Politics
Who needs Trump or Harris? In hotly contested states, it was time for football
PHILADELPHIA and GREEN BAY, WIS. — A bird beak perched on his nose, a Philadelphia Eagles’ fan expressed his disdain for the day’s opponent by dragging a Jacksonville Jaguars helmet on the ground by a leash.
Nearly 1,000 miles northwest, green and yellow Green Bay Packers flags punctured the otherwise dreary, rainy gray skies, as the Wisconsin faithful replaced their trademark cheesehead hats with ponchos and tried to stay dry under pop-up tents before their contest with the Detroit Lions.
On Sunday, two days before the election, in two of the nation’s most closely divided states that will determine control of the White House, football took center stage for fans who also happen to be voters.
Over cheesesteaks and Yuengling beer in Philadelphia and an inordinate variety of sausages and Miller Lite cans in Green Bay, fans were trying to put their election anxiety on hold for a few hours of tailgating and four quarters of football.
Watching the game in person meant they could escape the nonstop attack ads that have blanketed battleground states for months with increasing intensity ahead of election day on Tuesday.
“I stopped watching TV, and it’s almost impossible to listen to the radio, because you want to try to try to get a moment of peace, and you just can’t get it,” said Tim Ellsworth, 63, who lives in a suburb of Green Bay and was tailgating across from Lambeau Field.
The retiree, who previously ran paper mills, is a supporter of former President Trump, but he’s sick of the politicking by politicians on both sides of the aisle.
“It’s just who can lie more? You can’t believe any of it from either side. It’s just pathetic on either side,” he said.
A friend and fellow Packers-Trump fan whom he had been tailgating with since 10 a.m. unsteadily waved a bottle of beer and showed off rounds of spent shotgun shells to a reporter before asking Ellsworth what Trump had lied about.
“It’s all the way through,” Ellsworth replied. “All the way. At the Senate level, down to the local, state levels. They’re lying. So I just look forward to Tuesday.”
Dave Schofield, who wore the Eagle beak on his nose outside Lincoln Financial Field in Philadelphia, said he is anxious that Trump is blowing the election because “he can’t keep his mouth shut.”
“Some of the things he says, it’s all right to say it at a bar with your buddies, but you don’t say that stuff out loud,” said Schofield, a 63-year-old chemical salesman.
But Schofield and his friends weren’t stewing or scanning the latest polling averages on Sunday.
“Everybody’s worried more about the game today,” said his friend Everett Terry, a 65-year-old police officer who posted a “Trump Safety/Kamala Crime” placard on his truck. On Monday, he said, they can get wound up about politics again, then wait like everyone else for Tuesday’s results.
Despite the country’s political polarization, many people in these tailgate groups weren’t even sure who their football friends were supporting.
“We’re here to talk about the Eagles,” said Mike Warren, a 67–year old supporter of Vice President Kamala Harris in the same tailgate group as Schofield and Terry.
Warren was more eager to show off the green illustrations on the van he bought this year with his brother, with images of LeSean McCoy and other Eagles legends making spectacular catches.
But underneath, Warren is also scared.
Trump “will go against whatever the rules say that he should do,” said Warren, who works in human resources. “The majority says one thing, he disagrees. He finds a way to get around it. That’s what scares me.”
Steve Rostloch, a 41-year-old carpet installer from Mequon near Milwaukee, is a Harris supporter and said he expected to her to win.
“She’s a woman. Women always win,” he said. “I ain’t voting for that idiot.”
But if Eagle and Packers fans shared anything, it’s the recognition that Trump and Harris remain neck and neck.
“I’m hoping Trump wins, but I don’t know. This is tough to say. I mean, it seems like it’s very close in so many places,” Cyle Wanek, 42, said outside Lambeau Field.
Wanek grew up so close to Lambeau that he could hear the crowds roaring as a child. His dad entered the family into the season-ticket lottery more than two decades ago. They finally got their season tickets last year.
Grilling cheddar wieners from Konop Meats near Stangelville — “Go there for meat!” Wanek advised — the aluminum foundry worker said he predicted the Packers would win by 20 but was uncertain who is going to prevail on Tuesday. (His prediction would prove as suspect as some polls.)
Camaraderie among fans of rival teams was also on display Sunday, though with a sharp dose of ribbing.
Mike Kleczka, 60, and his wife, Debbie, a nurse, grew up in Wisconsin. They live in Kansas, but said it was nice to take their mind of politics for a few hours as they tailgated with their daughter Rachel and her husband before the game.
“It is, because we’ll be back at it tomorrow, right?” Kleczka, a direct marketer, said.
While the family largely agrees on politics, the bigger rift is sports. Rachel, 23, married Josh Forgie, 26, a Michigan native who was wearing a blue Lions jersey in the sea of Packer green and yellow. They have had some interesting conversations around the dinner table, they chuckled.
“The Lions have kind of been easy to make fun of,” Kleczka said.
Forgie smiled as he shot back, “The five games we played you guys? We won.”
(This was a few hours before the Lions once again beat the Packers 24-14.)
In Philadelphia and Green Bay, overt political displays were rare, though
Tim Biegalski, a 26-year-old contractor from King of Prussia, Pa., wore the closest thing to a political jersey, a green shirt with a “Hurts/Barkley ’24” logo. For the uninitiated, that’s the team’s quarterback and running back, Jalen Hurts and Saquon Barkley.
He’s voting for Trump, after supporting President Biden four years ago and Trump in 2016, but calls this year’s election “a no-win situation.”
Biegalski hopes Trump wins. But unlike most fans asked whether they would prefer a White House or a Super Bowl victory, Biegalski said if he had to choose — in a city so passionate about sports that it was home to the first NFL stadium to have a jail built into in its bowels — he’d rather have another Eagles championship.
“Super Bowl all day,” he said. “That will bring more joy than the election.”
Bierman reported from Philadelphia, Mehta from Green Bay.
Politics
Trump has Christmas message to 'Radical Left Lunatics,' tells inmates Biden granted clemency to 'GO TO HELL!'
President-elect Trump dished out a fiery Christmas message on Wednesday in which he wished a “Merry Christmas” to “Radical Left Lunatics,” told the 37 prisoners whose death row sentences were recently commuted by President Biden to “GO TO HELL!,” and more.
“Merry Christmas to the Radical Left Lunatics, who are constantly trying to obstruct our Court System and our Elections, and are always going after the Great Citizens and Patriots of the United States but, in particular, their Political Opponent, ME. They know that their only chance of survival is getting pardons from a man who has absolutely no idea what he is doing,” Trump declared on Truth Social.
“Also, to the 37 most violent criminals, who killed, raped, and plundered like virtually no one before them, but were just given, incredibly, a pardon by Sleepy Joe Biden. I refuse to wish a Merry Christmas to those lucky “souls” but, instead, will say, GO TO HELL! We had the Greatest Election in the History of our Country, a bright light is now shining over the U.S.A. and, in 26 days, we will, MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN. MERRY CHRISTMAS!” he added.
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Biden recently announced that he commuted the sentences of 37 prisoners on federal death row to life sentences without the potential for parole.
“Make no mistake: I condemn these murderers, grieve for the victims of their despicable acts, and ache for all the families who have suffered unimaginable and irreparable loss,” the president said in a statement, but noted that he is “more convinced than ever that we must stop the use of the death penalty at the federal level.”
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In a separate post, Trump declared, “Merry Christmas to all, including to the wonderful soldiers of China, who are lovingly, but illegally, operating the Panama Canal (where we lost 38,000 people in its building 110 years ago), always making certain that the United States puts in Billions of Dollars in ‘repair’ money, but will have absolutely nothing to say about ‘anything.’
He also discussed Canada, referring to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau as the “Governor” of America’s northern neighbor, while suggesting that Canadian businesses would boom if the nation became a U.S. state.
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“Also, to Governor Justin Trudeau of Canada, whose Citizens’ Taxes are far too high, but if Canada was to become our 51st State, their Taxes would be cut by more than 60%, their businesses would immediately double in size, and they would be militarily protected like no other Country anywhere in the World. Likewise, to the people of Greenland, which is needed by the United States for National Security purposes and, who want the U.S. to be there, and we will!” Trump declared.
Politics
Opinion: How press freedoms could fare under the second Trump administration
With Donald Trump set to return to the White House next year, there’s much speculation on how his second administration will affect press freedom. The short answer is that we don’t know, but prognosticators do have the benefit of an important dataset: his first term.
And, if that record is any indication, national security “leaks” to the press may be an area of tension between journalists and the new leadership at the Justice Department. If there is a chilling effect on sources coming forward with newsworthy information in the public interest, Americans will be less informed and the American government will be held less accountable.
Things have been quiet on that front for the last four years, but the first Trump administration inherited and expanded the Obama administration’s aggressive pursuit of sources who disclosed government secrets to the press.
And President-elect Trump has often decried national security leaks and called for aggressively investigating and prosecuting them.
It would be foolish for press advocates to discount the possibility of a repeat of his first term, and perhaps an escalation.
There are several federal laws that can be read to criminalize the public disclosure of national security secrets. The most prominent is the Espionage Act of 1917, a World War I-era law that was initially used against domestic opponents of the war but applies to the act of communicating, delivering or transmitting “information relating to the national defense,” a broad term, to anyone not entitled to receive it.
In other words, if someone were to anonymously slip a manila envelope under a reporter’s door with government secrets — even secrets that the public has a clear interest in knowing, such as the warrantless domestic wiretapping by the George W. Bush administration — the Justice Department has consistently claimed the authority to investigate and prosecute the source, as well as the journalist, under the Espionage Act. There is no “public interest” defense.
Historically, it hasn’t been used that way. For about 90 years, the Espionage Act was deployed against actual spies, not journalists’ sources. There are a few exceptions — most prominently the Pentagon Papers case, in which the government launched a failed prosecution against Daniel Ellsberg and Anthony Russo — but source cases are in the single digits. And, while there were investigations involving journalists, no reporter or news outlet was ultimately prosecuted under the Espionage Act in that period.
The reason is simple. When the reporting is in the public interest, taking the leaker or journalist to court would be a “political firestorm,” as a federal appeals court judge put it in one of those few exceptions, a 1980s case involving a leak of classified photographs.
But the Bush and Obama administrations marked a shift in practice.
Under President George W. Bush, the Justice Department brought the first Espionage Act case other than Russo against individuals outside government, who had not sworn to protect government secrets. The Bush administration also featured the Valerie Plame case, which started as a leak investigation, in which Judith Miller of the New York Times spent 85 days in jail for refusing to identify a confidential source from her reporting about the run-up to the Iraq war. And the Bush Justice Department issued a subpoena in 2008 to force the New York Times’ James Risen to identify his source in another leak case, which the Obama administration pursued until 2015.
Then the Obama administration started to bring Espionage Act prosecutions against journalists’ sources in earnest. Depending on how you count, his administration brought 10 such cases. That is more than all other presidents combined.
Trump’s first term followed that trend. The Justice Department brought eight cases against journalist sources, including two under bank secrecy laws, as well as the Julian Assange case. The Assange case is complicated, but he was charged in part under the novel and dangerous legal theory that publishing secrets is a crime.
These cases can involve secret government demands for reporters’ notes; phone, email and text records; and correspondence with sources. That kind of snooping can reveal the constellation of a journalist’s sources beyond just the investigation in question and can give the government visibility into other stories the newsroom is investigating, including stories about the government. As Miller said when facing jail time: “If journalists cannot be trusted to keep confidences, then journalists cannot function and there cannot be a free press.”
The Justice Department during Trump’s first term turbocharged Obama-era approaches. In addition to seizing years of records from reporter Ali Watkins’ phone and email providers, a Customs and Border Protection agent threatened to reveal private information unless she identified her sources. Watkins was a reporter at Politico at the time of the questioning and was at the New York Times when she learned of the records seizure.
Then, in the early days of the Biden administration, we learned that the Justice Department in the last days of the Trump administration had authorized demands for phone and email records for eight reporters at CNN, the New York Times and the Washington Post in three separate leak investigations. It did so without notifying those outlets in advance — to give them a chance to negotiate or challenge the demands — and the CNN and New York Times demands came with a gag order preventing newsroom lawyers from even alerting the reporters that they had been targeted.
The history of leak investigations under Presidents Bush, Obama and Trump shows that the threat to the free flow of information is bipartisan and spans administrations. President Biden’s term has been a notable exception, but a reprise may be coming.
Gabe Rottman is the policy director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press.
Politics
Trump picks Miami-Dade County Commissioner Kevin Marino Cabrera for Panama ambassador
President-elect Trump picked Miami-Dade County Commissioner Kevin Marino Cabrera to serve as ambassador to Panama.
Calling the Miami-Dade County Commissioner a “fierce fighter,” Trump said that he would advance the “MAGA agenda” to the Central American country.
“Kevin is a fierce fighter for America First principles. As a Miami-Dade County Commissioner, and Vice Chairman of the International Trade Consortium, he has been instrumental in driving Economic growth, and fostering International partnerships,” Trump wrote in the Wednesday announcement. “In 2020, Kevin did an incredible job as my Florida State Director and, this year, advanced our MAGA Agenda as a Member of the RNC Platform Committee.”
“Few understand Latin American politics as well as Kevin – He will do a FANTASTIC job representing our Nation’s interests in Panama!” he said.
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The announcement came after Trump said that Panama was “a Country that is ripping us off on the Panama Canal, far beyond their wildest dreams.”
In a post on Truth Social on Wednesday, Trump also accused Chinese soldiers of illegally operating the canal and “always making certain that the United States puts in Billions of Dollars in ‘repair’ money but will have absolutely nothing to say about ‘anything.’”
In a statement on X, Cabrera thanked Trump for the nomination.
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“I’m humbled and honored by your nomination to serve as the U.S. Ambassador to Panama,” he wrote. “Let’s get to work!”
Cabrera won his county election two years ago following an endorsement by Trump.
He also served as the Florida state director for Trump’s 2020 campaign and was a member of the RNC Platform Committee.
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