The Weekly Sift

Once the election board picks a side, does it matter what the voters want?

The usual methods of stealing elections go back to Athens and Rome: Bring in unqualified voters of your own, or use force or trickery to prevent your opposition’s voters from showing up in the right place. If voters vote by dropping tokens in a box, miscount the tokens, or maybe lose boxes from precincts where you don’t expect to do well. There’s a long history of such tried-and-true methods being used in the United States, and voting systems are designed to avoid such shenanigans.

For the most part they’ve been designed pretty well, and by now actual election-day cheating is fairly rare (despite Donald Trump’s baseless claims about every election he’s ever lost, going back to the Iowa caucuses in 2016 and even the Emmys “The Apprentice” lost). That’s why most current cheating goes on before election day, by “purging” the voting roles of legitimate voters, or requiring IDs that your voters are more likely to have than your opposition’s voters.

2020. But in 2020, Trump came up with a novel scheme to cheat after all the votes had been cast and counted: At every level from county election boards to the counting of electoral votes in Congress on January 6, Trump did his best to delay certification of Biden’s victory. The goal of this delay was not just to declare himself the winner (as he hoped Mike Pence would do by counting the votes of his fake electors), but to delegitimize his loss by pushing certification past certain legal deadlines.

If January 6 had come and gone with no recognized winner, he might have been able to push the decision into the House, where each state has only one vote and Republican delegations outnumbered Democratic delegations. Or possibly the succession might have been decided in the Supreme Court, where the 6-3 Republican majority has shown its willingness to decide cases on a partisan basis. If January 20 had arrived and no new president could be inaugurated, then he might simply have stayed in power temporarily until … well, until never. If voters had taken to the streets to protest their disenfranchisement, right-wing militias could make sure that demonstrations turned into riots that required federal troops and temporary martial law.

At each stage, Trump would hold out the promise of a peaceful transfer of power … but not yet. Here’s what Ted Cruz was proposing on January 6:

And what I would urge of this body is that we do the same [as in the contested Hayes/Tilden election of 1876]. That we [appoint an] electoral commission to conduct a 10-day emergency audit, consider the evidence, and resolve the claims [of fraud]. For those on the Democratic aisle who says, say there is no evidence, they’ve been rejected, then you should rest [in] comfort if that’s the case.

From today’s perspective, when Trump is still making claims of fraud despite uncovering no evidence in nearly four years, it seems naive to imagine that any ten-day audit could have resolved the doubts Trump had falsely instilled in his followers. If the electoral commission didn’t decide in Trump’s favor, then it too would have been “rigged” and “fake”. So then it’s January 16, with four days to inauguration, and there’s still no president-elect. What then?

2024. Four years later, Trump has had time to refine this plan. In many ways, he’s in worse shape to pull it off: He isn’t president. So if Harris wins, but her victory can’t be certified by January 20, it’s Biden who might stay in power. (Biden might then resign and let Harris become president until her victory could be certified.) And as President of the Senate, it’s Kamala Harris who will preside over the joint session of Congress on January 6.

Also, one state where the election is likely to be close (Arizona) now has a Democratic governor, but another (Nevada) has flipped in the other direction.

But he has one advantage now that he didn’t have in 2020: Despite the lack of evidence, the myth of the 2020 stolen election has become dogma among Republicans, who have worked to make local election posts more partisan. Republican officials like Aaron van Langevelde, who voted to certify Biden’s victory in Michigan because that was his legal duty, have been replaced by people more loyal to Trump than to the law.

Across the country, county-level boards of canvassers have what is legally known as ministerial duties. They aren’t supposed to be investigators and they aren’t supposed to make judgment calls. The law assigns them the mundane job of receiving vote totals from the precincts, adding them up, and passing the information up to state officials by some set deadline. Recounts and challenges to the votes-as-first-counted are somebody else’s job.

But Republicans see county election boards as places to stand while they throw monkey wrenches into the system. If counties don’t certify totals and pass them up the line, then states also can’t certify elections. This has been tried out in various state and local elections since 2020, usually unsuccessfully. (Often the refusal to certify comes from rural Republican counties who are protesting election fraud that they imagine happens in urban Democratic counties.)

A few weeks ago, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) published a report Election Certification Under Threat. The report identifies 35 officials in eight states who have already refused to certify an election. Nearly all of them are either still in office or likely to be reappointed at any moment. The report lists, state by state, the actions that can be taken to overcome the threat.

Those steps usually begin with a mandamus lawsuit. Mandamus is Latin for “we command”, and is related to the English word mandate. In a mandamus case, a court has the power to force an official to do his or her job. If the official refuses, the court has options that vary by state. The court may appoint a new official, or fine or even jail the resisting official.

What gives a court this kind of power is the ministerial nature of the job. Typical state law says that election supervisors shall (not should or even may) certify an election within a certain time period. If they don’t, they’re violating the law. Even if the officials are correct in thinking that vote totals are tainted, dealing with that is somebody else’s job. They’re just supposed to collect numbers from the precincts, total them up, and pass the results on.

Mandamus suits should work just about everywhere. Local officials can call attention to their cause by initially refusing the certify an election, but ultimately they’ll have to.

Georgia. But “just about anywhere” may not include Georgia, which Biden carried by less than 12,000 votes in 2020, and where Harris/Trump polls are very close.

In a series of meetings in July and August, the Georgia State Election Board voted 3-2 to change the rules governing local election boards. (The three members voting to change the rules all deny that Joe Biden won Georgia in 2020, despite the complete lack of evidence for that view. Trump has given them a shout-out at a political rally. When was the last time a national candidate paid any attention to a state election board?) Lawrence Tribe and Dennis Aftergut summarize the new rules and their apparent purpose:

The first rule requires local election officials to conduct “reasonable inquiry” into election results before certifying them. The term “reasonable inquiry” is dangerously elastic, creating an opening for authoritarians to do whatever they want. No sensible court would ever approve such a system, by which unelected appointees could issue open-ended election rules making certification discretionary, especially without any such directive from the legislature of Georgia to end democracy.

The second rule permits individual county board members “to examine all election related documentation created during the conduct of elections prior to certification of results”. The opportunities are unlimited to delay certification by demanding that documents great and small be produced before certification.

One apparent goal is to bypass federal and state law requiring states’ votes certified in time for Congress, on 6 January 2025, to bless the election results. If enough states’ certifications are stalled so that too few electors are actually appointed as of 6 January, under the 12th amendment, the presidential election goes to the House. There, per the constitution, the election is determined by one vote per state delegation. Given gerrymandering and how the House is structured, Republicans have held a majority of the state delegations for years. In November, by their votes, Trump would become president, regardless of whether he has won the electoral college vote or a popular vote majority.

Who are those guys? One unintended benefit of Trump’s relentless assault on democratic processes is that we all get a rolling civics lesson. Here’s some stuff I never knew before about the Georgia State Elections Board:

The board has five members: one appointed by the state House, one chosen by the state Senate, one each from the Republican and Democratic parties, and a nonpartisan chair selected by the General Assembly or by the governor if the General Assembly is not in session when there is a vacancy.

The three Trumpists trying to monkey-wrench Georgia elections are the House, Senate, and Republican Party appointees. The Democratic appointee and the chair appointed by Republican Governor Kemp voted against the new rules.

You may notice from that description that none are elected by the People of Georgia, and so they really shouldn’t (and almost certainly don’t) have the power to circumvent laws passed by the legislature. If state law says that the local election officials have until 5 p.m. the next Monday to certify Tuesday’s election (as it does say), the GSEB can’t authorize further delay.

Remedies. With that in mind, some Georgia voters and the Georgia Democratic Party are suing the GSEB in state court

To remedy these harms and prevent chaos in November, this Court should follow decades of binding precedent and declare both that the statutes mean exactly what they say and that SEB’s rules must be construed consistent with those statutes in order to be a valid exercise of SEB’s authority. …

Such relief is needed now, before the November 5 election and the start of the six-day clock the election code sets for certification. Election officials are already setting procedures and staffing for canvassing. Similarly, candidates and political organizations are already allocating resources and making efforts to ensure that every vote is counted. Withholding relief until a county board or other superintendent relies on the rules to delay certification or not certify at all risks disorder, including extremely rushed emergency judicial proceedings across multiple courts; imposes additional burdens on Georgia’s courts, election officials, and political organizations; and could lead to the discarding of valid votes cast by qualified electors

Democrats may have some allies in this effort: Georgia’s Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger and Governor Brian Kemp. Both have denounced the new rules, and Kemp reportedly has asked the state attorney general to determine whether he can remove the GSEB’s three Trumpist members.

At a rally in Atlanta on August 5, Trump denounced Governor Kemp, who has consistently denied Trump’s claim that the 2020 Georgia election was rigged against him. But they have since patched up their differences and Kemp is supporting Trump. If Kemp removes board members Trump picked out for praise, though, the feud may start up again.

Harris’ best strategy: Win big, win everywhere. Of course, this disruption will only occur if Trump loses Georgia, and is only one of the tricks he can be expected to play in any state where the election is close. The best way to avoid another tense November, December, and early January is if Harris wins by margins large enough to dwarf Trump’s complaints, and to win in enough states that no single one is necessary for an Electoral College majority.

The most direct path for Harris to get 270 electoral votes (exactly) is to win Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania, along with the 2nd congressional district in Nebraska. (Nebraska and Maine give separate electoral votes to each of their districts. Nebraska’s lone Democratic electoral vote should cancel the lone Republican vote from Maine.) Also in play are Georgia, Arizona, Nevada, and North Carolina. Winning two or three of those would protect the election from a lot of shenanigans.

Trump’s VP pick has had an inauspicious debut.

Let me say this right up front: In no part of Hillbilly Elegy did J. D. Vance confess to having sex with a couch. In fact, we have no reliable reports of Vance sexually abusing any piece of furniture. Ever. He has not been banned from Ikea. The clip of him singing a love song to a couch is fake; the lip movements don’t even match the audio. If you search on the #CouchHumper hashtag, all you’ll get is misinformation. Are we clear on that?

But somehow this week the mythical Vance/couch tryst became one of the funniest examples in the history of framing. It started on social media, with a tweet providing exact page numbers for the confessional excerpt. If you didn’t happen to have a copy of Hillbilly Elegy handy, how could you check? Surely nobody would just make something like that up, would they? [1]

Largely because of that specific referencing, the rumor began to take off — I even believed it myself at first — to the point that it needed to be debunked. So AP published a fact-check (since removed) which it headlined: “No, JD Vance did not have sex with a couch.”

As any fan of George Lakoff knows, the first law of debunking misinformation is: Don’t put the lie in the headline. The reasoning is simple: Directly negating a frame invokes the frame. In Lakoff’s famous example, “Don’t think of an elephant” invariably makes you think of an elephant. Until this week, the most famous real-life violation of Lakoff’s rule was Richard Nixon’s immortal denial “I’m not a crook.” If you had never before considered whether Nixon might be a crook, you did then.

Well, lots of people who don’t delve deeply into social media, and so hadn’t heard the rumor at all, do read AP headlines. And they immediately thought: J. D. Vance? A couch? What’s up with that? And then, even though they didn’t have time to read the article, they wondered what exactly was wrong about the rumor. Did Vance just flirt with the couch? Did the couch misinterpret his intentions? Maybe he was napping on the couch and had a wet dream. That’s embarrassing, but it’s innocent; it could happen to any young man.

A few people who made the early couch memes may have believed the claim was true, but before long everybody knew it was invented. And yet the jokes just kept rolling in a tone of OK-it’s-false-but-I’m-having-too-much-fun. [2]

I am still looking for a social psychologist who can explain why this has been so enjoyable. But in the meantime I’ll take a stab at it. I think the message here is: “See? We can lie too.”

Democrats are sick to death of Trump and his minions pushing lies that they know are lies, like that the 2020 election was stolen, or Kamala isn’t a citizen, or Democrats support murdering babies after they’re born, or other countries have sent their prison population to the US, and hundreds of others. Mike Johnson is a lawyer, so he has to know that his Harris-will-have-trouble-getting-on-the-ballot claims are bogus, but he makes them anyway.

We’re sick to death of answering stuff like that with facts, only to watch the lie propagate in spite of the facts. So you want to lie? Fine. Our lie is funnier and more viral than yours.

I’ll be interested to see whether people start consciously using it that way, responding to right-wing BS with Vance-and-the-couch claims, and, when challenged, saying, “Oh, I thought you had started a lying contest.”

Another reason we’re all being so merciless with the couch jokes is that other stuff emerged this week: stuff Vance really did say that personally insulted millions of us, and left us feeling like “I dare you to say that to my face, you couch-humper.”

In one, he disparaged women who decide not to have children (like my wife) as

childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable, too

In another, he proposed that people without children (like me) should have less voting power than parents, because we “don’t have as much of an investment in the future of this country”.

How does it make any sense that we’ve turned our country over to people who don’t really have a direct stake in it?

Wow. What a judgmental, clueless thing to say. J. D. Vance has never met me, but he’s sure that I don’t care about the future, that I couldn’t possibly care like he does, because my only connection to the future is through my sister’s kids and grandkids, the children of my close friends, the kids in my church community, the students I’ve taught, the coworkers I’ve mentored, and my membership in the human race. Kamala Harris is even a stepmother to her husband’s children, but she’s one of the childless cat ladies Vance called out by name. Apparently, step-parenting doesn’t count either.

Another childless person he called out by name was Pete Buttigieg, whose adopted twins are nearly three now. But at the time

Chasten and I had been through a fairly heartbreaking setback in our adoption journey. He couldn’t have known that, but maybe that’s why you shouldn’t be talking about other people’s children. [3]

In an interview Sunday with Jen Psaki, Pete offered a more abstract perspective on Vance’s attitude.

He seems to view everything in terms of the negative. … I think a lot of us who have had kids would certainly say that that experience opens you to a new way of thinking about the world. But he doesn’t talk about it in those terms. He talks about how anybody who doesn’t have kids is less than, that their perspectives have less value, which is a really strange take.

Precisely. If Vance wants to wax poetic about how parenthood has changed him for the better, I’m happy for him. But if he wants to project onto me the benighted mindset he had before becoming a father, or (based on that projection) assign me a correspondingly lesser role in the nation we share, I’ve got a problem with that.

And let’s be clear: Projection is the key concept here. Vance’s attack is actually a confession. He doesn’t care about the future beyond how it affects his own biological descendants. Caring about other people’s kids, or about your community more broadly, is so foreign to him that he can’t even imagine how people like me can do it.

Such a me-and-mine worldview perfectly explains his position on climate change. If he can leave his own children well fixed by selling out to fossil fuel companies, that sounds pretty good to him, even if it condemns everyone else’s kids to an apocalyptic hellscape.

His attempts to clean this up only doubled down.

I’ve got nothing against cats. I’ve got nothing against dogs. … People are focusing so much on the sarcasm and not on the substance of what I said, and the substance of what I said, Megyn, I’m sorry, it’s true.

But he wasn’t being “sarcastic”. He was being an asshole. He has ignorantly insulted me and millions of people like me, and when it was pointed out to him, he wouldn’t apologize. So the insult stands.

Do you want an asshole to be vice president of United States?

But OK, let’s put aside the insults and assholery and look at what Vance was proposing, which is — let’s face it — just a dumb unworkable idea: Children get votes, which their parents get to cast. So if Mom and Dad disagree — it is OK for a woman to disagree with her husband, isn’t it? — which one gets to cast the kids’ votes? If Mom and Dad separate with joint custody, where do the votes go? And think about those stereotypic welfare moms that Republicans love to scapegoat, the ones who keep having kids just to get more welfare. Do they get extra votes? If I’m an undocumented immigrant, but my “anchor baby” is an American citizen, can I cast her vote?

The whole idea is stupid. Clearly Vance just says stuff without thinking it through.

Minnesota Governor Tim Walz burnished his Harris-VP credentials by applying a term that has stuck: weird. If you want to say that Vance’s ideas are scary or stupid, I can’t argue with you. But the main thing they are is weird. Here’s an example of the far-out scenarios that hatch in Vance’s mind, and the kinds of things he justifies with these bizarre fantasies. [4]

Let’s say Roe v Wade is overruled. Ohio bans abortion … let’s say in 2024. And then every day, George Soros sends a 747 to Columbus to load up disproportionately Black women to get them to go have abortions in California. … And if that happens, do you need some federal response to prevent it from happening? … I’m pretty sympathetic to that actually.

Federal response like what exactly? Banning pregnant women from crossing state lines? Making women take pregnancy tests before getting on interstate flights? What? Suppose a pregnant Ohio State student flies home to California for Thanksgiving and miscarries while she’s there. How can she prove she didn’t get an abortion? What happens to her?

I’m sure Vance’s musings would sound perfectly normal in the Republic of Gilead. But not here. In America, they’re weird.

[1] Apparently, people have been making stuff like this up for a long time. In Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail, Hunter S. Thompson told this story about Lyndon Johnson.

The race was close and Johnson was getting worried.  Finally he told his campaign manager to start a massive rumor campaign about his opponent’s life-long habit of enjoying carnal knowledge of his own barnyard sows.

“Christ, we can’t get a way with calling him a pig-fucker,” the campaign manager protested.  “Nobody’s going to believe a thing like that.”

“I know,” Johnson replied.  “But let’s make the sonofabitch deny it.”

[2] Rep. Jack Kimble is often amusing, but he’s not a real congressman. California’s 54th district does not exist.

[3] Pete is being generous. Yes, Vance couldn’t have known at the time that Buttigieg and his husband were having trouble adopting. But he knows now, and hasn’t offered any kind of apology.

I haven’t found any direct statement of Vance’s views on same-sex marriage, or adoptions by same-sex couples, but he opposed the Respect for Marriage Act that would have codified marital rights for same-sex couples, and many of his “pro-family” statements use phrases that are also used by anti-gay hate groups. So it’s possible, even likely, that Vance not only thinks Pete should have second-class citizenship, but that he opposes any attempt by gays and lesbians to qualify for first-class citizenship by getting married and adopting children.

[4] Lots of Republican proposals are justified by similarly bizarre fantasies. We have to ban late-term abortions, for example, because of the possibility that some woman might carry a healthy fetus for nearly nine months, and then choose an abortion at the last minute on a whim. Who does that?

Or we need to ban trans athletes from high school and college sports, because women’s programs could be overrun by men pretending to be women. How many trans athletes do they think are out there? Are they dominating any sport? Is any women’s program in America being overrun by them? Can Republicans name even one trans athlete whose motivation is anything like what they’ve described?

Trump designed Project 2025 to be deniable. But the Republican platform isn’t deniable, and it’s bad enough.

Recently a lot of attention is being paid to Project 2025, which I warned you about last August. Project 2025 is a massive 900-page plan for the second Trump administration to hit the ground running next January, together with a database of loyal MAGA Republicans to staff it, and a process by which Trump acolytes can declare their fealty in hopes of landing a government job.

In essence, Project 2025 plays two familiar roles: The 900-page doorstop is a very detailed party platform, and the staffing database resembles what a presidential transition team might do — enlarged by Trump’s plan to “demolish the Deep State” by circumventing civil service requirements and appointing over 50K people, rather than the usual 4K or so.

What’s different about Project 2025 is that (by farming the effort out to a consortium of conservative groups headed by The Heritage Foundation), Trump has made the whole effort deniable. So if something in the 900 pages terrifies you, like that it will get rid of all the people in the Justice Department or the Pentagon who thwarted Trump’s post-2020-defeat coup, or that it reverses all the rules that protect LGBTQ people from discrimination, Trump can tell you not to worry. It’s not his platform or his transition team, it’s those guys.

I know nothing about Project 2025. I have no idea who is behind it. I disagree with some of the things they’re saying and some of the things they’re saying are absolutely ridiculous and abysmal. Anything they do, I wish them luck, but I have nothing to do with them.

Meanwhile, if you’re a MAGA cultist and you love the stuff in the 900 pages, Trump gives you a wink and a nod: Sure, that’s what we’re going to do, but I can’t say that just now.

In other words, Project 2025 is designed to be the mother of all dog whistles. Undecided voters are supposed to hear one thing, while MAGA cultists hear something else. If Trump has one superpower, it’s his ability to get people to believe that he’s telling them the truth and lying to the other guy.

Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts understands how the game is played:

No hard feelings from any of us at Project 2025 about the statement, because we understand Trump is the standard-bearer and he’s making a political and tactical decision here.

I’m not going to do an elaborate debunking of Trump’s Sargeant-Schultz-like I-know-nothing claim, because other people have done that. Suffice it to say that Trump knows a lot about Project 2025, he knows the people behind it, he has everything to do with them, and he agrees with what they’re saying, especially the parts that are ridiculous and abysmal.

But OK, Trump has his superpower and we’re being naive if we ignore it. Lots of people are going to believe his denials and accuse us of being afflicted with Trump Derangement Syndrome if we are skeptical. So let’s leave the details of Project 2025 for another day and consider the Trump plans that aren’t deniable: the draft platform for the Republican Party, whose national convention is meeting in Milwaukee at this very moment. I don’t think even Trump could get away with saying that he knows nothing about the Republican Party or who’s behind it, so let’s examine what’s in the party platform.

The platform is a 16-page document with a three-page preamble, ten pages of elaboration, and three pages of filler. The introduction culminates in “twenty promises that we will accomplish very quickly when we win the White House and Republican Majorities in the House and Senate”. The promises are in all-caps, as if they were Trump posts on Truth Social. Most of them probably were at some point.

Inflation. A number of the promises are deceptively simple, like #3 “End inflation and make America affordable again.” (I’ll spare you the all-caps.) I’m sure that when Democrats read this they immediately slapped their foreheads and said, “Why didn’t we think of that? We’ve been wondering what we should do about inflation. Why didn’t it occur to us to end it?”

So OK, how do Republicans plan to end inflation? That’s Chapter 1 of the elaboration.

We commit to unleashing American Energy, reining in wasteful spending, cutting excessive Regulations, securing our Borders, and restoring Peace through Strength. Together, we will restore Prosperity, ensure Economic Security, and build a brighter future for American Workers and their families. Our dedication to these Policies will make America stronger, more resilient, and more prosperous than ever before.

Most of this in code.

• unleashing American Energy means (as the preamble says) “drill, baby, drill”. It’s not about unleashing American wind energy or solar energy. It means producing as much fossil fuel as we possibly can and ignoring what that means for climate change.
• reining in wasteful spending is the same sleight-of-hand we’ve been seeing in Republican proposals since Reagan. It’s a fudge factor that makes their budget numbers work. In #14, they promise to “protect Social Security and Medicare with no cuts”. #12 will “strengthen and modernize our military, making it, without question, the strongest and most powerful in the world”. #2 envisions “the largest deportation operation in American history”, which sounds like it might be expensive to pull off. Ditto for #8, which will “build a great Iron Dome missile defense shield over our entire country” and #11 “rebuild out cities”. No specific examples of “wasteful spending” are given, and it’s hard to imagine cuts that could make up for all this increased spending. Spending rose in every budget of the first Trump administration (going from Obama’s last budget of just under $4 trillion to Trump’s last of $7.2 trillion), and would likely continue rising in a second. The platform also promises tax cuts (#6), so deficits should go up substantially, assuming Republicans haven’t ended arithmetic too.
• cutting excessive regulations means two things: In general, abandoning efforts to protect Americans from whatever rapacious corporations may decide to do, and more specifically, eliminating rules aimed at fighting climate change by cutting fossil fuel use.
• securing our borders appeals to the misperception (widespread among the MAGA base) that undocumented immigrants cost our government much more than they actually do. Trump’s plans to secure the border are an expense, not a savings.
• restoring Peace through Strength means letting Russia take Ukraine, ending the “wasteful spending” of supporting Ukrainian sovereignty.

And then there’s stuff that would drastically increase prices, like tariffs.

Republicans will support baseline Tariffs on Foreign- made goods, pass the Trump Reciprocal Trade Act, and respond to unfair Trading practices. As Tariffs on Foreign Producers go up, Taxes on American Workers, Families, and Businesses can come down.

Trump has long pushed the bizarre idea that foreigners pay our tariffs. In fact, importers pay tariffs, which they pass on to their customers as higher prices. Do you buy anything made in another country? It’s price will go up 10%. To the extent that the government relies on tariffs rather than income taxes, the tax burden shifts from rich people to ordinary consumers.

How will this plan end inflation? It won’t. Gas and cars might be a bit cheaper, at great cost to future generations. Corporate costs might go down, but Americans across-the-board would be less safe from pollution and dangerous products. (And would those lower corporate costs mean lower prices, or just larger profits?) Government spending and deficits would continue to increase, unless Republicans got clever with the “no cuts” promise on Social Security and Medicare. (They might decide that ending cost-of-living increases in Social Security isn’t a “cut”, or that freezing overall Medicare spending isn’t a “cut”, even though it would mean less care and higher costs for individuals. I know I wasn’t going to mention Project 2025, but it wants to raise the retirement age, which wouldn’t “cut benefits” for anybody who still received benefits. But the platform explicitly promises “no changes to the retirement age”, which you should totally believe because Trump is lying to the other guy, not you.)

Climate and the environment. The word “climate” does not appear in the platform, because an underlying principle of the document is that climate change is not a problem and nothing needs to be done about it. But refusing to combat climate change has a strong implied presence in the document.

The glorification of fossil fuels is everywhere.

Under President Trump, the U.S. became the Number One Producer of Oil and Natural Gas in the World — and we will soon be again by lifting restrictions on American Energy Production and terminating the Socialist Green New Deal.

Guess what? The US is still the world’s largest producer under Biden, and the Green New Deal never passed Congress. But carry on.

Republicans will increase Energy Production across the board, streamline permitting, and end market-distorting restrictions on Oil, Natural Gas, and Coal. The Republican Party will once again make America Energy Independent, and then Energy Dominant, lowering Energy prices even below the record lows achieved during President Trump’s first term.

Want to drill for oil in some environmentally sensitive area? No problem! And did I mention that the US is already energy independent, in that we’re a net exporter of oil and gas? And if you remember those low gas prices during the Trump administration, you might also remember that they happened during the Covid lockdown, when nobody was driving. And “market-distorting restrictions” means subsidizing sustainable fuels.

I didn’t mention one of the Republicans’ ideas for lowering housing prices:

open limited portions of Federal Lands to allow for new home construction

Look around your neighborhood and see if you can spot any federal lands you’d like to build on. None? But mining companies have their eyes on lots of federal lands.

Republicans will revive the U.S. Auto Industry by reversing harmful Regulations, canceling Biden’s Electric Vehicle and other Mandates, and preventing the importation of Chinese vehicles.

Those “harmful regulations” are things like CAFE standards to increase gas mileage. And of course Republicans don’t want you driving an EV, which Exxon doesn’t profit from. Cheap Chinese EVs should be a genuine debate, because while importing them would cost American jobs in the auto industry, it would also speed the transition away from fossil fuels. But it isn’t an issue in this campaign, because Biden also wants to keep them out.

Social Security and Medicare. We’ve already talked about how a Republican administration might get around its promises not to cut these programs. But something nobody talks about is how undocumented immigrants prop them up: Many immigrants work under fake SSNs, which means that they pay taxes but will never collect benefits. Legal immigrants tend to be much younger than the general population, so they pay taxes now but won’t collect benefits for many years. So Trump’s deportation plan will harm all our pension funds. But the platform makes it sound like money flows in the opposite direction.

Republicans will protect Medicare’s finances from being financially crushed by the Democrat plan to add tens of millions of new illegal immigrants to the rolls of Medicare.

I have no idea what plan they’re talking about, and I doubt they do either. Another bit of cluelessness is

corrupt politicians have robbed Social Security to fund their pet projects

I blame both parties for this bit of rhetoric, which goes back to Al Gore’s “lockbox” promise. The federal government has been running deficits, and the federal trust funds have been investing their money in government bonds, as many private pension plans do. Unless the US reneges on its debt (something Trump has hinted at from time to time), nobody is “robbing” Social Security.

Culture wars and education. The platform promises to end “political meddling” in our schools and “restore Parental Rights”, but we can see what this really means by looking at Ron DeSantis’ Florida. Florida education is full political meddling, including a law listing ideas that can’t be taught in Florida schools. And “Parental Rights” means rights for conservative Christian parents, which come at the expense of the rest of us.

So if you want your child to learn real American history rather than rah-rah propaganda, you don’t have that right. If you want a library stocked with books from a wide range of views, including books that help non-White or LGBTQ kids make sense of what they’re experiencing, tough luck. Moms For Liberty said no, and they have the final word.

The platform also calls for ending tenure for teachers and “allowing various publicly supported Educational models”, which means using public money to support conservative Christian schools.

Republicans will support overhauling standards on school discipline, advocate for immediate suspension of violent students, and support hardening schools to help keep violence away from our places of learning.

“Hardening schools” is a euphemism for making them more like prisons. Republicans refuse to do anything about our gun problem, so instead we’ll turn our schools into armed camps. (And of course no armed teacher or school guard will ever flip out and start killing students.)

Republicans will ensure children are taught fundamentals like Reading, History, Science, and Math, not Leftwing propaganda. We will defund schools that engage in inappropriate political indoctrination of our children using Federal Taxpayer Dollars.

“Leftwing propaganda” and “inappropriate political indoctrination” means recognizing that racism is still a problem in America, or that families take many different forms these days.

Republicans will champion the First Amendment Right to Pray and Read the Bible in school, and stand up to those who violate the Religious Freedoms of American students.

Conservative Christian teachers will be allowed to indoctrinate their students, but non-Christian teachers won’t have similar rights. Teachers who use the Bible to teach critical reasoning skills rather than Christian dogma will find themselves in deep trouble.

We are going to close the Department of Education in Washington, D.C. and send it back to the States, where it belongs, and let the States run our educational system as it should be run.

But of course they’re also going to cut federal spending on “Leftwing propaganda”, no matter what a liberal state might want its kids to learn. States rights are for red states, not blue states.

Our Great Teachers, who are so important to the future wellbeing of our Country, will be cherished and protected by the Republican Party

But we’re also getting rid of tenure.

All sorts of phrases in the platform advocate returning to the Dead White Guys tradition in education: “Western Civilization”, “Classic Liberal Arts Education”, and so on.

Immigration. In several places, the platform frames desperate families arriving at our borders as an “invasion”, which is to be met with force and fortification.

We will complete the Border Wall, shift massive portions of Federal Law Enforcement to Immigration Enforcement, and use advanced technology to monitor and secure the Border. We will use all resources needed to stop the Invasion— including moving thousands of Troops currently stationed overseas to our own Southern Border.

Nonviolent solutions — like funding more immigration courts and judges, so that people who arrive here with legitimate asylum claims under our laws and treaty obligations can have their cases handled promptly and won’t have to wait around here or elsewhere — are not mentioned. That was a big piece of the bipartisan immigration bill Trump had his allies in Congress torpedo a few months ago.

The platform also promotes the myth of “Migrant Crime”, as if crimes by migrants were somehow different or more virulent than crimes by American citizens. They aren’t.

And then there’s “the largest deportation program in American history” and “sending Illegal Aliens back home”. That’s millions of people working millions of jobs. Restaurant workers, crop pickers, teachers, nurses, programmers, and probably people you know whose paperwork you never thought about. Your mom or grandpa might have to go to a nursing home because home health aides will suddenly be in short supply. You or your spouse might have to quit working, because child care will be hard to find.

And how do you do an operation of this size without making its processes automatic and inflexible? Where do the millions of people go? To detention camps while we find countries to accept them? How do we keep those camps from turning into hellholes, staffed by people who get off on having power over helpless human beings?

But that’s one thing the platform doesn’t say.