Trump's Enablers Attack the Clinton Campaign for Contacting the FBI About a National Security Threat

Jonathan Rauch has now joined Charlie Savage, David Frum, and Max Boot in pointing out that, regardless of the lies being circulated in the indictments brought by John Durham, the Trump-Russia investigation was not a hoax cooked up by the Clinton campaign. Here's Rauch's conclusion:

The Steele-Clinton-FBI counternarrative is not as loony as #StopTheSteal, but it is a wall of flak thrown up to distract from Trump’s undisputed behavior. If you prefer some term other than “collusion,” you can choose your own. It will not change what is in front of our nose: Trump’s behavior was unprecedented, unpatriotic, sinister, subversive, and obscenely corrupt. That is what we should be talking about.

Among the arguments Rauch made was to tackle the idea being circulated in right wing media that there was something nefarious about taking information to the FBI - like the Steele dossier or the connection researchers found between the Trump Organization and Alpha Bank.  

Did Clinton associates and Steele alert the FBI? Yes, but that is what concerned citizens are supposed to do if they have reason to think a hostile foreign power is interfering in our election (as, of course, one was). In fact, as really ought to be obvious, Russia’s efforts to penetrate the Trump campaign should have been reported to the FBI not only by Christopher Steele, Clinton associates, and Australian diplomats, but also, and especially, by the Trump campaign.

It is important to point that out because the entire premise of the narrative being crafted to defend Trump's behavior rests on the idea that it was wrong for people to report their concerns to the FBI. That is how inverted and corrosive this whole story has become. 

I was reminded of an interview George Stephonopoulos conducted with Trump back in June 2019. Take a listen to the exchange that begins at about the 2:20 mark in the video below when the former president is asked whether Don, Jr. should have gone to the FBI after being approached by a business associate with the promise of dirt on Clinton from the Russian government. 

ONE-ON-ONE: @GStephanopoulos has an exclusive @ABC interview with President Trump, discussing everything from why Trump is unhappy about the latest 2020 polling to ongoing questions about the Special Counsel's Russia investigation. https://t.co/YaQlQ5Pmfp pic.twitter.com/nTRwJvxeH0

— World News Tonight (@ABCWorldNews) June 12, 2019

Here's the relevant exchange:

TRUMP: Okay, let’s put yourself in a position: you’re a congressman, somebody comes up and says, “Hey I have information on your opponent.” Do you call the FBI?

STEPHANOPOULOS: (inaudible) if it’s coming from Russia you do.

TRUMP: I’ll tell you what: I’ve seen a lot of things over my life. I don’t think in my whole life I’ve ever called the FBI. In my whole life. You don’t call the FBI. You throw somebody out of your office, you do whatever you--

STEPHANOPOULOS: Al Gore got a stolen briefing book. He called the FBI.

TRUMP: Well, that’s different. A stolen briefing book. This isn’t a (inaudible). This is somebody who said “We have information on your opponent.” Oh, let me call the FBI. Give me a break, life doesn’t work that way.

STEPHANOPOULOS: The FBI Director says that’s what should happen.

TRUMP: The FBI Director is wrong. Because, frankly, it doesn’t happen like that in life.

As David Clay Johnston wrote in 2016, "No other candidate for the White House this year has anything close to Trump’s record of repeated social and business dealings with mobsters, swindlers, and other crooks." In other words, the former president actually told the truth when he said that "I've seen a lot of things over my life." But he bragged about never calling the FBI, suggesting that "life doesn't work that way."

I suspect that when your life is all about business dealings with mobsters, swindlers, and other crooks, you don't tend to contact the FBI when a foreign adversary tries to interfere in an election. But for the rest of us, that is precisely what we should expect to do. 

That's what the Clinton campaign did. No one would be off base in assuming that the campaign's motives were also self-serving. But when you're running for president, protecting this country's elections from foreign interference should be a top-of-mind concern. Getting to the bottom of what Russia did was a critical national security issue. That necessitates the involvement of the FBI.

We've all had to grapple with the fact that, for four years, the man who occupied the White House was a con artist who is currently being investigated for a whole host of crimes, including financial fraud. It all makes a total mockery of his claims about being a "law and order president." But to turn the tables and now suggest that people associated with the Clinton campaign were wrong for going to the FBI with concerns about possible collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia is not only unconscionable, it further erodes the rule of law in this country. 

My Faith in Humanity Is Being Challenged

Living through the election and presidency of Donald Trump changed my perspective in some important ways. The one that feels the most obvious is that I used to believe that when it became clear that Republican policies were a failure, voters would wake up and recognize what had gone wrong.

Based on the 2008 election, I had reason to believe that was true. After Bush/Cheney completely botched the response to Katrina, lied to get us mired in an endless war in the Middle East, and implemented policies that brought on the Great Recession, voters actually elected this country's first African American president who promised "hope and change." 

But I failed to envision that someone like Trump could come along and exploit the racism those eight years unleashed. As Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote:

Replacing Obama is not enough—Trump has made the negation of Obama’s legacy the foundation of his own. And this too is whiteness. “Race is an idea, not a fact,” the historian Nell Irvin Painter has written, and essential to the construct of a “white race” is the idea of not being a nigger. Before Barack Obama, niggers could be manufactured out of Sister Souljahs, Willie Hortons, and Dusky Sallys. But Donald Trump arrived in the wake of something more potent—an entire nigger presidency with nigger health care, nigger climate accords, and nigger justice reform, all of which could be targeted for destruction or redemption, thus reifying the idea of being white. Trump truly is something new—the first president whose entire political existence hinges on the fact of a black president. And so it will not suffice to say that Trump is a white man like all the others who rose to become president. He must be called by his rightful honorific—America’s first white president.

Over the course of Trump's presidency, he told more than 30,000 lies. Face-checkers were so busy they could hardly keep up. With the spread of a global pandemic, those lies became deadly. 

None of that affected the stranglehold Trump had on the Republican Party. Instead, steps that would have helped curb the spread of the virus were politicized as "tyranny" and things just continued to get worse. 

Then, when it was clear that Trump lost the 2020 election, he unleashed the Big Lie. Even today, Fox News is reporting that, according to their polls, 77 percent of Trump voters think he actually won. That lie set the stage for an attempted coup. And yet still, polls show that, in a head-to-head match-up with Biden, Trump wins a plurality of voters. 

Regardless of the economic boom currently underway, voters fail to give Biden any credit, while "Republicans say, bizarrely, that current economic conditions are much worse than they were in March 2009, when the economy was losing 800,000 jobs a month."

What I have had to grapple with over the last year is that, no matter the facts, a rather large share of voters will fail to recognize that they've elevated a lying con artist and are prepared to follow him - even if it means the destruction of our democracy. A "great awakening" for these people is not going to come. 

On the one hand, this realization has forced me to question the judgement of people who are friends and family. While I've disagreed with most of them about politics for a long time now, this divide goes much deeper. I literally cannot imagine how they rationalize their support for Trump. But it makes me question their discernment in other areas of their lives as well. 

But the big question that remains is "how does this end?" Since I can't imagine a "great awakening," it seems that I have no choice but to believe that, in defense of their position, things will simply get worse. The escalation of threats and violence we've seen this fall feel like a harbinger of things to come. 

Every fiber of my being wants to reject that conclusion. But my mind tells me that's my privilege talking. I've grown up in a country that, even as we struggled, seemed to eventually move in the direction of doing what's right. That core belief is being challenged today. 

All of that reminds me of something Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote a few days after Obama was elected in 2008.

Here is where Barack Obama and the civil rights leaders of old are joined -- in a shocking, almost certifiable faith in humanity, something that subsequent generations lost. The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. may have led African Americans out of segregation, and he may have cured incalculable numbers of white racists, but more than all that, he believed that the lion's share of the population of this country would not support the rights of thugs to pummel people who just wanted to cross a bridge. King believed in white people, and when I was a younger, more callow man, that belief made me suck my teeth. I saw it as weakness and cowardice, a lack of faith in his own. But it was the opposite. King's belief in white people was the ultimate show of strength: He was willing to give his life on a bet that they were no different from the people who lived next door.

That makes me wonder what Rev. King would say today. Certainly the obstacles he faced were much more severe. But we've watched thugs pummel people who simply wanted to protect the Capitol. Trump and his supporters just cheered them on. 

I truly have no idea where all of this will lead. But perhaps the hardest thing for me to grapple with these days is that my faith in humanity is being challenged. That one goes to the core because cynicism has never been an option for me.

Hispanic Protestants Join Christian Nationalists to Support Trumpism

In the immediate aftermath of the 2016 election, a narrative developed that white working class voters supported Trump because of their "economic anxiety." Eventually we learned that the movement was more of a reaction to the former guy's xenophobia. 

Some of the same people who were wrong last time are now lighting their hair on fire about the fact that in 2020, Trump increased his support among Hispanics. The tale they tell is that it has been the Democrats embrace of "wokeness" that turned off Hispanic voters. They counsel that the party needs to get "tough on crime" and address the so-called "border crisis" to win those voters back. 

In his piece making that argument, this is how Ruy Teixeira describes Hispanic voters:

Clearly, this constituency does not harbor particularly radical views on the nature of American society and its supposed intrinsic racism and white supremacy. They are instead a patriotic, upwardly mobile, working class group with quite practical and down to earth concerns. Democrats will either learn to focus on that or they will continue to lose ground among this vital group of voters.

As so many political commentators do, that description assumes that Hispanic voters are a monolith, ignoring the fact that they come from over 20 different countries in Europe, Central and South America, and the Caribbean.  Here is what Meaghan Winter found when it comes to Hispanic identity.

Almost everybody I spoke with said that Latino, Latinx, and Hispanic are all unsatisfying terms: They rely on the false idea that there’s some fixed and universal pan-Latino identity, when in reality the wide range of people who represent Latinidad don’t come close to sharing the same history, let alone uniform tastes and opinions. “We as Latino people hold three different stories in our bodies,” José Humphreys, a second-generation Afro–Puerto Rican and the pastor and co-founder of Metro Hope Covenant Church, in Harlem, told me. “There’s African heritage, there’s Native and Indigenous heritage, and European. Those three stories ... manifest in different ways.”

Some polling has found that Hispanics reject the nomenclature of Latinx. Perhaps pollsters should ask how those same voters feel about Latino and Hispanic. They might be equally unpopular. It is very possible that preferred terms would be "Mexican-American," or "Cuban American," or Puerto Rican. That distinction showed up in the 2020 exit polls from Florida, where Biden lost the Cuban-American vote 41-56, but won the Puerto Rican vote 68-31. 

Looking at individual states, we also see a huge gender gap among Hispanics in some of the exit polls. Nevada stands out - where Biden won 66% of the Latina vote and only 45% of the Latino vote. While not quite as dramatic, Arizona saw a 10 point gender gap among Hispanics. It is those kinds of numbers that led Eric Garcia to explore why Latino men are moving away from Democrats.

But the dramatic difference among Hispanic voters in 2020 was documented by Public Religion Research Institute. 

The differences between Hispanic Protestants, Catholics, and those who are religiously unaffiliated persist through many questions in the survey, with Hispanic Protestants notably more pro-Trump, conservative, and Republican than Catholics or those who are religiously unaffiliated. Religion is the largest demographic divider among Hispanic Americans, excepting only partisanship.

It is Hispanic Protestants who are Trump supporters - by a large margin.

We tend to assume that the vast majority of Hispanics in this country are Catholic. But for years now Pew Research has been documenting the fact that a growing number are converting to Protestant evangelicalism.

Latinos are leaving the Catholic Church and converting to evangelical Protestantism in increased numbers, and evangelical organizations are putting more energy and resources toward reaching potential Latino congregants. Latinos are the fastest-growing group of evangelicals in the country, and Latino Protestants, in particular, have higher levels of religiosity—meaning they tend to go to church, pray, and read the Bible more often than both Anglo Protestants and Latino Catholics.

Here is what Pew documented between 2007 and 2014:

From an anecdotal perspective, I would suggest that you would be hard-pressed to find a majority-white megachurch in Texas that doesn't have a specific outreach effort to Hispanics. Many of them are planting sister churches within that community.

In her book about Christian nationalists, "The Power Worshippers," Katherine Stewart documented one of these outreach programs led by Jim Domen, founder of a group called Church United. It recruits Hispanic pastors to politicize their congregations. The group receives both logistic and financial support from Christian nationalist groups.

Church United's busy schedule of activities costs money. It is unclear from the organization's reporting where it comes from. The mailing address takes us to the Newport Beach, California post office box of a real estate investment company run by Larry Smith, a businessman with close ties to activist organizations. Smith currently sits on the board of Ralph Drollinger's Capitol Ministries. He has also served on the board of the Family Action PAC, which seeks "to recruit and elect qualified leaders who will advance a culture in which human life and family are valued, personal responsibility is encouraged, and liberty thrives...Domen told me that the FRC [Family Research Council] also donated approximately $50,000 to Church United efforts in 2018.

The issues these groups are promoting will come as no surprise. The emphasis on "human life and family" are code words for abortion and gay rights. So the appeal is the same as we see with Christian nationalists - the true base of Trump's support. 

Given all of that, it is doubtful that Democrats adopting a "tough on crime" or "secure the border" message will have much of an impact on Hispanic protestants. Much as with Christian nationalists, it is the party's commitment to equal rights for women and LGBTQ Americans that is at the heart of the division. 

Did Trump Commit So Many Crimes that We'll Fail to Get to the Bottom of His Collusion with Russia?

Donald Trump has the distinction of being the only president in U.S. history to be impeached twice - once for his attempt to extort a foreign leader for dirt on his political opponent and once for inciting a riot at the Capital in order to overturn an election. While a partisan Senate failed to convict him on either charge, the latter is still being investigated by congress. In addition, he faces a whole array of civil and criminal charges related to financial fraud and sexual assault that are currently working their way through the system.

There is, however, one major issue with Trump that seems to have been placed on the back burner, even though it was never resolved. Here's David Frum's explanation about why that happened.

Since Donald Trump declared for president in 2015, it’s seldom been possible to get to the bottom of one scandal before Trump distracts attention with a bigger and worse scandal. For more than a year, the United States has been convulsed by Trump’s frontal assault on election integrity and the peaceful transfer of power...These dark threats have understandably overwhelmed the effort to fill in the blanks of the Trump-Russia scandal of yesteryear.

I agree with Frum that part of the problem is that much of the focus has understandably been placed on uncovering Trump's role in an insurrection. But let's not forget former Attorney General Bill Barr's role in lying about the result of the Mueller investigation. He is the one who repeatedly said that the special prosecutor found no evidence of "collusion." Barr then dismissed multiple examples that Mueller uncovered in which the former president attempted to obstruct justice. 

But Barr didn't stop there. He also appointed John Durham to muddy the waters with an investigation into the origins of the Trump-Russia probe. After indicting two people for lying to the FBI, right wingers are now busy re-writing the story as a hoax perpetrated by the Clinton campaign and the Democratic Party. For example, take a look at the false narrative created by J. Peder Zane from the right wing site RealClearPolitics.

Russiagate began with a kernel of truth: Someone – probably Russians, though we still don’t know for sure – hacked the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton’s private server. Fearful of what might be released, the Clinton campaign tried to discredit any damaging material by raising dark questions about its source...

In response, the Clinton campaign financed an absurd collection of conspiracy theories involving peeing prostitutes and billion-dollar bribes, the so-called Steele dossier. Its importance cannot be overstated – it was the dossier that linked the Trump campaign to the hacking. No dossier, no collusion theory...

The appointment of Special Counsel Robert Mueller to investigate the fantasy in May 2017 fueled the fire. His effort became part of the scheme: He only looked for evidence that might implicate Trump, ignoring questions about who cooked up the conspiracy theory, how they disseminated it throughout the government and media, and the laws they might have broken in the process.

Despite his best effort, Mueller said he’d found no evidence of collusion when he released his report in April 2019. That should have killed the conspiracy theory and – following the script of previous major scandals – sparked a period of reflection by the government, the media and the American people that asked: How did we get this so wrong?

Let's take up a couple of the blatant lies.

1. We know exactly who hacked the DNC and Clinton servers. It was the Russian government. End of story.

2. The Steele dossier did not launch the collusion theory. The FBI opened their counterintelligence investigation on July 30, 2016. According to an inspector general report, they did not know about the dossier until September 19, 2016. 

3. Mueller found reams of evidence of collusion (not a legal term), but had been limited to a criminal investigation. He was not able to prove the existence of a criminal conspiracy. 

In these efforts to re-write history, Max Boot points out that these Trump enablers want to ignore the bipartisan findings of the Senate Intelligence Committee report on Russia’s election interference. Here's just one example:

The report also sheds further light on the connections between the Trump campaign and WikiLeaks, which was used by Russian intelligence to release stolen Democratic emails. The report concludes: “The Trump Campaign took actions to obtain advance notice about WikiLeaks releases of Clinton emails…; created messaging strategies to promote and share the materials in anticipation of and following their release; and encouraged further theft of information and continued leaks.”

The key campaign middleman was Roger Stone, who refused to cooperate with investigators and was later pardoned, along with Manafort, by Trump. The report cites extensive evidence that, despite Trump’s denials, Stone kept Trump informed of his contacts with WikiLeaks.

For the last month of the 2016 campaign, Trump was obviously obsessed with Wikileaks - declaring his love for an organization that had been "used by Russian intelligence to release stolen Democratic emails."

The other thing right wingers like Zane want to ignore is that, when it comes to Durham's indictment of Michael Sussmann, the entire case is falling apart. It has now become clear that Durham cherry-picked communication among the researchers that discovered the internet connection between the Trump Organization and Alpha Bank in order to suggest that they questioned its relevance. 

[D]efense lawyers for the scientists say it is Mr. Durham’s indictment that is misleading. Their clients, they say, believed their hypothesis was a plausible explanation for the odd data they had uncovered — and still do.

The Alfa Bank results “have been validated and are reproducible. The findings of the researchers were true then and remain true today; reports that these findings were innocuous or a hoax are simply wrong,” said Jody Westby and Mark Rasch, lawyers for David Dagon, a Georgia Institute of Technology data scientist and one of the researchers whom the indictment discussed but did not name.

Steven A. Tyrrell, a lawyer for Rodney Joffe, an internet entrepreneur and another of the four data experts, said his client had a duty to share the information with the F.B.I. and that the indictment “gratuitously presents an incomplete and misleading picture” of his role.

In addition to that, documents recently released by Durham undermine his claim that Sussmann lied to the FBI about the client(s) he was representing during a meeting with James Baker. The indictment suggests that Sussmann was working on behalf of the Clinton campaign, but lied when he stated that he was not meeting with Baker on behalf of any client. A report of the Durham team's interview with Baker in June 2020 contradicts that claim.

According to that report, Mr. Baker did not say that Mr. Sussmann told him he was not there on behalf of any client. Rather, he said the issue never came up and he merely assumed Mr. Sussmann was not conveying the Alfa Bank data and analysis for any client.

“Baker said that Sussmann did not specify that he was representing a client regarding the matter, nor did Baker ask him if he was representing a client,” the Durham team’s report said. “Baker said it did not seem like Sussmann was representing a client.”

Of course, none of that matters to Trump enablers like Zane. Durham's 27-page indictment provides them with fodder to suggest the whole Russia investigation was a hoax cooked up by the Clinton campaign. They're going to run with that, just as they swallowed Barr's lies about the Mueller report. 

While right wingers create a false narrative about Trump's collusion with Russia, there are several things that remain disturbing about the whole affair:

• The former president has pardoned key players in the whole scheme (ie, Paul Manafort and Roger Stone). 
• We don't see any effort to hold Trump accountable for obstructing justice (even as he continues to brag about it). 
• We still don't know whether, for four years as president, Trump was acting as a Russian asset.

I will continue to assert that getting to the bottom of all of that is at least as important as uncovering his role in an insurrection. 

If the U.S. Experienced Another Pearl Harbor, Republicans Would Blame Biden

Today marks the 80th anniversary of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. I'll leave it to historians to dig into the context and outcome of that infamous event. Instead, I find myself wondering what would happen if the United States experienced something similar today. 

Of course, there is not a war raging all over Europe. But the world remains a dangerous place. As I write, the Biden administration is working furiously to stop what appears to be yet another attempt by Russian President Vladimir Putin to invade Ukraine. Tensions are rising with China and - due to Trump's decision to pull out of the Iran nuclear agreement, that country is justifiably playing hardball with negotiations that are attempting to stop them from developing nuclear weapons. 

I'm not comparing any of those challenges to World War II as it was raging in 1941. But were any of them to escalate into a much more serious situation, it is already clear how Republicans would respond. Instead of rallying the country around a unified response, they would blame President Biden and deepen the political divide. 

In many corners of right wing media, the set-up is already underway. As an example, the editorial board of the New York Post proclaims that: "The world is becoming more dangerous under Joe Biden." They mention the three areas of tension I noted above, making them all Biden's fault rather than holding the leaders of Russia, China, and Iran accountable.

What’s prompting such international boldness? Well, it might be no coincidence that it comes after Biden’s botched bugout from Afghanistan was broadly seen as a sign of gross incompetence and weakness. And his handling of other matters, too, domestically and internationally, has backfired (think: inflation, the southern border) so spectacularly that our enemies may see him as vulnerable.

There was a time when Republican presidents focused on our foreign adversaries as "evil." Reagan referred to the Soviet Union as the "evil empire" to keep the Cold War inflamed and Bush, Jr. talked about Iran, Iraq, and North Korea as the "axis of evil" in order to justify his global war on terror. But these days, Republicans are intent on identifying Democrats as the real threat. 

If you have any doubt that Republicans would politicize a global threat and blame Biden, I would merely point you to how they've handled the coronavirus pandemic. Instead of helping to rally the country to stop the spread of Covid - which has now resulted in more deaths than the number of Americans killed in WWII - they have politicized every preventative measure, while blaming Biden for failing to end the pandemic.

An event like the bombing of Pearl Harbor or the 9/11 attacks would not result in the kind of patriotic unity we've seen in the past. Instead of rallying around a president to tackle the threat, we'd see nothing but blame and recriminations from the right. I suspect that leaders like Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping are intelligent enough to know that. So if they are picking up a sign that the U.S. is vulnerable, that is more likely the source.

In a World That Seems to Have Gone Crazy, Dana Milbank Provides a Dose of Sanity

Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank had the impression that news coverage of President Biden had been "unrelentingly negative." He wondered if it was just his imagination. So he worked with a team of data analysts to compare the coverage of Biden's first 11 months of 2021 to the coverage Trump got during the first 11 months of 2020. Here's what they found:

Biden began the year with a bit of a honeymoon period. But other than an uptick in June, his coverage has grown increasingly negative - ending up on par or worse than how the media covered Trump. That might make sense were it not for this:

In 2020, Trump presided over a worst-in-world pandemic response that caused hundreds of thousands of unnecessary deaths; held a superspreader event at the White House and got covid-19 himself; praised QAnon adherents; embraced violent white supremacists; waged a racist campaign against Black Lives Matter demonstrators; attempted to discredit mail-in voting; and refused to accept his defeat in a free and fair election, leading eventually to the violence of Jan. 6 and causing tens of millions to accept the “big lie,” the worst of more than 30,000 he told in office. And yet Trump got press coverage as favorable as, or better than, Biden is getting today.

Milbank didn't mince words when it came to his conclusion, writing that:

My colleagues in the media are serving as accessories to the murder of democracy...We need a skeptical, independent press. But how about being partisans for democracy? The country is in an existential struggle between self-governance and an authoritarian alternative. And we in the news media, collectively, have given equal, if not slightly more favorable, treatment to the authoritarians.

Every American should read Milbank's entire piece. But even more importantly, honest members of the press should do so and pause to reflect on their own complicity. 

It won't surprise anyone who has actually been paying attention that, as his opening, Milbank provides some headlines from Politico to make his point:

“Let the Democratic freakout begin.”

“Dems start to face the hard questions.”

“Does the WH owe Larry Summers an apology?”

“The other big intra-Democratic fight.”

“No BIF bump for Biden.”

“White House braces for a bad CBO score.”

“ … Biden dithers …”

“Biden tries to calm nerves about 2024.”

“The case for why Biden is screwed.”

Although Milbank acknowledged that it wasn't just Politico, a journalist from that publication - Ryan Lizza - got a bit defensive on Twitter. That's when Milbank pointed to this:

It’s interesting that Germany’s Axel Springer completed its takeover of Politico on Oct. 18, and that’s exactly when Politico took its sharply negative turn against Biden. Maybe this explains the pushback from @RyanLizza

— Dana Milbank (@Milbank) December 5, 2021

Regular readers might remember that back in August I noted the sale of Politico to Germany's Axel Springer and suggested that their reporting was about to get worse. As a reminder, here is how Thomas Meany described Axel Springer's flagship publication, Bild:

The experience of reading Bild is a sugar-rush of gossip, accompanied by the clanging gong of headlines. As is traditional, scandals are designated for the front page, but in Bild’s current iteration, fear-mongering appears to be privileged over celebrity soup... 

According to the Bild worldview, the best way to counter the left is to portray its demands as totalitarian, and the best way to kill off the far right is to cannibalise its grievances.

It is becoming increasingly clear that Politico is following in Bild's footsteps. 

What makes all of this even more confounding is the way it is treated by those who claim to quantify media bias. Take a look at where AllSides places Politico.

Not only is Politico placed on the left, they have the right wing site RealClearPolitics in the center. All of the major TV network news sites, along with the New York Times and the Washington Post, are also on the left. CNN is either left or far left, depending on whether we're talking about straight news or opinion. That is a dream come true for Rupert Murdoch, who started Fox News with the lie that mainstream media has a liberal bias. 

When I look at things like this it makes me feel like the world has turned upside down and I am tempted to question my own sanity. That is precisely why Milbank's column is so important. It grounds us in the facts about what is actually going on. 

Democrats Don't Have to Chose Between "Defund the Police" and Being "Tough on Crime"

In their quest to win back working class voters, several liberal pundits are suggesting that Democrats need to take on the issue of the rise in violent crime. After pointing to polls showing that voters - especially people of color - see this as a major issue, the claim is that the whole "defund the police" movement that arose during the George Floyd protests is hurting the party. 

While as a slogan, "defund the police" is clearly problematic politically, it is important to keep in mind what it actually represents. 

Only in rare instances are liberal advocates calling for the outright elimination of police departments. Proponents by and large want to redirect some funds now spent on police forces to items such as education, public health, housing and youth services. The idea is that low-income communities would become stronger — and less in need of policing tactics — if root problems were addressed.

It is therefore important, when referring to the slogan "defund the police," to indicate whether it is being used as liberal activists meant it, or as a right wing talking point used by Republicans to lie about Democrats.

The problem isn’t guns and it isn’t COVID either. It’s violent rioting and the Defund the Police movement, both of which were supported, financially and rhetorically, by the Biden admin.

Read my latest via @foxnews https://t.co/jLSdb2Mngt

— Jim Banks (@RepJimBanks) June 24, 2021

The pundits who are worried about how the slogan is affecting voters don't tend to bother with making that distinction. Instead, they pose it in the outdated false dichotomy of "tough on crime" vs "soft on crime," as we see from Ruy Teixeira.

The former UK prime minister, Tony Blair, had a very successful slogan: “Tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime”. Democrats would be well-advised to adopt a similar approach.

Nowhere in that piece does Teixeira mention that President Biden rejected the false notion of defunding the police. He might have addressed these facts:

In his fiscal 2022 budget, Biden kept his campaign promise and proposed to more than double the funding for the Community Oriented Policing Services (COPS) Hiring Program. Funding is provided to state and local governments to hire law enforcement officers, thus inflating the size of police departments. In Trump’s last year, $156.5 million was provided for COPS Hiring, while Biden would boost that to $388 million, Justice Department documents say. In fact, Biden would boost funding for all COPS grant programs to $651 million, up from $386 million under Trump.

Moreover, Biden announced on June 23 that he was urging cities experiencing an increase in crime to tap funds in his coronavirus relief bill “to hire police officers needed for community policing and to pay their overtime.” He added that they also “can use the funding to scale up wraparound services for the residents as well, including substance abuse and mental health services that we know will make a difference in prevention of crime.”

Interestingly enough, it was Vice President Kamala Harris who originally offered a way out of the "tough on crime," vs. "soft on crime" dichotomy. In 2008, while serving as the District Attorney of San Francisco, she published a book titled "Smart on Crime." In 2013, then-Attorney General Eric Holder took up the theme with a report titled "Smart on Crime: Reforming the Criminal Justice System for the 21st Century." It identified five goals.

1. To ensure finite resources are devoted to the most important law enforcement priorities;
2. To promote fairer enforcement of the laws and alleviate disparate impacts of the criminal justice system;
3. To ensure just punishments for low-level, nonviolent convictions;
4. To bolster prevention and reentry efforts to deter crime and reduce recidivism;
5. To strengthen protections for vulnerable populations.

The first one is critical in that it specifically addresses an issue with policing. As David Simon pointed out so powerfully in the HBO series, The Wire, the war on drugs distorted policing with a focus on chasing after statistics that only looked "tough on crime," but were heavily weighted with minor arrests for possession and trafficking, depleting resources that otherwise could have been devoted to violent crime. 

Not too long ago, I noted that Simon had been vindicated when State's Attorney Marilyn Mosby announced that, during the pandemic, Baltimore would no longer prosecute drug possession, prostitution, trespassing and other minor charges, to keep people out of jail and limit the spread of the coronavirus. 

And then crime went down in Baltimore. A lot. While violent crime and homicides skyrocketedin most other big American cities last year, violent crime in Baltimore dropped 20 percent from last March to this month, property crime decreased 36 percent, and there were 13 fewer homicides compared with the previous year. This happened while 39 percent fewer people entered the city’s criminal justice system in the one-year period, and 20 percent fewer people landed in jail after Mosby’s office dismissed more than 1,400 pending cases and tossed out more than 1,400 warrants for nonviolent crimes.

Following the 2016 shooting that killed five police officers in Dallas, the chief articulated the problem as it exists today, suggesting that we're asking law enforcement to do too much. 

Asking law enforcement to solve all of our problems is not only a diversion of resources. It doesn't work, but is a sure-fire way to take steps towards becoming a police state.

After four years of dog whistles from Donald Trump about being the "law and order" president followed by a racist backlash against the movement to reform policing, it is important for Democrats to be clear. We remain the party committed to reforming police abuses. But just as importantly, we reject the false notion that we have to chose between "defund the police" and being "tough on crime." Instead, we can proactively be "smart on crime."