Month: May 2021

Watching Republican Senators perform their tortured Donald Trump fealty dance over the January 6th Commission on Thursday would have been amusing if it weren’t so pathetic. Some furrowed their brows with concern while others defiantly refused to even speak with the grieving mother of Capitol police officer Brian Sicknick who died that day. The Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, who delivered a scathing speech on the floor of the Senate after Trump was acquitted in his second impeachment trial, was reportedly calling individual senators and begging them to vote against the bill as a personal favor to him (and no doubt a very special gift for Donald Trump.) Republicans spent the night vamping, preening and delaying so they could vote against the bill under cover of darkness in the wee hours of the morning and then sneak out of town without having to face the media or their consciences. Unfortunately, the vote had to be postponed until Friday so now they will just have to own their shame in front of the whole country.

January 6th is a day that will live in infamy just like December 7th and 9/11. But this one implicates the former president and dozens of elected Republicans have decided that they must circle the wagons to prevent any bipartisan investigation which might put that on the record.

For the most part, the GOP has regained its balance in the wake of the Big Lie and January 6th by simply capitulating to the reality that it’s Donald Trump’s party and they are just along for the ride. All the polling shows that the vast majority of Republican voters still revere him and if he chooses to run again in 2024, he is the overwhelming favorite to win the nomination. If any of them still have reservations, they’re comforting themselves with the illusion that his authoritarian madness is better than allowing the government to spend money on average working families and the poor and the sick as President Biden is proposing.

Interestingly, as the Republicans in DC were making fools of themselves on Thursday trying to please the Dear Leader, a former GOP superstar gave a speech at the Reagan Library in which he implored the party to stop catering to Trump and focus on ideology again. Fox News board member Paul Ryan, former speaker of the House and one time Great Young Gun of the GOP, laughably asserted, “voters looking for Republican leaders want to see independence and mettle.”

“They will not be impressed by the sight of ‘yes men’ and flatterers flocking to Mar-a-Lago,” Ryan asserted.

Clearly, he’s been out of the country, perhaps visiting another planet, for the last few years. They love “yes men and flatters flocking to Mar-a-lago.” In fact, it is a requirement, as his successor the Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy can attest. (And, by the way, Ryan couldn’t even bring himself to mention Trump by name the entire speech. So much for that profile in courage.)

If Ryan wants to put an end to this cycle of sycophancy, he might want to start by having a little chat with his fellow Fox News board members Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch. They are just as responsible for the fetid mess the Republican Party has become as Donald Trump is. More actually.

As it happens, Ryan isn’t the only former speaker of the House trying to push the Republican party to start pretending they care about policy. Trump’s Majordomo Senator Lindsay Graham of South Carolina has teamed up with 90s throwback Newt Gingrich to do one of those popular 90s reboots everyone’s all excited about. Politico reports that they’re working on a MAGA Contract for America:

The group is still just beginning to hammer out the details of what a Trumpified Contract might look like. But it is likely to take an “America-First” policy approach on everything from trade to immigration. The source described it as “a policy priority for 2022 and beyond.”

Gingrich described it this way:

“It should be positive. School choice, teaching American history for real, abolishing the ‘1619 Project,’ eliminating critical race theory and what the Texas legislature is doing. We should say, ‘Bring it on.'”

If there’s one thing you can say about Gingrich it’s that he’s a sunny, upbeat forward-thinking guy, as you can see by what he considers a “positive” agenda. His original Contract with America was a monstrous document, calling for punitive measures against poor women, destroying product liability, extremely harsh criminal justice laws and more. They were the far right’s racist dog whistles combined with the mainstream’s corporate giveaways but they were sold with an aggressively hostile demagogic pitch that the right-wing voters who listened to talk radio were thrilled to hear.

Luckily, most of it was never enacted although I’m not sure Republican voters ever knew that — or cared for that matter. It was a political document, introduced late in the campaign that served Gingrich’s myth more than anything else. He was the great Republican hope of his day, battling mano-a-mano with President Clinton and almost always losing until he was finally forced out after the GOP’s 1998 midterm drubbing during the impeachment crisis. Since then he’s been a Fox News gadfly desperately seeking relevance. Like so many other aging 90s icons, he’s seizing his chance to relive his glory days.

Trump actually already issued a “Contract with the American Voter” in the month before the 2016 election with 28 policies he promised to enact in his first hundred days. (The branding genius has never once come up with an original slogan.) I don’t think anyone read it, almost certainly not Trump himself. He has never had any interest in specific policy beyond his singular obsessions with immigration and trade anyway. But he is attentive to the right-wing media zeitgeist which, as you can see by the “ideas” Gingrich threw out, are really what this contract is going to be all about.

It has been said before but deserves to be said again: The Republican party is out of ideas.

The GOP is organized solely around their resentments and Republican voters love Trump because he speaks to what they care about. He even gives them new grievances to complain about! People like Liz Cheney and Paul Ryan think their voters have been hoodwinked by Trump’s magical powers while Lindsay Graham and Kevin McCarthy think they can rework Trump’s appeal into something recognizable as a functioning political party.

They’re all wrong.

Republicans know exactly what they have in Trump and it’s exactly what they want. And I think if there’s one person who gets that it’s Newt Gingrich. After all, he’s the man who laid the foundation for Trumpism all those years ago. 

What’s surprising is that Amazon is not offering these for free delivery via Prime:

Amazon was lampooned on social media Thursday after sharing a video highlighting “AmaZen”, a small enclosed booth installed in an Amazon warehouse where employees can go to “focus on their mental wellbeing”.

The human-sized box has an interactive kiosk inside, where workers can watch videos about “mental health” and “mindfulness practices”. Critics of the company, which has come under fire in the past for not allowing workers sufficient bathroom breaks, putting them in danger of frequent injury, and forcing them to spend hours on foot, said the company’s money would be better spent supporting its labor force.

“I feel like livable wages and working conditions are better than a mobile Despair Closet,” writer Talia Levin tweeted.

Vice adds:

“With AmaZen I wanted to create a space that’s quiet, that people could go and focus on their mental and emotional well-being,” Leila Brown, the Amazon employee who invented the booth said in the video. “The ZenBooth is an interactive kiosk where you can navigate through a library of mental health and mindful practices to recharge the internal battery.”

Brown is giving away the game by using the language of machines. A worker is not a robot with a battery that needs to be charged. A worker is a human who needs things Amazon simply does not provide its workers. Amazon drivers piss in bottles and shit in bags. Amazon drivers sued for being paid less than minimum wage and fought against an initiative to install surveillance cameras in their cars. 

Perhaps an Orgasmatron would have been more welcome.*

Given the anti-democratic trajectory of our republic, the Despair Closet just could be the next big thing. Under Republican authoritarians (or worse — looking at you, Tom Cotton) to suppress the vote, pack the courts, instigate insurrection, steal elections, kill their own voters (with anti-science), and undermine faith in the country they profess to love just, just so much, despair is tempting. Fuck it.

But despair is no more helpful than performative cynicism or moving to Costa Rica. Those who once preached, wore or displayed on their cars “If you are not part of the solution, you are part of the problem” need now to take their own device … um, advice.

*Orgasmatron is Woody Allen’s name, in Sleeper, for a parody of Reich’s orgone accumulator, a telephone booth-sized plywood and metal box said to store a healing and enlivening force.

Republicans have long puffed out their chests believing that the U-S of A is superior to those countries. “Socialist” places such as Denmark or Sweden. Former Eastern Bloc places such as Croatia, the Czech Republic, and Slovenia. What those places share and what Republicans hope to replicate here is minority rule.

David Frum likely was not the first to predict that “If conservatives become convinced that they cannot win democratically, they will not abandon conservatism. They will reject democracy.” That was January 2018. The conservative long march toward minority rule continues apace. Unlike Roosevelt University political scientist David Faris (“It’s Time to Fight Dirty”), Frum does not think Democrats are complacent about the danger” because Biden’s approval ratings are good.” Their challenge is what to do about it.

Frum writes today in The Atlantic that the problem for Democrats in stopping that slide is the very diversity they celebrate. The Trumpified Republican Party is now a narrow block (or bloc, if you will) dedicated to stopping anything Democrats want. “A disparate majority loosely committed to diverging goals,” Frum writes, “will have difficulty imposing its will on a cohesive minority strongly committed to a singular goal.”

True, that. So what’s a Democrat to do? Frum sees a few options with differing risk/reward calculations:

The first path is for congressional leaders to rewrite the reform bills fast to please pro-Biden moderates and Black incumbents—and then to cram the modified bills through the House and Senate. That would require cajoling and appeasing pro-filibuster Senate Democrats such as Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, which in turn implies disappointing activist Democrats outside Congress.

Failing that, the second approach requires Democrats to engage in a radical rethinking of their reaction to voter suppression in Republican states. Remember, they still have some federal laws on their side. The U.S. Supreme Court weakened the Voting Rights Act in 2013, but it did not kill it. The Obama administration’s Justice Department won voting-rights cases in North Carolina before the 2016 election. Taking decisive action to fill the 80-odd federal judicial vacancies with pro-voting judges followed by turbocharging enforcement efforts at the Department of Justice may seem only second-best compared with new legislation. But if new legislation cannot be enacted, then second-best will have to do.

And maybe executive and judicial action need not be so second-best as all that. Federal civil-rights action can deter states even before its final adjudication. Republican state politicians may be ruthless in their pursuit of partisan advantage, but they are not the only power centers in their states. As the battle over voting rights in Georgia demonstrated, business interests can be mobilized against overt racial discrimination.

Public stands Cisco Systems, Coca Cola, Delta Airlines, and Major League Baseball took against the GOP putsch in Georgia did not stop the election suppression legislation, but may have “altered the incentives of business elites in other states contemplating a Georgia path.”

During the Obama-era health care debates, progressives wanting universal health care or at least a public option sneered at centrists such as Rep. Jim Clyburn of South Carolina who were prepared to compromise with Republicans to get “half a loaf.” Frum’s suggestion that pissing off Democratic activists by postponing their wish list until Democrats have passed legislation to save democracy may not be betrayal so much as triage. Sometimes bad choices are the only ones available. That’s not betrayal, that’s life.

But Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema need to wake up and smell the authoritarianism. The insitution they wish to preserve won’t be helped if their blindness helps Republicans in completing their project to demolish the republic.

New polling from PRRI, which is not a political polling outfit (they poll religious attitudes) will make your skin crawl. The cult is a real cult:

Nearly a quarter of Republicans say they believe that the US government, media, and financial sector are controlled by a group of Satan-worshipping pedophiles who run a global child sex trafficking operation, according to new polling from the non-partisan Public Religion Research Institute. 

This belief is a core tenet of the far-right QAnon conspiracy theory, which continues to dominate far-right thinking months after former President Donald Trump left office. An even larger share of Republicans — 28% — believe in two other tenets of QAnon: that a coming “storm” will oust powerful elites and restore the country’s rightful leaders, and that “patriots” may have to use violence to save the US. 

Overall, between 15 and 20% of Americans say they completely or mostly agree with the three tenets of QAnon. The polling found that a host of factors, including political orientation, news consumption, religious beliefs, and socioeconomic and demographic profile, correlate with belief in the conspiracy theory. Republicans are significantly more likely than Independents and Democrats to believe in QAnon. 

Right-wing news consumption is the strongest predictor of belief in QAnon. Those who say they trust far-right media the most are nearly nine times more likely to believe in QAnon than those who most trust broadcast networks including ABC, CBS, and NBC.

Certain groups of Christians are also much more likely to believe in QAnon. Hispanic Catholics and Hispanic Protestants are almost three times as likely as non-religious Americans to believe in the conspiracy theory. White Catholics, evangelical Protestants, and mainline Protestants are about twice as likely as to subscribe to QAnon.

About a quarter of white evangelical Protestants believe in all three tenets of QAnon, while 24% of Hispanic Protestants believe in the Satan-worshiping cabal, 29% believe in the coming storm, and 12% believe Americans might have to resort to violence. 

Just over 20% of white evangelical Protestants, Hispanic Protestants, and Mormons believe in QAnon. Jewish Americans and Americans who don’t associate with a religion are the least likely to believe in QAnon. 

QAnon believers are also much more likely than other Americans to believe in various other conspiracy theories. Nearly three-quarters of QAnon believers also believe that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from Trump.

Overall, 29% of Americans believe Trump’s lie that the election was stolen. 

I guess I’m not super surprised that a lot of fundamentalist religious types might buy into conspiracy theories. They are accustomed to not interrogating their beliefs. And there are a lot of these people in our polity. And they are the deluded tails wagging the GOP dog these days.

It’s what this 28% believes that freaks me out:

” a coming “storm” will oust powerful elites and restore the country’s rightful leaders, and that ‘patriots’ may have to use violence to save the US.” 

That number represents tens of millions of gun-toting Trump cult extremists.

It’s one thing to try to sabotage another country’s election in order to install your preferred useful idiot. It’s not a nice thing, especially when your own country’s politicians welcome the help, but it’s not unprecedented by any means.

This, on the other hand, is just evil:

A network of Russian marketing companies known for selling dubious nutritional supplements and pushing malware is behind a disinformation campaign to denigrate Western coronavirus vaccines, according to a new RFE/RL investigation.

The revelations, which lead to a Moscow-based businesswoman active in pro-Kremlin political circles, add new insight into the campaign that targeted social media influencers in France and Germany, among other countries, and reportedly attracted the attention of French intelligence agencies.

The woman, Yulia Serebryanskaya, is a veteran of political campaigns and event planning for the ruling United Russia party, and briefly ran as an independent for election in the Moscow city elections in 2019.

She also heads an organization called Russian Initiative, which describes itself as a “worldwide union of Russian speakers” that “helps people carry on our culture and adequately represent our traditions, our social achievements, rather than tolerate a distorted idea of the Motherland, wherever they are.”

The disinformation campaign involving marketing companies adds a new dimension to Russia’s murky, under-the-radar efforts to promote its own COVID-19 vaccines — in particular the Sputnik V vaccine backed by the country’s sovereign wealth fund, the Russia Direct Investment Fund.

Known as RDIF, the fund has aggressively promoted Sputnik V, extolling, and at times exaggerating, its benefits, while also openly criticizing Western vaccines such as Pfizer/BioNTech, AstraZeneca, and Moderna, and amplifying negative scientific results.

There is no indication that RDIF is linked to the marketing campaign that began to appear in recent weeks, targeting social media influencers in France and possibly elsewhere.

A French investigative news site called Fact & Furious, along with other outlets including The Wall Street Journal, the Associated Press, and The Guardian, reported that French bloggers had received e-mails from a person claiming to work for a marketing firm called Fazze.

The e-mails reportedly offered to pay the bloggers to produce videos on YouTube, Instagram, and other platforms criticizing the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine in particular.

Leo Grasset, a French science blogger whose YouTube account has 1.2 million subscribers, reported he had been contacted, and posted screenshots of some of the e-mails to his Twitter account.

This is so grotesque. They are actually trying to kill people. I have to assume they got the idea from the American right …

I tweeted this last night:

I am evidently not alone. This interview with David Faris by Sean Illing at Vox does a great job explaining the stakes:

The direction of the GOP poses an enormous challenge for Democrats: How do you deal with an opposition party that is strategically committed to undermining core democratic institutions? And, more urgently, what are the consequences of not reforming those institutions before they’ve been dismantled?

As it stands, Democrats and progressive activists for democratic reform have coalesced around HR 1, a bill passed by House Democrats that would, among other things, end partisan gerrymandering and create a national system for automatic voter registration. But the prospects of HR 1 becoming law are slim, mostly because key Democratic senators like Joe Manchin (WV) and Kyrsten Sinema (AZ) won’t break the filibuster to pass it.

Back in 2018, I spoke with Roosevelt University political scientist David Faris about his book It’s Time to Fight Dirty. His argument then was that Democrats had to play constitutional hardball and basically do whatever was necessary to win.

The situation today is even more dire than it was in 2018. “I’m not sure people appreciate how much danger we are in,” Faris wrote in a recent Twitter thread. “If Republicans succeed [in rigging the rules to take the presidency in 2024], they will crack this country in half.”

I reached out to Faris again to talk about what the options are if Democrats fail to pass democracy reform in the Senate — hint: there aren’t many — and if he thinks the Democrats are sleepwalking into a serious political crisis if they don’t find a way to pass major democratic reforms in the next year or two.

A lightly edited transcript of our conversation follows.

Illing: You said we were “at a very dangerous moment in American history” back in 2018. I have to say, the situation seems worse now. Trump is gone, but over the last year or so the Republican Party has taken an explicit turn against democracy itself. So what’s your current level of concern?

Faris: My current level of concern is exploring countries to move to after 2024. I’m deeply concerned about the direction that the Republican Party has taken, especially over the last year or so. Things were bad in 2018, but the basic problem in 2018 was that we had structural factors working against the Democrats and you had a Republican Party that was fundamentally trying to keep people from voting.

The most destructive thing that Trump did on his way out the door was he took the Republicans’ waning commitment to democracy and he weaponized it, and he made it much worse to the point where I think that a good deal of rank-and-file Republican voters simply don’t believe that Democrats can win a legitimate election. And if Democrats do win an election, it has to be fraudulent.

So 2020 felt like a test run. The plot to overturn the 2020 election never had a real chance of working without some external intervention like a military coup or something like that, which I never thought was particularly likely. But the institutional path that they pursued to steal the election failed because they didn’t control Congress and they didn’t control the right governorships in the right places.

So I worry complacency has set in on the Democratic side and people are lulled into thinking things are normal and fine just because Biden’s approval ratings are good.

Illing: 2020 was a “test run” for what, exactly?

Faris: It was a test run for a way to overturn an election with the veneer of legality. You have to give Trump and Republicans some kind of dark credit for figuring out that this is really conceivable. I think they now know that, even though it would cause a court battle and possibly a civil war, that if they can’t win by suppressing the vote and the election is close enough, they can do this if they control enough state legislatures and the Congress.

If Democrats don’t make some changes to our election laws and if they lose some races that they really need to win in 2022 and 2024, then we’re in real trouble.“When people think of democracy dying, they think of some very dramatic event like Trump riding down Pennsylvania Avenue in a tank or something. That’s not the reality here.”

Illing: I’m not naive about what’s possible here, but I do want to mention a tricky dynamic. Some — not all, but some — of the Republican support for the election shenanigans was likely performative, right? The Republican base is essentially a personality cult, and Republican politicians know this. They had virtually no chance of actually overturning the 2020 election, but it was politically beneficial to play along. If they knew there was a real chance at succeeding, that would be a different calculation because surely some of them understand how cataclysmic that would be.

Again, to be super clear here: I’m not saying they wouldn’t do it. Some of these Republicans seem totally down the rabbit hole, and some of them are behaving like method actors who are just completely lost in their characters. But I really do wonder how the calculus would change for them if they absolutely knew their vote would overturn an election.

Faris: That’s what I thought in the first few weeks after the election when the people in Congress would go on background to reporters and be like, “We just got to let them vent a little bit,” or that “Trump is like a toddler and we just have to let him work his emotions out in public.” But if it was really the case that most of them didn’t really believe it or wouldn’t go along with it, then I don’t think it ever could have gotten to the point where well over 100 members of Congress formally objected to the election results.

Illing: You were urging Democrats in 2018 to pass the sorts of reforms that are still on the table today, like packing the courts or granting statehood to DC and Puerto Rico. Are we beyond that now?

Faris: What needs to be done has gotten more complex. The structural problems are even worse than I anticipated. I also didn’t fully anticipate the unapologetically authoritarian turn in Republican politics. But the fixes are still there. You have to abolish the filibuster in the Senate, you have to mandate national nonpartisan redistricting, you have to make voting easier, and you have to outlaw some of these Republican voter suppression tactics.

Illing: I’ve had conversations with some Democrats and when these ideas about nuking the filibuster or court-packing or granting statehood to DC and Puerto Rico come up, the argument is often that it’s a nonstarter because Joe Manchin or Kyrsten Sinema simply won’t do it. What’s wrong with that thinking?

Faris: Certainly the laws that you can pass are contingent on getting the most moderate member of your caucus on board. If Joe Manchin (D-WV) says, “I won’t do $15 minimum wage, I’ll do $12.” Then you’re stuck with $12 or you get nothing. And so that’s a reality.

But I think the problem with this analysis is the assumption that Manchin is an ideological roadblock for progressivism, where he seems to me more of a procedural roadblock to the constitutional hardball that needs to get played here. I mean, he voted for the Covid-19 relief bill, and that was one of the most left-wing things I’ve ever seen come out of Congress. So I don’t actually think that Manchin is that far from the center of the caucus in terms of policy.

Where Manchin seems to be very far away from what House Democrats want to do is on the democracy reform stuff. It’s maddening because nothing that Manchin wants to do policy-wise can get done without abolishing the filibuster. Democrats are not going to have a majority after next year if they don’t do some of these things now. So it’s a mistake to assume Manchin can’t be moved. That’s the job of leadership. That’s Joe Biden’s job. That’s Chuck Schumer’s job.“The most destructive thing that Trump did on his way out the door was he took the Republicans’ waning commitment to democracy and he weaponized it”

Illing: Let’s just say that Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, for whatever reason, refuse to respond to the realities of the moment — then what?

Faris: It’s bleak. I don’t know what else to say.

Democrats have to get extremely lucky next year. They either need to luck into the most favorable environment for the president’s party that we haven’t ever had for a midterm election or … I don’t know. There’s not much else they can do. None of these democracy reforms can get through on a reconciliation bill. If Democrats don’t pass nonpartisan redistricting, they’re going to be fighting at a huge disadvantage in the House. That’s the ballgame.

Progressive activists are going to pour a billion dollars into the Florida Senate race, and then [Marco] Rubio is going to win by 10 points. So if they don’t act, it’s very simple. The Democrats will have to fight on this extremely unfair playing field against a newly radicalized Republican Party that is going to pull out all the stops in terms of voter suppression to win these elections, on top of the situation where they’re making other changes to state laws that could allow them to mess around with results in other ways, like what we’re seeing in Georgia now.

There’s a very circular structure to this kind of proto-authoritarianism. You have anti-democratic practices at the state level that produce minority Republican governments that pass anti-democratic laws that end up in front of courts that are appointed by a minoritarian president and approved by a minoritarian Senate that will then rule to uphold these anti-democratic practices at the state level.

And so there is no path to beating some of these laws through the courts. The Supreme Court has already said it’s not going to touch gerrymandering. And so there’s nothing left except Congress using its constitutional authority under the elections clause to do some regulation to the elections. I just don’t see another way.

I’m not sure people appreciate how much danger we are in. This is coming. And if Republicans succeed, they will crack this country in half. It will be ugly and violent and I really would like to note live through that. We must act now. 9/— David Faris (@davidmfaris) May 11, 2021

Illing: It feels like we’re sleepwalking into a real crisis here, but it’s hard to convey the urgency because it’s not dramatic and it’s happening in slow motion and so much of life feels so normal. And yet our democratic system is losing any semblance of legitimacy and down that road is a range of possibilities no one wants to seriously consider. …

Faris: When people think of democracy dying, they think of some very dramatic event like Trump riding down Pennsylvania Avenue in a tank or something. That’s not the reality here.

Take the scenario where Republicans don’t have to steal the 2024 election. They just use their built-in advantages in which Biden wins the popular vote by three points but still loses the Electoral College. Democrats win the House vote but lose the House. Democrats win the Senate vote, but they lose the Senate.

That’s a situation where the citizens of the country fundamentally don’t have control of the agenda and they don’t have the ability to change the leadership. Those are two core features of democracy, and without them, you’re living in competitive authoritarianism. People are going to wake up the next day and go to work, and take care of their kids, and live their lives, and democracy will be gone. There really won’t be very much that we can do about it. Or there’s the worst-case scenario where the election is stolen and then we’re sleepwalking into a potentially catastrophic breakup of the country.

One thing I would ask Republicans: If it goes that way, what is it that you think you will have won? What are we even fighting about at this point? You got your corporate tax cuts. You got the Supreme Court. What is the purpose of this? Why do you want the power if it means alienating half the country and potentially breaking it up? I guess I just hope that there will be some introspection among party leaders when we’re approaching that precipice.

I’m not a big Churchill worshipper but what Faris says reminds me that he published a book of his speeches from 1932 on in 1938 and it was called “While England Slept.” We all know what happened.

I am very worried. The Democrats are held hostage by a couple of useful idiots, Kyrsten Sinema and Joe Manchin. And they are foolishly, foolishly assuming that the economic recovery and kitchen table issues will overwhelm all this authoritarian activity on the right.

I think it will be pure luck if we get out of this with our country intact. And there is every reason to believe that they will steal back the congress next year and that Donald Trump or one of his clones will be elected in 2024 to undo whatever Biden manages to get passed in the next few months (if he gets anything else passed.)

And they think he can do no wrong:

Senate Republicans see a special grand jury investigation into President Trump‘s business practices by Manhattan District Attorney Cy Vance Jr. as more evidence that Democrats want to keep Trump in the spotlight to drag them down in the midterm elections.

Republicans think the investigation will only further deepen partisan divisions over the former president and believe that even if he’s indicted, it won’t diminish him as a political force in 2022 and beyond. 

GOP lawmakers say a lot depends on what Vance is able to prove in court if he brings a criminal case against Trump, his business associates or the Trump Organization itself.   

But they say it’s too early to assess whether a criminal indictment against Trump — or even a conviction — will inflict any serious damage on Trump’s popularity among Republican-leaning white working-class voters who are the core of his base.

One Senate Republican who requested anonymity said Trump would have to be “in jail” to be neutralized as a political force.

“It’s one thing if someone’s in jail,” the source said, predicting that otherwise Trump will be able to paint any criminal investigations of his business practices as political retribution.

“This is a continuation of the greatest Witch Hunt in American history,’” Trump declared after The Washington Post reported that the Manhattan DA had convened a grand jury that is expected to consider an indictment of Trump or his associates.

A Quinnipiac University poll released Wednesday showed a large majority of Republicans want Trump to run again for the White House in 2024.

Sixty-six percent of Republicans surveyed said they want Trump to launch a third presidential campaign, while 25 percent of Republicans say he shouldn’t run.

Polling also shows a majority of Republicans have embraced Trump’s claims that the 2020 presidential election was tainted by widespread fraud, even though those claims were never substantiated in court and even influential Republicans such as Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) and Sen. Pat Toomey (R-Pa.) have characterized them as “conspiracy theories,” “lies” or “not substantiated.”  

Other Republicans say they doubt Trump’s grip on the GOP base will be weakened by any criminal case that comes from New York, a solidly Democratic state.

“I’ve heard so much about what’s going to happen to Trump I just tune it all out,” said Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.). “I don’t think anything coming out of New York is going to affect Trump very much.”

Graham said Democrats are going to try to keep relitigating Trump’s past actions right through the next election.

“We’ll try to make the election about their failed policies, they’ll I’m sure try to make it about President Trump,” he said.

“I think the 2022 election is going to be about the future, not the past. And I keep telling President Trump that,” he said.

Donald Trump is your past and your future, you dope. You can’t escape him or his problems and the Democrats have no choice but to run against him.

Republicans ran against Roosevelt, Johnson and Carter’s “failed policies” for decades after they were long gone. Trump is almost certainly running again and he’s going to be out there whining and moaning about the stolen election and inciting his cult followers to violence for the foreseeable future. Sorry, Lindsay. You can try to change the subject but your Dear Leader won’t let you. He knows what your voters want and they want that evil clown circus.

I learned many troubling things about the Secret Service from Carol Leonnig’s book and during her virtual book interview with Michael Krasny hosted by Book Passage (Video link) Leonnig makes it clear that politicized members of the Secret Service played an active role in spreading COVID.  Specifically Tony Ornato, who went from protecting Trump as a Secret Service agent to promoting Trump as his Deputy Chief of Staff in charge of the rallies.

Leonning explained on her book tour that Congress and the White House are “allergic” to investigating the Secret Service. But if we are to keep the current President and VP safe post January 6th. there needs to be an investigation to see who can be trusted.

I did some simple research and found out the Secret Service is under the Department of Homeland Security, The House committee that would investigate them is chaired by a Democrat, Bennie G. Thompson, so I wrote to see if they were planning on investigating the role senior members of agency played in spreading COVID, or in covering up for Trump’s campaign staff’s reckless disregard for the health of agents, officers and the general public.

We need to push for this. If we don’t, the committee will be pushed by the right on “the border crisis” and then all the hard work done revealing the problems will be covered up.  When I suggested an investigation my friends were quick to point out all the ways that Trump will “get away with it” Or ask “Why bother? We have a better chance of busting Trump for tax fraud.”  Because people died! When they get away with murder, they will keep doing it.

Here’s my letter.  If you would like to see an investigation happen you can help by asking the members on the committee. (They are listed below. I’d especially like to alert those in New Jersey where Trump’s Bedminster club is located that Leonnig said agents were told not to wear masks, in violation of CDC guidelines & state laws.

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Rep. Bennie G. Thompson, (D) MS
Chairman, House Committee on Homeland Security 

On Oct 5, 2020 you requested a briefing from the Secret Service agency on the current safeguards in place for Secret Service employees to be kept safe from coronavirus-related threats–including those from the President.
(CHAIRMAN THOMPSON STATEMENT ON TRUMP’S DISREGARD FOR HEALTH OF PUBLIC, SECRET SERVICE)

1) What was the response to your request? Was it satisfactory?

2) As the Chairman of the group that oversees the agency, will you convene a hearing to investigate it based on the reporting from Carol Leonnig’s recent book Zero Fail?

3) I’m specifically concerned about the role played by Tony Ornato while he was Trump’s Deputy Chief of Staff for Operations during the COVID rallies. Ornato has returned to the Secret Service in a training capacity, so he is under the purview of your committee for oversight.

Carol Leonnig’s reporting has shown over 300 agents were infected or taken off the line because of exposure to co-workers with COVID. (Video link) This weakened the ability of the agency to do its job.

4) Leonnig said that there is definitive proof that the Tulsa rally led to a 4-fold spike in COVID cases in the community.  (Video link)

Is your committee looking into whose actions led to this unnecessary illness and loss of life following that event and others in multiple states?

8) If there is no investigation planned by your committee, are you aware of other committees that are looking into the role of the Secret Service in spreading COVID nationwide?

LLAP,

Spocko

Rep. Tom Malinowski, (D) NJ 7th District Trump’s Bedminster Golf Club is located in Malinowski’s district @RepMalinowski

I got quite a bit of blowback when I said last year that if Trump lost he would be running the party from Mar a lago as the president in exile. Welp:

As candidates begin to enter races for the 2022 mid-term elections, more than 8 in 10 Republicans (85 percent) say they would prefer to see candidates running for elected office that mostly agree with Donald Trump, according to a Quinnipiac (KWIN-uh-pea-ack) University national poll of adults released today. Overall, a majority of Americans (53 – 39 percent) say they would prefer to see candidates running for elected office that mostly disagree with Trump.

Asked whether they would like to see Trump run for president in 2024, Republicans say 66 – 30 percent they would. Overall, two-thirds of Americans (66 – 30 percent) say they do not want to see him run.

Six months after the 2020 presidential election, two-thirds of Republicans (66 – 25 percent) say they think that Joe Biden’s victory was not legitimate. Overall, Americans say 64 – 29 percent that Biden’s victory was legitimate. Among registered voters, it’s also 64 – 29 percent, which is fairly similar to polls taken in December 2020 and January 2021.

“The numbers fly in the face of any predictions that Donald Trump’s political future is in decline. By a substantial majority, Republicans: (1) believe the election was stolen from him, (2) want Trump to run again, and (3), if they can’t vote for Trump, prefer someone who agrees with him,”

said Quinnipiac University Polling Analyst Tim Malloy.

I would love to know what it is they want their politicians to agree with? That Trump is the most persecuted billionaire in human history and it’s so unfair because he’s so very, very good? That he is above the law? That he is allowed to grab women by the pussy? That Vladimir Putin is a good guy? That the press should be locked up the way the Belarusian dictator locks up his critics? That dissidents should be sent to the gulag? What?

They don’t really give a damn about his trade war or even taxes since most of them just take the standard deduction like everyone else. They care about his disgusting, racist, grotesque, trolling of all the people they hate.

Us.

The 1994 Gingrich Revolution election left Democrats here in shock. The New York Times reported, “In the North Carolina House of Representatives, a 78-to-42 Democratic edge was transformed into a 67-to-53 majority for the Republicans.” Similar flips occured across the country. A decade later, Democrats of that era were still flinching. After redistricting post-2010, they are still flinching today. For some, the glory days of Jim Hunt never ended. They look backwards and not forwards.

One might call it a rut. Someone less generous might think it the learned helplessness of an abused spouse. Reflexive caution will not serve Democrats well in 2022, wrote Evan Scrimshaw at Substack as he lamented Manchester United’s lose last night on penalty kicks. Scrimshaw ascribes Man U. ‘s loss in the Europa League Final to the team’s “quixotic loyalty” to a keeper past his prime. Stuck-in-the-past politics could blow a winnable midterm for Democrats as well:

The Chicago Tribune tracked Presidential and Vice Presidential campaign stops in 2020, and Biden/Harris made 5 stops in Ohio and 13 in Florida – states with no Senate race or winnable down ballot priorities, and in the case of Ohio, no case for being the tipping point – while only going to North Carolina 7 times, Georgia 4 times, Iowa only once, and Maine a grand total of *checks notes* 0 times. (The Ohio count does not include the Presidential debate held there.) If you broaden it out to include former President Obama, who camped out the final weekend in Miami, you see a pattern – of a party not knowing where the battleground was, and of making strategically extremely suboptimal decisions.

The focus on Ohio and Florida were examples of the party not knowing what they were doing, but the focus on Ohio – remember, a final Monday visit was extended there – is the real kicker. Why did they go to Ohio? Because that’s where you go in a Presidential election, because it’s a state that matters. The fact that Ohio was solely a vanity project didn’t matter to the Biden camp, because there were no particularly good House targets there, no Senate seat, no chance to flip a State House or State Senate, no chance of it being a tipping point state. They went there out of instinct, out of reflex, out of comfort. They prioritized Ohio and Florida, both states which, even as Florida had a plausible-based-on-2016 case to being a path to 270, were trending right and being less essential for the Electoral College, and ignored Georgia and Arizona, where the ticket went 4 times each. Maine and Iowa, key Senate targets, were ignored, and even North Carolina, which had the right combination of Senate seat and tipping point potential, was visited about half as frequently as Florida.

You can see the same instincts now, as people talk about how Democrats need to make sure they are bipartisan and decent, while the GOP keep a member with an addiction to bad Holocaust comparisons in their caucus. The instincts to Clinton or Obama era moderation are being suppressed so far, but the instincts are still there, and you see it across politics. Would Val Demings make a good Senator? I mean, she’d be a damn sight better than Marco, which isn’t saying much, but she also isn’t going to be a Senator, I’m sorry to say. And yet, there are many in Democratic politics rushing to promote her campaign and donate to her cause. The rush to make Tim Ryan a national star after his House speech on the need for a Commission into January 6th feels like the same performative bullshit that so many of us did for Jaime Harrison in South Carolina last year, and the cynic – and the metric ton of whiskey – in me says it probably ends the same. The questions about Iowa or Missouri could decide the majority (they won’t), the freakouts about whether Biden either giving up too much in an infrastructure deal with the GOP or not getting a deal at all with the GOP might hurt him in 2022 (it won’t), they all feel very old and stuck in the past. They feel of a different age, and they are. The problem is, nobody seems to get it.

What party regulars think is a winning formula based on the past and what average voters do in the present are two different things. If Democrats “listen to the old hands, if they play the game the old way, if they fight the last war – then they will leave their voters feeling the way Manchester United left me, and millions of others, feeling tonight – with the sinking feeling that the only reason we lost was cowardice and devotion to the past,” Scrimshaw wrote.

One sees it everywhere: a reluctance to embrace the unfamiliar new because it is new and unfamiliar. Cautious decisions to forgo canvassing even at a COVID-appropriate distance last year cost Democrats races they might have squeaked out. I can’t help but worry that the need to play it safe could torpedo what one friend believes could be a 2022 blowout election in Democrats’ favor. Conventional wisdom may no longer apply. If it ever did.