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Abbreviated Pundit Roundup: Misadventures of the oracle [1]

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Date: 2024-06-09  

Abbreviated Pundit Roundup is a long-running series published every morning that collects essential political discussion and analysis around the internet.

We begin today with Greg Sargent of The New Republic and the implications of what the shoe salesman means by getting “revenge” and “retribution” on Democrats.

The idea that Trump should pursue “revenge” and “retribution” for prosecutions is everywhere on the right. After a federal judge ordered Steve Bannon to surrender to prison, numerous MAGA influencers, including the MAGA God King himself, angrily vowed such payback. Republicans have said Trump should “fight fire with fire” (Senator Marco Rubio) and that GOP district attorneys should declare open season on Democrats (Stephen Miller). Trump, of course, has offered many versions of this, including to Dr. Phil and Hannity. In the media, this story tends to be framed as follows: Will Trump seek “revenge” for his legal travails, or won’t he? But that framing unwittingly lets Trump set the terms of this debate. It implies that he is vowing to do to Democrats what was done to him. But that’s not what Trump is actually threatening. Whereas Trump is being prosecuted on the basis of evidence that law enforcement gathered before asking grand juries to indict him, he is expressly declaring that he will prosecute President Biden and Democrats solely because this is what he endured, meaning explicitly that evidence will not be the initiating impulse.

As part of The Nation’s special issue on Project 2025, Joan Walsh takes a look at what Project 2025’s plans are for American health care. In his chapter of Project 2025’s Mandate for Leadership, Severino promises to make HHS the “Department of Life” again—and to go even farther than Azar did. The plan outlines how HHS would use its power as a federal agency to dramatically curtail access to reproductive health services. Severino pledges that HHS will restrict access to birth control, rescind the FDA’s approval of medication abortion, and abolish what he calls “mail-order abortion”—the latter by using the long-dormant Comstock Act to prosecute anyone who provides such medication by mail. HHS will also focus on weeding out programs geared to the rights of LGBT people, especially anyone who is transgender. It would direct subsidies for childcare facilities to parents themselves—all in a punitive, misguided effort to shore up the nuclear family. This isn’t a public health document; it’s a theocratic manifesto, an attempt at ensuring public health through ultra-orthodox Christianity. [...] Severino would also leave Americans far more vulnerable to crass capitalism when they are seeking healthcare. He wants HHS to promote private-sector Medicare Advantage plans, which—take it from me, I did my homework—may give healthy “young” seniors decent benefits at lower costs, but which get more expensive, and more restrictive, as seniors age and need more care. He recommends making Medicare Advantage the “default option” once a person qualifies for the senior-citizen health program at age 65, which would be a boon to private insurance companies, since it essentially privatizes the wildly popular public program. Severino would also repeal recent legislation allowing Medicare to negotiate better prices for commonly used drugs. And he doesn’t like Medicaid any better: He would weaken the ACA provisions that rely on Medicaid expansion and would impose work requirements on recipients. Beth Reinhard of The Washington Post introduces us to another Trump loyalist; one who feels that we are living in a “post-Constitution time.” A battle-tested D.C. bureaucrat and self-described Christian nationalist is drawing up detailed plans for a sweeping expansion of presidential power in a second Trump administration. Russ Vought, who served as the former president’s budget chief, calls his political strategy for razing long-standing guardrails “radical constitutionalism.” He has helped craft proposals for Donald Trump to deploy the military to quash civil unrest, seize more control over the Justice Department and assert the power to withhold congressional appropriations — and that’s just on Trump’s first day back in office. [...] Since Trump left office, Vought has led the Center for Renewing America, part of a network of conservative advocacy groups staffed by former and potentially future Trump administration officials. Vought’s rise is a reminder that if Trump is reelected, he has said he will surround himself with loyalists eager to carry out his wishes, even if they violate traditional norms against executive overreach. Manuel G. Pascual of El País in English cites a series of new studies that are effective in combating misinformation yet difficult to implement.

The most effective way to combat misinformation is to try to ensure that the websites that spread it receive less advertising revenue. This is the conclusion reached by a study published recently in the scientific journal Nature, after researchers analyzed 1,276 misinformation websites and 4,209 legitimate websites between 2019 and 2021, as well as the behavior of 42,595 unique advertisers, who placed more than 9.5 million ads in that period. [...] The study confirms, firstly, that online misinformation is financed mainly by advertising revenue and, secondly, that the automation of the allocation of advertising space amplifies the financing of misinformation. Next, it examines how the financing of these websites affects advertisers and, finally, proposes measures to reduce this investment. According to NewsGuard, this sum isn’t minor: for every $2.16 of digital advertising revenue spent in legitimate media, American advertisers spend $1.00 on websites that misinform users. The approach of this work is innovative because, until now, most interventions to try to counteract the proliferation of misinformation have focused on the consumer side: developing fact-checking websites, labeling responsible content, asking readers not to spread content they don’t trust, etc. The goal of Amad and his colleagues, however, was to take action on the supply side.

Today is the last day of voting for elections in the European Parliament and Jennifer Rankin of Guardian tells us the trends to watch for.

In the first European election since Britain left the EU, voters are being asked to elect 720 lawmakers to the world’s only directly elected transnational parliament. Opinion polls suggest the mainstream, pro-European groups will retain their majority, but see their clout and influence challenged like never before, with nationalist and far-right parties on course to gain a record number of seats. Once derided as a talking-shop, the European parliament has gained significant powers over the last two decades. MEPs are joint legislators with national government ministers on a swathe of EU policies, such as climate action, artificial intelligence, workers’ rights and farm subsidies. The parliament, which sits in Brussels and Strasbourg, will also have the final say on whether the German centre-right politician, Ursula von der Leyen, gets a coveted second-term as European Commission president, one of the most powerful positions in European politics. [...] The latest polls suggest Meloni’s Brothers of Italy is on course to triple its percentage share of the vote, at the expense of her coalition partners, the far-right League. While Le Pen has made overtures to Meloni to create a nationalist “super-group”, most analysts expect the Italian leader to shun that alliance in favour of a smaller, more coherent right-wing group that could work with von der Leyen’s commission. Polls suggest the nationalist and far-right parties could return a record 165 MEPs, but these are likely to remain scattered over two, possibly three groups as well as unaffiliated MEPs, blunting its influence.

Matthew Kamanski of POLITICO looks at what elections in Mexico, India, and South Africa may have to tell us.

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