Month: September 2022

Some new speculation on why the Trump team named him

This was in a NY Times report from the weekend about Trump’s lawyers:

After ignoring Mr. Herschmann or giving him what he seemed to consider perplexing answers to the requests for weeks, two of the former president’s lawyers, M. Evan Corcoran and John Rowley, offered him only broad instructions in late August. Assert sweeping claims of executive privilege, they advised him, after Mr. Corcoran had suggested that an unspecified “chief judge” would ultimately validate their belief that a president’s powers extend far beyond their time in office.

Mr. Herschmann, who served on Mr. Trump’s first impeachment defense team but later opposed efforts to reverse the results of the 2020 election, was hardly reassured and sounded confused by the reference to a chief judge.

Jonathan Swan has a report this afternoon about why Trump ‘s team put forward Judge Raymond Dearie forward:

Raymond Dearie’s appointment as special master to review records the FBI seized from Mar-a-Lago was a positive development for former President Trump, whose lawyers recommended him. But their call for the low-profile New York judge was befuddling given Dearie has no apparent connection or loyalty to Trump.

Driving the news: Two sources with direct knowledge of the closely held deliberations now tell Axios what Trump’s legal team was thinking:

Lawyers and advisers to the former president believe Dearie’s role on the secretive court that approved controversial warrants used to surveil former Trump campaign aide Carter Page in 2016 and 2017 made Dearie a deep skeptic of the FBI.

The two sources were granted anonymity because they were describing sensitive discussions within the Trump team.

Details: Dearie’s seven years on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, including during the Page case, is a matter of public record and has been reported. But it has not been previously reported that this experience drove the Trump team’s thinking in requesting him.

Dearie could not be reached for comment. He has not made any public comments — that Axios is aware of — to suggest that the Trump team’s thinking is more than a hope or a theory. And, he will be reviewing the documents themselves for privilege, not reviewing representations about the documents by the FBI.

A representative for the United States District Court for the Eastern District of New York — the court on which Dearie has served since 1986 — did not respond to questions about whether Trump team’s understanding of Dearie’s view of the FBI matches his actual view.

Taylor Budowich, a spokesperson for Trump, did not respond to a request for comment.

Why it matters: As special master, Dearie will vet more than 11,000 documents seized from Mar-a-Lago for both attorney-client privilege and executive privilege to determine if any material was improperly swept up in the search.

His appointment could, at a minimum, delay the Justice Department’s investigation into the former president. The department has argued that such a delay could harm U.S. national security because of the sensitive nature of the highly classified documents Trump improperly kept at Mar-a-Lago.

Flashback: The Justice Department’s investigation into Russian election interference in the 2016 presidential election and connections to the Trump campaign involved a flawed process.

Dearie, 78, served for seven years on the FISC. He was one of the judges who signed off on FISA warrants to surveil Page.

Two of the four approved warrants were later declared invalid after a DOJ Inspector General report found a series of misstatements and omissions in the FBI’s applications to get the warrants.

A former FBI lawyer, Kevin Clinesmith, pleaded guilty in 2020 to altering an email submitted as part of the surveillance application — a felony charge.

The FISA process typically is not adversarial in real time because people who do not know they are under surveillance cannot push back against FBI claims in court.

Judges historically have appeared to give the FBI significant deference in these cases. But the Page saga showed how that trust could be misplaced.

Trump’s lawyers are betting that has made Dearie more skeptical of the FBI than an average judge — in a way that endures beyond the Page case.

Between the lines: Trump has a history of demanding loyalists in key roles, which made his team’s suggestion of Dearie as special master a puzzle to many legal observers.

Dearie, whom former President Reagan appointed to the federal bench in 1986, is widely respected in the legal community and has a reputation as an “exemplary jurist” and a straight-shooter.

Since the announcement, Dearie has even received praise from Trump enemies. Andrew Weissmann, a former lead prosecutor in the Russia investigation who appeared before Dearie early in his career, told the New York Times that Dearie was “a fair-minded, smart judge who has a ton of common sense…”

Dearie’s bipartisan high esteem worked to Trump’s benefit. U.S. District Court Judge Aileen Cannon, a Trump appointee in the Southern District of Florida, did not face pressure to reject Dearie as she would have with a recommendation of someone seen as a Trump loyalist.

Dearie was not on the Justice Department’s list of recommended special masters, but the DOJ accepted the recommendation from Trump’s team due to his “previous federal judicial experience and engagement in relevant areas of law.”

Since 2011, Dearie has been on “senior active” status, meaning he has a reduced caseload but continues to preside over cases, as his court calendar suggests.

Two days after Trump made his request for a special master, Dearie told Law.com he would move to inactive status.

Two weeks later, Trump’s lawyers submitted Dearie’s name to DOJ as one of two recommendations for the role. It is not clear whether or how those developments are connected.

What’s next: Cannon said Dearie will need to complete his review of materials by Nov. 30 — a timeline closer to the Trump team’s suggestion than to DOJ’s proposed deadline of Oct. 17.

The Nov. 30 deadline could shift subject to Dearie’s own proposals. Cannon also asked Dearie to submit interim reports and recommendations on documents before his entire review is complete.

In granting the request for special master, Cannon also temporarily barred law enforcement agencies from accessing the material for their investigation of Trump’s handling of the documents until the special master review is complete.

After Cannon rejected DOJ’s request to allow investigators to continue reviewing classified documents, the DOJ asked the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit to issue a partial stay of Cannon’s order.

These things are probably unrelated. Dearie isn’t a “chief judge” and Trump’s lawyers are idiots. But you have to wonder.

In any case, you have to wonder where these guys got the idea that Dearie was extremely skeptical of the FBI after that one guy changed an email in the Carter Page case. And that doesn’t directly engage the issue of executive privilege although that issue is going to be at the center of this special master’s business. Is any of this real or are they just engaging in Trumpian wishful thinking?

And anyway, if it wasn’t that, why did they pull his name out of the hat?

People are happy in their own lives. It’s your life that upsets them.

For those who think the news media has no influence:

Per Gallup, in every aspect of their personal lives, from work to family to community, health, financial security all of it, the vast majority of Americans are satisfied. They’re just upset about what’s going on with all the other people. I think that says something profound about our culture war. It’s about what’s happening “out there” with “the other” not here where I am.

Merrick Garland at Ellis Island

If you have a few minutes today, listen to this speech from Attorney General Merrick Garland. The timing couldn’t be better:

Compare that to the cramped, cranky whining from Attorney General Bill Barr in his various speeches about how black people deserve to be shot by police. It couldn’t be more different.

Here’s a person who can summon more grace than I could. Ken Starr tortured this woman:

Joe Conason says it all:

For anyone who criticized the late Kenneth W. Starr in life, it might be prudent to observe the ancient Latin injunction: Say nothing but good of the dead. Or to step by in silence.

Yet the career of the former federal appellate jurist who served as Whitewater independent counsel and instigated the impeachment of President Bill Clinton merits rigorous attention, if only because his story illuminates so starkly the hostility of the religious right and the Republican Party toward American women.

No doubt Starr would protest that assessment and instead call attention, as he so often did, to his pietistic moralism. He always peppered his speech with phrases like “as we say in the New Testament,” and once sent forth a flack to inform Washington reporters that as he jogged along the Potomac River every morning, he sang Christian hymns.

That posturing went on full display during the Whitewater probe that he steered into a sex hunt. He was appointed by a panel of right-wing Republican judges after they forced out the moderate Republican Robert Fiske, who was about to end the fruitless investigation. From the beginning, Starr was tainted.

Whitewater was in fact a dry hole, because the Clintons had lost money on the ill-fated land deal and done nothing wrong. Having promised and failed to bring down both Bill and Hillary, he tried to resign– and then was forced by outraged conservatives to resume the hunt with his tail between his legs. It was not long before he started searching for a way to shape the prurient gossip about Bill Clinton into a criminal prosecution.

At that point, Monica Lewinsky fell into his clutches, thanks to Linda Tripp, a vindictive “friend” who also happened to be a conservative zealot, and Lucianne Goldberg, a scheming literary agent who had once spied on reporters for Nixon. Starr mercilessly exploited the young woman who had entered into an affair with the feckless president. Rather than accept a proffer that had been given to his own prosecutors, Starr tormented Monica (and her mother!) for months with threats of prison, unless she told the untrue story he wanted to hear, and wore a wire into Oval Office.

He concluded the investigation by humiliating both her and the president with the publication of The Starr Report, described aptly by critic Renata Adler as “a voluminous work of demented pornography.” By then Starr’s manic invasion of what many Americans regarded as private behavior had turned the public decisively against him. His inquisition crashed, along with his lifelong yearning for a seat on the Supreme Court.

In the ensuing episodes of his life, Starr confirmed all the suspicions about him aroused by the Lewinsky debacle. His professed concerns with morality and the protection of womanhood proved time and again to be a scrim for his worldly priorities of profit and power.

In 2007, Starr joined the defense team of Jeffrey Epstein, the wealthy pedophile who had raped many underage girls and ultimately committed suicide in a Manhattan jail cell. He arranged for Epstein to obtain a sweetheart plea deal from US Attorney Alex Acosta, who had worked under him at Kirkland & Ellis, Starr’s longtime law firm. When exposed a decade later, this revolting scheme forced Acosta’s resignation from his Trump administration post as Secretary of Health and Human Services. Yet Starr’s “morality” easily accommodated this lucrative and depraved bit of lawyering.

Even so, a few years later Baylor University, a Baptist religious institution, named Starr as its president and chancellor. The university had reason to regret that choice soon enough, when Starr was revealed to have repeatedly concealed an epidemic of rapes at the school between 2012 and 2016. The Baylor regents bounced him from the presidency after an independent investigation of his conduct, and he subsequently quit his posts as chancellor and law professor in disgrace.

When Starr returned to the public stage as a lawyer for Donald Trump during his first impeachment, nobody could still pretend to be surprised by his hypocrisy. Untroubled by Trump’s history of boastful adulteries and serial abuse of women –including his first wife, who had accused him of marital rape — or his hush payment to porn actress Stormy Daniels, Starr liked to talk about how proudly he had voted in 2016 to prevent a Hillary Clinton presidency. Naturally, Trump eulogized him as “a great American patriot.”

How did Starr’s perverse style of conservatism, supposedly motivated by Biblical rectitude, inform his abuse of the heroic Lewinsky and his subsequent excusal of rapes and rapists? Apparently, he justified it all in the name of his godly mission. But now we have the whole sordid record of how he used virtue as a cover for vice. It is impossible to find in this reactionary figure even a trace of respect for female dignity and equality.

And now we know just how deeply embedded his pious misogyny is in the modern Republican Party that still admires Ken Starr.

He was a villain from the get-go, personifying the unctuous sanctimony of a certain kind of right-wing phony. His imprint on our culture will be with us for a very long time.

Find the fans

Dan Pfeiffer’s newsletter takes up the case. He gives all the reasons outlined by Nate Cohn about the possibility of a big polling error this time that could leave the Democrats in the dust, which has everyone quaking in their boots now. But there’s more:

While polls may or may not be wrong in certain places, there is plenty of evidence for Democratic resurgence and an improved political environment. First, you can ignore the polls and look at the results in special elections where Democrats consistently outpace their 2020 performance. Second, while inflation is still high, gas prices have been dropping steadily for months. Finally, and most importantly, sometimes it makes sense to ditch the calculator and use your common sense. It’s obvious and apparent the Dobbs decision energized millions and millions of voters.

It’s also worth noting that the polls were much more accurate in 2018 — including in Ohio and Wisconsin.

Trump was on the ballot in 2016 and 2020 and not in 2018. So, there may be something about the voters who turn out for Trump. Without Trump, the polling inaccuracies may be absent in this election. Nate Silver makes a compelling argument against polls being inherently pro-Democratic.

People’s concerns about the polls stem mostly from a sample of exactly two elections, 2020 and 2016. You can point out that polls also had a Democratic bias in 2014. But, of course, they had a Republican bias in 2012, were largely unbiased in 2018, and have either tended to be unbiased or had a Republican bias in recent special elections.

True, in 2020 and 2016, polls were off the mark in a large number of races and states. But the whole notion of a systematic polling error is that it’s, well, systematic: It affects nearly all races, or at least the large majority of them. There just isn’t a meaningful sample size to work with here, or anything close to it

The truth is no one knows, but the results in this upcoming election will tell us a lot about if the last two presidential elections were polling flukes or if polling now is beyond repair. If it’s the former, we can go back to a healthy skepticism of polls. If it’s the latter, the art and science of politics is in for a massive overhaul.

2016 and 2020 were major polling errors. The other misses in recent years were more in line with historical expectations. I think we know what was different in those two years, don’t we? It was Donald Trump. He attracts a type of voter that doesn’t respond to polls and goes unmeasured. And apparently, these voters are only interested in him personally, not the Republican party, not the Republican project.

I think I’ve seen those voters before: Arnold Schwarzenegger voters. I remember standing in line to vote (back before we had mail-in voting in California) and the line was super long, full of odd voters. It was like waiting in line for a rock concert. I’d never seen anything like it. People were dressed funny, they were doing all of Arnold’s lines from his movies (“I’ll be back” etc.) and basically having a party. They weren’t voters, they were fans. It wasn’t about politics at all.

Those are the people who aren’t being polled and who vote because Trump is on the ballot. If they can find those people (or adjust for them) the polls will be more accurate.

A NYT cartoon addresses a still-contested question

Fourteenth Amendment, Section 1: All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.

Christian nationalists accept as given that one becomes a Christian by being “saved” (infant baptism for Catholics). They are much more stingy about what it takes to become an American despite one of the defined avenues being born into it. The 14th Amendment stipulates no ideological prerequisites.

That’s a good thing, since so many of our MAGA zealots have rejected the fundamental tenets of Americanism, especially the democratic process and majority rule. They’d like to disenfranchize Americans who don’t agree with their beliefs. They want to restore the monarchy, perhaps by force. They’ve already chosen a king.

But guess what? They’re still Americans. Maybe in name only, but they are saved from expulsion by meeting the minimum requirements in the constitution for which they’ve shown they have little use unless they are allowed to subjugate the rest of the country.

Usually, the side-eye is directed at new arrivals.

Let me recall a story readers have heard before:

My mother still tells the story of her mother (2nd generation Irish with a fresh memory of when her family members were treated as Latinos are now). She sat her down before sending my mother to school for the first time and looked her square in the face.

“When they ask at school what you are, you tell them you’re an American.”

When as a child she returned to Japan after a few years in the States, RumiHara realized she was an American too. It’s more than about where you are born.

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Political stunts obscure efforts to improve lives

Establishment Democrats prefer to campaign on what Democrats will do for you, i.e., “kitchen tables issues” or the 20 votes mentioned on Saturday. MAGA Republicans (virtually the establishment) whip up their base over what Democrats will do to you. They have no affirmative legislative agenda. They don’t have to promise big-money backers what Republicans will do for the people who fund them. That’s understood and best unspoken.

The New Yorker‘s John Cassidy references colleague Benjamin Wallace-Wells who noted that Republicans seem to be betting that they can win races across the country by putting a bellows to the heated culture wars. Republican governors Greg Abbott of Texas and Doug Ducey of Arizona have done it by shipping migrant children, women and men to blueish “sanctuary cities to “own the libs.” They used busses. Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida shipped his victims to Martha’s Vineyard from Texas using small jets and his taxpayers’ money allocated dubiously for removing migrants from Florida:

The forty-four-year-old’s central insight, Wallace-Wells pointed out, is that the best way to unify a party of the right these days is to mercilessly attack educated progressives wherever they can be found: in politics, the media, education, business, or wherever. To DeSantis, at least, flying undocumented Venezuelans from Texas to Martha’s Vineyard fits this model neatly. In response to questions at an event in the Panhandle, he conceded that his action wasn’t really about the migrants, or the struggle of the border cities to take in larger numbers of them. It was about owning the libs. “All those people in D.C. and New York were beating their chest when Trump was President, saying they were so proud to be sanctuary jurisdictions,” he said. “The minute even a small fraction of what those border towns deal with every day is brought to their front door, they all of a sudden go berserk, and they’re so upset that this is happening. And it just shows you that their virtue signalling is a fraud.”

That the Vineyard berzerking never happened is no impediment to Republicans flogging their narrative. Liberals are poseurs is their story and they are sticking to it, observed Elie Mystal, justice correspondent for The Nation.

Mystal continued, “See, the MAGA brain works off the assumption that everybody is just as small minded and bigoted as they are, others just lack the guts to say it. They can’t conceive that most people are just not as crappy as they are, and so they’re always projecting their crappiness onto others.” Besides, DeSantis himself conceded that the point of these stunts “isn’t to *solve* a problem, it’s to make one.”

Politico considers whether the DeSantis stunt has backfired. Many constituents among the large immigrant community in South Florida have, like the Venezuelans DeSantis (I nearly mistyped “DeSatanis”) diverted have fled communist or socialist countries. Their governor just signalled MAGA Republicans really feel about them.

“They know this is absolutely toxic in Miami-Dade County because it’s showing their true colors,” said state Sen. Annette Taddeo. She is challenging incumbent Rep. Maria Elvira Salazar (R) in FL-27. “All this outrage about socialism and communism — it’s all fake.”

More such disgusting demagoguery is on tap from the GOP in 2024.

While Republicans are trying to cause problems, Pres. Joe Biden is trying to solve them. His cancer “moonshot” means to address a disease that not only took one of his sons, cancer afflicts not only “Democrats and Republicans, but all Americans.”

Ezra Klein considers Biden’s creating a DARPA for health care to do what the more cautious National Institutes of Health cannot:

Shortly after winning the presidency, Biden persuaded Congress to fund an analogue focused on medical technology: ARPA-H. Why do we need an ARPA-H when the National Institutes of Health already exists? Because the N.I.H., for all its rigor and marvels, is widely considered too cautious. ARPA-H will — in a move some lament — be housed at the Institutes, but its explicit mandate is to take the kind of gambles that Darpa takes, and the N.I.H. sometimes lets go. Wegrzyn, Biden promised, is “going to bring the legendary Darpa attitude and culture and boldness and risk-taking to ARPA-H to fill a critical need.”

Here, two facets of the Biden administration reveal themselves, one of which I don’t think gets enough credit, the other which I worry doesn’t receive enough critique. The first is that the Biden administration has put technological advance at the very center of its agenda. Every big bill Biden has passed has carried a theory of how better policy could lead to better technologies that could lead to a better world. The second is that the Biden administration’s technological optimism is paired with an institutional conservatism: Too many Washington agencies proved too cautious during the pandemic, and little has been done to make them more daring.

Let’s start with Biden’s ambition. Four major bills have passed during his presidency: The American Rescue Plan, the Bipartisan Infrastructure Bill, the CHIPS and Science Act and the Inflation Reduction Act. Every one of them, at a core level, is about creating or deploying new technologies to solve ongoing problems.

The American Rescue Plan deployed vaccines and widespread testing and genomic surveillance to stifle the pandemic; the infrastructure bill is thick with ideas to make broadband access universal and develop next-generation energy and transportation technologies; CHIPS is an effort to break our reliance on Taiwanese and South Korean semiconductor manufacturing and keep ahead of China in fields of the future like artificial intelligence and quantum computing; and the Inflation Reduction Act uses tax breaks and loan guarantees to supercharge the wind and solar industries, build up advanced battery manufacturing, develop cost-effective carbon capture systems, and give the auto and home-heating industries reasons to go entirely electric.

Institutional obstacles inhibit progress, to be sure, and Klein devotes word-count to describing them. But Beltway dialogue, especially on the right, focuses more on what things cost and too little on what we get, Klein suggests.

It’s cliché, at this point, for politicians to brandish charts showing the stunning rise in projected health spending over the next 40 or 75 years. But those charts have always bugged me. Doesn’t what we get for that spending matter? You tell me if we’re living healthy lives until age 175, and then I’ll tell you whether spending a hefty share of G.D.P. on medical care is a scandal or a bargain.

We hear endlessly from critics that there is no difference between the major parties. But I put it to you that Democrats are at least trying to solve problems and make lives better while the GOP has no agenda save for defending its shrinking political turf.

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And what in the hell is this modified Nazi salute thing?

It will be very interesting if this becomes a thing at his rallies. Very disturbing.

Update___

It’s a QAnon song called WWg1WgA (Where We Go One, We Go All) and he’s used it in a previous campaign video. That would indicate that the people holding up the finger are QAnon people signifying “where we go one, we go all.”

He’s literally a religious cult figure now.

Here’s the story on the video from Media Matters:

Former President Donald Trump appeared to use a song named after the slogan for the QAnon conspiracy theory in a video promoting his rally speeches, which some in the QAnon community have hyped as supposedly corroborating the categorically false conspiracy theory and the movement it has inspired.

On August 9, Trump posted a video on his social media platform Truth Social featuring footage of himself speaking at his rallies and criticizing President Joe Biden. The video featured background audio and visual imagery of rain and thunderstorms before switching to a rising instrumental musical track.

According to a Media Matters review using both Google’s voice assistant and Apple’s Shazam app, the music in Trump’s video is a song titled Wwg1wga, produced in 2020 by an artist using the name “Richard Feelgood” on Spotify. The acronym “wwg1wga” is a common shorthand in the QAnon community for the slogan “Where we go one, we go all.” Discussion of a supposedly imminent “storm” is also important in QAnon lore, referring to a prophesied event where Trump’s perceived enemies — who are also supposedly part of a global satanic cabal of pedophiles — would be arrested and possibly executed. The phrase “the best is yet to come,” which was also featured in the video, is another popular refrain in the QAnon community. The Spotify album featuring Wwg1wga lists other songs whose titles also seem to be about QAnon, including Q Send Me and I Am Q.

Trump’s video has since been shared by One America News Network and received other right-wing media coverage that did not note the apparent conspiracy theory references scattered throughout it.

The QAnon community, however, has noticed and celebrated the appearance of the song, with supporters writing, “If that’s not a Q proof then I don’t know what is,” calling it “THE mother of all Q proofs,” and adding that it “might be the biggest nod they’ve ever given us tbh.” Others claimed that it was “confirmation” of the conspiracy theory and that “they’re basically telling us” that “there’s a plan at this point.” One QAnon adherent claimed of the song choice, “That’s not an accident. Team Trump knows exactly what they’re doing.”

Most women say no thanks

The Daily Beast reports on the latest trainwreck:

A new pro-Trump dating app backed by right-wing tech billionaire Peter Thiel has not even launched yet, but it’s already facing lots of rejection. The Right Stuff, scheduled to debut this month, was co-founded by former Trump body man and aspiring matchmaker Johnny McEntee, who recruited the sister of former White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany to help launch the app.

Kayleigh’s sister, Ryann McEnany, is particularly suited for the job. She has 146,000 Instagram followers—mostly young conservatives—and has been assigned a particularly tough task: convincing attractive, conservative women to sign up.

Her basic pitch, according to Instagram messages reviewed by The Daily Beast, is a mix of flattery and exclusivity: “Hi, I’m working with John McEntee’s team on an exclusive conservative dating app called The Right Stuff that’s expected to launch this summer! We would love to get you on our list for early access to the app.”

But despite the aim of enlisting female Capitol Hill staffers and right-wing politicos, the startup is already facing some problems. For one, there’s an emerging legal dispute with another dating service, also called The Right Stuff. That “The Right Stuff” has existed for more than two decades, but it has nothing to do with conservative politics.

[…]

Instead of drawing singles, the app has thus far largely drawn mockery, according to female Republican operatives who spoke to The Daily Beast.

Two Republican staffers in Washington, D.C., said many young conservative women have ignored McEnany’s outreach and have instead jeeringly passed around screenshots of her messages to group chats.

Other Republican staffers in D.C.—the sort who boast about downing drinks at the Navy Yard watering hole Mission and claim their pronouns are “Yee” and “Haw” on their Instagram profiles—told The Daily Beast the app has an array of possible problems, like liberals masquerading as right-wingers and the awkward potential of matching them with conservative staffers they already know.

“It’s all of Mitch McConnell’s staffers,” a female Republican operative said, speaking on the condition of anonymity because she still works in pro-Trump politics.

That certainly sounds enticing. But get a load of this:

Even before its launch, The Right Stuff—not to be confused with the white nationalist-affiliated site of the same name—has already generated other controversy. Upon release of a McEnany-led promotional video in August, the venture was derided on Twitter over its fixation on making a right-wing dating safe space free from pronouns.

Lolololol. It IS a white nationalist site. Also homophobic, of course.

The invite-only app reportedly will only permit heterosexual matches at the outset. As the LGBTQ+ website called “Them” pointed out, Thiel—who is gay—is therefore funding a product he wouldn’t be able to use. It remains to be seen whether the app catches on; other right-leaning startups, like Truth Social, Righter, and AlignPay, have not been able to fully compete with their mainstream counterparts.

There have been other causes of skepticism. “I feel like it could be vulnerable to people trolling,” a female Republican staffer told The Daily Beast.

She also questioned why The Right Stuff was even necessary. “You can meet other conservatives on normal dating apps. It’s something you can filter for,” she noted. More established applications, including Bumble, have long offered the ability to their users to filter out potential matches based on political leanings.

Others have said they are worried about limiting their prospective dating pool, particularly in the politically incestuous D.C. area.

“I don’t exactly want the world I work in knowing my dating status,” a D.C. reporter for a conservative publication told The Daily Beast.

That same reporter in The Right Stuff’s target demographic lamented that dating apps feel antithetical to “traditional” conservatism. “The internet seems to interfere with biological tendencies, like men courting women,” she said. “This isn’t like Alexa telling you the weather. You can’t upend the natural mating process and call it traditional.”

Apparently, traditional women have had a hard time meeting right wing men online who didn’t just want to hook up. Imagine that:

Meanwhile, a pre-launch, unpaid app ambassador that lives in Tampa, Florida, Savannah Dudzik, who met the startup’s representatives at a Turning Point USA gathering, added that she has historically disliked dating apps (such as Catholic Match), partly because men on the platform were just looking to hook up. She is hopeful for a more positive experience with The Right Stuff—serious romance only—and is excited to see it get off the ground. “I think it’s going to be a hit!” Dudzik said.

Except there is one catch: Dudzik hopes the app will ban right-wing males on the platform looking for “hookups.”

I don’t know how you filter for that. Remember, your Dear Leader thinks he can just grab women by the pussy whenever he wants to. So, good luck honey.

Meanwhile, there’s more than just one way to grift:

McEnany, for her part, has been busy promoting other right-wing causes as well. In recent days, she has championed a Google alternative that highlights “censored” stories, posted a beaming image of MyPillow guy Mike Lindell, and shared a movie scene featuring a Mexican mariachi band—in mocking reference to the Venezuelan migrants who were flown to Martha’s Vineyard by Florida officials, allegedly under false pretenses.

Evidently, The Right Stuff thinks its users will be attracted to that kind of ideology—or at least not alienated by it.

In one of its video advertisements harkening back to the values of the 1950s, three actresses ridicule the “crazy” world of modern dating, including fictional men who don’t want children for environmental reasons, ask a date to pay for a meal after forgetting their gift card in a fanny pack, and show up to a date on a bicycle.

“Download The Right Stuff today,” the advertisement concludes, “and start going out with normal guys.”

Normal guys like Donald Trump and Steve Bannon. Ooh baby. How can they resist?