Introduction

We’re in the beginning of the stretch run for the 2024 presidential election, and, already, I need a break. I’ll bet you do too.

With that in mind, regular readers will know I have occasionally posted stories from my long-ago time in Vietnam. A number of you, perhaps having dallied too long with the doctored-up Kickapoo Joy Juice, have suggested if I could come up with a few more, I might have the beginnings of an actual book some foolish people might be persuaded to read, maybe even buy.

Giving these misguided literary critics the benefit of the doubt, it’s conceivable they might have a barely discernible point. So, what follows is the first of two stories. I will post the second one next week. Let me know what you think.

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Orders arrive

It was a beautiful late summer day in Vietnam, and my 28-man Platoon and I, along with Rusty the scout dog and his handler, PFC Snyder, were feeling good. Having recently concluded one of our personally satisfying  occasional encounters with a few visitors from the North, we were sunning ourselves on the rocky top of what passed for a mountain in northern South Vietnam, when Bobcat called.

Bobcat, who preceded Bulldog of The Calendar and Nuts fame, was Colonel Robert Stillingworth, “Still” to his friends, Bobcat to me.

Anyway, Bobcat called, and the ultimate, sub-rosa reason he called was because, in his tenth month of a 13-month Vietnam tour, Bobcat, who has long since become one with the universe, had yet to win his Silver Star. He, like all full-bird Colonels of the Vietnam era, believed winning this award was essential in his quest for what he considered his much-deserved promotion to Brigadier General. Of course, I did not know any of this at the time. Why should I? But afterwards it explained everything.

As soon as I heard his voice, I knew siesta-time was over.  “Go to the secure freq. I have orders for you,” he said. I switched to our secure frequency. He said, “You are to proceed to the sea.” Then he gave me a couple of coordinates, which, with deduction worthy of an officer and a gentleman, I presumed to be somewhere on the coast of the South China Sea. “You are to be there no later than 0100 hours. You will receive further orders upon arrival. Any questions?”

Well, no. Seemed simple enough. Then I heard, “Bobcat out.” The man had a way with words.

I pulled out my map and saw that our upcoming little nighttime stroll would cover about 24 kilometers, we called them “clicks.” This would equal roughly 15 miles. Twenty-four clicks in less than eight hours and, since we had just been resupplied with rations, ammo, and what not a couple of hours earlier, we’d be bebopping along with about 85 pounds on our backs.

The good news was we wouldn’t have to bebop through much jungle. After we made it down the mountain, we’d be just about one click from Highway 1, the only paved road north of Saigon. We’d take that north, and it would lead us right to where we were supposed to go. Simple. As long as we didn’t stumble onto any of the bad guys.

So, I gave the bad news to the squad leaders and my platoon sergeant Dave Lucey, we gathered up our stuff, and off we went. About an hour later, we were on Highway 1. That’s when the rain began. It rained all the way to the sea.

We arrive

In the gloom of a rainy night, about one click from where we were supposed to wind up, we took a right off the highway onto a dirt track and saw the lights from a village up ahead. As we got nearer we could hear voices, a lot of them. But before we got there we smelled the bread.

In our haste to make the deadline, we hadn’t stopped to eat, just kept slogging up Highway 1 in the rain. Now, dead ahead of us, a sorry group of cold and wet-to-the-core soldiers, was an old woman, smiling from ear to ear, standing behind a table in front of a tiny building that appeared to be the village bakery. She had two hanging oil lamps, one on each side of her, and spread out on her table were loaf after loaf of newly baked bread. Somehow, the lady had known we were coming.

Ravenous as we were, we bought every loaf, making the smiling Mama-San instantly wealthy. We wolfed them down. If you ignored all the sand still in the bread it was the best we ever tasted.

Then we moved on to our rally point, where all the voices were coming from. We found ourselves in a little harbor, really little. And in it were a few small boats, not much more than Sampans, really.

Standing on a small pier hanging out over the water was the Intelligence Officer of our Brigade, Lieutenant Colonel Horace Barnacle. He showed me written orders, but didn’t let me read them, and told me the boats behind him belonged to the South Vietnamese Navy. “Excuse me, Sir, South Vietnam has a Navy?” I asked. “Yup, and you’re lookin’ at it.” He then said, “Your orders are to board that ship over there with your men and, ah, the dog, I see you have a dog. Well, that’ll be all right. Dogs can swim. The ship will ferry you up the coast to just south of the DMZ , where you will conduct an amphibious assault and secure the beach.”

When he said DMZ, he got my attention, because the DMZ was the Demilitarized Zone, the most dangerous place in all of Vietnam.

I just looked at the man and said, “Sir, this is a joke, right?” “No joke,” he said. “Get ready to board, cause you’re leaving in 15 minutes.” “But sir,” I said, “Are you going to brief me on the resistance my men and I will likely encounter when we do this stupid-ass, crazy thing?”

Colonel Barnacle draped his arm over my shoulder and pulled me aside. “Lieutenant,” he said. “Believe me when I tell you it is highly unlikely you and your men will encounter much resistance, if any.”

“Is this just an exercise?” I asked. “Sort of,” he said. “But it’s kind of secret. Now get your ass on the boat.”

So, we did. Scout dog Rusty, PFC Snyder, and the rest of us began squeezing ourselves into the hold on the deck of the first boat. The hold, about 20 by 20 feet, sloped from the middle out to the sides. At the middle it was about four feet high. At the sides it was down to about two and a half feet. Somehow, we crammed ourselves in. It would have been a lot less uncomfortable if it weren’t for all the 85-pound rucksacks and weaponry. Finally, crushed together, we pushed off from the dock, and the put-putting engine sent us all slowly out into the South China Sea.

But before we got too far out, our South Vietnamese Navy piece of junk started rattling underneath us. Then, after about ten seconds of gears squishing and grinding, everything stopped, and it became quiet. Too quiet. From somewhere in the middle of the hold we were stuffed into, I heard Randy Billingsley, who was our M-60 machine gunner, say, “I can’t swim.”  Then, a couple more guys said the same thing, and I was beginning to think Vietnam’s hot, swampy, snake infested jungle wasn’t such a bad place, after all.

That was when a door opened in the front of our compartment, which seemed to be getting smaller by the moment, and a wiry little man with a big smile slipped through it. He was carrying a wrench about the size of his arm. He slid between two of our guys and opened another door. He oozed through that one and disappeared.

Next came the banging. That was when Billingsley once again let everyone know he couldn’t swim. This got Rusty the dog upset, so he began howling. Then, everyone was talking excitedly at once, Rusty kept barking, the little man kept banging, and I began to get worried.

I don’t know what would have happened next, if not, at that very moment, the engine hadn’t suddenly come to life, which instantly silenced everyone, even Rusty. The second door opened and the little man with the big wrench was once more with us with an even bigger smile. He said, “Okey dokey,” and vanished through the first door.

Relieved, we continued up the South China Sea in the dead of night.

About ten minutes later my big mistake reared its furry, German Shepherd head, because that was when  Snyder, stuck way back in the left corner, yelled over to me, “Lieutenant, the dog’s gotta go.” The mistake had been loading Rusty and Snyder in first. They always led after our Point man in the jungle. Why not here? Well, this was why not.

There was nothing we could do, no way to get him anywhere else. So, with all of us glued tightly together and doing our best to squeeze away from the stench about to come, Rusty did his thing, a four-plopper according to Snyder, and the rest of our trip up the South China Seacoast was redolent with the very special aroma only dogshit  can make.

The assault

At 0815 hours in the morning we were finally at the assault point. Getting out of the little torture chamber that would have made Grand Inquisitor Torquemada proud was probably the most ridiculous part of the entire operation. But we did it and said goodbye to South Vietnam’s gunless Navy. We even scooped up Rusty’s calling card to save the little man with the big wrench from having to do it. After we tossed that into the sea, we noticed that the genius who designed the “plan” didn’t allow for low tide, so we hit the water for the big battle about a quarter mile from shore.

Not a shot was fired. Heads up, we casually waded ashore, walked up the beach, and found rectangular table after table along about 100 feet of beach, behind which, with smiles to light up the sky, stood six beautiful women of the American Red Cross, dressed in their signature pale blue outfits, handing out cans of Coca Cola. To the guys in the field, they were known as “Donut Dollies,” and they’d been doing this since World War II. But for us they had no donuts.

Having not died in the second coming of D-Day, we occupied the beach for the next three weeks, never encountering a single moment of stress from an enemy that must have had other things on its mind.

During our little vacation on the beach I developed a bacterial infection from a small cut I got when, in bare feet, I stepped on the discarded pull tab of a can of Bud. It became ridiculously painful, and I couldn’t stand up, let alone walk. So, I called in a chopper, my guys carried me to it, sat me in the door, and I flew back to base camp for ten days of penicillin shots in the ass. While there I met up with the Brigade Adjutant, a friend. It was he who told me the story of how Bobcat had directed an amphibious assault on a tightly held enemy location on the South China Seacoast, and, .45 calibers in each hand, had led his men to victory.

At least, that’s what the citation for his Silver Star said.

Last night, Vice President Kamala Harris accepted the Democratic Party’s nomination for President of the United States.  In doing so, she gave a deeply passionate speech, which, like most such speeches, was long on all the things she intended doing and short on how she intended doing them. But it was a great barnburner of a speech, anyway, that, as 100,000 red, white, and blue balloons fell from the ceiling, energized and electrified the faithful.

Now the real work begins, and momentum is with the Democrats. However, as Bill Clinton warned in his Wednesday night speech, the next 75 days will be difficult and everyone should be ready for some surprises. For my money, I think Kamala Harris will probably, like Hilary Clinton and Al Gore, win the popular vote, and you know what happened to them in the Electoral College tally. Our current President, Joe Biden, won the popular vote by nearly seven million votes, but it was only 44,000 votes in Georgia, Arizona and Wisconsin that separated him and Trump from a tie in the Electoral College.

“Joy” as a strategy will not carry Harris to victory on 5 November. She is going to have to coherently address actual domestic and foreign policies that will resonate with American voters.

One of the most important, and complex, policy issues that really matters is the economy.  In 1992, “It’s the economy, stupid,” got Bill Clinton elected. I’m betting the same will be true in 2024 for whoever wins. After all, a political truism is that Americans vote with their pocketbooks. While it’s objectively true that the overall economy has been steadily improving over the last 15 months, prices are still high, especially grocery prices, and it’s fascinating how many political decisions get made in a grocery store checkout line.

One of the ways Kamala Harris says she’ll be attacking high prices if she’s elected is by passing a national law forbidding price gouging. However, most states already have in place laws against price gouging. They address prices during emergencies; for example, jacking up the price of shovels during blizzards, or air conditioners during heat waves. At some point, when it conceivably gets its act together, the Trump campaign will most assuredly point this out, Trump will take credit for it, and his MAGA followers will believe him.

Economists don’t like price gouging laws, but the public does, so Harris’s message might resonate — for a while. As Michael Giberson of the Cato Institute says, the argument by many economists goes like this:

Economists and policy analysts opposed to price gouging laws have relied on the simple logic of price controls: if you cap price increases during an emergency, you discourage conservation of needed goods at exactly the time they are in high demand. Simultaneously, price caps discourage extraordinary supply efforts that would help bring goods in high demand into the affected area. In a classic case of unintended consequences, the law harms the very people whom lawmakers intend to help. The logic of supply and demand, so clear to economists, has had little effect on price gouging policies.

Or the public. This is why Harris and Walz think pushing a national law to combat price gouging will benefit them. They believe they can make political headway with a “greedflation” narrative, blaming rising prices on corporate profit-seeking. They seem to have determined that trying to educate the public about our actual economic improvement and why it’s been happening — due to policies of the Biden/Harris Administration — is too high a mountain to climb, and, in addition, makes them too closely connected to elderly Joe Biden. Easier to find a mythological prince of demons, a Beelzebub, paint it Republican, and go after it tooth and nail.

It might work. But there’s an alternative approach the public might appreciate if given the chance.

These are three economic points Americans understand: inflation, gross wages, and real hourly wage earnings. The last is the value of wages after factoring in inflation. Hence the word, “real.” Here is a chart from the Economic Policy Institute showing how all three have interacted since 2019.

I know. Looks complicated. But stay with me.

The orange-arrowed light blue line is inflation. As the orange arrow shows, inflation’s greatest 12-month gain happened in June 2022: 9.1%. The green-arrowed dark blue line is real wage earnings, which nearly perfectly correspond to inflation; as inflation increased, real earnings decreased. As it decreased, real earnings grew, even though gross wages, the very light blue line, continued growing in the 5% range.

The dark blue line with the red arrow is the 12 month change from April, 2020, through March, 2021: 7.7%. That spike in real and gross wages happened because early in the pandemic the bottom fell out and so many low wage workers lost their jobs. This skewed the chart’s data, because most high wage earners were still employed, which drove up both gross and real wage numbers.

The political message, if one just looks at this chart for a moment, is this: In the period from  April, 2023, through July 2024, — that’s one month ago — the U.S. has seen 15 consecutive months of real wage growth along with a corresponding leveling of inflation following a precipitous drop due to the Federal Reserve’s monetary policies. Further, in September, economists expect the Fed to decrease interest rates. If this happens, it will be the first drop in interest rates since the Fed began increasing them more than two years ago in March of 2022, and it will be great news for all Americans. It will also be great news for Kamala Harris.

Back to prices. Yes, they’re still high, and, more important, will likely not decline sharply before the election, but with the growth of real wages, Americans are catching up.

The bad news is that these statistics are esoteric. They’re data. And while charts convey noetic  statistical information, Americans feel grocery prices. They get emotional about them.

Nonetheless, Kamala Harris has an exceptional economic story to tell of a superb turnaround after a devastating, once-in-a-century pandemic. Donald Trump had nothing to do with that, but Harris and Joe Biden did.

Politically, Harris must distinguish herself from Joe Biden, so focusing for a while on price gouging will probably continue. Ultimately, though, the price gouging issue is like a painted hook on a wall; it might look pretty, but no hat will ever hang from it.

To win in November, it’s going to take a lot more than painted hooks, a lot more than Joy and sound bites like, “We won’t go back.”

These economic data are certainly more than sound-bites. Americans, if given the chance, will digest them easily.

“If the 75,000-plus immigrants who perform the hardest of work in Wisconsin’s dairy and agriculture were gone tomorrow, the state economy would tank.” — Jorge Franco, CEO of the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce of Wisconsin.

Immigration is one of the top, and thorniest, issues in this year’s presidential and down-ballot elections. It is polarizing, emotional, and filled with hyperbolic misinformation.

Is anyone telling the truth about it? And how would you know?

You’ve probably never heard of Peter Rousmaniere, but let me introduce him to you.

In 2006,when this Harvard MBA reached either the 2nd or 3rd act of his life, I’m not quite sure which, he dove into what he perceived as a then current and worsening crisis: Immigration in the U.S.

In the blog he’s written since then, Working Immigrants, he’s been relentless. One of the smartest people I know, Rousmaniere has become a recognized national expert and, somehow, manages to keep great swaths of data in his capacious brain.

Dividing his time between London and Boston, Rousmaniere never gets emotionally wound up in the issue. He just digs, finds facts, analyzes them, and presents data in a thoughtful and coherent manner. No shouting, no ranting, just cold, hard facts.

When considering the Democratic and Republican Platforms (as well as Project 2025), Peter Rousmaniere’s perspective is informative. For example, we all know that, if elected, Donald Trump plans the most “massive deportation in the history of America.” He says it will be 18 million people. The poorly written Republican Platform, Agenda 47, which compared to Project 2025 is the same wine in a smaller bottle, lists this as its third goal regarding immigration: “Begin Largest Deportation Program in American History.”

But, as Rousmaniere wrote last week:

H-2A temporary work visas designed mainly for farm workers have soared in usage, from 75,000 in 2010 to close to 400,000 today. Project 2025 calls for the elimination of these visas. Here is a 2022 in-depth demographic profile of unauthorized farm workers…

Nearly 45% of U.S. agricultural workers, or 950,000 out of 2.2 million, are unauthorized migrants. Donald Trump’s proposed mass deportation plan would severely impact states like Wisconsin, where 70% of dairy farm labor is performed by over 10,000 undocumented workers. The state’s dairy industry would collapse without these workers. The National Milk Producers Federation states that immigrant labor accounts for 51% of all dairy labor, producing 79% of the U.S. milk supply. California would also be heavily affected, as approximately 75% of its farmworkers are undocumented.

With these numbers in mind, it is blazingly obvious that, even if Trump were elected, there is not going to be any kind of mass deportation of undocumented farm and dairy workers, but they have been painted darkly by politicians, especially Trump, who began it all when he first came down that faux (like him) golden staircase in New York’s Trump Tower to announce his candidacy in 2015.

Immigration is a highly complex issue, but it has been made binary by most Republicans and some Democrats. I’m hoping, probably forlornly, that, when Trump and Kamala Harris meet for their debate on 10 September, ABC moderators Linsey Davis and David Muir will do their best to cut through the fog of partisan hyperbole and get the candidates to at least admit the complexity we all face dealing with our current immigration problem.

They could ask Peter Rousmaniere to send them some probing questions. But, given the history of presidential debates, probing questions with intelligent follow-up have as much chance of happening as looking up suddenly to see pigs flying by my second story window.

A new low even for Donald Trump

In 2018, Donald Trump bestowed the Presidential medal of Freedom on Republican mega-donor Miriam Adelson. Last Thursday, with Adelson in the audience at a campaign event at his Bedminster, New Jersey, golf club, Trump saluted her and contrasted her award with the Congressional Medal of Honor.

Just in time to fill the sails at the Democrat National Convention next week in Chicago, the Biden Administration yesterday released the results of its drug price negotiations made possible by the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 (IRA).

A Fact Sheet from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) reported that the Biden-Harris Administration has reached agreement for new, lower prices for all 10 drugs selected for negotiations following passage of the IRA. These negotiated drugs are some of the most expensive and most frequently dispensed drugs in the Medicare program and are used to treat conditions such as heart disease, diabetes, and cancer. The new prices will go into effect for people with Medicare Part D prescription drug coverage beginning 1 January 2026.

By September 1, CMS will announce final prices—or Maximum Fair Prices (MFPs)—for the ten selected drugs.

To understand and appreciate yesterday’s announcement, a little history is in order.

This is a story, 18 years in the making, of government-enabled corporate greed. It’s complicated and somewhat dense. It has to be to go on that long. It’s a story of how one industry, the pharmaceutical industry, has done Olympian good while achieving Titanic profit, which has been surgically excised, Midas-like, from the hides of American taxpayers who never felt the touch.

The story

Medicare Part D, a prescription drug benefit plan for Medicare beneficiaries, became law on 1 January 2006 under the George W. Bush administration and a Republican controlled Congress. The legislation was enacted with no funding provisions whatsoever. Since then, Washington politicians have been arguing over whether this government program should be allowed to negotiate with pharmaceutical companies the prices it pays for drugs its members need. Makes sense to negotiate with drug makers in the hopes of  lowering the cost of a non-funded government program, right? Medicare beneficiaries, all 64 million of them, and the public at large, overwhelmingly supported such a move. Over the years, pharmaceutical companies spent a king’s ransom donating to politicians to secure―should we say “buy?”―their votes in opposition.

In June of this year, the CMS Actuary reported Medicare’s total gross spending for 2023 was estimated at just north of $1 trillion, or 3.58% of GDP.

Shortly after that, Statista published an eye-popping chart showing Medicare’s growth in spending since 1970.

About 13% of 2023’s spending, or $130 billion, was for Medicare Part D drugs.

The Rand Corporation studied and compared US prices to 32 other OECD countries (The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development – the most developed nations) and reported our prices are “nearly twice those of other countries after adjusting U.S. prices downward to account for rebates and other discounts paid by drug companies.”

Given these astronomical costs, why hasn’t Medicare negotiated the prices of the drugs its been buying from pharmaceutical manufacturers in the 18 years since Part D became law in 2006? With 64 million beneficiaries, it should have huge leverage.

As the Kaiser Family Foundation explains:

Under the Medicare Part D program, which covers retail prescription drugs, Medicare contracts with private plan sponsors to provide a prescription drug benefit. The law that established the Part D benefit included a provision known as the “noninterference” clause, which stipulates that the HHS Secretary “may not interfere with the negotiations between drug manufacturers and pharmacies and PDP [prescription drug plan] sponsors, and may not require a particular formulary or institute a price structure for the reimbursement of covered part D drugs.”

In other words, although Medicare was buying drugs for its many millions of members, it was not allowed to even hint that a lower price might be more fair and appropriate for the government to pay. That is the very definition of a “sweet deal” for drug manufacturers.

Giving the negotiation contrarians the benefit of a doubt they more than likely don’t deserve, their argument in opposition hung on the slim thread that negotiations would lower the income of drug manufacturers, and that would, in turn, reduce the amount of money the companies invest in research and development to discover new life-saving drugs. My own opinion is that this argument is chock full of what makes the grass grow green and tall. And, by the way, the Congressional Budget Office agrees with me, although their analysists said it with a bit more eloquence.

The 2022 Inflation Reduction Act’s section dealing with Medicare Part D prices was the first time CMS was given license to attempt to stifle the rise in Medicare drug prices, which had been rising at 6% to 7% per year for the last couple of decades. According to drug savings company GoodRX, they’ve risen 34% in the last ten years, far outstripping the rate of inflation.

The Act passed without a single Republican vote. It required CMS to negotiate prices for the 10 drugs covered under Medicare Part D and Part B¹ with the highest total spending.

What it all means

Yesterday’s Fact Sheet from CMS claims the government’s landmark drug price negotiations will save Americans $7.5 billion in its inaugural year, 2026. The savings will be split between senior citizens, who will pay $1.5 billion less in out-of-pocket costs for the ten super-high-cost medications the IRA allowed to be negotiated, and the government, as its health insurance program for the elderly will pay $6 billion less to treat heart failure, blood clots, diabetes and other conditions in 2026.

The Fact Sheet asserts the medications negotiated will see prices cut by 38% to 79%. Diabetes drugs saw the biggest reductions, including a 79% discount off the list price for Merck’s Type 2 diabetes drug Januvia and a 68% cut for AstraZeneca’s Farxiga. Amgen’s Enbrel rheumatoid arthritis injection will see a 67% reduction off its 2023 list price. The smallest price cut was for AbbVie’s leukemia drug Imbruvica, with a 38% price reduction.

However, Seniors shouldn’t start popping Champaign just yet. Yesterday, Laura Tollen, senior editor for Health Affairs, threw a bit of cold water on those who want to treat what is a highly complicated issue in a simple, “Game over. We won,” manner, writing:

Because most of the first ten drugs and their close therapeutic comparators already receive deep manufacturer discounts under Part D, the program’s first round might not result in MFPs that are significantly lower than current net prices. This will not necessarily indicate program failure, but rather that the program has, at least, captured existing discounts. In this round, CMS selected products among Medicare’s highest-spending drugs—not necessarily because of their (already discounted) prices, but because of their widespread use for common conditions such as diabetes, heart disease, and arthritis. In later years, as CMS chooses additional drugs for negotiation that are not already discounted, there may be more savings potential.

Under the new Drug Price Negotiation Program, Medicare will negotiate another 15 drugs for 2027, another 15 for 2028, and another 20 for 2029 and later years. The drugs to be chosen for negotiation will be selected from among the 50 drugs with the highest total Medicare spending. The number of drugs with negotiable prices  will accumulate over time.

It took 18 years to get here, but here we are. The Biden-Harris Administration secured a large benefit for Medicare beneficiaries, all 64 million of them. Despite Laura Tollen’s caveat, if the earth stopped rotating tomorrow would be no less surprising than if this achievement isn’t trumpeted as total victory loud and often during next week’s Convention. This is inevitable, because I am sure the Harris campaign knows that only 36 percent of US adults are aware of the program.

Seniors vote, and Kamala Harris will be praying they’re paying attention.

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¹ Medicare will also negotiate in a similar manner the prices of Part B drugs. These are drugs administered in physicians’ offices or hospital outpatient departments. Part B drugs enter the drug pricing program in 2028.

Every four years during presidential campaigns, Republicans and Democrats release their Party Platforms.¹

Democrats released a draft of the their Platform in July, and it could easily be titled, “We’re not Donald Trump.” Trump’s name appears on 61 of the Platform’s 80 pages, totaling nearly 150 mentions. They’ll release the official version at there Convention, which begins next Monday in Chicago.

Republicans released their Platform a month ago at their Convention in Milwaukee. They took pains, as did candidate Trump, never to mention Project 2025, the 922 page manifesto written by the Heritage Foundation as a step by step guide to implementing extremist conservative policies in a second Trump administration. It took three years to write and cost $22 million to produce. Fifty-four of its contributing writers had high-ranking positions in the first Trump Administration, and all of them would most assuredly like to do the same if Trump wins in November. The authors include Stephen Miller, Trump’s senior advisor for policy and White House director of speechwriting, and Russell Vought, Trump’s director of the Office of Management and Budget.

But because of a large helping of backlash stew, Project 2025 became the literary equivalent of Lord Voldemort at the Republican Convention, the plan that must not be named.

Trump says he “knew nothing about the document,” and doesn’t know the people who wrote it. This is absurd, given that so many of them worked for him, some, like Miller and Vought, with offices near the Oval. Also, in April of 2022 Trump flew to the Heritage Foundation’s annual meeting on a Heritage-chartered luxury jet sitting in a place of honor right beside Kevin Roberts, the Foundation’s president and chief creator of Project 2025.

Trump was the conference’s keynote speaker.

“They’re going to lay the groundwork and detail plans for exactly what our movement will do,” Trump said in his speech. And later in the month, Roberts told the Washington Post, “I personally have talked to President Trump about Project 2025.”

When the Republicans exiled Project 2025 from their Convention, they unveiled Agenda 47, their Platform, in its place, and, except for their names and lengths, there’s not much policy difference between the two. They took all 922 Project 2025 pages and whittled them down to Agenda 47, a 19-page bullet point presentation.

Oh, and by the way, a poorly written bullet point presentation. At least Project 2025 was well written extremism. In reading Agenda 47, I found grammatical errors any copy editor should have found.

Given that Party Platforms are usually full of enough hot air to float the Superdome, Agenda 47 stands out as a monumental achievement in hyperbolic bloviation. Finding lies and disinformation is about as easy as finding wind in a hurricane, but for now, I just want to focus on one outlandish statement that Republicans are using to buttress their Agenda 47 (and Project 2025) plan to do away with the U.S. Department of Education, whose  origins go back to 1867, when President Andrew Johnson signed legislation creating the first Department of Education.

Found on Page 13 under the bullet-point heading, “Return education to the States,” this is the reasoning Agenda 47 gives for eliminating the Department:

The United States spends more money per pupil on Education than any other Country in the World, and yet we are at the bottom of every educational list in terms of results.

Both of these assertions are lies. The U.S. does not spend more money on education than any other Country in the World (their capitalizations, not mine), and we are not at the bottom of every educational list in terms of results.

Let me prove that to you.

The Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), coordinated by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), has measured the performance of 15-year-old students in reading, mathematics, and science literacy every 3 years since 2000, except for a 1-year delay in the current cycle (from 2021 to 2022) due to the coronavirus pandemic. In 2022, PISA was administered in 81 countries and education systems, including 37 member countries of the OECD. These were PISA’s conclusions regarding the mathematics and science literacy of U.S. students:

The U.S. average mathematics literacy score (465) was not measurably different from the OECD average score. Compared with the 80 other education systems in PISA 2022, the U.S. average mathematics literacy score was:

• higher than the average in 43 education systems;
• lower than the average in 25 education systems; and
• not measurably different from the average in 12 education systems.

The U.S. average science literacy score (499) was higher than the OECD average score (485). Compared with the 80 other education systems in PISA 2022, the U.S. average science literacy score was

• higher than the average in 56 education systems;
• lower than the average in 9 education systems; and
• not measurably different from the average in 15 education systems.

While U. S. students certainly have room for a lot of improvement, they are no worse than average in mathematics and better than most in science.

Regarding the claim we spend more than any other country, I’m sorry, but that gold medal goes to Luxemburg, and the silver to Norway. True, we spend way more than most, but as a percentage of GDP, while America is at the high end of the scale, our spending is not outlandishly off the charts.

And yet, just like Project 2025, Agenda 47, the Republican Party Platform, “commits” to eliminating the U.S. Department of Education and, by the way, sacking the department’s 4,400 federal professionals.

Educational professionals should read this section of Agenda 47 (it’s one page out of 19). Then they should think about it. And then they should do all in their might to educate (that is what they do) all who will listen. Then, just possibly, they might marshal friends, neighbors and relatives into a movement to vote to defeat the educational plans of Agenda 47 and Project 2025.

Throughout American history, party platforms have been, to put it charitably, aspirational in nature, a means of revving up the faithful and energizing them to get out there and do the door to door work necessary to win the coming election. But Agenda 47 is different. It is not aspirational or hopeful. It is, instead, a dystopian, declaratory, total commitment to a cause, the abhorrent cause of MAGA and Donald Trump. In its Preamble (yes, it has a Preamble), it says, “We will be a Nation based on Truth, Justice, and Common Sense.”

“Common Sense” (initial caps, again) surprised me. I was waiting for “the American way,” and I was expecting to see a picture of Clark Kent, morphing into Superman, hands on hips, standing out in space in front of the rotating earth and a great big American Flag rippling in the nonexistent breeze.

Early Boomers know what I’m talking about. But it seems MAGA enthusiasts don’t.

______________

In the 2020 campaign, Republicans did not release a Platform.

Donald Trump was on a roll.

After Joe Biden’s disastrous debate performance on 27 June, Trump gained momentum and Biden lost whatever he might have had, which wasn’t much. Then came the assassination attempt in Butler, Pennsylvania, a key state in the upcoming election. Trump’s MAGA followers attributed his surviving to being “touched by God.” Less than a week later, Trump tapped Hillbilly Elegy author and Ohio Senator J. D. Vance as his running mate. The Republican National Convention immediately followed from Milwaukee showcasing more hot air than the inside of a pizza oven. Republicans began getting the moving vans ready for 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

Meanwhile, democrats were in disarray in what seemed five-alarm fire mode, all of them calling for Joe Biden to withdraw. It took the irrepressible Nancy Pelosi to push him over the line. And so, on a summer Sunday afternoon, like Lyndon Johnson before him, 56 years ago, Joe Biden withdrew from the 2024 presidential race and endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris.

That was just twenty days ago, and since then everything seems to have changed.

Harris seems made for the moment, and appears to have, politically, grown immensely in her four years of calling the Naval Observatory home. Democrats have been instantly energized much as they were when Barack Obama ran in 2008. Suddenly, it is Donald Trump, the picture of elderly vigor at the Biden debate, who now looks just plain elderly compared to his 19-year younger opponent.

And then Harris selected former high school social studies teacher, football coach, National Guard Command Sergeant Major, Congressman, and Minnesota Governor Tim Walz as her running mate, The contrast to 39-year old, ex-venture capitalist from the Peter Thiel orbit, J. D. Vance, could not be more stark. We suddenly have Mr. Likable going up against a person who more and more seems an embarrassingly poor selection with his “childless cat ladies” and his attachment to Kevin Roberts, the Heritage Foundation’s president and proud creator of Project 2025. Vance wrote the forward for Roberts latest book that has now seen publication delayed until after the election, but reviewers have copies, and they have not been kind.

So far, the best republicans have been able to come up with in attacking Walz is to call him a communist, castigate him for, after 24 years of service, retiring from the National Guard two months before his unit was deployed to Iraq in 2005, and mock him as Tampon Tim, because he lobbied for and signed a Minnesota law to provide menstrual products in the bathrooms of the state’s public schools. This latter criticism suffered a huge backlash throughout the country and came across as discriminatory, racist, and mean-spirited (which it was).¹

What are the polls saying?

Two excellent sources for discovering how this is playing out with the electorate are Nate Silver’s Silver Bulletin (formerly FiveThirtyEight) and the Cooke Political Report. Both require subscriptions to get their full analysis.

They each report significant movement as of yesterday. The big news comes from the Silver Bulletin, which now concludes, with its 40,000 model simulations, that Harris has overtaken Trump in the all-important Electoral College voting.

And here’s the day to day tracking of that change happening.

This movement resides in three primary demographic groups: Women, Blacks and Independents, according to the Cooke Political Report, although there is some upward Harris movement in nearly all demographics.

Two weeks ago, on 23 July, Harris led Trump among women voters by 50.4% to 43.5%, for a lead of 6.9 percentage points. Yesterday, the lead had grown to 9.5 percentage points.

Among Black voters, Harris has gained 2.3% in the same period, with the greatest movement coming immediately after Trump’s catastrophic interview at the National Association of Black Journalists Convention.

Trump has had a contentious relationship with people of color since 1989 when he inserted himself into the case of the Central Park Five, Black and Latino men wrongly convicted in the beating and rape of a white female jogger. Trump famously took out a newspaper ad in New York City after the 1989 attack calling for their executions. They were later exonerated. He never apologized.

Finally, Independent voters, the group most likely to be the primary deciders in the upcoming election, have also moved toward the Harris/Walz ticket. On 23 July, Trump led Harris, 49% to 41.9%, a lead of 7.1 percentage points. By 4 August, his lead had decreased to only 2.6 percentage points.

However, I do not have to mention, but I will, anyway, that relying on polls, even the most reputable, is a lot like betting on the ponies and expecting to win, because someone you met outside the track has given you a compelling tip.

Regardless, Harris has energized her base as Joe Biden was unable to do. Moreover, because of the brilliant timing of Biden’s withdrawal, Trump’s campaign got little, if any, boost from the Republican National Convention.

This brings me to the Democrats’ Convention, which happens ten days from now in Chicago. If democrats can remain united, a big “if,” and if the Harris/Walz rally tour around America continues to bring joy to the faithful leading up to the Convention, it will be interesting to see to what new low level Donald Trump sinks to smear and malign his opponent.

Yesterday, in a sign that Trump is feeling the burn of the Harris heat, he agreed to debate her on ABC on 10 September. He had originally agreed to this debate when Biden was the candidate, but after Biden withdrew and passed the torch to Harris, he backed out.  He also agreed yesterday to two additional debates, one on CBS, the other, Fox. Harris said she’d be open to these, but her campaign has not not yet officially accepted.

As Harris surges and Trump seethes, this contest is guaranteed to become even more noxious than it already is.

________________

¹ After Vice President Harris announced Walz as her pick, Stephen Miller, a former senior  adviser to former President Trump, tweeted, “She actually chose Tampon Tim.” Chaya Raichik, who runs the far-right social media account Libs of TikTok, photoshopped Walz’s face onto a Tampax box. I have written previously about the serious issue of period poverty here.

How to explain the devotion Donald Trump’s MAGA followers have for him? Sociologists have suggested he tells them they’re powerless in the face of a large, amorphous, governmental bureaucracy out to grind them into tiny bits of nothing. This feeling of powerlessness creates an onrush of anger and frustration, which the atavistic arrogance of Trump hones in on and feeds off. He tells them their world is a dangerous and cruel place in which criminals and migrants aim to destroy America as they have known it, which means destroying them. He, only he, can protect and shield them from this coming annihilation.

His is a powerful cult-like message to people who believe themselves betrayed by their radical, leftist government. It’s a message he hammers throughout his 90-minute rally rantings. He castigates and maligns any and all, of either political party, who dare to even suggest criticism of him.

He never offers any cogent policies to inspire hope. He has none of those. He is the hope, the only hope. The Messiah.

And they believe him.

On 13 July, an obviously deranged young man named Thomas Matthew Crooks fired eight bullets at Donald Trump as he was beginning to speak at one of his rallies, this one in Pennsylvania. One of those bullets grazed Trump on his ear. Another took the life of Corey Comperatore, a 50-year-old grandfather and firefighter, who died shielding his wife and two young daughters after hearing the first shot. In the days that followed, Trump’s followers repeatedly said he had been spared by God to continue his work saving America. At the Republican National Convention he was venerated as “touched by God.”

No one could explain why God had not spared Corey Comperatore.

A different time, a different man

On 30 March 1981, President Ronald Reagan — just two months into his first term — was shot and wounded by John Hinckley Jr., who was, insanely, trying to impress the actress Jodi Foster. Ms. Foster was horrified, not impressed.

Reagan was leaving the Washington Hilton after a speaking engagement when Hinckley fired six shots at him. The sixth round ricocheted off the side of the presidential limousine and struck Reagan under his left arm, breaking a rib, puncturing a lung, and causing serious internal bleeding.

Reagan’s Secret Service detail threw him in the back of the limo and sped off to George Washington University Hospital. When he got there he was near death. But ER doctors stabilized him, operated, and removed the bullet that had lodged less than an inch from his heart.

He stayed in the hospital 12 days, and was released to return to the White House on 11 April. That night he wrote in his personal and confidential journal for the first time since being shot by Hinkley, who was later found not guilty by reason of insanity. He wrote about the day of the shooting and the days of recovery after. This is what he wrote:

Monday, March 30, 1981

My day to address the Building & Construction Trades Natl. Conference AFL-CIO at the Hilton Ballroom — 2pm. Was all dressed to go & for some reason at the last minute took off my really good wrist watch & wore an older one.

Speech not riotously received — still it was successful.

Left the hotel at the usual side entrance and headed for the car — suddenly there was a burst of gun fire from the left. Secret Service agent pushed me onto the floor of the car & jumped on top. I felt a blow in my upper back that was unbelievably painful. I was sure he’d broken my rib. The car took off. I sat up on the edge of the seat almost paralyzed by pain. Then I began coughing up blood which made both of us think — yes, I had a broken rib & it had punctured a lung. He switched orders from White House to George Washington U. Hospital.

By the time we arrived I was having great trouble getting enough air. We did not know that Tim McCarthy (Secret Service) had been shot in the chest, Jim Brady in the head & a policeman, Tom Delahanty, in the neck.

I walked into the emergency room and was hoisted onto a cart where I was stripped of my clothes. It was then we learned I’d been shot & had a bullet in my lung.

Getting shot hurts. Still my fear was growing because no matter how hard I tried to breathe it seemed I was getting less & less air. I focused on that tiled ceiling and prayed. But I realized I couldn’t ask for God’s help while at the same time I felt hatred for the mixed-up young man who had shot me. Isn’t that the meaning of the lost sheep? We are all God’s children & therefore equally beloved by him. I began to pray for his soul and that he would find his way back to the fold.

I opened my eyes once to find Nancy there. I pray I’ll never face a day when she isn’t there. Of all the ways God has blessed me giving her to me is the greatest and beyond anything I can ever hope to deserve.

All the kids arrived and the hours ran together in a blur during which I was operated on. I know it’s going to be a long recovery but there has been such an outpouring of love from all over.

The days of therapy, transfusion, intravenous, etc. have gone by — now it is Sat. April 11 and this morning I left the hospital and am here at the White House with Nancy & Patti. The treatment, the warmth, the skill of those at G.W. has been magnificent but it’s great to be here at home.

Whatever happens now I owe my life to God and will try to serve him in every way I can.

Lying on a gurney with a bullet through his lung and near his heart, fearing he might die that day, perhaps in the next moment, Ronald Reagan prays for the soul of John Hinkley, a mixed up kid with a Röhm RG-14 double action trying to impress a movie star. Then he vows to serve his God “in every way I can.”

I agreed with Ronald Reagan’s policies perhaps 10% of the time, maybe less. You remember trickle down economics, don’t you? Didn’t work out then, and it hasn’t since, but it’s still the Republican Party’s Yellow Brick Road.

Nonetheless, Reagan the man, the person, seems to have been a decent, compassionate, good human being who bore hatred for no one, even the young man who tried to kill him and nearly did.

I wonder if Donald Trump keeps a personal, confidential journal, and, if so, what’s in it?

Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s roadmap for a second Trump administration, written mostly by high-ranking members of his first administration, and spanning 922 pages, is basically a collection of policy transition proposals from 54 conservative organizations that outline how, should Trump win the November election, he can vastly remake the federal government to most effectively carry out a highly conservative, even extremist, agenda.

“It is not enough for conservatives to win elections,” the project’s website states. “If we are going to rescue the country from the grip of the radical Left, we need both a governing agenda and the right people in place, ready to carry this agenda out on day one of the next conservative administration. This is the goal of the 2025 Presidential Transition Project.”

Section 3, Central Personnel Agencies: Managing the Bureaucracy, is all about having “the right people in place.” It devotes nearly all of its 17 pages to denigrating federal employees, maintaining they have better pay and benefits than private sector workers, are nearly always highly rated in performance appraisals, are difficult or even impossible to terminate for poor performance, and have undue union protection. Authors Donald Devine, Dennis Dean Kirk, and Paul Dans point to President Trump’s attempts to rein in this abuse by issuing three executive orders near the end of his administration, which President Biden upon taking office promptly countermanded.

Here’s what Project 2025 says about that “undue union protection:”

Congress should also consider whether public-sector unions are appropriate
in the first place. The bipartisan consensus up until the middle of the 20th century held that these unions were not compatible with constitutional government.
After more than half a century of experience with public-sector union frustrations
of good government management, it is hard to avoid reaching the same conclusion.

Like a bright red rope in the snow,  a careful reading of Section 3 leads one to conclude that Project 2025’s priority regarding the federal workforce is “getting the right people in place” without civil service or union protection. In short, the authors are looking for loyalists.

How would Project 2025 get “the right people in place?”

There are three tiers of workers in the federal civilian workforce:

1. The first consists of the rank and file workers, and there are 2.87 million of them. Sixty-percent of these employees work for the  Departments of Defense, Veterans Affairs, and Homeland Security. There are 15 pay grade levels for these workers, beginning with GS-1 (starting pay – $27,822) and continuing through GS-15 (pay ranges from $155,700 to $183,500).
2. The second tier encompasses the nearly 9,000 Senior Executive Service (SES) positions. SES employees are leaders who work in key positions just below presidential appointees in about 75 federal agencies. They act as a bridge between career employees and political appointees and oversee nearly every governmental activity. Their compensation ranges from $135,468 to $203,700. Project 2025 alleges this is the group that stymied President Trump’s policy aims.
3. The third tier consists of the slightly more than 1,100 political appointees (minimum base pay is 120% of the beginning rate for a GS-15 worker). All of these require Senate confirmation. These appointees are the spoils of presidential victory, and their mission is to carry out the mandates of the President.

In the last month of his first term, frustrated by what he perceived as SES obstructionism to his desires and claiming that certain statutory language exempted SES positions from any civil service employment protections then in force, Donald Trump  issued an executive order that would have stripped civil service employment protections from Senior Executive Service employees perceived as disloyal and would have required expressions of allegiance to the president upon hiring. Schedule F was the name of the new employment category the executive order created.

The Biden Administration rescinded Trump’s executive order before it could go into effect and took steps to clarify and strengthen existing protections for civil servants.

Project 2025’s page 80 focuses in on the Senior Executive Service as not “respecting” the “political rights” of Administration leadership. Therefore, it justifies the creation of Schedule F thusly:

Frustrated with the activities by top career executives, the Trump Administration issued Executive Order 1395724 to make career professionals in positions that are not normally subject to change as a result of a presidential transition but who discharge significant duties and exercise significant discretion in formulating and implementing executive branch policy and programs an exception to the competitive hiring rules and examinations for career positions under a new Schedule F.

Project 2025 then says President Trump’s Schedule F “should be reinstated.”

If it were, what would be the consequences?

In the first place, presidential loyalty would be the prime hiring requirement not only for the eleven-hundred highest ranking people in government, but also for all 9,000 second tier SES governmental managers. Second, SES Schedule F employees, who oversee the nearly three million rank and file federal workers, would be ideally positioned to drive a president’s agenda, regardless of its merit or legality. Third, Schedule F would also allow loyalty requirements for higher ranking, 1st tier, rank and file federal employees. There is nothing in the Schedule F executive order that would prevent this, although Project 2025 says, “SES responsibility should come first.”

Historical context

With the death of German President Paul von Hindenburg on August 2, 1934. Adolf Hitler began to solidify his control over Germany. That same day, all military personnel in Germany swore a new oath of allegiance. The oath was no longer one of allegiance to the Weimar Republic’s Constitution or its institutions, but one of binding loyalty to Hitler himself:

“I swear by God this holy oath, that I will render to Adolf Hitler, Führer of the German Reich and People, Supreme Commander of the Armed Forces, unconditional obedience, and that I am ready, as a brave soldier, to risk my life at any time for this oath.”

From this point forward, all existing units and all new military recruits would swear the so-called “Führer Oath.” The oath became law in July 1935. The Nazis required civilian officials to swear a similar oath.

The Führer Oath did not happen overnight. Hitler and his henchmen had been planning it for years. Before taking the oath, military leaders had to be softened up, rather like the frog in the increasingly heated water. Some, perhaps most, Americans sincerely believe this could never happen in the greatest democracy the world has ever known.

In 1933, most Germans believed something like that, too.