NAJ screen shot

The Big Picture –
By Glynn Wilson –

WASHINGTON, D.C. — With all the clouds of gloom and doom rocking the world, there are still days when a little light shines through with portents that could hint at a chance of better days to come. It’s a long shot, but I think we should cling to these moments and try to build on them.

For starters, even though Don the Con Trump is still leading all other Republicans in the public opinion polls for that party’s presidential nomination, it can’t last. All the historical pressure and karma is coming down on Trump’s head. He is going down, one way or another.

One of the reasons is that as compromised as our allegedly independent judiciary is these days, especially the United States Supreme Court, there are still judges willing to tell the truth without fear or favor and let the chips fall where they may.

One such judge is Justice Arthur F. Engoron of New York, who issued a scathing rebuke of a ruling on Tuesday saying Trump persistently committed fraud by inflating the value of his assets. He stripped the former president of control over some of his signature New York properties in a major victory for Attorney General Letitia James in her civil lawsuit against Trump.

Even before the case goes to trial, the judge decided that no trial was needed to determine that Trump had fraudulently secured favorable terms on loans and insurance deals, according to deadline reporting by the New York Times.

James argued that Trump inflated the value of his properties by as much as $2.2 billion and is seeking a penalty of about $250 million in a trial scheduled to begin as early as Monday.

Justice Engoron wrote that the annual financial statements Trump submitted to banks and insurance companies “clearly contain fraudulent valuations that defendants used in business.”

In his order, Justice Engoron wrote that the former president and the other defendants, including his two adult sons and his company, ignored reality when it suited their business needs.

“In defendants’ world,” he wrote, “rent-regulated apartments are worth the same as unregulated apartments; restricted land is worth the same as unrestricted land; restrictions can evaporate into thin air.”

“That is a fantasy world, not the real world,” he said.

James started investigating Trump in March 2019 and filed a lawsuit against him last September, accusing him of “staggering” fraud in representing the value of his apartment buildings, hotels and golf clubs. Her filings accused Trump of using simple, duplicitous tricks to multiply the represented value of his signature properties, from Trump Tower to Mar-a-Lago. In one noteworthy example, she accused Trump of overestimating the size of the triplex apartment in Trump Tower in which he lived for decades, saying it was 30,000 feet, rather than about 11,000.

Justice Engoron seized on that, noting that Trump’s lawyers had “absurdly” suggested that the calculation of square footage was subjective and adding that good-faith measurements might vary by as much as 10 to 20 percent, but not 200 percent.

“A discrepancy of this order of magnitude, by a real estate developer sizing up his own living space of decades, can only be considered fraud,” he wrote.

“The documents do not say what they say; that there is no such thing as ‘objective’ value,” the judge wrote, paraphrasing their arguments as he saw them, and adding, “Essentially, the court should not believe its own eyes.”

In a footnote, he added a line from the movie “Duck Soup” uttered by Chico Marx: “Well, who ya gonna believe, me or your own eyes?”

In a followup analysis story, Times writers including Maggie Haberman say this:

“By effectively branding him a cheat, the decision in the civil proceeding by Justice Arthur F. Engoron undermined Mr. Trump’s relentlessly promoted narrative of himself as a master of the business world, the persona that he used to enmesh himself in the fabric of popular culture and that eventually gave him the stature and resources to reach the White House. The ruling was the latest remarkable development to test the resilience of Mr. Trump’s appeal as he seeks to win election again despite the weight of evidence against him in cases spanning his years as a New York developer, his 2016 campaign, his efforts to overturn his 2020 election loss and his handling of national security secrets after leaving office.”

Yes, as I recently wrote about Trump and others in the company obituary of Rupert Murdoch of Fox News, the term cheat is not just a lay term for kids on the playground. Scientists actually use the term cheaters to describe some people in evolutionary terms, and these “cheaters” are those for whom the selfish gene trumps and squeezes every ounce of altruism out of the human equation. It doesn’t matter to these selfish cheaters whether democracy or the rest of humanity survives or not.

Trump is the epitome of this. As a tribe, if we wish to survive, it is imperative that we kick him out of the tribe like the overly aggressive ape that he is, and go back to working altruistically together — if we want to survive. This is the most basic, fundamental struggle we face. Everything comes down to this: Will we allow the selfish gene to prevail, and all become selfish cheaters at each others’ throats? Or can we curb our human tendency to selfishness and once again promote the trait of altruism and help each other survive?

Our struggle is not just between love and hate. Even Martin Luther King knew this.

“Everyone must decide whether they will walk in the light of creative altruism or in the darkness of destructive selfishness.”

The Fundamental Lesson from Martin Luther King, Jr.

E.O. Wilson provides the other clue, for those who have an ear and can hear.

“In a group, selfish individuals beat altruistic individuals,” Wilson argued. “But, groups of altruistic individuals beat groups of selfish individuals. Competition between groups selects for pro-social groups. Competition within groups tend to undermine groups. The rest is commentary.”

More Good News

Putting aside the poll results showing that Trump is close on Biden’s heels in the race for president in 2024, let’s dig a little deeper into the demographic breakdowns in the polls to see what we might expect to happen in 2024.

Some readers who have been following me for years, even back before I launched the New American Journal from Washington, D.C. in 2014, may recall a story I wrote back in 2008 after Barack Obama won the presidency.

Fighting the Final Battles of the Civil War

I had been working with Jim Gundlach, a retired Auburn Sociology professor, who harbored a special fascination with the “age” variable in public opinion research. He ran a model on Obama’s candidacy before the election and predicted that the best he could possibly do in a national race was to win by about 7 percent, if he ran a flawless campaign and the other side stumbled (can you say Sarah Palin?). And Obama hit the number on the nail head, winning by about 57 percent nationally in the popular vote.

I was reminded of this recently, when New York Times columnist Thomas Edsall published a piece saying ‘This Is Going to Be the Most Important Election Since 1860’.

I was most interested in some of the results of interviews he conducted with political scientists asking the question:

Why should Republicans be worrying?

Robert M. Stein, a political scientist at Rice, indicated that turnout among MAGA supporters may be less important next November than how many MAGA voters there are (still alive) in the 2024 election, and in which states they live.

One of the most distinctive demographic characteristics of self-identified MAGA voters, Stein pointed out, “is their age: over half (56 percent) were over the age of 65 as of 2020. By 2024, the proportion of MAGA voters over 70 will be greater than 50 percent and will put these voters in the likely category of voters leaving the electorate, dying, ill and unable to vote.”

Because of these trends, Stein continued, “it may be the case that the absolute number and share of the electorate that are MAGA voters is diluted in 2024 by their own exit from the electorate and the entry of new and younger and non-MAGA voters.”

Along similar lines, Martin Wattenberg, a political scientist at the University of California-Irvine, argued … that generational change will be a key factor in the election.

Between 2020 and 2024, “about 13 million adult citizens will have died” and “these lost voters favored Trump in 2020 by a substantial margin. My rough estimate is that removing these voters from the electorate will increase Biden’s national popular vote margin by about 1.2 million votes.”

“The aging of the electorate works to the advantage of Biden and his fellow Democrats,” Edsall writes. “So too does what is happening with younger voters at the other end of the age distribution. Here, Democrats have an ace in the hole: the strong liberal and Democratic convictions of voters between the ages of 18 and 42, whose share of the electorate is steadily growing.”

Joe Trippi, a Democratic consultant, was exuberant on the subject, he said:

“Don’t forget Gen Z. They are on fire. Unlike you and me who dove under our school desks in nuclear attack drills but never experienced a nuclear attack, this generation spent their entire school lives doing mass shooting drills and witnessing a mass shooting at a school in the news regularly.”

Young voters, Trippi continued, “are not going to vote (Republican) and they are going to vote. Dobbs, climate, homophobia, gun violence are all driving this generation away from the (Republican Party) — in much the same way that Dems lost the younger generation during the Reagan years.”

Wattenberg was more cautious. He estimated that 15 million young people will become eligible to vote between 2020 and 2024.

“How many of them will vote and how they will vote is a key uncertainty that could determine the election,” he wrote. “Given recent patterns, there is little doubt that those that vote will favor the Democratic nominee. But by how much?”

So I sent this story to Jim Gundlach, who is still around down in Alabama playing with the numbers, and asked for his analysis and comments.

“I think he is right about the aging effect but I think there are two additional effects that add to the Democratic advantage,” he said. “The first is the Republican anti-COVID vaccine effort. While there is no direct measure of this mortality effect, let’s look at the change in the elderly death rate.”

He sent me this graph showing the relationship between the Trump vote and the COVID death rate.

“I have also looked at how the elderly death rate has changed in states by party,” he said.

Massachusetts is one of the most Democratic voting states. There the age 65+ non-Hispanic white death rate increased from 4108.7 to 4140.1 from 2019 to 2021. That is a 31.4 pain increase in their death rate.

The most Republican voting state, West Virginia, had the same statistics increase from 4697.8 to 5737.5. “That is a 1042 point increase,” he said. “That is a seven tenths of a percent increase compared to a 22.2 percent increase.”

“And when we have the next election there will be about two years of this kind of difference in Democratic versus Republican elderly white death rates,” he said.

In other words, Trump voters are dying off, and younger voters are more likely to vote for Democrats.

Abortion

Among those Edsall contacted for his column, there was near unanimous agreement that abortion will continue to be a major issue — as it was in 2022, when abortion rights voters turned out in large numbers, lifting Democrats in key races.

“It is the single most significant factor helping Democrats,” Ornstein declared, adding, “The fact that red states move more and more to extremes — including banning abortions for rape and incest, watching women bleed with untreated miscarriages, seeing doctors flee, criminalizing going to another state — will fire up suburban and young voters.”

Justin Gest, a professor of policy and government at George Mason University, pointed out … that:

“Democrats nationwide are taking a page out of the playbook of former President George W. Bush’s longtime adviser, Karl Rove. In those years, Republicans used state ballot measures and referendums on divisive culture war issues that split their way to mobilize conservative voters. In those days, the subject matter was often gay rights.”

Citing a June Ipsos poll that found “public opinion around the Dobbs decision and abortion remains mostly unchanged compared to six months ago,” Gest argued “that abortion remains salient more than a year after the revocation of abortion rights by the U.S. Supreme Court, but Democrats in many states will also use ballot measures to ensure it is top of mind.” Gest also noted that “supermajorities of the country favor preserving access to abortion to some extent.”

Gundlack agreed with Edsall’s analysis that the Republican effort to outlaw abortion will continue to fire up voter turnout for Democrats, who “have been doing much better in all the special elections since that court ruling. I think this effect will have a lot of women who regularly don’t vote turn out to vote against Republicans,” Gundlach said.

“Part of the effect is age, the elderly are more Republican,” he said. “And another part is sex. Females are more interested in keeping abortion available.”

Related: Supreme Court Dismantles Liberty, Rights and Freedoms, and Not Just for Women

Trump Trials

So on top of all that, what effect will all the Trump trials have on the election? I do not believe, as some commentators on cable television continually say, that Trump will benefit in public opinion from being tried as a criminal defendant. It has to result in the erosion of his support at some point. If he is found guilty, and as a convicted felon he can’t run for public office again, he will disappear and the Republicans will have no choice but to nominate someone else.

If the Republicans on the stage during the most recent televised debate is the best they can do, I don’t believe they have any chance of winning a national election. Pretending to be Trump may work in rural House races, but not the presidential election.

According to Edsall’s analysis, he is not so sure.

“In more normal — that is, pre-Trump — days, the fact that the probable Republican nominee faced 91 felony counts would have shifted the scales in favor of the Democrats,” Edsall writes. “But these are not normal times.”

Frances Lee, a political scientist at Princeton, pointed out that the 2024 election has no precedent.

“How will the Trump prosecutions unfold amidst the primaries and the presidential campaign?” Lee asked … “How will developments in these cases be received by Republicans and the public at large? We have little relevant precedent for even considering how these cases are likely to affect the race.”

Gary Jacobson, a political scientist at the University of California-San Diego, agreed, noting… “How will Trump’s trials evolve and how will people react to them? What happens if he is convicted and sentenced? What happens if he is acquitted?”

Lee and Jacobson were joined in this line of thinking by Whit Ayres, a Republican pollster, who emailed his view that:

“The greatest uncertainty on the Republican side is the potential impact of the Trump trials. An acquittal, especially in the first case to go to trial, would almost certainly strengthen him. But what about a conviction, especially if it involves jail time? That may be the greatest uncertainty in American politics in my lifetime.”

The Media

The last but not least factor to consider in what will happen in 2024 is how the press and media will cover the campaign. Will they continue to try to normalize the MAGA Republicans? Or do what most of them did after the 2020 election when Trump was denying he lost, and after Jan. 6, 2021 after the attack on the Capitol?

One source of uncertainty is the media, Edsall admits, “which can, and often does, play a key role in setting the campaign agenda. The contest between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump is a prime example.”

In the aftermath of the 2016 election, the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard conducted a study, “Partisanship, Propaganda, & Disinformation: Online Media & the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election.” It found that reporting on Hillary Clinton was dominated “by coverage of alleged improprieties associated with the Clinton Foundation and emails.”

According to the study, the press, television and online media devoted more space and time to Clinton’s emails than it did to the combined coverage of Trump’s taxes, his comments about women, his failed “university,” his foundation and his campaign’s dealings with Russia.

“Going into 2024, it is unlikely the media could inflict much more damage on Trump,” Esdall says, “given that the extensive coverage of the 91 felony counts against him does not seem to affect his favorable or unfavorable rating.”

Biden, in contrast, has much more to gain or lose from media coverage, he says.

Will the media focus on his age or his legislative and policy achievements? On inflation and consumer costs or economic growth and (low) employment rates? On questions about Biden’s ability to complete a second term or the threats to democracy posed by the ascendant right wing of the Republican Party?

I would add that all the national coverage of Hunter Biden’s laptop and his troubles, and more recently the coverage of the corruption of New Jersey Democrat Robert Menendez, is a way for mainstream media outlets to appear “fair and balanced.” Unfortunately, there is no way that Hunter Biden’s troubles or the corruption of Senator Bob Menendez can compare to the corruption of Trump and all the Republicans who actively worked for months to undermine democracy itself.

Trump is without a doubt the most corrupt politician in American history by far. Anyone who continues to say that Trump was not a “politician” is fooling themselves. He was an amazingly effective politician. So there is no comparable story on the other side to balance that out. We must report the facts and the truth, and not try to find a way to say in this case that Republicans and Democrats are equally corrupt. That is not supported by the facts. It’s not true.

Democracy At Stake

Herbert Kitschelt, a political scientist at Duke, argued that matters of immense concern are at stake.

“This is going to be the most important election since 1860,” he said, “because it is going to be about the future of this country as a democracy.”

It will be an election, he continued, “about whether this country will preserve the rule of law in an independent justice system; whether women will be respected as autonomous decision makers or subjected again, step-by-step, by a religion-encoded male supremacy; whether this country will continue to hold free and fair elections or generalize to the entire realm a new version of what prevailed in the South before the civil rights legislation.”

The 2024 election, in Kitschelt’s view, “is the last stand of the nationalist ‘Christian’ white right, as their support is eroding in absolute and relative terms, and of all those who believe that white supremacy across all U.S. institutions needs to be protected, even at the cost of giving up on democracy.”

But, on an even larger scale, he argued, “The 2024 election will also be about whether this country will preserve a universalist sense of citizenship or devolve into a polity of splintered identity pressure groups, rent-seeking for shares of the pie.”

Unfortunately, Kitschelt concluded, “if the Democrats let the Republicans succeed in priming the identity issues that divide the potential Democratic coalition, the white Christian nationalists will have a greater chance to win.”

Edsall admits that’s Trump’s goal, but in fact it’s central to his strategy to become America’s first authoritarian dictator. I still don’t quite understand why not one writer at the New York Times will admit this is what’s at stake. While they still insist on referring to him as “Mr. Trump,” and quote him calling the judge in his civil case “deranged,” is there not a point at which we can just call Trump what he is? He wants to be our Putin. Should we be fair and balanced to the evil, killer dictator Putin too?

The Biggest Danger

And it’s not just up to the “press” or TV media anymore. Now social media plays a far more important role in shaping public opinion than the press ever did in the 20th century when a “fair and balanced” news media covered “both sides.”

Misinformation, disinformation, outright lies and right-wing fascist propaganda spread further and faster on social media platforms than they ever did on radio or television.

As I wrote in Rupert Murdoch’s corporate obituary, it remains to be seen whether the Rush-Fox-Trump-MAGA phenomenon will continue indefinitely. It’s certainly not going to be stopped by Elon Musk at X (Twitter) or Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta, Facebook, Instagram or Threads, or China’s TikTok.

And the Google-YouTube evil empire is not going to stop it either. The question is, will it help Trump like it did in 2016?

If Bork’s Thinking is Behind Google Strategy, Let’s All Boycott Google

The public is going to have to wise up about how it uses this technology going forward. That is going to be the real test. Clearly we don’t have a Congress that is educated or tech savvy enough to help. It’s going to be up to “the people.”

Related: Rupert Murdoch of Fox News Steps Down: Will the Rightward Tilt of America Continue or Peak in 2024?

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