Weekly Recap: Jun 30th - Jul 7th
A recap of the big political stories affecting the United States this past week.
Conversation and internet searches around Project 2025 have increased following the Supreme Court's decision to upend American politics by deciding that Presidents have immunity for anything considered an official action.
While the court did not define what an official action was, Donald Trump’s lawyer had discussed examples of what official actions might be, including using US Special Forces to assassinate a political rival and swapping out electors to change the outcome of a presidential election.
This is not a ruling to dismiss lightly, as it can significantly impact our nation's future. A President could look to cancel elections, change presidential term limits, and order the military to attack civilians.
This ruling, combined with Project 2025, creates a terrifying threat to our nation that cannot be overstated. Trump’s intentions with a second term are to dismantle our democratic foundations for his own power, and there is a group of people, including the Heritage Foundation, who want to help him succeed with that goal.
The President of the Heritage Foundation said this during an interview this week:
"We are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.
Great Britain and France held elections this week, which saw the far-right lose.
For Great Britain, it is the first time in 14 years that the conservative party is not in charge.
France was an even greater surprise for pollsters who had predicted a major win for the far-right, but as has been the case so often in modern times, the polls were wrong.
Polls have struggled to maintain accuracy, including in the US, where polling expected Hillary Clinton to win in 2016, Joe Biden to lose in 2020, and said there would be a red wave in the 2022 midterms. President Biden overperformed polls routinely during primaries, and congressional elections have defied polls recently.
Despite polls' overall inaccuracy and a major poll showing Biden improving in battleground states, the media and a handful of Democratic insiders have continued their calls for President Biden to step aside in the 2024 race and allow another candidate to take his place.
President Biden has repeatedly declared that he is staying in and intends to win. This should have been enough for the media to change their narrative from speculation over Biden dropping out to instead interviewing those who still say he should drop out and ask what exactly their plan is for the 2024 election since Biden was voted in by the people as the Democratic candidate and says he isn’t going anywhere.
There has been significant pushback against the media, particularly some article sites and podcasts, for continuing the narrative that Biden should drop out. This has created a rift in the coalition to defeat Trump at a time when unity is needed most.
Four months is far too short to spin up a new candidate, but it is plenty of time for both the debate and the calls for Biden to step down and fade into the background as other topics take their place.
What matters most for Democrats and those who want to keep Trump out of the White House is whether or not the coalition can put this behind them and show the nation a unified front heading into election day.
Border crossings along the southern border dropped for four consecutive months and were down to 84,000 in June, below the number that crossed in March, April, May, and June of 2019 when Trump was President.
This decrease has happened without any help from Republicans in Congress, who obstructed earlier bipartisan immigration attempts.
Instead, Biden worked with Mexico to increase immigration enforcement on their side of the border and enacted an executive order that allows the shutdown of most asylum requests between ports of entry when the daily average number of border encounters exceeds 2,500.