Letters from an American - March 24, 2024

Episode Date: March 25, 2024

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March 24, 2024. The Senate passed the Appropriations Bill shortly after midnight on Saturday morning, and President Joe Biden signed it Saturday afternoon. In his statement after he signed the bill, Biden was clear. Congress's work isn't finished, he said. The House must pass the bipartisan national security supplemental to advance our national security interests. And Congress must pass the bipartisan border security agreement, the toughest and fairest reforms in decades, to ensure we have the policies and funding needed to secure the border. It's time to get this done. House Speaker Mike Johnson, a Republican of Louisiana, has refused to bring forward the National Security Supplemental Bill to fund Ukraine,

Israel, the Indo-Pacific, and humanitarian aid to Gaza. He has also refused to bring forward the border security measure hammered out in the Senate after House Republicans demanded it and passed there on February 13th. Johnson is doing the bidding of former President Trump, who opposes aid to Ukraine and border security measures. Congress is on break and will not return to Washington, D.C. until the second week in April. By then, political calculations may well have changed. MAGA Republicans appear to be in trouble. The House recessed on Friday for two weeks in utter disarray. On ABC News' This Week, former Representative Ken Bach, a Republican of Colorado who left Congress Friday, complained that House Republicans were focusing on messaging bills that get us nowhere, rather than addressing

the country's problems. He called Congress dysfunctional. On Friday, NBC announced it was hiring former Republican National Committee, or RNC, Chair Ronna McDaniel as a political analyst. Today, the main political story in the U.S. was the ferocious backlash to that decision. in the U.S. was the ferocious backlash to that decision. McDaniel not only defended Trump, attacked the press, and gaslit reporters, she also participated in the effort to overturn the 2020 presidential election. In an interview with Kristen Welker this morning on NBC's Meet the Press, Welker was quick to point out that the interview had been arranged long before she learned of the hiring. McDaniel explained away her support for Trump's promise to pardon those convicted for their participation in the January 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol

by saying, when you're the RNC chair, you kind of take one for the whole team. RNC chair, you kind of take one for the whole team. That statement encapsulated Trump Republicans. In a democracy, the team is supposed to be the whole country. But Trump Republicans like McDaniel were willing to overthrow American democracy, so long as it kept them in power. That position is increasingly unpopular. Former Representative Liz Cheney, a Republican of Wyoming, wrote on social media, Ronna facilitated Trump's corrupt fake elector plot and his effort to pressure Michigan officials not to certify the legitimate election outcome. She spread his lies and called January 6th legitimate political discourse. That's not taking one for the team. It's enabling criminality and depravity.

McDaniel wants to be welcomed back into mainstream political discourse, but it appears that the window for such a makeover might have closed. In the wake of Trump's takeover of the RNC, mainstream Republicans are backing away from the party. Today, Senator Lisa Murkowski, a Republican of Alaska, said she could not get behind Donald Trump and expressed regret that our party is seemingly becoming a party of Donald Trump. She did not rule out leaving the Republican Party. In Politico today, a piece on Trump's vice president, Mike Pence, by Adam Wren, also isolated Trump from the pre-2016 Republican Party. Pence appears to be trying to reclaim the mantle of that

earlier incarnation of the party, backed as he is by right-wing billionaire Harlan Crowe, who has funded Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas over the years, and the Koch Network. Wren's piece says Pence is focusing these days on a non-profit policy shop aimed at advancing conservative ideals. Renz suggested that Pence's public split from Trump is the latest sign that Trumpism is now permanently and irrevocably divorced from its initial marriage of convenience with Reaganism. Trump appears to believe his power over his base means he doesn't need the established Republicans. But that power came from Trump's aura of invincibility, which is now in very real crisis thanks to Trump's growing money troubles.

Tomorrow is the deadline for him to produce either the cash or a bond to cover the $454 million he owes to the people of the state of New York in fines and disgorgement of ill-gotten gains for fraud. Trump does not appear to have the necessary cash, and he has been unable to get a bond. He claims a bond of such size is unprecedented and practically impossible for any company, including one as successful as mine, and that the bonding companies have never heard of such a bond of this size before, nor do they have the ability to post such a bond, even if they wanted to. But Louis Jacobson of PolitiFact corrected the record. It is not uncommon for companies in civil litigation cases to post bonds of more than $1 billion. Trump made his career on his image as a successful and fabulously wealthy businessman.

Today, Don Porleone trended on X, formerly Twitter. own, trended on X, formerly Twitter. The backlash to McDaniel's hiring at NBC also suggests a media shift against news designed to grab eyeballs, the sort of media that has fed the MAGA movement. According to Mike Allen of Axios, NBC executives unanimously supported hiring McDaniel. A memo from Kerry Budoff-off Brown, who is in charge of the political coverage at NBC News, said McDaniel would help the outlet examine the diverse perspectives of American voters. This appears to mean she would appeal to Trump voters, bringing more viewers to the platform. But former Meet the Press anchor Chuck Todd took a strong stand against adding McDaniel to a news organization, noting her credibility issues and

that many of our professional dealings with the RNC over the last six years have been met with gaslighting and character assassination. This pushback against news media as entertainment recalls the 1890s when American newspapers were highly partisan and gravitated toward more and more sensational headlines and exaggerated stories to increase sales. between Joseph Pulitzer's New York World and William Randolph Hearst's New York Journal that is widely, and almost certainly inaccurately, blamed for pushing the United States into war with Spain in 1898. More accurate, though, is that the sensationalism of what was known as yellow journalism created a backlash that gave rise to new investigative journalism designed to move away from partisanship and explain clearly to readers what was happening in American politics and economics. In 1893, McClure's magazine appeared, offering in-depth examinations of the workings of corporations and city governments and launching a new era of reform.

Three years later, publisher Adolph Oaks bought the New York Times and put up New York City's first electric sign to advertise in nearly 2,700 individual lights of red, white, blue, and green that it would push back against yellow journalism by publishing all the news that's fit to print. Oaks added that motto to the masthead. With his determination to provide nonpartisan news without sensationalism, in just under 40 years, Oaks took the paper from just over 20,000 readers to more than 465,000 and turned the New York Times into a newspaper of record. In that era that looks so much like our own, the national mood had changed. Letters from an American was produced at Soundscape Productions,

Dedham, Massachusetts. Recorded with music composed by...