Perhaps you’ve heard that the Supremes stopped protecting Trump and the Manhattan DA will now have access to his financial papers and tax returns? He’s not happy. Jonathan Chait summarizes his tantrum:
[T]he former president released a statement that, even by Trumpian standards, brims with anger.
Trump’s response bears every hallmark of an authentically Trump-authored text, as opposed to the knockoff versions produced by his aides. It is meandering, filled with run-on sentences, gratuitous insults, and exclamation points. Trump’s position on the tax returns rests on a series of assertions, ranging from his false claim that Robert Mueller found “No Collusion” to his insistence that he actually won the 2020 election to his extremely ironic complaint that prosecutors targeting their political opponents is “fascism, not justice.” (Trump, of course, spent his presidency publicly demanding his Attorneys General investigate his political rivals.)
The statement does contain one unambiguously true point: “This is something which has never happened to a president before.” That’s correct, because every president for the past several decades has voluntarily released his financial information. Only Trump refused.
The most conspicuous absence from Trump’s statement is any explanation as to why he has fought so hard to conceal this information, which all his predecessors willingly disclosed. He goes on at great length about the prosecutors’ motives for obtaining it without even gesturing at his own for withholding it.
Journalists have pieced together enough about various Trump financial dealings to demonstrate the high likelihood that he has committed a series of financial crimes. There is probably enough to charge him even without the tax forms. Giving Vance still more information certainly can’t help Trump.
His outpouring of rage that Manhattan district attorney Cyrus Vance will finally have access to his financial documents suggests the only plausible reason for Trump’s evident dismay: He is very scared of being charged with crimes.
Trump thinks everyone is as dishonest and corrupt as he is, so it makes sense that he laments the fact that no other president has been subject to the scrutiny that he has been.
No other president has ever been as corrupt and dishonest — criminal really. That’s the answer. Whether the authorities ever catch up with him is unknown. But his hysteria does indicate that he’s mighty worried about it.
The US has officially lost half a million people to COVID.
Never forget:
On Wednesday February 29th, 2020, in front of a packed White House briefing room, President Trump told the country there were only 15 cases of coronavirus in the US, and “within a couple days [it is] going to be down to close to zero.” This contradicted both the CDC’s Anne Schuchat, who’d said minutes earlier from the very same stage that “we do expect more cases,” and Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar, who’d said “we can expect to see more cases in the United States.”
The next day, on the White House lawn, Trump told reporters that Democrats were trying to weaponize the situation to hurt him and said the media was “doing everything they can to instill fear in people, and I think it’s ridiculous.” The people who weren’t giving him credit for his handling of the situation “don’t mean it. It’s political.”
Why is everyone harping on this raging, resurgent pandemic that already has killed 225,000 Americans? The @POTUS is tired of hearing it! https://t.co/3lyIPf0fr0
For many decades, there was little evidence of partisan behavior in what can be the most bare-knuckled power play in the federal judicial system: when all the active judges on a federal appeals court reconsider the decisions of three-judge panels of their colleagues, a practice that lawyers call en banc review.
That changed in the Trump era, a new study has found.
“From 2018-2020 there was a dramatic and strongly statistically significant spike in both partisan splits and partisan reversals — more in both categories than we observed in any other time period over 60 years,” Neal Devins and Allison Orr Larsen, law professors at William & Mary, wrote in the study, called “Weaponizing En Banc,” to be published in The New York University Law Review.
By partisan splits, they meant full-court panels in which the judges appointed by presidents of one party almost perfectly diverged from those appointed by ones of the other party. Partisan reversals were what the term implies: ones in which an en banc majority dominated by appointees of presidents of the party in control of the court, over the dissents of most appointees of the minority party, overturned a three-judge panel dominated by appointees of the minority party.
Here is an example of both things. When the full U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, in Richmond, Va., ruled last year that a challenge to President Donald J. Trump’s business practices could move forward, the court split along partisan lines. All nine judges in the majority were originally nominated by Democratic presidents; all six judges in dissent were nominated by Republicans. The decision overturned a unanimous ruling from a three-judge panel of Republican appointees.
In dissent, Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson III lamented the majority’s ruling, writing that it had invited “the judiciary to assemble along partisan lines in suits that seek to enlist judges as partisan warriors in contradiction to the rule of law that is and should be our first devotion.”
In examining 950 en banc cases over 54 years, Professors Devins and Larsen wrote that they had expected to see very little evidence of these sorts of partisan splits or reversals in the 1960s and 1970s. That proved true. But they anticipated a steady rise in such behavior starting in the 1980s, as the Reagan administration turned its attention to stocking the federal courts with conservative judges. That proved wrong.
“Our data largely show stability and a lack of partisan en banc behavior from the end of the Reagan administration to the start of the Trump administration,” they wrote.
Professor Larsen said that was the good news. “We got a different answer than the one we expected,” she said. “En banc wasn’t used as a weapon for years and years and years.”
But the study also found what it called “a Trump-era uptick.”
“Almost 35 percent of en banc decisions in 2018-2020 involved either a partisan reversal or partisan split,” the professors wrote.
Grover Norquist was right when he said all they needed was a president who could hold a pen.
With the Trump cult getting more and more extreme this may swing back a bit as some right wing judges recognize that this is hurtling out of control and they have lifetime tenure. We’ll have to see. But no matter what, there are a ton of unqualified far-right operatives sitting on the federal bench. They will likely stick with program. It’s what they were hired to do.
Ann Coulter got disinvited to CPAC a few years back because her gross rants finally became too much even for them. Well, she should petition to come back because they have clearly lowered their standards way beyond even her toxic rants:
According to its schedule, CPAC is hosting Young Pharaoh during a Sunday session called “Please Check the Number and Dial Again: Doubt, Dysfunction, and the Price of Missed Opportunities.” CPAC states on its website that Young Pharaoh is a “Philosopher, Scholar, Musician” and links to his Twitter account. CPAC also links to youngpharaoh.net — that site redirects to “Pharaoh Aten University,” which features Young Pharaoh’s videos spreading conspiracy theories about vaccines and the “new world order.”
Young Pharaoh has posted numerous anti-Semitic tweets. He’s also frequently promoted dangerous conspiracy theories. Here is a sampling of the tweets on his CPAC-promoted account.
Anti-Semitism
Young Pharaoh: “THERE IS NO #HISTORICAL OR #SCIENTIFIC EVIDENCE PROVING THE EXISTENCE OF #JEWS OR #JUDAISM… ITS ALL A COMPLETE #LIE. … COMPLETELY MADE UP FOR #POLITICAL GAIN.”
Young Pharaoh: “ALL OF THESE #BIGTECH COMAPNIES, #MEDIA, & #SOCIALMEDIA PLATFORMS ARE CONTROLLED BY #CCP & #ISRAEL THROUGH #JEWISH #CEO & CORRUPT #DEMOCRATS.”
Young Pharaoh promoted the “Frazzledrip” conspiracy theory. For more on the “Frazzledrip” conspiracy theory, which was also promoted by Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) go here.
Every single debate about speech, offense, harm, “cancellation” etc is inescapably a debate about where to draw the line and what falls on which side. Ad nauseum.
Remember when the networks all raced to cover Sean Spicer, Kayleigh McEnany and Sarah Sanders’ daily press briefings like they were prophecies from the oracle of Delphi? Yeah, me too.
After creating new programming rules for the Trump administration and airing virtually every minute of every White House press briefing live and in its entirety, CNN has quietly cut the cord with the new Democratic administration.
Just one month into President Joe Biden’s term, the all-news cable channel last week stopped airing the daily White House press briefings. Perhaps the events weren’t entertaining enough, as White House spokesperson Jen Psaki has routinely declined to insert Biden into cultural war debates, refused to castigate reporters, and won’t make stuff up in the name of partisan warfare, the way her Republican predecessors did.
Instead, Psaki has answered questions as best she can about White House policy, while treating journalists with respect, instead of mocking them in search of cheap political points.
That’s no longer considered must-see TV at CNN. Fox News also stopped airing the briefings, which is completely expected. MSNBC as of last week was still airing the live Q&A’s from the White House.
CNN’s move represents one of the most dramatic ways the press has changed the way it covers Biden, as compared to Trump. Suddenly gone is the nonstop, unfiltered coverage of White House briefings, which defined cable news during the past four years.
In January 2017, the rules changed overnight when Trump was inaugurated and suddenly the media sessions were treated as breaking news events. That, despite the fact that during the final six months of Barack Obama’s presidency, just three percent of daily White House press briefings aired live, according to Media Matters.
In other words, Obama briefings were not aired. Trump’s were. Now, Biden’s are not. So much for liberal media bias.
There were no blockbuster stories or public crises unfolding back in early 2017. It was simply the D.C. press collectively deciding that every Trump utterance and each one of his administration’s briefings had to be carried live, which meant hundreds of hours of free airtime.
That brand of obedient programming led to a breathless mindset more synonymous with a wartime culture — Everybody stop what you’re doing, the White House is about to make a statement! There was no justification for the nonstop coverage, especially when the briefings were built on deceits, designed to foil honest inquiries.
Early on, reporters knew the Trump White House press briefings were a sham and a waste of time. In June 2017, CNN’s Jim Acosta called the events “useless” and “pointless” because so little relevant information was being given to reporters.
And from May 31 that year, on CNN [emphasis added]:
ALISYN CAMEROTA: So then Sean Spicer goes to the podium with the press; and he can’t confirm or comment on the questions that the press has about Jared Kushner and whether or not Jared Kushner tried to set up this back channel. So I mean, at what point — why is Sean Spicer holding these press briefings? You know? What’s the point of these?
DAVID GREGORY: There’s really no point. And what’s unfortunate for Sean Spicer is that the White House press secretary position under President Trump doesn’t have credibility.
That same day, CNN’s Dylan Byers detailed just how little substance then-White House spokesperson Spicer delivered at the briefings: “For two days in a row, since returning from President Trump’s trip abroad, the White House press secretary has held uncharacteristically short press briefings in which he claimed not to know the answer to questions, outsourced questions to other officials or dismissed the premise of questions entirely.”
That was January 2017. CNN for the next four years continued to air virtually every White House press briefing during Trump’s term. It wasn’t until February 2021, with a new Democrat president inside the Oval Office that CNN decided press briefings were no longer newsworthy.
Even more unforgivable was the fact that Trump’s pandemic briefings were aired all last year. Every time Trump addressed the novel virus and America’s unfolding pandemic, he made things worse with his steady stream of reckless contradictions, lies, and misinformation. One low point was when Trump used a television briefing to suggest Americans inject bleach into their bodies to fight off Covid-19, a deadly suggestion. This, while Trump was simultaneously lying about dismantling the White House’s pandemic team, accused hospital workers of stealing much-needed surgical masks, and told governors on a conference call that he hadn’t heard any complaints about there being a shortage of coronavirus tests.
Another briefing moment of shame came in April when Trump hosted one of the most bizarre televised performances by a sitting president. The planned rant featured a campaign-style commercial that aired in the briefing room and attacked the media as well as Trump’s critics who had hammered him over the administration’s botched handling of the pandemic. Immediately following the meltdown, CNN anchor John King admitted, “That was propaganda aired at taxpayer expense in the White House briefing room.”
So why did CNN keep airing future briefings?
More importantly, why did CNN decide the time to stop airing them was when a new Democratic president took office?
Good question. I think we know the reason, of course. The Psaki briefings aren’t a trainwreck, which news networks love to cover. Maybe they don’t think they are newsworthy in themselves. But they need to take a good hard look at how much they contributed to validating the chaotic Trump Show by putting it on the air unfiltered day after day.
Donald Trump may be spending his post-presidency golfing at Mar-a -Lago but he remains front and center in the hearts and minds of millions of Republican voters, as evidenced by the 46% who said in a new Suffolk University/ USA Today poll released over the weekend that they would join a Trump Party if he decided to split off from the GOP. A whopping 80% of Republican respondents said they support punishing any Republicans in Congress who voted for Trump’s impeachment. He is still their Dear Leader even in exile.
So the GOP still has a Trump problem. If it loses 20-30% of its voters, it will prove difficult to win any elections whether it’s called the Trump Patriot Party or the plain old GOP. That is because the polarization that powers the extreme right-wing under Trump depends upon having every last self-identified Republican vote their way. There are no more crossovers when it comes to Donald Trump.
This is the dilemma now Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., finds himself trying to navigate as he tries to take back the Senate in 2022. So far, he’s tried to have it both ways. Perhaps he and South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham are playing some elaborate game of “good cop-bad cop” with Graham ostentatiously currying Trump’s favor while McConnell writes op-eds in the Wall Street Journal desperately trying to assuage big money donors and appalled suburban voters with reassurances that the Republican establishment hasn’t gone completely mad.
It’s impossible to know how any of that will work out but whatever happens, the GOP is taking advantage of one major aspect of Trump’s legacy: The Big Lie. A recent Quinnipiac poll found that 76% of Republicans still say they believe there was widespread fraud in the 2020 election and that Trump was the legitimate winner. Republican lawmakers in states across the country are now rushing to pass various draconian vote suppression schemes.
It’s not that they haven’t been doing that all along, of course. That’s conservative electoral strategy 101, about which I’ve writtenmanytimes. Having lost the popular vote seven out of the last eight presidential elections, they know very well that they do not have the support of a majority of voters in the country. Now that Trump conveniently persuaded GOP voters that the presidential election was stolen from them in broad daylight, the opportunity to curb voting in some new and ingenious ways has presented itself and they are going for it.
So far this year at least 165 bills that would restrict voting access are being considered in state legislatures nationwide reports the Brennan Center for Justice. And the excuse Republicans are using is that they must do this to “restore trust” in the voting system — trust that was destroyed by the outrageous lies of Donald Trump and his henchmen. What a neat trick. Apparently, the only way they can restore trust is to “fix” problems that don’t exist but which also happen to suppress Democratic votes.
Take Georgia, for instance, ground zero for Trump’s post-election machinations. According to the Brennan Center, the Republican legislature has proposed curtailing early voting — including on Sundays when historically Black churches have caravaned congregations in what is called “souls to the polls” — making drop boxes more onerous to access and requiring several new steps in order to vote by mail. One of the most counterintuitive restrictions is a new process that disallows dropping ballots off on Election Day and three days prior. It makes no sense. If you’ve forgotten to get your ballot in the mail you should be able to walk it in. What can possibly be a reasonable rationale against that?
You can see how important this issue is right now by the fact that this week’s CPAC conference is featuring seven panel discussions on “election protection” with names like “The Left Pulled the Strings, Covered It Up, and Even Admits It.” “Failed States (PA, GA, NV, oh my!)” and “They Told Ya So: The Signs Were Always There.” Here’s one of the featured speakers, a lawyer who secretly helped Trump behind the scenes:
It goes without saying that the right-wing media continues to flog this lie but it is spread far and wide by the the major networks as well which continue to feature guests who find subtler ways to poison the public’s mind. Take Rep. Steve Scalise, R-La, on ABC’s “This Week” dodging the question in a different way, suggesting that the “real problem” is that the states didn’t follow their own laws in the election, as some of Trump’s bush league lawyers argued at the time before being shot down by every judge who heard them.
This version of the Big Lie is what MSNBC’s Chris Hayes dubbed “High Hawley-ism”, after the unctuous mewlings of Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo, during the post-election period, which Hayes says is a trial balloon for GOP state legislators to unilaterally award electoral college votes to whomever they choose. You may recall that was what Trump was trying to do up until the very minute his rabid mob sacked the Capitol. Hayes wrote:
This dubious theory, that only state *legislatures* can make these kinds of changes also invites all kinds of mischief by federal judges to reach in and overrule state supreme courts. It didn’t work in 2020, but that doesn’t mean it won’t.
Further, as Scalia memorably noted there is no constitutional guarantee of the right to vote for president; we vote for electors. Every state with R control could pass a law awarding all state electors to the candidate that won the most counties and basically guarantee R victory.
As the New York Times reported at the time, the conservative majority on the Supreme Court gave plenty of signals during the election campaign that they were amenable to this idea, making it clear that they believe state legislatures have the right to enact strict measures against (non-existent) voter fraud. As Wendy R. Weiser, the director of the Democracy Program at the Brennan Center for Justice, told the Times:
Even without the reasoning, it’s very clear that what the court has done throughout this election season has made it clear that federal courts are not going to be significant sources of voting rights protection in the lead up to elections. It’s the unique constitutional role of the courts to protect individual rights like voting rights, and they’re treating it like policy decisions.
That’s what Trump put Amy Coney Barrett on the Supreme Court to do for him last fall, but the cards just didn’t fall his way enough to put it to use. Even so, the Big Lie about the stolen election has opened the door for a wave of voter suppression not seen in decades with a Supreme Court ready to rubber stamp it. It may end up being his greatest legacy.
Somebody killed two people in a gun store and people in the store shot back killing him. Bullets were flying from all directions and some other people got shot too and nobody knows what exactly happened. Imagine that:
A person entered a gun store and shooting range in a New Orleans suburb and fatally shot two people Saturday, prompting customers and staff to open fire on the shooter, a sheriff said. The shooter also died.
The shooting happened around 2:50 p.m. at the Jefferson Gun Outlet in the suburb of Metairie, according to a release from the Jefferson Parish Sheriff’s Office.
Sheriff Joseph Lopinto said the shooter initially struck two people inside, and then several other people — whether employees or store customers — opened fire on the shooter, both inside and outside of the building. Outside the building a man could be seen afterward behind yellow police tape yelling “Where is my son?”
Guns and ammunition are sold in the front of the outlet that faces a main thoroughfare through Jefferson Parish. Customers who want to frequent the gun range generally go around to the side entrance of the building. Staff who work there often wear a sidearm.Investigators look at evidence near the side entrance at Jefferson Gun Outlet in Metairie, La.
Lopinto said two other people also were hit by gunfire and were hospitalized in stable condition. He said there were multiple shooters.
“We’re trying to put it all together,” the sheriff said during a short briefing with journalists.
Trump always used to say, “we need bullets going in the other direction.” This is what happened. It could have been a whole lot worse.
Darryl Robertson, former staff writer at VIBE, and graduate student at Columbia University studying African American history (via Salon).
After a stint in a Mississippi prison, Darryl Robertson began his writing career working for the local newspaper in Laurel (Salon):
For the first time in my life I had to interact with white people. I’d never really been around white people before. Because of my ignorance, I believed that all white people were godly intellectuals. This is not to say that now I believe that white people aren’t intelligent. Many white white people are. It’s just that before I knew any, I assumed that all white people had to be experts in the study of life.
My ideas about whiteness were shaped by society. On television, most people were white. My teachers were white. Politicians were white. And white people lived in big houses in safe neighborhoods, which looked very expensive. My mind associated all of this with intelligence. But my stereotypical notions of whiteness waned as I began to spend time around all kinds of white people, from public officials and police officers to working-class whites in my community.
A friend my wife met years ago while electioneering told her the same thing recently, confirming Robertson’s early impressions. He’d grown up thinking white people were simply smarter.
The former staff writer for VIBE found new experiences revealed the unfair stereotypes he’d held about white people. It works both ways, of course:
I’m convinced that America will never cure its racial sickness because no one wants to begin with what they do not understand. Beginning with what you do not understand is to expose your ignorance. And America, academia, liberalism, capitalism, and extremism frowns on ignorance. But in actuality, all of us are ignorant. But we’ll never understand our ignorance, because America has made ignorance a taboo.
What I learned from my early interactions with white people in downtown Laurel, along with my former college classmate, is that everyone — whether consciously or unconsciously — is on the hunt for answers. I think it would benefit everyone if we understood that people’s experiences and educations, however flawed, shape their thoughts and ideas. What we know, or think we know, is minuscule compared to what we don’t understand.
Faking it until you make it does not work with race relations. Robertson’s tale is one of those reminders it is useful to get regularly enough to remind us what we don’t know. Two things I tell myself often:
1) I’m not as smart as I think I am. 2) There are libraries filled with things I don’t know.
Naomi Klein directs her “Shock Doctrine” lens at the cascading disaster in Texas to understand why Texas Republican politicians there fear the Green New Deal.
Once the self-described party of small government, low taxes, and family values, Republicans also considered themselves the party of ideas back in the Reagan-Gingrich period. Over time the GOP became the party of vote suppression, conspiracy theories, and owning the libs, if not of outright sedition. The “failed policies of the past” is a standard catchphrase among conservatives for never-specified liberal approaches to governing they abhor, governing being something they have long abandoned.
The free-market fundamantalism that led to the collapse of the go-it-alone, deregulated energy grid in Texas is further proof, Klein believes, that the party’s hoary playbook is not up to the challenges of the 21st century. The late economist Milton Friedman said that in an ordinary disaster, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around.
All Texas Republicans offer is retrenchment. Gov. Greg Abbott’s first reflex was not swift effective action to address his state’s humanitarian crisis. It was to run to Fox News to name a liberal scapegoat.
In short, Republican ideas are no longer lying around — they are lying in ruin. Small government is simply no match for this era of big, interlocking problems. Moreover, for the first time since Margaret Thatcher, Britain’s former prime minister, declared that “there is no alternative” to leaving our fates to the market, progressives are ready with a host of problem-solving plans. The big question is whether the Democrats who hold power in Washington will have the courage to implement them.
The horrors currently unfolding in Texas expose both the reality of the climate crisis and the extreme vulnerability of fossil fuel infrastructure in the face of that crisis. So of course the Green New Deal finds itself under fierce attack. Because for the first time in a long time, Republicans face the very thing that they claim to revere but never actually wanted: competition — in the battle of ideas.
The ideas “lying around” these days are on the progressive side. With the Green New Deal and the Sunrise Movement, with Fight for $15, with The Poor People’s Campaign, and others. As Texas recovers, that should be clearer than ever.
This piece shows some new polling suggesting that the GOP has become the party of the working class, blue collar worker. They have gained 12 points in that cohort during the Trump years. The vast majority are white blue collar workers, but it wasn’t just them:
But the blue-collar bump spreads into other voter groups for Republicans too, including groups that are often harder for the GOP to reach. Hispanic blue-collar voters have peeled off to the Republican Party in the past 10 years.
That 13-point gain is impressive, even bigger than the growth Republicans had with blue-collar whites, and it definitely might be seen as a bright spot for the party as it tries to find a way to make inroads with the fast-growing ethnic group. For years the assumption has been that the Democrats had an inside track to winning the Hispanic vote, but maybe that’s less true than had been believed, especially among blue-collar Hispanics.
And you can even see the Republicans’ blue-collar growth among African Americans, a voter demographic that has long been deeply problematic for the GOP.
To be clear, those numbers are still very small. But considering the struggles Republicans have had wooing Black voters, even a little positive movement is something for the party to welcome. Ultimately elections are all about margins, and losing a group by 7 points fewer than the last time could pay dividends in states where the vote is close.
Together these data points suggest that GOP has not only made substantial inroads with blue-collar voters, but that the party is increasingly reliant on blue-collar voters as a key, if not the key, component of its coalition.
Ok. So why did this happen?
Political strategists often debate about the best way to win voters: Are cultural or economic appeals better? These data suggest that economic appeals might offer the Republican Party the best way to broaden its appeal. That path, however, would likely mean a retooling on policy policy approaches to make them better resonate with blue-collar voters.
What weird way to look at this. It’s obvious that the appeal is cultural. Donald Trump the billionaire, who signed the biggest tax cuts for people like himself in US history, tried to repeal health care benefits and never produced anything better, rolled back safety regulations and put an entire platoon of plutocrats in charge of the government was not an economic populist. He was a demagogue who appealed to this cohort on cultural grounds almost exclusively.
If these people were motivated on the basis of economics they would obviously vote for Democrats, who offer a far friendlier (if sometimes imperfect) economic agenda. They switched to Trump because they like Trump’s shitheel personality and the fact that he was perfectly willing to call out “the elites” they hate. It’s not about money. It’s about culture.
And you know who understands that better than anyone? Donald Trump.
