Abbreviated Pundit Roundup: Europe's anxieties of a Trump return to power

We begin today with McKay Coppins of The Atlantic and the European fears and preparations for a second Trump Administration.

“We’re in a very precarious place,” one senior NATO official told me. He wasn’t supposed to talk about such things on the record, but it was hardly a secret. The largest armed conflict in Europe since World War II was grinding into its third year. The Ukrainian counteroffensive had failed, and Russia was gaining momentum. Sixty billion dollars in desperately needed military aid for Ukraine had been stalled for months in the dysfunctional U.S. Congress. And, perhaps most ominous, America—the country with by far the biggest military in NATO—appeared on the verge of reelecting a president who has repeatedly threatened to withdraw the U.S. from the alliance.

Fear of losing Europe’s most powerful ally has translated into a pathologically intense fixation on the U.S. presidential race. European officials can explain the Electoral College in granular detail and cite polling data from battleground states. Thomas Bagger, the state secretary in the German foreign ministry, told me that in a year when billions of people in dozens of countries around the world will get the chance to vote, “the only election all Europeans are interested in is the American election.” Almost every official I spoke with believed that Trump is going to win.

The irony of Europe’s obsession with the upcoming election is that the people who will decide its outcome aren’t thinking about Europe much at all. In part, that’s because many Americans haven’t seen the need for NATO in their lifetime (despite the fact that the September 11 terrorist attacks were the only time Article 5 has been invoked). As one journalist in Brussels put it to me, the alliance has for decades been a “solution in search of a problem.” Now, with Russia waging war dangerously close to NATO territory, there’s a large problem. Throughout my conversations, one word came up again and again when I asked European officials about the stakes of the American election: existential.

David Smith of the Guardian interviews a professor of German at the University of Sheffield about the comparison between Adolf Hitler and Donald Trump as political performance artists.

The Hitler-Trump analogy is controversial. “Some of Trump’s critics – including Biden’s campaign – argue that Trump’s incendiary rhetoric and authoritarian behavior justify the comparison,” the Politico website observedrecently. “Meanwhile, Trump’s defenders – and even some of his more historically-minded critics – argue that the comparison is ahistorical; that he’s not a true fascist.”

The former camp now includes Henk de Berg, a professor of German at the University of Sheffield in Britain. The Dutchman, whose previous books include Freud’s Theory and Its Use in Literary and Cultural Studies, has just published Trump and Hitler: A Comparative Study in Lying. [...]

Above all, De Berg argues, Hitler and Trump were and are political performance artists who speak only vaguely about policies – Make Germany/America great again – but know how to draw attention using jokes, insults and extreme language. In this they differ from Joseph Stalin, the Soviet autocrat who was a poor public speaker and preferred to work behind the scenes.

Ryan Tarinelli of Roll Call reports that House Judiciary Chair Jim Jordan is proposing that Republican retribution for the shoe salesman’s criminal conviction in New York can (in part) be done through the appropriations process.

The Ohio Republican pitched a series of policy riders for fiscal 2025 appropriations bills in a letter to the House Appropriations Chairman Tom Cole.

One proposed policy rider goes after special counsel John L. “Jack” Smith’s office, which has brought criminal charges against Trump in Florida and the District of Columbia. The rider would prohibit funding for an “office of a Special Counsel, who has not been confirmed by the United States Senate to serve as a U.S. Attorney,” from being used “to bring a criminal prosecution of a former or current President or Vice President.”

Another rider would prohibit funds from being used to consult, advise or direct state prosecutors and state attorneys general “in the civil action or criminal prosecution of a former or current President or Vice President brought against them in state court.”

[...]

The policy riders are the latest example of congressional Republicans stepping to Trump’s defense after a New York state jury found the former president guilty of 34 felony charges of falsifying business records.

Dan Diamond of The Washington Post looks at yesterday’s wild exhibition of Republican clownage at yesterday’s COVID-19 hearing investigation the nation’s pandemic response featuring the retired Dr. Anthony Fauci.

The prominent infectious-disease expert, who served as a senior leader at the National Institutes of Health for four decades before leaving government at the end of 2022, said Republicans have distorted emails between himself and other scientists as they discussed whether a laboratory leak of the coronavirus was possible. [...]

The hearing with Fauci, widely viewed as the face of the United States’ coronavirus response, drew a circus-style environment to a covid panel that has often struggled for attention as the public has moved on from the pandemic. A line of would-be spectators snaked around the Rayburn House Office Building, seeking a seat in the standing-room-only hearing; a person sitting in the front row wore a T-shirt emblazoned with “JAIL FAUCI.”

Lawmakers also packed the roster, including Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), a member of the covid panel who skipped seven of its last 10 hearings. Greene also briefly brought the hearing to a halt by accusing Fauci of wrongdoing with lab experiments on beagles and other matters, saying he should be in prison and refusing to address him as a doctor. Democrats protested Greene’s accusations, and Wenstrup rebuked her for violating decorum. Fauci expressed puzzlement over why Greene was invoking beagles at a hearing dedicated to the covid response.

Noah Weiland of The New York Times reports that Blacks and Latinos are twice as likely as whites to lose Medicaid coverage through the renewal process.

The findings from researchers at the Oregon Health & Science University, Harvard Medical School and Northwestern University are some of the first comprehensive data on race gathered after a pandemic-era policy that allowed Medicaid recipients to keep their coverage without regular eligibility checks ended last year.

More than 22 million low-income people have lost health care coverage at some point since April 2023, when the policy allowing continuous enrollment lapsed. The process of ending that policy — what federal and state officials have called “unwinding” — was one of the most drastic ruptures in the health safety net in a generation.

“Medicaid eligibility is complex, and then applying and keeping Medicaid coverage is a huge logistical barrier,” said Dr. Jane M. Zhu, an associate professor of medicine at the Oregon Health & Science University and one of the study’s authors. “What this analysis is showing is that these barriers have downstream spillover effects on particular communities.”

Paul Krugman, also of the The New York Times, wonder if President Joe Biden should downplay his success in handling the naton’s economy.

...our economic growth has been the envy of other wealthy nations. Stocks are way up since President Biden took office. Inflation has declined sharply and unemployment is still below 4 percent. The latest numbers seem to support the view that the apparent acceleration of prices earlier this year was a statistical blip, and that disinflation is still on track.

Yet there’s still a lingering conventional wisdom that says Biden shouldn’t trumpet his economic record. The Washington Post’s editorial board just wrote that “Telling Americans the economy is good won’t work.” The Financial Times’s editorial board wrote that “The president’s state of the nation address in March was littered with superlatives about the economy” but that his messaging “risks negating the experience of voters on the ground” — basically saying that Biden shouldn’t talk about his economic achievements, even implying that he should try to relate to voters by acknowledging that the economic picture out there is bad, which it isn’t. [...]

That said, telling voters to buck up and realize how good they have it would also be a bad move. But has anyone in the Biden administration said anything like that? It would be pretty obtuse if they had. But I’m not aware of any examples. As far as I can tell, administration officials, including Biden himself, talk about low unemployment, falling inflation and rising real wages — and do so very carefully, studiously avoiding the bombast and excessive boasting so common in the previous administration. But even mentioning good economic news is supposedly an affront to everyday Americans because it amounts to denying their lived experience.

John Cassidy of The New Yorker thinks that American can learn some things from the Chinese success with electric vehicles.

The timing of the new tariffs can’t be divorced from the upcoming election and from Biden’s determination to show voters in battleground states that he is standing up to China and protecting U.S. jobs. In a call with reporters, Lael Brainard, one of the President’s top economic aides, said, “We know China’s unfair practices have harmed communities in Michigan and Pennsylvania and around the country.” But another factor that surely played into the announcement is the remarkable growth of Chinese E.V. makers, particularly BYD Auto, which is now selling low-cost E.V.s in Europe, Southeast Asia, and Latin America, as well as in its home market. In Mexico, for example, the zippy BYD Dolphin Mini hatchback costs roughly the equivalent of twenty-one thousand U.S. dollars. With General Motors having halted the production of the Chevy Bolt, the cheapest E.V. readily available in the United States is the Nissan Leaf, which starts at around twenty-eight thousand dollars, and has a shorter range than the BYD model. Here, the average cost of an E.V. is fifty-five thousand dollars, and the cheapest model from Tesla, which still accounts for more than half of the country’s E.V. sales, starts at about forty thousand dollars. [...]

Part of Chinese E.V. companies’ success can be attributed to lower wages, in addition to lax labor and environmental standards. We certainly wouldn’t want to mimic any of that. There are no independent labor unions in China, and the average manufacturing wage is equivalent to about ten thousand U.S. dollars a year, including overtime pay. There is also evidence that forced labor, involving Uyghur workers, has been used in parts of the Chinese supply chain for lithium-ion batteries. However, labor costs make up a relatively small part of total car-production expenses—less than twenty per cent, in many cases. Chinese E.V. manufacturers have also made significant advances in design and manufacturing, often by taking technologies and processes that were invented elsewhere and improving them. “A lot of Chinese car companies, their big success has come in learning by doing,” Ilaria Mazzocco, an expert on China’s industrial policy at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, in Washington, D.C., told me. “By innovating in production techniques, they have been able to reduce costs, and then reinvest capital in research and development.” Kyle Chan, a Princeton researcher who writes on industrial policy and clean-energy technology, pointed to three areas where Chinese E.V. makers have made impressive progress: developing lithium-ion batteries, casting aluminum car frames, and using computer simulations in the design process.

Paola Nagovitch of El País in English examines the expansion of Spanglish, the world’s fastest growing hybrid language.

Though it is hard to know the exact number of people who speak Spanglish, it’s estimated that there are 35 to 40 million people in the United States who, like Hernández, communicate with it, more than half of the 62 million Latinos who live in the country. It’s a number that will only grow as the Latino community expands over the coming years: by 2060, it is predicted that one in every four U.S. residents will have Latino heritage. “It is the fastest-growing hybrid language in the world,” says Ilan Stavans, professor of Latinx and Latin American studies at Massachusetts’s Amherst College.

There are different kinds of Spanglish, depending on the country of origin of the community who speaks it. New York Puerto Ricans speak Nuyorican version, a Spanglish that combines Puerto Rican words with African American English, while Miami Cubans communicate in Cubonics and California Mexicans have their own, Chicano version. Aside from these differences, Spanglish usually manifests in one of three ways, explains Doctor José Medina, linguistic researcher and educational consultant, who works with school districts across the country to create and develop bilingual programs. [...]

For Medina, people who speak Spanglish have a “superpower”: translanguaging, or the ability to move fluidly between several languages. “We all have a linguistic repertoire and our job is to utilize the parts of that linguistic repertoire that we need at different times. Translanguaging gives us the opportunity to understand that when we mix languages, it’s not incorrect. In truth, we are putting our knowledge on display at a high academic level because we can use both languages at the same time, something that not everyone can do,” he says.

Philip M. Napoli and Asa Royal write for Nieman Journalism Lab about the popularization of the term “fact-based journalism.”

Here’s a term you may be hearing with increasing frequency: “Fact-based journalism.” The Associated Press uses it in fund-raising appeals, as does ProPublica, and our local NPR affiliate. The National Association of Broadcasters and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting both describe themselves as purveyors of “fact-based journalism” in their public relations materials. [...]

When and why did this term rise to prominence? We did a keyword search of “fact-based journalism” in NewsBank, a news repository of over 12,000 sources, for the years 1990 through 2023.

As the graph below indicates, usage of the term ballooned starting in 2016 and saw a big spike in 2021. And as the graph also indicates, the term “fact-based journalism” was rarely used prior to the early 2000s.

The increasing usage of the term corresponds with the beginning of Trump’s presidency. Given this timing, we next conducted a parallel search of the term “fake news.” Our suspicion was that the term “fact-based journalism” arose in response to the rise of the notion of “fake news” that so dominated the discourse around journalism and politics during the Trump presidency. The results support our hypothesis.

Ione Wells of BBC News thinks that Britain’s Conservative party may split even more because of the entry of Nigel Farage as a candidate for a seat in the House of Commons.

Nigel Farage’s announcement on Monday to run as a candidate for Reform UK in this general election is a move that has the capacity to both reset and re-align the Conservative Party.

Despite having stood to be an MP unsuccessfully seven times, he is more of a household name than some Conservative ministers. Many Conservative campaigners and strategists feared him standing for Reform UK, worried that he might split the vote in some seats that the Conservatives are trying to hold on to - or even ones where they’ve previously enjoyed a pretty safe majority.

While they won't admit it publicly, some in the Labour camp are privately delighted at the news of his campaign for exactly this reason.

This is the first way Mr Farage has the potential to "reset" the Conservative party - by potentially denying it seats.

Finally today, Arifa Noor of Pakistan’s English language daily Dawn looks for a clear definition of the term “digital terrorism.”

While the press release was wide-ranging, it also spoke of “politically motivated and vested digital terrorism” against “state institutions” aimed at inducing “despondency in the Pakistani nation, to sow discord among national institutions, especially the armed forces, and the people of Pakistan by peddling blatant lies, fake news, and propaganda”. Most commentators interpreted this as being directed at the use of social media by the PTI. No wonder, then, that this point was discussed in detail, along with other issues highlighted. Many read it as a warning to the party.

However, interpretations aside, it also sent some of us in search of the meaning of the term ‘digital terrorism’. The manner in which it was used — spreading despondency and discord among people and institutions through fake news and propaganda — seems different from many of the definitions available at forums which research terrorism or cyberterrorism or digital terrorism, where definitions vary, as they also do in the case of terrorism. Some of the definitions focus on attacks on computer systems and the use of viruses, others on the use of internet to conduct violence, while some may focus on terrorists using these technologies to carry out violent attacks. It may seem unnecessary exercise to split hairs but definitions do matter.

After all, Pakistani society in general and the Pakistan Army in particular know better than most the scourge of terrorism. Even at present, we are struggling with the challenge — according to one report, during the first four months, the country reported nearly 250 incidents of terrorism and counterterrorism operations, while fatalities numbered around 280.

Have the best possible day everyone!