“Republicans have been negotiating in bipartisan good faith to meet the real infrastructure needs of our nation. The President cannot let congressional Democrats hold a bipartisan bill hostage over a separate and partisan process.”
“Unless Leader Schumer and Speaker Pelosi walk-back their threats that they will refuse to send the president a bipartisan infrastructure bill unless they also separately pass trillions of dollars for unrelated tax hikes, wasteful spending, and Green New Deal socialism, then President Biden’s walk-back of his veto threat would be a hollow gesture.”
No, no, no. You don’t get to decide what Pelosi and Schumer say to their own members which is what this is all about.
Mitch will never go along with any of this, that’s a given. He is trying to blow the whole thing up because that’s what he does. The real question is whether there were ever 10 Republicans on board with this infrastructure plan and if there ever will be. In the end, in my view it’s always been about whether Joe Manchin will hold the line and make it clear he’ll pass the “bipartisan” bill through reconciliation if the Republicans don’t want a piece of it. That’s it. And I think Mitch knows it.
The Reconciliation piece of it has nothing to do with him and isn’t really his business.
Slate’s Fred Kaplan adds a coda to the mic Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Miley dropped on Florida Reps. Matt Gaetz and Michael Waltz last week over understanding social forces in the country they defend.
Kaplan notes the right-wing hysteria over critical race theory and recalls that West Point has had a social science department since the beginning of the Cold War. Long before “woke” became a slur on the right, Maj. Isaiah Wilson taught a course on gender, class, and sexuality (1999). “The professor teaching the course now, a civilian named Rachel Yon,” Kaplan writes, “took it over from Wilson in 2012—again, predating the kerfuffle over wokeness and CRT.” That is, she was “not a fashionable hire.”
The military nonetheless continues to be a place where gender and race issues persist, including with the disturbing presence of white-supremacist militia members in the ranks.
Milley was burned once by Trumpism when he accompanied Donald Trump out to Lafayette Square last summer immdiately after the police used tear-gas to clear it for Trump’s bible-holding photo-od. Milley “soon apologized for his presence and gradually began moving away from Trump’s orbit, taking his duties as an independent military adviser more properly.” Even more reason he has less tolerance now for political attacks from Trumpist congressmen.
That brings us to Secretary Austin and to Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who were both slammed by congressional Republicans at a House Armed Services Committee hearing last week. Florida Reps. Matt Gaetz and Michael Waltz, the latter a former Army Green Beret, led the charge, citing cadets and their parents who were disturbed by the stand-down to discuss extremism and the divisiveness of classes on race.
“Thanks for your anecdotal input,” Austin replied. “I have gotten 10 times that amount of input, 50 times that amount of input, on the other side that has said, ‘Hey, we’re glad to have had the ability to have a conversation with ourselves and with our leadership.’”
Milley then gave his now-viral rebuttal:
Wow! This is a must watch.
Asked about Critical Race Theory, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Mark Milley delivers an answer you need to watch.
“I’m white, and I want to understand white rage, why they attacked this building?” pic.twitter.com/ISUQNDQV3v
Neither Austin nor Milley care to deal with this political crap, says Kaplan:
Both have commanded troops in battle. (Austin is a retired four-star Army general.) Milley graduated from Princeton and holds an M.A. in international relations from Columbia, but, a retired officer who knows him told me, “he likes to portray himself as a guy who got to Princeton by being a hockey player and proceeded to be part of the bottom half of the class that helped the top half achieve what they did.” Still, they see that race and gender are not merely social issues but national-security issues and that dealing with these thorny problems is part of their jobs.
The Princeton quip gave me a chuckle. It’s even more reason that Milley showed little patience with an unprincipled frat boy like Gaetz.
But that’s all it took for flag-wrapped pseudo-patriots to call for defunding the military they supported unreservedly before joining the Trump cult. I keep saying, their commitment to this country is a mile wide and an inch deep. They are better at boasting about principles than sticking to them.
Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus R. Vance Jr. (D) and New York Attorney General Letitia James (D) have been cooperating on the prospective Trump crime family prosecution. First stop in the two-year investigation appears to be the Trump Organization itself (Washington Post):
Prosecutors in New York have given former president Donald Trump’s attorneys a deadline of Monday afternoon to make any final arguments as to why the Trump Organization should not face criminal charges over its financial dealings, according to two people familiar with the matter.
That deadline is a strong signal that Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus R. Vance Jr. (D) and New York Attorney General Letitia James (D) — now working together, after each has spent more than two years investigating Trump’s business — are considering criminal charges against the company as an entity.
Trump attorneys met virtually with prosecutors on Thursday to try talking the city and state out of filing charges.
And what of Allen Weisselberg?
People familiar with the probe confirmed to The Washington Post that prosecutors were looking at charging the Trump Organization as an entity, as well as Trump Organization chief financial officer Allen Weisselberg, following Weisselberg’s refusal to assist in the investigation.
[Trump attorney Ronald] Fischetti, who took part in the Thursday meeting, said Friday that prosecutors are going forward with a case against the company because Weisselberg wasn’t “cooperating and saying what they want him to say” with respect to whether Trump had personal knowledge about his CFO’s alleged use of cars, apartments and other compensation that prosecutors think may not have been reported properly to tax authorities, according to people with knowledge of the case.
“They’re looking at charging the corporation or corporations tied to tax charges,” Fischetti said Friday. “Donald Trump is not being indicted.”
He said that last part for his boss to hear.
Former Trump Organization vice president Barbara Res told CNN over the weekend Trump “deserves to go to jail” for his business practices:
“As far as Trump is concerned, if they were to get evidence against Trump it would be to the extent that nothing major has ever happened to my knowledge…. that he doesn’t know about,” Barbara Res told CNN’s, Jim Acosta.
She added that she knows Trump and she knows that “he’s very deliberate, very measured, and very vengeful, and he doesn’t follow the rules. He never did follow the rules.”
One month ago, gambling sites reported the betting odds were even that Trump gets indicted in 2021.
The sooner, the better. Trump has taken his white grievance tour back on the road. The fascist right is emboldened, even if suspended. Former attorney general Bill Barr is painting himself as principled when from his Senate confirmation hearings it was clear he was as slippery as the XL pipeline; then he covered for Trump with his Mueller report summary. New York state, at least, has suspended Rudy Giuliani’s law license. The quicker the hammer comes down on the rest, the quicker the country will begin to regain a sense that the law applies to everyone.
By lunchtime, the representatives from the recruiting agency Express Employment Professionals decided to pack up and leave the job fair in the St. Louis suburb of Maryland Heights. Hardly anyone had shown up.
“We were hoping we would see prepandemic levels,” said Courtney Boyle, general manager of Express. After all, Missouri had just cut off federal unemployment benefits.
Business owners had complained that the assistance, as Gov. Mike Parson put it, “incentivized people to stay out of the work force.” He made Missouri one of the first four states to halt the federal aid; a total of 26 have said they will do so by next month. But in the St. Louis metropolitan area, where the jobless rate was 4.2 percent in May, those who expected the June 12 termination would unleash a flood of job seekers were disappointed.
Work-force development officials said they had seen virtually no uptick in applicants since the governor’s announcement, which ended a $300 weekly supplement to other benefits. And the online job site Indeed found that in states that have abandoned the federal benefits, clicks on job postings were below the national average.
Here are some words from one of the 50 GOP ostriches who refused to vote for the Bipartisan January 6th Commission:
"Here in the US, there's a growing recognition that this is a bit like WWF — that it's entertaining, but it's not real…I think people recognize it's a lot of show & bombast, but it's going nowhere. The election is over. It was fair" — Romney on Trump's lies about the election pic.twitter.com/S277i7SN6O
I’m watching CNN’s John Avlon patting Romney on the back for these comments as if he’s saying something truly brave.
He is not. Yes, this is like WWF (some of us have been pointing this out since 2015) and well over 50%of the country have known this from the beginning. But is there a “growing recognition” anywhere on the right that this is true?
Uhm. No. The cult is alive and well. Not even the unnecessary deaths of over half a million people changed it. Here are some poll results from the middle of this month:
Three quarters of Republican voters support state efforts to reexamine votes from last fall’s presidential election and over half believe the audits will change the outcome of the election, a poll published Wednesday suggests, after a previous survey found 3 in 10 Republicans believe a conspiracy theory that Trump could be “reinstated” this year as conservatives across the country lobby for audits in attempts to overturn the election results.
74% of Republican voters support state efforts to review the 2020 presidential election and 51% expected a change in outcome, according to a Politico/Morning Consult poll of 1,994 registered voters conducted Jun. 11-13.
The findings complement polling last week indicating 3 in 10Republican voters buy into claims former President Trump will somehow be reinstated before the year is out, as well as other polling suggesting a persistent and widespread belief in baseless claims of electoral fraud.
Trump and his allies have consistently refused to acknowledge the legitimacy of November’s 2020 election, stirring up groundless claims of electoral fraud before voting was even underway. Though no evidence of fraud has ever been produced and volley after volley of election lawsuits have failed, Republican legislators in numerous states have nurtured and seized upon these fears to justify introducing more restrictive voting legislation. Trump’s latest obsession in pushing this conspiracy is ballot audits—even in places where past audits have found no evidence of fraud—which he believes could potentially prove his winning of the election.
Political scientist Rachel Bitecofer made a name for herself as an election analyst who saw the 2018 blue wave coming long before anyone else. On July 1 of that year, she presciently predicted a 42-seat gain for Democrats — a near-perfect call, when others still envisioned smaller gains. At the same time, she warned that the landscape would be very difficult for Democrats in 2022, based on the same understanding of negative partisanship and the ways the electorate has changed. The 2018 midterms were a referendum on Donald Trump’s presidency more than it was about individual candidates and individual races, she argued, foreseeing that aggrieved Republicans would be similarly motivated in 2022.
She believes that Democrats have not learned that lesson. So they are once again counting on “kitchen table issues” trumping the monumentally, overwhelmingly aggrieved party of The Big Lie. Not bloody likely.
So:
[R]ather than fruitlessly try to change their thinking, Bitecofer has decided to go around them, leaving the academic world and creating her own super PAC — Strike PAC — to do the kind of messaging her research suggests is key to winning elections with today’s electorate. There are no big-money donors involved. She’s counting on grassroots support to deliver a grassroots message. The first batch of ads she’s released paint a clear picture of the threat to democracy the Republican Party now presents, and an equally clear picture of how Democrats should respond.
Salon spoke with Bitecofer about her PAC, this new wave of advertising and the thinking behind them — and of course how she sees next year’s critical midterm elections. This interview has been edited, as usual, for clarity and length.
On “Morning Joe,” you said your new PAC “is about bringing a brand offensive against the whole Republican Party. It’s not just about Donald Trump, but it definitely includes him.” Three things struck me about that. First, that seemed to be exemplified by your ad, “Fuse.” Tell me about that one. Why is it shaped the way it is, and why now?
All four of our launch-packet ads are targeted toward different aspects of this branding offensive. “Fuse” is geared towards a national audience. In political advertising, the conventional two types are what we call “persuasion” — which is trying to get voters who don’t have a firm vote to come over and vote for you — and the other type is “mobilization,” making sure your core voters will show up.
What Strike PAC is doing is not within those two buckets. It certainly has overlap — it’s performing both persuasion and mobilization. But what it’s arguing is, “Look, the GOP doesn’t really run anything except a marketing/branding op and it’s predominantly a branding offensive against the left.” They don’t spend a lot of time on their own brand, but they do spend a lot of time in their messaging on discounting, discrediting and debasing our brand. That will go from everything from economics to the “woke” war, so it’s always about showing us as unattractively to voters as possible. We’ve never answered that.
Democrats, up until now, have been told by their consultants, “Don’t worry about it,” or “Don’t push back on ‘socialism’ or ‘defund the police.'” To their credit, candidates are starting to understand when somebody is lobbing missiles at you, you can’t just stand there and pretend it’s not hitting. They are starting to try to put forward a response. But the it’s a defensive mechanism, it’s not offensive. The GOP is saying, “We’re going to have a debate about these topics,” and when you enter into that field, you are basically on the defense the whole time because you’re having a conversation that’s been structured by the opposition party.
So that’s what “Fuse” is trying to change?
It’s flipping that GOP tactic over to our side. It’s attacking the Republicans to make a conversation about their anti-democratic power grab, that goes back from contesting the results of 2020, an armed insurrection, Trump actually trying to use the Justice Department to stage a coup, and the Republican Party’s wholesale embrace of that.
It’s not like Trump did these things and the Republican Party stood against him. They have slowly but surely normalized this anti-democratic behavior. In fact, they have doubled down on it by going into these state legislative sessions trying to restrict voter access for progressive parts of the electorate, even going so far as to put provisions that take the certification process away from nonpartisan actors and into their partisan hands.
That conversation is something you might see if you’re me or you, if you’re very political, but for the broader electorate it’s happening completely invisibly. There’s very little media coverage — certainly not saturation coverage like you would see for Clinton’s emails — about this power grab, what that means for democracy and what it means for Democrats in the next cycle.
So “Fuse” is about fixing that problem, putting the stakes of 2022 in clear-eyed focus for the other half of the electorate. Because the Republican electorate has been told now for a while that the other side is coming after democracy, right? So it’s their belief in a Democratic Party that has been articulated by the GOP. It’s completely out of whack of reality, but Republican voters believe that Democrats are trying to “destroy democracy,” and what they’re doing is saving it. It’s not like they don’t have a motivation. So we really need this side of the electorate to realize that this meta-conversation about American democracy is on the ballot in 2022.
To me, “bringing a brand offensive” pretty much describes how Republicans have run the vast majority of their national campaigns at least since Ronald Reagan, if not Richard Nixon. Democrats have virtually never done so—not even when Trump first ran in 2016. Why do you think that is?
That’s exactly right. You could believe it’s a problem that began when polarization really began to take off in the mid-2000s when asymmetry appears, and to some extent that’s true, because Republicans developed this technique of making every election a referendum on the Democratic brand. But you’re right, it does have its roots back in the 80s.
That said, we really do see a distinct version of the modern GOP that has its origins in that 2004 Bush re-election campaign with Karl Rove, to use the gay marriage issues to turn out on their side, but also to talk about politics — including Senate and House races that might have otherwise been more local — with the intention of making them about the national party, about the national political climate and the national brand. That really starts to solidify with the 2010 midterms. They made it a referendum on Obamacare and Nancy Pelosi, and tied every candidate to that as tightly as they could. So every candidate really didn’t stand for re-election on their own performance in office or voting record, things that people think traditionally mattered. Instead, it was all about whether they were a Democrat.
We never made that adjustment at all. In fact, it seems like we don’t even really recognize how distinctly different voter behavior in the two coalitions are and how hyper-partisanship has changed things. Whether or not we want that change, it’s there, right? We’ve been grasping for this old-school model of electioneering, it’s like when Sega was replaced by Nintendo.
The GOP is running this very strategic, very intentional branding campaign, and we’re still talking about politics in terms of policies and things like that. We’re arguing that we are making a huge mistake when we’re tinkering around in the branches of electioneering infrastructure on the left, because our real problem lies at that root level, where we are not engaged in a campaign technique that matches the moment.
That segues to the third thing I wanted to ask about. “Bringing a brand offensive” sounds like a logical outgrowth of your election analysis in terms of the hyper-polarization driven by negative partisan. So, how did the idea of Strike PAC develop out of your earlier work?
You could say it had its genesis on election night 2020. Around 7 o’clock it was clear that Biden was going to win the presidency — at least to me — with the Midwest swinging back to the Democrats. But it was also becoming increasingly apparent that Democrats had delivered a tremendous underperformance down-ballot. I understood exactly why those two things were, the most important factor being the asymmetry in terms of how they do politicking, how they do campaigns and elections at that messaging and strategic level.
The way that you would nationalize the 2020 campaign down-ballot is that instead of Biden running against Trump, the party should have run against Trump and the Republican brand. You don’t make it about one guy, you make it about the whole party embracing and covering for him and staying next to him. But you also make it about economics. Reaganomics has now got a 40-year track record, and it’s a total shitshow. It should be easy to eviscerate. In 2020, for example, Democrats could have made the economic argument for the HEROES Act. The HEROES Act was introduced in July and then blocked by Mitch McConnell in the Senate. The Democrats should have been from top to bottom, even at the state legislative level, hammering the Republicans for denying economic aid in a crisis. And that did not happen.
I also saw many things that I assumed would get fixed after 2016 go completely unaddressed. It was dramatically underwhelming in terms of what changed. And then there was suspension of field operations [by Democratic campaigns]. That was a huge mistake. Yes, I understand that, ethically, you do not want people knocking on doors in a pandemic. But when the opposition party is doing it and it is the only thing that really ever shows a measurable effect — at least if you’re doing it to mobilize people, not persuade them — then you have to find a way, right?
So I was watching that and I was deeply concerned. At that point I wasn’t even sure if Democrats would hold onto the House. It’s just unbelievable, they had the best fundamentals you could ever hope for in 2020. You’ve got a man who’s mismanaging this pandemic, completely incompetent. At that point his negligence had led to the death of hundreds of thousands of people and you don’t make that a central theme? Like, “Hey! These people can’t do government!” So I realized these things were not going to change unless I found a way to do it myself.
While “Fuse” exemplifies the idea of a brand offensive against the GOP, you have another ad that does that as well, “Hold the Republican Party Accountable,” which starts with Donald Trump saying, “Part of the problem is nobody wants to hurt each other anymore. You’ll never get back our country with weakness.” Tell me about this ad.
It’s not one that we necessarily would show in its entirety to target voters, because it’s a little long. But this ad is about trying to get people to understand that we seem to have two conversations in America. We have the right talking about how extreme and crazy the Democrats are. Then we have Democrats bitching about that, bitching about “woke” culture and self-inflicting. It’s like, the Republican Party makes a critique, and then Democrats jump in and start having that conversation too, just amplifying it.
We don’t have any conversation on this side about a party that literally is extreme, has an extremism problem which has been quantified throughout dozens of political science articles, and Democrats just assume, “Well everyone knows the Republican Party is extreme.”
Actually, the average person on the street, if they’re not one of the 10% of people like us and your readers, you ask them about the Republican Party and they are apt to say, “Low taxes, right?”
There’s no media ecosystem that’s focused on how crazy the Republican Party is. The assumption is that the mainstream press has a liberal bias, but left-wing topics are not centralized in the way that right-wing topics become. There’s no intensive conversation about what the Republican Party has been doing for the last five years as it has progressively fallen down the pathway towards fascism. So that ad is about telling that story and tying those disparate events into a cohesive story.
The interview goes on to talk about the campaign her PAC is running in Virginia which is quite interesting. Here’s the one about the California recall, closer to home for me:
You also have an ad about the California recall targeting Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom. How does that embody your strategy? And how does that contrast with the Democrats’ ineffectual response to the 2003 recall of Gray Davis?
Yes, exactly. You hear that the electorate is much more Democratic than it was in 2003 and that is verifiably true, OK? But that doesn’t mean that California isn’t still at risk of having a repeat of 2003. In the recall in 2003, the turnout was in the 30% range, and when you’re talking about only 30% of California, there’s a very motivated Republican Party versus a complacent Democratic one. Because Newsom will probably poll pretty decently and [folks will say] “Oh, this is in the bag. It doesn’t really matter. I’m not worried about it.”
We’re doing a couple things with this ad. Again, we’re doing the nationalization component that’s lacking in Democratic messaging, and is the bread and butter of the GOP. But it’s also innovating — I wanted to show an example of something that other people might want to copy, which is to make the frame of the recall not about Newsom. Because if it’s about Newsom, then you’re going to have this conversation about whether he shut down too long, or too little and blah blah blah. You’re just playing right into their hands. That’s the conversation they want to have.
Instead, you want to personalize the stakes of the recall to the electorate, so that they feel the connection, and you want to paint to them a picture: “It’s not about Newsom or the Democrats, it’s about you controlling California and turning it into a liberal wonderland. And they’re coming for it!” You want to make voters feel motivated about the recall, and also attacked. Their identity is being attacked. That’s how the Republicans would approach it. That’s how they defended Scott Walker, which is what I’m modeling this on.
Here’s another one of her ads with what she calls the “positive, values-driven firewall Democratic brand”
That ad in particular is again a movie-style ad. It’s aimed specifically at Democrats, but ultimately the same methodology will be adapted to go after young people, especially voters of color. Latinos are a huge persuasion target for conversion right now and even young Black voters, but younger white voters in particular. The GOP, in my opinion, still over-performs with white young people, people under age 30, relative to what the Republican platform, and their embrace of racism and fascism, should warrant. When you’ve got one party that is constantly taunting the Democrats — “They support Hamas, and they’re socialists, yada yada yada,” you want to create an image for those younger voters: “No, this is what the Democratic Party really is.”
That sounds logical to me. She’s certainly right that the GOP overperoms with young white people and frankly they overperform with people of color too.
And yes, it would be nice if Americans as whole truly understood how much GOP policies have failed them over the years. It’s insane that they think they are better on the economy. But that’s because Americans fetishize business success and wealthy corporations and individuals back Republicans for their own parochial reasons not for the general health of the economy as a whole.
Another aspect of your modernization strategy is “Undermining the Republican brand and areas of perceived dominance, like the economy.” You did this in an ad you showed on “Morning Joe” [at 9:25] comparing Democrats’ and Republicans’ record on the economy since 1933, on GDP growth, job creation and the stock market, using sports imagery from football, basketball and baseball to drive home the point that Democrats do much better on all these key indicators. The difference is stark, but Democrats never talk about it.
That’s exactly right. If you ask the average voter, the GOP often wins or at least breaks even on the question of which party is good for the economy, although the facts bear out a completely different story. But instead of making an affirmative case for ourselves, especially as we move through Reaganomics — and even by the early 2000s the failures of that economic philosophy were already legion — instead of running on that, saying “The GOP tried this thing and it totally destroyed our infrastructure, it destroyed our K-12 education system,” and going on what I’ve called a brand offensive, you see Democrats try to align themselves rhetorically with their opponents, saying “I’m a fiscal conservative.”
The economy tends to be the most salient issue, or second-most salient, every election cycle. So why would we concede on an issue that’s that important to so many people? Especially when we’re better at it? So that’s why we’re going after that, and the other sacred cows for the GOP, national security. I’m going to go after national security as well because the performance of the Republican Party over the last 20 years on foreign policy and national security is terrible.
It’s a long interview so click over to the read the rest. It’s all interesting. As I said, I’m no expert, but I do know that the standard approach of touting “kitchen table issues” is insufficient. We are dealing with a very sophisticated propaganda machine that dominates the political culture in such way that assuming “reality” (aka “real results”) can compete. I don’t know if her ideas will work better but they are a different approach. It’s worth considering.
Following up on my post yesterday about the brewing fight between Wisconsin GOP officials and Trump, local Charlie Sykes had this update. The RINOs are running as fast as they can.
It was a curious choice. Gableman had been a featured speaker at a post-election pro-Trump rally, where he echoed false election claims.
“I don’t think anyone here can think of anything more systematically unjust than a stolen election,” Gableman told a crowd at a pro-Trump rally staged Nov. 7 in a parking lot at American Serb Hall in Milwaukee.
But this was only the start of the campaign to appease the angry God King.
State Senator Chris Kapenga, one of the targets of Trump’s screed, wrote a fawning 2-page letter to the ex-president telling him (I’m not making this up) that he wore “Trump socks,” and planned to wear a “Trump/Pence mask” when he got on an airplane.
Kapenga explained: “”I figure, if the liberals are going to force me to wear a mask, I am going to make it as painful for them as possible.”
Our cringes cringed. But the cup of humiliation had not yet been drained. Some delegates presented a resolution calling for Vos’s resignation. Even though it was rejected, Trump doubled down on his election lie in a recorded video:
There was, of course, little or no pushback to the Lie from the state GOP — a reminder that despite occasional ineffectual gestures, Republicans have not yet exhausted their capacity for truckling and bootlicking.
Their capacity for genuflecting to Donald Trump is limitless. If he told them all they needed to drink a Hale-Bopp cocktail (the exit drink of the heaven’s Gate cult — phenobarb and vodka) they would do it.
Appearing on Fox News Sunday, Banks continued to push his talking points, insisting that the president was “being held hostage” by The Squad, a group of progressive lawmakers that includes Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) and Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN), among others.
After Banks asserted that Democrats have spent a year “stigmatizing” police and providing a “recipe that criminals in every city in America are liking,” Wallace confronted the congressman on his personal opposition to additional funding for local law enforcement agencies.
“Let me push back on that a little bit because in the program that he announced this week, the president said that the central part in his anti-crime package is the $350 billion in the American Rescue Plan, the COVID relief plan that was passed,” the Fox anchor said before airing Biden’s remarks.
“Congressman Banks, you voted against that package, against the $350 billion, just like every other Republican in the House and Senate, so can’t you make the argument that it’s you and the Republicans who are defunding the police?” Wallace added.
The Indiana lawmaker, meanwhile, attempted to fall back on his claims that The Squad’s rhetoric was to blame, only for Wallace to interrupt him before he could continue reciting his canned lines.
“No, no, sir, respectfully—wait, sir, respectfully, I heard you make that point but I’m asking you there’s $350 billion in this package the president says can be used for policing and let me put up some of the specific things that he said,” Wallace declared while Banks tried to object.
“Congressman Banks, let me finish and I promise I will give you a chance to answer,” the Fox News Sunday moderator continued. “The president is saying cities and states can use this money to hire more police officers, invest in new technologies and develop summer job training and recreation programs for young people. Respectfully, I’ve heard your point about the last year, but you and every other republican voted against this $350 billion.”
Banks, however, completely ignored Wallace’s point, instead repeating his argument that the main reason violent crime is on the rise is that progressives had “stigmatized one of the most honorable professions in America.”
Wallace had a point. I would just add that this didn’t show much respect for law and order either.
I have long wondered how the party that wants to drown the government in the bathtub, worships guns and fetishizes the idea that a population must be armed against he government came to be considered the party of “law and order.” I suppose it’s because so many cops are members of their coalition but that just means the cops are fools, which I would have hoped they’d have reassessed after January 6th.
The idea that Republicans are now going around wringing their hands over a few Black Lives Matter activists carrying signs that say defund the police after what they did and continue to defend is especially rich. But as you know, shamelessness is their superpower.
“Bill, I look around, and you are the only person who can do it,” Republican Senate leader Mitch McConnell told then-Attorney General William Barr, one of Donald Trump’s most faithful cabinet members.
It was post-election November 2020. Trump had lost reelection. McConnell needed Trump in Georgia stumping for GOP Senate candidates for the January runoffs. Trump’s stolen-election narrative might hamper McConnell’s efforts there and depress GOP turnout. But McConnell could not attack Trump’s story himself. The notoriously vindictive Trump might sabotage Georgia Republicans instead.
On December 1, Barr admitted to the Associated Press’ Michael Balsamo between bites of salad that “To date, we have not seen fraud on a scale that could have effected a different outcome in the election.” The AP story ran shortly thereafter.
“My attitude was: It was put-up or shut-up time,” Barr told me. “If there was evidence of fraud, I had no motive to suppress it. But my suspicion all the way along was that there was nothing there. It was all bullshit.”
Barr had expected Trump to lose, he tells The Atlantic. Still, he asked the U.S. Attorney in Michigan to look into Trump’s claim that “ballot dumps” in Detroit had won the state for Joe Biden. There was nothing to it. Biden simply beat Trump badly in the Detroit suburbs.
“In every other county, they count the ballots at the precinct, but in Wayne County, they bring them into one central counting place,” Barr said. “So the boxes are coming in all night. The fact that boxes are coming in—well, that’s what they do.”
Doing Trump’s unbidding
Three Republicans and one Democrat from the Michigan Senate oversight committee charged with investigating allegations of fraud in 2020 last week found no evidence “to prove either significant acts of fraud or that an organized, wide-scale effort to commit fraudulent activity was perpetrated in order to subvert the will of Michigan voters.”
Barr also looked into allegations that voting machines across the country were rigged to switch Trump votes to Biden votes. He received two briefings from cyber-security experts at the Department of Homeland Security and the FBI. “We realized from the beginning it was just bullshit,” Barr told me, noting that even if the machines somehow changed the count, it would show up when they were recounted by hand. “It’s a counting machine, and they save everything that was counted. So you just reconcile the two. There had been no discrepancy reported anywhere, and I’m still not aware of any discrepancy.”
As is his nature, Trump felt betrayed at Barr’s refutation of Trump’s conspiracy claims. Shortly after the AP story ran, he called Barr to the president’s personal dining room. Red-faced and trying to control himself, Trump confronted Barr about the AP story:
“Did you say that?”
“Yes,” Barr responded.
“How the fuck could you do this to me? Why did you say it?”
“Because it’s true.”
The president, livid, responded by referring to himself in the third person: “You must hate Trump. You must hate Trump.”
Trump spouted off about the supposed ballot dump and coverage of a committee hearing of the Michigan legislature taking testimony about massive election fraud.
By his account to Karl, remember, Barr was unmoved:
“You know, you only have five weeks, Mr. President, after an election to make legal challenges,” Barr said. “This would have taken a crackerjack team with a really coherent and disciplined strategy. Instead, you have a clown show. No self-respecting lawyer is going anywhere near it. It’s just a joke. That’s why you are where you are.”
It’s not clear whether Barr ceremonially washed his hands in front of Jonathan Karl after the interview, but that is obviously the point. On Thursday, the state of New York suspended Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani’s law license. Potentially in advance of his dis-Barr-ment.
The former attorney general must be looking over his shoulder.
