For years, Democrats mocked Republicans for their politically craven fealty to former president Donald Trump.
Washington
Analysis | Democrats criticize Biden privately, back him publicly. Sound familiar?
But now, they’re borrowing a page from the Republican playbook.
Following President Biden’s halting and politically damaging debate performance on June 27, Democratic lawmakers and strategists who regularly lambasted Republicans are offering one, often painfully candid, assessment in private (Biden cannot beat Trump and needs to step aside) and a different, less-than-truthful one in public (Biden had “one bad night,” but he’s up for the job of beating Trump).
They have also begun offering variations of the “I just need to see more of Biden to feel confident in supporting him” excuse — their version of the fail-safe Republican “I didn’t see the tweet” chestnut.
“We’ve spent years shaming Republicans for blindly following Trump off the proverbial cliffs, especially when it meant an electoral disaster for their party, like the cycles of 2018, 2020, and 2022,” said Michael LaRosa, a former Biden White House communications official. “It turns out, we’re just as loyal to the name or leader of our party, as well, even if it invites political risk for everyone in the party running on the ballot.”
In an op-ed in the New York Times on Wednesday, actor George Clooney, a prominent Democratic donor, also said the quiet part out loud, calling on party leaders “to stop telling us that 51 million people didn’t see what we just saw.”
“We love to talk about how the Republican Party has ceded all power, and all of the traits that made it so formidable with Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, to a single person who seeks to hold on to the presidency, and yet most of our members of Congress are opting to wait and see if the dam breaks,” Clooney wrote, before urging Democrats to “speak the truth.”
Of course, the situations are hardly analogous. With Trump — who can be bullying, cruel, misogynistic and routinely traffics in racist tropes and falsehoods — issues of character are what have long repelled Republican voters and officials alike.
During the 2016 presidential race, an “Access Hollywood” video emerged of Trump boasting about groping women, and more than a dozen women came forward accusing him of sexual misconduct. Last year, a New York jury found that Trump sexually abused and defamed the writer E. Jean Carroll and, more recently, another New York jury convicted him on 34 felony counts of falsifying business records. He also refused to accept the results of the 2020 presidential election, encouraging his supporters to do the same — a decision that ultimately contributed to the deadly Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection at the U.S. Capitol.
By contrast, Biden’s only sin in the minds of his supporters right now is aging, and publicly grappling with the indignities and fragility of entering his ninth decade.
“I reject the scale of Biden’s failures compared to Trump’s — it’s just not a comparison,” said Tim Miller, a former Republican strategist and ardent Trump critic who works as a writer for the Bulwark website.
But, Miller added, he nonetheless sees similarities between his former party and how Democrats are handling the current moment.
“The gap between private and public as a means of self-protection, of career protection, is very similar — shrouding that careerist unwillingness to say the truth in some fake, high-minded notion that they’re doing the right thing in private,” Miller said.
Even here, Democrats on the whole are being more candid than many Republicans beholden to Trump. So far, 12 House members and one senator have called for Biden to step aside as the party’s presidential nominee, and several other lawmakers from both chambers have gone public with their concerns. On Wednesday, former House speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) pointedly told MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” that Biden — who has repeatedly said he has no plans to bow out — needs to make a “decision” on whether he is running for president.
During the Trump years — and even now — the Republicans who dared to publicly utter what many of their colleagues privately whispered could almost be boiled down to a lonely trio: Reps. Liz Cheney of Wyoming and Adam Kinzinger of Illinois, and Sen. Mitt Romney of Utah. (The two House members no longer hold office, and Romney is retiring when his term ends at the end of this year.)
Will Ritter, co-founder of Poolhouse, a center-right ad agency, said that during Trump’s presidency, the constant message from Democrats was “‘brokered convention,’ ‘25th Amendment,’ ‘protecting the party,’ ‘protecting democracy.’”
Now, however, Ritter said, the Democrats “are headed over a cliff,” and the new message has become “one bad night” and “he’s always had a stutter” — a reference to comments from Sen. Chris Coons (D-Del.), a co-chair of Biden’s campaign, who said Tuesday that Biden has long had a stutter and should not be held to “too high a standard.”
“We’re getting honest talk from George Clooney, and cute word games from almost every elected Democrat,” he said.
Since Biden’s debate debut, the president’s team has also lost credibility with the media — a public rupture that comes after years of Biden aides browbeating reporters for daring to broach the age of the 81-year-old president.
“The other point Republican staffers have just been laughing about is how finally the Biden administration is getting a big dose of what the normal Republican candidate faces in terms of the press,” said Elise Jordan, a former George W. Bush staffer and aide on the 2016 presidential campaign of Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), who now considers herself an independent. “It’s just so much harder to deal with, and it’s not going to end, either.”
Biden, too, is exhibiting some characteristics that are shared by Trump and some other politicians. He distrusts negative polls. He has begun lashing out at “elites” and the media. He is now relying heavily on what he personally sees and hears, in situations tailored only to feature his supporters. And he has surrounded himself with a small, insular circle reluctant to bring him bad news.
Jordan said her takeaway from watching Biden’s interview with ABC News’s George Stephanopoulos last Friday was that Biden “was absolutely Trumpish.”
“He was so arrogant and seemed to feel entitled to the office, not that it was an honor to serve, and he didn’t seem to be concerned with democracy, which is allegedly the whole reason for his candidacy,” Jordan said.
In some ways, the about-face from many Democrats may not matter. A key voting bloc this election cycle is the “double hater” voters disillusioned with both major-party options. Nonetheless, many remain driven by negative partisanship — the belief that the other side is so cosmically awful that party tribalism kicks in and they will show up and vote for just about anyone to stop, in the case of Democrats, Trump.
LaRosa, for instance, describes himself as a Biden supporter who has never supported a challenge to Biden or a third-party candidate. But since leaving the White House, he has at times been publicly critical of Democrats and the Biden operation, and noted their strategy “for the last year has been to deny data, undermine or ridicule anyone who questions them, and wage war against the free press.”
“Now, President Biden is left without any goodwill and his message is undercut,” LaRosa said. “You can’t say that Trump is a threat to democracy while you crucify reporters for asking questions, tell us not to believe poll after poll, and manipulate the primary process to crush your political opposition.”
“It’s all,” he added, “sort of Trumpian, to be honest.”
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), “on behalf of the Department of Education (ED),” on Monday released a Notice Inviting Grant Applications for the Child Care Access Means Parents in School (CCAMPIS) program. Applications are due by May 29.
Last November, ED announced that it had entered into an interagency agreement with HHS to administer the CCAMPIS program. This is the first CCAMPIS competition conducted under this arrangement.
Approximately $73.5 million will go to institutions of higher education that awarded at least $250,000 in Pell grants to enrolled students in FY 2025. HHS will award about 148 grants, ranging from $150,000 to $1 million.
The terms of the grant competition are not significantly different than prior competitions. As before, there are two absolute grant priorities that every application must address – leveraging non-federal resources and utilizing a sliding-fee scale for low-income parents.
This year’s competition includes only one invitational priority that reflects the Trump administration’s general educational policy. The new priority, entitled “Expanding Education Choice in Early Learning Settings,” encourages applications that “expand access to education choice … including by empowering parents in choosing the early learning setting that best meets their family’s needs.” Flexible childcare programs that include drop-in care and care during nontraditional hours are also encouraged.
One other notable difference from prior competitions is an expanded “Terms and Conditions” section that not only requires compliance with applicable civil rights laws, but also refers to Trump administration Executive Orders and guidance on racial discrimination that clarify “the application of federal antidiscrimination laws to programs or initiatives that may involve discriminatory practices, including those labeled as Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (“DEI”) programs.” This includes any “discriminatory equity ideology [as defined in Executive Order 14190] in violation of a federal antidiscrimination law.”
The exact scope of these terms is unclear because courts have not found many of the practices described in these Executive Orders and guidance documents to be violations of federal law.
The Newsfeed
This week, the team brings you stories about how communities including Filipino immigrants, Sephardic Jews and Somalis arrived in the Pacific Northwest
Each week on The Newsfeed, host Paris Jackson and a team of veteran journalists dive deep into one topic and provide impactful reporting, interviews and community insights from sources you can trust. Each day this week, this post will be updated with a new story from the team.
Group hopes to boost recognition for Seattle’s Filipinotown
By Venice Buhain
The group Filipinotown Seattle hopes to make sure that the legacy of Filipino Americans in Seattle’s Chinatown-International District isn’t forgotten.
One of the group’s current projects is pushing for a Filipinotown placemarking sign in the CID.
“Filipino Americans have had a presence here for over 100 years in Seattle,” said Filipinotown Seattle Executive Director Devin Israel Cabanilla.
He said that the signage is important to remind people that “the International District is not just Chinatown. Japantown. Filipinotown is here as well.”
The group held a poll on what signage might look like and where it might be located. It would be similar to the Chinatown sign on South Jackson Street and Fifth Avenue South, or the Wing Luke Museum
In the early 20th century, the area now known as the CID was a hub full of businesses, entertainment, social groups and housing that served Seattle’s growing immigrant population from Asia and elsewhere. The communities all intermingled throughout the CID.
“This area was a central place for Asian Pacific immigrants simply because of segregation,” Cabanilla said.
Because the Philippines was a U.S. territory from 1898 to 1946, Filipino immigrants were unaffected by laws in the 1920s that restricted immigration from Japan or China. Many Filipinos came to study at the University of Washington or to work in burgeoning industries, like lumber, farming, canneries and factories.
While the physical Filipino presence in terms of buildings and storefronts in the CID dwindled in the later 20th century with redevelopment, Seattle Filipinos and Filipino Americans continued to make impacts locally, regionally and nationally.
“It may not have been in terms of storefronts, but our presence has always existed in terms of politics, culture as well,” Cabanilla said.
The Seattle Department of Transportation said it is aware that the group is working on its signage request, but the Department of Neighborhoods has not yet received a formal request. They are also working to develop a clearer process for this and other similar neighborhood signage proposals.
Filipinotown Seattle said it hopes that the sign helps remind Seattle of the CID’s unique designation as a neighborhood shaped by many immigrants and migrants to Seattle.
“Is it Chinatown? Is it Japantown? Is it Little Saigon? It’s all those things. And I think re cultivating that this is a multicultural district, Filipinotown is helping establish: Yes, it’s more than one thing,” Cabanilla said.
Venice Buhain is a multimedia journalist at Cascade PBS. She previously was the Cascade PBS’s associate news editor and education reporter. Venice has also worked for KING 5, The Seattle Globalist and TVW News.
Venice Buhain is a multimedia journalist at Cascade PBS. She previously was the Cascade PBS’s associate news editor and education reporter. Venice has also worked for KING 5, The Seattle Globalist and TVW News.
The state of Washington is getting a seventh temple of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
The Marysville Washington Temple was announced Sunday night during a devotional in the Marysville Washington Stake by Elder Hugo E. Martinez, a General Authority Seventy in the church’s United States West Area Presidency.
“We are pleased to announce the construction of a temple in Marysville, Washington,” the First Presidency said in a statement. “The specific location and timing of the construction will be announced later. This is a reason for all of us to rejoice and express gratitude for such a significant blessing — one that will allow more frequent access to the ordinances, covenants and power that can only be found in the house of the Lord.”
The other temples in Washington are the Columbia River, Moses Lake, Seattle, Spokane, Tacoma and Vancouver temples.
The church has 214 temples in operation. Plans for another 170 temples have been announced; many of those temples are in various stages of planning and construction.
Sunday’s temple announcement follows the new practice of the church’s First Presidency, which determines where temples will be built — and when and how they will be announced.
The First Presidency directed a General Authority Seventy to announce the first temple in Maine at a fireside there in December.
In January, church President Dallin H. Oaks said the Maine announcement set the pattern for future temple announcements.
“The best place to announce a temple is in that temple district,” he told the Deseret News.
The First Presidency will continue to decide where future temples will be built. It then will “assign someone else to make the announcement in the place where the temple will be built,” he said.
This pattern came to him as a strong impression after he assumed leadership of the church in October, following the death of his friend, President Russell M. Nelson.
This came as a strong impression to him shortly after he assumed the leadership of the church, President Oaks said.
The church remains in the midst of an aggressive temple-building era. President Nelson announced 200 new temples from 2018 to 2025. All but one were announced at general conference.
Five dozen temples are now under construction.
President Oaks now has overseen the announcement of two temples, neither at a general conference.
At the October conference he said that “with the large number of temples now in the very earliest phases of planning and construction, it is appropriate that we slow down the announcement of new temples.”
Ten new temples are scheduled to be dedicated in the next six months.
- May 3: Davao Philippines Temple.
- May 3: Lindon Utah Temple.
- May 31: Bacolod Philippines Temple.
- June 7: Yorba Linda California Temple.
- June 7: Willamette Valley Oregon Temple.
- Aug. 16: Belo Horizonte Brazil Temple.
- Aug. 16: Cleveland Ohio Temple.
- Aug. 30: Phnom Penh Cambodia Temple.
- Oct. 11: Miraflores Guatemala City Guatemala Temple.
- Oct. 18: Managua Nicaragua Temple.
Two-thirds of the 170 temples still to be built are outside the United States.
Temples are distinct from the meetinghouses where Latter-day Saints worship Jesus Christ each Sunday. Temples are closed on Sundays, but they open during the week as sanctuaries where church members go to find peace, make covenants with God and perform proxy ordinances for deceased relatives.
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