BREAKING: Remember America? We do.#ImpeachmentDay pic.twitter.com/tzGPwX7zBG
— Eleven Films (@ElevenFilms) February 5, 2020
"what digby sez..."
Month: February 2020
Some wise words from a Never-Trumper. Rick Wilson in the Daily Beast wrote about the SOTU. Here’s the conclusion:
Trump knew this speech had a utility for his campaign, and that it is framed against the impeachment acquittal vote on Wednesday. He knows that soon—very soon—he’ll enjoy the fruits of Mitch McConnell’s labor. He knows that after he is acquitted in the Senate there is no power in American government that will constrain him again. He knows he is about to hold executive power at a level no president before him could have imagined. That knowledge was enough to have him read off the teleprompter for one night.
It wasn’t the speech that Trump wanted to give, which we’ll hear soon enough.
“The state of the union is pure, weapons-grade, uncut fucking chaos, and I am both unhinged and unbound from any consequence, ever. All the pretty words my speechwriters worked so hard on are a thin veneer over the seething mass of coming horrors. I have gambled our economy, compromised our security, and shredded our dignity, and I’ll do it again. My message to the American people: bend the knee. To my enemies: vengeance is coming.”
That “bend the knee, vengeance is coming” ethos is infecting our entire political culture. It is authoritarianism in plain sight. Liberals and progressives who still care about freedom, equality and civil liberties had better gird themselves for this fight.
Mitt Romney makes the impeachment of Trump bipartisan. Good for him:
Romney is a Republican. He’s not my kind of guy. But for the nominee of the party just 7 years ago to vote to remove the current GOP president from office is highly symbolic.
This shows just how far the Republican party has sunk into Trump’s cult of personality. Just ask Romney:
Former RNC chairman Michael Steele made a comment on MSNBC last night which I think is worth pondering. He said “Democrats are going to have to bring their “A” game, meaning their asymmetric game.” I’m not sure how to do that. Trump is a master at transgressive politics and I don’t know if the Democrats have that kind of skill.
But let’s just say that pretending he’s normal isn’t going to cut it. That’s why I liked this very much:
She’s not concerned that the other side is going to stage one of their patented phony hissy fits because she realizes that anyone who supports Trump, a man who said that Nazis are very fine people and bragged about grabbing women by the pussy while calling for the fainting couch over her alleged misbehavior, is a sanctimonious cynic and totally shameless. You cannot worry about those people in the face of impending fascism.
Weirdly enough, Tuesday night wasn’t the first time a president delivered a State of the Union address in the middle of his impeachment trial. Back in 1999, Bill Clinton delivered one in the same circumstances. It’s hard to believe the timing would work out almost exactly the same way but it did.
Clinton was skilled at giving State of the Union speeches under stressful situations. In 1994 he gave the speech without a Teleprompter for several minutes and nobody knew the difference. In 1997, it was broadcast on a split screen with the verdict in the O.J. Simpson civil case. In 1998, his speech came just two weeks after the revelations about his affair with Monica Lewinsky and was good enough that many people believe it may have saved his presidency. Still, the speech during his impeachment must have been very tough. Historian Douglas Brinkley said at the time:
This is a stage performance of Clinton at his best. We watch in wonderment this flawed, failed President who has so much talent, so much intelligence, but whose Achilles’ heel has been so destructive for him.
Clinton’s performances always seemed to be him walking the high wire while we all held our breath waiting for him to fall, relieved when he somehow made it to safety. He was an adept survivor but he was grievously scarred by his self-inflicted wounds. Trump too is a survivor — but he is more of a carnival act, putting on one spectacle after another, distracting and misdirecting, leaving everyone dizzy and overwhelmed
Coming as it did while the whole country awaits the preordained verdict to come in the Senate, and in the midst of a wild electoral debacle for the Democrats in Iowa, Trump’s speech was even more surreal because, unlike Clinton, he is running for re-election. And although I would never have believed it was possible at the time, the level of polarization today is much worse than it was during the Clinton era. Despite the blatantly partisan, political nature of that impeachment, based as it was on charges of lying about an inappropriate personal matter, the two party leaders in the Senate had worked together to lay out a process. While the outcome was also predetermined then, there were some party crossovers in the final vote.
The anger and aggression is much more intense this time, even though there’s almost no chance that any Republicans will vote to convict Trump. And while Clinton was remorseful for his behavior, publicly apologizing to the nation for putting it through the whole ordeal, Trump is clearly furious and reportedly plotting his revenge,
Democrats are in no mood to compromise either. It is a pitched battle at this point, and that was obvious when all the members of Congress were forced to be in the same room together, with the president they either love or hate standing before them to give his big speech.
Trump was clearly on edge. When Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi held out her hand to shake his before he took the podium, he refused to take it, signaling that there would be no more nods to decorum than absolutely necessary. In what was a first as far as anyone can remember, the Republicans chanted “Four more years” from the floor as he began to speak. Their enthusiasm only got more hysterical as the evening wore on.
Trump delivered the speech in his usual wooden style when he’s reading someone else’s words on the Teleprompter. He bragged for at least a half an hour about his alleged accomplishments, ungraciously stating as usual that he had succeeded where all his predecessors had failed. And there were some reality-show moments. He announced that he was giving a little girl in the audience a voucher for the school of her choice and acknowledged a 100-year-old Tuskegee airman along with his 13-year-old great-grandson, who aspires to join the Space Force. He really went for the bathos and pathos by surprising a military wife with her husband who had been deployed overseas. Everyone, Republicans and Democrats alike, applauded as expected for these calculated moments of Oprah-like sentimentality.
Many of the “real folks” he acknowledged in the audience were people of color and part of his speech seemed geared to giving the false impression that he is particularly devoted to raising up minorities with appeals to school choice and criminal justice reform. This was likely one of his consultants’ ideas, perhaps with the aim of peeling off a few African American men from the Democrats, but mostly in an attempt to lure back some of the formerly devoted white women in the suburbs who find him to be reprehensible.
That might have been successful except for the fact that while he eschewed the usual puerile insults and crude mockery, he then went on to deliver his customary hard-right, red-meat rally speech, in slightly more flowery language.
He hit all the high points, from religious freedom (except for Muslims, of course) his silly border wall, abortion, judges, school choice and one that I think we’re going to hear a lot more about: socialism.
Freedom unites the soul? What?
But the real gift to the MAGA base was a brilliant reality-TV moment, one designed to fill their hearts with joy and make every liberal in America’s head explode. There is no one Trump could have brought into the Capitol who could possibly have been more offensive to Democrats everywhere than Rush Limbaugh. He is among the top five people in the country responsible for the utter degradation of American politics over the past 30 years. Trump would not be president were it not for the odious path Limbaugh laid out. So naturally, when he found out that Limbaugh had been diagnosed with cancer, he invited him to a joint session of Congress as his special guest.
Trump extolled Limbaugh’s virtues as Republicans ecstatically cheered, then announced that he was presenting him with the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and instructed First Lady Melania to put it around his neck right then and there. The moment was oddly redolent of Trump’s old beauty-pageant days with Limbaugh playing the role of the surprised winner:
He wasn’t actually surprised. It had been announced earlier. But that’s reality TV for you.
It appears that Nancy Pelosi knows how to do reality show politics as well.
She was asked on her way out why she did it and she replied, “Because it was a manifesto of mistruths.”
Trump must be steaming. She stole the show.
Yes, it’s mostly true, except for the parts that are total lies and misrepresentation.
Donald Trump means to win by repetition if not by attrition. Trump once told Billy Bush his theory of the Big Lie after saying on camera that “The Apprentice” had No. 1 ratings on TV. It wasn’t true. Challenged once the cameras were off, Trump said, “[Y]ou just tell them and they believe it. That’s it: you just tell them and they believe.” Whatever the truth is, lie bigger.
Trump turned last night’s State of the Union Address into another reality show. Trump awarded ailing Rush Limbaugh the Presidential Medal of Freedom live on national TV. Seated in the gallery was an army wife, a mother of two, whose husband had been deployed to Afghanistan for seven months. Trump introduced her, then produced her husband like a mystery guest for an on-camera reunion.
If he had asked the audience to look under their seats for envelopes, his night would have been complete except for the string of lies in a speech he used to launch a new season of settling scores.
The Washington Post does yeoman’s work fact-checking the lies in last night’s speech. Like Lewis Carroll’s oysters, they came thick and fast.
“Many of these claims have been fact-checked repeatedly, yet the president persists in using them,” the Post explains. He repeats them to wear down the “fake news” and to exhaust the rest of us until we accept reality as he says it is.
There were so many lies that the Post lacked space for addressing Trump’s claims about “a socialist takeover of our healthcare system” that would “bankrupt our Nation by providing free taxpayer-funded healthcare to millions of illegal aliens .”
Kaiser Health News addresses the claim:
“Medicare for All would dramatically shift how we pay for health care, but not necessarily how much we spend in total,” said Larry Levitt, a vice president at the Kaiser Family Foundation. “It’s hard to make the case that it would bankrupt the country.” (Kaiser Health News is an editorially independent program of the foundation.)
Furthermore, to suggest that providing undocumented immigrants with insurance would bankrupt the country is misleading. Those immigrants make up a small number of the population — about 11 million, compared to the total national population of approximately 327 million.
“A very, very small percentage of the total cost is associated with that 11 million people,” said Linda Blumberg, an analyst at the Urban Institute, a Washington think tank. “We’re talking about a strawman.”
But breaking reality is easy if you reject objective truth. It’s even easier if you introduce technology. Iowa Democrats did that Monday night with a phone app intended for reporting caucus results. The app failed for many and phone lines meant as backup became jammed. Wednesday morning, we’re still trying to learn who won and how many delegates each candidate carries going into New Hampshire.
NPR reports:
When things began to go awry, the party was vague for hours about what was causing the delay, leaving the public and campaigns confused, frustrated and even suspicious. The party had promised the new app would also mean quicker results, but instead the hours dragged on with nothing to report.
“The media is ready to go and everyone’s ready to declare a winner and the candidates have their speeches and there’s this sense of anticipation,” says Rick Hasen, an election law expert who’s just written a book — Election Meltdown: Dirty Tricks, Distrust, and the Threat to American Democracy — about all the things that could go wrong in 2020.
“If the Iowa Democratic Party had said, ‘well, it’s going to be a day or two before we have results,’ people’s expectations would have been managed,” Hasen said.
Speed kills, roadside warnings once said. In the Republican-controlled Senate’s desire for a speedy end to Trump’s impeachment, the body is expected to acquit Trump today on charges of abuse of power and obstruction of Congress. No witnesses testified for or against the president in his “trial.”
Speed may have killed the Iowa caucuses on Monday. We’re just awaiting the autopsy. One wonders if the same is true of the republic.
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He’s making his list and checking it twice:
With Senate Republicans on track to acquit Donald Trump on Wednesday, Washington is bracing for what an unshackled Trump does next. Republicans briefed on Trump’s thinking believe that the president is out for revenge against his adversaries. “It’s payback time,” a prominent Republican told me last week. “He has an enemies list that is growing by the day,” another source said. Names that came up in my conversations with Republicans included Adam Schiff, Jerry Nadler, Mitt Romney, and John Bolton. “Trump’s playbook is simple: go after people who crossed him during impeachment.”
Several sources said Bolton is at the top of the list. Trump’s relationship with Bolton was badly damaged by the time Bolton left the White House in September. Trump has since blamed his former national security adviser for leaking details of his forthcoming memoir that nearly derailed the impeachment trial by pressuring Republicans to call witnesses. In the book Bolton reportedly alleges Trump told him directly that Ukraine aid was tied to Ukraine announcing investigations into the Bidens (Bolton has denied being a source of the leak).
The campaign against Bolton has already begun. On January 23, the White House sent a cease and desist letter to Bolton’s lawyer demanding that Bolton’s publisher, Simon & Schuster, not release the book in March without removal of certain information. Trump intends to ratchet up the pressure, and some Republicans close to the White House fear how far Trump will take things after he’s gotten off for a second time (Trump famously made his July 25 call to Volodymyr Zelensky the day after Robert Mueller testified before Congress.) “Trump has been calling people and telling them to go after Bolton,” a source briefed on the private conversations said. The source added that Trump wants Bolton to be criminally investigated.
He’s done it to Strozk, Page, Comey, McCabe, Brennan and now Bolton. And his loyal henchman in the DOJ has helped him every step of the way. I have no doubt he’ll help him with this little project as well.
Bolton might have thought about appearing before the House Intelligence Committee and testifying when it might have actually helped. (It probably wouldn’t have, but he’d be in a better position to fight anything Barr attempts. )
Don’t ever say Trump didn’t warn people.
People wonder what’s happened to the Republican party that they are all lining up like a bunch of robots behind their dear Leader. Here’s a reporter in USA Today:
Back in 1999, I spent a long day tooling around Iowa with Lamar Alexander. At the time of our travels in a Winnebago, accompanied by a couple of aides and a press corps consisting of me and an AP photographer, he was a former Tennessee governor and a presidential candidate trying to compete with the rock star campaign of George W. Bush.
What I remember most from that day was a dramatic back story that, to my puzzlement, he did not mention in his pitch to voters. President Bill Clinton had been impeached by the House and tried in the Senate in a consuming saga of sex, lies and investigations. Voters seemed ready for someone of, as they say, unimpeachable character. Enter Alexander, at least theoretically.
Who would be more perfect for the moment than a man who had taken over a state amid a gubernatorial pardon-selling scandal so serious that he was sworn in three days early in a secret 1979 ceremony, to cut short outgoing Gov. Ray Blanton’s corruption spree? So sensational they made a movie about it, called “Marie,” in which a lawyer (and future senator) named Fred Thompson played himself. The obvious narrative was that Alexander knew how to restore trust in government — he had already done it in Tennessee.
Alexander never became president, but in 2002, he was elected to his first of three terms in the Senate. He was known in Washington for pragmatic bipartisanship — a senator who quit leadership in 2011 so he could work across the aisle more often, and who made good on that most recently in partnership with Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., on education and health policy.
Now Alexander’s just another Republican cowering at the prospect of crossing President Donald Trump, one of the many people I don’t recognize despite having covered and followed them for years or even decades.
What happened? The truth is that these so-called sane Republicans were always primed to follow their leader. They followed Reagan, they followed the Bushes and they are following Trump. There’s a reason John McCain was called “maverick” and it’s because he was one of the few to buck the leadership. (Now we know that his little sidekick Lindsey Graham was just trying to bask in the reflected glow of the lights and cameras that followed him around.)
The people who refused to fall in line were right-wing ideologues like Gingrich and the new Freedom Caucus types, not the establishment. Now that the nuts are in charge the establishment is doing what it always does.
The Republican establishment has always been a bunch of lemmings. I’ve written about it for years.
According to a new book from Daily Beast reporters Lachlan Markay and Asawin Suebsaeng, Sinking in the Swamp: How Trump’s Minions and Misfits Poisoned Washington, Trump wanted to push the birther conspiracy during the 2016 election but was reined in by his staff:
By 2016, he apparently considered it a liability. But to jettison this from his arsenal would be to ignore what made Trump, well…Trump. Still, the decision was made by the future president and his senior staff that it was worth letting this one slide. In the days leading up to Trump’s first presidential debate with Hillary Clinton, held at Hofstra University on September 26, 2016, Team Trump tried to organize an event at the site of the Trump International Hotel in the nation’s capital. There, he would—however tepidly—relinquish birtherism at long last.
But first, the campaign wanted Trump to release an official written statement renouncing birther conspiracy theories and declaring once and for all that baby Barack was born in the United States. His aides asked him for a short and sweet statement, just a few sentences; they could put this to bed quickly and hopefully without causing a big fuss.
Trump convened some of his top campaign brass, including Hope Hicks and Jason Miller, on a conference call that month as he was patched in from his executive perch at Trump Tower in Manhattan. He told them he wanted to dictate a statement.
“Okay, are you ready?” Trump asked everyone on the call. “Okay, here it is….”
This kicked off what two people on the call independently described as a seven‐minute, meandering spat of word vomit during which Trump kept finding new ways to say that his birther crusade was, in fact, necessary, good, and proper. He repeatedly echoed his past comments on the matter, claiming credit for forcing President Obama to settle the issue by publicly releasing his original long-form birth certificate. He insisted this never would have happened without his incessant questioning of Obama’s birthplace. He had achieved what John McCain, Bill Clinton, and so many others could only dream of doing, he thought. He blamed Hillary Clinton for being the godmother of the racist birtherism craze and for starting it in the first place. (She didn’t.) So really, Trump reasoned, what he did was a smashing success that warranted no apology, and he was happy he helped settle one of the great questions of our time.
Had this soliloquy been made public, it would have spanned two pages, single spaced.
“You get all that?” Trump asked.
At first, the Republican presidential nominee was met with dead silence, with those on the line confused as to what the optimal response could possibly be. Multiple advisers wanted to tell him that his dictated statement was far, far, far too long and would cause many more headaches for the campaign than it would resolve. If released, this would defeat the purpose of everything the campaign staff was trying to accomplish on this front. And yet, no one wanted to upset Trump, whose legendary hair-trigger temper could easily be set off by the slightest sign of perceived insolence.
Hicks—a top confidante and a press and comms hotshot whom Trump had for years treated as a surrogate daughter and whom he affectionately called Hopey and Hopester—was the brave one. Hopey/Hopester went first.
“Uh, we can’t do this,” she said, explaining that it would predictably deliver Trump a self-inflicted blow. She recommended they go the route of a less obstreperous, and much shorter, statement to the media.
“Okay,” Trump said, before polling the other members of the conference call on whether they agreed with Hicks, or if they preferred using the diatribe the boss had just dictated. No campaign official who chimed in sided with Trump, with each of them giving some pussyfooting version of “this is insane, why would we do this?” adding a “sir” or two to be safe.
After each aide said their piece, the call was interrupted by yet another uncomfortable silence. It lasted an interminable three seconds. Then the inevitable eruption came.
“I WANT THAT STATEMENT!!!! GET ME THAT FUCKING STATEMENT!!!!!!!” Trump roared into his phone—multiple recipients of his wrath recount—as his thundering voice crackled on the receiving ends. “I WANT THAT GODDAMN FUCKING STATEMENT RIGHT NOW!!!!! WHERE THE FUCK IS IT, WHY IS…JASON! JASON! GET THE HELL UP HERE NOW!”
Click.
By the time all the other participants on the call had hung up, Miller, Trump’s trusted senior communications adviser, was already hustling up to DJT’s 26th floor office in the tower. Behind closed doors, Miller—with a thick skin for verbal lashing and a calming voice—miraculously managed to walk Trump back off that ledge and strike a compromise: Miller would release a brief, innocuous statement in his own name, not Donald J. Trump’s, and the Republican presidential nominee would get to have his own say at the Trump hotel event in Washington, D.C. The secret, gargantuan Trump statement would be canned, never to see the light of day. When Miller emerged from Trump’s office, he assured fellow campaign officials that he’d put out that fire, at least for the time being.
Actually, his statement ended up being pretty close to that:
“Hillary Clinton and her campaign of 2008 started the birther controversy. I finished it. I finished it. You know what I mean. President Barack Obama was born in the United States. Period. Now we all want to get back to making America strong and great again.”
Here’s the Politifact statement on that.
How come nobody ever talks about the incredibly abusive way he speaks to his staff? Somebody should tell him to “be best.”