Dispatches

TRUMP APPROVAL ABOVE 50% IN 17 STATES.

Donald Trump’s job approval rating varied widely across the United States in 2018, with 17 states giving him ratings of 50% or higher, and 16 states giving him ratings below 40%, the Gallup Poll found. The states most approving of Trump were generally in the South and Mountain West areas of the country, while he fared most poorly in New England and on the West Coast.

In 2017, Trump had approval of 50% or higher in 12 states — five fewer than in 2018 — and approval below 40% in 17 states — one more than in 2018. Those shifts reflect the modest improvement this past year in his approval ratings nationally, from 38% in 2017 to 40% in 2018.

The five states that moved to 50% or higher job approval last year were Missouri, Kansas, South Carolina, Mississippi and Utah.

Results are based on combined data from the 2018 Gallup tracking poll, encompassing interviews with more than 73,000 US adults, including 500 or more in 38 states and 1,000 or more in 27 states. Each state sample has been weighted to match the demographic characteristics of that state’s population to ensure it is representative of the state’s residents.

Although much can change between now and Election Day 2020, a job approval rating of 50% or higher would presumably put Trump in good position to win a state in the presidential election. The 17 states with 50%+ approval ratings account for a combined total of 102 electoral votes. In contrast, the states in which Trump has an approval rating below 40% account for 201 electoral votes.

In order to get to the 270 electoral votes needed to win the presidency, Trump would have to win all but one or two of the states in which his 2018 approval rating was between 41% and 49%. Some of the more challenging states to win from among this group, based on that approval rating, would be Texas (41%); Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan (all at 42%); and Arizona and Florida (43%). Trump won all of those states in 2016, and thus it is certainly possible that he can do so again. But he clearly has a lot of ground to make up in those states to get close enough to 50% that he can finish with more electoral votes nationwide than the Democratic candidate.

West Virginia (62%) and Wyoming (61%) residents were most approving of Trump’s performance in 2018 and were the only two states with ratings above 60%. South Dakota, North Dakota, Alaska, Mississippi and Alabama had the next-highest approval ratings for Trump, with Tennessee, Kentucky and Arkansas constituting the remainder of the top 10. All but Mississippi ranked among the top 10 states in 2017.

Trump’s job approval ratings were lowest in Hawaii (26%) and Vermont (28%), with California and Massachusetts (each at 29%) also below 30%. The remainder of the bottom 10 includes Maryland, New York, Illinois, New Jersey and New Hampshire, with three states (Rhode Island, Connecticut and Washington) tied for 10th lowest.

The rank-order of Trump job approval in 2018 aligns with his performance in the 2016 presidential election. The states ranked first (West Virginia) through 30th (Texas) are the 30 states Trump won in 2016, while Trump lost every state ranked between 31st (a four-way tie between Oregon, Virginia, Nevada and Delaware) and 50th (Hawaii). Thus, it is unlikely Trump will win any states where his approval rating was not among the top 30 states in 2018.

Now that several Democratic politicians have announced their candidacies for the 2020 presidential election, the campaign gearing up. Trump’s job approval ratings by state give a baseline estimate of how his re-election prospects stand from an Electoral College perspective. While his ratings in 17 states are high enough to suggest he has a good chance of winning those states in the presidential election next year, they tend to be smaller states and account for barely a third of the electoral votes he would need to win the presidency. A second Trump term will be won or lost in the larger states that he won in 2016 but had approval ratings in the low 40s in 2018. He cannot lose more than one or two of those states and still win the election, particularly because it appears unlikely that he would prevail in any state he did not win in 2016.

There are several examples when presidents who had nationwide approval ratings in the 40% range in the year before the election won a second term, including Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. All managed to get to 50% approval by the time of the presidential election. Trump has yet to attain that level in his presidency, but he will have the next 20 months to get to there, and to make the case to Americans that he deserves a second term.

TRUMP PRESIDENCY CONTINUES TO DEVALUE HIS BRAND. Yet another Manhattan condo association has decided that living in a Trump-branded building is no longer desirable. A Riverside Boulevard residential condominium formerly known as Trump Place is just the latest piece of real estate to choose to rebrand itself in the face of Donald Trump’s horrific presidency—and, the Washington Post reports, it’s the fifth residence to do so in a single neighborhood. 

The decision follows a similar one by condo owners at 200 Riverside Blvd., a few blocks north, in October.

Both buildings sit on the former site of a rail yard on the Upper West Side that President Trump helped develop in the 1990s. The area was named Trump Place in his honor, and six buildings once bore signs with that name.

Since Election Day 2016, the owners of five buildings have decided to remove it — a stark demonstration of Trump’s unpopularity in the city that gave him his start, and which he still calls home.

While the move is meaningful for residents, it’s at most a symbolic jab at the Trump Organization: None of the buildings were affiliated with the company, and the Trumps made no money from them, Jessica Sutherland noted at DailyKos (2/21).

GREEN NEW DEAL DOESN’T MENTION FARTING COWS. “I don’t want to say this. I shouldn’t have to say this,” Mark Sumner wrote at DailyKos.com (2/24). “But because it keeps coming up, I’m going to say it: The Green New Deal does not mention cows. That’s amazing, I know, considering how ‘cows’ seem to come up every time a pundit brings up the plan. And not just from the right. I spent the afternoon in an argument that included the phrase ‘implied bovine methane.’ Which I consider to be a genuine cow product of another sort.”

Following is everything the Green New Deal has to say about agriculture, Sumner noted:

“Working collaboratively with farmers and ranchers in the United States to eliminate pollution and greenhouse gas emissions from the agricultural sector as much as is technologically feasible, including— by supporting family farming; by investing in sustainable farming and land use practices that increase soil health; and by building a more sustainable food system that ensures universal access to healthy food.”

That’s it. It doesn’t threaten a single one of the 1.5 billion cows now living on this planet. Not unless “working cooperatively” means that ranchers are going to say “sure, shoot them.”

Sumner added, “I’m told there was a FAQ written at one point that mentioned cows. And to that I say … I didn’t read the FAQ. I didn’t read the FAQ because the entire Green New Deal is only 14 pages long and not difficult to read—unlike the Manafort sentencing documents that are 870 pages long and kicking my butt after hours of reading. Also, everything I’ve heard about the FAQ indicates it was idiotic, contained a number of misstatements about what was in the actual resolution, and was withdrawn almost immediately. So I can only assume that people still arguing based on what was in the FAQ, are more interesting in arguing than anything else.

“Maybe, in a process that worked with farmers and ranchers to improve our agriculture system, there would be fewer cows. Maybe not. Maybe there would be an end to feedlots and animals stuffed full of grains they don’t like washed down with buckets of antibiotics. That seems like a good idea. And maybe not. But whatever the answer is, what it’s not is in the Green New Deal. Because the Green New Deal on agriculture, as on nearly every other point, is little more than a mom and apple pie agreement on ‘hey, let’s do nice things’ so we can all nod, and at least agree on the goals we are working toward before some other piece of legislation has to lay out the details.

“Also, it’s possible that the hysteria over a plan that’s about as straightforward and non-threatening as possible is driving me to hysteria. And can I just point out that beef cattle only live a couple of years, so we don’t need cow hit squads? We are cow hit squads.”

CNN HIRES REPUBLICAN OPERATIVE TO HEAD 2020 ELECTION COVERAGE. CNN hired a Republican operative and former spokeswoman for Donald Trump’s Department of Justice to coordinate political coverage for the 2020 campaign, Politico reported (2/19). Sarah Isgur worked for Atty. Gen. Jeff Sessions during his tenure at the Department of Justice, in addition to holding roles on Carly Fiorina’s 2016 presidential campaign and one of Ted Cruz’s Senate campaigns. Isgur is an experienced political operative, but she has never worked in journalism, a qualification that seems like it should be relevant to her new job, Sarah Jones noted at New York Magazine (2/19).

Brian Stelter, who anchors CNN’s “Reliable Sources” program, reported that Isgur would join a team of editors. CNN also announced that she won’t cover the Department of Justice, though that doesn’t ameliorate many concerns about the hire. Isgur isn’t just new to journalism; she also can’t cover many of the day’s most significant stories, which makes CNN’s decision to hire her look especially strange, Jones noted.

Officials at the Democratic National Committee were concerned about Isgur’s alleged involvement in Fox News’ false reporting around the right-wing conspiracy theory that DNC staffer Seth Rich leaked DNC emails to WikiLeaks and was murdered in 2016 as a result, TheDailyBeast.com reported (2/20). The DNC sought and received assurances from CNN that Isgur will not be involved in the debates that the channel hosts and moderates for the Democratic primary.

The backlash to Isgur’s hiring has not just come from the DNC but from within the network’s political reporting unit as well, Daily Beast reported. One CNN staffer described the hiring as “very bizarre” while another said political staff at the network were “demoralized.”

DRUG SEIZURES SHOW EMPTY PROMISE OF TRUMP BORDER WALL. Last week was a good one for US Customs and Border Protection, Luke Barnes noted at ThinkProgress (2/25).

On Feb. 19, agents at Pharr International Bridge in McAllen, Texas, stopped a truck carrying a shipment of frozen strawberries. Upon further inspection, they discovered the trailer contained 906 pounds of methamphetamine worth an estimated $12.7 million. Two days later agents searching a car at the Falfurrias Checkpoint, 60 miles north, found 45 pounds of methamphetamine worth $1.4 million.

The biggest bust, however, occurred a day later at the Savannah, Ga., seaport. There, officers searched a shipment of pineapples from Colombia, and found that the fruits were concealing over a ton of cocaine with an estimated street value of $19 million.

“This was an outstanding interception of narcotics by our CBP officers,” Savannah CBP Area Port Director Lisa Beth Brown said in a statement. “This seizure … highlights the important work our officers do each day to stop illegal activities at our borders and ports of entry.”

These drug busts highlight an important point in law enforcement’s battle against illegal narcotics — that the vast majority of seizures made are at legal points of entry between the United States and Mexico.

According to the DEA’s 2018 National Drug Threat Assessment, the “most common method employed by (Mexican drug cratels) involves transporting illicit drugs through US POEs (Ports of Entry) in passenger vehicles with concealed compartments or…with legitimate goods on tractor trailers.”

The report adds that other commonly-used methods of smuggling include underground tunnels, maritime vessels, commercial cargo trains and even ultralight aircraft and drones. Cartels “also rely on traditional smuggling methods, such as the use of backpackers…on clandestine land trails to cross remote areas of the [border] into the United States.” This method becomes impractical however when attempting to smuggle the quantities of drugs seen in the seizures last week.

To smuggle that quantity of drugs directly across the border, “you would need to line up a huge number of humans and march them across the desert where their heat signature can be picked up,” Sanho Tree, Director of the Institute for Policy Studies’ Drug Policy Project, previously told ThinkProgress. “If you had a tunnel why would you risk this inefficient line of smuggling?”

Trump, however, has refused to let the reality of how drugs enter the US get in the way of his desire to build a wall across the US/Mexico border, which would cost up to $40 billion and would distract from the successful seizures of drugs, like the above ones described, at legal points of entry.

“You listen to politicians, in particular certain Democrats, they say [drugs] all come through the ports of entry,” Trump said in a rally in El Paso (2/15). “It’s wrong, it’s wrong. It’s just a lie. It’s all a lie.”

After the longest government shutdown in US history failed to give Trump the $5.7 billion worth of wall funding requested, Trump declared a “national emergency” to circumvent getting congressional approval for the wall.

On Feb. 25, 23 former GOP senators and representatives released a letter urging Republicans to block the emergency declaration, calling the move unconstitutional. The group includes former Sens. John Danforth (R-MO) Chuck Hagel (R-NE), Gordon Humphrey (R-NH), Dick Lugar (R-IN), Olympia Snowe (R-ME), and more than a dozen former US representatives. A bipartisan group of 58 former senior national security officials also issued a statement saying that “there is no factual basis” for Trump’s proclamation of a national emergency to build a wall on the US-Mexico border.

SUPREME COURT LIMITS CIVIL ASSET FORFEITURE. The Supreme Court unanimously decided (2/20) that police and sheriffs’ departments can’t arbitrarily seize cars driven by people who are dealing drugs. In the case of Timbs v. Indiana, the Court ruled that state governments must abide by the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition on the imposition of “excessive fines” for criminal offenses.

Tyson Timbs is an Indiana man who was busted in his SUV and who later pleaded guilty to one count of selling a controlled substance. He was sentenced to six years in prison, but was released on probation. However, the state went after his vehicle, which he bought for $42,000 in 2013 from life insurance proceeds he received after his father’s death. A state trial court denied the state’s seizure of the Land Rover because Timbs had purchased the vehicle legally, and it was worth far more than the fine that Timbs was assessed, which the state court determined violated the Eighth Amendment’s protection against excessive bail.

The state supreme court overturned the decision, ruling that the US Supreme Court had never held that the Eighth Amendment’s excessive fines clause applies to the states. The US Supreme Court cleared up that point, in an opinion written by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg: “The Eighth Amendment’s Excessive Fines Clause is an incorporated protection applicable to the States under the Fourteenth Amendment’s Due Process Clause … Protection against excessive fines has been a constant shield throughout Anglo-American history for good reason: Such fines undermine other liberties ... The historical and logical case for concluding that the Fourteenth Amendment incorporates the Excessive Fines Clause is indeed overwhelming.”

Welcome back, RBG. And good on the conservative Rutherford Institute for filing an “amicus” brief in the case, challenging the power of states to engage in abusive “policing for profit” tactics.

As Charles Pierce noted at Esquire.com, Justice Clarence Thomas’s concurrence went right to the heart of the scam. Civil forfeiture, Thomas wrote, has become “widespread and highly profitable ... This system — where police can seize property with limited judicial oversight and retain it for their own use — has led to egregious and well-chronicled abuses.”

Pierce concluded, “Sorry, Mayor Goober. You’re out of the car-theft business. You’re going to have to ask the residents of Bugtussle to tax themselves if you want to buy that rocket-launcher.”

COAST GUARD OFFICER ACCUSED OF PLOTTING MURDER OF PROMINENT DEMS & MEDIA PERSONALITIES. It may not have gotten the attention that the media paid to actor Jussie Smollett’s alleged false report of an attack by white supremacists in Chicago, but the FBI (2/15) detained a Coast Guard lieutenant, Christopher Hasson, on drugs and weapons charges that turned into a domestic terrorism case. As detailed in a tweet by Seamus Hughes of George Washington University’s Program on Extremism (2/20), the feds filed to keep Hasson locked up, alleging that Hasson “intended to murder innocent civilians on a scale rarely seen in this country.”

Charles Pierce noted at Esquire (2/20) that the feds did something they rarely do. They flat-out called Hasson a “domestic terrorist” who was “bent on committing acts dangerous to human life and intended to affect governmental conduct.”

According to WMAR-TV, federal agents found 15 firearms and 1,000 rounds of ammunition in Hasson’s apartment. Moreover, investigators found deleted e-mails in which Hasson allegedly mused about a “two-pronged attack” consisting of a bioterror assault followed by a sniper attack, and also ones in which he bragged about being a white nationalist. He also allegedly was an enthusiastic fan of Anders Brevik, the white nationalist who murdered 77 people during a 2011 crime spree in Norway.

According to the documents, Hasson corresponded with other neo-Nazi leaders and, at one point, appealed to whatever world exists in his head:

“Please send me your violence that I may unleash it onto their heads. Guide my hate to make a lasting impression on this world.”

Most ominous of all, according to the documents filed with the court, Hasson apparently was putting together a hit list of prominent political figures and media stars, including apparent references to Speaker Nancy Pelosi; Congresswomen Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ilhan Omar; Congressman Beto O’Rourke; Sens. Richard Blumenthal, Kamala Harris, Kirsten Gillibrand, Elizabeth Warren, Tim Kaine, Chuck Schumer and Cory Booker; MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough, Ari Melber, and Chris Hayes; CNN’s Don Lemon, Chris Cuomo and Van Jones. Here’s the whole thread from Hughes’s account.

Hasson created a list of “traitors” and targets on Jan. 19 in an Excel spreadsheet on his work computer. The spreadsheet was created two days after he conducted a series of internet inquiries, such as “what if trump illegally impeached”; “best place in dc to see congress people”; “where in dc to congress live”; “civil war if trump impeached”; and “social democrats usa”

Pierce concluded, “So I guess what I’m saying is that this really may not have been the best day for the president* to be calling media outlets enemies of the people. After all, there are some people out there who still take him seriously.”

US HINTS AT MILITARY INTERVENTION AFTER VENEZUELANS BLOCK ‘AID.’ A convoy of trucks reportedly carrying food and medicine was greeted with tear gas and a physical blockade along the bridge linking Colombia and with the Venezuelan town of Urena (2/23).

US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo responded with interventionist escalation, telling Fox News Sunday viewers that “every option is on the table” in response to a direct question about a potential US military incursion on behalf of Juan Guaidó, leader of Venezuela’s National Assembly, who declared himself president in January and promptly received backing from President Trump.

International convoys tried to cross the border in two different locations on Friday and Saturday (2/22 and 2/23). Along the Simón Bolívar Bridge between Venezuela and Colombia, two trucks caught fire after soldiers fired tear gas at their convoy. In Ureña, on the Venezuela side of the bridge, citizens clashed with soldiers, who reportedly killed two civilians in the violence.

A similar, separate attempt to move materials into the country from Brazil generated physical violence in a second location (2/22). The new, US-friendly government of proto-fascist Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro ran into similar physical barriers at the crossing from the Brazilian city of Pacaraima to the Venezuelan border town of Santa Elena de Uairén. Venezuelans who came out to meet a promised food convoy threw rocks at the soldiers who blocked them, and the soldiers shot at them in response. Two were killed and more than a dozen injured.

The aid push from Pacaraima looked quite different on the ground from the way it has been characterized in press releases from either government, Bloomberg’s Samy Adghirni told the BBC (2/23).

“Let’s be clear, what the Brazilian and American governments are calling aid shipments to Venezuela are actually two very small trucks,” Adghirni said on the BBC’s Newshour broadcast. “There was talk about 200 tons of aid, and this is clearly not the case.”

The question of what exactly is in the trucks that were pushed back by Venezuelan soldiers looms large, Alan Pyke noted at ThinkProgress (2/24).

The push to cross the physical border with goods plays out under large, heavy clouds of history. Latin Americans of all nationalities and political persuasions have grown up steeped in memories of dozens of coup attempts, political subversions, arms shipments, and other interventions in local sovereignty from US governments over more than a century.

The White House formally recognized Guaidó’s claim that he is now president, giving the US diplomatic community’s preference that Maduro step down all the force and rigidity of official policy. Just a few days later, Trump hired Elliott Abrams to a specialized position working on the Venezuela crisis. Abrams spent much of the 1970s and 1980s engineering the very same coups and interferences that leave lingering suspicion and anger toward US actors in the region still today. His presence in headlines and in policymaking would have only exacerbated a sense of defiance and solidarity among whatever share of the Venezuelan populace remains willing to support Maduro after years of privation under his policies.

Shortly after that personnel move, Maduro announced that a plane full of rifles had been seized at an airport, saying that the plane had arrived from the US and portraying the weapons shipment as evidence of the same old-school imperialism.

The international aid shipments now seeking to cross Maduro’s border barricades are naturally complicated by these recent reifications of old historical patterns.

Guaidó has openly called on soldiers to defy Maduro’s orders and help the aid trucks through. Some did this weekend, though the scope of the defections ranges wildly from one international news dispatch to another – from as few as three soldiers to as many as 60.

The army as a whole has so far remained loyal to the elected president against the one now recognized by the US and other powers. It is the sort of loyalty, however that has often shattered in similar civil conflicts throughout modern history, against the backdrop of being ordered to fire live rounds at hungry countrymen.

N.C. COURT ATTACKS FRUITS OF ILLEGAL GERRYMANDERING. A perennial problem in gerrymandering cases is that, even when an illegal map is eventually struck down by the courts, the state will often administer one or more elections using the deficient map before the courts can intervene, Ian Millhiser noted (2/25).

That effectively means illegally elected lawmakers will make new laws — sometimes for years. It also means partisans have little incentive not to gerrymander, because their illegal maps are likely to be in effect for at least one election.

On Feb. 22, a North Carolina state court offered a radical and creative solution to this problem, invalidating two state constitutional amendments that were proposed by an illegally gerrymandered legislature after the state’s legislative maps were invalidated — but before a new election could remove lawmakers in gerrymandered seats from office.

The case is North Carolina State Conference of the NAACP v. Moore.

Under the North Carolina Constitution, the state legislature may propose constitutional amendments with a 3/5s supermajority vote in both chambers. Such proposed amendments must then be ratified by a majority of the voters.

In June of 2018, about a year after the Supreme Court affirmed a lower court decision striking down many of North Carolina’s legislative districts as unconstitutional racial gerrymanders, state lawmakers proposed six amendments to the state’s constitution. Two of these amendments, a cap on income taxation and a voter ID requirement, were later ratified by voters.

In his opinion striking down these amendments, Judge G. Bryan Collins reasons that an illegally gerrymandered legislature cannot propose an amendment — at least after the state’s legislative maps were declared invalid by the Supreme Court of the United States.

The state constitution, Collins notes, provides that “the people of this State have the inherent, sole, and exclusive right of regulating the internal government and … of altering or abolishing their Constitution and form of government.” Yet, when the Supreme Court determined that the state’s legislative maps are invalid, the state’s “General Assembly lost its claim to popular sovereignty.”

“The unconstitutional racial gerrymander,” Collins reasoned, “tainted the three-fifths majorities required by the state Constitution before an amendment proposal can be submitted to the people for a vote, breaking the requisite chain of popular sovereignty between North Carolina citizens and their representatives.”

Judge Collins’ opinion is brief, but it appears to apply only to state constitutional amendments proposed after the state’s legislative maps are struck down. Ordinary legislation would likely survive under Collins’ reasoning. In that sense, Collins strikes a balance between the need for the state to be able to conduct business, and the need to ensure that an illegal majority in the state legislature does not enact laws which cannot be easily repealed by a future legislature.

It remains to be seen whether Collins’ opinion survives contact with higher courts — although it has a fighting chance in a state supreme court where Democrats will soon enjoy a 6-1 majority. It is highly unusual, to say the least, for a court to strike down the acts of a gerrymandered legislature — though Collins’ opinion is limited enough in scope that it can be read largely as a shield against illegitimate constitutional amendments.

Yet, while opinions like Collins’ are rare, Judge Collins also addressed a very real problem in gerrymandering cases. Without protections against lawmaking by legislators who owe their jobs to an illegal gerrymander, those legislators have every incentive to enact illegal maps and then ride them out through as many elections as possible before a court intervenes.

TRUMP’S SHAMELESS FLIP-FLOP ON HIGH-SPEED RAIL. The Trump administration announced Feb. 19 it plans to kill a deal to provide $929 million for California’s effort to build the country’s first high-speed rail train.

But while President Donald Trump now mocks high-speed rail on Twitter, calling it “a ‘green’ disaster,” candidate Trump once mocked America for not having any high-speed trains and vowed to be the “greatest infrastructure president in the nation’s history.”

Yet, the only piece of infrastructure Trump appears to care about as president is his border wall with Mexico — and he’s now actually willing to kill infrastructure projects in blue states like California simply because they oppose him on the wall, Joe Romm noted at ThinkProgress (2/20). >

Indeed, Trump’s Department of Transportation (DOT) vowed to pull back all of its money for California’s high-speed rail project just one day after the state joined 15 others in a lawsuit to stop Trump’s declaration of a national emergency to fund the wall.

“It’s no coincidence that the administration’s threat comes 24 hours after California led 16 states in challenging the president’s farcical ‘national emergency,’” Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-CA) said in a statement. “This is clear political retribution by President Trump, and we won’t sit idly by.”

What’s more, the president’s move is pure hypocrisy. In a March 2016 presidential campaign rally, Trump explained that the US needs to invest heavily in its train system to compete with the vastly superior infrastructure in Asia.

“You go to China, they have trains that go 300 miles an hour. We have trains that go ‘chug, chug, chug.’ And then they have to stop because the tracks split, right?” said Trump. “They have trains that go 300 miles an hour. They have trains, Japan, China, a lot of countries … We are like third world.”

That rally led to media headlines like “Trump Agrees With Democrats on High-Speed Trains.” After all, high-speed rail was a major component of infrastructure investment in President Barack Obama’s stimulus 2009 bill, which provided the initial funding for California’s high speed rail project.

Then in June 2016, candidate Trump asserted he would “build the greatest infrastructure on the planet earth — the roads and railways and airports of tomorrow.” He actually claimed that America’s infrastructure problem can be fixed “only by me.”

Yet, as president, Trump abandoned all of those promises. Indeed, in recent days, he has instead been attacking California’s bullet train project.

Last week, Gov. Newsom announced that he was scaling back the plan for high speed rail between San Francisco and Los Angeles since its $77 billion price tag would “cost too much and, respectfully, take too long.” He pledged to build a much shorter system in California’s Central Valley, connecting Merced and Bakersfield.

“California has been forced to cancel the massive bullet train project after having spent and wasted many billions of dollars,” Trump tweeted the next day. “They owe the Federal Government three and a half billion dollars. We want that money back now. Whole project is a “green” disaster!”

Newsom called that claim “fake news.”

Then this week, Trump falsely claimed the bullet train would be “hundreds of times more expensive than the desperately needed Wall!” That, however, would represent trillions of dollars. A look at the numbers show that, in fact, the rail project’s projected cost of $77 billion would be comparable to the wall, which the conservative Cato Institute estimated last month would be nearly $60 billion.

The day after California led a 16-state lawsuit against Trump’s emergency declaration, Trump’s Transport Department said in a statement it wants its money back — not just the $929 million yet to be provided, but also the $2.5 billion in funds DOT already gave the state (for a total of nearly three and a half billion dollars).

Trump tweeted “Send the Federal Government back the Billions of Dollars WASTED!”

Whether the Transportation Department actually has the ability to get back already spent funds is unclear and may take a long time to settle in the courts. But what is quite clear now is the president’s remarkable hypocrisy on high-speed rail.

DIDN’T SEE THE DEATH OF CLOUDS COMING. The climate crisis, which now seems to have overmuch to do with where Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez hangs her hat, is prompting all manner of dire warnings but, Charles P. Pierce admits, the possible Death of Clouds was not something he saw coming. From the Washington Post:

“But Earth’s broad portfolio of clouds in the year 2019 could potentially be altered by extreme climate change. Those stratocumulus cloud decks could vanish, further intensifying global warming. That’s the unsettling conclusion of a study published Monday in the journal Nature Geoscience, based on a computer model that provides a new warning that climate change could deliver surprises on top of the already existing and clearly predictable consequences.”

As the Post story makes clear, this scenario is unlikely to occur, but it could occur, which indicates to us that the climate crisis has aspects to it of which we still are unaware, and which could pop up on a world that is utterly unprepared for them.

“The effect appeared intense if CO2 reached 1,200 parts per million — three times the current level, which is already much higher than the preindustrial level of carbon dioxide. If CO2 reached 1,300 parts per million, the new report states, the global atmospheric temperature would rise 8 degrees Celsius above whatever warming had already been produced from greenhouse gases. ‘It’s a dramatic effect,’ Schneider told The Washington Post. The stratocumulus cloud decks ‘break up altogether,’ he said.”

“Bad enough that an entire industry, and one of our two major political parties, is dedicated to the proposition of denying the damage we obviously are doing to the planet,” Pierce noted. “We are doing damage we don’t even know we’re doing.”

From The Progressive Populist, March 15, 2019

Populist.com