Do you approve or disapprove of the decision to indict Trump? (Click image to enlarge)

Dear Commons Community,

Sixty percent of Americans approve of the indictment of former President Donald Trump, according to a new CNN Poll conducted by SSRS following the news that a New York grand jury voted to charge him in connection with hush money payments made to adult film actress Stormy Daniels. About three-quarters of Americans say politics played at least some role in the decision to indict Trump, including 52% who said it played a major role.

Independents largely line up in support of the indictment – 62% approve of it and 38% disapprove. Democrats are near universal in their support for the indictment (94% approve, including 71% who strongly approve of the indictment), with Republicans less unified in opposition (79% disapprove, with 54% strongly disapproving).   As reported by CNN.

While views on the indictment are split along party lines, the poll finds that majorities across major demographic divides all approve of the decision to indict the former president. That includes gender (62% of women, 58% of men), racial and ethnic groups (82% of Black adults, 71% of Hispanic adults, 51% of White adults), generational lines (69% under age 35; 62% age 35-49; 53% age 50-64; 54% 65 or older) and educational levels (68% with college degrees, 56% with some college or less).

CNN has reported that the former president faces more than 30 counts related to business fraud, but the indictment remains under seal and the charges were not publicly known at the time of the survey. The investigation relates to a $130,000 payment made by Trump’s then-personal attorney, Michael Cohen, to Daniels in late October 2016, days before the 2016 presidential election, to silence her from going public about an alleged affair with Trump a decade earlier. Trump has denied the affair. At issue in the investigation is the payment made to Daniels and the Trump Organization’s reimbursement to Cohen.

A scant 10% overall see Trump as blameless regarding payments made to Daniels, but Americans are divided about whether his actions were illegal or merely unethical. About 4 in 10 say he acted illegally (37%), 33% unethically but not illegally, and another 20% say they aren’t sure. Only 8% of political independents say Trump did nothing wrong, and among the rest, they are mostly on board with the indictment even if they aren’t already convinced Trump did something illegal.

Even among those who disapprove of the indictment, the perception that Trump’s actions were questionable is fairly widespread, with about half in that group saying Trump did something wrong regarding payments to Daniels (52%). Far more in that group say he acted unethically rather than illegally, though (49% unethical, 3% illegal), with the remainder split between thinking he did nothing wrong (23%) and not being sure (24%). Among those who approve of the decision to indict Trump, just 1% say his actions were not wrong at all, while 59% call them illegal and 23% unethical.

The survey suggests that the indictment has not had a major effect on views of Trump personally. The poll finds his favorability rating at 34% favorable to 58% unfavorable, similar to his standing in a January CNN poll, in which 32% held a favorable view of the former president and 63% an unfavorable one. Among Republicans, 72% hold a favorable view in the new poll, similar to the 68% who felt that way in January.

Most Americans (76%) believe politics played at least some role in the decision to indict Trump, who is both a former president and current candidate for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination. About half (52%) see it as having played “a major role” in the decision, while around a quarter say it played a minor role and 14% no role at all. Another 10% are unsure if politics was a factor in the grand jury’s vote.

Nearly all Republicans, 93%, see the indictment as politically motivated, including 83% who say politics played a major role. Among independents, 52% say politics played a major role; that drops to 25% among Democrats.

Americans are split over the effect the indictment may have on democracy. About three in 10 say the decision strengthens US democracy (31%) and an identical share say it weakens democracy (31%). Roughly a quarter say it has no effect on democracy (23%) and 15% are unsure. Republicans broadly see it as weakening democracy (62% say so). Two-thirds of those who disapprove of the indictment say the same (67%) as do 54% of those who believe politics played a major role in the decision to indict. Most Democrats see it as strengthening democracy (55%). Among those who approve of the indictment, 48% say it strengthens democracy and 30% that it has no effect on it.

The poll also finds that Americans split over the investigation launched by House Republicans into Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s handling of the Trump case, with 38% saying they disapprove of the GOP’s efforts to investigate him, 35% saying they approve, and a sizable 27% unsure how they feel about the investigation.

More than 9 in 10 Americans have heard at least a little about the historic indictment, with 51% saying they’ve heard a lot. Democrats are most apt to be highly tuned in, with 56% saying they’ve heard a lot about the charges, compared with 48% each among independents and Republicans.

The CNN poll was conducted by SSRS on March 31 and April 1 among a random national sample of 1,048 adults surveyed by text message after being recruited using probability-based methods. Results for the full sample have a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 4.0 percentage points. It is larger for subgroups.

This is not good news for Trump’s ambition to become our next president.  Not only are Independents supportive of his indictment but more than 20% of Republicans are in favor of it.

Tony

Courtesy of EAB

Dear Commons Community,

The following article is part of Saving the College Dream, a collaboration between AL.com, The Associated Press, The Christian Science Monitor, The Dallas Morning News, The Hechinger Report, The Post and Courier in Charleston, South Carolina, and The Seattle Times, with support from the Solutions Journalism Network.

Entitled, “Community colleges are reeling. ‘The reckoning is here’”, it paints a stark evaluation of the difficulties that our community colleges are facing.  Declining enrollments, stagnant budgets and a super-heated job market are creating “no win” situations for many of them.

Below is the article in its entirety as published by The Associated Press.

Tony

When Santos Enrique Camara arrived at Shoreline Community College in Washington state to study audio engineering, he quickly felt lost.

“It’s like a weird maze,” remembered Camara, who was 19 at the time and had finished high school with a 4.0 grade-point average. “You need help with your classes and financial aid? Well, here, take a number and run from office to office and see if you can figure it out.”

Advocates for community colleges defend them as the underdogs of America’s higher education system, left to serve the students who need the most support but without the money to provide it. Critics contend this has become an excuse for poor success rates and for the kind of faceless bureaucracies that ultimately led Camara to drop out after two semesters. He now works in a restaurant and plays in two bands.

With scant advising, many community college students spend time and money on courses that won’t transfer or that they don’t need. Though most intend to move on to get bachelor’s degrees, only a small fraction succeed; fewer than half earn any kind of credential. Even if they do, many employers don’t believe they’re ready for the workforce.

Now these failures are coming home to roost.

Community colleges are far cheaper than four-year schools. Published tuition and fees last year averaged $3,860, versus $39,400 at private and $10,940 at public four-year universities, with many states making community college free.

Yet consumers are abandoning them in droves. The number of students at community colleges has fallen 37% since 2010, or by nearly 2.6 million, according to the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center.

“The reckoning is here,” said Davis Jenkins, senior research scholar at the Community College Research Center at Teachers College, Columbia University. (The Hechinger Report, which produced this story, is an independent unit of Teachers College.)

Those numbers would be even more grim if they didn’t include high school students taking dual-enrollment courses, according to the Community College Research Center. High school students make up nearly a fifth of community college enrollment.

Yet even as these colleges serve fewer students, their already low success rates have by at least one measure gotten worse.

While four out of five students who begin at a community college say they plan to go on to get a bachelor’s degree, only about one in six of them actually manages to do it. That’s down by nearly 15% since 2020, according to the clearinghouse.

Two-year community colleges have the worst completion rates of any kind of university or college. Like Camara, nearly half of students drop out, within a year, of the community college where they started. Only slightly more than 40% finish within six years.

These frustrated wanderers include a disproportionate share of Black and Hispanic students. Half of all Hispanic and 40% of all Black students in higher education are enrolled at community colleges, the American Association of Community Colleges says.

The spurning of community colleges has implications for the national economy, which relies on their graduates to fill many of the jobs in which there are shortages. Those include positions as nurses, dental hygienists, emergency medical technicians, vehicle mechanics and electrical linemen, and in fields including information technology, construction, manufacturing, transportation and law enforcement.

Other factors are also contributing to the enrollment declines. Strong demand in the job market for people without college educations has made it more attractive for many to go to work. Thanks to so-called degree inflation, many jobs that require higher education call for bachelor’s degrees where associate degrees or certificates were once sufficient. And private, regional public and for-profit universities, facing enrollment crises of their own, are competing for the same students.

Many Americans increasingly are questioning the value of going to college at all.

But they are particularly rejecting community college. In Michigan, for instance, the proportion of high school graduates enrolling in community college fell more than three times faster from 2018 to 2021 than the proportion going to four-year universities, according to that state’s Center for Educational Performance and Information.

Those who do go complain of red tape and other frustrations.

Megan Parish, who at 26 has been in and out of community college in Arkansas since 2016, said she waits two or three days to get answers from advisers. “I’ve had to go out of my way to find people, and if they didn’t know the answer, they would send me to somebody else, usually by email.” Hearing back from the financial aid office, she said, can take a month.

Oryanan Lewis doesn’t have that kind of time. Lewis, 20, is in her second year at Chattahoochee Valley Community College in Phenix City, Alabama, where she is pursuing a degree in medical assisting. And she’s already behind.

Lewis has the autoimmune disease lupus and thought she’d get more personal attention at a smaller school than at a four-year university; Chattahoochee has about 1,600 students. But she said she didn’t receive the help she needed until her illness had almost derailed her degree.

She failed three classes and was put on academic probation. Only then did she hear from an intervention program.

“I feel like they should talk to their students more,” Lewis said. “Because a person can have a whole lot going on.”

Employers, meanwhile, are unimpressed with the quality of community college students who manage to graduate. Only about a third agree that community colleges produce graduates who are ready to work, according to a survey released in December by researchers at the Harvard Business School.

Community colleges get less government money to spend, per student, than public four-year universities: $8,695, according to the Center for American Progress, compared with $17,540.

Yet community college students need more support than their counterparts at four-year universities. Twenty-nine percent are the first in their families to go to college, 15% are single parents and 68% work while in school. Twenty-nine percent say they’ve had trouble affording food and 14% affording housing, according to a survey by the Center for Community College Student Engagement.

Community colleges that fail these students can’t just blame their smaller budgets, said Joseph Fuller, professor of management practice at Harvard Business School.

“The lack of resources inside community colleges is a legitimate complaint. But a number of community colleges do extraordinarily well,” Fuller said. “So it’s not impossible.”

Maggie Haberman

Dear Commons Community, 

Donald Trump is expected to fly to New York this week from his home in Florida to be arrested. For now, the specific charges are unknown because the indictment is under seal, but they involve his role in the payment of hush money during the 2016 presidential campaign to cover up an extramarital affair.    To help us get ready for the week ahead, David Leonhardt interviewed his  colleague Maggie Haberman, who’s known for her behind-the-scenes reporting on Trump. 

Below is the interview.

Tony

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Asa Hutchinson

Dear Commons Community,

Asa Hutchinson, who recently completed two terms as Arkansas governor, announced yesterday he will seek the Republican presidential nomination, positioning himself as an alternative to Donald Trump just days after the former president was indicted by a grand jury in New York.

Hutchinson said Trump should drop out of the race, arguing “the office is more important than any individual person.”

Hutchinson, who announced his candidacy on ABC’s “This Week,” said he was running because “I believe that I am the right time for America, the right candidate for our country and its future.” He added: “I’m convinced that people want leaders that appeal to the best of America and not simply appeal to our worst instincts.”

He is the first Republican to enter the race since Trump became the only former U.S. president to ever face criminal charges. Hutchinson’s candidacy will test the GOP’s appetite for those who speak out against Trump. Others who have criticized Trump, including former Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan, have opted against a campaign, sensing the difficulty of prevailing in a primary.

Hutchinson, in an Associated Press interview later yesterday, said it was important for voters to have an alternative leader and “not simply go by default to somebody who is really wrapped around what happened in the past.”

“I don’t think you have to be blustery. I think you can be honest and authentic, and that’s what I want to be able to offer,” he said.

In a sign of Trump’s continued grip on the Republican base, most in the party — even those considering challenging him for the nomination — have defended him against the New York indictment. Hutchinson, notably, had said Friday that Trump should “step aside,” calling the charges a “distraction.”

In addition to Trump, Hutchinson joins a Republican field that also includes former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley and entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is expected to jump into the race in the summer, while U.S. Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina, former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and former Vice President Mike Pence are among those considering bids.

“I think I stand out by stating my convictions and my vision for the country,” Hutchinson told the AP. “I think that is illustrated in the last week, in how I’ve handled the Trump indictment, how I’ve handled how we need to move forward as a party and a country.”

The formal campaign announcement will come April 26 in Bentonville, his hometown and also the home of Walmart’s headquarters. He will be campaigning in the coming weeks in Iowa, Indiana and Kentucky.

He said he could be very competitive in places like Iowa, where campaigning involves “retail politics” like chatting with potential voters in diners. He also said he believed he would be financially competitive, though, “certainly it’s not going to be at the level of the Donald Trumps of the world.”

Hutchinson, 72, left office in January after eight years as governor. He has ramped up his criticism of the former president in recent months, calling another Trump presidential nomination the “worst scenario” for Republicans and saying it will likely benefit President Joe Biden’s chances in 2024.

The former governor, who was term-limited, has been a fixture in Arkansas politics since the 1980s, when the state was predominantly Democratic. A former congressman, he was one of the House managers prosecuting the impeachment case against President Bill Clinton.

Hutchinson served as President George W. Bush’s head of the Drug Enforcement Administration and was an undersecretary of the Department of Homeland Security.

As governor, Hutchinson championed a series of income tax cuts as the state’s budget surpluses grew. He signed several abortion restrictions into law, including a ban on the procedure that took effect when the U.S. Supreme Court struck down Roe v. Wade last year. Hutchinson, however, has said he regretted that the measure did not include exceptions for rape or incest.

Hutchinson earned the ire of Trump and social conservatives last year when he vetoed legislation banning gender-affirming medical care for children. Arkansas’ majority-Republican Legislature overrode Hutchinson’s veto and enacted the ban, which has been temporarily blocked by a federal judge.

Trump called Hutchinson a “RINO” — a Republican In Name Only — for the veto. Hutchinson’s successor, former White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders, has said she would have signed the legislation.

Since taking office, she’s signed legislation aimed at reinstating the currently blocked ban by making it easier to sue providers of such care to minors.

Hutchinson, who endorsed Sanders and signed other restrictions on transgender youth into law, said the Arkansas ban went too far and that he would have signed the measure if it had focused only on surgery.

Although he has supported Trump’s policies, Hutchinson has become increasingly critical of the former president’s rhetoric and lies about the 2020 presidential election. He said Trump’s call to terminate parts of the Constitution to overturn the election hurt the country.

Hutchinson also criticized Trump for meeting with white nationalist leader Nick Fuentes and the rapper Ye, who has praised Adolf Hitler and spewed antisemitic conspiracy theories. Hutchinson has contrasted that meeting to his own background as a U.S. attorney who prosecuted white supremacists in Arkansas in the 1980s.

An opponent of the federal health care law, Hutchinson after taking office supported keeping Arkansas’ version of Medicaid expansion. But he championed a work requirement for the law that was blocked by a federal judge.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, Hutchinson tried to push back against misinformation about the virus with daily news conferences and a series of town halls he held around the state aimed at encouraging people to get vaccinated.

The former governor is known more for talking policy than for fiery speeches, often flanked by charts and graphs at his news conferences at the state Capitol. Instead of picking fights on Twitter, he tweets out Bible verses every Sunday morning.

I think Hutchinson would run a formidable campaign against Biden.  He will have difficulty persuading the Republicans that he should be their candidate.

Tony

The New York Times. Credit…Laura Salafia.

Dear Commons Community,

Cade Metz, a  technology reporter for The New York Times has a featured article today, based on an interview with OpenAI CEO, Sam Altman.  Entitled, “The ChatGPT King Isn’t Worried, but He Knows You Might Be,” Altman comments on what he sees as the pros and cons of totally changing the world as we know it. And if he does make human intelligence useless, he has a plan to fix it.   Here is an excerpt. 

“In 2019, Altman believed artificial general intelligence (A.G.I) would bring the world prosperity and wealth like no one had ever seen. He also worried that the technologies his company was building could cause serious harm — spreading disinformation, undercutting the job market. Or even destroying the world as we know it.

“I try to be upfront,” he said. “Am I doing something good? Or really bad?”

In 2019, this sounded like science fiction.

In 2023, people are beginning to wonder if Sam Altman was more prescient than they realized.

Now that OpenAI has released an online chatbot called ChatGPT, anyone with an internet connection is a click away from technology that will answer burning questions about organic chemistry, write a 2,000-word term paper on Marcel Proust and his madeleine or even generate a computer program that drops digital snowflakes across a laptop screen — all with a skill that seems human.

As people realize that this technology is also a way of spreading falsehoods or even persuading people to do things they should not do, some critics are accusing Mr. Altman of reckless behavior.

This past week, more than a thousand A.I. experts and tech leaders called on OpenAI and other companies to pause their work on systems like ChatGPT, saying they present “profound risks to society and humanity.”

The article concludes as follows:

“Mr. Altman believes that effective altruists have played an important role in the rise of artificial intelligence, alerting the industry to the dangers. He also believes they exaggerate these dangers.

As OpenAI developed ChatGPT, many others, including Google and Meta, were building similar technology. But it was Mr. Altman and OpenAI that chose to share the technology with the world.

Many in the field have criticized the decision, arguing that this set off a race to release technology that gets things wrong, makes things up and could soon be used to rapidly spread disinformation. On Friday, the Italian government temporarily banned ChatGPT in the country, citing privacy concerns and worries over minors being exposed to explicit material.

Mr. Altman argues that rather than developing and testing the technology entirely behind closed doors before releasing it in full, it is safer to gradually share it so everyone can better understand risks and how to handle them.

He told me that it would be a “very slow takeoff.”

When I asked Mr. Altman if a machine that could do anything the human brain could do would eventually drive the price of human labor to zero, he demurred. He said he could not imagine a world where human intelligence was useless.

If he’s wrong, he thinks he can make it up to humanity.

He rebuilt OpenAI as what he called a capped-profit company. This allowed him to pursue billions of dollars in financing by promising a profit to investors like Microsoft. But these profits are capped, and any additional revenue will be pumped back into the OpenAI nonprofit that was founded back in 2015.

His grand idea is that OpenAI will capture much of the world’s wealth through the creation of A.G.I. and then redistribute this wealth to the people. In Napa, as we sat chatting beside the lake at the heart of his ranch, he tossed out several figures — $100 billion, $1 trillion, $100 trillion.

If A.G.I. does create all that wealth, he is not sure how the company will redistribute it. Money could mean something very different in this new world.

But as he once told me: “I feel like the A.G.I. can help with that.”

Altman may be in a world by himself but he is honest when admitting that he is not sure what  A.G.I. will bring!

The entire article is worth a read.

Tony

Asa Hutchinson

Dear Commons Community,

Asa Hutchinson, the former Republican Arkansas governor, who is seeking his party’s presidential nomination, does not think Trump should be running for president.

“That’s the standard that I’ve set as governor: When a public official is indicted, I think in regard for the office, and the office is more important than the person, they should step aside and that standard should apply here,” Hutchinson said Friday on Fox Business Network  (see interview in the video below).

When anchor Stuart Varney pressed him on if he thought Trump should now step aside, Hutchinson said, “Well, I do, but he’s not going to. Only he can make that decision.”

Hutchinson’s remarks came in stark contrast with other possible Republican competitors for the White House, who rushed to criticize the as-yet undisclosed charges against Trump.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis said he would not help extradite Trump from Florida, even though extradition is not likely to be an issue in Trump’s case. “The weaponization of the legal system to advance a political agenda turns the rule of law on its head. It is un-American,” he said in a tweet.

Gov. Glenn Youngkin of Virginia, who has also been mentioned as a possible contender, tweeted, “Arresting a presidential candidate on a manufactured basis should not happen in America.” And Nikki Haley, Trump’s former ambassador to the United Nations who announced her run in February, tweeted, “This is more about revenge than it is about justice.”

In contrast to those statements, Hutchinson’s reaction neither called the indictment politically motivated or attempted to link the New York prosecutor to billionaire financier George Soros, as DeSantis’ and other high-profile Republicans’ statements did.

“It is a dark day for America when a former President is indicted on criminal charges. While the grand jury found credible facts to support the charges, it is important that the presumption of innocence follows Mr. Trump,” Hutchinson said.

“We need to wait on the facts and for our American system of justice to work like it does for thousands of Americans every day.”

Prior to his comments on Fox Business, Hutchinson struck a slightly softer tone in the statement following the indictment Thursday, saying voters should ultimately decide Trump’s fitness for office.

“Donald Trump should not be the next President, but that should be decided by the voters,” he said.

Still, Hutchinson in the past has shown a willingness to go after Trump, even as Trump has continued to be the clear favorite in party polls well ahead of next year’s GOP primaries.

“We need to wait on the facts and for our American system of justice to work like it does for thousands of Americans every day.”

In January, he said the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection attempt at the U.S. Capitol should disqualify Trump from running. And in December, he said Trump’s endorsement of diminishing value for Republicans.

“There’s a cost that comes with his endorsement, we saw this time and time again in the midterm elections,” he said in an interview on CNN.

While Hutchinson avoided the strident tone of many other Republicans Friday, he did say as a former U.S. attorney he likely would not have brought the New York case.

“I don’t believe this is a good case to bring. I would not have brought this case, based upon the facts that I know. But I also believe we have to be patient and we have to have some confidence in our system of justice that it’s going to work in this case, too,” he said.

Asked by Varney why he did not seem as outraged by the case as many of his fellow Republicans, Hutchinson had a simple answer.

“Well, I’m not an outrageous person,” he said.

Hutchinson is a Republican who consistently puts the country over his party!

Tony

——————————————————————————————————

Dear Commons Community,

In his statement condemning the Manhattan grand jury indictment of Donald Trump, Florida Governor and likely Republican presidential candidate Ron DeSantis mentioned neither the former president nor the district attorney who will prosecute the case, Alvin Bragg, by name. But he did name-check George Soros, a favorite target of antisemitic conspiracy theories — twice.

For some, the implication was obvious.  As reported by Yahoo News and other news media.

“It’s hard to even call it a dog whistle of antisemitism,” former assistant U.S. Attorney Andrew Weissmansaid of the Florida governor’s statement in a cable news appearance.

Soros indirectly helped fund Bragg’s run for office, but he is not involved in the case against the former president, which is focused on an allegedly improper 2016 payment to the former adult-film actress Stormy Daniels.

Soros and Bragg have never met.

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin and other Republicans similarly invoked Soros in denouncing the decision to indict Trump.

Last week, Sen. J.D. Vance of Ohio, a Republican who has been accused of trafficking in xenophobia and white supremacy, charged that Soros and Bragg “are trying to turn America into a third-world country.”

On Thursday night, a single hour of Fox News primetime programming featured 10 mentions of Soros, including two descriptions of Bragg as a Soros “puppet.”

A Hungarian American billionaire who funds progressive causes, Soros is frequently invoked as shorthand for a nexus of wealth, progressive politics and cultural clout.

“Soros offers a combination that is useful to his detractors: born abroad, Jewish, in finance, high profile,” Emily Tamkin, the author of a book about Soros, told Yahoo News. She added that because Soros is “genuinely influential in politics, finance and philanthropy,” conspiracy theories about him are easily concocted.

George Soros

When Bragg was running to become the Manhattan district attorney in 2021, Color of Change, a group backed by Soros, spent roughly $500,000 on efforts on Bragg’s behalf, such as on mailers and voter turnout.

Trump, who is running for president again, is avidly using the indictment to solicit campaign contributions, depicting himself as the target of the “Soros Money Machine.” He has long faced accusations of antisemitism, although his daughter Ivanka and son-in-law Jared Kushner are observant Jews.

Trump has routinely trafficked in antisemitic tropes about dual loyalty, wealth and parsimony.

Last year, in a post on his social media platform, Truth Social, he attacked American Jews — who mostly vote Democratic — for not rewarding his staunch support of Israel’s right-wing government. “Our wonderful Evangelicals are far more appreciative of [Trump’s record on Israel] than the people of the Jewish faith, especially those living in the U.S,” he complained.

Trump warned that “U.S. Jews have to get their act together and appreciate what they have in Israel — Before it is too late!”

Thursday’s indictment allowed Trump and his loyal supporters the opportunity of reviving a grievance-laden narrative that invariably turns the former president into a victim of nefarious forces.

“This was their mission,” Eric Trump, the president’s son, said on Fox News of Bragg and his prosecutors. “This is what they promised Soros. It’s why they received the big checks.”

Soros survived the Holocaust as a child. As an adult, he moved to New York, where he started a successful hedge fund. His philanthropy through the Open Society Foundations supports civic institutions in emerging democracies. In the U.S., Open Society funds education, public health and independent media not-for-profit organizations.

According to experts in antisemitism, invoking the 92-year-old philanthropist serves to promote toxic ideas about Jews. “A person who promotes a Soros conspiracy theory may not intend to promulgate antisemitism,” according to the ADL, formerly known as the Anti-Defamation League. “But Soros’ Jewish identity is so well-known that in many cases it is hard not to infer that meaning.”

Trump allies including Tucker Carlson, the popular Fox News anchor, have promoted the “great replacement” theory, which holds that Democrats — purportedly funded by Soros and other members of elites — are trying to bring immigrants of color into the United States in order to create an electorally insurmountable nonwhite political bloc.

Fears of racial obsolescence powered the white supremacists who rampaged through Charlottesville, Va., in 2017, shouting that “Jews will not replace us” and, in the following year, were also cited by Robert Bowers, who killed 11 people at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh.

During the racial justice protests of 2020, some conservatives falsely accused Soros of encouraging violence.

The most recent attacks on Soros come as the nation faces an unprecedented increase in antisemitic incidents, which became more frequent at around the time Trump first announced he was running for the presidency in mid-2015.

“When in doubt, blame the Jews,” the intelligence analyst and scholar Aki J. Peritz wrote on Twitter in response to DeSantis.

Progressive activists have called the claim that Soros controls Bragg not only antisemitic but also racist. Last week, after Trump called Bragg a “Soros-backed animal,” a group of Black and Jewish lawmakers from New York condemned Trump’s “incendiary racist and anti-Semitic” rhetoric.

Trump and his antisemitic GOP goonies have no sense of shame when it comes to denigrating others.

Tony

President Biden speaks to reporters in Rolling Fork, Miss., on Friday. (Mandel Ngan/AFP via Getty Images)

Dear Commons Community,

As President Biden strode out of the West Wing yesterday,  a reporter asked him if he had any thoughts about the indictment of former President Donald Trump by a Manhattan grand jury.

“I have no comment on Trump,” Biden said.

In refusing to say anything about the legal drama in which Trump now finds himself embroiled, Biden is remaining diligently on script, which has amounted to a blank page when it comes to the several federal and state investigations targeting his predecessor.  Asreproted by Yahoo Newws and other news outlets.

Known on Capitol Hill and during his time as Barack Obama’s vice president for his inveterate loquacity, Biden has been notably disciplined in speaking about Trump, whom he used to refer to as “the former guy.” As last year’s midterm elections neared, Biden took to lambasting the MAGA Republicans he claimed were beholden to Trump and his extremist ideas.

But he has never commented on Trump’s legal challenges, which include a federal investigation into the handling of classified documents, a Georgia inquiry into electoral interference and District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s case in New York.

Invariably, the White House refers the matter to the Department of Justice.

Invariably, the Department of Justice says nothing.

That is precisely how the White House wants things to stay. With partisan sentiment already on such florid display on Capitol Hill, the president and his advisers believe that he benefits by remaining well above the fray. (It only helps that the Justice Department typically doesn’t comment on ongoing investigations, making the job easier for White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre, as well as for Biden himself.)

As pundits on cable news debated the merits of Bragg’s emerging case against Trump on Friday, Biden toured an area of Mississippi devastated by tornadoes. With him was the state’s Republican governor, Tate Reeves, as well as Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith, also a member of the GOP.

The dichotomy recalled Biden’s infrastructure-related trip to the Kentucky-Ohio border earlier this year, which took place as House Republicans were in the midst of a contentious speakership fight. While recriminations flew on Capitol Hill, the president basked in a bipartisan Midwestern glow, standing next to Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine, both of whom are Republicans.

If the mood in Mississippi was understandably much more somber, it nevertheless broadcast a similar message, one the White House is especially eager to promulgate ahead of next year’s presidential election: that Biden is a serious president, focused on serious business, while some Republicans and conservatives push antisemitic tropes and threaten violence.

The contrast redounds to Biden’s benefit, the White House believes — if only he can remain quiet.

Good advice!

Tony