Donald Trump's evil support for Russian Vladimir Putin risks undermining NATO's alliance

Mississippi Free Press Editor and CEO Donna Ladd said that the newspaper should report on Donald Trump saying he would encourage Russia to attack certain American allies. She was right.

Doanld Trump and Vladimir Putin in Helsinki, Finland on July 16, 2018.

Several major national media outlets were fumbling the ball and either ignoring those remarks or giving them less weight than they deserve. Mississippi Free Press editor said we should set an example for how national media ought to cover such extreme policy declarations. So we did.

"Trump Encourages Russia to Attack American Allies: ‘Do Whatever the Hell They Want’", Mississippi Free Press.

"We may be a local Mississippi outlet, but this is important. It should be leading every newspaper in the country."

North AtlanticTreaty Organization

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump said he encourages Russia to attack U.S. allies who he believes does not contribute enough money toward NATO defense costs. 

I can’t express how gratifying it has been to see people around the country, frustrated with many national publications’ treatment of stories like this, embracing our decision.

Although we are a Mississippi publication; local reporting in the Magnolia State is and always will be our primary focus. But, we  believe there is value in ensuring that we’re telling readers about important national stories, too—and drawing attention to news that we believe deserves more attention. 

National stories affect Mississippi, too. “Hell, if a paper called NEW YORK Times 😊can report urgent national news, then a site called MISSISSIPPI Free Press can too,” said our editor.

Donald Trump would encourage Russia to attack U.S. allies whom he claims do not contribute enough to the NATO defense costs, he told a crowd of supporters to (wrongminded❗) cheers at a South Carolina rally.

“One of the presidents of a big country (big country❓) stood up and said, ‘Well sir 😧⍰ 😕, if we don’t pay and we’re attacked by Russia, will you protect us?’ I said, ‘You didn’t pay❓ You’re delinquent❓’ He said, ‘Yes, let’s say that happened.’ No, I would not protect you. In fact, I would encourage them to do whatever the hell they want,” the Republican frontrunner for his party’s 2024, presidential nomination said.

Dismantling the North Atlantic Treaty Organization has been a goal of the evil 😈Russian President Vladimir Putin, who orchestrated efforts in 2016, to help Trump and hurt Clinton’s electoral prospects. Members of NATO—which includes the U.S., Canada and 29 European countries—pledge to defend any other nation that gets attacked. (Dismantling NATO is dangerous.)

Mississipi Free Press plans to report more stories about national and state interest in the future, which may even involve a Washington, D.C.-based reporter or collaboration to help better cover Mississippi’s congressional delegation and the policy decisions that affect Mississippians.

#TrumpIsPutinPuppet

Donald Trump is a selfish grifter

Echo opinion letter published in the Holland Sentinel newspaper, in Michigan:

Donald Trump will never change.(Ya' think❓)

Approximately four years ago, I saw Donald Trump in the Oval Office, at the Resolute Desk, with a smarmy grin on his face. He was hawking a donor's products. Since then, I have refused to purchase anything Goya®. Donald Trump always has been and always will be a transactional grifter.

"Do something for me (give me money), and I will do something for you (use the Oval Office to sell for you)."

Do you have a "that's enough" moment? No matter what he tells you, Donald Trump cares about only one person: himself. Nothing has changed. Think carefully on November 5th. (IOW Vote Blue❗)

From Barbara Webbe in West Olive, Michigan

Donald Trump is not interested in supporting democracy but admires dictators

An election choice like no other- democracy or fascism❓

Unlike our current president Joe Biden, the alternative is disasterous.  Trump aims to be a dictator❗

Echo opinion letter published in the Waterbury Connecticut Republican Americans newspaper:

Are we better off now compared to four years ago? (Maine Writer- IMO, the COVID pandemic and Trump are synonomous!)

The answer is a resounding yes, if for no other reason than this: We now have a president who, should he lose the next election, will accept the results graciously and respectfully.

The contrast with the former president is clear. He acted and continues to act in an erratic and dangerous manner when faced with an unfavorable outcome. He did everything in his power to circumvent the will of a country that emphatically rejected him in 2020, going so far as to foment an attack on the Capitol, Congress, and on his own vice president! 

Trump considers the protections enshrined in our Constitution mere suggestions for him to twist, subvert, and defile as he sees fit. And still he claims to be a member of the ‘law and order’ party.

He aspires to be a dictator, there can be no denying that – he said it himself. His idols are Kim Jong Un, Vladimir Putin, and Vikor Orbán. Is that what we want for our country? The American Revolution was fought and won to break free of the shackles of a king. Why would any American be in favor of further eroding our democracy and subjecting the United States to the iron fist of authoritarianism? 😡

“You can’t love your country only when you win.”

#VoteBlue2024  #VoteBidenHarris

From Stephen Tarnowski from Southbury Connecticut

Donald Trump needs an Evangelical reality test: Philander, racist, sexual abuser and Bible heretic

How can evangelicals like Mike Johnson tolerate Trump?
Echo opinion by LZ Granderson published in the Lost Angeles Times newspaper:

At the 2016, Republican National Convention, when I told Donald Trump’s “God whisperer” 😟Paula White that he referred to her as his pastor, she said she was his spiritual advisor — as if that were some sort of “get out of jail free” card for her.

And yet White worked hard in our conversation to convince me that the foul-mouthed person on the campaign trail was godly.
Then came her turn to speak at the convention. Most of the seats were empty when White took the stage, which says a lot about the interest attendees had in the words of Trump’s spiritual advisor.

It was as if their minds were already made up.

This was after Trump referred to a book of the Bible as “Two Corinthians” in a speech at Liberty University, the private Christian college where Jerry Falwell Jr. was president, before a sex scandal forced him to resign later that year. 

This was after Trump mocked a journalist’s disability. This was after he came down the escalator at Trump Tower and kicked off his campaign by bashing Mexico and Latinos before offering “and some, I assume, are good people.” Trump had shown what kind of person he was, and somehow still had evangelical Christians’ support.

But, he must have feared there would be some limit to their capacity for cognitive dissonance, because he did not want evangelical voters to find out about his 2006, affair with Stormy Daniels. 

In fact, Trump paid her money to stay quiet days before the election. I don’t know if that’s what White spiritually advised him to do, but she went on to serve Trump at the White House, so she must have made peace with the deceit.

The reason Trump is on trial in New York isn’t because of President Biden or Democrats. It’s because he wanted to deceive a crucial bloc of voters and in doing so is accused of falsely claiming the hush payment as legal services on business documents. And he is accused of falsifying documents in connection with other crimes.

In other words, it’s not a witch hunt. It’s repercussions.

Now, it appears, it’s House Speaker Mike Johnson’s turn to find some sort of balance between his personal faith and his professional interest. The joint news conference between Trump and Johnson at Mar-A-Lago, will most likely help Johnson keep his job — which was murky after Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene called his leadership into question — but it does nothing to erase the fact he’s aligned with a thrice-married adulterer who mocked Jimmy Carter the day after Rosalynn Carter, his wife of 77 years, entered hospice.

The image of Johnson standing at the lectern — as Trump stood behind him like a jack-o’-lantern the day after Halloween — was frightening. Unnerving. It was not a show of strength; it was another sign of how far some white evangelicals are willing to drag their faith through the mud just to be next to power.

Christians believe in a thing called grace, and Lord knows I’ve benefited from a lot of it in life. But, Trump doesn’t express remorse for his affair with Daniels or the hush money spent to trick his Christian supporters. He has been found liable for sexual abuse. He’s bragged about grabbing women by their private parts and kissing them without consent.

The fact that Trump could be forgiven is irrelevant if he hasn’t changed or stopped his abuses or given any indication of regret. What we have in Trump is not a story of redemption but a clear account of who he really is and always has been.

In February during a rally, he said this about his opponent Nikki Haley: “Where’s your husband? Oh, he’s away. He’s away. What happened to her husband? What happened to her husband? Where is he? He’s gone!”

It was no secret: Haley’s husband was deployed overseas with the South Carolina National Guard, something she discussed openly at campaign events. Trump knew “what happened to her husband.” But he just gambled that some in his audience didn’t know and that he could score cheap political points by smearing a service member.

You don’t have to act surprised. That’s the kind of person Trump has always been, regardless of whether he had a “God whisperer” on staff. This is the kind of person Johnson cozied up to  in a desperate grab at keeping his job. (Maine Writer IMO- Speaker Johnson was no guest at Mar-A-Lago.  Betcha' he paid his own way including getting an invoice for his meals. Wanna' bet?)

I’m not sure what the former president’s current spiritual advisor is whispering in his ear these days, but by now it’s clear he doesn’t need to listen to get reelected.

(P.S. Maine Writer- Hypocricy on steroids!)

Donald Trump is finally on trial in Manhattan!

Echo essay published in Trump On Trial, in Intelligencer by Margaret Hartmann:

April 15, 2024, courtroom photo in Manhattan

“Sleepy Joe” was always a low-energy Trump nickname. Donald Trump’s derisive name for Joe Biden never had the zing of “Crooked Hillary” or “Liddle Marco,” and it was too similar to other Trump nicknames like “Sleepin’ Bob” Casey and “Sleepy Eyes” Chuck Todd. Now there’s a new problem with it that no one anticipated: It’s easy to turn it back on “Sleepy Don” when he nods off — repeatedly! — during a criminal trial over hush-money payments he allegedly made to cover up an affair with a porn star.

In an interview during a break, journalist Maggie Haberman told CNN’s Jake Tapper that Trump looked sleepy during previous court appearances but this incident was worse:

During day one of Trump’s criminal trial in Manhattan — which will determine whether he broke the law by paying off Stormy Daniels just before the 2016, election, then disguising the payments — the former president reportedly fell asleep in the courtroom. Maggie Haberman wrote on the New York Times’ trial liveblog on April 16:

• Trump appeared to be sleeping. His head kept dropping down and his mouth went slack.
• Haberman said Trump was roused a short time later:
• Trump was apparently jolted back awake, noticing the notes his lawyer passed him several minutes ago.

Stewart Bishop, a reporter for Law360 who was in the courtroom, made the same observation: "It very much looks like Trump is dozing off right now." Perhaps Trump was embarrassed — but incredibly, it wasn’t enough to keep him from dozing off again during the proceedings again, the next morning.

Donald Trump gets no support from officials who served in his failed administration

Echo opinion letter published in the Cedar Rapids Iowa newspaper, "The Gazette":

Trump is sleeping during the Manhattan trial

The question Donald Trump’s supporters must ask themselves is how they reconcile their (wrongminded❗) support for him against the damming testimonies coming from those who served him and know him best. The list includes top military advisers, lawyers, economic advisers, some members of his Cabinet, press officials, and campaign aides.

John Kelly, a retired four-star general who served as his chief of staff, criticized Trump as having a “contempt for our democratic institutions, our Constitution and the rule of law.” 

Trump, he said, is “[A] person that did not want to be seen in the presence of military amputees because ‘it doesn’t look good for me’ … and rants that our most precious heroes who gave their lives in America’s defense are ‘losers’ and wouldn’t visit their graves in France.” (In fact, Trump referred to Marines buried at cemetery in France in crude and derogatory terms, a former senior official says, reported in CNN by Jim Acosta.)

Maine Veterans Cemetery in Augusta, Maine

Former defense secretary Mark Esper said Trump is not “fit for office because he puts himself first, and I think anybody running for office should put the country first.”

Former White House counsel Ty Cobb claimed, “He never cared about America, its citizens, its future or anything but himself … In fact, as history will show from his divisive lies, as well as from his unrestrained contempt for the rule of law and his related crimes, his conduct and mere existence have hastened the demise of democracy and of the nation.”

These assessments come from conservative Republicans who know the man intimately. Ignoring them risks turning our democracy into an autocracy governed by a lawless and vengeful leader.

From Thomas Hill in Cedar Falls Iowa

P.S. from Maine Writer:  Notice the reticence and "no shows" from Donald Trump's family while he is on trial for 91 indictments. 

Donald Trump owns chaos he created and supported during his administration

Trump’s final year in office proves incompetence an echo opinion letter published in Florida's Orlando Sentinel: 

We don’t examine the effectiveness of the presidency of Abraham Lincoln by excluding the Civil War. We don’t look at George W. Bush’s effectiveness by excluding the financial market meltdown in 2008. Why do supporters of Donald Trump disregard his (chaotic!) fourth year in office?

Since George Washington’s time in office, we have judged a president’s effectiveness based on what shape they left the country in upon exiting the Oval office. Bottom line is, virtually no one was better off four years ago than they are today.

Whether you believe that Trump was a victim of circumstances or a poor administrator, he owns everything that occurred under his presidency. The tax cuts for the rich, the riots, the pandemic. He owns it all. That is what you sign up for when you choose to run for this country’s highest office.

In 1993 (after George H.W. Bush), 2009 (after George W. Bush), and in 2021 (after Trump) the elected presidents (Clinton, Obama and Biden) inherited a country in economic shambles and each of these Democratic presidents had to focus their first years of service restoring the economic wellbeing of this country.

Trump inherited a robust economy but couldn’t successfully drive the car for four short years.  #Vote Blue 2024  #VoteBidenHarris2024

Dan McGarvey in Orlando, Florida

Trump rallies are evidence of his bizarrre cult attraction fueled by delusional ideation

Former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley gets a broken ⏰clock award for this comment: Nikki Haley argues Donald Trump is always followed by ‘chaos’ before a large South Carolina crowd (AP report). Donald Trump Is His Own Chaos Whisperer

Chaos on steroids❗ Reported in The New York Times by Katherine Miller*- So, Trump opened his Allentown Pennsylvania rally by presenting a delusional fake news lead. He told theMAGA cult crowd that Israel was under attack, adding that “it would not have happened if we were in office — they know that, we know that, everyone knows that.” Onstage, at rallies over the last year, Trump has done these alt-universe loops in which if the election hadn’t been taken from him, nothing bad would have befallen the world — no embarrassing Afghanistan withdrawal, no Hamas attack on Israel, no Russian invasion of Ukraine, no inflation. Sometimes, with the way Trump talks, he can subtly lock more and more people into his inability to process his 2020, defeat. He does this by pairing his personal misfortune with that of the entire globe. (IOW Trump is detached from reality. Moreover, IMO, he should be receiving psychiatric medical care!)

But, in Allentown on Saturday night, these hypotheticals ended someplace else. When talking about the world being ablaze, Trump told the crowd about something Viktor Orban, the illiberal prime minister of Hungary, had said: “Bring Donald Trump back as president and it’ll all stop.” (👀Frank L. Baum wrote a classic story about delusional behavior like "Bring Trump Back😟😓".....like "follow the yellow brick road....OMG❗)  

As Trump put it, “He said something else, and I wouldn’t say it, I wouldn’t really like the word. ‘China was afraid of Donald Trump, Russia was afraid of Donald Trump, everybody was afraid of Donald Trump’ — I don’t want to say that. I want to say they respected me.”
Quantifying chaos is hard to do, but the last eight years have been some of the most chaotic in decades in American politics. And for the last year, Trump talked a lot about ending all this chaos simply through his resumption of the presidency — a kind of leviathan, superman thing. 

Delusional Trumpzi ideation! 

Before the rally, the Trump campaign played a movie-trailer-esque video that warned of nuclear annihilation. 

There is a theory advanced by some Republicans that Trump’s chaos and unpredictability deter others’ impulsive behavior — that other leaders could not quite read how the United States might respond, so the anxiety provoked by that uncertainty stalled out otherwise bigger and more drastic shifts in the world. After she left the administration, Nikki Haley, a former ambassador to the United Nations, framed her and Trump’s approaches to diplomats in the manner of a good-cop-bad-cop routine. “He would, like, ratchet up the rhetoric,” she said in 2018, “and then I would go back to the ambassadors and say, ‘You know, he is pretty upset. I can’t promise you what he is going to do. I’ll tell you, if we do these sanctions, it will keep him from going too far.’”

Trump himself will allude to his own chaos as preventive. Onstage, he sometimes claims he prevented Vladimir Putin from invading Ukraine earlier on the strength of personal negotiation in which  Trump threatened a wild action. “‘Vladimir, don’t do it, don’t do it — if you do it, this is what’s going to happen.’ Someday I’ll tell you what I said,” Mr. Trump said at an Iowa rally on October 7. “He said, ‘No way you’ll do that.’ I said, ‘I will. I will; I’ll do it.’ And he didn’t believe me.” (This symptom is like the psychiatric patient who hears voices! There is medication available to treat these delusions.)

Then, in a possibly telling insight into how Trump views politics, he added: “But, he believed me 10 percent! That’s all you needed!” He said the same was true of Xi Jinping and Taiwan — Mr. Xi had believed him 10 percent and “that’s enough.” The idea of Trump injecting just enough creeping doubt or pain into the equation of how a person perceives what he’s saying explains a lot about American political chaos over the last eight years.

When you press on different parts of Trump’s reasoning, you find problems. For one thing, talking to Tucker Carlson last year, Mr. Orban framed his praise the opposite way from what Trump said in Pennsylvania: “The best foreign policy of the recent several decades belongs to him. He did not initiate any new war. He treated nicely the North Koreans and Russia, even the Chinese, you know. He did the policy that was the best one for the Middle East, the Abraham Accords.” And there are real crosscurrents even at Trump rallies: At the Pennsylvania event he opened by saying, “God bless Israel.” But at one point Trump supporters also chanted “Genocide Joe” — the chant about the president’s handling of Israel’s war in Gaza and the thousands of Palestinians who’ve died — to which Trump said, “They’re not wrong.”

Since the pandemic began, in particular, it can feel as though we live in a more precarious, interlocking world, where one bad development can threaten even worse ones, like a wider regional conflict in the Middle East. Trump talks a lot about what wouldn’t have happened, but a lot may still happen next year, regardless of whether he or President Biden is elected. (Hey Trumpzi cult❓  Praise Isreal or call their actions Genocide❗ Chaos on steroids.)

Politics involves the art of perception, particularly during campaigns. And Trump (has a Fascist instinct). He knows how perception works — how to build up themes and crush opponents. Those skills have reshaped American politics. But not everything works like that.

One thing he barely talked about on Saturday night was abortion. “Sometimes with Great Events come difficulties,” he posted recently about how he helped end Roe v. Wade, just before announcing that he would leave the issue to the states, rather than pursuing a federal ban. But leaving abortion to the states also doesn’t resolve the issue — one state supreme court can essentially end in vitro fertilization programs, and another can ban abortion in the space of a month.

Indeed, Trump clearly wants this to go away, for people to not talk about it, for voters to just kind of land on a middle ground, quietly. But people have strong beliefs about what abortion law should look like, beliefs that exist outside of Trump, in part because — like war or the pandemic — abortion policy is not one of perception. Abortion is banned or permitted in real life. (Women risk death if they are unable to receive abortion care in emergent pregnancy situations.)

Katherine Miller is a staff writer and editor in The New York Times Opinion

Immigrants support the economy where aging population cannot fill jobs

Echo essay reported in The New York Times by Jeanna Smialek.

Maine has a lot of lobsters. It also has a lot of older people, ones who are less and less willing and able to catch, clean and sell the crustaceans that make up a $1 billion industry for the state. Companies are turning to foreign-born workers to bridge the divide. 

Chadai Gatembo, 18, who came to Maine two years ago from the Democratic Republic of Congo.

“Folks born in Maine are generally not looking for manufacturing work, especially in food manufacturing,” said Ben Conniff, a founder of Luke’s Lobster, explaining that the firm’s lobster processing plant has been staffed mostly by immigrants since it opened in 2013, and that foreign-born workers help keep “the natural resources economy going.”

Maine has the oldest population of any U.S. state, with a median age of 45.1. As America overall ages, the state offers a preview of what that could look like economically — and the critical role that immigrants are likely to play in filling the labor market holes that will be created as native-born workers retire.

Nationally, immigration is expected to become an increasingly critical source of new workers and economic vibrancy in the coming decades.

It’s a silver lining at a time when huge immigrant flows that started in 2022, are straining state and local resources across the country and drawing political backlash. While the influx may pose near-term challenges, it is also boosting the American economy’s potential. Employers today are managing to hire rapidly partly because of the incoming labor supply. The Congressional Budget Office has already revised up both its population and its economic growth projections for the next decade in light of the wave of newcomers.

In Maine, companies are already beginning to look to immigrants to fill labor force gaps on factory floors and in skilled trades alike as native-born employees either leave the work force or barrel toward retirement.

Governor Mills has requested for the state's legislators to work to create an Office of New Americans, an effort to attract and integrate immigrants into the work force, for instance. Private companies are also focused on the issue. The Luke’s Lobster founders started an initiative called Lift All Boats in 2022 to supplement and diversify the fast-aging lobster fishing industry. It aims to teach minorities and other industry outsiders how to lobster and how to work their way through the extensive and complex licensing process, and about half of the participants have been foreign-born.

They included Chadai Gatembo, 18, who came to Maine two years ago from the Democratic Republic of Congo. Mr. Gatembo trekked into the United States from Central America, spent two weeks in a Texas detention center and then followed others who were originally from Congo to Maine. He lived in a youth shelter for a time, but now resides with foster parents, has learned English, has been approved for work authorization and is about to graduate from high school.

Mr. Gatembo would like to go to college, but he also enjoyed learning to lobster last summer. He is planning to do it again this year, entertaining the possibility of one day becoming a full-fledged lobsterman.

“Every immigrant, people from different countries, moved here looking for opportunities,” Mr. Gatembo said. “I have a lot of interests — lobster is one of them.”

A smaller share of Maine’s population is foreign-born than in the country as a whole, but the state is seeing a jump in immigration as refugees and other new entrants pour in.

That echoes a trend playing out nationally. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that the United States added 3.3 million immigrants last year and will add another 3.3 million in 2024, up sharply from the 900,000 that was typical in the years leading up to the pandemic.

One-third to half of last year’s wave of immigrants came in through legal channels, with work visas or green cards, according to a Goldman Sachs analysis. But a jump in unauthorized immigrants entering the country has also been behind the surge, the economists estimate.

Many recent immigrants have concentrated in certain cities, often to be near other immigrants or in some cases because they were bused there by the Texas governor, Greg Abbott, after crossing the border. Miami, Denver, Chicago and New York have all been big recipients of newcomers.

In that sense, today’s immigration is not economically ideal. As they resettle in clusters, migrants are not necessarily ending up in the places that most need their labor. And the fact that many are not authorized to work can make it harder for them to fit seamlessly into the labor market.


Adriana Hernandez, 24, a mother of four from Caracas, Venezuela, is living with her family in a one-bedroom apartment in Aurora, Colorado. After journeying through the Darién Gap and crossing the border in December, Ms. Hernandez and her family turned themselves in to immigration authorities in Texas and then traveled by bus to Colorado.

They have no work authorization as they wait for a judge to rule on their case, so Ms. Hernandez’s husband has turned to day labor to keep them housed and fed.

“Economically, I’m doing really badly, because we haven’t had the chance to get a work permit,” Ms. Hernandez said in Spanish.

ImageAdriana Hernandez, a mother of four from Caracas, Venezuela, who lives with her family in Aurora, Colo., is awaiting a work authorization.Credit...Jimena Peck for The New York Times

It’s a common issue in the Denver area, where shelters were housing nearly 5,000 people at the peak early this year, said Jon Ewing, a spokesman with Denver Human Services. The city has helped about 1,600 people apply for work authorization, almost all successfully, as it tries to get immigrants on their feet so they do not overwhelm the local shelter options.

Most people who gain authorization are finding work fairly easily, Mr. Ewing said, with employers like carpenters and chefs eager for the influx of new workers.

Nationally, even with the barriers that prevent some immigrants from being hired, the huge recent inflow has been helping to bolster job growth and speed up the economy.

“I’m very confident that we would not have seen the employment gains we saw last year — and we certainly can’t sustain it — without immigration,” said Wendy Edelberg, the director of the Hamilton Project, an economic policy research group at the Brookings Institution.

The new supply of immigrants has allowed employers to hire at a rapid pace without overheating the labor market. And with more people earning and spending money, the economy has been insulated against the slowdown and even recession that many economists once saw as all but inevitable as the Federal Reserve raised interest rates in 2022 and 2023.

Ernie Tedeschi, a research scholar at Yale Law School, estimates that the labor force would have decreased by about 1.2 million people without immigration from 2019 to the end of 2023 because of population aging, but that immigration has instead allowed it to grow by two million.

Economists think the immigration wave could also improve America’s labor force demographics in the longer run even as the native-born population ages, with a greater share of the population in retirement with each year.

The nation’s aging could eventually lead to labor shortages in some industries — like the ones that have already started to surface in some of Maine’s business sectors — and it will mean that a smaller base of workers is paying taxes to support federal programs like Social Security and Medicare.

Immigrants tend to be younger than the native-born population, and are more likely to work and have higher fertility. That means that they can help to bolster the working-age population. 

Previous waves of immigration have already helped to keep the United States’ median age lower and its population growing more quickly than it otherwise would.

“Even influxes that were difficult and overwhelming at first, there were advantages on the other side of that,” Mr. Tedeschi said.

In fact, immigration is poised to become increasingly critical to America’s demographics. By 2042, the Congressional Budget Office estimates, all American population growth will be due to immigration, as deaths cancel out births among native-born people. And largely because immigration has picked up so much, the C.B.O. thinks that the U.S. adult population will be 7.4 million people larger in 2033, than it had previously expected.

Immigration could help reduce the federal deficit by boosting growth and increasing the working-age tax base, Ms. Edelberg said, though the impact on state and local finances is more complicated as they provide services like public schooling.

But there are a lot of uncertainties. For one thing, nobody knows how long today’s big immigration flows will last. Many are spurred by geopolitical instability, including economic crisis and crime in Venezuela, violence in Congo, and humanitarian crises across other parts of Africa and the Middle East.

The C.B.O. itself has based its projections on guesses: It has immigration trailing off through 2026 because it anticipates a slow reversion to normal, not because it is actually clear when or how quickly immigration will taper.

National policies could also reshape how many people are able to come to — and stay in — the United States.

Chenda Chamreoun, who came to the United States from Cambodia in 2013, is a quality assurance supervisor at Luke’s Lobster’s processing plant in Saco, Maine.Credit...Greta Rybus for The New York Times

The influx of immigrants has caused problems in many places as the surge in population overwhelms local support systems and leads to competition for a limited supply of housing. As that happens, immigration has become an increasingly critical political issue, surging to the top of the list of the nation’s most important problems in Gallup polling.

Former President Donald J. Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee, has warned of an immigrant-created crime wave. He has pledged to deport undocumented immigrants en masse if he wins the presidential election in November.

The Biden administration has used its executive authority to open a back door to allow thousands of migrants into the United States temporarily, while also taking steps to repair the legal refugee program. But as Democratic leaders have joined Republicans in criticizing President Biden over migration in recent months, he has embraced a more conservative tone, even pledging to “shut down” the border if Congress passed a bill empowering him to do so.

Politics are not the only wild card: The economy could also slow. If that happened, fewer immigrants might want to come to the United States, and those who did might struggle to find work.

Some economists fret that immigrants will compete against American workers for jobs, particularly those with lower skill levels, which could become a more pressing concern in a weaker employment market. But recent economic research has suggested that immigrants mostly compete with one another for work, since they tend to work in different roles from those of native-born Americans.

At the Luke’s Lobster processing plant in Saco, Maine, Mr. Conniff has often struggled to find enough help over the years, despite pay that starts at $16 per hour. But he has hired people like Chenda Chamreoun, 30, who came to the United States from Cambodia in 2013 and worked her way up from lobster cleaning to quality assurance supervisor as she learned English.

Now, she is in the process of starting her own catering business. Immigrants tend to be more entrepreneurial than the nation as a whole — another reason that they could make the American economy more innovative and productive as its population ages.

Ms. Chamreoun explained that the move to the United States was challenging, but that it had taught her how to realize goals. “You have more abilities than you think.”

J. Edward Moreno contributed reporting from New York, and Zolan Kanno-Youngs from Washington.

New Hampshire Chris Sununu visibly lost his political way and needs a moral compass

ABC News’s George Stephanopoulos conducted a skillful and revealing interview with New Hampshire Governor Chris Sununu. Over nine damning minutes, Sununu illustrated how deep into the Republican Party the rot has gone.

The context for the interview is important. Former New Hampshire Governor Sununu is hardly a MAGA enthusiast. During the 2024, GOP primary, he supported Nikki Haley, and over the past several years, he’s been a harsh critic of Donald Trump. Sununu has referred to him as a “loser,” an “asshole,” and “not a real Republican.” He has said the nation needs to move past the “nonsense and drama” from the former president and that he expects “some kind of guiltyverdict” against Trump. “This is serious,” Sununu said last June. “If even half of this stuff is true, he’s in real trouble.”

Christopher Thomas Sununu is an American politician and engineer who has served since 2017, as the 82nd governor of New Hampshire.

Most significant, as Stephanopoulos pointed out, five days after January 6, Sununu said, “It is clear that President Trump’s rhetoric and actions contributed to the insurrection at the United States Capitol Building.”

During the interview, Sununu didn’t distance himself from any of his previous comments; in fact, he doubled down on them. He reaffirmed that Trump “absolutely contributed” to the insurrection. “I hate the election denialism of 2020,” Sununu said. 

And he also admitted that he’d be very uncomfortable supporting Trump if he were convicted of a felony. But no matter, Sununu reiterated to Stephanopoulos that he’ll vote for Trump anyway.

“Look, nobody should be shocked that the Republican governor is supporting the Republican president,” Sununu said.

It’s worth examining the reasons Sununu cited to justify his supportfor Trump. The main one, according to the New Hampshire governor, is “how bad Biden has become as president.” 

Sununu cited two issues specifically: inflation, which is “crushing people,” and the chaos at the southern border.

Let’s take those issues in reverse order. Any fair-minded assessment would conclude that Joe Biden has been a failure (not!🚫😦) on border security—crossings at the southern border are higher than ever—and that the president is rightfully paying a political price for it. His record in this respect is worse than Trump’s.

But, Trump’s record is hardly impressive. In fact, Trump never got close to building the wall he promised, (Mexico never agreed to pay for it!) and fewer people who were illegally in America were deported during the Trump presidency than during the Obama presidency. Illegal border crossings, as measured by apprehensions at the southwest border, were nearly 15 percent higher in Trump’s final year in office than in the last full year of Barack Obama’s term—when Trump called the border “broken.” Illegal immigration has bedeviled every modern American president.

More incriminating is that earlier this year, Republicans, at the urging of Trump, sabotaged what would arguably have been the strongest border-security bill ever, legislation supported by Biden. 

So why did Republicans, who have lacerated Biden for his lax enforcement policies, oppose a bill that included so much of what they demanded❓ Because they wanted chaos to continue at the southern border, in order to increase Trump’s chances of winning the election. That tells you what the Republican priority is.

As for inflation: During the Biden presidency, it soared to more than 9 percent—inflation was a global crisis, not specific to the United States—but has cooled to about 3.5 percent. (When Trump left office, inflation was less than 2 percent.) America’s inflation rate is now among the lowest in the world. More important, wages are rising faster than prices for ordinary workers, and low-wage workers have experienced dramatic real-wage growth over the past four years and for the first time in decades.

More broadly, the American economy is the best in the world❗❗ 😃The United States recovered from the coronavirus pandemic better than any other nation. Interest rates are the highest in decades, but America’s GDP significantly outpaced those of other developed countries in 2023. The economy grew by more than 3 percent in the fourth quarter of 2023, which is higher than the average for the five years preceding the pandemic. Monthly job growth under Biden, even if you exclude “catch up” growth figures in the aftermath of the pandemic, has been record-setting. Trump’s record, pre-pandemic, isn’t close.

In 2023, we saw the highest share of working-age Americans employed in more than two decades, while the Biden administration has overseen more than two years of unemployment below 4 percent, the longest such streak since the late 1960s. At the end of last year, retailers experienced a record-setting holiday season. The stock market recently posted an all-time high; so did domestic oil production. The number of Americans without health insurance has fallen to record lows under Biden. Trump claims that crime “is rampant and out of control like never, ever before.” In fact, violent crime—after surging in the last year of the Trump presidency (largely because of the pandemic)—is declining dramatically. 

As for abortions, during the Trump presidency, they increased by 8 percent after 30 years of near-constant decline.

Even if Republicans want to insist that Biden’s policies had nothing to do with any of this, even if these positive trends are happening in spite of Biden rather than because of him, America during the Biden presidency is hardly the hellscape that MAGA world says it is and at times seems to be rooting for it to be. 

On Biden’s watch, for whatever constellation of reasons, a good deal has gone right. And deep down, Trump supporters must know it, even as they wrestle with reality in order to deny it.

So the underlying premise that Sununu and MAGA world rely on to justify their support for Donald Trump—that if Biden wins, “our country is going to be destroyed,” as Trump said during a rally on Saturday—is false. Which raises the question: What is the reason Sununu has rallied to Trump?

It’s impossible to fully know the motivations of others, but it’s reasonable to assume that Sununu wants to maintain his political viability within the Republican Party. He’s undoubtedly aware that to break with Trump would derail his political ambitions. 

But for Sununu, like so many other Republicans, that partisan loyalty comes at the cost of his integrity.

Chris Sununu is not a true believer, like some in MAGA world. He’s not psychologically unwell, like others. He knows who Trump is, and what the right thing to do is—to declare, as Liz Cheney has done, that she will not vote for Donald Trump under any circumstances.

“I certainly have policy differences with the Biden administration,” she has said. “I know the nation can survive bad policy. 

We can’t survive a president who is willing to torch the Constitution.” Donald Trump has shown he’s willing to do that and more. Sununu is pledging fealty to a man who, among other things, attempted to overturn an election, summoned and assembled a violent mob and directed it to march on the Capitol, and encouraged the mob to hang his vice president. He sexually assaulted and defamed a woman, paid hush money to a porn star, and allegedly falsified records to cover up the affair. Trump controlled two entities that were found guilty of 17 counts of criminal tax fraud and falsifying business records. He invited a hostile foreign power (Russia) to interfere in one American election and attempted to extort an allied nation (Ukraine) to interfere in another four years later. He has threatened prosecutors, judges, and the families of judges. 

And he has been indicted in four separate criminal cases, one of which finally began in Manhattan. 

Trump has championed crazed and racist conspiracy theories, dined with avowed anti-Semites, and mocked war heroes, people with handicaps, and the dead. He has swooned over the most brutal dictators in the world, sided with Russian intelligence over American intelligence, abused his pardon power, and said we should terminate the Constitution. He obsessively told his staff to use the FBI and the IRS to go after his critics.

Donald Trump makes Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton look like Boy Scouts.

It’s not all that uncommon for politicians to put party above country, to bend and to break when pressure is applied. 

Courage is a rare virtue, and tribal loyalties can be extremely powerful. But this is not any other time, and Trump is not any other politician. Rather (and obviously), Trump is a man of kaleidoscopic corruption. There is virtually nothing he won’t do in order to gain and maintain power. And he telegraphs his intentions at all hours of the day and night.

Given all Trump has done, and given all we know, the claim that Joe Biden—whatever his failures, whatever his limitations, whatever his age—poses a greater threat to the republic than Donald Trump is delusional.

In his new book Finish What We Started: The MAGA Movement’s Ground War to End Democracy, Isaac Arnsdorf reminds us of something that Steve Bannon 😠😧, who served as a close adviser to Trump and is one of the most influential figures in the MAGA movement, once said: “Lenin wanted to destroy the state, and that’s my goal too. I want to bring everything crashing down, and destroy all of today’s establishment.”

Chris Sununu has now enlisted in that war. What is so discouraging, and so sickening, is how many others in his party have done so as well. They are Trump’s willing accomplices. 

MAGA maniacs like Steve Bannon are the evil equivilent of the release of the flying monkeys in The Wizard of Oz

Peter Wehner is a contributing writer at The Atlantic and a senior fellow at the Trinity Forum.