started to elect antimajoritarian politicians - politicians who embrace the core right-wing tenet that some people are better than others and those people should be in charge.
White nationalists want whites in charge. Dominionists want rule by Christian men. Libertarians want rule by bosses. But they all believe that nature made some to rule and others to be ruled.
This is a hard ideology to make work in a democracy, which is notionally a majoritarian project. To get elected, antimajoritarians have two main tactics.
The first is scapegoating. White supremacy is how the GOP gets turkeys to vote for Christmas:
LBJ’s Southern Strategy was remarkably frank about this: “If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you.”
Right now, the GOP and its state media organ, Fox, have opted to put its main base (old white people) into harm’s way by converting high-risk activity into a marker of tribal loyalty. They could kill of a LOT of their base. It’s a weird flex.
But then there’s the other antimajoritarian way to win: cheating (i.e. gerrymandering), which brings me back to Hoeffler.
Hoeffler was really careful about never saying the quiet part out loud.
Not only did he never admit he was gerrymandering on racial lines, he also exhorted his allies to never write down anything like this, not to send emails or make notes to themselves about it.
But Hoeffler wasn’t good at following his own advice. When he died suddenly in 2018, he left behind computers and thumb-drives stuffed with frank admissions that REDMAP was a cheat, designed to steal the votes of nonwhites and other traditional Democratic voters.
Worse (for Hoeffler and the GOP), the person who inherited his data was his estranged, anarchist daughter, Stephanie. She put all that data online:
She dumped it all in raw form, so no one could accuse her of putting Hoeffler’s deeds and intentions in a false negative light – it’s all there, including materials that reflect badly on Stephanie. She was more interested in truth than her own feelings.
Before Stephanie doxed her father, court cases over REDMAP gerrymandering had been stalled and nosediving. Afterwards courts - presided over by GOP-appointed judges - had no choice but to find in favor of the plaintiffs, against GOP redistricting.
Proving intent is key to prevailing in court challenges to redistricting and other election fuckery. It’s really hard. The bar is set incredibly high. If the redistricters can make ANY sort of claim of a legit purpose for the new boundaries, they usually win.
But not when they come right out and say the quiet part out loud. When the President goes on NATIONAL TELEVISION and announces that he wants fewer people to vote because otherwise, “you’d never have a Republican elected in this country again,” well…
Both figuratively and literally, Trump has a really hard time keeping it in his pants. He ALWAYS says the quiet part out loud from “rapists and drug traffickers” to his statement that he would withhold aid from states whose governors criticized him.
He’s really good at running across the river hopping from the back of one alligator to the next before the jaws snap closed, but that’s a strategy much better suited to owning the news cycle than the courtroom.
Because courts don’t lose focus when your outlandish deeds are chased by more outlandish ones, obliterating the previous scandal from the public mind. They are deliberative, slow, plodding.
Remorseless.
Remember when Trump’s Muslim ban got struck down because courts weighed his statement that it wasn’t a Muslim ban against his tweets where he said it was? Saying the quiet part out loud is good antimajoritarian electioneering. It’s a terrible legal strategy.
Running across a river on the back of alligators works great…until it doesn’t. It’s hard to keep running once you lose a leg.
Trump no longer has a leg to stand on.
White supremacy is how the GOP gets turkeys to vote for Christmas
People don’t often look back on the early 1900’s for advice, but what if we could actually learn something from the Lost Generation? The New York Public Library has digitized 100 “how to do it” cards found in cigarette boxes over 100 years ago, and the tips they give are so practical that millennials reading this might want to take notes.
Back in the day, cigarette cards were popular collectibles included in every pack, and displayed photos of celebrities, advertisements, and more. Gallaher cigarettes, a UK-founded tobacco company that was once the largest in the world, decided to print a series of helpful how-to’s on their cards, which ranged from mundane tasks (boiling potatoes) to unlikely scenarios (stopping a runaway horse). Most of them are insanely clever, though, like how to make a fire extinguisher at home. Who even knew you could do that?
The entire set of life hacks is now part of the NYPL’s George Arents Collection. Check out some of the cleverest ones we could find below. You never know when you’ll have to clean real lace!
It is no coincidence that Iran and Venezuela, two countries targeted by the US, are both being hit hard by the pandemic. Iran accounts for just 1.1% of the world’s population but an astounding 11.2% of COVID-19 deaths, while Venezuela appears to be on the verge of a massive outbreak, judging from the rapid spread of the disease since the first diagnosis in that country 12 days ago. American sanctions have weakened both countries’ health infrastructure by curtailing access to foreign exchange and the capacity to import key medical inputs. In Venezuela, studies show that financial and oil-sector sanctions have cost the Venezuelan economy at least $17 billion a year since 2017, or more than four times the country’s level of non-oil imports. While sanctions are far from the only cause of the economy’s collapse, they were the driving factor behind the massive contraction in 2019, during which Venezuela lost one-third of its GDP. As UN Human Rights Chief Michelle Bachelet warned last August, the sanctions “are extremely broad and fail to contain sufficient measures to mitigate their impact on the most vulnerable sectors of the population,” with “far-reaching implications on the rights to health and to food in particular.”
Sanctions have had a dramatic effect on Iran’s economy as well. Oil production plummeted by 1.8 million barrels per day, to almost half the pre-sanctions level, after the Trump administration withdrew from the 2015 nuclear deal. Last October, Human Rights Watch reported that US economic sanctions were “causing unnecessary suffering to Iranian citizens,” and that the consequences for patients with rare diseases could be “catastrophic.” Iran now has the second-highest rate of mortality from COVID-19, second only to Italy. The US authorities disingenuously argue that the sanctions carve out exceptions for transactions related to humanitarian goods. Those who deal with Iran know that this is false. It’s like telling someone who has just lost their job and income that they can still go to a store and buy whatever they want. Moreover, economic sanctions not only reduce the targeted country’s capacity to pay for essential inputs; they also dramatically increase the regulatory and reputational risk of doing any business whatsoever with that government. Almost all private-sector firms thus decide not to take the gamble – or to charge high fees for doing so.
[…]
US economic sanctions have caused millions of people to suffer, and soon they could kill tens of thousands, if not far more. Exacerbating civilians’ suffering to try to change their government’s conduct is ethically wrong and prohibited by international law. Pursuing this strategy during the worst health crisis the world has faced in modern times demonstrates reckless disregard for human life and contempt for the norms of civilized behavior.
