Month: August 2019

Trump loses another Steve

by digby

And he’s distraught:

Over the past month, President Donald Trump has asked several administration officials the same question. “Where’s Steve?” the president has repeatedly inquired, according to two officials who’ve heard him do so in the White House.

The “Steve” in question isn’t Steve Mnuchin, Miller, Bannon, or Moore. It’s Steve Cortes, a member of the Trump 2020 advisory board and a paid on-air contributor at CNN, a perennial media foe of the president’s.

Late last week, The Hollywood Reporter published a story on how Cortes had been “benched” by network brass, and hadn’t appeared on CNN in the U.S. in more than a month. “They just won’t book him,” a former CNN contributor told THR. “They’ll just pay him. They won’t fire him, because that’s just blatant. But they won’t book him, and they’ll tell all the producers not to book him.”

Within the past few weeks, the leader of the free world came to notice Cortes’ absence from CNN, a network Trump has on-and-off insisted that he doesn’t watch or pay attention to anymore.
[…]
On top of grousing to his aides, Trump got on the phone with Cortes in the past month to ask him what was going on, and to complain about CNN’s “bias” and how unfairly the cable news network has treated its pro-Trump, conservative commentator, two sources familiar with the call tell The Daily Beast.

“It wasn’t enough to have a stacked, four-versus-one panel,” said former Rep. Jack Kingston (R-GA), a current Trump surrogate and former CNN contributor. “CNN has decided to eliminate as many Trump supporters as possible, including me, Jeff Lord, Jason Miller, Bryan Lanza, and Steve Moore. The Republicans who survive are the ones who take constant jabs at Trump. They’re Never Trumpers or RINOs.”
[…]
[T]he president has known and personally liked Cortes for years, and this isn’t the first time he’s taken an interest in the TV commentator’s career path. In late 2017, Trump and Cortes had a conversation at the White House in which the president remarked on how much he appreciated all of Cortes’ appearances on Fox News (the network on which Cortes was a regular at the time), a former White House official recalled.

Still, the president had something else on his mind: he asked Cortes to go back to CNN, where the Trump surrogate was most needed to do battle with the network’s armada of anti-Trump liberals and Never Trumpers, according to this ex-official. The president made it clear he wanted Cortes sticking it to the libs at CNN before and during his re-election campaign.

Cortes didn’t disappoint. By late Jan. 2018, he tweeted: “It’s official, I’m now a @CNN Political Commentator. Had a terrific run at @FoxNews, excited about the adventures ahead!”

It’s unclear if this latest adventure has effectively ended, or if he’s just in the penalty box. CNN, Cortes, and the White House did not provide comment for this story.

Earlier this year, Cortes was briefly considered, according to Politico, as a possible successor to White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders, a job that ultimately went to Stephanie Grisham.

Cortes caused a minor internal stir at the network over his attempt to recast history in Trump’s favor, admonishing the media and essentially absolving Trump of his comments following the murder of a protester by a neo-Nazi at a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville in 2017. Earlier this month, Trump shared a video Cortes recorded for the conservative website PragerU in which the CNN pundit made a heavily revisionist argument—one that has picked up steam in recent months and is nowadays regularly made by Trump campaign officials—claiming that Trump had not referred to neo-Nazis or white supremacists in Charlottesville as “very fine people” but was instead referring to a different group of protesters.

CNN’s media reporter Oliver Darcy criticized Cortes on Twitter, saying the commentator’s comments were “a weird thing for someone who is a paid CNN commentator to say, given the network’s accurate reporting on the matter.” Primetime anchor Anderson Cooper added that although he likes Cortes personally, his description of Trump’s comments about Charlottesville were “inaccurate” and “actually wrong.”

The pundit’s absence from CNN’s air comes as pro-Trump pundits have become far scarcer on the cable news network. Earlier this year, the network decided not to renew the contracts of two of Trump’s fiercest on-air defenders—Kingston and former South Carolina Lt. Gov. Andre Bauer—and as The Hollywood Reporter pointed out, another commentator sympathetic to Trump, Ben Ferguson, has not been on CNN since April.

They were all extremely annoying, lying, sycophants. Their defenses of Trump were insulting to the collective intelligence of the audience. Cortes was one of the worst.

This is a problem for any news organization that wants to present a “both sides” opinion panel. It requires them to allow shameless hacks to lie and make fools of themselves and the network loses credibility every time one of them appears. The only answer is to retire the format. There is no requirement that they do this.

If a cable network simply adheres to the idea that they are there to present the truth it’s really not difficult.

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And he had the nerve to call Clinton crooked

by digby

President Donald Trump has filed financial disclosure statements that appear to misstate the value and profitability of his Scotland golf courses by $165 million, possibly violating federal laws that are punishable by jail time.

Trump claimed in his 2018 U.S. filing that his Turnberry and Aberdeen resorts were each worth more than $50 million. For that same time period, he filed balance sheets with the United Kingdom government showing that their combined debt exceeded their assets by 47.9 million British pounds ― the equivalent of $64.8 million at the exchange rate on Dec. 31, 2017, the date of the last U.K. filing available.

His 2018 “public financial disclosure” filed with the U.S. Office of Government Ethics also claims those two resorts earned him “income” of $23.8 million. His filings with the U.K. Companies House office in Edinburgh for that period showed the resorts had actually lost 4.6 million pounds ― equal to $6.3 million.

His U.S. disclosure statement also fails to mention $199.5 million in loans Trump has made to those resorts: $54.9 million from him personally to Trump International, Scotland in Aberdeenshire; $144.6 million from his trust to Trump Turnberry in Ayrshire.

Knowingly providing false or incomplete information on that form is a violation of the Ethics in Government Act punishable by up to a year in jail. Signing the form attesting to the untrue information constitutes making a false statement, punishable by up to five years in prison.

“The numbers don’t appear to add up,” said Virginia Canter, an ethics law expert with Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. She added, though, that OGE regulations give filers a fair amount of latitude in determining asset value. “That said, it’s not at all clear after reviewing the U.K. balance sheet for Aberdeen how they came to $50 million. … I think it raises legitimate questions.”

Yeah, yeah. No big deal. Yet another possible criminal act by the president of the United States. Republicans are all fine with it. He could shoot someone on 5th avenue …

Early Tuesday evening, after this article was published and days after HuffPost first sought comment, the Trump Organization, his family business that operates the resorts, responded through Chief Legal Officer Alan Garten, who said the two sets of statements are filed under different accounting and legal standards. “As a result, while both filings provide financial information, the filings each have distinct reporting requirements and standards. Thus, the two filings cannot and should not be compared,” Garten wrote in an email.

He did not respond to follow-up questions about the widely divergent claims regarding assets and income and why Trump failed to disclose the two loans.

The story goes on to report some of the other financial crimes Trump is credibly accused of committing over the years. But this is happening right now, while he’s in the White House:

Trump’s golf courses in Scotland and Ireland offer unique insights into the state of Trump’s businesses because they are required to submit detailed financial documents annually, even though they are privately held. In the United States, where the vast majority of Trump’s businesses are located, there is no such disclosure requirement ― meaning there is no straightforward way of determining whether Trump has similarly misstated the asset value and profitability of his U.S. properties.

Americans would have a clearer understanding of the actual financial health of Trump’s businesses had he kept his initial promise to release his tax returns if he ran for president. But Trump reneged on that pledge almost immediately after entering the race. At first he claimed he would release the returns after “routine audits” had been completed, before eventually arguing that Americans had voted for him anyway and that they were not interested in seeing his taxes. In doing so, he became the first major-party nominee since Watergate to fail to disclose his returns.

Trump’s supposed great wealth was a major selling point for him during his campaign in the Republican primaries. Weeks after entering the race in June 2015, Trump declared in a press release that his net worth was “in excess of TEN BILLION DOLLARS.” In a recent speech, he claimed the presidency was forcing him to lose billions: “It’s probably costing me from three to five billion,” he told workers at a petrochemical plant in western Pennsylvania last week. “I don’t care. I want to do the right job.”

Both of those assertions are almost certainly false.

In the 2005 book TrumpNation, business journalist Timothy L. O’Brien wrote that Trump was most likely worth no more than $250 million, not the many billions of dollars he was claiming at the time. Trump sued him for defamation, but lost ― and in the process lied dozens of times about his business dealings in a deposition taken by O’Brien’s lawyers.

In 2015, National Journal found that Trump had made so many poor business decisions over the years that had he simply taken the fortune his father placed him in charge of in 1974 and put it into a broad index fund, he would have been far wealthier than he wound up.

Despite those and a great deal of other published reports that detailed his multiple casino bankruptcies and poor track record in business, Republican voters chose to support him anyway.

Rick Tyler, who worked for Texas Sen. Ted Cruz’s campaign in the 2016 GOP presidential primaries, said Republican voters were not paying attention to news coverage that picked apart Trump’s creation myth. “His ostentatious opulence and his willingness to flaunt it led many Republicans to believe that he possessed the business acumen needed to straighten out Washington,” Tyler said. “Republicans should now acknowledge that assumption was false.”

He’s a shameless criminal. And yet at least 50 million Americans, probably more, are going to vote for him again in 2020. They just like the fact that he owns the libs. That’s it.

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Planning for victory
by Tom Sullivan

The psychic cost our acting president takes on the country (and the world) is its own kind of national deficit and a drag on campaign planning. We will never get back the time and money spent litigating clearly illegal administration actions, the time spent debunking the lies and insults, the attention wasted trying to unravel and process unhinged comments and daily, petty cruelties. There are human costs mounting even now to mitigate, but there also opportunity costs to giving attention to tweets that should be spent on laying the groundwork for victory in the coming battles.

Matt Ford tracks the psychological toll the stress of “Trump’s gnawing hunger to be at the center of the daily news cycle” takes for the New Republic. We writes:

Wasting time is a defining feature of Trump’s presidency. He is fairly adept at frittering away his own days, spending an indeterminate number of hours languishing in front of the television, simply to watch cable news coverage of himself so he can then offer comments about it on Twitter. But when it comes to wasting the time of everyone around him, the president is without peer. Trump’s haphazard style of governance forces journalists, lawyers, and government officials to expend innumerable hours on doomed initiatives and errant tweets. His corrosive effect on American politics forces Americans to devote far more hours of their life to thinking about him than they should. All of this amounts to a tax of sorts on the national psyche—one that can never be repaid.

It is time progressives cannot afford to waste.

We tore out the nasty carpeting in the Democratic committee headquarters here last weekend after our monthly planning meeting. Funds are secured to replace it now so the space will be ready for the flood of volunteers in 2020. The air conditioning units that died in 2016 are gone, replaced this summer with efficient new ones. Such investment is unthinkable most places. Where would little county committees get the money?

I tell this story in my trainings about how good planning builds on itself:

You all know these guys. They show up every presidential election. You’ve never seen them, don’t know their names. All they want is a yard sign. But if at your storefront they see volunteers arriving for a phone bank, signs bundled and staged to go out, people with clipboards headed out to canvass? I’ve seen this multiple times: People who are never going to knock a door or pick up a phone get their signs and – unprompted – pull out a checkbook and ask, “Who do I make the check out to?” And leave $100.

Because they can see with their own eyes your team has got it going on. And they don’t even know what It is. But it smells like victory and they want a piece of it.

Bridget McCurry has no money. She also has a regional call center she carries in her trunk and can set up overnight. She built it from parts. Much of it donations or from the Goodwill store. Thirty laptops running Chrome, with cheap headsets, mice, and a customized VoteBuilder interface developed by a high school intern who went on to Stanford University.

Bridget McCurry is, shall we say, unorthodox. She’s beyond thirty-something. She calls volunteers her Kings and Queens, makes them glitter name badges. She claims 80-year-olds teach 70-year-olds in five minutes how to run Crowdcall, the customized VoteBuilder tool. She makes phone-banking easy. She makes it fun. And she is relentless. Volunteers don’t come back to make calls for candidates. They come back to make calls for Bridget.

And she didn’t write a grant request or start a nonprofit or launch a Kickstarter. She. Just. Started. She built this with virtually no income, but with drive, passion and creativity. If you are waiting for money before planning your Get Out The Vote program, you might be doing it backwards.

Democrats as a party let local infrastructure languish because their approach to campaigns is too top-down and too campaign-focused. Even Obama’s vaunted turnout machine was the most top-down “grassroots” effort ever seen. County committees in many places are so under-resourced and demoralized they have forgotten how to win if they ever knew. Across the country, local committees cannot even maintain Facebook pages, let alone websites. State parties make it hard for voters to find their local organizations.

Not long ago, New York state Democrats listed chair names, street addresses, and maybe a phone number for many county organizations. (They have since improved.) An organizer said at the time, “I don’t think Andrew wants us talking to each other.”

It’s even harder for a voter to make contact in Louisiana.

Grinding teeth to nubs over tweets won’t fix that. Donald Trump won’t likely defeat himself. Progressives spread countless pixels complaining about the lack of proper infrastructure for fighting the right’s messaging. What we miss is how much winning comes down to mechanics and logistics and to just getting started. As for money, if you build it, the money will come.

He ‘s afraid of Obama’s yuge crowd size

by digby

Ah. This explains it:

President Trump has now canceled his planned trip to Denmark, claiming he’s doing so because Denmark’s prime minister has shot down his “proposal” to buy Greenland. But is that the real reason he has nixed the trip?

Some observers have offered another possible explanation: Trump’s predecessor, Barack Obama, plans to visit Denmark at the end of September, and Trump feared the contrasting optics.

“Trump was scared of the likely contrast,” opined David Frum. “Trump knows Obama is bigger than he is, around the world as well as in the United States. That knowledge tortures Trump.”

Several things are immediately striking about this episode. First, it’s a measure of how low we’ve all sunk that, in trying to explain why the president of the United States is making a consequential decision involving an official state visit, we’re forced to choose between two competing rationales that have nothing whatsoever to do with international diplomatic considerations or our national interest.

Notably, the official reason for the cancellation is nearly as saturated in narcissism and megalomania as the “less” flattering Obama-oriented explanation is: Trump is either angry that Denmark Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen is not taking his suggestion seriously, or he’s embarrassed by it — or both.

Trump might argue that he views acquiring Greenland as being in our national interest, of course. Indeed, The Post reports that officials had discussed offering Denmark an arrangement in which the United States takes over its annual subsidies to Greenland, apparently because of wariness of Chinese and Russian expansion in the Arctic.

Of course Trump was afraid that Denmark would show more love for Obama than for him. He’s not wrong to assume that. And the biggest clue is that Trump insulted Obama at least 733 times in his chopper talker this afternoon.

Just a couple of examples:

Trump closes by falsely blaming Obama for his family separation policy.

"I am the one that kept the families together. You remember that, right? Just remember I said it. And now it gets even better — President Obama and others brought the families apart." pic.twitter.com/0wmk3E8tAr— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) August 21, 2019

REPORTER: You said Russia was kicked out of the G8 b/c they outsmarted Obama. In fact, it was b/c they annexed Crimea. You know tha–

TRUMP: That was outsmarting Obama … they took over Crimea during his term, not mine … Putin made a living on outsmarting President Obama. pic.twitter.com/PjQax6K8Yl— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) August 21, 2019

Toxic nostalgia

by digby

This from Michelle Goldberg
is the most important thing you will read all week:

In 2014, Peter Pomerantsev, a British journalist born in the Soviet Union, published “Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible,” which drew on his years working in Russian television to describe a society in giddy, hysterical flight from enlightenment empiricism. He wrote of how state-controlled Russian broadcasting “became ever more twisted, the need to incite panic and fear ever more urgent; rationality was tuned out, and Kremlin-friendly cults and hatemongers were put on prime time.”

Since 2016, the book has enjoyed a new life among people struggling to make sense of the dual shocks of Brexit and Donald Trump’s victory. Both catastrophes demonstrated the triumph of xenophobic post-truth politics, and both were assisted by Russian information warfare. Pomerantsev’s book about Russia suddenly seemed prophetic about the rest of the world.

Now, he’s written a penetrating follow-up, “This Is Not Propaganda: Adventures in the War Against Reality,” that is partly an effort to make sense of how the disorienting phenomena he observed in Russia went global. The child of exiled Soviet dissidents, Pomerantsev juxtaposes his family’s story — unfolding at a time when ideas, art and information seemed to challenge tyranny — with a present in which truth scarcely appears to matter.

“During glasnost, it seemed that the truth would set everybody free,” he writes. “Facts seemed possessed of power; dictators seemed so afraid of facts that they suppressed them. But something has gone drastically wrong: We have access to more information and evidence than ever, but facts seem to have lost their power.”

Why? Social media, which enables the rapid spread of misinformation, is clearly one reason. But Pomerantsev’s most intriguing insight is about how a post-fact society emerges from despair and cynicism about the future.

Throughout the Cold War, he writes, “both sides were engaged in what had begun as a debate about which system — democratic capitalism or communism — would deliver a rosier future for all mankind. The only way to prove you were achieving this future was to provide evidence.” Obviously, this didn’t mean regimes told the truth, only that they were invested in being seen as truthful. That’s why facts that revealed their deceptions could endanger them.

But today, few leaders claim to have an ideological map to a better world. The march of history has been replaced by the will to power. Pomerantsev contrasts Soviet propaganda, which tried, however crudely, to be convincing to outsiders, with modern Russia disinformation, which just aims to confuse. You could make a similar comparison between Ronald Reagan’s rhetoric and Trump’s. One way of communicating points forward, the other, back. Pomerantsev quotes the Russian-American Harvard professor Svetlana Boym, who wrote, “The 20th century began with Utopia and ended with nostalgia.”

Reading that, I thought of a feeling I’ve had since 2016 that the orderly progression of time has given way to something chaotic and hallucinatory. I don’t think I’m alone in this; it’s common to hear liberals talk about the “dark timeline” we’re all trapped in.

So much of the culture feels stuck. Social media creates a sense of eternal present; things that happened two weeks ago feel like half-forgotten history. Internet technology, once imbued with futuristic idealism, has become a source of destruction and dread. Fashion has turned back to the 1990s, which was itself a time of nostalgia for the 1970s. Cinemas are full of remakes. At least when the Sex Pistols screamed “No future,” they were sublimating nihilism into art. But now?

“It’s like we went too far. We imagined too much,” says a character in the recent TV series “Years and Years,” a dystopian drama co-produced by HBO and the BBC that takes place just a few years in the future. “We sent all those probes into space, and we went to the very edge of the solar system, built the hadron collider and the internet, and we painted all those paintings and we wrote all those great songs, and then, pop. Whatever we had, we punctured it. And now it’s all collapsing.”
[…]
To move beyond this horrible moment, we’ll need to reform the algorithms that turn YouTube into a machine for radicalization and make Facebook an accessory to ethnic cleansing. But the bigger challenge may be to create belief in a future that doesn’t seem nightmarish, to restore faith in a rational path forward, to give people a sense of control over their destiny. “The need for facts is predicated on the notion of an evidence-based future,” writes Pomerantsev.

A society invested in real, tangible common projects needs objective truths. One organized around a desperate longing for a mythologized past does not. Pomerantsev’s book suggests that the authoritarian darkness that’s descended on so much of the globe is a hangover from the so-called end of history after the Cold War. If that’s true, perhaps one way to dispel it is to get history moving again.

There is no going back. And frankly we shouldn’t want to. Despite the belief among too many of both the young and old, things weren’t better “then.” It’s been bad for a long time, with waves of hope coming in fits and starts. It’s important to make Trump the apotheosis of this long term dark trend.

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I think he means it

by digby

He says this over and over again. At some point I think people have to consider that he’s actually thinking about it.

Talking about serving more than two terms suddenly isn't a joking matter for Trump anymore.

"In six years — or maybe 10 or maybe 14, right? — in six years, when I'm not here, the New York Times goes out of business very quickly," he says, deadpan. pic.twitter.com/VN6zZUr5S0— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) August 21, 2019

I think people believe he’s trolling and of course that’s part of it. But he is a salesman who believes that loud and annoying repetition is the best way to advertise. (Think used car ads on late-night TV.) So I don’t think it’s smart to dismiss this out of hand. If the election is even slightly close anywhere I have no doubt they will contest the results. And if it turns into a political shitshow as it was in 2000, I could easily see him refusing to leave and we simply have no real mechanism for removing him without his cooperation.

This could happen in 2020. But if he legitimately* gets four more years there is no telling what they will have done to make this “legal” by 2024.

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Flipping the Senate is not out of the question

by digby

It’s CW that the Dems have no chance to take the majority in the Senate but it’s not actually true. Yes, it would be difficult because the country is polarized and most states are red or blue with little chance of changing them in the near term. We saw how that played out in a blue wave in 2018. However, some states are in flux and the number of Republican seats up for reelection is much higher than for Democrats so there is a chance.

This piece in Rolling Stone analyzes the lay of the land:

Mark Kelly, the fighter pilot-turned-astronaut and husband of retired congresswoman Gabby Giffords, announced in February that he is running to unseat Sen. Martha McSally (R-Ariz.) in 2020. His campaign has been doing quite well. In July, it announced that Kelly had raised $4.2 million in the second quarter, more than all but six presidential candidates. Kelly’s campaign manager called the haul a “sonic boom.” Get it?

On Tuesday, an Arizona poll showed Kelly leading McSally — who lost her 2018 race against Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.) but was appointed by the state’s Republican governor to fill the seat left vacant by John McCain’s death — by a margin of 46 to 41 percent. If Kelly goes on to defeat McSally next November, Democrats will have flipped Arizona’s two Senate seats in two scant years following over two decades of Republican control.

Republicans currently hold a 53-47 advantage in the Senate. Thirty-four seats are up in 2020. Twenty-two of them are currently held by Republicans. On the surface, this seems like good news. Twenty-two chances to make up a three-seat disadvantage? And Democrats only have to defend 12 seats? Let’s do this!

The problem is that the vast majority of the 22 seats Republicans will have to defend are in solid red states. Only three are deemed to be truly up for grabs: McSally’s seat in Arizona, Cory Gardner’s seat in Colorado, and Susan Collins’ seat in Maine.

Gardner has been in the Senate since 2015, and, staring down reelection in a state Hillary Clinton won in 2016 by almost five points, has been careful to keep his distance from Trump (although he has endorsed his reelection in 2020). Considering his favorability in the state has been slipping and the popularity of possible challenger John Hickenlooper, who recently jettisoned himself from the presidential race, Gardner could be in trouble.

Same goes for Collins, who will face a respectable Democratic challenger in a state that voted for Clinton in 2016. When Maine House Speaker Sara Gideon, the frontrunner to land the Democratic nomination, announced in June that she is running to unseat Collins, she raised over $1 million in 10 days. She’s also outpacing Collins in in-state donations by a wide margin.

Though Democrats certainly have a shot to flip Arizona, Colorado, and Maine, all three races are expected to be close. But say Democrats do win all three seats. That would level the Senate at 50-50, right? Which means they’d only need to get lucky and flip one more seat to gain a majority? Maybe John Cornyn’s in Texas if Beto O’Rourke drops out of the presidential race to run? Maybe Steve Daines’ in Montana if Steve Bullock drops out and does the same? Maybe a truly galvanizing Democratic challengers could emerge purple-ish states — or at least states that have demonstrated some purple-ish or tendencies — like North Carolina, Iowa, Kansas, or Georgia?

It’s possible, but it’s also assuming Democrats can defend all 12 of their own seats that will be up in 2020, which is going to be difficult. The biggest test will come in deep-red Alabama, where Doug Jones won a seat in a 2017 special election largely because his opponent, Roy Moore, was a credibly accused pedophile. Undeterred, Moore is running again, but he’ll have to win a primary in which his opponents likely will not have been accused of sexually assaulting a 14-year-old. It’s going to be tough for Jones to hold the seat, regardless, and if he doesn’t Democrats will need to flip Arizona, Colorado, Maine, and at least two other states that don’t seem too inclined to go blue just yet. (This is also assuming Democrats will hold onto the other 11 seats they must defend, which is far from a given, especially in Michigan and New Hampshire.)

Though the odds are long, there’s still well over 14 months between now and the November 2020, which is practical an eternity in Trump years. There’s no telling what the president could do between now and then that could sink his own chances, and with them the chances of the Republican senators who have been holding his water. Stranger things have happened.

Indeed they have. In big landslide years, many strange things happen. And sometimes you just have a flukey election (as we know.) So it’s not impossible. And it’s really, really worth working for — any progressive advances (or even a halt to the GOP destruction) will hit a brick wall named Mitch McConnell in 2021 otherwise.

Never say never. I wouldn’t have thought the NRA could ever be in the position they are in either. (Yes, I know they still wield great influence, but the truth is that it’s the gunowners not the organization holding all the cards now.) The right wing institutions are imploding and that includes the Republican Party.

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Truckers in despair that the stable genius for whom they vote is destroying their lives

by digby

I’m sure these guys listen to Rush all day long. This is where that ends up:

Morris Coffman has been a truck driver for 35 years. And he’s been a conservative for even longer than that — his whole life.

“That said,” Coffman told Business Insider, “[Trump] is absolutely a moron. His idiotic ideas will tank the economy even further.”

Truckers, like Coffman, lean conservative. A Verdant Labs analysis of Federal Elections Commission data found that nearly three-quarters of truck drivers are Republican — one of the most conservative jobs in America, along with surgeons and farmers.

And truck drivers supported Trump in droves, according to an Overdrive magazine survey from 2016. About 75% said they planned to vote for Trump, up from 66% who supported Sen. Mitt Romney, the Republican presidential nominee in 2012.

But a sharp downturn in the trucking industry and a slew of tax changes have hampered their ability to make a living. And many connect those two trends to Trump’s economic policies.

“He has not affected our business in a positive way,” said one truck driver who asked to be quoted anonymously for fear their small business might suffer. “He’s killing our business. If consumers aren’t buying, then there is no demand. This really isn’t about my political leanings — it’s pure business.”

Trump’s tax reworking in 2017 led to many truck drivers having to pay hundreds in taxes this year, thanks to a change in per-diem laws. Dennis Bridges, an accountant who specializes in doing taxes for truckers, told Mother Jones in April that 75% of his clients saw an unusually large tax payment, and about 20% had to fork over more than $5,000.

That might’ve been bearable in 2018, when trucking capacity was tight, the industry was raking in cash, and truckers saw their pay jump. But now the trucking “bloodbath,” as Coffman and other truckers describe current transportation conditions, has meant low rates and low pay for truckers. Trucking has been in a recession since late 2018.

Read more: 2,500 truck drivers have lost their jobs in 2019 as the transportation ‘bloodbath’ rolls on. Here’s the full list of bankrupt trucking companies.

Transport research groups reported that the volume of trucks purchased in July fell to its lowest level in nearly 10 years. The number of loads needing to be moved in the spot market tumbled by 37% this July compared to one year ago, and rates have fallen by as much as 18%.

“I have witnessed many ups and downs in the industry but nothing like this,” Coffman told Business Insider. “Many, many owner-operators and drivers have either lost equipment or lost a job in the last year.”

[…]

Whatever the cause of the downturn, truckers are a key demographic for any politician to target. The segment of truckers called owner-operators, for instance — who are independent, rather than company drivers — are fiercely engaged with politics on the national level.

Nearly 90% are registered voters, according to the Owner-Operator Independent Drivers Association, compared to about 78% of the general population. More than half have contacted an elected official.

Trump has previously catered to truckers, pledging to slash taxes to help their businesses. “America first means putting American truckers first,” he said at a 2017 trucker event.

But truckers, including conservative ones, don’t believe Trump has lived up to his promise.

“You can not bully your way to a good economy,” Coffman said.

These guys thought that an overfed, silly man on a reality TV show was a business genius. That’s what comes of years and years of Limbaugh brain rot. They are learning the hard way. I won’t be surprised if they vote for Trump anyway. That kind of hardcore indoctrination isn’t easily undone, even with an economic catastrophe. But it only takes a few to make a difference….

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Stephen Miller is on a roll

by digby

It just gets worse and worse.

First this:

The U.S. won’t be vaccinating migrant families in holding centers ahead of this year’s flu season, despite calls from doctors to boost efforts to fight the infection that’s killed at least three children at detention facilities in the past year.

“In general, due to the short-term nature of CBP holding and the complexities of operating vaccination programs, neither CBP nor its medical contractors administer vaccinations to those in our custody,” a Customs and Border Protection spokeswoman said in an emailed statement.

At least three children who were held in detention centers after crossing into the U.S. from Mexico have died in recent months, in part, from the flu, according to a letter to Reps. Rosa DeLauro, D-Conn., and Lucille Roybal-Allard, D-Calif., from several doctors urging Congress to investigate health conditions at the centers.

The United States had previously gone almost a decade without any children dying while under U.S. immigration custody.

I’m pretty sure Miller and Trump consider those deaths a feature not a bug.

And now this:

The Trump administration unveiled a regulation on Wednesday that would allow it to detain indefinitely migrant families who cross the border illegally, replacing a decades-old court agreement that imposed a limit on how long the government could hold migrant children in custody and specified the level of care they must receive.

The White House has for more than a year pressed the Department of Homeland Security to replace the agreement, known as the Flores settlement, a shift that the administration says is crucial to halt immigration across the southwestern border.

The new regulation, which requires approval from a federal judge before it could go into effect and was expected to be immediately challenged in court, would establish standards for conditions in detention centers and specifically abolish a 20-day limit on detaining families in immigration jails, a cap that has prompted President Trump to repeatedly complain about the “catch and release” of families from Central America and elsewhere into the United States.

“This rule allows the federal government to enforce immigration laws as passed by Congress,” Kevin K. McAleenan, the acting secretary of homeland security, said in a statement. He called it a “critical rule” that would allow the government to detain families and maintain the “integrity of the immigration system.”

The administration proposed the rule last fall, allowing the public to comment on the potential regulation. It is scheduled to be published this week in the Federal Register and would take effect 60 days later, though administration officials concede that the expected court challenge will probably delay it.

[The Flores agreement protected migrant children for decades.]

Under the new rule, the administration would be free to send families who are caught crossing the border illegally to a family residential center to be held for as long as it takes for their immigration cases to be decided. Officials said families cases could be resolved within three months, though many could drag on much longer.

Trump administration officials — who briefed reporters on Tuesday night on the condition of anonymity to discuss the plans — said that many of the families would be detained until they were either released after being awarded asylum or they were deported to their home countries. Some families might be awarded parole to leave the facilities while the courts decide their fate.

The 20-day limit has been in place since 2015, a legal outgrowth of a 1997 court-ordered consent decree after a federal class-action lawsuit alleged physical and emotional harm done to immigrant children held for extended periods of time in the detention facilities.

Previous administrations tried to change the rules for detaining children in efforts to reduce surges of migrants crossing the border. Mr. Trump’s homeland security officials have repeatedly said that limiting the detentions of entire migrant families has driven the surge of Central American families who crossed the border this year.

The officials said on Tuesday that enacting the new regulation would send a powerful message that bringing children to the United States was not “a passport” to being released from detention.

They predicted that the rule would cause a significant decrease in the number of families trying to cross into the United States illegally, reducing the need for more family residential centers.

Withdrawing from the consent decree has also been a personal objective for Stephen Miller, the architect of Mr. Trump’s immigration policy. Delays in finishing the new regulation had prompted Mr. Miller to lash out at senior homeland security officials, who were ousted from the department.

The New York Times reported in April that Mr. Miller berated the former acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Ronald D. Vitiello, for not finishing the new rule. Mr. Vitiello later had his nomination withdrawn by Mr. Trump, who said he was not tough enough for the job.

And to think that conservative evangelical Christians love these guys.

.

I miss shark week

by digby

NEW: President Trump: “I think any Jewish people that vote for a Democrat – I think it shows either a total lack of knowledge, or great disloyalty.” pic.twitter.com/E3jSpbxMH7

— NBC News (@NBCNews) August 20, 2019

….The Prime Minister was able to save a great deal of expense and effort for both the United States and Denmark by being so direct. I thank her for that and look forward to rescheduling sometime in the future!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 20, 2019

Our Ambassador to Denmark is a grad of Life Chiropractic College & an actress “best known for her work in Deathstalker & the Warriors from Hell” as Wiki painfully notes.

So Trump trying to buy Greenland may not make him the most ridiculous American Denmark has encountered. https://t.co/K7qj1fUNr0

— stuart stevens (@stuartpstevens) August 21, 2019

He seems nice

Update:

Remember when Republicans pretended to be mad about "dual loyalty" tropes? https://t.co/pjnqJGF9eZ— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) August 21, 2019