Autocracy and ‘enemy from within’ are thrust to center of campaign’s final days.
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Vice President Kamala Harris takes a tour and meets union workers Monday at the International Union of Painters and Allied Trades training facility in Warren, Michigan. (Melina Mara/The Washington Post)
Inside a third-floor conference room of the Warwick Hotel in Philadelphia, Vice President Kamala Harris was grappling with how to hone her closing argument to voters. How could she warn of the dangers she believes Donald Trump poses, while connecting it to people’s everyday lives?
Drinking an iced tea as she prepared for a live town hall on CNN, Harris settled on a pithy line that has now become the summary of her closing argument at rallies, interviews and other events. As president, she has taken to saying, Trump would sit in the Oval Office stewing over his “enemies list” — while if she prevails, she will focus on a “to-do list” to fix Americans’ problems.
The point Harris is seeking to make — and one she will reiterate on Tuesday, when she addresses a large rally a week before Election Day on the Ellipse in Washington — is that Trump’s vows to eviscerate democratic norms are not just theoretical but would affect people’s day-to-day lives. If Trump is consumed with boosting himself and using his power for revenge, her argument goes, he will not have time to help ordinary Americans.
In the campaign’s final days, the question of whether a vote for Trump would risk letting the country slide into autocracy has been thrust into the center of a bitterly fought race that polls show will come down to razor-thin margins in seven battleground states. Not only has the subject become Harris’s closing argument as she seeks to sway a tiny sliver of undecided voters, but Trump has made incendiary comments about how he would govern that have prompted a string of former staffers and fellow Republicans to speak out against him.
Harris’s campaign is betting that some of the voting blocs where she is strongest — including college-educated voters, who tend to vote in higher numbers — are moved by arguments about how dangerous a second Trump term would be. But the campaign also recognizes that to appeal to a wider swath of voters, Harris and her surrogates must explain why Trump’s threats to democracy matter when it comes to the issues that affect people’s day-to-day lives, from the economy to health care.
It is not clear whether the strategy will work. In the past, character attacks against Trump have not moved independent voters as much as Democrats hoped, two prominent strategists involved in the 2018 and 2020 elections said. Some advisers to the Harris campaign — and Future Forward, a super PAC supporting Harris — have raised concerns about the argument and whether focusing more heavily on a different issue, like abortion rights, might be more effective.
Trump’s supporters agree.
“‘Trump is bad’ is not a winner. You know who tried that? Everybody. I think it zero matters,” said David Urban, a Trump ally.
Polls show Harris and Trump in a deadlocked race that has not moved for weeks, including in the battleground states of Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan, Georgia, North Carolina, Nevada and Arizona. Polls suggest that Harris will perform particularly well with college-educated voters and young women — both of whom tend to be reliable voters — while Trump has gained support among young White men and has cut into support among traditionally Democratic groups like Latinos and Black men.
Harris’s Tuesday speech on the Ellipse — the site where Trump spoke just before the Jan. 6, 2021, riot, urging supporters to march to the U.S. Capitol, “fight” for him and to “peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard” as Congress was finalizing the presidential election results — is meant to provide a stark visual reminder of a day when American democracy faced its biggest threat in modern history.
Democrats have often been frustrated that many voters seem willing to look past Trump’s behavior and actions on Jan. 6, appearing to focus more on issues like the economy and immigration.
In an effort to strike a balance between reminding voters of Trump’s behavior and addressing their immediate concerns, Harris is expected to address the former president’s actions before and during the Capitol assault, but to spend most of the speech providing a contrast between what Trump and Harris presidencies would look like.
As part of that argument, she will spend much of her speech discussing reproductive rights and what she has dubbed “Trump abortion bans” across the country. Harris also plans to devote time to the economy and keeping prices down, as well as to how she would uphold national security, while arguing that Trump would destroy it.
“All of these issues are issues that affect and concern the American people, and I will continue to speak on all of them,” Harris told reporters Friday in Houston.
A senior Harris adviser emphasized that the backdrop of the vice president’s speech will be the White House, because they want voters to visualize the choice they have in determining who will occupy that building in January.
“A closing argument should reach all the voters that you think you either need to persuade or motivate, and that’s what we’re going to do,” the adviser said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to preview the speech. “So this is not going to be a narrow message. Because what we’ve seen in research is when voters really focus on, ‘Okay, it’s not theoretical, Donald Trump could really be back in the White House,’ [they ask,] ‘What does that mean for me?’”
For that reason, Harris will address not only issues around the rule of law and democracy, but also the economy, tax cuts, health care and abortion, the adviser said. “This is going to touch all the key issues that all the voters out there who have yet to make a decision are most concerned about,” the adviser said.
Even as she focuses more on Trump, Harris and Democrats up and down the ballot still believe abortion is one of their strongest issues and among Trump’s biggest weaknesses. They cite anger among suburban women over sweeping abortion restrictions that have taken effect in many states after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022, with justices appointed by Trump bolstering the majority.
Harris has held two abortion-focused events in recent days, including one in Houston that featured pop superstar Beyoncé and one in Michigan, where former first lady Michelle Obama spoke in visceral terms about what could happen to women if Trump is elected, imploring men to take such threats seriously.
“A vote for him is a vote against us, against our health, against our worth,” Obama said Saturday. “So fellas, before you cast your votes, ask yourselves, what side of history do you want to be on?”
In the past week, Trump has become increasingly specific about how he would go after his perceived opponents and has made comments that have alarmed Democrats and some Republicans, including his claim that “the enemy from within” is a bigger threat than North Korean leader Kim Jong Un. Trump’s former White House chief of staff, John F. Kelly, warned that Trump would rule like a dictator, met the definition of a “fascist” and has shown admiration for Adolf Hitler.
Trump has also said that on his first day back in office — a day on which he previously said he would rule like a dictator — he would fire special counsel Jack Smith, who is leading the Justice Department’s investigations into Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election and his handling of classified documents.
“Jack Smith should be considered mentally deranged, and he should be thrown out of the country,” Trump said Thursday.
The former president has also repeatedly asserted that it is Democrats who are the threat to democracy, urging that the military should be used to handle the “enemy from within,” which he said included former House speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-California) and Rep. Adam Schiff (D-California). Trump’s running mate, Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio), sought to argue that Trump did not mean he would use military force against Pelosi and Schiff, but rather against “left-wing lunatics who are rioting.”
Trump’s campaign advisers, however, argue that voters are not moved by the rhetoric from Kelly and others warning of the dangers Trump poses to democracy — either because they do not believe it, because they endorse some of Trump’s hard-line ideas or because they feel Harris is the worse choice regardless. Even some of Harris’s advisers have questioned privately whether the focus is a smart one in the final stretch.
“People care about what impacts them, what impacts their families. Is Kamala Harris going to spend time with all these nonsensical attacks?” said Jason Miller, a Trump campaign spokesman. “The remaining undecided voters who are out there are angry about how the country is being run and are going to make a decision on that. They are concerned about the economy, they are concerned about the border.”
Some of Trump’s advisers have questioned privately why Harris is not talking about abortion more and believe they still hold the advantage on the economy and immigration.
“Everyone knows who Donald Trump is 100 percent,” one of his advisers said. “What are you going to really tell voters about Donald Trump that they don’t already know?”
Harris’s advisers respond that she does not have to choose between the threat to democracy or pocketbook issues as her closing focus, but can make both pillars of her final argument. The vice president has argued that Trump’s actions on Jan. 6, as well as his 34 felony convictions and the multiple legal cases pending against him, are emblematic of how he would govern — focused on himself rather than the people he is supposed to serve.
To make that case, Harris has spent significant time with former GOP congresswoman Liz Cheney of Wyoming in the final stretch of the campaign in an effort to persuade Republicans turned off by Trump to cast their votes for her. Last week, Harris campaigned with Cheney in the “blue wall” states of Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan, where Cheney spoke about why Trump’s willingness to upend long-held democratic norms is compelling her to vote for a Democrat for the first time in her life.
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Opinion
Bezos was within his rights to screw this up
Bossing around editorial boards is the province of a newspaper owner.
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Jeff Bezos in Glasgow, Scotland, in November 2021. (Chris Jackson/Getty Images)
It turns out editorial writers don’t like having their work spiked.
Los Angeles Times Editorials Editor Mariel Garza — and others — resigned last week, after owner Patrick Soon-Shiong blocked an endorsement of Vice President Kamala Harris. A parallel process is underway at The Post following the Friday announcement by publisher William Lewis that committed the paper to a policy of presidential non-endorsements, starting right away.
Poof went a pending Post endorsement of Harris.
Two columnists have left The Post, and editorial writers David E. Hoffman and Molly Roberts have both stepped down from their positions on the Editorial Board. “I find it untenable and unconscionable that we have lost our voice,” wrote Hoffman in a letter to David Shipley, who leads the paper’s Opinions section. The turmoil here on K Street is a slow-moving plume, in part because many staffers didn’t foresee this turn of events, myself very much included. In my Oct. 14 media chat, I received a question from D.C. activist and author Peter Rosenstein: Why hasn’t The Post made a presidential endorsement? My response obsessed over the Editorial Board’s likely considerations in timing the piece for maximum impact, never considering the absurd possibility that the endorsement wouldn’t happen.
Well, it didn’t happen. What did I miss and, more important, what now?
No aggressive news organization avoids the occasional public crisis over coverage breakdowns and management upheaval. The Post has contributed its share, reaching back to the Janet Cooke scandal to the Iraq War debacle to the more recent imbroglio over Lewis’s botched transition plan following the departure of former executive editor Sally Buzbee.
Such low points notwithstanding, The Post’s ownership has a decades-long record of taking valiant and principled stands on fundamental journalistic questions. Donald Graham, who led The Post under various titles for decades before the sale to Jeff Bezos in 2013, was famous on Wall Street for abjuring the gospel of short-term profitability. “We don’t do quarters; we don’t do forecasts,” Graham told financial analysts in 2006.
Bezos carried the torch onward. He invested in the newsroom, doubling its head count; he invested in the website; he invested in branding (“Democracy Dies in Darkness”); he proved stalwart when reporter Jason Rezaian was imprisoned in Iran and when Saudi agents assassinated contributing columnist Jamal Khashoggi.
All the while, he avoided foisting his business agenda on the newsroom. “People had a lot of suspicions about Bezos, but the reality is that he never interfered in our coverage in any way, and I was very grateful for that,” former executive editor Martin Baron told the New Yorker. “And he did that despite enormous pressure from Donald Trump, starting when Trump began his campaign for the presidency in 2015.”
Now this. Many others have eloquently described the sudden endorsement outage as a cowardly and unprincipled act. Agreed. I have little to add to the condemnations that have already piled up, other than to say that the decision falls in that column of watershed Post moments. A lot of people would have forgotten about the Harris endorsement slated to run in the newspaper; few will forget about the decision not to publish it.
In a Monday op-ed defending his decision, Bezos fell back on the well-documented decline of trust in the American media, citing Gallup data indicating that our industry has now underperformed even Congress in this category. Although such endorsements don’t move voters, he argues, what they “actually do is create a perception of bias. A perception of non-independence. Ending them is a principled decision, and it’s the right one.” One issue here: Newspapers have been endorsing candidates for centuries; cratering trust is a modern phenomenon. Another issue here: Endorsements are nothing more than an opinion about the central question of a political campaign, just the way other editorials are opinions about a policy debate, a natural disaster or Metro funding.
So is Bezos taking the first step toward banishing opinions altogether from this space? If so, gird for more subscriber defections, catastrophic ones.
A committee of one — Bezos — is the arbiter of all these questions. In a statement on the controversy, the Washington Post Guild said, “The message from our chief executive, Will Lewis — not from the Editorial Board itself — makes us concerned that management interfered with the work of our members in Editorial.” Watch out there, Guild: That’s like accusing an NFL coach of “interfering” with the offensive game plan.
“I think it is within his prerogative to make these kinds of decisions,” Baron said of Bezos in an interview Monday. “He is the owner, owns 100 percent of The Washington Post. I think at other places, frequently the owner or the controlling shareholder or the publisher will get involved in those kinds of decisions. A lot depends on the particular institution.”
Correct: Setups vary, but under long-established and idiosyncratic newspapering practices, editorial board decisions fall under the suzerainty of the owner and publisher. To the extent they see fit, they can tell the board what to say about this or that issue.
Preferably, those orders steer clear of decreeing silence on autocratic creep.
Oligarchs who use their editorial boards to pronounce on the world have injected some whimsy into American history. Consider Robert McCormick, the legendary aristocrat who led the Chicago Tribune from 1925 through 1955. In his book “The Colonel,” Richard Norton Smith wrote that McCormick once issued editorial guidance that garden “weeds are among our principal evils.” What’s more, McCormick mounted a campaign for the reform of rabies laws after a stray dog killed one of his sheep and told his editorialists to debunk the image of Franklin D. Roosevelt as a Hudson Valley farmer. “What he has is a large suburban estate on the Hudson River. His so-called farm is nothing but suburban acreage … held for speculation.” On less weighty matters, McCormick was a committed isolationist.
Does Bezos’s late-in-the-game endorsement policy portend a retrenchment of McCormick’s “era of personal journalism” at The Post? “Absolutely, that’s what it is,” said Andy Rosenthal, a former editorial page editor at the New York Times. “The Post is not hiding the fact that that is what it is.” Rosenthal worked under former New York Times Co. chairman Arthur Sulzberger Jr.; given that title, Sulzberger “could have come in with a list” of imperatives for the editorial board. But that would have been “insane,” said Rosenthal, and instead Sulzberger talked through the issues with the board.
Bezos is fashioning a third model: years and years of exemplary statesmanlike deference and patience, punctuated by an editorially violent and destabilizing fiat. Hey, it’s his paper.
Цитата:
Post owner Bezos defends endorsement decision.
Facing criticism and subscriber cancellations, Jeff Bezos published an opinion piece Monday calling his decision to end presidential endorsements “principled” and signaled more changes to come.
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The Washington Post's logo near the entrance of its headquarters on K Street Northwest. (Sarah L. Voisin/The Washington Post)
Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos published an opinion piece Monday night on the news organization’s website, defending his decision Friday to end the paper’s practice of endorsing presidential candidates on its opinion page while lamenting that the move was announced so close to Election Day.
Bezos — who did not block presidential endorsements in the two campaigns since he bought The Post in 2013 — called his move to halt presidential endorsements “a principled decision” and also cast doubt on their usefulness. Bezos said his decision is aimed at restoring public trust in the news media.
“Presidential endorsements do nothing to tip the scales of an election,” he wrote. “No undecided voters in Pennsylvania are going to say, ‘I’m going with Newspaper A’s endorsement.’ None. What presidential endorsements actually do is create a perception of bias. A perception of non-independence.”
The op-ed, which appears in Tuesday’s print edition, comes as nearly one-third of The Post’s 10-member editorial board stepped down Monday in the wake of Bezos’s decision.
The board members — all of whom have said they intend to remain at the newspaper in other roles — include David E. Hoffman, a 42-year Washington Post veteran who was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for columns on autocracy and resigned Thursday, the day before publisher William Lewis shocked the board by announcing the decision to cease a long-standing practice of issuing endorsements in presidential races. Board member Molly Roberts confirmed that she is stepping down. The third board member is Mili Mitra, who also serves as director of audience for The Post’s opinions section. Bezos made no mention of the resignations in his opinion piece.
“Let me give an analogy,” Bezos wrote. “Voting machines must meet two requirements. They must count the vote accurately, and people must believe they count the vote accurately. The second requirement is distinct from and just as important as the first.”
A draft of The Post editorial board’s planned endorsement of Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic candidate, had been written but was closely held by opinion editor David Shipley, and had not been shared with the full board before Lewis’s announcement, according to two board members who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe internal discussions. According to reporting by The Post and other news organizations, Bezos made the decision to end presidential endorsements.
“I would also like to be clear that no quid pro quo of any kind is at work here,” Bezos wrote. “Neither campaign nor candidate was consulted or informed at any level or in any way about this decision. It was made entirely internally.”
Lewis has said Bezos did not see the endorsement draft or “opine” on it, and Bezos did not say in his piece whether he’d seen the draft.
Bezos did, however, express regret about the timing, which has prompted widespread criticism that he was attempting to aid Trump by suppressing the unpublished Harris endorsement, perhaps in hopes that the Republican candidate would be helpful to Bezos’s business interest if he defeats Harris.
“I wish we had made the change earlier than we did, in a moment further from the election and the emotions around it,” he wrote. “That was inadequate planning, and not some intentional strategy.”
Bezos also discussed revelations in news reports that Dave Limp, an executive of one of his companies, Blue Origin, had met with Trump the same day the presidential endorsements decision was unveiled.
“I sighed when I found out, because I knew it would provide ammunition to those who would like to frame this as anything other than a principled decision. But the fact is, I didn’t know about the meeting beforehand,” Bezos wrote. “There is no connection between it and our decision on presidential endorsements, and any suggestion otherwise is false.”
His varied business interests are prone to suggest the appearance of conflicts, he said.
“I once wrote that The Post is a “complexifier” for me,” he said. “It is, but it turns out I’m also a complexifier for The Post.”
While praising The Post’s journalists, he also made clear that he considers the status quo unacceptable. Without going into detail, he wrote that “we will have to exercise new muscles. Some changes will be a return to the past, and some will be new inventions. Criticism will be part and parcel of anything new, of course.”
He also expressed concern about public perception of journalism writ large.
“We must be accurate, and we must be believed to be accurate. It’s a bitter pill to swallow, but we are failing on the second requirement.”
The Post’s editorial board is part of the newspaper’s opinions section, which operates independently from the staff that provides news coverage. The remaining members of the board following Monday’s board resignations are Shipley, Charles Lane, Stephen Stromberg, Mary Duenwald, James Hohmann, Eduardo Porter and Keith B. Richburg.
“It’s extremely difficult for us because we built this institution,” Hoffman said in an interview before the public announcement of his decision to step down. “But we can’t give up on our American democracy or The Post.”
In a letter to Shipley about his decision to step down, Hoffman wrote, “I believe we face a very real threat of autocracy in the candidacy of Donald Trump.”
Hoffman — who took a buyout in 2009 but returned to the paper in 2012 to join the editorial board — has won two Pulitzer Prizes. In 2010, he was awarded the prize for his book “The Dead Hand: The Untold Story of the Cold War Arms Race and Its Dangerous Legacy.”
Roberts — who writes columns on technology and society, as well as serving on the editorial board — said she decided to step down from the board “because the imperative to endorse Kamala Harris over Donald Trump is about as morally clear as it gets.”
“Donald Trump is not yet a dictator,” she wrote. “But the quieter we are, the closer he comes — because dictators don’t have to order the press to publish cooperatively … the press knows and it censors itself.”
Цитата:
Opinion
The hard truth: Americans don’t trust the news media
A note from our owner.
By Jeff Bezos
October 28, 2024 at 7:26 p.m. EDT
Jeff Bezos is the owner of The Washington Post.
In the annual public surveys about trust and reputation, journalists and the media have regularly fallen near the very bottom, often just above Congress. But in this year’s Gallup poll, we have managed to fall below Congress. Our profession is now the least trusted of all. Something we are doing is clearly not working.
Let me give an analogy. Voting machines must meet two requirements. They must count the vote accurately, and people must believe they count the vote accurately. The second requirement is distinct from and just as important as the first.
Likewise with newspapers. We must be accurate, and we must be believed to be accurate. It’s a bitter pill to swallow, but we are failing on the second requirement. Most people believe the media is biased. Anyone who doesn’t see this is paying scant attention to reality, and those who fight reality lose. Reality is an undefeated champion. It would be easy to blame others for our long and continuing fall in credibility (and, therefore, decline in impact), but a victim mentality will not help. Complaining is not a strategy. We must work harder to control what we can control to increase our credibility.
Presidential endorsements do nothing to tip the scales of an election. No undecided voters in Pennsylvania are going to say, “I’m going with Newspaper A’s endorsement.” None. What presidential endorsements actually do is create a perception of bias. A perception of non-independence. Ending them is a principled decision, and it’s the right one. Eugene Meyer, publisher of The Washington Post from 1933 to 1946, thought the same, and he was right. By itself, declining to endorse presidential candidates is not enough to move us very far up the trust scale, but it’s a meaningful step in the right direction. I wish we had made the change earlier than we did, in a moment further from the election and the emotions around it. That was inadequate planning, and not some intentional strategy.
I would also like to be clear that no quid pro quo of any kind is at work here. Neither campaign nor candidate was consulted or informed at any level or in any way about this decision. It was made entirely internally. Dave Limp, the chief executive of one of my companies, Blue Origin, met with former president Donald Trump on the day of our announcement. I sighed when I found out, because I knew it would provide ammunition to those who would like to frame this as anything other than a principled decision. But the fact is, I didn’t know about the meeting beforehand. Even Limp didn’t know about it in advance; the meeting was scheduled quickly that morning. There is no connection between it and our decision on presidential endorsements, and any suggestion otherwise is false.
When it comes to the appearance of conflict, I am not an ideal owner of The Post. Every day, somewhere, some Amazon executive or Blue Origin executive or someone from the other philanthropies and companies I own or invest in is meeting with government officials. I once wrote that The Post is a “complexifier” for me. It is, but it turns out I’m also a complexifier for The Post.
You can see my wealth and business interests as a bulwark against intimidation, or you can see them as a web of conflicting interests. Only my own principles can tip the balance from one to the other. I assure you that my views here are, in fact, principled, and I believe my track record as owner of The Post since 2013 backs this up. You are of course free to make your own determination, but I challenge you to find one instance in those 11 years where I have prevailed upon anyone at The Post in favor of my own interests. It hasn’t happened.
Lack of credibility isn’t unique to The Post. Our brethren newspapers have the same issue. And it’s a problem not only for media, but also for the nation. Many people are turning to off-the-cuff podcasts, inaccurate social media posts and other unverified news sources, which can quickly spread misinformation and deepen divisions. The Washington Post and the New York Times win prizes, but increasingly we talk only to a certain elite. More and more, we talk to ourselves. (It wasn’t always this way — in the 1990s we achieved 80 percent household penetration in the D.C. metro area.)
While I do not and will not push my personal interest, I will also not allow this paper to stay on autopilot and fade into irrelevance — overtaken by unresearched podcasts and social media barbs — not without a fight. It’s too important. The stakes are too high. Now more than ever the world needs a credible, trusted, independent voice, and where better for that voice to originate than the capital city of the most important country in the world? To win this fight, we will have to exercise new muscles. Some changes will be a return to the past, and some will be new inventions. Criticism will be part and parcel of anything new, of course. This is the way of the world. None of this will be easy, but it will be worth it. I am so grateful to be part of this endeavor. Many of the finest journalists you’ll find anywhere work at The Washington Post, and they work painstakingly every day to get to the truth. They deserve to be believed.
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С интересом и понятными ожиданиями, Dimitriy.
