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Iran will start injecting uranium gas into over a thousand centrifuges at a fortified nuclear facility built inside a mountain, the country’s president announced Tuesday in Tehran’s latest step away from its atomic accord with world powers since Presid…
November 5, 2019Read More
There are two possible authoritarian futures looming over the United States.In one scenario, President Trump wins re-election in 2020 with solid majority support and uses his mandate to crush the opposition, making good on his threats against the media, erasing millions of Democrats from voter rolls, rounding up and deporting millions of undocumented immigrants, and seizing control of the intelligence services in order to purge them of anyone deemed insufficiently pro-Trump. This would be an American version of what we’ve seen in Russia under Vladimir Putin, in Turkey under Recep Tayyip Erdogan, and in Hungary under Viktor Orban.Although something like this nightmarish state of affairs haunts the minds of many on the left, it isn’t going to happen.But another scenario might.In this alternative timeline, which The New York Times foreshadowed on Monday in an ominous analysis of recent polling data, the 2020 election unfolds differently. Trump wins but without a mandate. On the contrary, he earns something like an anti-mandate. George W. Bush won the presidency in 2000 while losing the popular vote by 550,000. Trump himself won in 2016 while falling short in the popular vote by 2.9 million. In 2020, Trump could prevail again, only this time while losing by as many as five million votes.How could it happen? Trump remains quite competitive in the states that put him over the top in the Electoral College last time — Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin. Those are states he would likely carry, as he did last time, by a relatively narrow margin. Meanwhile, Trump’s extreme and intense unpopularity among Democrats points to a 2020 vote in which the margin of his loss in “blue” states could be enormous. Instead of winning an anemic 31.6 percent of the vote in California, as he did in 2016, Trump might realistically pull in just 25 percent in 2020. If something similar happens in Oregon, Washington state, Illinois, New York, and throughout New England — in other words, if the country’s bluest states become even bluer in 2020 than they were in 2016 — then the Democrat’s popular vote win could climb quite a bit higher than it was then, with Trump still managing to win the presidency in the Electoral College.That’s when things could really go off the rails.Democrats would be faced with a truly alarming situation. The president they loathe would be deeply unpopular on a national basis, as he has been for the entirety of his first term. They themselves would know they are favored by millions more voters than he is. And yet they would nonetheless be frozen out of the presidency. Again — for the third time in six presidential elections, and with the gap between the popular vote and Electoral College outcome growing each time.And it’s not just the presidency. Democrats face considerable obstacles to winning majority control of the Senate, too. Those who say they would have better luck with more centrist candidates have a point, but that wouldn’t necessarily solve the party’s problems. The Democratic Party is big and diverse along ideological and demographic dimensions, and its voters are very inefficiently distributed around the country. Add it all up and we’re left with a party forced to do multiple contradictory things at once — win back centrist white voters who switched from Obama to Trump between 2012 and 2016, and excite minority voters who showed up in large numbers for Obama in 2008 and 2012 but stayed home in 2016, and keep the suburban Romney voters who flipped to the Democrats in the 2018 midterm elections.That’s a very tall, and maybe an impossible, order. But if it is, that means Democrats, despite their significantly greater popular support in the country at large, are likely to be denied control of the presidency as well as the Senate for some time to come. And because those branches of government play a decisive role in making lifetime appointments to the judiciary, Democrats could well end up thwarted across almost the entirety of the federal government (with only the lower house of Congress realistically winnable).In that case, the will of the majority would not so much be checked, as the Constitution intends, as completely blocked on nearly all fronts — very much including those fronts that enable unpopular institutions (like the Electoral College) to be reformed. Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents would find themselves trapped in a system in which they possess almost no institutionally legitimate means to reach and exercise meaningful political power.That’s an untenable situation. There is no democracy in the world that would remain politically stable under such circumstances. It’s one thing for Orban’s Fidesz Party or the Law and Justice party in Poland to govern in a quasi-authoritarian manner after receiving a solid plurality or majority support in an election. Yes, those elections are often far from perfectly free and fair. With each one, the party in power has additional means of rigging the vote in its own favor. Yet the outcome nevertheless bestows a modicum of legitimacy on the government’s rule.But that wouldn’t be the situation in the United States. Democrats and their allies would be perfectly justified in taking to the streets in outraged protest, and they would almost certainly do so — in numbers that would rival or surpass what we’ve seen in recent weeks in Chile. More radical factions, including troublemaking Antifa activists, would do their best to spark violence, with the president egging them on with taunts on Twitter, and in speeches at rallies and at official events.With protests growing in size and unrest increasing, municipalities would send in the police, just as Trump would eventually deploy the national guard, to restore order using force. Which would only intensify the indignation fueling the protests, leading the cycle to continue and escalate.That is how authoritarianism is most likely to come to the United States: through the dialectical interplay between the expression of legitimate anger at America’s institutions for failing to adequately reflect majority public opinion and the government’s need to uphold law and order.Maybe it won’t happen. Maybe Trump will be impeached and removed from office. Maybe he’ll survive impeachment but go into the general election so hobbled that Republican voters stay home on Election Day 2020, preventing him from carrying the states he needs to win. Maybe the Democrats will nominate a candidate who appeals to voters in ways that confound the most pessimistic predictions, propelling him or her to a solid win in the Electoral College.The future isn’t written. Any one of those scenarios, or some mixture of them, could happen, sparing us from having to endure a far darker political possibility. But that doesn’t mean we should turn away from that darkness or deny the many factors that could well lead it to envelope us.This is now our American reality.
November 5, 2019Read More
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan called Tuesday for Russia and the United States to keep to their promises and ensure that Syrian Kurdish fighters pull out of a so-called safe zone along Syria’s northern border with Turkey. In his weekly speech …
November 5, 2019Read More
* Johnson to Corbyn: What is your Brexit plan? HARLOW, England, Nov 5 (Reuters) – British opposition leader Jeremy Corbyn accused Prime Minister Boris Johnson on Tuesday of seeking to hijack Brexit to unleash a Thatcherite bonfire of regulation that w…
November 5, 2019Read More
Iran announced Tuesday it would resume operating centrifuges at its landmark underground nuclear facility, taking the most provocative step so far in its strategy of slowly violating the 2015 nuclear agreement in protest at US sanctions. Hassan Rouhan…
November 5, 2019Read More
Researchers say they believe the debris field off the Philippines is from the U.S.S. Johnston DD-557, which played a pivotal role in the Battle of Leyte Gulf.
November 5, 2019Read More
(Bloomberg) — Want to receive this post in your inbox every day? Sign up for the Balance of Power newsletter, and follow Bloomberg Politics on Twitter and Facebook for more.Chinese President Xi Jinping is suddenly sitting pretty in Asia, thanks largely to missteps by two of his biggest rivals: U.S. President Donald Trump and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi.Modi abruptly pulled out of a 16-nation regional trade deal yesterday, removing a key counterbalance to China. That’s bad news for Japan, which urged India to stay in.U.S. influence also took a hit from Trump’s no-show at a regional summit in Bangkok. Southeast Asian leaders responded by snubbing a meeting with National Security Adviser Robert O’Brien.What’s more, China’s asking price is becoming clear for Xi to head to the U.S. and sign a deal centered on agricultural purchases that Trump is seeking ahead of next year’s election. You can read our report here about how Beijing wants tariffs scrapped on as much as $360 billion of Chinese imports before Xi gets on the plane.The Chinese leader made a pledge to a trade expo today that the phase-one deal would lead to other measures to open China’s markets. But investors are doubtful: The European Chamber said many agreements reached last year saw “no follow-through.”Still, with Trump and Modi on the sidelines, Xi may not need to worry.Global HeadlinesFor the record | House Democrats will release closed-door testimony from two central players in Trump’s back-channel effort to influence the Ukrainian government, a key step as the impeachment inquiry shifts to a new, public phase.Already released: Marie Yovanovitch, the former U.S. ambassador to Kyiv, told House investigators she felt threatened by the way Trump spoke about her on a July 25 call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy, according to a transcript of her private deposition made public yesterday. How accurate is Trump’s contention that there was something untoward about 2020 rival Joe Biden’s diplomatic efforts at the time his son Hunter was on the board of a Ukrainian energy company? Ryan Teague Beckwith takes a closer look.Ascendant Democrat | Exuding new confidence as a top-tier Democratic 2020 presidential candidate, Pete Buttigieg is seizing on Biden’s stumbles in Iowa and questioning Senator Elizabeth Warren’s electability to pitch himself as: a) the alternative to both; and b) the candidate best-positioned to lead the party against Trump.Trump’s 2020 campaign announced it’s creating “Black Voices for Trump,” a coalition aimed at bolstering the president’s support among African-Americans. Vice President Mike Pence will address the group Friday in Atlanta.Snatching power? | U.K. Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn may be able to wrest control of the government from Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s Conservatives in next month’s election, thanks to support from the Scottish National Party after its leader, Nicola Sturgeon, hinted she’d never help the Tories stay in power.Corbyn, who has avoided being pinned down on Brexit, will attack Johnson’s strategy head-on today after the prime minister wrote an open letter saying the Labour party offered more uncertainty and delay.Salvaging a legacy | Time is running out for 83-year-old Mahmoud Abbas. Foreign aid to Palestinians has dropped nearly 80% over the past decade, Israel’s half-century military occupation remains firmly in place, and the campaign for statehood has stalled. So the Palestinian Authority president has called for the first national elections since 2006. The tactic could backfire if the Islamist group Hamas wins again — or it could prove another sign of Abbas’s weakness if the vote doesn’t go ahead.‘Eat the rich’ | The graffiti scrawled on the wall in front of the upmarket Cumbres hotel in central Santiago, the Chilean capital, underscores the damage to the reputation of a country President Sebastian Pinera described as an “oasis” of calm in Latin America only a month ago. As Philip Sanders reports, three weeks of civil unrest over living costs and social services have forced the cancellation of two global conferences and rocked the tourism industry.What to Watch:Here are the highlights of today’s off-year elections in the U.S., via Bloomberg Government.Two U.S. states that Trump won by large margins in 2016 — Kentucky and Mississippi — will elect governors. Both races are competitive and winning either would be a coup for Democrats. Trump has campaigned for the Republican contenders. Voters in Tucson, Arizona, which is about 60 miles from Mexico, will decide whether or not to become a “sanctuary city“ that restricts interactions between local police and federal immigration enforcement. Uber has a stake in elections in its home town. San Francisco voters will decide whether to impose a special rideshare tax to raise money for transit services and transportation-improvement projects. And Amazon has donated an unprecedented $1.5 million to try to fill a Seattle council seat.Tell us how we’re doing or what we’re missing at [email protected] finally … To Hindus, it’s the revered birthplace of the god Ram. To Muslims, it’s the site of a 16th-century mosque that was razed in 1992 by Hindu extremists. After a long legal fight — and much bloodshed — India’s Supreme Court is set to rule on which of the country’s biggest religions owns the site. Either way, the ruling on Ayodhya is likely to inflame tensions at a time when hardliners are feeling increasingly empowered under Prime Minister Modi. \–With assistance from Karl Maier and Kathleen Hunter.To contact the author of this story: Daniel Ten Kate in Hong Kong at [email protected] contact the editor responsible for this story: Ruth Pollard at [email protected], Michael WinfreyFor more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.com©2019 Bloomberg L.P.
November 5, 2019Read More
Paris Agreement, Election Day, Mexico: Here’s what you need to know.
November 5, 2019Read More
Britain’s three major national political parties wooed weary voters on Tuesday, all promising an end to Brexit wrangling if they win next month’s national election — but offering starkly different visions of how to achieve that. Prime Minister Boris J…
November 5, 2019Read More
Last Sunday in northeast Syria was a day fraught with geopolitical symbolism. As Russian forces raised their flag over a former school that had been used by American troops in the town of Ain Issa, about 100 miles to the east on the M4 highway a U.S. p…
November 5, 2019Read More
(Bloomberg) — Want the lowdown on European markets? In your inbox before the open, every day. Sign up here.A Bulgarian accused of spying for Russia who was freed on bail was allowed by a court to visit Moscow, where he received an award from President…
November 5, 2019Read More
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