Month: July 2022

Of course he did

SCOOP: BEFORE election day, Steve Bannon talked to associatees about how Trump's plan was to declare victory no matter the results and cast doubt on a Biden win. @dfriedman33 got a hold of the audio: https://t.co/X12jbayEBY

Another brick on the criminal intent pile

— Clara Jeffery (@ClaraJeffery) July 12, 2022

On the evening of October 31, 2020, Steve Bannon told a group of associates that President Donald Trump had a plan to declare victory on election night—even if he was losing. Trump knew that the slow counting of Democratic-leaning mail-in ballots meant the returns would show early leads for him in key states. His “strategy” was to use this fact to assert that he had won, while claiming that the inevitable shifts in vote totals toward Joe Biden must be the result of fraud, Bannon explained.

“What Trump’s gonna do, is just declare victory. Right? He’s gonna declare victory. But that doesn’t mean he’s a winner,” Bannon, laughing, told the group, according to audio of the meeting obtained by Mother Jones. “He’s just gonna say he’s a winner.”“He’s gonna declare victory. But that doesn’t mean he’s a winner.”

“As it sits here today,” Bannon said later in the conversation, describing a scenario in which Trump held an early lead in key swing states, “at 10 or 11 o’clock Trump’s gonna walk in the Oval, tweet out, ‘I’m the winner. Game over. Suck on that.’”

Trump’s plan to falsely declare victory while tens of millions of votes were still being counted was public knowledge even before the election. Axios reported on the scheme at the time. Bannon himself discussed the idea on November 3—Election Day—on his War Room podcast. Weeks earlier, Bannon had interviewed a former Trump administration official who outlined how Trump would would use allegations of fraud to dispute an electoral defeat and would seek to have Congress declare him the winner. Last month, the congressional committee investigating January 6 detailed how Rudy Giuliani convinced Trump to go ahead with a victory declaration after 2 a.m. on November 4, over the objections of campaign staff. “Frankly, we did win this election,” Trump insisted in that infamous news conference.

The nearly hour-long audio obtained by Mother Jones is new evidence that Trump’s late-night diatribe—which came a few hours later than Bannon had anticipated—followed a preexisting plan to lie to Americans about the election results in a bid to hold onto power. The new recording stands out for the striking candor and detail with which Bannon described a scheme to use lies to subvert democracy. Bannon also predicted that Trump’s false declaration of victory would lead to widespread political violence, along with “crazy” efforts by Trump to stay in office. Bannon and his associates laughed about those scenarios at various points in the recording.

Bannon really earned that pardon, didn’t he?

“American carnage is Donald Trump’s true legacy.”

Is it ever. And people who worked closely with him know it. Here’s one from Trump’s former campaign manager:

Did Trump know that right wing militias were planning a violent attack on the US Capitol that day? Of course he did. We still don’t know what he wantd meadows to say/find out when he instructed him to call Roger Stoner and Mike Flynn on the night of January 5th and why he wanted him to attend a meeting that night at the Willard Hotel “war room.” But we do know that Trump had two phone calls with Bannon on January 5th — and Bannon said this that same day:

American carnage is what they wanted. It’s what they planned. It’s what they got.

Hutchinson called it “unhinged.”

On Dec 18, 2020, Sidney Powell, Lt. Gen. Flynn, and others entered the White House for a meeting.

The meeting lasted multiple hours and included two groups of Trump advisers trading insults, accusations of disloyalty to the president, and even challenges to physically fight. pic.twitter.com/azqHAENbmB

— January 6th Committee (@January6thCmte) July 12, 2022

I wrote about this incredible meeting at the time and then this piece for Salon a bit later. It’s been confirmed. My God. Just think about the fact that the president listened to these lunatics. And he wants to be president again.

An excerpt of one of my posts about this:

Of all the wild reports that emerged over the past few months about the ongoing insanity in the White House during Trump’s lame duck period, there was always one story that I found so incredible that I wondered if it might not have been exaggerated.

Back in December of 2020, the New York Times reported that a late-night meeting took place in the Oval Office in which the president proposed that Sidney Powell be made a Special Counsel and be given security clearance to pursue her inane claims of massive election rigging. Even Giuliani opposed that idea, but the meeting concluded without anyone knowing if Trump would follow through or not. Retired General Michael Flynn was also present, as was, for some unknown reason, Patrick Byrne, the former CEO of Overstock.com. Jonathan Swan at Axios later reported that these people had actually somehow snuck into the White House (which I didn’t think was possible) to convince the president to “invoke emergency national security powers, seize voting machines and disable the primary levers of American democracy.”

This Oval Office meeting went on for many hours with people coming and going throughout, arguing and yelling back and forth, as the president pressed for these conspiracy theorists to be given more power while his staffers pushed back. It eventually ended up in Trump’s residence with arguments continuing back and forth and no resolution at midnight.

Powell, for her part, insisted that the real story was that the election had been stolen by Venezuela, Iran, China and others, in cahoots with the voting machine manufacturers — all of which was a total fantasy. Flynn was pushing for the military to seize the voting machines. Byrne was babbling that he knew how these things worked because he’d bribed Hillary Clinton with 18 million dollars in an FBI sting which nobody understood. It was, in other words, completely unhinged nonsense.

According to Swan, Powell kept referring to an Executive Order from 2018 which was written to impose sanctions on foreign interference, as if it gave Trump some sort of authority. But the New York Times had earlier reported that there was another Executive Order they were bandying about, which has remained vague until now, but which we knew was supposed to authorize the seizure of the voting machines. Last Friday, Politico reported that it had a copy of that proposed Executive Order. Nobody knows who wrote it, but it’s a good bet that Michael Flynn and Sidney Powell herself had a hand in it. The document would have authorized the Special Counsel to investigate the 2020 election. Flynn had been the first to float the idea of having the military seize the voting machines a few days earlier, and that too appeared in this draft Executive Order. Curiously, however, the order mentions a couple of classified orders, one of which had never been made public and therefore must have come from someone with a security clearance.

This document is now in the hands of the January 6th committee, which is no doubt trying to run down who wrote the draft. Subpoenas have gone out to Powell and Giuliani although I doubt anyone expects them to comply. Dominion Voting Systems has sued Powell and a number of media companies for defamation for spreading these lies and there’s a good chance that they will lose since her claims were total fabrications.

But after reviewing the reports of this strange meeting in which three crackpots found their way into the White House and commanded nearly six hours of the president and his staff’s time in the middle of the worst public health crisis in a hundred years, I couldn’t help but reflect on the fact that today the vast majority of Republicans are convinced that the election was stolen and the party has done nothing to disabuse them of that fact. And the same delusional former president who took those ridiculous proposals to defy the peaceful transfer of power and fraudulently overturn the election seriously is the front runner for the Republican nomination in 2024.

How is it even possible that such a person could be let anywhere near the White House again?   

He is the front runner.

They need to shake this off

This is in a Members-Only article at TPM (which you should subscribe to if you can, it’s great) but I don’t think they’ll mind if I post this letter they received from one of their readers:

Yesterday afternoon, you retweeted the Politico story on the White House lawyers’ conservative approach to post-Dobbs fixes saying “If this is true it shows a total misunderstanding of the current political moment.”

That is exactly the problem.

For decades, lawyers for the Executive Branch, in both DoJ and the White House, have urged their “clients”—agencies and the President—not to be overly aggressive in exercising their authority for fear that agency action would be invalidated in court. 

There were very good reasons for this caution.  Government lawyers wanted to be in a strong position when defending their clients and feared that they would have less credibility in critically-important cases if forced to defend close-to or over-the-line administrative actions.  In other words, the (likely accurate at the time) belief was that if government lawyers were not forced to defend marginal exercises of federal power, they were more likely to win when it really counted—when key federal government prerogatives were on the line.  Or at least they would win in the non-marginal cases.

In addition, losing in court was generally perceived to be a black mark for an agency or department.  A referee presumed to be neutral had concluded government had abused its authority.

Government lawyers haven’t recognized, or don’t want to recognize, that their world has fundamentally changed.  

Today’s federal courts are highly skeptical of everything the federal government does, or tries to do—including actions that ten or twenty years ago would have easily been upheld in court.  And they have imposed, and are imposing, new and much more restrictive constraints on agency authority.  Finally, does anyone believe that caution by Biden Administration lawyers will give them more credibility, and a better chance to win, when they go before today’s courts?

In other words, is the old approach the right one for this very different judicial landscape?  There is a strong argument that it is not.

To begin with, continuing to apply the “don’t do it if we are likely to get sued and might lose” standard drastically limits the scope of permissible government action.  Every action that moves the needle more than a tiny bit in the progressive direction is going to be met with a lawsuit.  And that lawsuit likely will be filed in a judicial district populated by conservative judges.  And those conservative judges are likely to rule against the Biden Administration.  So losing is a strong possibility in virtually every single case.

But much more importantly, applying the old standard lets the courts avoid public accountability for their new, dramatically more constraining, constitutional and statutory construction standards. 

If a federal agency acts, but a court holds the action unlawful by applying those new restrictive standards, that opens the door to a public conversation about an activist judiciary.  But if the agency never acts, or takes only ineffective half-measures, it is the agency, and the President, who are attacked for failing to address a problem effectively.  The courts get a complete pass, even though their new standards are the reason that the government couldn’t take appropriate action.

In today’s post-Dobbs world, moreover, it is at least questionable whether the public would perceive judicial invalidation of government action as a black eye for the Executive Branch rather than yet another example of newly-muscular conservative court majorities changing the legal rules.

But there is that tradition of government lawyers’ caution when it comes to actions that will generate lawsuits. 

The key question, therefore, is whether those lawyers—and more importantly their clients, the policymakers responsible for delivering results to the American people—will step back and reassess that tradition and decide whether it fits the dramatically changed judicial environment that the Administration now faces.

That is partially a legal question, but it’s not clear that the old standard is providing much legal benefit in this very different legal environment.  So it is much more a policy and political question:  which approach best shows the American people why the federal government is unable to address the nation’s problems effectively?  Isn’t our key dysfunction the toxic combination of congressional paralysis and judicial aggressiveness.  Don’t Americans deserve—and shouldn’t progressives want—to shine a bright spotlight on that reality?

This strikes me as right on the money. It’s yet another example of Democrats’ ongoing fealty to the “Don’t Make Trouble” Doctrine and it’s never been more self-destructive.

An interesting little tid-bit as we wait for today’s hearing:

Trump White House counsel Pat Cipollone corroborated virtually all of the revelations from previous witnesses, including former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson, in lengthy testimony before the panel last week, a top Jan. 6 committee member told NBC News.

“Cipollone has corroborated almost everything that we’ve learned from the prior hearings,” Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., said in an exclusive interview just hours before the next hearing. “I certainly did not hear him contradict Cassidy Hutchinson. … He had the opportunity to say whatever he wanted to say, so I didn’t see any contradiction there.”

He had the opportunity to contradict, questions or not, on the record and under oath, and he didn’t. If he thought she lied, would he not have said so?

You should be watching

‘Member this? “Big protest in D.C. on January 6th. Be there, will be wild!”

If you reading this, the latest , live January 6 hearing in the House is already underway. It started at 10 a.m. ET. The focus today is (or is reportedly) the a) extremists who planned and materially advanced the assault on the U.S. Capitol, and b) their ties to President Trump and the White House.

CNN has a preview of coming defendents whose names may come up today:

Joe Biggs, a Proud Boys leader from Florida and former InfoWars correspondent, assumed a top leadership role within the Proud Boys after the January 4 arrest of Proud Boys Chairman Enrique Tarrio, according to the Justice Department. Biggs allegedly led the Proud Boys in a march to and around the Capitol building, and was present at the initial breach of Capitol grounds.

Biggs faces nine federal charges including seditious conspiracy and has pleaded not guilty.

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Kelly Meggs is a leader of the Florida chapter of the Oath Keepers and is one of several members charged with seditious conspiracy. He has pleaded not guilty. Text messages from around January 6 show that Meggs discussed the possibility of using the Proud Boys as a “force multiplier” on January 6 with other Oath Keepers, and that he was in touch with former Trump adviser Roger Stone about providing security during the Stop the Steal rally.

Meggs allegedly led the infamous first “stack” of Oath Keepers up the steps and into the Capitol building on January 6, according to the Justice Department. Once inside, Meggs allegedly went searching for House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

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Rochester Proud Boys member Dominic Pezzola is accused of smashing a window with a stolen police officer’s riot shield, precipitating the first breach of the Capitol building.

He was allegedly one of the first rioters inside, and was at the front of the group who chased Capitol Police Officer Eugene Goodman up the stairs.

Pezzola faces 10 federal charges including seditious conspiracy and has pleaded not guilty.

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Stewart Rhodes, an Army veteran and graduate of Yale law school, founded the Oath Keepers in 2009 and has led the far-right organization ever since. Rhodes was at the Capitol on January 6 but is not alleged to have entered the building, though phone records show he allegedly communicated with members who did go inside the Capitol and with members staged at an armed “quick reaction force” just outside Washington, DC.

Rhodes was also a member of a “VIP” Signal chat alongside Roger Stone, Ali Alexander, Alex Jones and other key Trump allies, according to people familiar with Signal messages that prosecutors have obtained.

Rhodes, along with nine other members of the Oath Keepers, is set to go to trial in September on charges of seditious conspiracy. He is currently being held in a federal detention facility near Washington, DC. Rhodes has pleaded not guilty to all criminal charges stemming from January 6.

There are more.

Having lost over 60 court cases challenging his 2020 election loss, Trump turned to promoting/encouraging/suggesting violence on Jan. 6 to stop certification of Joe Biden’s win.

A committee aide told reporters Monday night:

“We will show how some of these right-wing extremist groups who came to D.C. and led the attack on the Capitol had ties to Trump associates, including Roger Stone and Gen. Mike Flynn,” said the committee aide.

You should be watching. Now.

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How did that work out?

A wise Vulcan once said, “After a time, you may find that having is not so pleasing a thing after all as wanting. It is not logical, but it is often true.”

Now that conservatives have won their half-century fight to undo Roe v. Wade, will the old saying hold true?

Remember when conservatives passed a constitutional amendment to ban alcoholic beverages?

How did that work out?

Michael Kazin, a professor of history at Georgetown University, thinks it may be time to review the religiously driven temperance movement’s half-century-plus fight to pass the 18th Amendment (New York Times):

Since the middle of the 19th century, prohibitionists had pressed, in a variety of ways, to ban the “liquor traffic,” which they cursed for debauching men who neglected or abused their wives and children. Women knelt in prayer before taverns to shame their owners to shut down. Every year, thousands of Protestant churches observed Anti-Saloon Sunday, when donations were collected, and petitions were signed for the cause.

Dry factions bloomed in both major parties, although Republicans were more solidly united behind the idea than Democrats. By the time Congress passed the 18th Amendment, Prohibition was the law in nearly half the states; 17 had done the deed by popular vote.

Yet the vigor of enforcement seldom matched the movement’s crusading fervor. Kansas passed a dry law in 1880, but illegal saloons known as “blind pigs” operated rather freely in the cities of the state. When the temperance activist Carry A. Nation took to raiding such places, hatchet in hand, she was seeking to embarrass government officials for shirking their duties; they sent her to jail for destroying private property.

Already the unintended consequences of Dobbs are emerging.

Putting women and doctors in jail for violating abortion bans may not in practice seem so pleasing as wanting it happen. And devoting more enforcement resources to the task at a time conservatives wring their hands over personal feedom, decry the Deep State, and demand on tougher action on violent crime, may be a tough sell. So it was with banning alcohol.

Nation may have led a movement, but average Americans viewed prohibition as an infringement on personal liberty, says Kazin.

Of course, the political challenge of stopping abortions will differ from the challenge of abolishing the traffic in alcohol. State, not federal, authorities are in charge now, and they may face less of a backlash from constituents, many of whom have long sympathized with the anti-abortion cause. And it would most likely be more perilous to operate a safe underground clinic than it was to run a speakeasy in places where most people considered saloons a permanent, if sometimes regrettable, feature of urban culture.

Yet, in some ways, the anti-abortion movement after the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision is actually weaker than was its moralist precursor when Prohibition became the law of the land. Nearly 60 percent of Americans disapprove of the Dobbs decision. And while many conservative Christians of all denominations think abortion is sinful, they no longer command public opinion as did evangelicals a little over a century ago. In addition, the two major parties are now firmly planted on opposite sides of the issue, whereas Prohibition had bipartisan support. And young women, vital foot soldiers in the bygone dry army, now overwhelmingly oppose the judicial and legislative effort to police their wombs.

Kazin’s emphasis on Dobbs’ lack of popular support overlooks that there is likely a craving among religious zealots and fans of authoritarian strongmen for an anti-abortion Stasi. Think of owning the libs as their fascist gateway drug. They won’t stop there.

But Kazin believes “indecent and unenforceable assaults on individual freedom” in the name of policing wombs will evoke a stronger reaction among a larger group of Americans than the anti-abortion army has members.

Americans will rebel, Kazin predicts. What he’s not predicting is how soon and in what form Dobbs will go the way of the 18th Amendment.

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They just don’t care how many people suffer and die

This is just one of the many consequences of the right’s great anti-abortion victory that are happening all over the country. There is no evidence that they care:

Six days after the Supreme Court struck down the right to abortion, lupus patient Becky Schwarzgot an unexpected message from her rheumatologist.

“This is a notice to let you know that we are pausing all prescriptions and subsequent refills of methotrexate,” the message read. “This decision has been made in response to the reversal of Roe vs. Wade.”

Schwarz was stunned. Methotrexate is a cheap, common drug prescribed to millions of Americans. Like her, many have rheumatic illnesses. Others take it to treat inflammatory bowel disease, psoriasis or cancer.

Yet few are aware that it is used off-label to end ectopic pregnancies, or that it could be restricted by doctors or pharmacists even in states like Virginia that do not ban abortion.

The reasons are numerous, and muddy.

In Texas, dispensing methotrexate to someone who uses it to induce a miscarriage after 49 days of gestation is a felony; that makes pharmacists hesitant to fill such prescriptions for almost anyone with a uterus. A new total ban on abortion in Tennessee will effectively criminalize any medication that could disrupt pregnancy past the point of fertilization, with strict exceptions for a patient who will otherwise die. And in Virginia, confusion over rules about who is permitted to prescribe drugs “qualified as abortifacients” may be blocking access to the medication.

“That’s what was shocking to me,” said Schwarz, a 27-year-old who lives in Tysons Corner, Va. “In a state where I thought I was relatively protected regardless of what the Supreme Court decided, I found out I wasn’t.”

Methotrexate was originally developed as a chemotherapy agent more than 60 years ago. But in low doses, it has proved to be one of the safest, least expensive and most effective treatments for roughly a dozen autoimmune conditions, from juvenile idiopathic arthritis to Crohn’s disease.

“It’s one of the most common medications that I prescribe,” saidDr. Grant Schulert, a pediatric rheumatology specialist at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital. “It’s really a mainstay of our practice.”

Indeed, methotrexate was first approved to treat rheumatic illnesses in 1959, before Schulert was born and almost 15 years before Roe vs. Wade was decided.

There is no way they can mitigate this sensibly. What is likely to happen is that there will have to be some mechanism to track women’s fertility to ensure that they are not using this life-saving drug “improperly.” Perhaps doctors will have to sign off with proof that their patients aren’t pregnant before prescribing it. And in some states I have no doubt they’ll just say, “tough luck, we’re saving babies here.”

The Orbanesque Governor makes the GOP establishment swoon

Following up on the post below, here’s Jonathan Chait on the DeSantis threat. It’s serious:

A glimpse into this future came recently when I proposed on Twitter that DeSantis is “a deeply authoritarian figure.” The incredulity and rage of the conservative response this summoned was captured by a Fox News story headlined “NY Mag writer wrecked for calling DeSantis ‘a more competent authoritarian’ than Trump: ‘Hysterical’.”

What’s revealing about this episode is how it has put on display the belief on the right that to call DeSantis a threat to democracy is not only wrong but self-evidently absurd. Conservatives are defining out of existence the idea that the party itself, rather than one man, could be a threat to democracy.

Half a dozen years ago, I wrote a cover story for this magazine arguing that the authoritarian danger posed by Donald Trump was not limited to his personal fascination with dictatorships and power but also grew more broadly out of the soil of American reactionary politics. Here was the argument. Unlike the Eisenhower-era Republican Party, and unlike the conservative parties in every other democratic country, the conservative movement never accepted the democratic legitimacy of the welfare state. Conservatives considered the ability of majorities to vote for economic redistribution a threat to liberty and placed the preservation of liberty (as they defined it) above democracy. And so, while Trump’s almost feral contempt for democracy and the rule of law represented a unique threat, the longer-term danger to the Republic was the institutional power of a movement that had never truly made its peace with democratic principles.

DeSantis is a flawless sample of this belief system. The conservative argument that democracy is dangerous lies so close to his heart that he wrote an entire book dedicated to the precept that “when the people find they can vote themselves money, that will herald the end of the republic.” After the election, DeSantis floated a plan for legislatures to appoint pro-Trump electors, negating the election results. (The Supreme Court is ruling on the legality of this method, which may well be the cutting-edge conservative tool to negate elections.) In office, he has engineered a series of disturbingly illiberal schemes to entrench his own power, from instituting a poll tax to disenfranchise some million mostly non-white Floridians to punishing firms that dare to oppose his agenda, among many other steps.

While conservatives frequently blurt out their belief that democracy is bad because “we’re a republic, not a democracy,” they blanch at the authoritarian label. To the extent many of them grudgingly accept that Trump poses some danger to the Republic, they attribute that danger entirely to his idiosyncratic style. As National Review’s Dan McLaughlin puts it, “My quarrel all along with Trump was his longstanding & notorious personal & public character. DeSantis just doesn’t have those issues.”

It follows from this premise that any attempt to associate non-Trump elements of the Republican Party with authoritarianism is transparently disingenuous. In my DeSantis profile, I wrote that his candidacy reflects the calculation that “any former Republican voter who opposed Trump on moral rather than aesthetic grounds is gone and not worth trying to bring back.”

Christopher Rufo, who has essentially the same relation to the DeSantis campaign that Don Jr. has to the Trump campaign, essentially confirms this. “The test for ‘NeverTrump’ intellecuals [sic] is where they stand on DeSantis,” he writes, “He should be their guy: elite education, military background, leadership experience, impeccable character. If they can’t get behind him, the takeaway is clear: it’s not about principles; they serve the Left.”

If you believe the only legitimate objection to Trump is his personal character, then objecting to a politician without those character traits must be a bad-faith ploy, revealing that the complaints about Trump were never serious to begin with.

National Review editor-in-chief Rich Lowry acknowledges a handful of DeSantis’s illiberal abuses of power only to dismiss them as trifling. In a column defending DeSantis, the subject of boosterish coverage in his and every major conservative publication, Lowry largely reduces the liberal critique to a straw man. “By any reasonable standard, DeSantis’ supposed sins are peccadilloes compared to those of Trump,” he writes, “Trump has continued to promote conspiracy theories about the 2020 election and endorse candidates who believe or pretend to believe in them; DeSantis criticized Anthony Fauci.”

What this seemingly clever comparison omits is that DeSantis also promoted conspiracy theories about the 2020 election. He has never conceded that Joe Biden won the election legitimately. Instead, he created an election-crimes task force and claimed the public needed to restore confidence in the sanctity of the ballot.

The Republican mainstream has dismissed Trump’s efforts to undermine the election as off-message whining that distracts attention from more potent messages like inflation. “Trump is acting on an entirely personal and selfish priority,” complains Lowry. “There’s no principle at stake in embracing the Jan. 6 mob or advancing 2020 conspiracy theories.”

This dismissal of Trump’s project catastrophically misses its profound significance. He has recruited activists and candidates into the party inspired by his belief that Democratic election victories are inherently illegitimate. There is no longer any serious Republican effort to stop election truthers. Trump is winning the war for the heart of the party in a rout. Over the last year, the percentage of Republicans who describe the events of January 6 as a “riot” has declined from 62 percent to 45 percent, while the share who describe it as a “legitimate protest” has risen from 47 percent to 61 percent.

What’s just as important as DeSantis’s longstanding suspicion of democracy and string of thuggish Orbanist maneuvers is his calculation that he can co-opt these same radical forces. The path to reconstituting the GOP as a party that we can entrust with the Republic involves shoving out at least some of its extremists while bringing the Never Trump wing back into the fold. DeSantis’s strategy is just the opposite. He has ignored the slice of Republicans who disdain Trump’s authoritarianism and courted anti-vaxxers, QAnon believers, and insurrectionists. And he has demonstrated repeatedly a “no enemies to the right” strategy that inevitably binds him to the party’s most fanatical elements.

Whether a President DeSantis would be more or less dangerous than Trump is not a question I can answer with any confidence. Trump poses a greater danger of triggering an immediate constitutional crisis, while DeSantis is more likely to methodically strangle democracy through a series of illiberal Orbanist steps like he has modeled in Florida. I suppose the threat of a quick death is more dire than the threat of a slow one, but I have little confidence in projecting out these comparative dangers. The only meaningful conclusion I can make about the choice of Trump versus DeSantis is “neither.”

Republicans like Rich Lowrey — and DeSantis — see the benefits of Trumpism. They enjoy owning the libs and his authoritarian bent is seen as nothing more than “political hardball” necessary to keep those libs out of power. I’m not sure they really believe in any real policies anymore. They’re even hostile to the military and seem fairly lackadaisical to tax cuts. They care about power, period. Trump lost a lot of elections for them but they see the advantage to using what’s he’s built for the future. And no one sees it more clearly than DeSantis.

He’s very upset and you should be too

Colin, [I don’t know who Colin is or why this got sent to me]

Our country is currently facing a great threat. A new enemy has emerged from the shadows that seeks to destroy and intimidate their way to a transformed state, and country, that you and I would hardly recognize.

This enemy is the radical vigilante woke mob that will steamroll anything and anyone in their way. Their blatant attacks on the American way of life are clear and intensifying: stifling dissent, public shaming, rampant violence, and a perverted version of history.

A group that will, literally, tear down monuments and buildings but — perhaps in an even more sinister way — tear down the American spirit itself. They go after the family unit, parental rights, traditional moral values, the church, and fact-based education.

Over the past few years, we’ve watched horrified as this group has attempted to brainwash our children into thinking we live in an evil, racist, irredeemable country.

We listened to them deny science and data to exert political theater all the while trampling over personal liberties enshrined in the Constitution.

>> DONATE NOW TO HELP US CONTINUE THE FIGHT <<

We saw them take to the streets for an entire summer like outlaws burning, looting, and destroying everything in sight while being told they were “mostly peaceful” and “passionate.”

We watched Big Tech moguls in Silicon Valley be the arbiters of truth – deciding who gets to speak and who gets silenced through the digital public square.

We listened to the legacy media muffle legitimately verifiable news stories that didn’t align with their preferred narrative, only to watch the truth trickle out months later at a more politically expedient time.

Well, Colin, the time for listening and watching from the sidelines is over.

>>> FIGHT BACK <<<

This enemy has taken over media, educational institutions, corporate boards, professional sports, foundations, and professional institutions. They have left no corner of our lives untouched. But all hope is not lost.

We The People still have a say. We know the truth, you and I, about America and the country she is and can be. We must fight to defeat these false pretenses and predetermined narratives.

I am choosing to counter this enemy with faith, with reason, and with freedom. As Governor of the Free State of Florida, I have chosen to lead with a vision that builds America up rather than tears it down.

Together we can ensure that our children are raised to know they live in the greatest state in the nation, the greatest country in the world and that they have an opportunity to continue making them even greater.

If you’ve been waiting for the right time to get off the sidelines and fight for the rights you know were given to man by God Himself – the time is NOW.

If you’re with me, Colin, chip in any amount to help me defeat this enemy. I can’t do it without you. I promise you; I will never stop fighting.

Sincerely,

Ron DeSantis

That’s the message. And apparently, tens of millions of Americans agree with him.

Everyone seems to assume that this message has mainstream appeal. Does it?