Month: October 2018

How Democrats can stop vote suppression

by digby

Honestly,if Democrats don’t fix this problem this country could lose it all. And they have to be very smart about it because the courts are in extremist right wing hands for a generation:

Faced with the latest flurry of hardball Republican tactics on voting issues this election cycle, Democrats are grappling with the reality of an opposition that now seems determined to cement long-term minorityrule. In order to combat this dynamic, progressives need a plan of their own for the next time they control both houses of Congress and the presidency. The single best step that Democrats could take under a future unified control would be to use the “nuclear option” to expand voting rights. This would let Democrats, by a simple majority vote, enact wide-ranging voting reform, from restoring a key part of the Voting Rights Act, to automatic voter registration, to statehood for D.C.

This progressive version of electoral hardball—which would merely mean killing the filibuster for voting rights legislation—is an appropriate response to the hardball tactics Republicans have used to manipulate the U.S. political system in recent years. Consider the most prominent example of recent Republican hardball: the Republican Senate in 2016 denying Obama-nominated Judge Merrick Garland a hearing for a Supreme Court spot after the death of Justice Antonin Scalia. In 2017, meanwhile, the Republican Senate invoked the so-called nuclear option, which lowered from 60 votes to a simple majority the number of senators necessary to confirm a Supreme Court nominee, leading to the confirmations of Justices Neil Gorsuch and, more recently, Brett Kavanaugh.

GOP hardball has by no means been restricted to the federal level. From Georgia to Kansas to North Carolina to North Dakota, Republican-dominated legislatures have used a variety of means to make it harder for likely Democratic voters to register and vote.

The Supreme Court has abetted all of these efforts, killing off a key provision of the Voting Rights Act, freeing the wealthy to spend unlimited sums of money to influence elections, and failing to rein in extreme partisan gerrymandering in states like North Carolina and Wisconsin.

There is thus a growing fear that all these moves, combined with the bias of the Senate toward small states, will lead to a period of sustained minority rule in the United States. In response, some have proposed radical changes, such as a plan to pack the Supreme Court with liberal justices if and when Democrats take control. Others fear that such tactics by Democrats could cause things to spiral out of control, further eroding democratic norms after a period in which President Donald Trump has attacked courts, the free press, and the integrity of the election system itself.

In his engaging new book, An Uncivil War, Washington Post columnist Greg Sargent grapples with the challenges to democratic norms and majority rule unleashed by Trump and the Republican Party. Sargent mines the political science and legal literature on norm devolution and constitutional hardball to urge Democrats to think carefully about the kind of change they might undertake should they retake the levers of power in 2021 or beyond. Drawing on the work of professors Joseph Fishkin and David Pozen, Sargent cogently argues that “Democrats will have to do whatever they can to, in effect, take the weaponry out of GOP hands (in effect, out of both parties’ hands) whenever possible.”

Sargent is on the right track, and the key is finding the right balance between restoring political equality and fomenting an all-out political war. Rather than begin with a radical step like court packing, Democrats could, by simple majority, vote to adopt a procedure whereby all future voting rights measures need only a simple majority to pass. Not only would killing of the filibuster here be the exact same move that Republicans did to allow for the majority votes on Kavanaugh and Gorsuch, Democrats could correctly claim that such a move will further the values of equality embedded in the 14th and 15th amendments of the Constitution.

That’s election expert Rick Hasen and he offers some specifics.

It’s also important that Democrats start talking about this issue openly. It’s been going on forever, but in recent years as its ramped up in GOP circles I think Democrats have been afraid to make a big deal of it because it calls the legitimacy of elections into questions and they are afraid the right will weaponize that.

After 2016 and Russian interference and Trump’s claiming Clinton won the popular vote with “illegals” voting, it’s pretty clear that ship has sailed. It’s time for the Democrats to make this a central plank of their agenda and go out and make the argument in the name of simple fairness. If a majority of the country hasn’t gone completely batshit insane it should be a basic civic argument they can make. And doing it in the wake of this imbecile gaining the White House under blatantly unfair voting systems and foreign interference is the right time. If not now, when?

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Gird yourself for a major dirty trick

by digby

I don’t think we should be surprised that they’d try this. They think they can discredit Mueller by twisting the left into pretzels and throwing the Kavanaugh claims back in their face. The aim is to make those who say “believe women” denounce Mueller as a predator.

It’s a good thing that we know that they’re offering money to women to come forward but I’m going to guess that they’ll just say it’s a Deep State pushback and they’ll claim the one woman who is apparently going along with this should be believed.

Natasha Bertrand in The Atlantic:

An alleged scheme to pay off women to fabricate sexual assault allegations against Special Counsel Robert Mueller has been referred to the FBI for further investigation, a spokesman for the special counsel’s office told The Atlantic. “When we learned last week of allegations that women were offered money to make false claims about the Special Counsel, we immediately referred the matter to the FBI for investigation,” the spokesman, Peter Carr, told me in an email on Tuesday.

The special counsel’s attention to this scheme—which was brought to the office by a woman claiming she herself had been offered money to make up sexual harassment claims against Mueller—and its decision to release a rare statement about it indicates the seriousness with which the office is taking the purported scheme to discredit Mueller in the middle of an ongoing investigation.

The special counsel’s office confirmed that the scheme was brought to its attention by several journalists who were told about it by a woman alleging that she herself had been offered roughly $20,000 by a man claiming to work for a GOP activist named Jack Burkman “to make accusations of sexual misconduct and workplace harassment against Robert Mueller.” The woman told journalists in an email, a copy of which I obtained, that she had worked for Mueller as a paralegal at the Pillsbury, Madison, and Sutro law firm in 1974, but that she “didn’t see” him much. “When I did see him, he was always very polite to me, and was never inappropriate,” the woman wrote. The firm has not returned a request for comment about whether the woman actually worked there.

The woman explained that she was contacted by a man “with a British accent” who wanted to ask her “a couple questions about Robert Mueller, whom I worked with when I was a paralegal for Pillsbury, Madison, and Sutro in 1974. I asked him who he was working for, and he told me his boss was some sort of politics guy in Washington named Jack Burkman. I reluctantly told [him] that I had only worked with Mr. Mueller for a short period of time, before leaving that firm to have my first son.”

She continued: “In more of an effort to get him to go away than anything else, I asked him what in the hell he wanted me to do. He said that we could not talk about it on the phone, and he asked me to download an app on my phone called Signal, which he said was more secure. Reluctantly, I downloaded the app and he called me on that app a few minutes later. He said (and I will never forget exactly what it was) ‘I want you to make accusations of sexual misconduct and workplace harassment against Robert Mueller, and I want you to sign a sworn affidavit to that effect.’” The man “offered to pay off all of my credit card debt, plus bring me a check for $20,000 if I would do” it, she wrote. “He knew exactly how much credit card debt I had, right down to the dollar, which sort of freaked me out.”

The woman was not willing to speak to the reporters by phone, according to Scott Stedman, one of the reporters who received the letter. So portions of her story have gone uncorroborated. Around the time that the journalists began receiving the email, Burkman released a video on his Facebook page claiming, without evidence, that Mueller “has a whole lifetime history of harassing women.” On Tuesday, the day the special counsel revealed that it had referred the woman’s claims to the FBI, Burkman tweeted a similar allegation.

In an emailed statement, Burkman denied knowing the woman who originally alerted journalists to the alleged scheme and called the FBI referral “a joke, mueller wants to deflect attention from his sex assault troubles by attacking me.” He added in a separate email that “on Thursday 1200 NOON ROSSYLN HOLIDAY INN we will present a very credible witness who will allege that Mr. Mueller committed against her a sexual assault.” Mueller’s spokesman reiterated that the claims are false.

Burkman, a conservative radio host, is known for spreading conspiracy theories. He launched his own private investigation into the murder of DNC staffer Seth Rich, dangled uncorroborated claims of sexual harassment against a sitting member of Congress, and earlier this year offered $25,000 to FBI whistleblowers for any information exposing wrongdoing during the 2016 election.

It’s an obvious play. Don’t underestimate their ability to manipulate the left with this either. 2016 showed they can do it.

Update: Here’s the email from the woman he tried to recruit:

This woman is about to get dragged through the streets by the rabid wingnuts, I’m afraid.

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The gender gap on the economy

by digby

What could possibly explain this? I can’t imagine.

A remarkable gender gap has opened up in Americans’ views of their own finances and the broader national economy.

Men feel better about the economy than they have in over a decade. Women are far more skeptical. And the sharp divide has emerged since President Trump was elected two years ago.

Nearly half of men — 47 percent — said their family’s finances had improved in the past year, according to a survey conducted for The New York Times in early October by the online research platform SurveyMonkey. Just 30 percent of women said the same, despite an unemployment rate that is near a five-decade low and economic growth that is on track for its best year since before the recession.

Asked how they expected the American economy to fare over the next five years, nearly two-thirds of men said they anticipated “continuous good times economically.” Women were more likely to expect “periods of widespread unemployment or depression.” The gaps remain even between men and women who are similar in age, race, education and income.

It isn’t clear how men’s and women’s diverging views of the economy will affect next month’s elections. There has historically been at most a loose connection between the state of the economy and midterm election results, and Mr. Trump’s signature economic policies poll poorly with swing voters. What is clear is that the gender divide — transcending party lines and voting preferences — is a striking departure from the past.

Polls by the Pew Research Center going back to the mid-2000s showed almost no gender gap on economic questions until Mr. Trump took office; since then, men have become significantly more confident, while women’s confidence has stalled.

And maybe it’s because having a misogynist billionaire in the White House has opened their eyes about this:

The gender gap in pay has narrowed since 1980, but it has remained relatively stable over the past 15 years or so. In 2017, women earned 82% of what men earned, according to a Pew Research Center analysis of median hourly earnings of both full- and part-time workers in the United States. Based on this estimate, it would take an extra 47 days of work for women to earn what men did in 2017. 

By comparison, the Census Bureau found that full-time, year-round working women earned 80% of what their male counterparts earned in 2016. 

Also:

And maybe most men just like Trump’s bullying attitude and want to excuse that by giving him credit for the growth in an economy he has nothing to do with.

And maybe most women just know that something is very, very wrong.

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Real Americans only need apply

by digby

Trump’s been saying he wants to end birthright citizenship since the campaign but he hasn’t talked much about it until now. I guess he’s been saving it as a special gift for his white supremacist base. Ian Millhiser unpacks is proposal:

Donald Trump, in an interview with Axios, said that he plans to sign an executive order stripping many Americans of their citizenship. Though it is unclear how far Trump wants to go, or whether he would attempt to retroactively strip many existing citizens of their citizenship, Trump apparently wants to target the children of undocumented immigrants.

“We’re the only country in the world where a person comes in and has a baby, and the baby is essentially a citizen of the United States for 85 years with all of those benefits,” Trump falsely claimed. “It’s ridiculous. It’s ridiculous. And it has to end.”

Trump’s plan is unconstitutional. It’s not even arguably constitutional. It is so obviously unconstitutional that it was rejected by a notoriously racist Supreme Court more than a century ago. The few scholars who think that Trump can actually do this are considered radicals even within conservative legal circles.

If the Roberts Court ultimately upholds such an order, it will reveal that its Republican majority is so captured by partisanship that it cannot even be trusted to read the clear words of the Constitution.

“Subject to the jurisdiction thereof”
The Fourteenth Amendment was the price a victorious Union extracted from rebellious states that waged a treasonous war to defend slavery. In order to be admitted back into the Union, ex-Confederate states were required to ratify this amendment. Among other things, the Fourteenth Amendment explicitly stated that nearly anyone born in the United States would automatically become a citizen.

One of the primary purposes of this amendment was to wipe away the Supreme Court’s decision in Dred Scott v. Sandford, the infamous pro-slavery decision which held that black men and woman are “regarded as beings of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the white race either in social or political relations, and so far inferior that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.”

“All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside.”

Yet the Fourteenth Amendment also speaks in expansive terms about who qualifies for birthright citizenship — much more expansively than if the amendment were intended simply to grant citizenship to former slaves. “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside.”

The amendment, in other words, only places two limitations on who automatically qualifies as a citizen. A person must either be born or naturalized in the United States, and they must be “subject to the jurisdiction thereof.”

The word “jurisdiction” is a legal term which refers to lawful power over a person. A federal court has “jurisdiction” over a particular individual if it has the power to issue binding rulings against that person. Likewise, someone is “subject to the jurisdiction” of the United States if they are bound by its laws.

Thus, if the children of undocumented immigrants were beyond the reach of the Fourteenth Amendment’s citizenship provision, that would mean that they were immune to American law altogether. It would be unlawful for the federal government to arrest, detain, or deport them.

The Supreme Court explained more than a century ago, in its 1898 decision in United States v. Wong Kim Ark, why the Fourteenth Amendment contains a limited exemption for people not “subject to the jurisdiction” of the United States.

The real object of the fourteenth amendment of the constitution, in qualifying the words ‘all persons born in the United States’ by the addition ‘and subject to the jurisdiction thereof,’ would appear to have been to exclude, by the fewest and fittest words (besides children of members of the Indian tribes, standing in a peculiar relation to the national government, unknown to the common law), the two classes of cases,- children born of alien enemies in hostile occupation, and children of diplomatic representatives of a foreign state,-both of which, as has already been shown, by the law of England and by our own law, from the time of the first settlement of the English colonies in America, had been recognized exceptions to the fundamental rule of citizenship by birth within the country.

When the Fourteenth Amendment was ratified, in other words, there were a few limited classes of children who were born with the United States’ territory but not subject to its laws. They included some Native Americans whose tribes existed as separate sovereign nations within the United States, but also children of foreign diplomats (who enjoy diplomatic immunity from the law of the nation they are visiting), and any children born to a hostile invading army.

All other children, by the Fourteenth Amendment’s explicit terms, are citizens if they are born in the United States.

More racist than the racists

It’s unclear why Trump believes that the text of the Fourteenth Amendment does not apply to him. Last July, however, former Trump administration official Michael Anton published a Washington Post op-ed arguing against birthright citizenship. (Notably, after this op-ed was published, the Post added a lengthy editor’s note to it, revealing that Anton doctored a quote in order to bolster his argument.)

Anton’s argument is difficult to follow, and key parts of it rest on mere assertions that propositions that Anton wishes were true are “clearly” true. Anton writes, for example, that “the children of immigrants who came here illegally clearly don’t” qualify as citizens, without citing any provision of the Constitution or other historic text that supports a distinction between the children of documented and undocumented immigrants.

Nevertheless, the crux of Anton’s argument appears to be that someone is not “subject to the jurisdiction” of the United States if they do not owe “allegiance” to this nation — and therefore are unable to bestow citizenship upon their children.

This argument is foreclosed by Wong Kim Ark. The United States citizen at the heart of that case was a laborer born in the United States to “persons of Chinese descent, and subjects of the emperor of China.” Yet the Supreme Court held him to be a citizen, regardless of the fact that he was born to parents who owed no allegiance to the United States.

It’s worth noting once again that Wong Kim Ark was decided in 1898 — two years after the Court’s notorious segregation decision in Plessy v. Ferguson. Notably, five of the justices who endorsed segregation in Plessy also upheld birthright citizenship in Wong Kim Ark.

The case for birthright citizenship, in other words, is so clear cut that even many of the most notorious racists in the Supreme Court’s history believed that the children of foreign nationals born in the United States are American citizens.

Trump is literally taking a position to the right of many of the justices who gave us separate-but-equal.

It goes on. Much will depend, of course, on the Trump Court.

As Newt Gingrich says, “we’ll see if the Kavanaugh fight was worth it.”

Weighed in the balances and found wanting
by Tom Sullivan

Sharper than any razor. Watch:

Every charge Schmidt leveled against Trump and Trumpism, Chris Hayes observes, was raised “by Mitt Romney, by Lindsay Graham, by Marco Rubio, by Rick Perry, I mean, on and on and on….” One by one, “the Borg assimilates them,” Hayes laments. Former Republican strategist Steve Schmidt responded:

All of these people were happy to stand and assert that they believed in the American idea and ideal when the American idea and ideal was not being tested, when it was not under assault, when it was not being contested.

What we see is a crisis of profound cowardice in what I would argue is the worst generation of political leadership the country may have ever had.

Only Robert Mueller could add to that indictment. Or the God of Abraham. Or a chastened Jules Winnfield pondering the inequities of the selfish and the tyranny of evil men.

The only accomplices Schmidt omitted from his rebuke Monday night are the president’s unshakable evangelical and conservative foot soldiers. They wrapped themselves in the mantle of Americanness and in the name of Jesus so long as their primacy in the social order went uncontested. Now, Redhats celebrate the Seven Deadly Sins on two legs. They wait in line for hours to applaud the man of corruption who lies to them with abandon, sneers at the rule of law, embraces murderous despots, and “pals around with” white supremacists. Xenophobes all, he and they traffic in fear in the home of the brave.

Redhats chant for retribution against those who will not bow as they do before their idol in supplication. Followers, once, of a different man who two millennia ago was himself scapegoated cheer when their president-king vilifies their neighbors and scapegoats the weak and strangers in the land of Washington, and of Lincoln, and of e pluribus unum.

They have sold their birthright for a mess of Trump pottage. They have no claim left either to those American ideas and ideals, or even to their savior’s name.

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

Dumbass in chief

by digby

This is so idiotic I don’t even know what to say:

President Donald Trump complained that his predecessor Barack Obama wasn’t criticized for the 2015 mass shooting at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina in an interview with Fox News on Monday.

After Laura Ingraham asked the president about last week’s attempted bombings of almost a dozen prominent Democrats who have been frequent targets of his incendiary rhetoric, Trump pivoted to criticizing the Washington Post before making the bizarre comments about Obama.

Referring to media reports that connected Trump’s rhetoric with the attempted bomber, whose van was covered with stickers supporting the president and taking aim at numerous Democrats and the media, Trump said, “They didn’t do that with President Obama with the church, the horrible situation with the church. They didn’t do that.”

Ingraham did not follow-up on Trump’s remarks to ask why Obama could have been blamed for a mass shooting that was carried out by a white supremacist.

Most of the time he’s just dumb as dirt.

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“I never believed what liberals said about us all along”

by digby

“It’s like we can’t be shocked by Donald Trump because we know who he is. We know what’s in his DNA. But the way people react, turn the lens to those crowds after this horrific shooting, this tragedy,” Charlie Sykes said. “They’re talking CNN sucks, chanting lock her up. The moral test to the Republican party that they have failed over and over again, the president has been a man who has stoked our divisions, has stoked the fear and the hostility, has created this toxic stew. and we’re being reminded the number of people out there who take him both literally and seriously.

“So at one level you have people who are willing to rationalize and defend his behavior, but also you have the folks out there, the haters who draw oxygen from what this president has done, from the whistles that he has sent. That’s what makes this such a dangerous time. the fact is the president of the United States is the arsonist in chief.”

“Rick Wilson, I’m naive,” Scarborough said.

“I never believed what liberals said about us all along. I never believed there was this undercurrent in the Republican party of racism, nativism, anti-semitism. We spent our entire lives telling people it wasn’t true. I’ll be damned, I’m 55 years old. Bingo, they had us exactly right. They had the party exactly right. What are we to do now?”

“Joe, this is emblematic of the entire problem of the Republican party being bought out by Trumpism. It revealed a segment of our demographic, a part of our party we wanted to pretend was in the closet, we kept them in the basement and hosed them off once a year on Election Day, and unfortunately we now have to face the fact that that element feels empowered and emboldened,” Rick Wilson said.

“They read tweets like today — I’m sure that tweet sounded better in the original German –and they’re not taking it as some sort of joking Trumpism. They take it as marching orders. And maybe it’s only a tiny fraction, but it only takes a tiny fraction to march into a synagogue and kill 11 people. It only takes a tiny fraction to send out 14 bombs It’s not a dog whistle, it’s an air raid siren.

“But Rick, the problem is, 90% of Republicans support him. You have people chanting in the crowd. I would have never, ever, ever over five decades predicted this would happen. After people were targets of bombs, that you actually still have the president of the United States still attacking those people and people in the crowd more disturbingly chanting attacks at CNN and Hillary Clinton ‘lock her up!’ Where were they raised? Not in my neighborhood.”

“They were raised in the post-2010 era. They repeated over and over again conspiracy theories and stoked the sense of inferiority,” Wilson said.

“The victim complex, ‘I’m a victim, Hollywood doesn’t like me, the media doesn’t like me,’ but hold on, I own the Supreme Court, I own the United States House of Representatives, I own the United States Senate, I open the United States presidency, I own the Justice Department, I own the DHS, I own everything but i’m still a little snowflake who gets their feelings hurt when Hollywood does a movie I don’t like. Please explain that to me. They own the world and they’re still victims?” Scarborough said.

“This is a sign of how fundamentally weak Donald Trump is. The guy is a quivering blob of man-baby goo,” Wilson said. “He’s a tantrum-throwing infant all the time, He knows his base loves that sense of alienation. They love being reminded that certain people can read and they don’t read so good. And they love that sense of somebody who’s going to be their champion and stoke their anger and tell them all their resentments are justified. That’s part of what you and I fought against and Charlie fought against and Peggy fought against for so long, is the acknowledgment that there are people who want to have their fears stoked.”

“Donald Trump is an arsonist, as Charlie said, and in a whole spectrum of areas that we have to acknowledge that his unique social media power makes that arsonist incredibly dangerous for this country and this republic.”

From Susie at Crooks and Liars.

I don’t recall Peggy and Charlie warning anyone. I do remember Peggy arguing in the days when New Orleans was underwater after Katrina that looters should be shot though.

We see you, Donnie

by digby

Those are results from the latest PRRI Poll. It would appear that a majority of Americans see him for what he is. Even 33% of Republican voters don’t want him to be the nominee in 2020.

Across a wide array of measures, a majority of Americans disapprove of the president and his conduct in office. Almost six in ten (58%) disapprove of Trump’s job performance as president. 

Nearly seven in ten say they would like his speech and behavior to be more consistent with his predecessors (69%) or that he has damaged the dignity of the presidency (69%). Nearly six in ten (59%) say he has not used his authority to pardon appropriately, and a majority (54%) believe that his decisions and behavior as president have encouraged white supremacist groups.

Among Republicans, and independents who lean toward the Republican Party, one-third (33%) say they would prefer someone else as the Republican nominee in 2020. Support for Trump is nearly unchanged from one year earlier.

With the 2018 midterms fast approaching, nearly six in ten (58%) Americans disapprove of Trump’s performance as president, including 42% who strongly disapprove. Just over four in ten (41%) Americans have a positive view of Trump’s job performance.

A majority of Americans say there is nothing that President Trump could do to change their opinion of him. More than four in ten (46%) say they disapprove of Trump’s job performance and that there is nothing he could do to win their approval, while 14% say they approve of Trump and that there is nothing he could do to lose their approval. By contrast, four in ten Americans either approve (27%) or disapprove (13%) of the president but say that there is something he could do to change their mind.

Among Democrats, almost eight in ten (78%) say they disapprove of the president and there is nothing he can do to win their approval, while 12% disapprove but say there is something he could do win their approval. By contrast, nearly four in ten (37%) Republicans say they approve of the president and that there is nothing he can do to lose their support. A slim majority (51%) of Republicans approve of Trump but say there is something he could do lose their approval. 

There are notable gender gaps among partisans. Democratic women are more likely than Democratic men to say they will never approve of Trump (82% vs. 72%). By contrast, Republican men are more likely than Republican women to say they will always approve of Trump (44% vs. 30%).

There are deep divides between members of different religious traditions. Black Protestants (66%) are more likely than religiously unaffiliated Americans (58%), Hispanic Catholics (56%), white Catholics (39%), and white mainline Protestants (38%) to say they will never approve of Trump. Only 16% of white evangelical Protestants say the president cannot win their approval. 

Meanwhile, about one-quarter of white evangelical Protestants (25%) and white mainline Protestants(22%) say there is nothing Trump could do to lose their support, compared to 19% of white Catholics and 12% of Hispanic Catholics. Just six percent of black Protestants and four percent of religiously unaffiliated Americans say there is nothing Trump could do to lose their approval.

Trump and the Republicans have been going on and on the last few days about their African American outreach really paying dividends.  They had a black youth confab in recent days and held an event in the White House with some big Trump fans and they’re pushing this Russian bot campaign called #walkaway which is about Democrats, particularly black Democrats, leaving the party to join the Trump cult.  Kanye’s even selling t-shirts that say “Blexit” on them.

These numbers suggest they found every single young African American Trump supporter in the country for their little gathering. It filled one hotel ballroom.

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He won’t distance himself from violent Redhats. He respects them.

by digby

People keep saying that Trump should simply say that he doesn’t want the support of racists and anti-Semites and that anyone who commits a violent act against his opponents is not a supporter of his.

The problem is that he doesn’t believe that. He likes these extremist criminals.

Remember this from the campaign?

Asked what motivated the alleged attack, Scott Leader — who was convicted of a hate crime and jailed for a year in the assault of a Moroccan man shortly after the Sept. 11 attacks — name-checked the Republican front-runner.

“Donald Trump was right, all these illegals need to be deported,” Scott Leader, 38, allegedly told the police. The Leaders pleaded not guilty to multiple assault charges with a dangerous weapon, indecent exposure and making threats.

Trump was asked about the alleged assault at a news conference on Wednesday.

“I haven’t heard about that,” Trump said. “It would be a shame, but I haven’t heard about that.”

He then added: “I will say that people who are following me are very passionate. They love this country and they want this country to be great again. They are passionate. I will say that, and everybody here has reported it.”

He gets them and they get him.

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Trump to order thousands of troops to the border

by digby

The Korean DMZ. Trump was reportedly very impressed by it. He wants one for ourselves.

This is insane:

The U.S. military plans to deploy 5,000 troops to the southwest U.S. border in anticipation of a caravan of would-be asylum seekers and migrants currently moving northward in Mexico, U.S. officials said Monday.

The new figure is a major increase from initial estimates of 800 troops and would represent a military force equal to about one-third the number of customs officials currently working at the border. The military sent about 2,000 National Guard troops to the area earlier this year.

“This is an invasion of our Country and our Military is waiting for you!” President Trump wrote on Twitter on Monday morning, without directly mentioning troop numbers.

Mr. Trump also repeated his previous assertion that gang members and criminals were hiding among the migrants. The White House has provided no evidence that such people are in the caravan. Many of the people in the caravan have said they are fleeing violence, poverty and political instability.

The U.S. and federal law-enforcement officials said troops are likely to be deployed to ports of entry, at least in initial phases of the U.S. military mission, which the Pentagon has named Operation Faithful Patriot.

U.S. troops later expect to support border officials by doing things like building tents, providing medical support and helping staff command and control centers.

Under the latest plans, about 1,800 troops will go to Texas, 1,700 to Arizona and 1,500 to California. The troops will be drawn from about 10 U.S. Army installations and consist largely of military police and engineers, one of the U.S. officials said. U.S. Marines also will be deployed, the U.S. official said.

These migrants are no threat to the country. None. They are Central Americans fleeing extreme poverty and violence, many of them young women and their children.

It’s military pageant to give Trump and his followers a thrill. It has no purpose other than to turn this country into a dystopian hate-filled hellhole.

I guess if Trump wills it, it shall happen.