Against Harris, Trump Tries to Run the Birther Playbook

By Frank Rich, New York Magazine

15 August 20

Most weeks, New York Magazine writer-at-large Frank Rich speaks with contributor Alex Carp about the biggest stories in politics and culture. Today, what Kamala Harris means for the Biden campaign, Donald Trump’s racist attacks against her, and conspiracists in Congress.

fter months of speculation, Joe Biden announced that his running mate will be Kamala Harris. Is she the right choice for his campaign?
The low bar for vice-presidential candidates is that they not be the wrong choice. In retrospect Harris was the safest and perhaps the inevitable choice, which is also why she was the most frequently predicted choice. And yet, when the announcement came, there was genuine elation among Democrats — and perhaps some non-Democrats, too — that is already reflected in polling. The actual fact of Harris on the ticket — a woman of color with a multicultural background as various as the nation’s and a record of ceaseless accomplishment despite all the racial obstacles along the way — is deeply moving. Context counts. The Harris story may be more moving now, in this year of Black Lives Matter protests and a raging pandemic, than it was destined to be during her presidential campaign, which imploded in what now seems like the prehistoric year of 2019.

Harris was a safe choice because, of all the veep finalists, she was one of only two who had been ruthlessly vetted during a national political campaign. Given the bipartisan conviction that Biden’s age is a political vulnerability, it always seemed unlikely he’d pick the other, his fellow septuagenarian Elizabeth Warren, even if he and Warren came to an ideological truce. Nor did it seem likely that Biden would pick a white woman after Black women contributed so mightily to his primary triumph. In retrospect, even Harris’s demerits are compatible with Biden’s: her ideological blurriness, her mixed record on criminal justice, and a presidential run that matched Biden’s failed earlier runs in its haplessness. As for her fierce attack on Biden in that first debate, count it as a plus: After nearly four years of the oleaginous sycophancy of Mike Pence, a vice-president who would tell off her boss is a refreshing novelty.

Almost as soon as Harris had been named to the ticket, she became the target of increased attacks from Donald Trump and others on the right, focused largely on her race and gender. Will these comments energize Trump’s base, or are they a sign of a flailing campaign not sure of what might stick?

It would seem that the only ones who didn’t anticipate that Harris might land on the ticket were Trump and his campaign. It didn’t take 48 hours to see that they are panicked by her. Trump stepped up his threat to sabotage the election by sabotaging the post office, and he embraced a ludicrous birther theory that Harris is ineligible to run for vice-president because her parents were immigrants.

He made these moves after the usual misogynistic and racist insults failed to move the needle anywhere except among his own base and Fox News. His sad attempt at coining a nickname — “Phony Kamala” — fell flat, even as “Sleepy Joe” is also losing whatever zing it had. (The contrast between Biden’s public bike riding and Trump’s shaky walk down a shallow ramp at West Point has been duly noted on Twitter.)

The deploying of race and gender to try to diminish Harris’s stature and achievements is not the sole province of Trump, his sons, and the Fox prime-time thugs who go right for the jugular. There’s also a subtler form of this animus among conservative commentators who almost to a man and a woman use the same locution. “She checks all the boxes,” writes Ramesh Ponnuru at Bloomberg, a necessity because “a white woman would have been a disappointment to too many Democrats.” Or as the Journal summed it up in an editorial in which it also wielded the Trump-favored adjective nasty at Harris, Biden “checked the essential boxes his party had demanded — a woman, a minority, and a progressive who has moved left as the Democratic Party has.”

To which one might respond, Pence checked the essential boxes his party demanded — a man, white, and a reactionary who has moved to the right as the Republican Party has. No wonder so many are looking forward to seeing these two very different representations of America go at it in the vice-presidential debate.

But will that debate happen? The rumors that Trump might replace Pence on the ticket with Nikki Haley or someone else he thinks might appeal to the “suburban housewife” persist. (The White House denials have no more credibility than any other statements from an administration that lies more often than not.) Clearly Trump has to do something to shake up his failing campaign, and, whether it involves Pence or not, what better time to do it than next week, as counterprogramming to the Biden-Harris convention? It would be entirely in character for the desperate, out-of-control Trump to spring an October surprise in August.

In Marjorie Taylor Greene, who won her House primary in Georgia this week, Congress is likely to have its first open supporter of QAnon, the conspiracist pro-Trump movement. Some GOP House members tried to stop or slow her campaign — will they accept her as a colleague?

The simple fact is that Greene has already been welcomed to Washington by both Trump (who applauded her as a “future Republican star”) and the House GOP leader Kevin McCarthy, whose office released a statement embracing her after this week’s primary victory. Other GOP House leaders, Steve Scalise and Liz Cheney, who once spoke out against her views, retreated into silence once she won the primary. Trump’s most visible House advocate, the Ohio congressman Jim Jordan, helped raise thousands of dollars for her campaign.

What does it mean to be a follower of QAnon, a conspiracy theory proliferating on the darkest reaches of the internet? In addition to the by-the-book racism and Islamophobia, Greene has endorsed the central QAnon premise accusing the Democrats of officiating over a “global cabal of Satan-worshipping pedophiles,” has accused Hillary Clinton of murder and George Soros of being a Nazi, and supported a truther theory that no plane crashed into the Pentagon on 9/11.

In a deep-red district, Greene is all but certain to win her House seat. She is only one of “at least 70 Republican candidates” who ran for Congress this cycle and expressed support for QAnon, in the calculation of Media Matters, with 19 of them on the November ballot. As the former GOP political operative turned Never Trumper Tim Miller has said, this coming House Republican caucus “is going to have more QAnon believers than Trump skeptics.”

Miller’s point cuts to the heart of the debate going on right now between disaffected Never Trumpers and other conservative Republicans about the fate of the party post-Trump. Some Never Trumpers argue that the GOP must be burned down. As the longtime Republican strategist Stuart Stevens argues in his new book, It Was All a Lie, the GOP is irredeemable. Trump is the culmination of a party that has been built on white grievance and racism for decades. Other anti-Trump conservatives see hope for rebuilding the GOP after Trump is gone. David Brooks, for instance, sees a future built around the likes of current Senators Marco Rubio, Tom Cotton, Ben Sasse, and Josh Hawley, even as he posits in passing that Republicans must “deracialize their appeal.”

Back on planet Earth, that seems highly unlikely. Racism is a cancer that has been metastasizing for half a century in the GOP. If Vichy Republicans like Rubio, et al. can’t bring themselves even now to mobilize against a QAnon candidate like Greene, there’s no reason to believe that they have the will or the power to fight the next iteration of Trumpism any more than they’ve been able to stand up to Trump.

Dismantle the Department of Homeland Security. Its Tactics Are Fearsome.

By Anthony D. Romero, ACLU

15 August 20

The very premise of a "homeland security" bureaucracy is chilling. It's a loaded weapon that sits on the proverbial coffee table in the Oval Office.

s an organization dedicated to civil liberties, civil rights, and the rule of law, we at the American Civil Liberties Union believe that the government has both the authority and responsibility to enforce its laws — laws that promote justice, equality, and the general welfare. In recent weeks, the actions of federal agents have shown us all that the Department of Homeland Security isn’t capable of acting consistently with the Constitution, and should no longer exist in its current state.

The scenes unfolding in Portland, Oregon, and elsewhere are a reminder of the red flags many have raised about DHS throughout its history: that its powers are too great, and that it lacks the oversight and management to be effective. We can preserve our freedoms and our security better by dismantling DHS and beginning anew.

People across the political spectrum watched in disbelief as federal agents were deployed to American cities — despite objections by mayors and governors — to escalate violence against protesters. Paramilitary forces abducted people exercising their constitutional rights in Portland, placed them in unmarked vehicles, and took them to undisclosed locations.

The tactics deployed by DHS agents are unlawful and shocking, but they are no surprise: Back in 2002, we at the ACLU called the initial blueprints for the behemoth bureaucracy “constitutionally bankrupt.”

Dire warnings become DHS reality

And for nearly 20 years, we have seen many of our warnings about DHS become tragic realities. We objected to a knee-jerk plan that failed to respond to the intelligence law enforcement failures that contributed to the tragedy of 9/11. We believed that DHS would use the veil of “security” to target communities of color and immigrants, and urged greater civil liberties oversight.

Now, of course, we know that DHS has surveilled Black Lives Matter activist circles; descended into mosques and community centers to infiltrate Muslim communities; shot and killed foreign nationals across the border; and monitored protests using&nbs;fusion center intelligence sharing hubs.

DHS is also responsible for separating children from their parents at our borders — a tragedy we continue to litigate.

The short history of DHS has been filled with violence, the stoking of fear, and a lack of oversight. The department’s horrific tactics are being used in cities across the country.

The fearsome tactics of DHS are well known to the communities against whom they are used. Its dysfunction is one of the Beltway’s worst kept secrets. DHS’s overbroad mandate and unchecked powers have turned it into a tinderbox, now ignited by a president willing to trample on the constitutional limits of presidential powers. While calls for reform have been loud and clear for years, new signals are now coming from the highest levels of the DHS diaspora.

Tom Ridge, the first secretary of Homeland Security, said recently that DHS “wasn’t designed to become the president’s personal militia.”

Former Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff asserted that President Donald Trump’s deployment of agents to U.S. cities is “damaging to the department.”

And Richard Clarke, who served on the National Security Council for Presidents George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, has called for dismantling DHS. 

Nearly 20 years of abuse, waste, and corruption demonstrate the failure of the DHS experiment. Joining 22 agencies with conflicting missions — including border security, disaster relief, and immigration enforcement, among others. Many insiders knew DHS to be an ineffective superagency, but President Trump has converted DHS into our government’s most notable badge of shame.

Break DHS into parts

Dismantling DHS, breaking it apart into various federal agencies, and shrinking its allocation of federal dollars will allow for more effective oversight, accountability, and public transparency. The spun-off agencies will have clearer missions and more limited functions. A behemoth of a federal agency too easily hides its problems and failings. Congressional oversight can be more readily divided among various congressional committees. Smaller agencies with clearer mandates will make Cabinet-level jobs more attractive to top-notch professionals.

There is also the added benefit that breaking up DHS will provide a larger number of Cabinet posts to reflect our country’s diversity. 

Most important, the very premise of a “homeland security” bureaucracy is chilling and ought to be questioned. Defense of the “homeland” became a rallying cry for hawks and some doves in the aftermath of 9/11, but this frame betrays the broader values that ought to infuse our democracy. Why, for example, is an agency responsible for citizenship and immigration under a threat-oriented department? Immigrants are not a threat to the “homeland.” 

Years of chaos and impunity make a clear case for the dismantling of DHS. President Trump’s use of DHS as his personal militia should be enough to start a meaningful bipartisan debate about DHS’ future. If there is one thing we have learned from the authoritarianism on display in Portland, it’s that we have to remove the loaded weapon that sits on the proverbial coffee table in the Oval Office.

Donald Trump should not be allowed to provide a precedent for future presidents with authoritarian tendencies to repeat the injustices we are enduring. Dismantling DHS into its component parts would restore greater balance to our system of checks and balances. And rather than tolerating misinterpretation of “homeland security,” we need our government to advance a “more perfect union.”