The goal was to make “MAGA Republicans” a label for everything that voters find politically toxic about the GOP right now.
MOOSIC, Pennsylvania — President Joe Biden’s primetime speech Thursday night was an attempt to yoke two different but connected concepts together. The first was, as he said, “Donald Trump and the MAGA Republicans represent an extremism that threatens the very foundations of our republic.” The second was simply to urge Americans to vote for Democrats in the fall.
Speaking in front of a bright red background set against Independence Hall that seemed to owe as much to Dark Brandon memes as the traditional trappings of the presidency, Biden’s warnings were mixed in with in political language aimed at voters who seem have recently seen reasons — like the overturning of Roe vs. Wade and a new barrage of unsettling investigations and revelations related to former President Donald Trump — to consider voting for Democrats in an election that looked dismal for the party in power just a few months ago.
Biden focused the attack on “MAGA Republicans,” a constituency that he tried to make clear did not even constitute “a majority of Republicans.”
The goal seemed to be to make “MAGA Republicans” a label for everything that voters find politically toxic about the GOP right now, linking swing voters’ disdain for and exhaustion with Donald Trump with their opposition to the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision.
“American democracy only works only if we choose to respect the rule of law,” he argued while pledging “I will not stand by and watch the will of the American people be overturned by wild conspiracy theories and baseless, evidence-free claims of fraud.
At times Biden’s rhetoric seemed almost indistinguishable from that of a Republican never-Trumper like Liz Cheney, who wants to rescue the GOP to from Trumpism. He trained his ire on those who “promote authoritarian leaders, and they fan the flames of political violence that are a threat to our personal rights, to the pursuit of justice, to the rule of law, to the very soul of this country.”
At others, he sounded more sound like Ted Kennedy as he warned of the social conservatives who want an America “where there is no right to choose, no right to privacy, no right to contraception, no right to marry who you love.” This made up only a small part of his speech, but it was one of the few excerpts released to the press before its delivery, a signal that it is a message the White House wants to stick.
The speech also came with a boast about Biden’s political accomplishments, hailing legislation passed by Congress including the infrastructure bill and the climate, health care and tax law Democrats recently passed.
A detailed argument about the threat of illiberal democracy as practiced in Viktor Orban’s Hungary — which is increasingly being hailed as a model on the American Right — would not have carried the same weight. High-minded rhetoric about creeping authoritarianism tends to be too obscure for voters.
Instead, the address was a fusion of Biden’s longstanding concerns about American democracy—-he has often said that Trump’s response to the 2017 white supremacist march in Charlottesville inspired him to run for president — and a more traditional argument ahead of the midterms.
Biden’s remarks came as Democrats are feeling new optimism about their prospects in 2022. Although inflation remains high, gas prices have fallen considerably in recent months and Democrats have racked up success after success in recent special elections, winning a seat in Alaska for the first time in 50 years earlier this week and pulling an upset in a swing district in New York’s Hudson Valley last week. The change in the political climate tracks to June, after the Dobbs decision in which the Supreme Court held that women have no constitutional right to an abortion.
In a statement Thursday afternoon, a White House official told Vox, “Like he’s said for months, the President is calling out ‘ultra-MAGA’ congressional Republicans for radical proposals that an overwhelming majority of the country – and an enormous percent of Republican voters – oppose; like putting Medicare and Social Security on the chopping block and a national abortion ban.”
Biden’s speech was prebutted hours before by House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy in a machine shop in northeastern Pennsylvania. The top House Republican argued that Biden was right that American democracy was under threat. “Democracy is on the ballot in November,” said the California Republican. “And Joe Biden and the radical left are dismantling American democracy before our very eyes.” McCarthy argued that with Biden’s criticism of “MAGA Republicans” that the President has “chosen to divide, demean, and disparage his fellow Americans — Why? simply because they disagree with his policies.”
In contrast to Biden, McCarthy mentioned Trump only once when he condemned the FBI raid on Mar A Lago as an “assault on democracy.” However, he left clear what his views on Trump were, casually referencing Trump’s “America First” slogan, “Our values should inspire us to defend America first, not blame America first.”
Biden wants Americans to link McCarthy’s caucus with all that comes with Trup far more closely than that.
Women have always been crucial in The Lord of the Rings. Now they’re the main characters.
The first question I got after seeing the first two episodes of Amazon’s new Lord of the Rings prequel series The Rings of Power was, “Is it like Game of Thrones?” It’s a fair question; in the age of streaming services, high fantasy has been practically synonymous with the epic HBO franchise, which now has its own prequel, House of the Dragon. But from my female friends who asked it, I knew exactly what they meant: “Is this version of Middle Earth going to be one where women are routinely assaulted, degraded, and objectified?”
The Lord of the Rings, while never as gratuitously graphic as GoT, has always had a complicated relationship to its women. In a 1969 essay for the Columbia University Press, feminist scholar Catharine Stimpson published a scathing critique of the women of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. “The most hackneyed of stereotypes,” she described them. “They are either beautiful and distant, simply distant, or simply simple.”
Yet for her sake, I hope that Stimpson watched Peter Jackson’s adaptations, which, despite centering mainly on the male characters just as the source material does, greatly expand the roles of Middle Earth’s most famous women. This was thanks in large part to Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens, the two screenwriters who, alongside Jackson, wrote the scripts for all three films. Beyond fleshing out the duties of Galadriel, Arwen, and Eowyn, Walsh and Boyens were also responsible for the trilogy’s most poignant moments, adding emotional depth to characters that in the text appear flat or one-note.
All of this is to say that despite The Lord of the Rings books’ reputation as a coming-of-age series for boys, when they were released in the first few years of the millennium, the films found an enormous fan base among young women. “It is technically an epic fantasy adventure, but I don’t think it hews to the same kind of ideas of masculinity and power that a lot of these stories traditionally do,” the writer Karen Han told the New York Times for a story on LOTR’s millennial female fans. In fact, it is the stereotypically male-coded vices of greed and power that are the overarching foes of Tolkien’s works, while the humble Hobbits and unspoiled countrysides and forests of Middle Earth are the heroes.
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Amazon
For women like me who grew up loving LOTR, the news that Amazon was producing a prequel was both exciting and slightly worrisome. Had Game of Thrones cast such a shadow over the entertainment world that a high fantasy series without sex and gore was considered unprofitable? (For context about what happens to the women of GoT, in the first two episodes of House of the Dragon, there’s a brutally graphic childbirth scene in which both mother and infant die, and in the second, a grown man almost marries a 12-year-old girl.)
Co-showrunner Patrick McKay has previously said publicly that The Rings of Power will eschew graphic violence and sex scenes and will be appropriate “for kids who are 11, 12, and 13,” though the concerns were widespread enough that more than 50,000 fans signed a Change.org petition to keep nudity out of the series. Anonymous sources told the fan blog The One Ring that while there will be nudity in the series, it would be “sparse and not sexualized.”
To answer the question: The Rings of Power is not like Game of Thrones, at least not in that way. In short, it explores Middle Earth’s Second Age, which takes place thousands of years before the events of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings and is not based on any of Tolkien’s novels, but rather the information gleaned in their appendices. We know broadly what happens during the Second Age; much of its main plot is described in the opening flashback of The Fellowship of the Ring: The evil lord Sauron distributes the rings of power to humans, elves, and dwarves, keeping the secret all-powerful One Ring for himself, which Isildur eventually takes by cutting off Sauron’s finger in battle.
But because Tolkien never dedicated a book to the Second Age, showrunners McKay and J.D. Payne have taken creative liberties with the characters who fill out the story. Happily, many of the most important ones are women: Amazon’s series centers on a younger Galadriel, played by Morfydd Clark (Cate Blanchett in the films), a warrior elven princess intent on avenging her brother’s death by Sauron. Though we see zero dwarf women in LOTR, The Rings of Power introduces Disa (Sophia Nomvete), the wife of dwarf prince Durin IV, who seems to wield meaningful power in Khazad-dûm. Among the hobbit-like Harfoots, we see the spunky young Nori Brandyfoot (Markella Kavenagh), and in the world of men, there’s the healer and single mother Bronwyn (Nazanin Boniadi), who strikes up a romance with a warrior elf Arondir (Ismael Cruz Córdova). None of these characters aside from Galadriel were created by Tolkien himself, which again, could be exciting, but could just as easily end up falling into the stereotypical tropes of high fantasy women written by men. The truth is we simply haven’t seen enough of these characters yet to say for sure (it does, however, pass the Bechdel test).
Though The Rings of Power, at least in its first few episodes, doesn’t seem to rejoice in the suffering of its characters the way Game of Thrones tends to, I remain skeptical about the other ways in which it mirrors the HBO series — namely, in its story structure. Like many shows in the age of prestige TV, The Rings of Power regularly leaves its audience with mysterious cliffhangers as we jump from scene to scene. It is action-packed, and it is beautiful to look at, but rather than hinging on one strong storyline, we’re strung along on several that remain frustratingly unclear. And just as I often felt nervous while watching Game of Thrones whether it had a coherent endpoint in mind as it weaved and bobbed through Westeros, I worry that The Rings of Power will be stuffed with too many invented subplots and side characters that ultimately don’t have anything to do with the story besides adding more run time. (The entire series will consist of 50 hours of television over five seasons, quadruple the length of all three extended LOTR extended editions.)
Despite the complexity in its language, its geography, and its plot, LOTR is, at its core, a quite simple story, one in which there is good and there is evil. We don’t get a lot of these kinds of stories anymore: As Polygon’s Susana Polo has written of the two decades after the film’s premiere, “Blockbuster film didn’t embrace the sincerity of the Lord of the Rings movies — the way they elevated deep and pure emotions to the level of an adult epic — in the same manner.” Instead, we’ve grown accustomed to cynical, self-deprecating heroes and antiheroes from our big-budget franchises. That hasn’t always been a bad thing; action and fantasy films embracing the nuances of morality and subverting the logic of cinema have led to some of the 21st century’s best filmmaking. But LOTR doesn’t aim to toy with its audiences’ expectations; it doesn’t have to. Its themes are timeless.
My hope for the rest of the series is that it resists the urge to inject this sort of postmodernism into Middle Earth and remains relatively escapist, not just so that viewers don’t have to think about current events while watching it, but so the women in the audience who view LOTR as comfort consumption can get a reprieve from seeing our oppression reflected back to us. I don’t need Jeff Bezos’s billion-dollar vanity project to show me why being a female elf sucks.
GOP candidates in states including Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Arizona are laying the groundwork to challenge an unfavorable result.
Republican officials in key states stood in the way of former President Donald Trump’s attempts to overturn the 2020 election results.
But this year, according to recent Washington Post reporting, 54 of 87 GOP candidates running for positions with power over the way elections are certified in presidential battlegrounds have falsely claimed that the 2020 election was fraudulent, and say they would have done things differently. The next time a presidential candidate seeks out help overturning an election, they could find willing accomplices in these candidates.
Though there are candidates who have peddled Trump’s election lies in every projected 2024 battleground, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Arizona present three scenarios for how bad actors — as secretaries of state or state attorneys general, in governors’ mansions or in state legislatures — could abuse their power over certifying elections to subvert a result they personally disagree with. Here’s how they could do it:
Wisconsin: A campaign to seize power from a bipartisan elections commission
How Wisconsin’s election system works:
The success of an effort to put Wisconsin’s elections in partisan hands would require cooperation from officials up and down the ballot there. Because of the checks and balances the state has put in place, overturning an election would mean getting sign-off from the winners of the secretary of state and gubernatorial races, as well as continued GOP dominance in state legislature contests.
What the GOP is doing:
Trump allies are targeting the Wisconsin Elections Commission, which administers elections and has the authority to investigate and prosecute violations of election laws. It was established in 2015 by the Republican-controlled state legislature and was intended to function similarly to the Federal Elections Commission, with three Republican and three Democratic appointees.
The commission has significant discretion over how elections are conducted, and plays a role in certifying election results. In 2020, after Republicans sought recounts in the large, heavily Democratic counties of Milwaukee and Dane based on false claims of fraud, the commission voted 5-1 to certify President Joe Biden’s victory.
State Republicans have since called for the dissolution of the commission, whose policies, they falsely argue, led to fraudulent votes that cost Trump reelection.
“The problem for Republicans is that the Wisconsin Elections Commission was pretty scrupulous. It did not tilt elections towards Republicans like they thought it would,” said Jay Heck, executive director of the democracy group Common Cause Wisconsin.
State Rep. Amy Loudenbeck, the Republican nominee for Wisconsin secretary of state, is one of those Republicans seeking to dismantle the commission and to re-empower the secretary of state’s office to preside over the state’s elections for the first time since the 1970s. (Before the commission, there was the Government Accountability Board, which also ran elections.)
If a Republican secretary of state presided over elections, they could tighten up rules around voting, from identification requirements to who could cast an absentee ballot and where they could drop it off — policies that, individually, might not cause a huge drop-off in voting, but together, amount to “death by a thousand cuts,” Heck said. And, if the secretary of state did assume the commission’s current power to certify the election results, they could try to disrupt that process as well.
Republican legislators introduced a bill expanding the secretary of state’s powers earlier this year, but it didn’t go up for debate before the end of the legislative session. State Republicans also fast-tracked a package of bills earlier this year aiming to strip the Wisconsin Elections Commission of its power and resources and force it to answer to the state legislature. So long as Republicans maintain their big majorities in both chambers, as they’re expected to, voting rights groups warn that these measures are likely to pass.
The legislature isn’t expected to have a veto-proof majority, however, and that makes who becomes governor important.
Wisconsin’s Democratic Gov. Tony Evers, who has supported the Wisconsin Elections Commission, is one of the most vulnerable incumbent governors across the country this year. His GOP opponent, construction magnate Tim Michels, has repeatedly echoed Trump’s election lies and has said that he’s open to decertifying Biden’s 2020 win in the state, even though there is no legal means to do so. The Cook Political Report rates the race a toss-up.
How bad it could get:
Essentially, Heck said, “Republicans are trying to weaken the Wisconsin Elections Commission for 2024 so that, when Trump runs again and Wisconsin will again be a very closely divided state, the election apparatus would be able to make decisions that would be very favorable for a Republican presidential candidate.”
Pennsylvania: Where the governor can unilaterally shape elections
How Pennsylvania’s election system works:
The biggest threat to the 2024 election in Pennsylvania is state Sen. Doug Mastriano, the Trump-endorsed Republican nominee for governor.
Mastriano’s an ardent MAGA Republican who bused hundreds of people to Washington, DC, and was outside the US Capitol on the day of the January 6, 2021, insurrection. He was also a key figure in Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election results in Pennsylvania. Mastriano organized a state Senate hearing featuring Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani, an unauthorized audit of voting machines that ultimately cost him a committee chair position, and a scheme to send fake electors who were favorable to Trump to Congress.
If elected, he would have the power to appoint Pennsylvania’s top election official, the “Secretary of the Commonwealth.” He hasn’t named who he intends to appoint if elected, but he’s indicated that it would be an individual who shares his philosophy on elections.
“As governor, I get to appoint the secretary of state. And I have a voting reform-minded individual who’s been traveling the nation and knows voting reform extremely well,” Mastriano told Steve Bannon, former chief strategist for Trump, in an April interview. “That individual has agreed to be my secretary of state.”
Elections in Pennsylvania are decentralized, with county officials holding most of the power over how elections are conducted. But the secretary of state still plays a key role, largely by issuing guidance; in 2020, for example, they gave county election boards direction on how to interpret a new law that allowed vote-by-mail statewide.
How bad it could get:
Mastriano has indicated he’s interested in a secretary of state who would use that power to restrict access to voting. He notably proposed making everyone re-register in an effort to purge voter rolls of dead voters and those registered to nonexistent addresses — an action that he claims the secretary of state could take unilaterally.
Secretaries of state in Pennsylvania can also choose to participate in defending challenges to election law. And they have to certify the voting machines selected by each of Pennsylvania’s counties. (Mastriano has suggested that he would decertify all of the state’s voting machines “with the stroke of a pen” via his secretary of state.)
Finally, they gather the election results from the counties and certify them. No one has ever refused to certify them, but that’s what watchdogs worry Mastriano’s pick for secretary of state would do.
“If you refuse to do that, you’d run into a situation where there would be litigation, but it would certainly throw a wrench into the process,” Jessica Marsden, counsel for Protect Democracy, a nonprofit focused on preserving fair and free elections, said.
Also worrying to pro-democracy experts are the ways Mastriano’s shown that he can activate supporters; his involvement in January 6 in particular has put voting rights groups on high alert for political violence.
“He has an ability to galvanize people to turn out in person and [do] harm,” said Salewa Ogunmefun, executive director of the voting rights group Pennsylvania Voice.
Arizona: A state that could be completely led by election deniers
All of the Republican nominees for the top three statewide offices in Arizona — state attorney general nominee Abraham Hamadeh, secretary of state nominee Mark Finchem and gubernatorial nominee Kari Lake — have made Trump’s 2020 election lies central to their campaigns.
None of them say they would have certified the results, suggesting that they might challenge an unfavorable result in 2024 if given the chance. Lake even preempted her own primary win by saying that she would challenge the results if she lost because it would have indicated “there’s some cheating going on.”
How Arizona’s election system works:
Each would have a role to play in the election certification process in 2024. Every county in Arizona has to separately certify their election results via the county board of supervisors; those results then get transmitted to the secretary of state. On the fourth Monday following a general election, the secretary of state canvasses the certified results from the counties in the presence of the governor and the state attorney general.
It’s not clear what the legal implications might be if the governor or attorney general didn’t show up for that step, and that could present a potential opportunity for Lake or Hamadeh to delay or undermine the certification, Marsden said.
The secretary of state is then supposed to formally certify the result, and the governor has an additional responsibility to sign the certificate of ascertainment that names the slate of electors, and send it to Congress. The governor could theoretically refuse to sign the certificate or sign a certificate with a slate of electors that didn’t match up with the popular vote.
How bad it could get:
If elected, Finchem would also have some control over the basic rules of how the election is conducted. Among other proposals, he wants to eliminate early voting entirely.
“That would certainly disenfranchise lots of voters and also potentially cause a lot of chaos in an election system that has for years relied on a substantial number of people voting earlier,” Marsden said. And Finchem has, as a state lawmaker, backed legislation that would allow the GOP-controlled state legislature to overturn the results of a future presidential election, allowing it to instead award delegates to its chosen candidate.
Should Hamadeh, Finchem, and Lake try to exploit their offices to overturn the election results, Marsden said, “There would certainly be litigation that would follow … But I think it would certainly increase the chance of a major election crisis.”
Even if they aren’t successful in materially impacting the results, they could still do significant damage to voter confidence. State officials “have really crucial megaphones to either bolster or cast doubt on election results,” Marsden said.