Joe Manchin wants your grandkids to suffer | Will Bunch Newsletter

Want to read my preview of Wednesday’s big GOP presidential debate in Milwaukee? Donald Trump won’t be there. Ron DeSantis will wish he wasn’t there. The rest of the mediocre field will prove which is a more embarrassing look: bizarre attacks on “wokeness” or bizarre defenses of Trump’s criminality. OK, my work here is done.

📮 In response to last week’s question about whether the 76ers should give into disgruntled star James Harden’s trade demands and essentially blow up the team, folks agree about one thing: Harden is now wildly unpopular in Philadelphia. But like Sixers’ management, few are sure what to do about him. Wrote Donald DeMarco: “Keep Harden and let him be a scorer again, not primarily a set-up man for Embiid. I’m too old to wait for the next five-year plan to bloom and fizzle.” I tend to agree, and so does Tom Mason, but for different reasons. “As a long-time Celtics fan,” he wrote, “I hope Harden stays with the 76ers!” Ugh.

This week’s question: As we prep for this week’s Republican debate, who do you think Donald Trump will, or should, choose to be his running mate? For a chance to be featured in my newsletter, email me your answer.

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In 2012, the government website for the NASA space agency — on its climate change page — published an article with this simple, search-engine friendly headline: “Could a hurricane ever strike Southern California?” The answer was a barely qualified “no.”

“The interesting thing is that it really can’t happen, statistically speaking,” Bill Patzert, an oceanographer and climatologist with NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab, said at the time. “The odds are infinitesimal — so small that everyone should just relax. Like 1 in 1,000. Of course, there’s always a chance.” Unlike the Atlantic and its warming Gulf Stream waters, California’s cold coastal currents are tropical-storm killers. At least they used to be.

Technically, Patzert’s statement still stands 11 years later, but barely. The Pacific Ocean storm Hilary — a Category 4 hurricane as it raced past the coastline of Mexico’s Baja California — was downgraded from hurricane to a powerful tropical storm just before its weakening eye crossed the U.S. border. But that technicality was small solace to the many stranded by flooded highways and mudslides that made a mess of the normally parched state, in what officials believe was the most intense burst of rainfall that the Golden State has ever experienced.

In the long hot summer of 2023, the White House is struggling to keep up with the nonstop stream of natural disasters. On Monday, President Joe Biden flew right over Hilary-ravaged California on his way to the Hawaiian island of Maui, where a hurricane-whipped wildfire that destroyed the town of Lahaina killed at least 114 people, with hundreds more still missing.

Weather-related crises abound. Wildfires — lethal, and choking large North American cities with smoke — are raging across much of Canada and the parched Pacific Northwest. In Lawrence, Kansas — the college town that was fictionally nuked in 1983′s The Day After — residents are instead getting seared by a heat index in the 130s, which is barely habitable. These are just the natural disasters in North America. This summer’s floods have ransacked cities from Slovenia to India, while Iran, Spain, and elsewhere broil in record heat.

There’s something happening here, and what it is ... well, it’s fairly clear. Under normal conditions, 2023 would probably remembered as a sizzling summer, thanks to factors like El Niño, a longstanding cycle of warm Pacific water that affects the world’s climate. But experts agree that what might have been a super-hot summer has morphed into a planetary crisis because of human-made climate change, created largely by the burning of fossil fuels. The dry conditions on Maui and the Canadian forests, the record ocean temperatures that topped 100 degrees off Florida, and the unthinkable thermometer readings are all triggered by our own carbon pollution, the kindling for these weather disasters.

Many times in America’s history, dire warnings have blown up into all-out crises. The Civil War. The Great Depression. Pearl Harbor. Jim Crow segregation. 9/11. The survival of the republic has often depended on leaders with the ability to grasp the moment, and sometimes to go against their long-held beliefs. The isolationists who voted to enter World War II, millionaire FDR fighting for the working class, or Southerner LBJ understanding the need for civil rights.

Then there is West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin — nominally a Democrat, arguably the most powerful player on Capitol Hill in the 2020s, and a profile in cowardice.

I’ve written a lot about Manchin in this space because he’s such a frustrating figure. A relic of the bygone era when West Virginia’s coal miners and rural poor were solidly Democratic, his party colleagues in Washington — especially the Biden administration — must bend over backwards to appease Manchin, since his seat would certainly go GOP if he weren’t around. But Manchin’s shtick — centered on his personal clout, as well as growing the coal-millionaire bank account that funds his Maserati and his yacht — is morally unjustifiable in a time of climate crisis.

Manchin’s act is also a complicated one. This time last year, after rebuffing Biden on climate legislation for nearly two years, he surprised political observers by relenting and voting to pass the Inflation Reduction Act. The law includes $369 billion for efforts to curb greenhouse-gas pollution, promoting clean power plants and electric cars. Maybe Manchin understood that Biden and the Democrats needed a pre-election achievement in 2022 to keep a narrow hold on the Senate, which is the basis of the West Virginian’s clout. That mission accomplished, this dying-coal-state senator is doing everything within his power to undermine the bill he voted for, and climate action generally.

Manchin has gone so far as to accuse the Biden administration of a “radical climate agenda” and suggested he could join with Republicans to undo the Inflation Reduction Act, or at least some of its key provisions. The devil is in the details, and according to an in-depth report last weekend from the Washington Post, Manchin is opposing a critical reappointment to the agency that regulates pipelines and threatening to block Biden appointees to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the Interior Department.

In fact, Manchin is fighting positive climate action every step of the way, from the implementation of tax credits to speed the production of electric vehicles to efforts to promote a new technology known as green hydrogen. He insists the purpose of the Inflation Reduction Act wasn’t even to fight climate change but to spur U.S. energy production of all varieties. “This bill that I wrote was done about energy security — truly producing more gas, more oil, more coal, than we have in the past consistently,” Manchin told a radio station in his home state.

And things could get worse. As the rift gets deeper between Manchin — whose seat is up for re-election next year — and the Democratic Party, he continues to seriously threaten to instead run for president on the No Labels third-party ticket. The wackadoodle billionaires supporting this third party actually think that Biden’s inconsistent liberalism is as dangerous to America as Donald Trump’s brand of fascism. But if a second Democrat runs for president, albeit a center-right one like Manchin, it would surely make Trump the 47th president and take America backwards on the climate crisis.

West Virginia has long had a high poverty rate, but I’m pretty sure everyone has TVs there. Has Manchin not even noticed this summer’s nonstop apocalypse of wildfires, floods, and heat waves? Does the senator really lack the smarts, let alone the moral fiber, to see the writing on the wall for the fossil fuels destroying our planet, and to use his influence to bring clean energy jobs to the Mountain State?

Manchin has spoken of passing his love of the outdoors to his 10 grandchildren, so why is he fighting to make it too hot to even go outside? Does a man whose ego seems to relish his frequent TV appearances care that he’ll be remembered for making the Earth uninhabitable for his grandkids, and ours? Because 100 years from now, the textbooks will portray Manchin and other men who enabled the fossil fuel industry as this millennium’s monsters of history.

Question: Will our society ever 100% recover from Trumpism? I’m doubtful. I’ve seen first hand the damage that it has done to relationships, friendships and people’s minds. — Via Cheyenne AKA Runaway (@GypsyDawne) on Twitter/X

Answer: It is something I think about constantly, and the reason is this: Throughout history, moments of unresolvable political division (like America in the 1850s over slavery) or rising authoritarianism (Europe in the 1930s) have only come undone in one fashion: brutal, unthinkable warfare. In this case, I don’t think we’re at that point, or that an all-out conflict like the U.S. Civil War is inevitable, although threats of violence and actual violence are increasing. I’ve focused a lot on a slow, long-term solution: improving access to education, which could lead to more critical thinking and greater tolerance and civic engagement. I even wrote a book about this. I just don’t know if we have enough time.

When it comes to the seriousness of the accusations against the two men, there’s simply no comparison between Donald Trump and Alexander Hawkins. The 77-year-old former president was charged last week in Fulton County, Georgia with 18 others in a sweeping racketeering indictment which accuses Trump of conspiring to tamper with the 2020 election results in the Peach State, and thus undermine the foundation of American democracy.

The 66-year-old Hawkins, in contrast, stood accused of shoplifting food from an Atlanta supermarket.

Trump is scheduled to visit the notorious Fulton County Jail on Thursday for just a few minutes before he is released on $200,000 bail, or $20,000 in cash — money that the alleged billionaire will probably raise from his army of small political donors. With his Secret Service escort and his high-priced lawyers, Trump was able to negotiate a quick in-and-out. Hawkins was not so lucky. He was too poor to make his $5,000 bail, and thus locked up in a jail that the U.S. Justice Department is currently investigating for filth, overcrowding, and excessive violence.

On Aug. 17, Hawkins left the Fulton County Jail — in a body bag. Jail authorities had found him unresponsive in a medical cell, making him the sixth inmate to die in the troubled facility this year. It was the latest outrage to occur at the county lockup in Atlanta, but it was far from the most egregious in a jail that is chronically overcrowded, understaffed, and that even the sheriff concedes is “dilapidated and rapidly eroding.” In September 2022, a 35-year-old inmate named Lashawn Thompson — charged with misdemeanor assault but struggling with mental-health issues and unable to make bail — was discovered dead in his rancid cell, devoured by bedbugs. (The county later paid his family a $4 million settlement.)

It’s hard to imagine Trump or some of his co-defendants like Rudy Giuliani, former mayor of New York, spending even one night at Fulton County Jail — but that cuts to the crux of the gross state of injustice in America, doesn’t it? Atlanta markets itself to the world as the ultramodern high-tech jewel of the American South, yet it cages its prisoners in this rundown, practically medieval facility.

Is the big test of American democracy whether there is justice for a powerful man like Donald Trump? Or is it our continued tolerance for the injustice that claimed the lives of powerless people like Alexander Hawkins and Lashawn Thompson?

As the first Republican presidential debate looms, it’s easy to forget that it’s been just four years since all the scrambling was on the Democratic side, in search of a challenger to Donald Trump. And on this day in 2019, I was writing about what might have been: the youthful and desperately frenetic campaign of the ex-Texas congressman, Beto O’Rourke. Seeking to recover from a botched launch and angered by a mass shooting in his hometown of El Paso that had targeted people of Mexican descent, O’Rourke, I wrote, was imitating the Warren Beaty movie “Bulworth” with a political campaign that came with both cursing and uttering radical truths. I wrote: “To watch him march in El Paso funeral processions or hugging devastated Latinx immigrant spouses in Morton, Miss., Robert Francis O’Rourke is evoking — maybe consciously, maybe not — the last truly great American presidential campaign, the tragically brief 1968 effort of Robert Francis Kennedy.” Check out, “Beto O’Rourke reinvents how to run for president. Is his ‘Bulworth’ campaign crazy enough to work?”