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US & Canada
Jon Lieber, head of Eurasia Group's coverage of political and policy developments in Washington, DC, shares his perspective on US politics.
This is what we are watching in US Politics this week: Campus protests.
They're happening everywhere. Elite schools, state schools, the Northeast, the Midwest, Southern California, campus protests are a major story this week over the Israeli operation in Gaza and the Biden administration's support for it. These are leading to accusations of anti-Semitism on college campuses, and things like canceling college graduation ceremonies at several schools.
Will this be an issue of the November elections?
Really difficult to say. Everyone remembers in 1968, massive protest at the Democratic National Convention, contributing to President Nixon's message that he was the “law and order” candidate, and the Democrats didn't have control. That could easily be repeated this year if the protests continue and are sustained into August at the Democratic Convention in Chicago, where it also was in 1968. And then, if the protests continue on campus once again, when schools come back in in the fall, right before the November elections.
One thing we're watching is how Donald Trump tries to spin these things. A key campaign message that he's been pushing so far, this cycle, is that everything they're saying about him are the things they're actually doing. They thought he would get the US into a war with Iran, and now President Biden came right up to the verge of that last week. They say, “He's the chaos candidate,” and now you've got wars all over the globe, you've got campus protests, you've got a spike in crime, and you've got a massive immigration problem under President Biden.
So, that message is going to be one that Donald Trump continues to push and will definitely resonate with Republican voters and could potentially resonate with independent voters if the large-scale protests and clashes with police continue into the fall.
U.S. President Donald Trump speaks with Judge Amy Coney Barrett after she was sworn in as an associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court on the South Lawn of the White House in Washington, U.S. October 26, 2020.
Should a former president be held accountable for crimes committed while in office? That was the basic, yet incredibly weighty, question before the Supreme Court on Thursday when it began hearing oral arguments in a case related to former President Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election results.
Trump, who doesn’t want to face trial in the federal Jan. 6 case against him before his expected rematch with President Joe Biden on Election Day, has declared that presidents should have absolute immunity. He’s effectively argued that presidents should be above the law.
What happened? Some of the conservative justices (three of whom were appointed by Trump) expressed concern that allowing former presidents to be criminally prosecuted could present a burden to future commanders-in-chief. They seemed skeptical of Trump’s sweeping claims but appeared open to the idea that presidents should have immunity for some actions. There was a great deal of focus on whether a distinction should be established between official acts and private behavior.
Justice Neil Gorsuch, a Trump appointee, emphasized that the court was “writing a rule for the ages.” But Justice Amy Coney Barrett, another Trump appointee, agreed with the notion that the ex-president’s legal team was pushing a “radical” idea on presidential immunity.
Meanwhile, liberal justices worried that if the court ruled in Trump’s favor, it could open the door for future presidents to commit crimes. “If there’s no threat of criminal prosecution, what prevents the president from just doing whatever he wants?” asked Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson.
TLDR: The court might rule that presidents should be granted some, but not absolute, immunity from criminal prosecution. This means the case could be kicked back down to the lower courts.
What’s next? Trump’s Jan. 6 trial was postponed to await the court’s ruling, which could come anytime between now and the end of June. Whether that trial occurs before voters go to the polls in November will depend on the timing and nature of the court’s final ruling.
Hard Numbers: Russia shoots down space resolution, US economy sputters, Nigerian prisoners make slippery escape, Ecuador gets lifeline
A Russian Soyuz rocket is carried to the launching pad at Russia's Baikonur cosmodrome on the territory of the former Soviet Kazakhstan on December 18.
13: A UN Security Council resolution reaffirming a long-standing prohibition on arms races in outer space got 13 votes in favor this week, but it was shot down by a single veto from UNSC permanent member Russia. Moscow says it wasn’t necessary to support a resolution that merely reaffirmed a 1967 treaty that Russia is already part of, but the US ambassador to the UN asked, “What could you possibly be hiding?” In recent months, the US has said it believes Russia is developing a new space-based, anti-satellite weapon.
1.6: The US economy expanded by just 1.6% in the first quarter of the year, lagging analyst forecasts by nearly a full percentage point, as consumer spending slowed. Normally that would create momentum for the Fed to cut interest rates to spur growth, but there’s no joy there either: Core inflation (which excludes food and energy) rose 3.7%, higher than economists expectations, limiting the scope for any near-term rate cuts.
118: Authorities in the Nigerian capital of Abuja are on high alert after a rainstorm destroyed a fence at a nearby penitentiary, allowing as many as 118 inmates to escape. A prison service spokesperson blamed “colonial era” facilities. Weak security and run-down buildings contribute to frequent prison-breaks in the West African nation.
4 billion: After months of talks, Ecuador and the IMF agreed to a $4 billion loan agreement meant to help stabilize the small Andean country’s finances as it grapples with a vicious cycle of economic hardship, rising poverty, and skyrocketing homicides. Just days earlier, Ecuadorians had voted yes in a referendum to boost the government’s ability to crack down on drug violence.Nashville Predators defenseman Ryan McDonagh (27) stick checks Vancouver Canucks forward Brock Boeser (6) during the third period in game two of the first round of the 2024 Stanley Cup Playoffs at Rogers Arena.
For the past 31 years of hockey folly, Canadian fans have greeted the NHL playoffs by telling anyone who will listen that “this year is different.”
It was 1993 when the Stanley Cup was last brought north of the border – that time by the Montreal Canadiens. But there are genuine grounds for optimism this year, with four Canadian teams competing in the last 16 for the first time in seven years.
The Toronto Maple Leafs haven’t won the Cup since 1967 and are already behind 2-1 in their best-of-seven series with the Boston Bruins at the time of writing.
The Winnipeg Jets are tied with the Colorado Avalanche, but hopes are high at the Whiteout street party, where fans gather wearing white Jets jerseys in downtown Winnipeg, after their team finished the season with eight straight wins.
Vancouver Canucks are tied with the Nashville Predators, but the Canadian fans are quietly confident after winning their division.
Meanwhile, the Edmonton Oilers are tied in their series against the LA Kings after game one, in which the world’s best player, Connor McDavid, proved unstoppable, providing five assists in a 7-4 win. The bookmakers have the Oilers as the third favorite, behind the Carolina Hurricanes and Florida Panthers, both of whom are 2-0 up in their series against the New York Islanders and Tampa Bay Lightning respectively.
Despite the prospect of making history, there is no sense that the country is getting behind any one franchise as “Canada’s team.” This is for good reason: If Vancouver and Edmonton triumph, they will face off against each other in round two.
Tribal loyalties run deeper than national ones in a country like Canada, with more geography than history.
TikTok logo displayed on a phone screen is seen through the broken glass with American flag displayed on a screen in the background in this illustration photo taken in Krakow, Poland on April 24, 2024.
We appear to be at a curious “hinge moment” in history where great powers are engaged in intense rivalries but at the same time are finding ways to cooperate.
Congress and President Joe Biden have just told China to sell TikTok, the social video-sharing app, or it will be banned in the US. It has also just voted to send $8 billion in military aid to Taiwan, a move the Chinese have described as a “dangerous provocation.”
At the same time, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken is in China attempting to thaw relations. He follows on the heels of Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen and recent calls between US and Chinese defense chiefs to discuss their differences.
Similar dual-track diplomacy is happening in other Western countries. Germany is “derisking” its relations with China, yet Chancellor Olaf Scholz visited Beijing earlier this month. Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese undertook a state visit to China in November, the first since 2016.
Canada’s government ordered a national security review of TikTok last September and has already banned the app on government devices. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said Canada is watching the debate in the US, and observers have little doubt that Canada will follow Washington’s lead, if the app is banned – just as it did when it blocked Huawei from its 5G network in 2022.
Sino-Canadian relations are likely to get cooler before they warm up. Interim findings of a Canadian public inquiry into foreign interference in the 2019 and 2021 elections by China will be released later this spring – details that are unlikely to lead to calls for rapprochement.
At the same time, Foreign Affairs Minister Mélanie Joly is sending her senior diplomat, David Morrison, to China as a prelude to an official visit.
The general sense is that we all have to coexist in the same neighborhood, albeit, in the words of US National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan, “in small yards with high fences.”
Comedian Bill Maher sees Canada as a cautionary tale for the United States, or perhaps more particularly for President Joe Biden.
“Yes, you can move too far left. When you do, you end up pushing the people in the middle to the right,” he said on a recent edition of his HBO show, “Real Time.”
Maher’s central contention was that the US doesn’t have much to learn from Canada on immigration, the economy, or “extreme wokeness.”
Biden most likely agrees.
Maher’s point speaks to an emerging divergence between the president and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, driven by their respective electoral imperatives.
Winning strategies?
The US presidential race is a coin toss, according to recent polls. To win, Biden needs to woo the one-third of American voters who consider themselves “moderates,” especially whites without college degrees, even at the risk of upsetting part of his progressive base. In 2020, he traded on his blue-collar roots and ran on a moderate message. That appears to be the game plan for 2024.
Trudeau, on the other hand, has decided to double down on his appeal to young, left-of-center voters, who first helped elect him in 2015 but who have since deserted him in favor of his Conservative rival. Pierre Poilievre now holds a 2:1 advantage with people born since 1980, according to a recent poll.
“Both candidates (Biden and Donald Trump) have their separate problems getting moderates to show up while playing to their base,” according to Jon Lieber, Eurasia’s head of research. “Biden has progressive Democrats who think he has not done enough on the climate, or student loans, or has done too much on Israel. It's not clear that it's a one-sided strategy,” he said.
Biden has just forgiven student loans and increased the top rate of income tax.
But he has also backed a $26 billion aid package to Israel, at the same time as Canada has halted arms shipments to Jerusalem.
On the border, Biden has shown a willingness to get tough. “Let’s shut down the border right now and fix it quickly,” he said before House Republicans nixed a bipartisan deal.
In Canada, Trudeau’s government presided over a 1.3 million increase in the country’s population last year, as temporary workers and international students flooded the country and contributed toward sharply raising shelter costs. (As Maher noted, the median cost of a home in the US is $346,000; in Canada, it is $487,000).
Defender of liberals
The Canadian prime minister was always much more of a kindred spirit with Biden’s Democratic predecessor, Barack Obama. Trudeau was invited for a state visit to Washington in spring 2016, when Obama all but passed him the baton as defender of the liberal economic order.
Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., said the moment was reminiscent of the scene in the movie “The Graduate,” where a young Benjamin Braddock is told the future is in plastics. The view was that Canada’s time had finally come.
Biden didn’t particularly buy into that mania, and Trudeau was never Robin to the president’s Batman the way he was with Obama.
Biden did follow Trudeau’s lead in appointing a gender-balanced cabinet.
When the president eventually visited Ottawa last spring, the two men made substantive agreements, particularly on the North American Aerospace Command and an integrated North American approach to clean energy, electric vehicles, and critical mineral development.
Still, there are perennial disagreements. Canada is plowing on with its plan to bring in a digital services tax that would hit US tech companies like Alphabet and Amazon. Washington opposes the move for singling out American firms.
There remains discontent about Canada’s military spending levels, even after last week’s budget announcement of increases that will see it spend 1.76% of GDP on defense by 2028, up from 1.4% now.
But any digressions are more political than policy-related.
The battle for moderates and independents
Biden’s path to reelection could hinge on his ability to win back blue-collar former Democratic voters in places like Pennsylvania’s 8th Congressional District, which went with Donald Trump in 2020.
The president has touted an economic plan to use government investments to rebuild America’s manufacturing capacity, but many voters remain unconvinced after inflation touched 40-year highs.
Polling suggests widespread disappointment with Biden’s performance, even among strong supporters like Black and Hispanic voters. According to an AP-NORC poll last month, only 38% of voters approved of his performance, down from 61% three years ago. The numbers on the economy are worse.
In such an atmosphere, identifying too closely with the left in the culture wars when it comes to transgender policies, diversity, equity and inclusiveness, critical race theory, or on-campus anti-Israel protests would be toxic to Biden’s prospects. He has condemned the intimidation of Jewish students on college campuses. “I condemn the antisemitic protests,” Biden said Monday.
Despite Biden’s falling approval ratings, Trump has even more problems attracting moderate voters. Of the one-third of voters who self-identified as moderates in 2020, 62% voted for Biden and 36% for Trump. There are indications that a significant share of moderate Republicans will not do so again this time.
Recognition that he was out of line with public opinion likely prompted Trump’s surprise announcement that he would not sign a national abortion ban as president, even though he has called the Supreme Court decision to overturn Roe v. Wade “an incredible thing.”
The battle for the moderate and independent vote is firmly engaged, which explains Biden’s tacit acknowledgment of Maher’s point that going too far left could drive the people in the middle into the arms of his Republican opponents.
The story for Trudeau is different, which is not surprising. As Lieber noted, the Canadian electorate is generally to the left of that in the US. Trudeau faces Canadian voters next year, and polling evidence suggests voters have tired of the idiosyncracies that once amused them.
He hopes he can reconnect with young voters and continue to be the standard-bearer of woke culture, prioritizing the interests of historically marginalized racial, gender, and sexual identity groups.
To those special interests, he has now added millennials.
The most recent federal budget focused on the issue of “generational fairness” for people born since 1980, who Trudeau says are not being rewarded like their parents or grandparents. “That’s not right. It’s not fair,” he said.
The problem, as many critics pointed out, was that the Liberals campaigned on a “fairness” agenda in 2015. At that time, “fairness” meant helping the middle class keep more of their income.
That definition shifted over time to appeal to people engaged in the culture wars – a shift from the aspirational left to the identity left.
Millennials may scoff at the Damascene nature of the Liberal conversion to generational fairness. The Trudeau government has recorded eight consecutive budget deficits and doubled the national debt since coming to power – a liability that will be passed on to the generation whose interests it says it is now trying to promote.
One veteran Canadian political observer said the Trudeau Liberals are like an aging rock band that realizes too late that people don’t want to hear the new songs, so they go back to playing their greatest hits.
It remains to be seen whether millennials will give the Godfather of Woke an encore.
FILE PHOTO: Former film producer Harvey Weinstein appears in court at the Clara Shortridge Foltz Criminal Justice Center in Los Angeles, California, USA, 04 October 2022. Harvey Weinstein was extradited from New York to Los Angeles to face sex-related charges.
The New York Court of Appeals overturned a 2020 sex crime conviction against disgraced film producer Harvey Weinstein on Thursday, citing procedural errors.
What’s the issue? The court found that the judge presiding over the 2020 trial had inappropriately allowed testimony from women who alleged Weinstein had sexually assaulted them in incidents unrelated to the cases at hand. The higher court ruled that doing so had unfairly prejudiced the jury.
The improper testimony comes from blurry lines around the use of “prior bad acts” witnesses. Generally speaking, courts don’t allow testimony to simply portray the defendant as having a low character. But in certain cases, prosecutors can call witnesses of a defendant’s past behavior to establish a motive or intent in another incident.
What’s next? Weinstein will stay behind bars, as he is still under a 16-year prison sentence from a separate case in California, which could amount to a life sentence for the 72-year-old. New York prosecutors, meanwhile, indicated they would pursue a new trial.Latest
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