Tag: Juan Williams

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The Trump Virus

Okay, let me answer the only talking point the Trump campaign has left: The president’s team is demanding that critics tell them what Joe Biden could have done better than President Trump to prevent the deaths of 140,000 Americans, and counting, due to the coronavirus. Obviously, this is a weak argument. You might even say it is a desperate argument.

Why? Because the only real issue is Trump’s handling of the virus.

Juan WIlliams

Already, 60 percent of Americans disapprove of Trump’s handling of the virus, according to a recent Washington Post/ABC News poll. Another recent poll, from Fox News, had 56 percent of registered voters disapproving of Trump’s response to the virus. In fact, voters have already concluded by a large margin — 17 percentage points in the Fox poll — that they trust Biden to do a better job of leading the nation through the pandemic.

Even on a personal basis, Fox reports that only 36 percent believe Trump has “the compassion to serve effectively as president.” By comparison, 56 percent say Biden is a compassionate man.

So the American people have reached a conclusion about the performance of the incumbent: Trump failed. And that has big political consequences because the coronavirus is the No. 1 issue for voters.

By asking what Biden could have done differently, Trump’s campaign is trying to change a national conversation that has already reached a conclusion. They are kicking up a storm of distraction by arguing that even if Trump dropped the ball, where is the evidence that Biden might have done any better?

Biden answered the question last week. While Trump was promising that “like a miracle — it will disappear,” Biden said he would have to work — improving testing, tracing people who had spread the disease, and using the Defense Production Act to get U.S. companies to produce tests, masks, and equipment for hospitals.

Trump did not do those things, Biden said, but instead “raised the white flag.”

“He has no idea what to do,” Biden told MSNBC host Joy Reid last week. “Zero.” Trump’s only concern is winning the election, Biden said. “And it doesn’t matter how many people get COVID or die from COVID,” Biden added, “because [Trump] fears that if the economy is strapped as badly as it is today … he is going to be in trouble [in November].”

Let’s take Biden’s answer with a grain of salt, since he is running against Trump. But what do political reporters — people watching every day, the judges at ringside — think of how Trump is handling the virus?

After interviewing Trump for an hour, Chris Wallace of Fox said Trump’s White House still “doesn’t seem to have a handle” on the pandemic. That is damning given that Trump was warned about the potency of the virus to kill in January.

Jake Tapper of CNN offered a similarly negative judgment. Trump’s “refusal to lead has a body count,” as in the number of people who have died from the virus.

How does Dr. Anthony Fauci, who has seen Trump’s response from the beginning, judge Trump’s performance? “When you look at the numbers, obviously, we’ve got to do better,” Fauci told The Atlantic a week ago. “We’ve got to almost reset this and say ‘Okay, let’s stop this nonsense.’ … So rather than these games people are playing, let’s focus on that.”

These judgments that Trump has failed are hard to refute. It is a fact that in January Trump told CNBC he had no worry about the coronavirus because “we have it totally under control. … We have it under control. It is going to be just fine.”

In late February, Trump again steered the country wrong by tweeting that the virus is “very much under control in the USA. … Stock Market starting to look very good to me!”

In March, as the situation grew worse, Trump blamed “Fake News Media and their partner, the Democrat Party,” for trying to “inflame the CoronaVirus situation.”

Then in mid-March he declared, “I’ve felt it was a pandemic long before it was called a pandemic.” Later in March, he announced the virus would be gone in time for Americans to gather at church for Easter services in mid-April.

Speaker Nancy Pelosi  now goes so far as to call the disease the “Trump Virus.”

“If he had said months ago, ‘Let’s wear masks. … Let’s socially distance’ instead of rallies … then more people would have followed his lead. He’s the President of the United States,” Pelosi told CNN, in explaining her negative judgment of Trump.

That’s why the question of what anyone else might have done is a useless parlor game. Its only purpose, as conceived by a desperate Trump campaign, is to get people to ignore the president’s costly failure.

Juan Williams is an author, and a political analyst for Fox News Channel.

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John Ratcliffe, Trump’s Choice for DNI, is a Partisan Hack

Last week, Dan Coats, the director of national intelligence, said it was “frustrating” to hear “rumors” about being fired by President Trump. They were more than rumors.

On Sunday, Trump confirmed via Twitter that Coats is leaving his position on August 15th. Officially, Coats is resigning — but no one really doubts that he has been pushed out by the president. Coats fell out of favor with Trump for publicly confirming Russian interference in the 2016 election. The Trump appointee also raised eyebrows at a conference when he revealed Trump failed to consult with him before extending an invitation to the White House to Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Juan Williams

Now Coats is on the way out for doing his job. But it is Coats’ proposed replacement that takes this story beyond frustrating and straight to outrageous. Trump will nominate Representative John Ratcliffe (R-Texas) to fill the role. Ratcliffe is a pure political player and a direct threat to the nonpartisan reputation of America’s intelligence agencies and their ability to protect the country by producing unbiased, first-rate information.

He auditioned for the role last week, when he subjected Robert Mueller to harsh questioning when the former special counsel appeared before Congress. Ratcliffe absurdly accused Mueller of having failed to respect “the bedrock principle of our justice system … a presumption of innocence” when it came to Trump. At the second of two hearings that day, Ratcliffe pumped conspiracy theories and innuendo into the congressional record as he quizzed Mueller about the Steele dossier and the FISA warrant against former Trump aide Carter Page. These are two red herrings that Trump allies have consistently used to try to discredit Mueller — and to downplay the threat from Russia.

It could have been even worse. Another name reported to have been in the mix was Representative Devin Nunes (R-California). This is the mudslinger who lied by saying he had evidence to support Trump’s claim that President Obama “wiretapped” Trump during the 2016 election. Nunes’ claim to fame comes from his eagerness to promote Trump’s “deep state” and “witch hunt” narratives about the intelligence agencies. The goal is to undermine the credibility of our intelligence agencies’ findings that Russia interfered in the 2016 election. Instead of facing that truth, Ratcliffe, Nunes, and Trump continue to feed conspiracy theories to right-wing websites and conservative talk radio.

“The Russians are absolutely intent on trying to interfere with our elections,” FBI Director Christopher Wray testified to Congress the day before Mueller asserted that the Russian interference is ongoing. “It wasn’t a single attempt,” Mueller said. “They’re doing it as we sit here.” Wray emphasized that the U.S. has not done enough to deter Russian interference.

House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff (D-California) recently said he had been unaware that three Senate races had been attacked by Russia. Earlier this year, former Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen was reportedly told by White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney not to mention Russian interference in front of Trump for fear it would upset him by calling into question the legitimacy of his presidency.

Wait, it gets worse. Hours after Mueller’s impassioned plea, Senate Republicans, led by Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, blocked three bills passed by the House of Representatives to safeguard U.S. elections from foreign interference. Should we be calling into question the patriotism of every Republican who last week voted against the election security bills?

McConnell dismissed the bills as “partisan” and their authors as promoters of a “conspiracy theory.” “This is an issue of patriotism, of national security, of protecting the very integrity of American democracy, something so many of our forbears died for. And what do we hear from the Republican side? Nothing,” said Senator Charles Schumer, the top Democrat in the Senate.

“To this day, Mr. Trump refuses to acknowledge the seriousness of Russian intervention, and the Republican-controlled Senate is unwilling to consider legislation for enhanced election security — maybe because doing either could be seen as an admission that the election was tainted,” wrote The New York Times editorial board. “The president appears more concerned with nursing his ego than safeguarding American democracy — and that puts us all, Republicans, Democrats, and independents, at risk.”

Let history record that a delusional president, concerned only with his own ego, and a traitorous Republican Congress, concerned only with their own re-elections, chose to ignore hard evidence regarding the Russian threat to our elections. Instead, we get the likes of John Ratcliffe as the president’s nominee to head national intelligence.

God save us.

Juan Williams is an author and a political analyst for Fox News Channel.

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Killing Obamacare: Trump Goes It Alone

If you are a Trump voter, why trust me? Let’s go to President Trump’s toadies in Congress and see what they have to say about his Justice Department’s call last week to push the federal courts to kill the Affordable Care Act (ACA).

Representative Tom Reed (R-N.Y.), one of Trump’s strong backers, bluntly told The Washington Post that the president’s order to the Justice Department is “not the smartest move.” He explained that doing away with the current law without having a replacement ready to go “leaves millions of Americans in harm’s way and they didn’t do anything.”

And here’s a Republican voice with enough distance from Trump to get the joke: “We couldn’t repeal and replace it with a Republican House,” Senator Lamar Alexander said, also to the Post, while laughing at the memory. He also pointed out the obvious: The House is now under the control of a Democratic majority.

Juan Williams

Now let’s go to Trump’s biggest enablers. Oh, they’re not talking. House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell want no part of this political suicide.

Here’s a tweet from Josh Holmes, McConnell’s former top aide. “Dear GOP,” Holmes wrote, “When Democrats are setting themselves ablaze by advocating the destruction of American health care, try to resist the temptation of asking them to pass the kerosene.”

What about the cabinet? Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar and Attorney General William Barr both told the White House not to do it, according to several reports.

And here is more dissent, this time from the conservatives at The Wall Street Journal. Destroying Obamacare without a replacement plan means angering millions of Americans who “now rely on the law for health insurance,” the paper editorialized. As for the long-promised, fantastic replacement plan, the Journal wrote: “If there’s some new emerging GOP consensus, we haven’t heard about it.”

Okay, so even the people who have been making excuses for Trump are not looking the other way on this one. Why? The answer is that angering voters by destroying the ACA would be a political catastrophe.

Health care stands out as the top reason the GOP lost 41 seats and control of the House in the 2018 midterm elections. According to the 2018 exit polls, 41 percent of voters identified health care as the most important issue to them. Fifty-seven percent of voters said Democrats are the better of the two parties at protecting people with pre-existing conditions. A poll taken by the Kaiser Family Foundation in mid-March found that 50 percent of Americans had a favorable opinion of Obamacare. Every one of the Democrats running for president are celebrating the ACA’s protections for people with pre-existing conditions. Several are promoting the idea of “Medicare for all” and “single-payer.” They know voters elected a class of freshman House Democrats who campaigned on these ideas.

AdWeek‘s Jason Lynch wrote after the midterms that health-care-themed advertising “accounted for 49 percent of all Democrat ads overall and 59 percent of all Democratic ads for House races.” Meanwhile, 367,000 Republican advertisements — only one-third of the Democratic total — mentioned health care, according to the Kantar analysis. The Republicans preferred to focus on tax reform, immigration, and low unemployment. That proved to be a loser for the party.

But the president is looking to stir his hardcore base for the 2020 campaign. Attacking Obamacare is a potential sop to the Ann Coulter faction of his base who correctly point out he has not lived up to his promise to build the wall — and have Mexico pay.

Will it work? Here is James Capretta, a health-care expert at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, on CNN last week: “The president, I don’t think, really has any idea what he’s really saying there. It’s more of a promotional and marketing impulse on his part. It leaves Republicans open to … ridicule by the Democrats that they don’t have a plan.”

But Trump is not convinced: “We are going to have great health care. The Republican Party will be the party of great health care. You watch,” the president told Sean Hannity last week.

If this legal takedown works, Trump will take all the credit. But Republicans in Congress know they will take the blame for leaving millions without health insurance. That’s why Trump’s tribe in Congress is not lining up on this one.

Juan Williams is an author, and a political analyst for Fox News Channel.

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The Color of Politics

It was one of those unforgettable moments in Congress. Representative Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, a new member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, was speaking to Elliott Abrams, President Trump’s special envoy to Venezuela:

“Mr. Abrams, in 1991 you pleaded guilty to two counts of withholding information from Congress regarding the Iran-Contra affair … I fail to understand why members of this committee or the American people should find any testimony that you give today to be truthful.”

Juan Williams

“If I could respond to that —” Abrams interjected.

“It wasn’t a question,” Omar shot back, cutting off the witness.

The sight of a young Muslim congresswoman, wearing a hijab, holding a powerful 71-year-old white Republican accountable signals the dawn of a new day in American politics. The heavily white, older male party of Trump is fighting to hold back what they see coming over the horizon.

Many people — including me — have been targets of President Trump’s Twitter tirades, but women of color provoke a special kind of Trump ire. Trump last month dismissed Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez with a wave of the hand and a “who cares,” after she told CBS’ 60 Minutes she has “no question” that Trump makes use of the “historic dog whistles of white supremacy.” Trump has been even more dismissive of other women of color.

A “lowlife” and a “dog.” That’s Trump talking about his former White House aide, Omarosa Manigault Newman. Representative Frederica Wilson of Florida? Trump demeaned her as “wacky” and said she was “killing” the Democratic Party. Former Utah Republican Congresswoman Mia Love? Right after her failed reelection bid, Trump said she “gave me no love and she lost. Too bad. Sorry about that, Mia.”

House Financial Services Committee Chairwoman Maxine Waters has been described by Trump as “an extraordinarily low IQ person.”

Imagine the bitter attacks if Trump faces a strong woman of color, such as Senator Kamala Harris, in the 2020 election.

The Democrats’ success in the midterms set off these unsettling changes in American politics for Trump and his base. The new House majority includes a record number of freshman Democratic congresswomen. In fact, 43 women of color are now serving in the House. Only one non-white congresswoman is a Republican — Representative Jaime Herrera Beutler, who was reelected in Washington state. The record number includes 22 black women, 11 Latinas, six Asian-Pacific Islanders, and the first two Native American women in Congress. It also brought to Congress the first two Muslim women: Omar and Representative Rashida Tlaib of Michigan. Last month, Tlaib told an excited crowd of liberal activists: “We’re gonna impeach the motherf****r” — referring to Trump. In that moment, she joined Ocasio-Cortez as a target of right-wing hate.

The New York Times reported last week that Republicans have “amped up” their efforts to demonize these young Democratic women. The most frequent charge against the newcomers from Trump’s conservative talk radio fans is that these women of color are dividing the country with “identity politics.”

That drew a response from Georgia’s Stacey Abrams, the first black woman nominated by a major party to run for governor. Writing in Foreign Affairs, Abrams pleaded guilty to having “intentionally and vigorously highlighted communities of color and other marginalized groups, not to the exclusion of others but as a recognition of their specific policy needs.” Abrams concluded that new “noisy voices represent the strongest tool to manage the growing pains of multicultural coexistence. By embracing identity and its prickly, uncomfortable contours, Americans will become more likely to grow as one.”

Abrams did not mention Trump. But he regularly uses white identity politics to stir up his base. It can be seen in his attack on Mexicans as rapists and his denigration of “shithole countries.” And who can forget Trump’s false and repeated insinuation that President Obama was not born in the United States? That racist conspiracy theory was the springboard for Trump’s presidential run. What we see in Trump’s fear of women of color is resistance to the rapid rise of racial change in our politics.

Juan Williams is an author, and a political analyst for Fox News Channel.

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The Democrats’ Purity Tests Will Only Help Trump

Can you see what is taking shape on the left? That’s the look of liberals forming a circular firing squad to shoot at top Democrats running for the party’s 2020 presidential nomination. 

The Democratic Party is highly unified in its opposition to President Trump. Independent and swing voters also tell pollsters they disapprove of Trump’s policies on taxes, immigration, and race relations. And the Party of Trump — formerly the GOP — lost 40 House seats in the midterms. That political reality makes Trump a weak candidate for reelection.

Juan Williams

But the Democrats still have to find a good candidate with an attractive message to beat even a bad candidate. The president’s supporters can see what’s up. Right-wing websites and Trump cheerleaders on talk radio are attacking possible Democratic candidates as budding socialists who will increase taxes and let every illegal immigrant run across open borders.

Trump’s white, working-class base is being warned on racial grounds that any Democratic nominee will ignore them while playing “identity politics” that favor blacks, Latinos, immigrants, women, and gays.

Trying to divide voters by race is so predictable for Trump’s team. What is surprising is that Democrats are too often fueling the Trump camp’s caricature by insisting on race-based review of their candidates. How painful and ironic will it be if racial debates inside the Democratic Party are allowed to weaken the focus on beating Trump and his racism?

For example, look at the attacks coming from the left against the leading candidate for the Democratic nomination in early polls, former Vice President Joe Biden.

Activists on the far left are bashing Biden for his support of President Clinton’s 1994 crime bill.

That bill had support from the Congressional Black Caucus at the time, being seen as an answer to high crime rates in black neighborhoods. But the old crime bill is now condemned by today’s activists, who take their cues from the Black Lives Matter movement. They fault the bill for pushing more black people into jail as a result of increased sentences for selling crack cocaine, and mandating longer sentences for repeat offenders and violent crime.

Biden is trying to get past this line of attack by asking for forgiveness: “It was a big mistake that was made,” Biden said at a Martin Luther King Day celebration last week in Washington.

Next in line for allegedly failing the racial test is a black woman, California Senator Kamala Harris. Her sin is that she was a prosecutor and California’s attorney general. “To become a prosecutor is to make a choice to align oneself with a powerful and fundamentally biased system,” according to an essay on The Intercept, a liberal website.

Also in line for the gauntlet of race-shaming are white candidates who did not show an interest in racial injustice early enough in their careers. Former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who supported controversial “stop-and-frisk” police tactics, as well as Senators Kirsten Gillibrand, Bernie Sanders, and Elizabeth Warren are all vulnerable on this point.

More broadly, this year’s Women’s March was a case study in how explosive racial issues — and, in that case, accusations of being soft on anti-Semitism — can splinter the unity of anti-Trump activists. Blacks, Latinos, and liberal women are at the heart of today’s Democratic base. There are record numbers of Latinos, Asians, and blacks now in Congress, and they are almost all Democrats. Honest debate about racial justice is overdue for both parties.

That debate will happen in the South Carolina primary, the first contest with a high percentage of minority voters. Early attention to that race indicates its importance for any Democrat trying to win the party’s nomination.

Democratic strategists know that Sanders would have beaten Hillary Clinton for the 2016 nomination if he had won more black and Latino votes. Democrats across the racial spectrum have to keep in mind that they have far more in common with each other than they do with Trump, a man whose racist rhetoric and white identity policies are damaging people of every color daily.

After a Black Lives Matter leader refused to talk with President Obama in 2016, Obama made the point that activists sometimes feel “so passionately … they never take the next step and say, ‘How do I sit down and try to actually get something done?'”

The most important “something” to get done right now is beating Trump. As liberal comedian Bill Maher is fond of saying, there is a big difference between a disappointing friend and a deadly enemy.

Juan Williams is an author, and a political analyst for Fox News Channel.

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Trump’s Race Problem: Black Republicans with Nowhere to Go

Trump supporters are rare among black people. President Trump won just eight percent of the black vote in 2016. His family business’ sordid history of housing discrimination and his racially insensitive comments — “look at my African American over here” — leave black Trump supporters open to mockery and charges of self-hate.

Juan Williams

A few black people thought they had a winning strategy for dealing with Trump. In exchange for access to his presidential power, they’d ignore warning signs and jump on his bandwagon. How did that work out for you, Omarosa? Trump reacted to her critical book by calling her a “dog” and a “crazed, crying low-life.”

Kanye West similarly went to the White House in a red “Make America Great Again” hat before realizing he was being “used” by Trump backers to, as he later said, “spread messages I don’t believe in.”

All that was bad enough. Now it is getting worse for the black conservatives trying to find a place in the party of Trump. Exhibit A is how Trump went out of his way to trash the first black Republican congresswoman, Utah’s Mia Love, after she lost a hard-fought reelection battle last month. “Mia Love gave me no love. And she lost,” Trump sneered. “Too bad. Sorry about that, Mia.” After Trump insulted her, Love told supporters: “This election … shines a spotlight on the problems Washington politicians have with minorities and black Americans.”

This is not a race problem afflicting all Republicans or all Washington politicians. It is more accurately labeled a “Trump politician race problem.” It is Trump who emboldened racists by saying that a march of white supremacists — and the people who protested against them — featured “fine people on both sides.”  

Trying to make sense of Trump’s bad record on dealing with people who are not white, Love argued: “It’s transactional. It’s not personal.” Wrong, congresswoman. It is personal.

His family business was sued in the 1970s for refusing to rent apartments to black people. He never apologized for wrongly blaming five black and Latino teenagers for a brutal attack on a woman in New York’s Central Park.

As Colin Powell, a black Republican, once wrote, Trump is a “national disgrace.” As Condoleezza Rice, another black Republican, said, she is “uncomfortable [with] what I see and hear” from Trump.

Next year, the 116th Congress will be the most racially diverse in history due to a record number of black and Latino Democrats. There will be just two black Republicans, Representative Will Hurd of Texas and Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina.

Scott is performing a high wire act in dealing with Trump. He recently opposed Trump’s nomination of Thomas Farr to a federal judgeship. Farr has a long history of defending racially discriminatory legislation. “We are not doing a very good job of avoiding the obvious potholes on race in America and we ought to be more sensitive when it comes to those issues,” Scott said.

Scott similarly broke with his party earlier this year to oppose Ryan Bounds, another Trump judicial nominee with a troubling history on race.

Scott also flies away from Trump by championing economic development for black America. While Trump is cutting the Minority Business Development Agency and neighborhood block grants, Scott is crisscrossing the country on a national “Opportunity Tour,” pushing conservative ideas for boosting economic development in minority neighborhoods. Scott insisted on a provision in last year’s Trump tax cut law that creates “opportunity zones,” making economically disadvantaged areas eligible for new federal tax breaks.

But here again, up pops the problem of being a black conservative when all Republican politics is defined by loyalty to Trump. While he got a provision into the Trump tax bill as the price for his vote, Scott still ended up supporting a Trump tax cut that in the short run benefits the richest one percent of Americans. That historic scam is exploding the deficit to pay for tax breaks for corporations and the rich. That means less federal dollars to help poor neighborhoods in need of revitalization.  

I am rooting for Scott and other principled black conservatives to reclaim the mantle of the party of Lincoln. There is a lot to lose if black conservative approaches to racial progress are sunk due to Trump loyalty tests.

Juan Williams is an author, and a political analyst for Fox News Channel.

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Trump’s GOP

On midterm election night, I looked into the camera and told President Trump — who watches a lot of Fox News — that his success in keeping a Republican Senate majority was the dagger that destroyed the old Republican Party. He is now the sole proprietor of what I call the Trump Party.

Juan Williams

Brit Hume, my conservative colleague, disagreed. He said Trump is fulfilling longstanding GOP priorities by nominating right-wing judges, lessening government regulation on business, opposing abortion, opposing gun control, and more.

But the GOP before Trump stood for free trade, not tariffs. They supported legal immigration. They fought high deficits. They backed NATO allies and opposed Russian aggression. And they did not embrace the politics of put-downs — including lying, nasty comments about women — while emboldening racists and anti-Semites.

It is hard for me to believe that so many people who once called themselves Republicans, specifically in Indiana, Missouri, and Florida, decided to vote for Trump’s candidates, despite the president’s daily words and actions debasing honest political debate. Those voters had no problem with a political ad so racist that Fox, NBC, and Facebook eventually pulled it. They had no issue with his fear-mongering over a caravan of desperate immigrants. They saw nothing wrong with him demonizing Democrats who stand up to him as a “mob.”

It is hard to understand how close to 40 percent of the country and 90 percent of Republicans approve of this man.

To choke off dissent from the old GOP, the day after the midterms Trump dumped on Republicans who did not embrace him. He named candidates who lost to shame them. He cut down proud Republican lawmakers including Representatives Peter Roskam of Illinois, Barbara Comstock of Virginia, and Mia Love of Utah.

As retiring Representative Ryan Costello (R-Pa.) tweeted, it is tough enough that so many House Republicans lost their seats but then to “have him piss on [you] — angers me to my core.”

In fact, of the 75 candidates endorsed by Trump, only 21 won. That is 28 percent, a losing record. Even in the Senate, where Republicans retained their majority, the party saw Democrats win the popular vote by more than 9 million votes. Somehow, Trump described those results as “very close to complete victory.”

He must be talking about the party of Trump, because the election results in the House, in governors’ races, and state legislature races were good news for Democrats.

But Trump was sending a message to Republicans. Like a mob boss, he demands absolute loyalty and will turn his back on any Republican who fails to fall in line. With Trump critics in the GOP like Ohio Governor John Kasich, Senator Jeff Flake, and Senator Bob Corker now leaving office, there will be few Republicans left to challenge Trump, further consolidating his rebranding of the GOP as his personal vehicle.

When the House GOP conference chooses its leaders next week, it will be a contest among zealous Trump acolytes. Freedom Caucus member Jim Jordan announced his bid for Minority Leader last week, saying it is House Republicans’ job to defend the president from Democratic investigation. He is challenging an incumbent, Kevin McCarthy, who is a longtime Trump apologist who brags about his personal relationship with the president. Forget House Republicans. 

The Republican resistance — such as it is — could find new voices among kinder, moderate GOP governors in blue states who eschewed the Trump brand of politics. Massachusetts Governor Charlie Baker was reelected with 67 percent of the vote. Maryland Governor Larry Hogan was reelected with 56 percent of the vote. Neither man has shown an appetite to take the fight directly to Trump. Mitt Romney, who once stood with the anti-Trump resistance, just won a Senate seat in Utah. But in 2018 Romney praised Trump, saying his policies are “pretty effective.” Trump then endorsed Romney.

Sticking with Trump cost Republicans the House majority and over 300 state legislative seats this time around. How many more seats in Congress and statehouses across the country are they willing to sacrifice on the altar of Trumpism? Will any Republicans step forward to try to reclaim the soul of their party before Trump further corrupts it? 

Juan Williams is an author and a political analyst for Fox News Channel.

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The Acid of Trump’s Racism

“If you look at the policies of Donald Trump, anybody — Martin Luther King — would be proud of him,” former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon told the BBC’s Newsnight recently. “You don’t think Martin Luther King would sit there and go, ‘Yes, you’re putting young black men and women to work?'”

Juan Williams

No, Steve, Dr. King would not be proud of Trump for shamelessly taking credit for the economic policies of his predecessor, the first black president of the United States. As FactCheck.org reported in January, black unemployment reached nearly 17 percent in 2010, in the wake of the financial crisis that began in 2008, precipitated by President George W. Bush’s financial policies. By 2016, it had dropped under Obama to 7.8 percent — “the lowest it had been in nearly 10 years” — before Trump took office. The rate has dropped another point since then. These facts fit with the damaging reality of the Trump tax cuts. They disproportionately benefit the overwhelmingly white, wealthiest one percent of Americans at the expense of the poorest half of Americans, who are disproportionately brown and black.

Trump’s sabotage of the Affordable Care Act will raise premiums on — and strip health insurance coverage from — those same black and brown people, along with working-class whites. Invoking Dr. King to excuse away the naked racism of this president plays to ignorance of the fight for racial equality in America. 

But Bannon is the man who said at a conference of the racist National Front party in France earlier this year, “Let them call you racist. … Let them call you xenophobes. Wear it as a badge of honor. Because every day, we get stronger and they get weaker.”

I’ve been thinking a lot about Trump and racism as I put the final touches on my new book (What the Hell Do You Have to Lose? — Trump’s War on Civil Rights, to be published in September). 

Since Trump emerged as a national political figure hawking racist conspiracy theories about Obama’s birth certificate, people have asked me whether I think Trump is a racist. My answer is “Yes.” But it’s not up to me. The facts of his life are all the evidence anyone should need.

The federal government sued the Trump family’s real estate business for racism, and Trump had to settle. Years later, Speaker Paul Ryan said Trump’s claim that a federal judge with Mexican heritage could not be fair fit the textbook definition of racism. As president, Trump has stirred racism, as evidenced by the spike in racial and anti-Semitic hate crimes. The hateful behavior includes his shamefully equivocal response to the neo-Nazi march in Charlottesville, Virginia, last summer, in which a woman was killed. It also includes his decision to focus not on last week’s racist tweet from Roseanne Barr, but on ABC’s failure to apologize for comments that he contends were unfair to him.  

As New York Times columnist Charles Blow put it: “It is not a stretch to understand that Donald Trump’s words and deeds over the course of his life have demonstrated a pattern of expressing racial prejudices that demean people who are black and brown and that play to the racial hostilities of other white people.”

Trump’s racist behavior has continued in the past few weeks. “You have to stand proudly for the national anthem or you shouldn’t be playing. … Maybe you shouldn’t be in the country,” Trump recently said about black NFL players kneeling during the national anthem to protest police brutality. Sadly, the NFL buckled to Trump and set a new policy last month requiring players on the field to stand during the anthem. 

It is remarkable how Trump’s racism has even corroded the NFL — one of America’s most racially inclusive institutions — to the point it feels free to tell black men to shut up about racial injustice.

Trump’s NFL rant came shortly after he described some illegal immigrants as “animals.” Trump and his allies tried to walk back his comments, saying he was talking only about MS-13 gang members. Even if critics are generous to the president, his words called to mind his smearing Mexican immigrants as rapists and drug mules. 

As if all that wasn’t clearly racist, the Washington Post reported last week that Trump once laughed it up in the Oval Office with Jared Kushner and Stephen Miller as he made up fictitious Hispanic names and crimes while editing an immigration speech. 

If you want more proof of how Trump’s racism is tearing apart the fragile fabric of racial comity woven by Dr. King and civil rights activists over the last five decades, just note that racist Louis Farrakhan praised Trump for “destroying every enemy that was an enemy of our rise.”

Case closed.

Juan Williams is an author, and a political analyst for Fox News Channel.

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Opinion Viewpoint

Swing Time for the GOP in Upcoming Mid-terms

So far, 24 Republicans have announced their retirements from Congress this cycle. This number is the highest of any congressional cycle since 1973.

What was happening in 1973?

The Watergate scandal. It exposed the lies and cover-ups of Republican President Richard Nixon and forced his resignation. In the 1974 midterm elections, 49 Democrats took House seats away from the Republicans, giving them more than a 2-1 majority in the lower chamber. Democrats also gained four Senate seats, bringing them up to a total of 60 seats.

Democrats are praying for history to repeat itself with President Trump in the Nixon role.

Incredibly, Republicans seem to agree that 2018 will be a lot like 1974. In addition to all the other retirements by House Republicans, there is now talk of Speaker Paul Ryan possibly quitting, too. Ryan’s spokesman has denied he is considering resigning. But Nevada Congressman Mark Amodei, a very vulnerable Republican in the coming midterms, is on the record telling reporters that is what he is hearing from party colleagues.

Talk of Ryan’s departure is significant because lesser-known House Republicans have no reason to think they will survive if Ryan isn’t inclined to try to hold on. Take a moderate Republican congressman like Pennsylvania’s Ryan Costello. He told MSNBC he is not running for reelection because Trump is making it impossible for House Republicans to do their jobs:”It’s very difficult for me to get [any] message out because we’re talking about Stormy Daniels or it was [fired FBI deputy director Andrew] McCabe. Before that, it was [fired secretary of State] Rex Tillerson and where he heard the news that he was fired, and just one thing after another.”

Then there is Trump’s budget deal. It explodes the deficit he pledged to reduce. Also, there is still no funding for any wall on the Mexican border. And don’t forget, Trump’s flip-flop on his promise to push for stronger background checks for gun purchases and to stop the sale of guns to people under 21.

Oh, and keep in mind that Trump’s approval ratings are historically low for a president who has only been in the White House a little more than a year. Such bad numbers are usually reliable signs that the president’s party is in trouble in the midterms.

And who can ignore the resignation of Trump’s chief personal lawyer in the Russia probe, John Dowd? He announced he was resigning just before The New York Times reported he discussed presidential pardons with lawyers for Michael Flynn and Paul Manafort — potentially proof of a conspiracy to obstruct justice. That led George Conway, another top Republican legal mind and the husband of Trump aide Kellyanne Conway, to tweet: “This is flabbergasting.”

Trump’s White House counsel Don McGahn has had to obtain his own high-priced D.C. lawyer to defend him in the Russia probe. This is the dark reality facing congressional Republicans with the midterms now seven months away. The heart of their peril is fear of energized Democrats producing a big turnout. That fits with the big turnout for recent student-led marches for gun control.

The Democrats will be marching out to punish Trump, but it is Congressional Republicans who will get trampled. And what about swing voters?

GOP losses in a special House race in Pennsylvania and the governor’s race in Virginia show support falling for GOP candidates among independent voters and suburban Republican women. Republicans as well as Democrats see no end of talk about extramarital affairs, hush money, and the tightening noose of the Mueller probe.

It is no secret that top Republican lawyer Ted Olson and other experienced DC legal powerbrokers have declined requests to represent Trump. Michael Cohen, Trump’s personal pit bull lawyer, is radioactive over his role in the Stormy Daniels affair and may face legal exposure of his own.

Cohen paid Daniels $130,000 in the closing stretch of the 2016 election campaign — money Daniels says was meant to keep her quiet about an affair with Trump. The Stormy Daniels lawsuit is a game-changer because Trump could be forced to give her lawyers a deposition about his sexual past — something that has the potential to set off more scandals.
The 2018 elections will be a referendum on Donald Trump. This is not about the Trump presidency but the man himself. Without Hillary Clinton to demonize, Trump now faces one opponent he can’t beat: Himself.

Juan Williams is an author, and a political analyst for Fox News Channel.

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Opinion Viewpoint

How Russian Bots Are Using You

Did you see #SchumerShutdown trending on Twitter two weeks ago?

You got used.

Fake Twitter accounts linked to Russia — hundreds of fake accounts — pushed the #SchumerShutdown, according to a group monitoring foreign internet activity.

Juan Williams

President Trump and Congressional Republicans reaped the political benefits of this Russian intelligence offensive. Schumer and congressional Democrats backed down out of fear that they were losing public support based on social media activity.

In fact, subsequent polling showed most Americans blamed the shutdown on Trump as well as the Republican majorities who control the Senate and the House, but still cannot pass a budget or immigration reform.

Russia’s backing for Trump and the Republicans who support him on Capitol Hill gives the GOP no incentive to investigate, punish, or disrupt the Russian interference. And the Russian social media attacks continue with shameless regularity.

Around the same time they pushed #SchumerShutdown, armies of Russian bots and trolls on social media were also pumping up the #ReleaseTheMemo hashtag, in support of the right-wing conspiracy theory that a classified memo on usage of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) reveals a shadowy “Deep State” cabal against President Trump.

The #ReleaseTheMemo offensive, pushed in part by Russian President Vladimir Putin’s operatives, is the latest effort to help Trump by disparaging the FBI and Special Counsel Robert Mueller with bogus political narratives.

This was the same type of cyber-warfare used by Russia during the 2016 election to elect Trump and defeat Hillary Clinton, according to U.S. intelligence agencies. Russia paid little price for that brazen interference in a presidential election. In fact, their intrusion achieved their desired outcome — Trump was elected. It worked. They got away with it.

They have no reason to stop doing it and every reason to keep doing it.

In addition, congressional Republican leaders have continued to conveniently close their eyes to the Russian meddling with American democracy while Trump benefits from it. As the midterm elections approach, with control of Congress at stake, Russia can be expected to make a push to keep Trump-friendly Republicans in power.This is already taking place, as the Russians have picked up the pace of their internet attacks by pitting Americans against Americans on race, religion, and immigration. The Russian goal is to polarize public opinion, undermine trust in elections, and weaken the U.S. as a world power.

Last week, Congress offered more proof of Russia’s success in damaging America by releasing documents from Facebook showing Russian agents behind 129 “phony event announcements during the 2016 presidential campaign, drawing the attention of nearly 340,000 users — many of whom said they were planning to attend,” according to The Washington Post.

In a December report, a former deputy director of the CIA and the former Republican chairman of the House Intelligence Committee wrote that there is “a perception among the media and general public that Russia ended its social media operations following last year’s election. … Wrong.” Michael Morell and Mike Rogers said the Russian attacks on American politics “continue to this day.”

It is no surprise that, in the last year, the Russians smeared the FBI, according to Morell and Rogers, as well as lashing out at ABC News, and stirring fevered anti-immigrant passions by highlighting all violent acts by illegal immigrants.

The Russians even went after Congressional Republicans who dared to criticize Trump. The Russian social media attacks, Morell and Rogers wrote, targeted Senator John McCain after he voted down a Trump-backed bill to kill ObamaCare. The Russians also targeted GOP Senators Bob Corker, Lindsey Graham, and Jeff Flake whenever they expressed concern about Trump’s actions.

The Russian social media effort in support of Trump now enters a perilous stretch as Mueller readies for an interview with the president regarding his campaign’s ties to the Russians, and questions of possible subsequent obstruction of justice. Public opinion, so ably influenced by the Russians, will play an important role. Last week, a CNN poll found 78 percent of Americans believe Trump should testify under oath as part of Mueller’s probe. Just 18 percent said he should not.

If Trump refuses to cooperate with the investigation, creating a clash over constitutional powers, public opinions, and support for the rule of law — across political lines — will be critical.

But those opinions will be under the influence of a hostile foreign power: Russia.

Juan Williams is an author and a political analyst for Fox News Channel.