Tag Archives: people

We Asked Trump Supporters at the Inauguration: What Should He Do First?

by MargheritaApq Posted on January 20, 2017

Mother Jones

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Thousands of red-capped Donald Trump die-hards lined up early to get into the inauguration Friday morning. They waved Trump merchandise and grinned broadly in plastic rain ponchos.

I wanted to know: Now that Trump is officially the 45th president of the United States, what do they want him to do first? Securing the country’s borders and repealing Obamacare were among their top choices. Less so: grappling with the swampiness of Washington, DC. “Drain the swamp—it’s not as literal as it sounds,” said Evan Jarman from North Carolina, who urged people to trust the incoming president and his Cabinet picks.

I also wanted to know about voters’ reactions to Trump’s relationship with Russia. “I’m not 100 percent comfortable with that, but I don’t think Vladimir Putin is the worst person on Earth,” said Kenneth Dempsey, who drove up from West Palm Beach, Florida, for the day. “Maybe he can get a Cabinet post, I don’t know.”

“Him and Putin, there are similarities there, and a lot of people see that as a bad thing,” said Jordan Horan, a 22-year-old salesman from Lincoln, Nebraska. “But I mean, I don’t know, I’m pretty excited for it.”

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We Asked Trump Supporters at the Inauguration: What Should He Do First?

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Donald Trump Is Already Campaigning For 2020

by Chi7769ygegjc Posted on January 18, 2017

Mother Jones

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I mentioned in passing yesterday that Donald Trump’s tweets aren’t meant for the press or for Congress or for people like you and me. They’re meant for his fans. Today brings a pretty good example of this:

This is obviously laughable. Even if you take Trump at face value, he’s been responsible for no more than a tiny handful of jobs, and he hasn’t negotiated a lower price on anything yet, let alone “massive” cost reductions on military purchases. So why bother tweeting something that makes him look ridiculous?

Because he needs his supporters to continue thinking he’s a miracle worker. To them, this tweet is a simple progress report. Even if anyone bothers fact checking it, they’ll never see it. All they see is Trump keeping them apprised of the tremendous progress he’s making in draining the swamp and bending Washington to his will.

But surely he can’t keep this up for multiple years, can he? At some point, after all, even people who don’t pay much attention to the news will eventually realize there’s a disconnect between reality and Trump’s big talk. Then they’ll start to see Trump for the empty hustler he is. Right?

This is the $64,000 question. I wish I knew the answer. For now, I’ll just say that I’m not sure. A lot of it depends on events, of course, and a lot of it depends on how successful Trump is at blaming other people for everything that goes wrong. Depending on circumstances, it’s possible that the true believers will stay on board forever, even if he shoots someone on Fifth Avenue.

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Donald Trump Is Already Campaigning For 2020

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Why Do Republicans Hate Obamacare?

by evelyne6707 Posted on January 16, 2017

Mother Jones

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Why are Republicans so hellbent on repealing Obamacare? This came up on Twitter the other day, and at first it sounds like a silly question. They’ve been opposed to Obamacare from the start, and they’ve been vocal about what they don’t like.

But it’s a more interesting question than it seems. After all, we no longer have to guess about its effects. We know. So let’s take a look.

The Good. Obamacare has provided more than 20 million people—most of them low-income or working class—with health coverage. It has done this with no negative effects on either Medicare or the employer health insurance market. It didn’t raise taxes more than a few pennies on anyone making less than six figures. It’s had no effect on the willingness of companies to hire full-time workers. Health care costs under Obamacare have continued to grow at very modest rates. And it’s accomplished all this under its original budget.

The Bad. Obamacare unquestionably has some problems. About 20 percent of its customers choose Bronze plans with very high deductibles. Some of the least expensive plans have narrow networks that restrict your choice of doctor. Some insurers have left the exchanges because they were losing money. And premium increases have been volatile as insurers have learned the market. But every one of these things is a result of Obamacare’s reliance on private markets, something that Republicans support. Insurers are competing. They’re offering plans with different features at different price points. Some of them are successful and some aren’t. That’s how markets work. It’s messy, but eventually things settle down and provide the best set of services at the best possible price.

The Popular. Obamacare is popular unless you call it “Obamacare.” If you call it Kynect, its negatives drop. If you call it the Affordable Care Act, its negatives drop. If you ask about the actual things it does, virtually every provision is popular among Democrats and Republicans alike. Even Obamacare’s taxes on the rich, which are fairly modest, are popular. Aside from the individual mandate, the only truly unpopular part of Obamacare is the name “Obamacare.” (And even that’s only unpopular among Republicans.)

So why the continued rabid opposition to Obamacare? It’s not because the government has taken over the health care market. On the contrary, Obamacare affects only a tiny part of the health insurance market and mostly relies on taking advantage of existing market forces. It’s not because the benefits are too stingy. That’s because Democrats kept funding at modest levels, something Republicans approve of. It’s not because premiums are out of control. Republicans know perfectly well that premiums have simply caught up to CBO projections this year—and federal subsidies protect most people from increases anyway. It’s not because everyone hates what Obamacare does. Even Republicans mostly like it. The GOP leadership in Congress could pass a virtually identical bill under a different name and it would be wildly popular.

In the end, somehow, this really seems to be the answer:

Republicans hate the idea that we’re spending money on the working class and the poor. They hate the idea that Barack Obama is responsible for a pretty successful program. They hate the idea that taxes on the wealthy went up a bit. They hate the idea that a social welfare program can do a lot of good for a lot of people at a fairly modest price.

What kind of person hates all these things?

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Why Do Republicans Hate Obamacare?

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Trump’s Shouty and Insane Press Conference Reminded Russians of…Putin

by KerryDye078 Posted on January 14, 2017

Mother Jones

During Donald Trump’s first press conference as president-elect, he called BuzzFeed a “failing pile of garbage,” shouted down questions from a CNN reporter, and evaded tough questions about the dossier released the day before alleging that Russia had been cultivating Trump for years and had assembled compromising material on him. In the United States, many found Trump’s harsh approach shocking. “It is our observation,” said Fox News anchor Shepard Smith, referring to Trump’s treatment of CNN, “that neither they nor any other journalists should be subjected to belittling and delegitimizing by the president-elect.”

But for some Russians, Trump’s bombastic style at the press conference, his animosity toward journalists, and his rambling nonanswers seemed all too familiar.

“Well, now the U.S. also has a president who never answers a direct question and is rude to journalists,” tweeted opposition activist Tikhon Dzyadko.

Others joked about what would have come next for the disobedient journalists, were they in Putin’s Russia:

“So I guess now Trump will close BuzzFeed and replace the head editor of CNN,” one user tweeted, alluding to the 2013 episode in which Putin unexpectedly shuttered RIA Novosti, a Kremlin-owned but somewhat independent news agency, restructured it as Rossiya Segodnya (“Russia Today,” no relation to the English-language RT), and replaced its top editor with Dmitry Kiselyov, a pro-Putin TV commentator known for extreme anti-gay comments, in what Russian media viewed as another example of the president’s tightening grip over the country’s media sector.

After the press conference, Russian journalist Alexey Kovalev, speaking from his own experience, published a letter to the US press on Medium about what to expect from Trump’s behavior toward journalists:

Congratulations, US media! You’ve just covered your first press conference of an authoritarian leader with a massive ego and a deep disdain for your trade and everything you hold dear. We, in Russia, have been doing it for 12 years now—â&#128;&#138;with a short hiatus when our leader wasn’t technically our leaderâ&#128;&#138;—â&#128;&#138;so quite a few things during Donald Trump’s press conference rang my bells.

One additional point of comparison: The leaders’ disrespect for facts. “You can’t hurt this man with facts or reason. He’ll always outmaneuver you,” writes Kovalev. “He always comes with a bag of meaningless factoids (Putin likes to drown questions he doesn’t like in dull, unverifiable stats, figures and percentages), platitudes, false moral equivalences and straight, undiluted bullshit.”

Some Russians went a step further, spoofing what the conference would have looked like if some Putinlike idiosyncrasies had been applied. At Putin’s press conferences, journalists are allowed to bring signs, often hinting at the subjects of their questions (“Education,” “the Arctic,” and “Gratitude for the Russian People” are actual signs in the photo below) to attract the leader’s attention. One Twitter user edited a photo from Putin’s December 2016 press conference, adding only a swoop of orange hair and the caption, “The first press conference of US President-elect Donald Trump.” (Hat tip for these tweets to the Moscow Times.)

Other users wondered in jest why American journalists’ questions were so serious—a far cry from the softball queries that have become mainstays of the Russian leader’s press conferences:

“What sort of a press conference is this, after which no one got a new apartment, and an American girl wasn’t gifted a cute puppy?” wrote this user, alluding to times Putin has created pseudo news events by doling out goodies to constituents.

“Why isn’t anyone asking Trump about the roads? I was in Arizona yesterday, there are definitely a couple of potholes.”

“American journalism is dead, insofar as no one is asking Trump where he’ll be spending New Years and what he’ll be serving at his table.”

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Trump’s Shouty and Insane Press Conference Reminded Russians of…Putin

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Trump Doesn’t Deny Contact Between His Team and Russia During Campaign

by MichealFeetham Posted on January 11, 2017

Mother Jones

In his first press conference in half a year, Donald Trump came close to acknowledging the intelligence community’s conclusion that Russia had meddled in the election to benefit him, saying, “I think it was Russia.” But he quickly added that others are always trying to hack US targets and downplayed the Russian hack, asking why it received so much more attention than a Chinese cyber-attack on the US government several years ago. And when Trump was given a chance to rebut claims that his campaign team had been in communication with Russian intermediaries during the campaign, he did not deny those allegations.

At the end of the nearly hour-long press conference, Trump ignored a question from a reporter about contacts between people associated with him and Russians. The reporter asked, “Can you stand here today, once and for all, and say that no one connected to you or your campaign had any contact with Russia leading up to or during the presidential campaign? And if you do indeed believe that Russia was behind the hacking, what is your message to Vladimir Putin right now?”

But Trump chose only to answer the second part of the journalist’s query. “Russia will have much greater respect for our country when I’m leading it than when other people have led it,” he said. “You will see that. Russia will respect our country. He shouldn’t have done it, I don’t believe he’ll be doing it more now, we have to work something out. But it’s not just Russia.”

The press conference comes one day after CNN reported that the heads of the major US intelligence agencies had briefed Trump and President Barack Obama about claims that Moscow had mounted a secret operation to co-opt or cultivate Trump, that there were extensive communications between people close to Trump and Russians during the presidential campaign, and that Russia had collected compromising material on Trump during his travels to the country. After CNN’s story went live, BuzzFeed published a raw “dossier” of information used for that briefing, prompting a furious response from Trump during his press conference.

Both stories came months after Mother Jones first reported that a former spy working for a Western country had sent the FBI memos containing the Russian allegations.

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Trump Doesn’t Deny Contact Between His Team and Russia During Campaign

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Here’s the Truth Behind Obamacare’s Horror Story Deductibles

by ZegBrewster Posted on January 9, 2017

Mother Jones

Recently, the go-to argument from the anti-Obamacare forces has been about deductibles. Sure, 20 million people have insurance. Sure, most of them can afford the premiums. But what’s the point if all it buys you is crappy insurance with a $6,000 deductible? As Nathan Nascimento put in National Review a few months ago, “what good is health-insurance coverage for middle- and low-income families if they can’t afford to use it?”

These crocodile tears would be amusing if they weren’t so infuriating. Nobody on the right has ever been willing to support higher funding so that deductibles can come down. In fact, folks on the right love high deductibles. It puts “skin in the game.” A combination of HSAs and high-deductible health policies is one of the standard bits of smoke-and-mirrors offered up by conservatives when you ask them what kind of national health care plan they’d like to see replace Obamacare.

But let’s put that aside for a moment and ask another question: what are the deductibles under Obamacare really like, anyway?1Here’s the answer:

The average deductible decreased from $900 to $850 in 2016. And as you can see if we extrapolate from the figures in the table, it looks like nearly two-thirds of all enrollees had deductibles under $1,000. Only about a fifth had the horror-story $6,000+ deductibles that we hear so much about.

But that’s not all. We don’t have figures for how this breaks down, but my guess is that the majority of the people with high deductibles are the famous “young invincibles” who are single, don’t qualify for subsidies because they’re fairly well off, and don’t think they’re going to get sick. So they buy the cheapest plan they can, take advantage of the preventive care stuff they’re allowed before the deductible kicks in, and go about their lives. No one in their right mind who had any kind of real health issues would ever buy a plan like this.

There are undoubtedly exceptions to this. There always are in a country the size of ours. I’m all for helping these folks out, but one way or another, that calls for more money, not less. Anybody who says otherwise is just playing with you.

1Hat tip to Andrew Sprung, who drew my attention to this table today.

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Here’s the Truth Behind Obamacare’s Horror Story Deductibles

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Show Us the Replacement!

by TerenceCocks Posted on January 6, 2017

Mother Jones

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Hmmm. Congressional Republicans might have a problem on their hands. Here’s one of the findings of the latest Kaiser Family poll on health care:

That little orange pie slice at the bottom—the one that says 20 percent—represents the number of people who support the idea of repeal and delay. About half the respondents don’t want to repeal Obamacare at all, and another 28 percent, showing the common sense that heartland Americans are famous for, don’t want to buy a pig in a poke. They may not be thrilled with Obamacare, but they sure want to see what’s going to replace it before it’s ripped apart.

This is the mantra Democrats should be hawking every second of every day. We don’t want a white paper, we want to see the real replacement. Does it really protect people with pre-existing conditions? Does it really keep premium costs down? Does it really reduce deductibles? Is it really a better deal for most working-class folks than Obamacare? Does it really keep the Medicaid expansion in place? Does it really guarantee that no one will be worse off than they are under Obamacare? And will it really cost less than Obamacare?

Every single person in America deserves an opportunity to look at the Republican plan, compare it to Obamacare, and figure out which one is a better deal for them personally. No one should support any kind of repeal plan until they’re allowed to see this.

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Show Us the Replacement!

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The Deification of Putin and Assange Continues Apace

by TresaLentuymrbh Posted on January 5, 2017

Mother Jones

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James Fallows listens to talk radio so you don’t have to:

This is scary. Not because these folks are defending Putin and Assange—plenty of people do that—but because these are precisely the people who were the most outraged by Putin and Assange as recently as last year. Now they’ve turned on a dime, and for one reason: because Donald Trump told them to.

Twenty years ago, a Washington Post reporter wrote that followers of television evangelists were “largely poor, uneducated and easy to command.” The blowback was huge and immediate and the Post apologized the next day. To this day, conservatives quote these words as evidence that the mainstream press has it in for conservatives.

But what else explains what’s happening now? Donald Trump has essentially commanded his followers to defend Putin and Assange, and with barely a whimper they’ve complied. And when the press starts to point out what’s going on, we get this:

“It is for the people.” Everything is “for the people.”

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The Deification of Putin and Assange Continues Apace

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Republicans Are Afraid to Let Americans See Their Health Care Plan

by SharynW08am Posted on January 4, 2017

Mother Jones

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Aside from whatever Donald Trump happens to be tweeting about, the biggest topic in DC right now is this:

Republicans finally have the power to repeal Obamacare, but they’re still not sure how

That’s Noam Levey at the Los Angeles Times:

In Washington, Republicans are also struggling to figure out what to do with Obamacare insurance marketplaces that Republicans worked for years to dismantle. In a reversal, GOP leaders now are trying to figure out how to prevent their collapse, which would jeopardize coverage for millions more Americans.

Insurance experts, including leading industry officials, have repeatedly warned Republicans over the past several months that repealing the health law without a replacement risks destabilizing insurance markets and will push many insurers to simply stop selling health plans.

J.B. Silvers, a former health insurance CEO, explains the danger of “repeal and delay” in more detail:

Some in Congress seem to think that passing the “repeal” part immediately but delaying its implementation for two or three years will somehow leave everything as it is now. But this naive notion misses the fact that the riskiness of the Obamacare individual insurance exchange markets will have been ramped up to such a level that continuing makes no sense.

Even if a company reaches break-even in the “delay” years, it will lose when the repeal is effective. If the premium subsidies now available to lower-income enrollees go away immediately and the mandate to sign up for an insurance plan disappears, then the number of people purchasing individual policies on the exchanges will drop like a rock. In fact, it is clear that even debating this scenario is likely to be self-fulfilling, since insurers must decide on their participation for 2018 by the late spring of 2017. Look for many to leave then.

Insurers are participating in the exchanges because they hope to make steady profits once the early problems are worked out. But if there’s no future for the exchanges, why bother? They’re taking losses for nothing. They might as well jump ship now.

Donald Trump is obviously worried about this, tweeting that Republicans need to make sure they don’t get any of the blame if Obamacare collapses. “Be careful!” he tweets. Newt Gingrich said much the same, and Greg Sargent decodes what this means:

Note that Gingrich’s primary concern is that Republicans will be put in the optical position of taking the blame for millions losing coverage — which, of course, would actually happen if Republicans do repeal the law without replacing it. So Republicans must create a way to make those who would lose coverage believe they won’t lose it later, with some sort of “bridge” that will keep them covered until that long-promised GOP replacement finally materializes.

The truth is that the Obamacare exchanges are in pretty good shape. There are problems here and there, and some people really have gotten hit with big premium increases. Overall, though, more than 10 million people are getting affordable health coverage from the exchanges and millions more are getting it from the Medicaid expansion. Premiums are now about where they should have been all along, and will probably increase at normal rates in the future. Obamacare isn’t perfect, but it’s in pretty good shape.

If it collapses, it will be due solely to appalling recklessness from the Republican caucus, which is afraid to put forward a plan of its own. That fear is well founded: It would take no more than a few days for everyone to figure out just how stingy it is and how many people would lose coverage under it.

If Republicans insist on hiding their plan from the American public, there’s only one possible reason for that: it’s terrible and they know it. Right now we have a working program that helps millions of low-income afford health insurance. If it collapses, that’s on Republicans. And they know it.

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Republicans Are Afraid to Let Americans See Their Health Care Plan

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The Lesson of 2016: Rabid Congressional Investigations Work

by EdwinRKZmcqbanlt Posted on December 31, 2016

Mother Jones

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So what did we learn this year? That America is more susceptible to authoritarian populism than we thought? Not really. Trump’s victory was a fluke, driven by Russian hacking, James Comey, and some bad polls in a few states.

That racism is on the rise? There’s really no evidence of that.

That Democrats need to pay more attention to the white working class? Maybe, but no matter how many times people say otherwise, that really wasn’t a root cause of Hillary Clinton’s defeat.

I could go on, but instead I want to suggest something the 2016 election does teach us: persistent, obsessive investigations pay off. In the 90s, Republicans started investigating Whitewater. Even Ken Starr knew there was nothing to this after a couple of years, but he was put under pressure to keep at it, and eventually he hit some fluke paydirt: Monica Lewinsky. This had nothing to do with Whitewater, but who cares? Scandal is scandal, and it rubbed off enough on Al Gore that Republicans took back the presidency in 2000.

Fast forward to 2012. Hillary Clinton did nothing wrong related to Benghazi. That was clear pretty quickly, but Republicans kept at it. I laughed at them at the time, but they had the last laugh when they once again hit a fluke bit of paydirt: Clinton’s private email server. Clinton didn’t really do anything seriously wrong here either, but it didn’t matter. Republicans kept at it for the next year and a half, and that was enough to convince a lot of people that Clinton was, somehow, corrupt and untrustworthy. That allowed Republicans to retake the presidency.

There was lots of other stuff going on too, but this is now twice that maniacal dedication to an investigation has paid off for Republicans. It’s basically a way of hacking the media, which feels like it has no choice but to cover congressional investigations on a daily basis. It’s news, after all, no matter how you define news.

So that’s a lesson for sure. I’m just not sure what the solution is.

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The Lesson of 2016: Rabid Congressional Investigations Work

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