Month: February 2021

According to this big NY Times tik-tok of the Trump post-election strategy, he just put his faith in the wrong people:

The senator was also under a false impression that the president was only blustering, the officials said. Mr. McConnell had had multiple conversations with the White House chief of staff, Mark Meadows, and the senator’s top political adviser, Josh Holmes, had spoken with Mr. Kushner, the president’s son-in-law and senior adviser. Both West Wing officials had conveyed the same message: They would pursue all potential avenues but recognized that they might come up short. Mr. Trump would eventually bow to reality and accept defeat.

Please. Trump didn’t accept the results in 2016 when he won! He convened a “voter Fraud Commission” to prove that the popular vote had been stolen from him. Anyone who thought he would ever concede was a naive fool. And say what you will about Mitch McConnell, he is not that.

Jonathan Chait shows just how ridiculous it is:

His incentives clearly ran toward humoring Trump’s attempt to overthrow the election and downplaying the damage it would cause. As Robert Costa reported on November 9, McConnell’s calculus was driven entirely by his desire to win the Georgia special elections. McConnell believed “the base must be stoked,” which meant supporting Trump’s lies. McConnell’s posture at the time was that Trump was merely doing to Democrats what they had done to him: “Let’s not have any lectures about how the president should immediately, cheerfully accept preliminary election results from the same characters who just spent four years refusing to accept the validity of the last election.” (In fact, Hillary Clinton conceded her defeat the morning after the vote.)

The Times does note that McConnell’s thinking about Trump’s autogolpe changed less because of any principled revulsion than because it became a liability rather than an asset in the Senate contest: “Perhaps most important in Mr. McConnell’s evolving calculus, internal polls were showing that the Republicans’ strongest argument in the Georgia runoffs was that a Republican-led Senate would be a necessary check on a new — and inevitable — Democratic administration.”

Everything in Trump’s history made it obvious he would provoke a crisis if defeated. McConnell chose to cooperate with Trump’s attack on the republic for the same reason he spent the previous four years cooperating with Trump: because it enhanced his own power.

McConnell has always fashioned himself the canniest man in Washington. His desire to broadcast his own savvy has frequently led him to counterproductively blurt out of his own cynicism. (McConnell has famously admitted that his goals under Obama were to deny the president bipartisan cover and make him a one-term president, quotes that Democrats later threw back in his face.) He simply cannot suppress his instinct to let everybody know how shrewdly he plays the game.

McConnell is now casting himself as a dupe because it is the only escape. He has been implicated in a historic crime.

McConnell played out the string until January 5th when he lost the Senate. Now, he’s running around trying to cover his tracks. The Grim Reaper knew exactly what he was doing.

There have been many hundreds of events across trials

We often focus on "top line" efficacy

But pay scant attention to how well these vaccines prevent severe illness

These results are for events after vaccines have had a chance to work — typically 14 days after first shot

— Ashish K. Jha, MD, MPH (@ashishkjha) February 1, 2021

The reason to get the vaccine above all else is that even if you are one of the rare unlucky ones to get the virus after being vaccinated, YOU WILL NOT DIE! You won’t even end up in the hospital.

That takes COVID from a deadly threat to an illness we might get and recover from. That’s everything.

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It wasn’t just the Jan. 6 Capitol riot that led Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R.-Ill.) to start a political action committee aimed at challenging Donald Trump’s hold on the Republican Party. It’s the way most GOP elected officials seem to have moved on. 

“The main impetus was obviously Jan 6th,” Kinzinger told me in an interview. “But I think even beyond that, it was seeing that there wasn’t going to be a mass wake-up, there wasn’t going to be a mass eye-opening to what we’ve become. And in fact, even in this recent week, you see the trend kind of back to Trumpism.”

Kinzinger, like Liz Cheney and Ben Sasse, is an ambitious pol who is making the bet that Trump lunacy is going to flame out. I’m not sure that’s a good bet. The more likely optimistic outlook is that the Republicans will slowly lose their ability to gain majorities or win the White House as people leave the party of crazy. The pessimistic outlook is that they actually continue to wield power through the minority for some time, getting increasingly authoritarian and violent.

There are many stories from around the country about voters changing their affiliation.

Some Republicans across the country are changing their party registrations following the insurrection at the Capitol on Jan. 6.

“It’s definitely a trend and we noticed it right after — on the 8th or 9th — right after the insurrection on the 6th,” Consuelo Kelly, the Broward County Supervisor of Elections communications director, told ABC News on Saturday about the changes in Florida.

The numbers are minuscule in the grand scheme of things — a few thousand voters here or there doesn’t make much of a dent in the Republican Party’s voter base nationwide. And some Democrats have also changed their party affiliations too, although at a lower rate. But the early numbers are raising eyebrows.

Dr. Michael McDonald, a political science professor at the University of Florida who studies voting and elections, told ABC News that this kind of change right after a federal election is out of the ordinary.

“It’s very unusual for people to change or switch their party registrations without some incentive to do so,” he said.

“The typical reason why people change their registration is there’s a primary approaching and that primary is in a party-registration state, where you have to be registered with a party or as an independent. So, before an election you’ll see people re-registering in order to participate in the primary in the states that have party registration,” McDonald added. “It’s not a typical activity for people to call up and say, ‘I want to be registered as a Democrat, Republican, independent or nonpartisan.’ That’s a very unusual thing to be happening and reports that we’re getting from election officers — it seems like it’s a thing.”

Maybe that won’t make any difference in the long run. A lot of these people may not have voted for Trump anyway and just decided they’s had enough of the GOP after his protracted temper tantrum after the election and the January 6th. But I would guess that moves like stripping Liz Cheney of her post and elevating Marjorie Taylor Green, along with a circus-like defense in the impeachment trial could move some more.

But again, even the best case, in my opinion, makes that a slow erosion of support rather than sudden collapse. The polls show that three quarters of Republicans are still Trump cultists in good standing. Apparently, nothing they’ve seen has made them change their minds about him or the party.

Update:

Here’s another story about Republicans leaving the party. This is a group of Bush administration officials. A few dozen here, a few hundred there and pretty soon you’re talking about a real exodus. We’ll see.

As the second impeachment trial of Donald Trump approaches, we are beginning to get some idea of how the House managers intend to proceed. The single Article of Impeachment alleges that Trump lied repeatedly about the results of the election and called people to Washington, D.C. for a rally at which he incited them to “violent, deadly, destructive and seditious acts.” It cites his earlier attempts to subvert and obstruct the certification of the results of the election including that astonishing phone call in which Trump openly asked an election official in Georgia to “find” the votes needed to overturn the election in his state.

Senate Majority leader Chuck Schumer told MSNBC on Saturday that the trial will “show the American people — vividly, on film — what happened there in the Capitol, what Trump said. … All of America will see it.”

There’s a lot of video and audio available to tell that story — much of it produced by the insurrectionists themselves. The call between Trump and Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger was also taped. There are dozens of court transcripts from indicted insurrectionists who say they believed that the president had told them to do what they did. It is well documented that Trump did what he is accused of doing.

This is why Republicans have offered up a defense for Trump that would evade the charges altogether and argue simply that the Senate has no constitutional right to impeach him at all since he is already out of office. The fact that then-Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., made sure the Senate was not in session to receive the Article of Impeachment until Joe Biden took office gives away the game on that one.

In other words, Republicans believe the best way to let Donald Trump off the hook for telling a crazed mob to march to the Capitol on January 6th to overturn the election they all know he lost, is to pretend that the process is fundamentally illegitimate. This is a highly disputed claim but it’s really all they’ve got.

Trump, however, is apparently having none of it.

Just a little over a week before he is to file briefs in the case, he abruptly parted ways with most of his legal team, a group of respected lawyers from South Carolina led by a former prosecutor named Butch Bowers. The split, which was made public on Saturday, reportedly occurred over differences of opinion about strategy. Trump’s former lawyers believed that his best defense was the one the Senate Republicans handed him on a silver platter last week when 45 of them cast a vote making it clear that they backed the “illegitimate process” argument and would acquit Trump of the charges on that basis.

Their client curiously disagreed.

According to both the New York Times and the Washington Post, Trump insisted that his lawyers mount a defense focusing on “his baseless claims about election fraud.” Bowers informed Trump they could not do it. The reason for that, of course, is that they would have to lie and like many of the lawyers Trump has employed since the election — other than the unhinged legal freakshow of Rudy Giuliani, Sidney Powell and Jenna Ellis — they refused to break the law on his behalf or participate in his propaganda campaign to undermine the election results.

The Times also reported that the newly pardoned Steve Bannon, back in Trump’s good graces and advising him on his future, believes that Trump should go to the floor of the Senate and make his case in-person because “he’s the only one who can sell it.” There was also speculation that Trump might let his old buddy Giuliani take over as he’s been champing at the bit to do from the beginning, but since Giuliani is actually a participant in the incitement, telling the January 6th mob that there should be “trial by combat,” it seems the president’s advisers have succeeded in keeping him from the case. And it was not entirely unlikely that Trump just would not bother to put up a case at all, allowing McConnell and his other henchmen in the Senate to make his argument for him and call it a day. After all, he already believes he’s guaranteed an acquittal as Trump’s reportedly told people he couldn’t see why he should have to spend money on lawyers if he already has the verdict in the bag.

But Trump did end up hiring two lawyers to replace the team that left on Saturday. Roger Stone’s former attorney David Schoen, who had evidently already been working with Trump, now assumes the lead role. Bruce Castor, a former DA from Pennsylvania best known for refusing to prosecute Bill Cosby, has also been added to the team. According to the news release announcing their hiring, they both believe that that the trial is unconstitutional — which doesn’t actually say much about how they plan to defend the president.

Both Schoen and Castor have reputations for theatricality. In Schoen’s case, that’s a literal description since he studied at the Actor’s Studio in New York and has recently acted in a docudrama about the late accused child trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, whom he met with just days before Epstein committed suicide. Schoen describes himself as someone who has represented “reputed mobster figures: alleged head of Russian mafia in this country, Israeli mafia and two Italian bosses.” Now he’s representing Donald Trump. Castor was evidently once an up and coming Republican politician in the state of Pennsylvania but his Cosby decision derailed his career when he turned to mush on the witness stand.

Trump’s new attorneys would appear to be the kind of lawyers who will do for his impeachment trial what Dr. Scott Atlas did for his COVID response. When asked about the Democrats’ reported trial strategy, Trump adviser Jason Miller told Axios’ Mike Allen: “‘Emotionally charged’ is code for ‘We know this is unconstitutional, but we’re going to try to put on a show anyway.'”

A show you say?

I asked one of Donald Trump’s former lawyers for a reaction to his new impeachment legal team.

Their response?

“Should be a circus.”

— Olivia Nuzzi (@Olivianuzzi) February 1, 2021

Trump likely sees this trial as a way to once again rally the base with a spirited “defense” stating the election was stolen, this time with an implicit admission that he believes the insurrection was justified. If he does that all the pundits insist it’s going to make the GOP senators very nervous and they might end up voting to convict. Will it? Nah. They’ll find a way to make sure he faces no accountability at their hands. We have to stop pretending otherwise.

The question is whether the “show” the Democrats put on to prosecute Trump will be more convincing to the American people than whatever “circus” Trump is planning. If you want emotion, he’s got plenty of emotion ready to go. He might even get some of that incitement going all over again. But the evidence of what he did that day is irrefutable. He’s guilty as sin.

Uhm yeah:

https://youtu.be/xfwbhC2Un2Y

Sixty to 70 former George W. Bush administration officials are leaving the Republican Party or cutting their ties to it.

Welcome to the un-party, pals!

Reuters this morning:

Dozens of Republicans in former President George W. Bush’s administration are leaving the party, dismayed by a failure of many elected Republicans to disown Donald Trump after his false claims of election fraud sparked a deadly storming of the U.S. Capitol last month.

These officials, some who served in the highest echelons of the Bush administration, said they had hoped that a Trump defeat would lead party leaders to move on from the former president and denounce his baseless claims that the November presidential election was stolen.

That did not happen. (You may have noticed.) So they are bailing. A few have registered as independents, a dozen former officials told Reuters.

“The Republican Party as I knew it no longer exists. I’d call it the cult of Trump,” said Jimmy Gurulé, who was Undersecretary of the Treasury for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence in the Bush administration.

It is still not a lot of switchers. “This is not a party in collapse,” write Philip Bump and Lenny Bronner. Not yet anyway.

We, or at least many of us, seem to be living in one of the dystopian futures from novels or film. There was no atomic war. But there is a great plague, mass death, economic dislocation, an environmental tipping point, and political unrest. The future hangs in the balance in the now.

The confluence of recent events you know. Including the Republican Party’s descent into madness behind an unbalanced huckster of a president. Insane conspiracy theories ate the brains of who knows how many Americans. But enough to follow the president’s prompting to riot and storm the U.S. Capitol seeking to overturn a presidential election.

In a 1968 B-movie, a hippie youth movement put a popular rock star in the White House and his lieutenants in Congress. “If you’re thirty, you’re through” ran the tagline for Wild in the Streets. Anyone 30 and over was consigned to detention camps and fed hallucinogens to keep them docile. Half a century later, the wilding is on the right, only it is not fiction. As the real world struggles to move forward, it is as if the American right inhabits a parallel, new Dark Age.

“The New Yorker Radio Hour” over the weekend reprised a 2017 interview with Rev. William J. Barber II of The Poor People’s Movement. The summary reads in part:

Politics and religion go hand in hand for Barber, but his agenda is diametrically opposed to that of the Christian right, which has so deeply influenced U.S. politics. Barber thinks that conservative Christians who focus on banning abortion and limiting L.G.B.T.Q. rights—rather than ministering to “the poor, the broken-hearted, the sick, … the stranger, and all of those who are made to feel unacceptable”—may be guilty of “heresy.”

The Christian right has in a sense created alt-Christianity for an alt-America organized around the QAnon conspiracy cult. Donald Trump is its messiah. The cult believes an international cabal of Democrats and elite, pedophile cannibals torture children, drink their blood and extract life-extending chemicals from their young bodies. QAnon “patriots” now sit in Congress, packing heat and ready to battle their colleague-adversaries from the prime universe the rest of us inhabit.

The cult’s conception of America is something out of A Canticle for Leibowitz, a post-apocalyptic novel first published in 1959. In a distant future, a new Dark Age, Catholic monks of the Order of Leibowitz collect and preserve ancient texts, much as Irish monks did during the first Dark Age. But so much technology and raw knowledge was lost in the “Flame Deluge” that (IIRC) the monks cannot comprehend many references in their manuscripts, They treat a 20th-century Leibowitz grocery list as a sacred text, not recognizing it for what it is, or was.

The alt-right’s version of both the United States and Christianity has the same feel of things misremembered, half-understood and corrupted by time.

“The so-called white evangelicals surrounding Trump say so much about what God says so little and so little about what God says so much,” Barber repeats frequently, condemning the “false and distorted narrative of Christian and religious nationalism.” Similarly, white nationalists say a lot about the 2nd Amendment while exhibiting far less veneration for the responsibility of government for the general welfare, public investment, etc., in the rest of the U.S. Constitution.

I suggested the other day that USA (o͞o´-suh) is an idol whose name the Trump cult spells out in shouted chants: U – S – A! U – S – A! Like the faith of the monks, their alt-America bears as little resemblance to the republic conceived by Jefferson, Madison, Franklin, et al. as the prosperity gospel does to the teachings of Christ.

Dennis Hartley in 2017 cited a description in A Canticle for Leibowitz of the impulses driving our brethren towards this new Dark Age:

“Ignorance is king. Many would not profit by his abdication. Many enrich themselves by means of his dark monarchy. They are his Court, and in his name they defraud and govern, enrich themselves and perpetuate their power. Even literacy they fear, for the written word is another channel of communication that might cause their enemies to become united. Their weapons are keen-honed, and they use them with skill. They will press the battle upon the world when their interests are threatened, and the violence which follows will last until the structure of society as it now exists is leveled to rubble, and a new society emerges. I am sorry. But that is how I see it.” – From the novel A Canticle for Leibowitz, by Walter M. Miller, Jr.