My message to Democrats: Don't you dare apologize for Biden!

Both mainstream and right wing media are once again obsessed with Joe Biden's age. Three events contributed to this renewed focus.

1. Publication of the book "Original Sin" by Alex Thompson and Jake Tapper,
2. The White House release of the audio tape of Joe Biden's interview with special counsel Robert Hur, and
3. The announcement that Biden has prostate cancer. 

The story being spun is that Biden was in mental decline during his presidency and that the truth about his condition was hidden from the public. Tom Bevan, publisher of the right wing site RealClearPolitics, said that "Gaslighting about Biden's mental conditions is one of the biggest scandals in American history." WOW, one of the biggest in American history?!

To believe that extreme hyperbole, you have to forget that President Biden took the historical step of stepping out of his race for reelection. You also have to completely ignore interviews like this one that Biden did with John Harwood nine days before the Hur interviews began - where he intelligently discusses some of the complex issues he was dealing with as president.

So where's this huge scandal? There isn't one. The truth is that Joe Biden's presidency was a tremendous success. There is a reason why that poses a big threat to Trump and Republicans. No one has consistently pointed that out better than historian Heather Cox Richardson. As an example, last August she wrote that "Under the direction of President Joe Biden, over the past three and a half years the Democrats have returned to the economic ideology of the New Deal coalition of the 1930s." What did that coalition accomplish?

Before 1935...the government served largely to manage the economic relationships between labor, capital, and resources. But [FDR's New Deal] recognized that the purpose of government was not to protect property; it was to protect the community...

This reworking of the American government to reflect community rather than economic relationships changed the entire fabric of the country, and opponents have worked to destroy it ever since FDR began to put it in place. 

The New Deal coalition survived those attacks until the 1980s. Here's what Biden faced when he took office: 

Biden set out to prove that democracy could work for ordinary people by ditching the neoliberalism that had been in place for forty years. That system, begun in the 1980s, called for the government to allow unfettered markets to organize the economy. Neoliberalism’s proponents promised it would create widespread prosperity, but instead, it transferred more than $50 trillion from the bottom 90% of Americans to the top 1%...

When he took office, Biden vowed to prove that democracy worked. With laws like the American Rescue Plan, the Bipartisan Infrastructure Act, the CHIPS and Science Act, and the Inflation Reduction Act, the Democrats directed investment toward ordinary Americans. The dramatic success of their economic program proved that it worked. 

Republicans want Democrats on their heels apologizing for Joe Biden because, as the Trump administration focuses on undoing everything the former president accomplished, they want to ensure that no president in the future tries to replicate a return to the New Deal coalition of the 1930s.

I, for one, will not capitulate to that nonsense and I'll call out any Democrat who does. What President Biden accomplished during his four short years in office was a huge step forward for this country. I'm not only grateful to him personally, I proudly embrace his vision of making the government work for ordinary Americans.

Musk will be leaving the federal government deeper in debt than when he started

There has been some speculation about what Elon Musk really wants out of the DOGE efforts. For example, lots of questions arise about his access to reams of government data on private citizens. Of course, the same can be said about how DOGE will increase the wealth of the wealthiest man on earth. 

But when it came to selling the public on DOGE, the message was clear. Here is what Musk promised last October during Trump's rally at Madison Square Garden.

Musk promised that he would cut $2 trillion from the federal budget. He said that our tax dollars were being wasted and DOGE was going to fix that. 

Three months later, Musk dropped that number in half, going from promising $2 trillion in cuts to $1 trillion. Now that he's heading back to try and rescue his failing companies, Musk is bragging about saving $160 billion. 

But there are a couple of problems with that number as well. Journalists who have studied the numbers provided by DOGE have consistently found inaccuracies, some of which are eventually corrected. Additionally, only about $69 billion has been itemized, with $16 billion being verifiable. Finally, those cuts are spread out over an average of three years. Caleb Acarma and Judd Legum found that DOGE's verifiable cuts to contracts and grants would produce about $5 billion of savings in fiscal year 2026.

Because numbers that large are hard to visualize, here's a graph of promises vs. reality:

But it gets even worse. Not only has total federal spending INCREASED by $156 billion since Trump took office,  there's also this:

DOGE, meanwhile, could end up costing the federal government $135 billion this year when accounting for the lawsuits its cuts have triggered and loss of tax revenue from a depleted IRS, according to the Partnership for Public Service, a good government nonprofit.

So in about 5 months we've gone from Musk promising to cut $2 trillion per year from the federal budget to adding something like $286 billion to the deficit (156 + 135 - 5). Meanwhile, approximately 260,000 federal workers have been fired, U.S. Aid has been demolished, the Departments of Education and Veterans Affairs have been gutted, and Social Security is being threatened (to name just a few).

Musk will be leaving the federal government in chaos and deeper in debt than when he started. Let's rename his efforts the Department of Techbro Incompetence (DOTI). 

Trump and MAGA are using civil rights laws to reinforce white supremacy

The day after he was inaugurated, Trump signed an executive order titled "Ending Illegal Discrimination and Restoring Merit-Based Opportunity." Six days later, right wing journalist Christopher Caldwell, wrote an article titled "The Biggest Policy Change of the Century." The tag line at The FreePress reads: "Trump is not simply eliminating the affirmative-action enforcement machinery. He is throwing it into reverse." What did he mean by that? Referring to Trump's executive order, here's what Caldwell told Andrew Sullivan (emphasis mine):

The first move is to say that you can longer do affirmative action, DEI, and that kind of thing. But the second move is to say, "we believe that DEI is actually racism"...Conservatives had always argued against the excesses of civil rights in a kind of principled way: "Actually, civil rights, well-meaning though it was, granted too much power to the federal government"...What the Trump administration has done...is lay claim to that power and is running the whole machine in reverse.

While I disagree with Caldwell about almost everything, he is absolutely right in his description of what the Trump administration is doing. They aren't just attempting to roll back civil rights protections. They're claiming that any move to enforce civil rights is discrimination...against white heterosexual able-bodied men. Here are the opening paragraphs of the executive order:

Longstanding Federal civil-rights laws protect individual Americans from discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin. These civil-rights protections serve as a bedrock supporting equality of opportunity for all Americans. As President, I have a solemn duty to ensure that these laws are enforced for the benefit of all Americans.

Yet today, roughly 60 years after the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, critical and influential institutions of American society...have adopted and actively use dangerous, demeaning, and immoral race- and sex-based preferences under the guise of so-called “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI) or “diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility” (DEIA) that can violate the civil-rights laws of this Nation...Hardworking Americans who deserve a shot at the American Dream should not be stigmatized, demeaned, or shut out of opportunities because of their race or sex.

This is something that has surfaced regularly in writings by MAGA influencers. For example, in writing about Princeton University, Christopher Rufo accused the school of waging a "war on civil rights"...against white men.

James Piereson has written that the Democratic Party's diversity initiatives violate civil rights law. In making the case, he actually utilizes the court case against Bob Jones University. You might remember that as the one that galvanized evangelical leaders to eventually band together and form the Moral Majority to protect their right to discriminate. 

In 1970, President Richard Nixon ordered the Internal Revenue Service to enact a new policy denying tax exemptions to all segregated schools in the United States based on Title VI of the Civil Rights Act. That not only affected segregation academies in the South, it also affected Bob Jones University, due to their discriminatory admissions policy. The case went to the courts, with the Supreme Court eventually ruling in favor of the IRS.

Now, Piereson is using that ruling to suggest that diversity initiatives in the Democratic Party violate civil rights law by suggesting that tax-exempt institutions may not violate “fundamental national public policy.” In MAGA terms, that last phrase means "anything Trump says."

Caldwell - who is obviously thrilled with this reversal by the Trump administration - has said that White Americans “fell asleep thinking of themselves as the people who had built this country and woke up to find themselves occupying the bottom rung of an official hierarchy of races.”

First of all, the notion that there is "an official hierarchy of races" is absolute nonsense. But even if there were such a thing, the idea that white people occupy the bottom rung is absurd. For most of us, that is proven by the disparities that continue to exist in areas like health care, education, housing, employment, and the criminal justice system. 

But for MAGA, those disparities are proof that "different groups have different preferences, talents, and capacities," as Rufo has written. In other words, their arguments are ultimately based on eugenics.

If your head isn't spinning over all of that, then you're not paying attention. MAGA and the Trump administration are utilizing civil rights laws to reinforce white supremacy. And yes, all of our deceased civil rights leaders are rolling over in their graves on that one. It's time the rest of us took notice.