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Month: August 2018

The greatest negotiator the world has ever seen?

The greatest negotiator the world has ever seen?

by digby

The Toronto Star reports that Trump, as usual, screwed the pooch:

In remarks Trump wanted to be “off the record,” Trump told Bloomberg News reporters on Thursday, according to a source, that he is not making any compromises at all in the talks with Canada — but that he cannot say this publicly because “it’s going to be so insulting they’re not going to be able to make a deal.”

“Here’s the problem. If I say no — the answer’s no. If I say no, then you’re going to put that, and it’s going to be so insulting they’re not going to be able to make a deal … I can’t kill these people,” he said of the Canadian government.

In another remark he did not want published, Trump said, according to the source, that the possible deal with Canada would be “totally on our terms.” He suggested he was scaring the Canadians into submission by repeatedly threatening to impose tariffs.

“Off the record, Canada’s working their ass off. And every time we have a problem with a point, I just put up a picture of a Chevrolet Impala,” Trump said, according to the source. The Impala is produced at the General Motors plant in Oshawa, Ontario.

Trump made the remarks in an Oval Office interview with Bloomberg. He deemed them off the record, and Bloomberg accepted his request not to reveal them.

But the Star is not bound by any promises Bloomberg made to Trump. And the remarks immediately became a factor in the negotiations: Trudeau’s officials, who saw them as evidence for their previous suspicions that Trump’s team had not been bargaining in good faith, raised them at the beginning of a meeting with their U.S. counterparts on Friday morning, a U.S. source confirmed.

He is such a fool. He can’t help but pose and preen because it’s really all he knows how to do.

Whatever “deals” he did in his business career were almost certainly actually hammered out by lawyers when he wasn’t in the room. And I’ll bet they rolled their eyes and said, “don’t pay any attention to him …” He’s the worst negotiator in the world.

By the way, he doesn’t deny saying it:

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A demagogue getting his people all worked up. What could go wrong?

A demagogue getting his people all worked up. What could go wrong?

by digby

Greg Sargent sounds an alarm. It’s loud:

At his rally on Thursday night in Indiana, President Trump unleashed his usual attacks on the news media, but he also added a refrain that should set off loud, clanging alarm bells. Trump didn’t simply castigate “fake news.” He also suggested the media is allied with special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s probe — an alliance, he claimed, that is conspiring not just against Trump but also against his supporters.

“Today’s Democrat Party is held hostage by left-wing haters, angry mobs, deep-state radicals, establishment cronies and their fake-news allies,” Trump railed. “Our biggest obstacle and their greatest ally actually is the media.”

In case there is any doubt about what Trump meant by the “deep state” that is supposedly allied with the news media, Trump also lashed out at the FBI and the Justice Department, claiming that “people are angry” and threatening to personally “get involved.”

Robert D. Chain, who was arrested this week for allegedly threatening to murder journalists at the Boston Globe while mimicking Trump’s language, also connected Mueller’s investigation to the media. “You’re the enemy of the people, and we’re going to kill every f–––ing one of you,” Chain snarled into one employee’s voicemail, according to FBI documents. “Why don’t you call Mueller, maybe he can help you out.”

Trump surely knew about this arrest when he repeated his attacks on the news media Thursday night — and when he connected the media to the Mueller investigation as part of a grand conspiracy against him and his voters.

Periodically in this country, whenever there is violence with a political cast, or whenever political rhetoric strays into something more menacing than usual, we hold debates about the tone of our politics and their capacity for incitement. Whether rhetorical excess can be blamed for violence or the threat of it is a complicated topic with no easy answers. But even so, in most or all of these cases, whichever side is culpable, most of our elected leaders on both sides have used their prominence to calm passions in hopes of averting future horrors.

This time, something different is happening. At this point, there is no longer any denying that Trump continues to direct incendiary attacks against working members of the free press even though his own language is being cited by clearly unhinged people making horrifying death threats against them.

Trump’s assaults on the media are different in another way, too. Previous presidents have tangled with the press, most notably Richard Nixon, who sicced his vice president on the TV networks. But as I discuss in my forthcoming book, even these presidents maintained a grudging acceptance of the news media as an adversarial mechanism of accountability that legitimately informs the public debate and thus retains a vital institutional role in our democracy.

Trump simply does not accept this at all. He is trying to destroy this foundational set of ideas in the minds of his supporters. And it seems to be working.

There’s more at the link.

yikes.

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They just can’t quit her

They just can’t quit her

by digby

If the Republicans keep the Senate look for the new judiciary chairman Lindsay Graham to deliver investigations and hearings into Hillary Clinton. If he replaces Jeff Sessions, he’ll re-open the investigation. He is one of the few Senators talking incessantly about her “crimes” these days, reflecting the president’s obsession with demanding he DOJ go after “the other side.”

Don’t think they won’t do it.

Their little white “slips” are showing

Their little white “slips” are showing

by digby

My Salon column this morning:

This week’s memorial to the late Sen. John McCain has not brought out the best in President Trump. Indeed, he seems to be increasingly upset as he obsessively watches cable news and sees the drama of the funeral and all the accolades pouring in from around the world in tribute to the nation’s most famous elder statesman.

Trump’s behavior on the announcement of McCain’s passing was typically boorish and crass, and as the mourning period goes on he seems to be doing everything short of turning cartwheels in the Rose Garden to get attention. He has pushed White House counsel Don McGahn out the door on Twitter and made clear that he’ll let Jeff Sessions stay on as attorney general until the midterms, pretty much putting Robert Mueller on notice. Grace of any kind is not this president’s strong suit.

Congressional Republicans have by and large behaved with more dignity, although that’s a very low bar. Most members gave stirring encomiums to their late comrade on the Senate floor this week, undoubtedly annoying Trump to no end. There were a few noteworthy exceptions. Sen. James Inhofe of Oklahoma defended Trump’s petulant behavior, saying, “Well, you know, frankly, I think that John McCain is partially to blame for that because he is very outspoken.” Apparently, disagreeing with Trump means you deserve to be treated disrespectfully upon your death regardless of your years of government service. Good to know.

McCain’s stalwart BFF, Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., also hedged about Trump’s sour attitude, first saying, “Clearly, they had a contentious relationship, but he’s not the only one to have a tense relationship with John McCain. How the president feels about Sen. McCain is his right to feel any way he’d like.”

Graham also claimed that the president generously told White House Chief of Staff John Kelly that the McCain family should get “whatever they need.” Then, on Thursday, Graham shifted gears, telling CBS News, “It bothers me greatly when the president says things about John McCain. It pisses me off to no end. And the way he handled the passing of John is just — it was disturbing.” This isn’t the only time in recent days that Graham has behaved erratically, but it’s perhaps the most surprising.

On the news of McCain’s passing, Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., the minority leader, had immediately proposed that the Russell Senate Office Building be renamed for the late Arizona senator. It seemed like a rare winning bipartisan issue, with no obvious downside for either team. Democrats would like to rename the building anyway since Sen. Richard Russell, a powerful Georgia Democrat who served from 1933 to 1971, was a notorious segregationist who led Southern opposition to the civil rights movement, using every parliamentary trick in the book to stymie bills to ban the poll tax or outlaw lynching. Russell co-authored the “Southern Manifesto” in 1956, opposing school desegregation, and even proposed bills to remove all African-Americans from the South.

Despite all that, it’s proving nearly impossible to replace Russell’s name on that building in this polarized political environment. McCain, at this moment, is probably the only deceased senator a majority could possibly agree upon. Which is not to say McCain’s legacy on civil rights was unblemished. He expressed regret in his later years for his early vote against the Martin Luther King Jr. national holiday and apologized for various other insensitive remarks and votes. He certainly was not the worst Republican on racial issues or civil rights, but that’s not saying much.

One would expect that Republicans would be anxious to name the Senate’s principal office building after one of their own. They could even commission a statue. (Russell has one.) But no. What seemed like a slam dunk has run into serious resistance — and not from Democrats, who might have been expected to express reservations about conferring such an honor on a conservative Republican. It’s the Republicans who are resisting, and their reasons why are revealing.

First, the McCain proposal is clearly a problem for Republican senators because it will upset the president. None of them has said that openly, but they calculate all their decisions through the prism of Trump’s childish needs and wants these days. And let’s face it: Chuck Schumer is trolling Trump just a little with this suggestion. Trump would see GOP acquiescence, even on this entirely symbolic issue, as disloyalty. We all know how he feels about that.

But in fact, what’s really holding up this name change is something else entirely. The first Republican senators to come out against the idea were from Georgia, Russell’s home state. It’s doubtful that more than a few of their constituents even remember Russell, who’s been dead for 47 years. But the state’s two current senators seem to believe there are enough of them to justify clinging to the old segregationist. Sen. David Perdue, R-Ga., complained that it wasn’t fair to remove Russell’s name over just “one issue” when he had supported many other things, including the Great Society and the War on Poverty. (Notably, Perdue and other Republicans think those were terrible failures — but whatever.)

One might chalk that up to home-state pride if it weren’t for the fact that other Southern Republicans are also stepping up to defend Russell. Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., said he’d prefer to name a commission to study how best to honor McCain, while Sen. Bill Cassidy of Louisiana said the Senate needed to “find another way.” Sen. Richard Shelby of Alabama was good enough to come right out and say it, as Huffington Post reported:

“Richard Russell was from the south and, I’m sure, not perfect like George Washington and everyone else in his day. But he was a well-respected senator. You want to get into that, [then] you have to get into George Washington and Thomas Jefferson and most of our Founding Fathers, maybe with the exception of Hamilton. It’s easy to prejudge what they should have done. We didn’t live in that era.”

Huffington Post mentioned to Shelby that Washington and Jefferson lived more than a hundred years before Russell. The senator responded by saying, “They did, but so did others.” We can be glad he has such a clear grasp of history.

This whole charade puts the lie one more time to the fatuous argument made by right-wingers like Dinesh D’Souza that there was no such thing as a Republican “Southern Strategy,” and that somehow the racist Southern Democrats of days gone by remain in the party while Southern Republicans are colorblind. That’s an absurd assertion on its face. At this point, Southern Democrats are largely African-American, and the occasional white Democrat who actually wins an election, like Sen. Doug Jones of Alabama, is heavily dependent on black votes.

Only one party is defending the name and legacy of one of the most prominent Democratic segregationists of the 20th century, and it’s not the Democrats.

More Russians?

More Russians?

by digby

I’m just going to leave this out there. I suspect it’s just the tip of the iceberg of what the Special Counsel’s office knows:

A senior Justice Department lawyer says a former British spy told him at a breakfast meeting two years ago that Russian intelligence believed it had Donald Trump “over a barrel,” according to multiple people familiar with the encounter.

The lawyer, Bruce Ohr, also says he learned that a Trump campaign aide had met with higher-level Russian officials than the aide had acknowledged, the people said.

The previously unreported details of the July 30, 2016, breakfast with Christopher Steele, which Ohr described to lawmakers this week in a private interview, reveal an exchange of potentially explosive information about Trump between two men the president has relentlessly sought to discredit.

They add to the public understanding of those pivotal summer months as the FBI and intelligence community scrambled to untangle possible connections between the Trump campaign and Russia. And they reflect the concern of Steele, a longtime FBI informant whose Democratic-funded research into Trump ties to Russia was compiled into a dossier, that the Republican presidential candidate was possibly compromised and his urgent efforts to convey that anxiety to contacts at the FBI and Justice Department.

The people who discussed Ohr’s interview were not authorized to publicly discuss details of the closed session and spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity.

Among the things Ohr said he learned from Steele during the breakfast was that an unnamed former Russian intelligence official had said that Russian intelligence believed “they had Trump over a barrel,” according to people familiar with the meeting. It was not clear from Ohr’s interview whether Steele had been directly told that or had picked that up through his contacts, but the broader sentiment is echoed in Steele’s research dossier.

Steele and Ohr, at the time of the election a senior official in the deputy attorney general’s office, had first met a decade earlier and bonded over a shared interest in international organized crime. They met several times during the presidential campaign, a relationship that exposed both men and federal law enforcement more generally to partisan criticism, including from Trump.

Republicans contend the FBI relied excessively on the dossier during its investigation and to obtain a secret wiretap application on Trump campaign aide Carter Page. They also say Ohr went outside his job description and chain of command by meeting with Steele, including after his termination as a FBI source, and then relaying information to the FBI.

Trump this month proposed stripping Ohr, who until this year had been largely anonymous during his decades-long Justice Department career, of his security clearance and has asked “how the hell” he remains employed.

Trump has called the Russia investigation a “witch hunt” and has denied any collusion between his campaign and Moscow.

Trump and some of his supporters in Congress have also accused the FBI of launching the entire Russia counterintelligence investigation based on the dossier. But memos authored by Republicans and Democrats and declassified this year show the probe was triggered by information the U.S. government received earlier about the Russian contacts of then-Trump campaign foreign policy adviser, George Papadopoulos.

The FBI’s investigation was already under way by the time it received Steele’s dossier, and Ohr was not the original source of information from it.

One of the meetings described to House lawmakers Tuesday was a Washington breakfast attended by Steele, an associate of his and Ohr. Ohr’s wife, Nellie, who worked for the political research firm, Fusion GPS, that hired Steele, attended at least part of the breakfast.

Ohr also told Congress that Steele told him that Page, a Trump campaign aide who traveled to Moscow that same month and whose ties to Russia attracted FBI scrutiny, had met with more senior Russian officials than he had acknowledged meeting with.

That breakfast took place amid ongoing FBI concerns about Russian election interference and possible communication with Trump associates. By that point, Russian hackers had penetrated Democratic email accounts, including that of the Clinton campaign chairman, and Papadopoulos, the Trump campaign associate, was said to have revealed that Russians had “dirt” on Democrat Hillary Clinton in the form of emails, according to court papers. That revelation prompted the FBI to open the counterintelligence investigation on July 31, 2016, one day after the breakfast but based on entirely different information.

Ohr told lawmakers he could not vouch for the accuracy of Steele’s information but has said he considered him a reliable FBI informant who delivered credible and actionable intelligence, including his investigation into corruption at FIFA, soccer’s global governing body.

In the interview, Ohr acknowledged that he had not told superiors in his office, including Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates, about his meetings with Steele because he considered the information inflammatory raw source material.

He also provided new details about the department’s move to reassign him once his Steele ties were brought to light.

Ohr said he met in late December 2017 with two senior Justice Department officials, Scott Schools and James Crowell, who told him they were unhappy he had not proactively disclosed his meetings with Steele. They said he was being stripped of his associate deputy attorney post as part of a planned internal reorganization, people familiar with Ohr’s account say.

He met again soon after with one of the officials, who told him Attorney General Jeff Sessions and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein did not believe he could continue in his current position as director of a drug grant-distribution program — known as the Organized Crime and Drug Enforcement Task Force.

Sessions and Rosenstein, Ohr was told, did not want him in the post because it entailed White House meetings and interactions, the people said.

Now read this article about how all the people Trump has targeted just happen to be, like Ohr, experts in Russian organized crime:

Bruce Ohr. Lisa Page. Andrew Weissmann. Andrew McCabe. President Donald Trump has relentlessly attacked these FBI and Justice Department officials as dishonest “Democrats” engaged in a partisan “witch hunt” led by the special counsel determined to tie his campaign to Russia. But Trump’s attacks have also served to highlight another thread among these officials and others who have investigated his campaign: their extensive experience in probing money laundering and organized crime, particularly as they pertain to Russia.

I’m sure it’s just a coincidence.

Radio Rwhite House by @BloggersRUs

Radio Rwhite House
by Tom Sullivan

“It’s working. Don’t let anyone tell you different,” Charlie Pierce laments.

Pierce responded to news yesterday that a man in Encino, California phoned a series of death threats to the Boston Globe. Pierce worked there for nine years and has lots of friends and one relative there still. The Boston Globe itself reports the suspect Robert Darrell Chain, 68, was arrested by the FBI Thursday and charged with making a threatening communication in interstate commerce:

Federal prosecutors said that Chain made 14 calls to the Globe’s main newsroom number between Aug. 10 and 22 after the newspaper’s editorial page called on media outlets to unite in opposition to Trump’s angry rhetoric against the press, including repeated references to reporters as “the enemy of the people.”

Authorities said the calls were “profane, lewd, and peppered with antigay slurs.”

“Anyone — regardless of political affiliation — who puts others in fear for their lives will be prosecuted by this office,” said Andrew Lelling, the US attorney in Massachusetts. “In a time of increasing political polarization, and amid the increasing incidence of mass shootings, members of the public must police their own political rhetoric. Or we will.”

US attorneys might want to forward that public service message to the gentleman sitting behind the Resolute desk. When he’s not watching Fox News, he’s stoking public anger on Twitter or among supporters at rallies. He’s a one-man RTLM.

NBC News’ David Douglas reports that after his court appearance in Los Angeles, Chain told reporters, ““America was saved when Donald J. Trump was elected President.”

The FBI reportedly found 20 guns at Chain’s home. An FBI affidavit that includes some transcripts of the calls is here.

Conservative columnist Michael Gerson calls out the sitting president for stoking fear among evangelical Christians meeting at the White House this week. The November election is “a referendum on your religion,” Trump warned. If Democrats prevail, it will be “the beginning of ending” of everything they have, “and they will do it quickly and violently. And violently. There is violence.”

Gerson writes, “Fighting for Trump, the president argued, is the only way to defend the Christian faith. None of these men and women of God, apparently, gagged on their hors d’oeuvres.”

Meanwhile, someone from Team Trump is playing fast and loose with sensitive security information. And using it to target political enemies, no less:

WASHINGTON — A former C.I.A. officer running for Congress accused a super PAC aligned with Speaker Paul D. Ryan on Tuesday of improperly obtaining her entire federal security clearance application — a highly sensitive document containing extensive personal information — and then using it for political purposes.

Abigail Spanberger, the Democratic candidate challenging Representative Dave Brat of Virginia, sent a cease-and-desist letter to Corry Bliss, the executive director of the Congressional Leadership Fund, which has raised more than $100 million to help Republicans in the midterm elections. She demanded that the super PAC destroy all copies of the form and agree to not use the information in any fashion.

The United States Postal Service blamed human error for the release to a Republican-aligned (oppo) research firm. Since Spanberger is a Democrat, Alex Jones did not launch into a spittle-flecked rant about another deep state conspiracy.

But the most disturbing news of the week (as we discussed yesterday) is the State Department is denying passports to (in some cases passport renewals to) Latinos from the southern border region. Their citizenship is now under blanket suspicion. The burden of proving themselves true Americans is on them.

“At this point, the Trump administration has the burden of proving this is anything other than vile, unadulterated racism,” writes Eugene Robinson.

Charlie Pierce is less polite:

This is unprecedented. This is unAmerican in the extreme. This is the kind of thing out of which blood-and-soil laws are drawn. (Dr. Wilhelm Stuckert, please call your office in hell.) Your papers are never in order, if you happen to fit a broadly drawn racial profile. This is fascism, pure and simple.

First they came for the non-citizen troops and veterans promised citizenship. Then they came for military enlistees promised naturalization. Then they came for citizens suspected of falsifying their citizenship applications. Then they came for hundreds of U.S. citizens that look to ICE agents like noncitizens. Now, they’re coming for Americans who were infants delivered by midwives the government suspects (but cannot prove) may have falsified their birth documents many decades ago.

There’s a loud, strong signal broadcast from Radio Rwhite House that it won’t stop there.

* * * * * * * * *

For The Win 2018 is ready for download. Request a copy of my county-level election mechanics primer at tom.bluecentury at gmail.

The Giuliani Report. Lol.

The Giuliani Report. Lol.  

by digby

We don’t know yet if Mueller is going to write a report. There’s a good chance that he’s just going to rely on “speaking indictments” to lay out his evidence. But if he does, the Trumpies are preparing an alternate reality for Fox News and other right wing media:

President Donald Trump’s legal team is crafting a “counter-report” that will seek to delegitimize Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian election meddling and present countervailing arguments.

Trump’s personal attorney, former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani, told The Daily Beast in an interview on Thursday that part of his report would examine whether the “initiation of the investigation was…legitimate or not.”

According to Giuliani, the bulk of the report will be divided into two sections. One section will seek to question the legitimacy of the Mueller probe generally by alleging “possible conflicts” of interest by federal law enforcement authorities. The other section will respond to more substantive allegations of Trump campaign collusion with Russian government agents to sway the 2016 election, and obstruction of justice allegations stemming from, among other things, the president’s firing of former FBI director James Comey.

Though this latter section will focus on the meat of Mueller’s investigation, Giuliani acknowledged that he doesn’t actually know what Mueller’s findings will look like, making the act of putting a counter-report together a bit more challenging.

“Since we have to guess what it is, [our report so far] is quite voluminous,” Giuliani said, claiming that he would spend much of this weekend “paring it down” and that he was editing the document created by the “whole team.”

“The first half of it is 58 pages, and second half isn’t done yet…It needs an executive summary if it goes over a hundred,” he added. Giuliani also indicated that most of what’s being put together by him and his Trump-defending colleagues currently can already be found on Google.

Giuliani said that Trump’s legal team had not conducted any original interviews or investigation for their current draft.

Yeah, I’m going to guess there will only be one “witness.”

I guess he plans on throwing the report together pretty quickly since he doesn’t know what Robert Mueller has but whatevs. He’s just that good.

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I guess the Republicans don’t ever expect to win Virginia again

I guess the Republicans don’t ever expect to win Virginia again

by digby


No end to the chutzpah of these people:

In a letter sent to House Speaker Paul Ryan on Thursday, President Trump announced that a majority of civilian federal employees will not receive pay increases next year, undoing the original 2.1% pay increase that was set to take effect in 2019.

The details: The president explained the change is an effort “to put our Nation on a fiscally sustainable course, and Federal agency budgets cannot sustain such increases.” No change has been announced for pay increases of military troops, which are still on track to receive a 2.6% bump according to the Military Times, marking their biggest pay raise since 2009.

He is such a total asshole:

It’s the conservative evangelicals, stupid

It’s the conservative evangelicals, stupid

by digby

Amy Walter at the Cook Report has an interesting analysis of the 2016 electorate that blows up some of the myths we’ve all been operating under due to the exit polls being less than accurate:

There are LOTS of opinions and narratives out there about white voters.

Hillary Clinton lost because white women abandoned her.

White, non-college educated voters are Trump’s base. They are never coming back/will come back to Democrats.

Donald Trump’s testosterone-laden presidency alienated lots of white, college-educated women who held their noses and voted for him in 2016.

Most of these narratives are built on data supplied by the 2016 exit polls and the “education level” cross-tabs in current polling. However, new data and analysis of the 2016 vote suggest that many of these assumptions are worth reassessing.

First, let’s look at this political aphorism that Hillary Clinton lost because white women abandoned her. That assumption comes directly from the 2016 exit poll that showed Trump winning white women by 9-points (52 percent to 43 percent).

However, a Pew Research assessment of the 2016 electorate, which was highlighted in an early August report, showed Trump did much worse with white women and white college-educated voters than what the exit polls found.

The exits show Trump winning white voters by nine-points. But, Pew’s validated voter survey (they matched voter file with the survey respondents) showed white women narrowly preferring Trump to Clinton by 2 points – 47 percent to 45 percent. Instead of winning decisively among this group (as the narratives and exits have shown), the Pew data suggests white women have always been, at best, ambivalent about Trump.

The exit polls and the Pew surveys both show a sizable gap in voter preference among white college-educated and white, non-college educated voters. In the exit poll, Trump narrowly carried white college-educated voters by three points (48 to 45 percent). But, the Pew survey found Clinton won these voters by 17 points! The exit polls also showed the electorate to be more heavily populated by white, college-educated graduates than the census and other data experts believe to be true.

Now, compare how white voters voted in 2016 to Trump’s current job approval rating and the congressional ballot question from the NBC/Wall Street Journal January-July merged poll (3,995 voters). Looking at the Pew data, you can see that opinions about Trump and vote preference among white women isn’t all that much different from where it was in 2016. The exit poll data, however, shows a significant drop-off in support for Trump among those same voters.

For example, according to exit polls, Trump carried white, college-educated voters with 48 percent of the vote. Today, his approval rating among these voters is just 37 percent. More ominously, after voting narrowly for Trump in 2016, these voters overwhelmingly prefer a Democrat for Congress over a Republican (54 percent to 39 percent).

But, what if you compared Trump’s current standing with the Pew data. Trump took 38 percent of college-educated voters in 2016, and his current standing with these voters is….37 percent. Their vote preference in 2016 (38 percent Trump to 55 percent Clinton), pretty much mirrors their vote preference for 2018 – 39 percent Republican to 54 percent Democrat.

She goes on to show that the polarization we have today is pretty much what we had in 2016. College educated whites never liked Trump and he never had the support of over 50% of white women. As she puts it, “it’s hardened not widened.”

But her big insight is this:

What you do see in both in both Pew and exits, is a drop-off among white, non-college voters. The exit polls found Trump getting 66 percent among this group, while Pew put it at 64 percent. Trump’s approval rating among these voters now stands at 57 percent. So, perhaps this is the group that has soured more on Trump that we appreciate.

But, Mike Podhorzer, AFL-CIO’s political director, suggests that if we want to have a better understanding of white, non-college educated voters, we need to stop lumping them into one, catch-all category. What really distinguishes a Trump-supporting white voter from one who doesn’t isn’t education or even gender, it’s whether or not that voter is evangelical.

Using a data set from Public Religion Research Institute, Podhorzer broke out white voters by gender, education and whether they identified as evangelical. The gap between white voters who approve and disapprove of Trump by gender was 25 points. By education (college versus non-college) it was about the same at 26 percent. But the gap in perceptions of the president between white voters who are evangelical and those who aren’t was a whopping 60 percent!

This evangelical support gap transcends education and gender. For example, among white evangelicals, college-educated men and non-college educated men give Trump equally impressive job approval ratings (78 percent and 80 percent respectively). But, among white men who aren’t evangelical, the education gap is significant. Those without a college degree give Trump a 52 percent job approval rating, while just 40 percent of those with a college degree approve of the job he’s doing.

Meanwhile, among women, if you remove evangelicals, white women with and without a college degree have the same (very low) opinion of the president.

White evangelical women without a college degree give Trump a 68 percent job approval rating, while those with a degree give him a much lower, though still positive 51 percent approval rating. Meanwhile, Trump’s approval among white, non-evangelical women without a college degree is 35 percent, just five points higher than the 30 percent approval rating he gets from white, non-evangelical college-educated women.

Podhorzer’s analysis leads to two conclusions. First, stop assuming that all white, non-college voters are core Trump supporters. Trump’s base is evangelical white voters, regardless of education level. Second, white non-evangelical, non-college women are the ultimate swing voters.

I think looking back we can all see the seeds of Trumpism in GOP politics. But I will admit that I didn’t see the total hypocrisy of the conservative evangelicals coming. I knew they were willing to put up with hyUpdatepocritical leaders if they admitted their sins and asked for forgiveness. That’s a Jesus thing. But a crude, nasty, unrepentant libertine? That one surprises me although when I think about it Sarah Palin foreshadowed all this. Her small town conservative evangelical hypocrisy was evident. But I honestly had no idea they were this immoral. I mean, they are way worse than the average person.

By the way, working class white men are pretty bad too but that isn’t a big shock that they dig Trump. But those non-evangelical white working class women? Maybe the Democrats ought to think about talking about their specific economic challenges a little bit more. There are a lot of single moms and single women among them and all this talk about re-opening steel mills and coal mines doesn’t exactly speak to their needs. They mostly work in service jobs, retail, and small businesses.

Update: How many norms can Trump and evangelical leaders break in one meeting?

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The tabloid president had a lot to hide

The tabloid president had a lot to hide

by digby
I guess it’s not unprecedented for a publication to hide damaging information about a politician it supports. But I’m pretty sure it isn’t common for the politician to pay them to keep it hidden. Maybe I’m wrong, but I’ve never heard of that before:

Federal investigators have provided ample evidence that President Trump was involved in deals to pay two women to keep them from speaking publicly before the 2016 election about affairs that they said they had with him. 

But it turns out that Mr. Trump wanted to go even further. 

He and his lawyer at the time, Michael D. Cohen, devised a plan to buy up all the dirt on Mr. Trump that the National Enquirer and its parent company had collected on him, dating back to the 1980s, according to several of Mr. Trump’s associates.
The existence of the plan, which was never finalized, has not been reported before. But it was strongly hinted at in a recording that Mr. Cohen’s lawyer released last month of a conversation about payoffs that Mr. Cohen had with Mr. Trump.

“It’s all the stuff — all the stuff, because you never know,” Mr. Cohen said on the recording. 

The move by Mr. Trump and Mr. Cohen indicated just how concerned they were about all the information amassed by the company, American Media, and its chairman, David Pecker, a loyal Trump ally of two decades who has cooperated with investigators.

It is not clear yet whether the proposed plan to purchase all the information from American Media has attracted the interest of federal prosecutors in New York, who last week obtained a guilty plea from Mr. Cohen over a $130,000 payment to the adult film actress Stephanie Clifford, also known as Stormy Daniels, and a $150,000 payment to a Playboy model, Karen McDougal. 

But the prosecutors have provided at least partial immunity to Mr. Pecker, who is a key witness in their inquiry into payments made on behalf of Mr. Trump during the 2016 campaign. 

The people who knew about the discussions would speak about them only on condition of anonymity, given that they are now the potential subject of a federal investigation that did not end with Mr. Cohen’s plea. 

Lawyers for Mr. Trump and Mr. Cohen declined to comment for this article as did American Media. 

It is not known how much of the material on Mr. Trump is still in American Media’s possession or whether American Media destroyed any of it after the campaign. Prosecutors have not said whether they have obtained any of the material beyond that which pertains to Ms. McDougal and Ms. Clifford and the discussions about their arrangements. 

For the better part of two decades, Mr. Pecker had ordered his staff at American Media to protect Mr. Trump from troublesome stories, in some cases by buying up stories about him and filing them away. 

In 2016, he kept his staff from going back through the old Trump tip and story files that dated to before Mr. Pecker became company chairman in 1999, several former staff members said in interviews with The New York Times. 

That meant that American Media, the nation’s largest gossip publisher, did not play a role during the election year in vetting a presidential candidacy — Mr. Trump’s — made for the tabloids.

I think the most significant aspect of this story is the fact that the tape we’ve all heard may be referring to a much bigger transaction than the Stormy Daniels payment.

I have no idea if the feds are following up on this. It wouldn’t surprise me if they aren’t doing much. There’s good reason to think the SDNY may not be quite the crusaders we think they are. But it certainly seems like a fertile field for investigation.

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