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26 November 20
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Here's Something to Give Thanks for This Thanksgiving: Our Democracy Survived
Art Cullen, Guardian UK
Cullen writes: "Going on 40 years I've been writing columns about giving thanks, and this year I mean it: thank God that America stood up for democracy again."
Trump and company did everything possible to try to thwart rule of law. Americans wouldn’t stand for itThis year is among the worst. Pandemic is our parlance. Covid runs wild over Iowa while its government stands back and does little. The president thumbs his nose at the virus and at the rule of law, skirted impeachment thanks to feckless senators, and would steal a win through a faithless electoral college, if he could.
But he can’t.
The people spoke. They elected Joe Biden with the most votes ever, and by a convincing margin, as a rebuke to it all. It was a vote for Biden – made by millions, in hopes of good will – but it was as much an act of revulsion for what Donald Trump represents.
Biden promised to govern with fairness and decency. People endorsed a middling approach with a split Congress. They demand that government gets along somehow. Fair enough. There’s wisdom in that vote.
It was a record turnout. So many have lamented a lack of civic engagement for good reason. Our local school board elections typically muster 10% turnout. This year, however, the people were engaged. Especially in Iowa, where they came out in awful weather, young and old, to hear Julián Castro or John Delaney campaign during the run-up to the caucuses. Dr Jill Biden, first lady in waiting, talked education to a handful of folks at Better Day Café. It was something to behold. We had a ringside seat.
Trump and company tried to keep people from voting. They tried to slow down the mail. They tried to sow fear that the system was rigged. But the people came out the first day they could and stood in line for hours, if necessary, to make sure their vote counted. County election officials, no matter their politics, tried to make it as safe and smooth as possible and it was, for the most part. That, too, was something to behold.
The judicial system worked. Judges appointed by Republicans threw out Trump’s efforts to suppress or overturn the vote. A score of lawsuits filed following the election, claiming unspecified fraud, were dismissed. Chief Justice John Roberts has held the center and protected the judiciary’s independence under great trial over the past year.
None of this was destined. It could have gone the other way. The attorney general tested whether there were limits and discovered them when his field offices told him no fraud was to be found in the balloting. The military brass wanted nothing to do with any of it.
The Republican secretary of state in Georgia, Brad Raffensperger, stood up for the integrity of the system. So did the FBI and CIA directors and the head of cyber-security, who got the boot from Trump for vouching for a safe vote. So did the Republican governor of Maryland. If only Republican senators would have stood up with them to get Trump to move on. Democracy isn’t perfect. But when Trump personally asked Michigan Republican legislative leaders to rig their electoral college delegation, they refused. When it counted, people stood up. That is no small feat.
It should never have gone this far. Now we know. About a third of Americans think Biden stole the election and that Rudy Giuliani should be allowed to practice law. Many of us were suckered by Trump and wised up. Most of us voted for sanity and a little bit of respect.
Mainly, the people demonstrated that liberty means something. They knelt in the park for Black lives that are not fully free. They objected to caging families at the border. They demanded their franchise as citizens. It could not be denied.
From time to time this year, I had my doubts. Iowa voted for Trump, after all. It was too close for comfort in Wisconsin. The rants and ravings still echo in the crazy chambers of social media. Pray Biden will have a way of defusing things. Actually, he already has. Reporters asked the president-elect the other day about Trump refusing to allow an orderly transition. Biden stopped and thought, and just said that Trump is reckless. He left it at that. Lord, what a relief in restraint. I give thanks. Democracy prevails.
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Trump supporters at his 2020 campaign kickoff in Orlando, Florida. (photo: Mandel Hgan/AFP)
Trump Races to Bring Back Firing Squads, Exclude Transgender People From Shelters
Isaac Arnsdorf, ProPublica
Arnsdorf writes: "The Trump administration is rushing to approve dozens of eleventh-hour policy changes. Among them: The Justice Department is fast-tracking a rule that could reintroduce firing squads and electrocutions to federal executions."
ix days after President Donald Trump lost his bid for reelection, the U.S. Department of Agriculture notified food safety groups that it was proposing a regulatory change to speed up chicken factory processing lines, a change that would allow companies to sell more birds. An earlier USDA effort had broken down on concerns that it could lead to more worker injuries and make it harder to stop germs like salmonella.
Ordinarily, a change like this would take about two years to go through the cumbersome legal process of making new federal regulations. But the timing has alarmed food and worker safety advocates, who suspect the Trump administration wants to rush through this rule in its waning days.
Even as Trump and his allies officially refuse to concede the Nov. 3 election, the White House and federal agencies are hurrying to finish dozens of regulatory changes before Joe Biden is inaugurated on Jan. 20. The rules range from long-simmering administration priorities to last-minute scrambles and affect everything from creature comforts like showerheads and clothes washers to life-or-death issues like federal executions and international refugees. They impact everyone from the most powerful, such as oil drillers, drugmakers and tech startups, to the most vulnerable, such as families on food stamps, transgender people in homeless shelters, migrant workers and endangered species. ProPublica is tracking those regulations as they move through the rule-making process.
Every administration does some version of last-minute rule-making, known as midnight regulations, especially with a change in parties. It’s too soon to say how the Trump administration’s tally will stack up against predecessors. But these final weeks are solidifying conservative policy objectives that will make it harder for the Biden administration to advance its own agenda, according to people who track rules developed by federal agencies.
“The bottom line is the Trump administration is trying to get things published in the Federal Register, leaving the next administration to sort out the mess,” said Matthew Kent, who tracks regulatory policy for left-leaning advocacy group Public Citizen. “There are some real roadblocks to Biden being able to wave a magic wand on these.”
In some instances the Trump administration is using shortcuts to get more rules across the finish line, such as taking less time to accept and review public feedback. It’s a risky move. On the one hand, officials want to finalize rules so that the next administration won’t be able to change them without going through the process all over again. On the other, slapdash rules may contain errors, making them more vulnerable to getting struck down in court.
The Trump administration is on pace to finalize 36 major rules in its final three months, similar to the 35 to 40 notched by the previous four presidents, according to Daniel Perez, a policy analyst at the George Washington University Regulatory Studies Center. In 2017, Republican lawmakers struck down more than a dozen Obama-era rules using a fast-track mechanism called the Congressional Review Act. That weapon may be less available for Democrats to overturn Trump’s midnight regulations if Republicans keep control of the Senate, which will be determined by two Georgia runoffs. Still, a few GOP defections could be enough to kill a rule with a simple majority.
“This White House is not likely to be stopping things and saying on principle elections have consequences, let’s respect the voters’ decision and not rush things through to tie the next guys’ hands,” said Susan Dudley, who led the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs in the Office of Management and Budget at the end of the George W. Bush administration. “One concern is the rules are rushed so they didn’t have adequate analysis or public comment, and that’s what we’re seeing.”
The Trump White House didn’t respond to requests for comment on which regulations it’s aiming to finish before Biden’s inauguration. The Biden transition team also didn’t respond to questions about which of Trump’s parting salvos the new president would prioritize undoing.
Many of the last-minute changes would add to the heap of changes throughout the Trump administration to pare back Obama-era rules and loosen environmental and consumer protections, all in the name of shrinking the government’s role in the economy. “Our proposal today greatly furthers the Trump administration’s regulatory reform efforts, which together have already amounted to the most aggressive effort to reform federal regulations of any administration,” Brian Harrison, the chief of staff for the Department of Health and Human Services, said on a conference call with reporters the day after the election. Harrison was unveiling a new proposal to automatically purge regulations that are more than 10 years old unless the agency decides to keep them.
For that proposal to become finalized before Jan. 20 would be an exceptionally fast turnaround. But Harrison left no doubt about that goal. “The reason we’re doing this now is because,” he said, “we at the department are trying to go as fast as we can in hopes of finalizing the rule before the end of the first term.”
Easier to Pollute, Harder to Immigrate
One proposal has raced through the process with little notice but unusual speed — and deadly consequences. This rule could reintroduce firing squads and electrocutions for federal executions, giving the government more options for administering capital punishment as drugs used in lethal injections become unavailable. The Justice Department surfaced the proposal in August and accepted public comments for only 30 days, instead of the usual 60. The rule cleared White House review on Nov. 6, meaning it could be finalized any day. The Justice Department didn’t respond to a request for comment.
Once finalized, this rule might never be put into practice. The Trump administration executed a federal prisoner in Indiana on Nov. 19 and plans five more executions before Jan. 20, all with lethal injections. After that, Biden has signaled he won’t allow any federal executions and will push to eliminate capital punishment for federal crimes.
Other less dramatic-sounding rules could prove harder to unravel and have broader consequences. In particular, the Environmental Protection Agency is on the cusp of finalizing several rules that would make it harder to justify pollution restrictions or lock in soot levels for at least five years. The agency wants to keep the soot standard unchanged over the objections of independent scientific advisers and despite emerging evidence that links particulate pollution to additional coronavirus deaths.
An EPA spokesman declined to comment on the timing of these rules. “EPA continues to advance this administration’s commitment to meaningful environmental progress while moving forward with our regulatory reform agenda,” the spokesman, James Hewitt, said.
While those rules have developed over years, others were launched later and officials are taking shortcuts to finish in time. Reviews by the White House’s Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs that normally take 90 days or more are now wrapping up in as few as five days.
The White House is close to completing several rules that would extend Trump’s record of restricting immigration and make the changes harder for the Biden administration to reverse. The pending rules would make it more difficult to claim asylum by excluding people with criminal convictions (even those that have been expunged), drastically shortening the application time and giving immigration judges more latitude to pick and choose what evidence to consider. The departments of Justice and Homeland Security didn’t respond to requests for comment.
Some rules read like Trump’s stump speeches translated into policy legalese. The Department of Energy is racing to loosen efficiency standards for showerheads and laundry machines, evoking Trump’s recurring bits about bathroom water pressure. “Do you ever get under a shower and no water comes out?” Trump said at an October rally in Nevada. “And me, I want that hair to be so beautiful.”
Notably, the trade group representing washer manufacturers actually opposes the administration’s proposal, saying it’s unnecessary because many machines already have short-cycle options. The proposed rule is supported by small-government advocates such as the Competitive Enterprise Institute. Water and electric companies warn it could lead to higher consumption and waste. The Energy Department didn’t respond to a request for comment.
The administration is also bucking business groups with proposals to restrict high-skilled immigration; in October, the departments of Homeland Security and Labor unveiled regulations to raise wage and education requirements for H-1B visas, which are often used in the information-technology industry. (The proposal drew opposition from the Small Business Administration, saying the higher costs would stifle innovation and growth.) But while raising the wage scale for skilled immigrants, the administration is pushing a different new rule to lower wages for “low-skilled” immigrant farmworkers. A spokesperson for U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (part of DHS) told ProPublica that “Any delay in responding to an economic emergency and high unemployment in a way that protects American workers and ensures the H-1B program is administered consistent with statutory requirements could cause real harm to the U.S. economy.” The Department of Labor didn’t respond to requests for comment.
Other rules are more clearly accommodating powerful business interests. A rule completed on Nov. 13 would restrict pension managers from considering social and environmental impacts (known in the industry as ESG) when choosing investments. Another Labor Department rule would make it easier for companies like Uber to withhold benefits by classifying workers as independent contractors instead of full employees. Both proposals had a truncated public comment period of only 30 days. A spokesman said the agency considers all comments regardless of how long the period lasts and that the department is working to complete all regulations on its agenda.
Chicken Plants on the Fast Track
Such shortcuts still might not be enough to finish some new rules that are just starting out now. Still, these tactics have raised alarms about the USDA’s proposal to speed up chicken factories, even though a regulatory change like that would ordinarily take two years or more. The USDA has not provided a timeline, and the proposal is not yet public while the White House reviews it. An agency spokesman said the department is following the standard process.
The rules change has the support of the National Chicken Council, an industry trade group, which argues that the timing is not political. Spokesman Tom Super called the proposal “the most deliberative and studied proposed rule that has ever been issued. It spans three decades, four administrations — Republican and Democrat — countless scientific studies and various court cases.”
The USDA has been laying the groundwork for the rule change for years. Even though safety concerns scuttled the USDA’s previous attempt to raise speeds from 140 birds per minute to 175, in 2018 the agency started granting one-off waivers to individual plants that sought permission to run faster.
The performance of those plants could equip the USDA to argue that the speed limit should go up in all of them. Although the agency has not yet released its formal justification for the new proposal, officials have referenced a new study in the journal Poultry Science that concluded that inspectors in plants with faster speeds did not detect higher average levels of salmonella contamination.
The USDA funded the study through a no-bid contract worth up to $500,000 awarded in 2018 to Louis Anthony “Tony” Cox Jr., a statistician who consults for business interests such as the American Petroleum Institute and the American Chemistry Council, according to the Center for Investigative Reporting.
Cox declined to share data he secured exclusively from the USDA or to be interviewed for this article. In emailed answers to written questions, he defended his methodology but acknowledged there’s room for further study.
Other evidence, however, suggests faster speeds could make chicken less safe to eat. In a September article in the journal Frontiers in Veterinary Science, USDA researcher Jeremy Marchant-Forde and a co-author found that USDA inspectors threw out record-low amounts of chicken when the agency let more plants speed up since May. The authors called this “a major threat to public health” to the extent it suggests inspectors were failing to find contaminated carcasses (rather than the birds having suddenly become much cleaner). But the authors cautioned they’re not food safety experts and declined to comment further.
While the food safety issues are debated, there’s already clear evidence that running faster lines poses higher worker risks, both repetitive strain injuries like carpal tunnel and traumatic injuries like cuts and amputations. But the USDA maintains that it is responsible only for food safety; worker safety is the job of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration.
That’s exactly the kind of interagency dialogue that the White House is supposed to coordinate when planning new regulations — and the kind of process that could be shortchanged in the final months of an administration, according to the American Public Health Association’s Occupational Health and Safety Section. An OSHA spokeswoman declined to say whether the agency has weighed in on the USDA’s proposal. The National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, part of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, has not yet commented on the proposal but plans to, a spokeswoman said.
“This last-minute push for an ill-advised rule change could be deadly for essential workers in slaughterhouses,” said Jessica Martinez, co-executive director of the National Council for Occupational Safety and Health, an advocacy group for safer working conditions.
Leasing Against the Clock
Since many finalized Trump rules are currently under court challenges, the Biden administration might be able to let some of them wither or die in litigation — especially where judges have blocked or struck down the regulations and the new Justice Department could decide not to appeal.
It will also have to wrestle with other changes the Trump administration is rushing to implement, using tactics other than rule-making.
The Trump administration is also pressing ahead with opening up more federal lands to oil and gas development, despite low prices, sluggish demand and complaints from environmental groups that drilling would encroach on wildlife habitats and national parks. Bids are starting at just $2 an acre for more than 445,000 acres of public land with leases for sale to energy companies through the Bureau of Land Management, according to data from EnergyNet.com.
The leases could expand dramatically as the BLM finalizes a plan to allow oil and gas drilling on an additional 6.8 million acres of the National Petroleum Reserve in Alaska, a habitat for bears, musk oxen, caribou and birds. Spokespeople for the BLM didn’t respond to a request for comment.
Separately, the Interior Department will open up drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. The agency is spending 30 days asking companies for bids, and then sales need another 30 days to take effect — just enough time to beat the clock before the inauguration.
An Interior Department spokesman said the agency is taking “a significant step” to implement Congress’ direction in the 2017 Republican tax bill to start drilling in ANWR. “The department will continue to implement President Trump’s agenda to create more American jobs, protect the safety of American workers, support domestic energy production and conserve our environment,” the spokesman, Conner Swanson, said. He didn’t say whether the leases would be done by Jan. 20.
Leases that have not yet been issued would be easier for the Biden administration to drop, but even finalized leases could be withdrawn if officials decide they were improperly issued or too environmentally dangerous, according to Erik Grafe, an attorney with Earthjustice in Anchorage. (Leaseholders might argue they deserve to be compensated.)
In addition, even once leases are issued, companies need permits and authorizations before actually taking action on the ground, Grafe said. Those steps would take more time and face legal challenges. Earthjustice and other groups are already suing to block the Arctic drilling program as a whole.
“We have been protecting this place forever,” said Bernadette Demientieff, executive director of the Gwich’in steering committee representing indigenous hunting communities in northeast Alaska. “This fight is far from over, and we will do whatever it takes to defend our sacred homelands.”
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Actor Tracy Morgan volunteering with Food Bank For New York City to distribute turkeys. (photo: Michael Loccisano/Getty Images)
The Other Public Health Crisis Threatening Thanksgiving
Nisarg A. Patel, Slate
Arnsdorf writes: "The Trump administration is rushing to approve dozens of eleventh-hour policy changes. Among them: The Justice Department is fast-tracking a rule that could reintroduce firing squads and electrocutions to federal executions."
Americans are facing almost unprecedented levels of food insecurity.
lthough the number of chairs around the Thanksgiving table may be fewer this year to stave off the spread of COVID-19, many festive smorgasbords are bound to be loaded. Yet, this holiday season, over 20 percent of American households will worry about having enough food on the table, a level of food insecurity the nation hasn’t seen since the Great Depression. In California, where I see patients, food insecurity—the lack of access to nutritionally adequate meals—has more than doubled since March, driven by heightened unemployment and school closures.
Our nation’s hunger crisis manifests inside the walls of America’s community hospitals. Food insecurity is linked to a higher risk of developing hypertension, heart disease, stroke, cancer, diabetes, arthritis, kidney disease, and hepatitis, which may in turn increase the risk of mortality from COVID-19. Food-insecure adults are 50 percent more likely to visit our already-strained emergency rooms and, when admitted, are hospitalized for 50 percent longer than food-secure adults. In New York City, the boroughs with the highest COVID-19 mortality also have the highest rates of food insecurity, poverty, and chronic disease. Fundamentally, akin to other social determinants of health, the types of foods that people have access to are associated with a significant and clinically observable impact on health outcomes.
The federal efforts to alleviate food insecurity have not been enough. Over 43 million families now rely on the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), and another 6.4 million rely on the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC). These federally funded programs, administered by state and local governments, help low-income families and their children put food on the table. But SNAP benefits cannot be used to purchase supplies that might be especially crucial in a pandemic when time and money is tighter than ever, like pre-cooked meals, vitamins and medicines, or household staples. WIC benefits are even more restrictive, limited to a narrow list of federally approved products. SNAP benefits are distributed to families anywhere from 10 to 40 days apart, which can make it hard to purchase large quantities of food at the beginning of the month in order to prepare for shelter-in-place orders, or quarantining. Furthermore, food stamp benefits average only $1.39 per person per meal, leaving recipients dependent on food banks and other charities. Food pantries, unsuited to handle a nationwide surge in demand, are currently overwhelmed.
While food insecurity dropped slightly after unemployment benefits were increased this summer, that federal aid was not renewed. Congress adjourned prior to agreeing on a winter pandemic relief package, leaving many Americans heading into the holidays facing uncertainty over their jobs, rent, food, and health. During the Great Recession, the temporary SNAP benefit increase served as an effective bottom-up stimulus and was crucial to prevent worse outcomes for those in poverty. Today’s food insecurity numbers dwarf 2008 levels. Increased benefits and flexibility would not only feed our most marginalized communities, but also boost the economy, and, in the long run, reduce strain on the healthcare system.
Fortunately, under both the Tenth Amendment and the Families First Coronavirus Response Act, state and local leaders have increased regulatory flexibility to fight food insecurity in times of national emergency and can take immediate, creative actions to alleviate the relatively restrictive nature of nutritional assistance. With renewed shelter-in-place guidelines in effect across the country, shelf-stable foods are in incredibly high demand and prone to shortages. State and local policymakers can apply for waivers to give SNAP and WIC recipients the flexibility to purchase a wider range of foods, and to use their benefits to stock up in fewer shopping trips to help dampen the third wave of COVID-19.
Food benefits should also be extended to low-income households who need additional food assistance while sheltering-in-place because of loss of income. Disaster SNAP, traditionally intended to replace benefits to those who lost food to natural disasters or extends benefits to households which would not ordinarily be eligible for but suddenly need food assistance, was an effective response to Americans affected by Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Today’s pandemic should be a call for states to implement the same emergency benefits today.
My colleagues and I can do our best to manage the worst symptoms of COVID19 in the hospital, but the restrictive benefits that many of our patients receive once they are discharged often forces them to turn to either the cheapest calories–processed foods made from refined sugars and oils–or go without food at all. In a time of social, economic, and emotional uncertainty, local governments should follow the evidence. Expanding nutritional benefits will give our country’s most vulnerable population financial freedom in a time of incredible stress and reduce the load on local health systems already strained to a breaking point.
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An elections worker rubs his head in the closing hours where absentee ballots were processed at the central counting board, Nov. 4, 2020, in Detroit. (photo: Carlos Osorio/AP)
The Inside Story of Michigan's Fake Voter Fraud Scandal
Tim Alberta, POLITICO
Alberta writes: "After five years spent bullying the Republican Party into submission, President Donald Trump finally met his match in Aaron Van Langevelde."
How a state that was never in doubt became a "national embarrassment" and a symbol of the Republican Party’s fealty to Donald Trump.
Who?
That’s right. In the end, it wasn’t a senator or a judge or a general who stood up to the leader of the free world. There was no dramatic, made-for-Hollywood collision of cosmic egos. Rather, the death knell of Trump’s presidency was sounded by a baby-faced lawyer, looking over his glasses on a grainy Zoom feed on a gloomy Monday afternoon, reading from a statement that reflected a courage and moral clarity that has gone AWOL from his party, pleading with the tens of thousands of people watching online to understand that some lines can never be uncrossed.
“We must not attempt to exercise power we simply don’t have,” declared Van Langevelde, a member of Michigan’s board of state canvassers, the ministerial body with sole authority to make official Joe Biden’s victory over Trump. “As John Adams once said, 'We are a government of laws, not men.' This board needs to adhere to that principle here today. This board must do its part to uphold the rule of law and comply with our legal duty to certify this election.”
Van Langevelde is a Republican. He works for Republicans in the Statehouse. He gives legal guidance to advance Republican causes and win Republican campaigns. As a Republican, his mandate for Monday’s hearing—handed down from the state party chair, the national party chair and the president himself—was straightforward. They wanted Michigan’s board of canvassers to delay certification of Biden’s victory. Never mind that Trump lost by more than 154,000 votes, or that results were already certified in all 83 counties. The plan was to drag things out, to further muddy the election waters and delegitimize the process, to force the courts to take unprecedented actions that would forever taint Michigan’s process of certifying elections. Not because it was going to help Trump win but because it was going to help Trump cope with a loss. The president was not accepting defeat. That meant no Republican with career ambitions could accept it, either.
Which made Van Langevelde’s vote for certification all the more remarkable. With the other Republican on the four-person board, Norman Shinkle, abstaining on the final vote—a cowardly abdication of duty—the 40-year-old Van Langevelde delivered the verdict on his own. At a low point in his party’s existence, with much of the GOP’s leadership class pre-writing their own political epitaphs by empowering Trump to lay waste to the country’s foundational democratic norms, an obscure lawyer from west Michigan stood on principle. It proved to be the nail in Trump’s coffin: Shortly after Michigan’s vote to certify, the General Services Administration finally commenced the official transition of power and Trump tweeted out a statement affirming the move “in the best interest of our Country.”
Still, the drama in Lansing raised deeper questions about the health of our political system and the sturdiness of American democracy. Why were Republicans who privately admitted Trump’s legitimate defeat publicly alleging massive fraud? Why did it fall to a little-known figure like Van Langevelde to buffer the country from an unprecedented layer of turmoil? Why did the battleground state that dealt Trump his most decisive defeat—by a wide margin—become the epicenter of America’s electoral crisis?
In conversations with more than two dozen Michigan insiders—elected officials, party elders, consultants, activists—it became apparent how the state’s conditions were ripe for this sort of slow-motion disaster. Michigan is home to Detroit, an overwhelmingly majority Black city, that has always been a favorite punching bag of white Republicans. The state had viral episodes of conflict and human error that were easily manipulated and deliberately misconstrued. It drew special attention from the highest levels of the party, and for the president, it had the potential to settle an important score with his adversary, Democratic Governor Gretchen Whitmer. Perhaps most important, Trump’s allies in Michigan proved to be more career-obsessed, and therefore more servile to his whims, than GOP officials in any other state he has cultivated during his presidency, willing to indulge his conspiratorial fantasies in ways other Republicans weren’t.
This, Republicans and Democrats here agreed, was the essential difference between Michigan and other states. However sloppy Trump’s team was in contesting the results in places like Georgia and Wisconsin, where the margins were fractional, there was at least some plausible justification of a legal challenge. The same could never be said for Michigan. Strangely liberated by his deficit of 154,000 votes, the president’s efforts here were aimed not at overturning the results, but rather at testing voters’ faith in the ballot box and Republicans’ loyalty to him.
“We have to see this for what it is. It’s a PR strategy to erode public confidence in a very well-run election to achieve political ends,” Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson, a Democrat, said in an interview last week. “This was not any type of valid legal strategy that had any chance at ultimately succeeding.”
“Anybody can sue anybody for any reason. But winning is a whole different matter. And Trump didn’t have a realistic pathway here,” Brian Calley, the former GOP lieutenant governor, told me prior to the certification vote. “I’m not too worried about the end result in Michigan. I understand the drama. … I know the system looks clunky. But I actually think we’ll look back on this and say, you know, we’ve actually got a very strong system that can stand up to a lot of scrutiny.”
Benson and Calley were right that Trump was never going to succeed at altering the outcome in Michigan—or in any of the other contested states, or in the Electoral College itself. The 45th president’s time in office is drawing to a close. No amount of @realdonaldtrump tweets or wild-eyed allegations from his lawyers or unhinged segments on One America News can change that.
But what they can change—where he can ultimately succeed—is in convincing unprecedented numbers of Americans that their votes didn’t count. Last month, Gallup reported that the public’s confidence in our elections being accurate dropped 11 points since the 2018 midterms, which included a 34-point decrease among Republicans. That was before a daily deluge of dishonest allegations and out-of-context insinuations; before the conservative media’s wall-to-wall coverage of exotic conspiracy theories; before the GOP’s most influential figures winked and nodded at the president of the United States alleging the greatest fraud in U.S. history.
Trump failed to win Michigan. But he succeeded in convincing America that a loss, no matter how conclusive, may never again be conclusive enough.
The irony of Michigan’s electoral meltdown is that Election Day, in the eyes of veteran clerks and poll workers across the state, was the smoothest it had ever been. Like clockwork, one can always depend on controversies—sometimes mini-scandals—to spring up by noontime on any given Election Day. But not in 2020. There were no documented instances of voter intimidation. No outcry over precincts opening late or closing early. Heck, in the state’s biggest and busiest voting jurisdictions, there were no lines to complain about. The day was eerily uneventful.
Much of this owed to months of tireless preparation by election officials at the state and local level. Of course, it also had something to do with the historic nature of 2020: More than half of Michigan’s voters chose to vote absentee, the result of a new law that predated the deadly Covid-19 pandemic that scared many people away from voting in-person. For this reason, Michiganders were not congratulating themselves when the polls closed on election night. They knew the real gantlet lay ahead.
“You’re talking about election officials implementing new laws, running an election with a 60 percent mail vote, in the middle of a pandemic,” said Chris Thomas, Michigan’s longtime chief elections administrator, a nonpartisan who spent decades working under secretaries of state from both parties. “In terms of voters getting the ballots processed and counted in a reasonable time period, I thought they did a marvelous job. But it was a huge challenge.”
Because state law prohibited the processing of absentee votes until 7 a.m. on Election Day—preventing workers from getting a head start with the time-consuming work of opening envelopes, removing ballots and preparing them for tabulation—everyone understood the state would face a historic backlog of votes to count once the polls closed at 8 p.m. This was the source of a monthslong dispute between the Democratic governor, the Democratic secretary of state and the Republicans who control both the House and Senate in Lansing. Whitmer and Benson warned the GOP leaders that a protracted counting process, especially in the scenario of a competitive election, would invite chaos. Other states Trump carried in 2016, such as Ohio and Florida, allowed for pre-canvassing of absentee and other mail-in ballots so that voters would know which candidate carried the state on election night. Why couldn’t Michigan do the same?
The Republicans—House Speaker Lee Chatfield and Senate Majority Leader Mike Shirkey—were not interested. Spooked by Trump’s continued assault on mail voting, and aware that their own members in the Legislature were distrustful of the new “no-excuse-absentee” rules, Chatfield and Shirkey weren’t inclined to do the process any favors. Only in the late stages of the race, when Republican state senator (and former secretary of state) Ruth Johnson suggested a meager concession—allowing 10 hours of absentee ballot processing before Election Day—did the GOP throw a bone to election workers.
It’s helpful to understand the party’s logic. Not only did they want to avoid the perception of aiding a system the president was attacking as illegitimate and not only were they skeptical of the Democrats’ concerns of a drawn-out count. But many Republicans didn’t believe the election would be terribly close to begin with. A summer’s worth of polling, conducted for them privately at the local and statewide level, indicated that Trump stood little chance of carrying Michigan a second time. The common expectation was that the president would lose comfortably, by at least 4 or 5 points, a margin that would render any controversy about absentee voting meaningless.
That thinking changed abruptly around 10 p.m. on election night. As the president surged to a durable lead in Florida—defying expectations by winning large numbers of Hispanics and holding his own among absentee voters—Michigan Republicans were gripped by equal parts euphoria and panic. It was clear Trump was running far more competitively than they’d anticipated; he was on track to win Florida, Ohio and North Carolina, three states that tally their ballots quickly, meaning the spotlight would abruptly shift to the critical, slow-counting battlegrounds of Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania.
Everyone here knew this had been a possibility, but it wasn’t until midnight that the urgency of the situation crashed over Republicans. Trump had built a lead of nearly 300,000 votes on the strength of same-day ballots that were disproportionately favorable to him. Now, with the eyes of the nation—and of the president—fixed on their state, Michigan Republicans scrambled to protect that lead. Laura Cox, chair of the state party, began dialing prominent lawmakers, attorneys and activists, urging them to get down to the TCF Center, the main hub of absentee vote counting in Detroit. She was met with some confusion; there were already plenty of Republicans there, as scheduled, working their shifts as poll challengers. It didn’t matter, Cox told them. It was time to flood the zone.
“This was all so predictable,” said Josh Venable, who ran Election Day operations for the Michigan GOP during five different cycles. “Detroit has been the boogeyman for Republicans since before I was born. It’s always been the white suburbs vs. Detroit, the white west side of the state vs. Detroit. There’s always this rallying cry from Republicans—‘We win everywhere else, but lose Wayne County’—that creates paranoia. I still remember hearing, back on my first campaign in 2002, that Wayne County always releases its votes last so that Detroit can see how many votes Democrats need to win the state. That’s what a lot of Republicans here believe.”
As things picked up at the TCF Center, with more and more white Republicans filing into the complex to supervise the activity of mostly Black poll workers, Chris Thomas noticed a shift in the environment. Having been brought out of retirement to help supervise the counting in Detroit—a decision met with cheers from Republicans and Democrats alike—Thomas had been “thrilled” with the professionalism he’d witnessed during Monday’s pre-processing session and Tuesday’s vote tabulating. Now, in the early morning hours of Wednesday, things were going sideways. Groups of Republican poll challengers were clustering around individual counting tables in violation of the rules. People were raising objections—such as to the transferring of military absentees onto ballots that could be read by machines, a standard practice—that betrayed a lack of preparation.
“Reading these affidavits afterward from these Republican poll challengers, I was just amazed at how misunderstood the election process was to them,” Thomas chuckled. “The things they said were going on—it’s like ‘Yeah, that’s exactly what was going on. That’s what’s supposed to happen.’” (The Trump team’s much celebrated lawsuit against Detroit was recently withdrawn after being pummeled in local courtrooms; his campaign has to date won one case and lost 35.)
At one point, around 3:30 in the morning, Thomas supervised the receiving of Detroit’s final large batch of absentee ballots. They arrived in a passenger van. Thomas confirmed the numbers he’d verified over the phone: 45 trays, each tray holding roughly 300 ballots, for a total of between 13,000 and 14,000 ballots. Not long after, Charlie Spies, an attorney for the U.S. Senate campaign of Republican John James, approached Thomas inside the TCF Center. He wanted to know about the 38,000 absentee ballots that had just materialized. Thomas told him there were not 38,000 ballots; that at most it might have been close to 15,000.
“I was told the number was 38,000,” Spies replied.
By five o’clock on Wednesday morning, it was apparent Trump’s lead would not hold.
His cushion over Biden had been whittled down to 70,000 votes. There remained hundreds of thousands of absentee ballots to be counted in the large, Democratic strongholds of Detroit, Lansing and Flint. The math was simply not workable for the president. Just before 9:30 a.m., Biden overtook Trump in the tally of Michigan’s votes—and suddenly, a switch flipped on the right.
After 24 hours of letting the democratic process work, Republicans around the country—watching Trump’s second term slipping through their fingers—began crying foul and screaming conspiracy. No state cornered the hysteria market quite like Michigan.
First it was breathless accusations about Antrim County, a rural Republican redoubt in northwestern Michigan with a total turnout of 16,044 voters, where the unofficial returns showed Biden leading Trump by 3,000 votes. (A human error caused the candidates’ totals to be transposed, the county clerk said, and it was quickly corrected, though this did nothing to stop context-less social media posts about the mistake from going viral, or to slow the spread of rumors about Governor Whitmer buying off local officials because she owned a vacation home in Antrim County.)
Then it was Stu Sandler, a longtime Michigan GOP operative and top adviser to James’ U.S. Senate campaign, moving preemptively to declare victory and accuse Democrats of trying to steal the seat. “John James has won this race. The ballots are counted. Stop making up numbers, stalling the process and cheating the system,” Sandler tweeted. (James, who was clinging to a small lead that would soon disappear, promptly retweeted this sinister claim. Sandler later deleted it and told me he apologized for tweeting “in the middle of an intense moment”—but stuck to his claims of widespread “irregularities” that damaged his candidate.)
The true insanity was saved for Detroit. By early afternoon on Wednesday, hundreds and hundreds of Republicans had descended on the TCF Center, responding to an all-hands-on-deck missive that went out from the state party and was disseminated by local officials. Cox, the party chair, tweeted out a video of her comrades standing outside the locked-up downtown building. “Republican poll challengers blocked from entering the TCF Center in Detroit! This is egregious!” she wrote.
Truly egregious was Cox’s dishonesty. At the time of her tweet, several hundred of her party’s poll challengers, attorneys and representatives were already inside the TCF Center monitoring the count. By law, Republicans were allowed to have 134 challengers in the room, one for each tabulation table. In reality, the GOP had far more than that, according to sworn testimony from nonpartisan poll watchers inside the TCF Center. Because of the overflow, election officials ultimately decided to lock down the complex, starting with the glass-encased canvassing room where the tabulation work was being done. This left dozens and dozens of Republicans trapped behind the glass—in addition to the hundreds of others locked outside with Cox. Some began to bang hard on the inside windows; others began to film workers handling the ballots, a violation of state law. To protect the workers, TCF officials covered some of the windows with cardboard—a decision Thomas said he was not consulted on, but absolutely agreed with.
“The people outside that room were doing exactly what the law says you would eject people for doing—they were disrupting the election,” Thomas said. “Everyone else in the room—the Democratic Party, the Republican Party, the ACLU, the nonpartisans—they all still had a full complement of challengers in the room. And the Republicans, by the way, had far more challengers in the room than they were entitled to.”
What made this behavior all the more confounding, Thomas said, is that the election was conducted more transparently than any he’d ever participated in. Each of the 134 tables had monitors placed at the end, “showing every keystroke that was made,” so that challengers could see exactly what was happening. But he came to realize that none of this mattered. Having dealt with Republican poll challengers for decades, Thomas said, it was clear the people who infiltrated TCF on Wednesday were not adequately trained or there for the right reasons.
“Unlike the people who were there Monday and Tuesday, these people Wednesday were totally unprepared. They had no idea how the system worked. They had no idea what they were there for,” Thomas said. “Many of them—not all of them, but many of them—they were on a mission. They clearly came in believing there was mass cheating going on in Detroit and they were on a mission to catch it.”
As conspiracy theories proliferated across the right-wing information universe—Sharpie markers disenfranchising Trump voters in Arizona, a marked Biden/Harris van unloading boxes full of ballots in Nevada, suspicious turnout patterns in Wisconsin—Detroit held a special place in the president’s heart.
When Trump addressed the nation from the White House on Thursday night, insisting the election had been “stolen” from him, he returned time and again to alleged misconduct in Michigan’s biggest city. Detroit, he smirked, “I wouldn’t say has the best reputation for election integrity.” He said the city “had hours of unexplained delay” in counting ballots, and when the late batches arrived, “nobody knew where they came from.” He alleged that Republicans had been “denied access to observe any counting in Detroit” and that the windows had been covered because “they didn’t want anybody seeing the counting.”
All of this was a lie. Republicans here—from Ronna Romney McDaniel to Laura Cox to federal and local lawmakers—knew it was a lie. But they didn’t lift a finger in protest as the president disparaged Michigan and subverted America’s democratic norms. Why?
In the days following Trump’s shameful address to the nation, two realities became inescapable to Michigan’s GOP elite. First, there was zero evidence to substantiate widespread voter fraud. Second, they could not afford to admit it publicly.
McDaniel was a case in point. Born into Michigan royalty—granddaughter of the beloved former governor, George Romney, and niece of former presidential nominee Mitt Romney—she knows the state’s politics as well as anyone. Working for her uncle’s campaign here, and then as a national committeewoman and state party chair, McDaniel earned respect for her canny, studied approach. She spun and exaggerated and played the game, but she was generally viewed as being above board.
That changed after Trump’s 2016 victory. Tapped by the president-elect to take over the Republican National Committee—on the not-so-subtle condition that she remove “Romney” from her professional name—McDaniel morphed into an archetype of the Trump-era GOP sycophant. There was no lie too outlandish to parrot, no behavior too unbecoming to justify, no abuse of power too flagrant to enable. Longtime friends worried that McDaniel wasn’t merely humiliating herself publicly; she seemed to be changing in private. She was no longer coolly detached from the passions of politics. If anything, she was turning into a true MAGA believer.
There was some relief, then, when in recent weeks McDaniel told multiple confidants that she doubted there was any scalable voter fraud in Michigan. Nevertheless, McDaniel told friends and fellow Republicans that she needed to stay the course with Trump and his legal team. This wasn’t about indulging him, she said, but rather about demonstrating a willingness to fight—even when the fight couldn’t be won.
If this sounds illogical, McDaniel’s thinking is actually quite linear. The RNC will vote in January on the position of chair. She is anxious to keep her job. It’s bad enough that despite an enormous investment of time and resources in Michigan, McDaniel was unable to deliver her home state for the president. If that might prove survivable, what would end McDaniel’s bid instantaneously is abandoning the flailing president in the final, desperate moments of his reelection campaign. No matter how obvious the outcome—to McDaniel, to the 168 members of the RNC, maybe even to Trump himself—any indication of surrender would be unforgivable.
This is why McDaniel has sanctioned her employees, beginning with top spokesperson Liz Harrington, to spread countless demonstrable falsehoods in the weeks since Election Day. It’s why the RNC, on McDaniel’s watch, tweeted out a video clip of disgraced lawyer Sidney Powell claiming Trump “won in a landslide” (when he lost by more than 6 million votes nationally) and alleging a global conspiracy to rig the election against him. It’s why McDaniel felt comfortable throwing under the bus a highly respected local Republican clerk in her own backyard, the Detroit suburb of Oakland County, for a human error that was rectified with transparency from start to finish. (The clerk, Tina Barton, called McDaniel’s insinuations of fraud “categorically false.”)
Honesty and decency have not been hallmarks of Republicanism during Trump’s presidency. They certainly are not priorities now. With Trump entering the anguished twilight of his presidency, all that appears to matter for someone like McDaniel—or Cox, the state party chair, who faces an upcoming election of her own—is unconditional fidelity to the president.
“The unfortunate reality within the party today is that Trump retains a hold that is forcing party leaders to continue down the path of executing his fantasy of overturning the outcome—at their own expense,” said Jason Cabel Roe, a Michigan-based GOP strategist who once worked as a vendor for McDaniel, and whose family goes back generations with hers. “Frankly, continuing to humor him merely excuses his role in this. The election wasn’t stolen, he blew it. Up until the final two weeks, he seemingly did everything possible to lose. Given how close it was, there is no one to blame but Trump.”
Roe added, “But if they want a future within the party, it is required of them to demonstrate continued fealty. Principled conservatives who respect the rule of law and speak out suddenly find themselves outcasts in a party that is no longer about conservativism but Trumpism. Just ask once-conservative heroes like Jeff Flake, Justin Amash and Mark Sanford.”
This same principle applies to Chatfield and Shirkey, the state legislative leaders who were summoned to Washington last week for a meeting with Trump. Under normal circumstances, nobody would begrudge anyone a meeting with the president. But the circumstances surrounding the Michigan GOP leadership’s secret huddle with Trump were anything but normal.
Just days earlier, a meeting of the Wayne County canvassing board had devolved into pandemonium after the two GOP members initially refused to certify the county’s results. There were valid concerns about some inconsistencies in the balancing of Detroit’s poll books; and yet, those inconsistencies were minimal relative to the 2016 election, when Trump won by a margin 15 times smaller—and when the board voted unanimously to certify the result. Monica Palmer, one of the GOP canvassers, caused an uproar when she offered to certify the rest of Wayne County—precincts like Livonia—without certifying Detroit. (Livonia, which is 95 percent white, had more poll-book irregularities than Detroit, which is 80 percent Black.)
Tweeting out siren emojis, Jenna Ellis, the attorney for Trump’s campaign, announced: “BREAKING: This evening, the county board of canvassers in Wayne County, MI refused to certify the election results. If the state board follows suit, the Republican state legislator will select the electors. Huge win for @realDonaldTrump.”
This proved wrong on two counts. First, the Wayne board—after a heated period of comments from the public—reversed course the same night and voted unanimously to certify the results after Democrats agreed to an audit of the county’s numerical inconsistencies. Second, the notion that legislators would under any circumstance be free to send their own partisans to the Electoral College had no basis in fact. Under Michigan statute, the only electors eligible to represent Michigan are those who will vote for the winner of the popular vote. There is no discretion for anyone—the governor, leaders of the legislature, canvassers at the county or state level—to do anything but follow the law.
That didn’t stop Trump from buying in. Having long been advised by his legal team that state legislators would be his ace in the hole—particularly in Republican-controlled states with close elections—the president called Chatfield and Shirkey the morning after the Wayne board meeting. He invited them to the White House for a briefing on the state of play in Michigan. Both Chatfield and Shirkey are talented and ambitious, self-grooming for future runs at higher office. Both could see the obvious problems of meeting with the president at such a precarious moment—and both could also see how spurning Trump could torpedo their careers in the GOP.
When they huddled with some of their rank-and-file members, an uneasiness gripped some of the people present. Some wanted to know whether Trump had been inviting legislators from other swing states; others wondered whether he might make a direct ask to intervene on his behalf, putting them in a tenuous and potentially incriminating position. More than a few mentioned how their inboxes had exploded ever since Mark Levin, the far-right radio personality, had begun tweeting screeds about legislatures having the power to send any electors they wish to the Electoral College.
Ultimately, the GOP lawmakers felt they were obligated to go. This was the president calling on them—and besides, they joked, it might be a long time before a Republican occupied the Oval Office again. But precautions were taken. In a savvy move, Chatfield and Shirkey prepared a letter addressing concerns over funding to deal with Covid-19 in Michigan. They also brought along their general counsels. These two maneuvers—one to soothe the outcry over Michigan lawmakers meeting with a president whose legal team was calling for them to overturn the state’s election results; the other to insulate them from improper discussions about doing exactly that—were sufficient to sidestep any major crisis.
The president asked them about allegations of fraud, and the legislators told him about various probes they had authorized to look into reports of irregularities. But Trump, perhaps sensing the nervous reticence of his guests, did not make the ask they feared. As the meeting went on, it became apparent to some people in the room that more than anything, Trump had called his Michigan allies to Washington to get an honest assessment of what had happened there. He wanted to know if there was any pathway to victory. They told him there was not.
“I don’t get it,” the president said, venting confusion and frustration. “All these other Republicans, all over the country, they all win their races. And I’m the only guy that loses?”
Right around the time Chatfield and Shirkey were bearing the bad news to Trump in Washington, the Republican rumor mill was churning back home.
With all 83 counties boasting certified results, the only thing that stood between Joe Biden and his rightful claim to Michigan’s 16 electoral votes was certification from the state board of canvassers. In a rational political climate, this would not have been the subject of suspense. But the swirling innuendo and disinformation had long ago swept away any semblance of normalcy. Already, one of the board’s two Republicans, Norm Shinkle, a career party fixture, had hinted he would not vote to certify the state’s result. Because the two Democrats would obviously vote in favor of certification, a manic gush of attention turned to the other Republican member, Aaron Van Langevelde.
The problem? Hardly anyone knew the guy. Van Langevelde, a deputy legal counsel to the Michigan House GOP, had been appointed to the board less than two years earlier by Governor Rick Snyder. He had kept a deliberately low profile in Lansing, attending the occasional happy hour but spending most of his time in nearby Eaton County, where he lives with his wife, an assistant prosecutor, and their three children.
All day Friday, and throughout the weekend, a chorus of Michigan Republican heavyweights tried and failed to contact Van Langevelde. When it became apparent that his extended family was shooing away callers—giving the impression he did not welcome this intrusive sort of spotlight—word got around that Van Langevelde had cold feet. By Sunday morning, speculation was rampant that Van Langevelde would resign from the board on Monday. This made perfect sense to Republicans and Democrats alike: Based on their fact-finding mission into the mysterious fourth board member, Van Langevelde was a bookish type, a rule follower, an obsessive student of world history (particularly the Roman Empire) who believes to his core in a conservative application of the law. His pious Dutch sensibilities, one co-worker said, make him “the the kind of guy that would turn himself in for tasting a grape at the grocery store.” He would be inclined, Lansing insiders figured, to vote in favor of certifying the results. But he would be disinclined to throw away his future in the Republican Party. A resignation from the board was his only way out.
Working off this expectation, a late lobbying blitz turned on Shinkle. In the 36 hours preceding Monday’s vote, he was inundated with calls and emails and text messages from high-ranking Republican luminaries around the state. Some, such as former congressman and House Intelligence Chair Mike Rogers, urged him to certify the results in accordance with Michigan law. Others, including McDaniel and Cox and other state party figures, pleaded with Shinkle to stand his ground and insist on a two-week delay. The response they got was universal: He would promise to “do my best,” then he would offer a litany of unsubstantiated allegations of fraud. (Not everyone bothered contacting Shinkle: That his wife served as a plaintiff’s witness in Trump’s ill-fated lawsuit against Detroit struck many people not just as a conflict of interest, but as a clear indication he would never vote to certify.)
When Monday morning arrived, the Michigan MAGA coalition hoped to wake up to news of a postponed meeting on account of Van Langevelde’s resignation. No such luck. Nervously, the calls and text messages and email chains began anew—this time directed not toward Shinkle or Van Langevelde, but to each other. What was going on? Was the 1 p.m. meeting really going ahead as scheduled? Would Van Langevelde, who had stayed silent and off the grid for the previous 96 hours, dare to vote against the party’s edict?
Some Republicans didn’t want to believe it. But for others, reality began to set in. They had grown so accustomed to Republicans falling in line, bending a knee to Trumpism, that the notion of someone acting on his own personal ethic had become foreign. But the more they learned about Van Langevelde, the more he sounded like just that type of independent thinker. Some viewed his relative youth as an asset, believing he wouldn’t risk throwing away his future in the party. What they had failed to appreciate was that young conservatives were oftentimes the most disillusioned with the party’s drift from any intellectual or philosophical mooring.
By the time the meeting commenced, just after 1 p.m., the smart money had shifted dramatically—away from any resignation or delay and toward prompt certification. Van Langevelde did little to disappoint. “The board’s duty today is very clear,” he declared just minutes into the meeting. “We have a duty to certify this election.”
Like a good attorney, Van Langevelde meticulously questioned a number of expert guest speakers to ascertain if they had dissenting views of the board’s authority under state law. Time and again, they affirmed his position. The body did not have power to audit or investigate or recount; that could be done only by distinct bodies after certification was complete. The job of the board of state canvassers was narrowly to examine the certified results from all 83 counties and then, based on the relevant vote totals, certify a winner of Michigan’s 16 electoral votes. The one time he was challenged—by Spies, the political superlawyer representing John James’ U.S. Senate campaign—Van Langevelde calmly brushed his recommendations aside, telling Spies, “I’m going to have to respectfully disagree with you on that.”
If this young canvasser’s rebellion against the entire Republican Party apparatus was surprising, what came next was all too predictable. Within minutes of Van Langevelde’s vote for certification—and of Shinkle’s abstention, which guaranteed his colleague would bear the brunt of the party’s fury alone—the fires of retaliation raged. In GOP circles, there were immediate calls for Van Langevelde to lose his seat on the board; to lose his job in the House of Representatives; to be censured on the floor of the Legislature and exiled from the party forever. Actionable threats against him and his family began to be reported. The Michigan State Police worked with local law enforcement to arrange a security detail.
All for doing his job. All for upholding the rule of law. All for following his conscience and defying the wishes of Donald Trump.
“It took a lot of courage for him to do what he thought was right and appropriate, given the amount of pressure he was under,” said Brian Calley, the GOP former lieutenant governor, who told me days earlier that he had never heard the name Aaron Van Langevelde. “He carried himself as well as anybody I’ve seen in that type of setting, including people with decades and decades of experience. He showed an awful lot of poise.”
In Michigan, the upcoming race to chair the Republican Party has already been turned on its head. Ron Weiser, the former party head who’s made it known that he wants to reclaim his old post, was thought to have a strong case against Cox, who has been viewed as unsteady by some GOP elders. But it was Weiser who, while chairing the party in 2018, recommended Van Langevelde to then-Governor Snyder—a fact Cox and her allies are already sharpening for attack.
That’s right: The name Van Langevelde is already so infamous in Michigan Republican lore that those associated with him are at risk of being branded turncoats, too.
It might sound silly, given Trump’s imminent departure from the White House. But Trump shows no sign of ceding the spotlight: He is already making noise about running for president in 2024. Because of this, and because of the sweeping transformation of the party—not just ideologically or stylistically, but mechanically, with MAGA loyalists now installed in state and local leadership posts across the country—the question of loyalty will continue to define the Republican identity for years to come.
That contours of that identity—what it means to be a Trump Republican—have gained clarity over time. The default embrace of nationalism. The indifference to ideas as a vision for governing. The disregard for institutional norms. The aversion to etiquette and the bottomless appetite for cultural conflict. Now there is another cornerstone of that identity: The subversion of our basic democratic process.
More than any policy enacted or court vacancy filled, Trump’s legacy will be his unprecedented assault on the legitimacy of the ballot box. And it will not be considered in isolation. Future iterations of the GOP will make casual insinuations of voter fraud central to the party’s brand. The next generation of Republicans will have learned how to sow doubts about election integrity in one breath and in the next breath bemoan the nation’s lack of faith in our elections, creating a self-perpetuating justification to cast suspicion on a process that by raw numbers does not appear conducive to keeping them in power.
Look no further than John James. It took three full weeks after Election Day—despite his race being called for Gary Peters on November 4, despite the certified county totals proving he had lost by 92,000 votes—for the Republican Senate nominee to concede defeat. In the interim, he released a series of videos calling for independent investigations into Detroit’s voting irregularities, insisting that such efforts are needed to “restore trust” in the system.
“This is not some whacked-out fringe,” James said in one taping. “When half the votes in our state believe we just had the most secure election in U.S. history, and the other half believe they were cheated, we have a problem.”
James is right. We do have a problem. Our elections continue to be underfunded. Our election bureaus are chronically understaffed. Our election workers are badly undertrained. Our elections are prone to a significant amount of human error—and any municipal or county clerk will tell you that concerns over not catching those errors keep them up at night.
But errors are not fraud. And when James says he’s troubled that half of Michigan’s voters feel they were cheated, he would do well to remember that he was the one telling them they got cheated in the first place.
That November 4 missive James retweeted from his campaign adviser—“Stop making up numbers, stalling the process and cheating the system”—has since been deleted. But there is no denying the advent of a pattern. Republicans in Michigan and across America have spent the past three weeks promoting baseless allegations of corruption at the ballot box, the rabid responses to which they use as justification to continue to question the fundamental integrity of our elections. It’s a vicious new playbook—one designed to stroke egos and rationalize defeats, but with unintended consequences that could spell the unraveling of America’s democratic experiment.
“By capriciously throwing around these false claims, you can’t get to the heart of a really important issue. In fact, you lose any credibility to get to the heart of that issue,” said Venable, the longtime Michigan GOP official who rocked his former comrades by endorsing Biden this fall. “And by the way, if you’re going to do an audit, you’d better do it statewide. This is not just a Detroit thing. There are sloppy Republican precincts all over the state. When I served on the Ingham County board of canvassers, we never had a problem in Lansing. You know where our big problems were? The small townships in the rural precincts of the county, run by Republican clerks. And those folks weren’t perpetrating fraud, either. That’s the point: There’s a difference between sloppiness and fraud. But you can’t solve one by inventing stories about the other.”
There is no immediate way to make Americans appreciate this distinction, no instant cure for the flagging confidence in our elections. But there are obvious incremental steps to take in the name of transparency and efficiency. First among them, acknowledged Chatfield, the Michigan House speaker, is getting rid of the rules that led to the TCF Center circus in the first place.
“There’s a lot we can learn in the state of Michigan, because the way we’ve handled this, it’s become a national embarrassment,” Chatfield told me in a brief interview after the final certification vote. “And one of the items where we should look at other states and see how they’ve done it well, is regarding the early processing of absentee ballots. We mishandled that this year. We should have allowed for early processing. We didn’t, and it became a spectacle. I think we can learn from that. It should be something the Legislature fixes moving forward.”
This is relatively easy for Chatfield to admit—he’s term limited and leaving office soon. For those Republicans left to pick up the pieces in the coming legislative session, there may be little incentive for bipartisan cooperation on a subject that now divides the two party bases as starkly as gun rights or tax rates. The backlash against absentee voting from Republican constituents was already fierce; in the wake of Trump’s defeat and the TCF Center conspiracies, Republicans might find it beneficial to avoid raising the issue at all.
There is little cause for optimism. If the majority of GOP politicians couldn’t be bothered to do the easy work of debunking crackpot conspiracy theories, how likely are they to do the hard work of hardening our democracy?
“A lot of our leaders in this country ought to be ashamed of themselves,” said Thomas, the nonpartisan elections guru who kept Michigan’s governing class guessing his political affiliation for the past several decades. “They have propagated this narrative of massive fraud, and it’s simply not true. They’ve leapt from some human error to massive fraud. It’s like a leap to Never Neverland. And people are believing them.”
He exhaled with a disgusted groan.
“The people of this country really need to wake up and start thinking for themselves and looking for facts—not conspiracy theories being peddled by people who are supposed to be responsible leaders, but facts,” Thomas said. “If they’re not going to be responsible leaders, people need to seek out the truth for themselves. If people don’t do that—if they no longer trust how we elect the president of the United States—we’re going to be in real trouble.”
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One America News (OAN). (photo: Drew Angerer/Getty Images)
ALSO SEE: OAN Suspended From YouTube
After Promoting a Sham Cure for Covid-19
OAN Is So Dangerous Because It Looks Like a Real News Channel
Karl Bode, VICE
Bode writes: "It's the president's favorite 'news' channel, and a cornerstone of America's growing disinformation problem. It's One America News (OAN), a rotating collection of wobbly conspiracies and gibberish that has more in common with a state-run disinformation network than a credible news organization."
Trump's favorite TV station doesn't have to be popular to be dangerous—it gives him something to point to to buttress his own conspiracy theorizing.
OAN’s definition of “news” has included false claims of electoral fraud, baseless Kremlin-backed conspiracy theories, false claims that the novel coronavirus was developed in a North Carolina lab as part of a vast government conspiracy, and accusations that last summer’s protests over the police killing of George Floyd were part of a diabolical “coup.”
“According to the mainstream media, the riots and extreme violence are completely unorganized,” the network proclaimed last August. “However, it appears this coup attempt is led by a well-funded network of anarchists trying to take down the president.”
Last June, 75-year-old Martin Gugino had his skull fractured after being shoved to the ground by Buffalo police officers. Video clearly showed the elderly Gugino doing nothing wrong, but OAN insisted he was an “Antifa provocateur” using sophisticated tech to target the police.
“Newly released video appeared to show Gugino using a police tracker on his phone trying to scan police communications during the protest,” the network falsely claimed.
Tuesday, YouTube suspended the OAN channel for a week after the company uploaded a video promoting a bogus cure for COVID-19.
In seven years OAN has gone from completely unknown to being routinely amplified by Trump, catering in many ways to an audience of one. It is a symbiotic relationship, in which Trump can point to what vaguely look like news reports to buttress his own conspiracy theorizing, and the network, by providing them, can access his massive and loyal audience.
This relationship, like so much about Trump's presidency, is seemingly unique and aberrant. But while experts say OAN’s impact is overstated and future success unsure, they also warn that without a major course correction, the channel’s modest success is a troubling harbinger of dumber and more dangerous things to come.
OAN is the brainchild of millionaire Robert Herring, who ran a chain of Los Angeles pet stores before making his fortune printing circuit boards. In 2003, Herring created Herring Networks, which includes WealthTV, a self-proclaimed “lifestyle and entertainment cable network,” and OAN, which was launched in 2013.
Few gave OAN a second glance until it became a network exclusively dedicated to pandering to Donald Trump’s insatiable ego. Dating back to 2015, Trump touted the network and its coverage of his presidential bid, and throughout his presidency, he has praised and promoted it to his tens of millions of followers. Throughout election season, OAN heaped lavish praise on the president, even pulling polls that dared suggest Trump might not win his reelection bid. And post-election, both Herring and the channel he founded have pivoted to parroting false Trump claims of rampant electoral fraud.
Much like the alternative-reality contemporaries OAN hopes to compete with, the channel’s unbridled dedication to Trumpism—and the relentless repetition of every conspiratorial MAGA brain fart—is routinely portrayed as objective journalism by company executives.
“We’re a no-fluff, very fast-paced live news service meant to inform,” Robert’s son Charles Herring told the Washington Post in 2017. “News anchors are not allowed to express opinions. They simply deliver the news and we leave it up to the viewers to decide. It’s not our family’s mission to determine the news.”
The president’s adoration of OAN means that despite being banned from briefings by the White House Correspondents’ Association for ignoring CDC safety protocols, the channel has been allowed to simply ignore the ban, and on any given week can still be found amplifying ludicrous claims from White House grounds with a quality reminiscent of high school A/V clubs.
Last week, OAN received yet another signal boost when Trump tweeted out a segment featuring bogus claim of electoral fraud propped up by “expert analysis” by Ron Watkins—son of 8kun (formerly 8chan) owner Jim Watkins—who is alleged to be a cornerstone of the QAnon conspiracy cult, where the false claim first originated:
But even with daily free marketing from the president, OAN’s real-world influence has been largely overstated.
OAN doesn’t subscribe to industry-standard Nielsen estimates, so accurately measuring its viewership has proven to be a guessing game for TV ratings firms. (OAN claims to reach around 35 million potential homes, little more than a quarter of the total number of U.S. homes that currently own a television set.) Research firms like Kagan estimate OAN’s reach to be 23 million cable subscribers, a significantly smaller potential footprint than right-wing outlets like Newsmax TV (58.2 million) or Fox News (78.6 million). When Nielsen attempted to more accurately measure how many of those users actually watch the channel last year, it wasn’t pretty:
OAN’s ambitions have been challenged by the fact that numerous major cable outlets, including Comcast, Spectrum, and Dish Network have refused to carry the channel. A June Bloomberg report attributed this reluctance to stringent OAN contract requirements, an asking price out of line with the channel’s quality, or a lack of interest in being associated with controversy.
OAN’s biggest cable distributor, AT&T/DirecTV, has been trimming costs due to sustained TV subscriber losses from cord cutting and mismanagement. Reports earlier this year indicated that OAN’s contract with AT&T is up for renewal next year, potentially removing AT&T’s 19 million potential viewers from the equation if a new deal can’t be reached.
Neither OAN nor AT&T responded to inquiries about the status of the contract.
While OAN may not be brainwashing a massive audience; it is providing plausible-seeming props and set dressing for Trump as he uses social media to create an alternate reality in which he won the election, defeated the coronavirus, and is unfairly besieged on all sides by mean journalists and the “deep state.” It’s a false reality OAN hopes to take to the mainstream.
The MAGA set has become furious at Fox’s failure to more fully embrace false claims of election fraud, and for (accurately) calling Arizona for Joe Biden before other outlets on election night. A recent Morning Consult poll found that Fox News’ favorability among Republicans dropped from 67 to 54 percent post-election—simply for occasionally telling viewers the truth.
But without free daily advertising from the president, overtaking Fox will be a steep uphill climb for the fledgling network—especially if OAN continues to double down on conspiracies and nonsense, Stanford professor of political economics Greg Martin told Motherboard.
“Fox News in some sense created the market for OAN, by building up the taste for conservative-slanted TV news in a large audience,” Martin said. But he added that Fox maintains its massive audience by including just enough hard news (like a legitimate election data team willing to call Arizona early for Biden) to keep at least the illusion of integrity intact.
Martin’s research has found that in terms of gaining cable TV market share, there are diminishing returns when it comes toward pushing extremism at your target audience, suggesting that OAN’s quest to out-conspiracy Fox might not be a winning formula.
“One of the points we make in the paper is that there is a tradeoff in moving farther towards the ideological extreme: if people watch, you'll have greater influence on their beliefs, but you also increase the risk that they are turned off by it and don't watch at all,” Martin said.
Martin added that Fox has been very successful at this balancing act to create the illusion of mainstream respectability, but a network like OAN positioning itself even further to the right of Fox is likely to be drawing viewers from a limited pool of total viewers.
“Fox has already pushed the envelope about as far as you can go before the returns to additional ideological extremity start to turn negative,” he said. “So I am skeptical that OAN will achieve anything like Fox's influence on public policy and politics in the US, even if its ratings were to continue to grow.”
While OAN may never see the same level of success as Fox News, it doesn't have to: It has had, and could continue to have, real effects on the public discourse just by inverting the usual formula by which powerful people reach a mass audience via news outlets. And other media scholars say the success it has seen is a troubling omen for the future of U.S. journalism and America’s accelerating battle with disinformation and propaganda.
Victor Pickard, an American media studies scholar at the University of Pennsylvania, told Motherboard OAN’s rise comes at a major inflection point for U.S. media. With U.S. journalism facing an existential and financial crisis—and so many bad faith actors looking to fill the vacuum created—OAN will likely be the least of our problems.
“It's difficult to imagine a surefire way to undo the damage to our media ecosystem, but one key piece of any solution must be to rebuild local journalism, whose dissolution has created the vacuum into which all manner of conspiratorial nonsense and disinformation has rushed in,” Pickard said.
Decades of corporate consolidation and layoffs have hit local journalism particularly hard, replacing quality local reporting with a troubling combination of Facebook conspiracies, Trump-loyal disinformation empires like Sinclair Broadcasting, and a flood of even more malicious actors looking to disguise corporate and political propaganda as legitimate local news.
Researchers have shown repeatedly that as local journalism is replaced with homogenized fluff and nonsense, Americans not only become less informed and more divided, but local corruption reporting falls through the cracks. In some instances, a lack of quality reporting has been directly linked to a measurable impact on election results.
Pickard noted that without addressing the underlying rot that fertilized the rise of the U.S. disinformation problem in the first place, things are likely to only get worse.
“Several structural conditions enabled the rise of OAN,” Pickard said. “First are the commercial values that incentivize media outlets to privilege profits above all else,” he said. “The proven formula of outrage-driven commentary is both cheap to produce and captures audiences' attention, which advertisers covet.”
In short, we’ve created an entire information ecosystem that prioritizes engagement above accuracy or insight, one in which it’s often not as profitable to tell the sometimes-boring but important truth.
Pickard has been a consistent advocate of providing more public funding for U.S. journalism as an antidote to the corrosive impact of engagement-based advertising. He also advocates for stronger “public interest protections that mandate social responsibilities such as maintaining ideological balance and fact-based coverage in our news media.”
In the 1940s the FCC passed the Fairness Doctrine, which required that broadcast news outlets cover issues of public interest fairly. But the rules were demolished in 1987 after Republicans spent years demonizing them, insisting they violated the First Amendment. Even if still around today, the rules would have only applied to broadcast television, not cable TV.
With inflammatory nonsense so profitable and Congress increasingly divided, a more modern proposal seems all but doomed. In its place, U.S. media policy has consisted of rubber stamping problematic mergers, eliminating decades-old media consolidation rules, and doubling down on an ad-based media environment that only tends to reward the inflammatory.
Without a major funding boost for real journalism and a massive rethinking of U.S. media policy, “news” empires like OAN will continue to see outsized influence on U.S. discourse, Pickard said—and it's not hard to imagine the possibilities for more sophisticated actors creating bespoke fake news for powerful politicians and political movements. Media experts also argue more mainstream journalists and outlets need to rethink their role in amplifying or validating bad faith viewpoints in a misguided quest for artificial balance.
“I predict that our news media in general will continue to worsen because there's less and less actual journalism,” Pickard said. “Meanwhile, the rightwing, fact-free media model is a proven money maker with no countervailing force.”
As trust in institutions is eroded, the public tends to turn to dubious, sometimes terrible alternatives to reinforce their shaken worldview. OAN wasn’t the first “news” outlet to exploit our failure to prevent conspiratorial thinking from being mainlined into the American bloodstream, and without a dramatic shift in U.S. media policy and funding, it certainly won’t be the last.
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Julián Gil. (photo: Colombia Solidarity Campaign)
Colombia: Activist Julian Gil Goes Free After 900 Days in Jail
teleSUR
Excerpt: "The social activist and former Technical Secretary of Colombia's Peoples' Congress (CDP) Julian Gil was acquitted on Tuesday of charges on the promotion of rebellion that was filed against him in 2018."
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Plastic pollution endangers marine animals, such as this young monk seal, which may get entangled in or ingest litter. (photo: Ocean Cleanup/Matthew Chauvin/Mongabay)
Clean Up Efforts Won't Solve the Plastic Pollution Crisis in the World's Seas
Isabella Backman, Mongabay
Backman writes: "The Ocean Cleanup is a highly touted nonprofit with the ambitious goal of cleaning up 90 percent of the ocean's plastic. In reality, the initiative's impact on the world's floating debris would be minimal, researchers reported recently in Science of the Total Environment."
he Ocean Cleanup is a highly touted nonprofit with the ambitious goal of cleaning up 90 percent of the ocean’s plastic. In reality, the initiative’s impact on the world’s floating debris would be minimal, researchers reported recently in Science of the Total Environment.
“I think the general public was believing that we had a solution to the plastic problem,” said Sönke Hohn, a marine biologist at the Leibniz Centre for Tropical Marine Research in Bremen, Germany, at the time of the study and lead author. “Our research showed that we are far away from having solved this problem if we don’t keep changing our behavior.”
Each year, 5 million to 13 million metric tons (11 billion to 28 billion pounds) of plastic wash into the ocean. The amount is expected to triple over the next century. Not only does this pose a danger to marine life, which can get entangled in plastic or ingest it, but it’s also a risk to human health through eating contaminated seafood.
The Ocean Cleanup is one of the most prominent initiatives for confronting this rapidly growing ocean waste. Its cleanup device, according to marine biogeochemist Matthias Egger from the nonprofit, works like a “giant Pac-Man,” sweeping up the debris using a screen attached to a floating barrier. The organization claims that it can use this device to clear the Great Pacific garbage patch—a vast gyre of plastic litter—of half its trash in five years.
To understand if the device could meet this goal, Hohn and his colleagues developed a mathematical model to simulate scooping plastic from the ocean. The team studied several scenarios: business as usual with no manual removal; one cleanup device; and a flotilla of 200 cleanup devices.
Results showed that one device would only remove a small fraction of 1 percent of the plastic by 2150. Even with 200 cleanup devices spread around the ocean working continuously for 120 years, the impact was still extremely modest. The model was the first to quantify the device’s ability to remove accumulated plastic from the ocean.
“The Ocean Cleanup is not going to solve the actual problem,” said Christine Figgener, a marine conservation biologist at the Costa Rican Alliance for Sea Turtle Conservation and Science, who was not involved in the study. “We need to solve the problem from all possible angles.
However, Egger disputes the study’s methods. Because the model assumes that plastic is spread evenly across the ocean, he believes Hohn’s team has underestimated the capability of the device.
“There are ocean garbage patches, which we focus on, and concentrations [of debris] there are up to 10,000 times higher than in surrounding waters,” Egger told Mongabay. The Great Pacific garbage patch, he explained, only covers about 0.4 percent of the total ocean’s surface, but it may contain up to 30 to 50 percent of the world’s marine plastic.
Nevertheless, scientists on both sides agreed that removing the debris is only part of the solution. Figgener, a vocal ocean advocate, sparked a global anti-straw movement in 2015 after a video went viral of her team removing a plastic straw from the nose of a sea turtle.
“We need to realize that corporations are mainly responsible for our plastic tides,” Figgener said. “If we stop buying from certain corporations and products, I think we will see more and more alternatives, maybe even from the same companies, because they will see that people are demanding something else.”
Agostino Merico, a physicist also at the Leibniz Centre and senior author of the study, stressed that the team’s objective was not to dismiss the efforts of the Ocean Cleanup.
“Our message is not that it’s useless to clean it up,” Merico told Mongabay. “Cleaning up our mess, which we have to clean, is not going to be easy, is not going to be fast, and is not going to be cheap.”
This article was originally published on Mongabay.
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