Month: December 2022

No doubt he had to have an extra cheeseburger and a liter of diet coke to get through it

On Tuesday night, Donald Trump added one last name to his 2022 loss column and it’s one that’s close to his heart. Former football hero Herschel Walker has been a Trump ally since long before he entered politics, so the ex-president has to take it personally that his handpicked candidate decisively lost his bid for the Georgia U.S. Senate seat held by Democrat Raphael Warnock. But then, this is just the latest in a long list of Trump-endorsed losers in statewide races this cycle. Whatever he may claim, his record in such races is 2-14.

In truth, Trump did sound a bit upset. His response to the news on his Twitter-substitute social media platform Truth Social was simply this: “OUR COUNTRY IS IN BIG TROUBLE. WHAT A MESS!” He might just as easily have been talking about himself. Bad as the runoff election results in Georgia were for Donald Trump, that was nothing compared to the big news out of Manhattan earlier in the day. That was where a jury found the Trump Organization, the family business founded by his paternal grandmother and his father in 1927, guilty on a range of criminal charges, including tax fraud, conspiracy and falsifying business records.

The Trump company’s longtime CFO, Allen Weisselberg, had already pleaded guilty to the scheme to provide him and his family with expensive perks under the table to avoid paying taxes and testified that the company also benefited from the scheme. Despite ample evidence that Trump knew exactly what was going on, Weisselberg dutifully fell on his sword, telling the jury that he and another employee came up with the entire scheme, which explains why the prosecutors never indicted Trump for his role in all of this. (Weisselberg also explained that while he is no longer CFO he still goes to the office, collects his $650,000 salary and expects to get a $500,000 bonus in January, which is awfully generous for a man who has admitted to committing a long list of financial crimes.)

This was a case brought against a company rather than an individual, so Donald Trump was not on trial. But the evidence made clear that the conspiracy went on for 15 years, so the idea that Trump wasn’t personally aware of it is ludicrous. According to one of his longtime attorneys, this is a man who liked to personally sign all the checks so he could “monitor and keep control over what’s going on in the company.” His signature appeared on the check that got him in trouble for using his charity’s money to pay off then-Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi. It also appeared on a check Trump signed while he was president, to reimburse his former lawyer Michael Cohen for the payoffs to adult film actress Stormy Daniels.

The judge largely kept Trump’s name out of the trial until the very end when the company’s defense attorneys brought him up repeatedly in closing arguments. That opened the door:

That gave prosecutors the opportunity to hammer Trump personally, claiming that he “knew exactly” what his executives were up to and had fostered a culture of deception and fraud. At one point in his closing arguments, Manhattan assistant district attorney Joshua Steinglass showed jurors a memo from Trump Organization chief operating office Matthew Calimari in which Calimari requested a $75,000 paycut — the exact amount of rent the company was paying for a Trump-owned apartment for him to live in. The document shown to jurors had Trump’s initials written in large letters with a black Sharpie pen. “Mr. Trump explicitly sanctioning tax fraud! That’s what this document shows!” Steinglass told the jury.

Of course Republican officials simply don’t care. As far as they’re concerned, this is penny-ante stuff hardly even worth talking about. As the New York Times put it, the potential criminal penalty, a fine of $1.62 million, amounts to little more than “a rounding error for Mr. Trump, who typically notched hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue during his presidency.” (That’s right, during his presidency.)

Trump responded to the verdict with this statement, which as usual is full of lies: 

It’s unlikely that this verdict will hurt Trump politically. But it could definitely damage his business and affect his ongoing legal battles, particularly the ones in New York, where he currently faces a major civil case brought by state Attorney General Leticia James, based on much of the same evidence used in this trial. But that case targets the individuals who run the company, specifically Trump himself, his sons Eric and Donald Jr. and his daughter Ivanka. The potential penalty in that case could be as much s $250 million. That’s not a rounding error.

Earlier this week, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, who successfully prosecuted the Trump Organization criminal case, announced he was bringing on a new prosecutor, Matthew Colangelo, who has extensive Trump experience, both working on the state’s civil case and the investigation of Trump’s foundation, which ended up with the Trump family barred from ever again running a charitable organization in New York. According to the New York Times, Colangelo is likely to take on a revived criminal investigation into allegations that Trump illegally inflated the value of his assets, as well as the Stormy Daniels hush-money payments.

While the financial penalty from this criminal verdict is insignificant, it’s hard to see how this case doesn’t shred the already tattered reputation of the Trump Organization. Sure, the Trumps can continue to do sweetheart deals with foreign countries, as they just did with a Saudi developer for a Trump-licensed golf resort in Oman. But his brand is now entirely contingent on his political influence. Nobody would want to do business with such a company without it.

Ivanka Trump has backed away from the business, “Succession” style, living instead on her husband Jared Kushner’s lucrative influence-peddling with many of the same actors. But Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump have never had any kind of real job other than working for the Trump Organization. Of course they seem to be spending all their time these days making trash-talk videos and appearing at fringe QAnon conferences, so perhaps the whole family has already moved on to greener pastures. The younger generation had better get real professions, however, because from the looks of things, there won’t be much left of the family business once Donald Trump gets through with it. 

Salon

Germany has violent antidemocratic crazies too

German authorities broke up a large anti-government plot today. CNN reports, “The members of the group follow a conglomerate of conspiracy myths consisting of narratives of the so-called Reichsbürger as well as QAnon ideology.”

BBC:

Twenty-five people have been arrested in raids across Germany on suspicion of plotting to overthrow the government.

The group of far-right and ex-military figures are said to have prepared for a “Day X” to storm the Reichstag parliament building and seize power.

A minor aristocrat named as Prince Heinrich XIII, 71, is alleged to have been central to their plans.

According to federal prosecutors, he is one of two alleged ringleaders among those arrested across 11 German states.

The plotters are said to include members of the extremist Reichsbürger [Citizens of the Reich] movement, which has long been in the sights of German police over violent attacks and racist and antisemitic conspiracy theories. They also refuse to recognise the modern German state.

Other suspects came from the QAnon movement who believe their country is in the hands of a mythical “deep state” involving secret powers pulling the political strings.

Interior Minister Nancy Faeser assured Germans that authorities would respond with the full force of the law “against the enemies of democracy”.

Yeah, that sounds familiar.

CNN’s report adds:

German Minister of Justice Marco Buschmann said on Wednesday that “democracy is defensible,” adding a “major anti-terror operation” has been underway since this morning.

“The Federal Public Prosecutor is investigating a suspected terrorist network from the Reich citizen milieu,” Buschmann said on Twitter.

“There are suspicions that an armed attack on constitutional organs was planned.”

The federal prosecutor’s office said the raids are continuing and are directed against a further 27 suspects.

The Washington Post:

The group was prepared to use violence and accepted that deaths would happen, the statement added. Its central “council” was headed by an individual named as Heinrich XIII P.R., who had reached out to Russian representatives inside Germany — although the prosecutor said there were no indications so far of a positive response to his overtures. German news media identified the individual as Prince Heinrich XIII, 71, a descendant of the House of Reuss, a royal dynasty from the German state of Thuringia.

“The 71-year-old aristocrat is a true descendant of the House of Reuss – a family who ruled over parts of Germany for hundreds of years – and is said to be hell bent on tearing down the German government to bring back the glory days of old,” says the London tabloid Daily Mail.

“The organisation is thought to have opposed Germany’s postwar constitution and intended to establish the ‘prince’ as the country’s new leader,” reports the Economic Times of India. “By German privacy laws, the other suspected ringleader is a 69-year-old former paratrooper identified only as Ruediger.

Now what?

The final act of the 2022 midterm drama closed Tuesday night with incumbent Sen. Raphael Warnock (D) defeating football legend Herschel Walker in a U.S. Senate runoff election in Georgia. The spread just now stands at just under three points.

“After a hard-fought campaign — or, should I say, campaigns — it is my honor to utter the four most powerful words ever spoken in a democracy: The people have spoken,” Warnock, 53, told joyful supporters in Atlanta.

Warnock won the seat in a special election on Jan. 5, 2021, making last night his third election contest in under two years. Walker, the Republican, was recruited to run for the seat by embattled former president Donald Trump. The Walker loss is the third Georgia Senate seat loss for candidates backed by Trump. Georgia’s Republican Lt. Gov. Geoff Duncan predicted days ago that Walker “will probably go down as one of the worst candidates in our party’s history.”

The Warnock win gives Democrats a 51-seat majority in the Senate and will make it easier for Senate Democrats to advance legislation for the next two years as well as to confirm judges. It also means Democrats may have an easier time holding their Senate majority in 2024. Democrats will, however, have to contend with a House narrowly controlled in January by the GOP. Warnock’s reelection means that rather than being an expected wipeout for Democrats, 2022 “was more or less a status-quo election,” The Washington Post’s Aaron Blake observes.

“The year of Republicans blowing it is now complete,” reads the subhead on Jim Newell’s analysis at Slate. With Joe Biden’s 2020 presidential win there, Georgia now becomes a major battlefield for Democrats in 2024.

Heavy early voting by Warnock supporters left Walker unable to gain the “yardage” he needed to make up on a rainy Election Day.

Aaron Blake (Washington Post):

One thing you’ll notice if you look at the map of the election results is that Walker often ran stronger in the state’s rural and ruby-red counties than he did four weeks ago. But Warnock ran stronger in the metro Atlanta area, and turnout was slightly stronger there. Turnout everywhere was very high for a runoff, and it looks like it will end up around 90 percent of the total vote on Election Day, but it was narrowly higher in blue counties.

I’d like here to compare two maps. The first is the Times’ Georgia runoff election map:

The second is my For The Win contact tracking map.

Stacey Abrams is due a lot of credit for her organizing in Georgia, and then some. But she is not the state party.

Grayed-out counties had no Democratic committees (or else zero digital presence) earlier this year. Of 159 counties, just over 100 had county party organizations. With so much of the population concentrated in the Atlanta metro area, Democrats can win statewide races by running up the score in the few, large urban counties even while getting clobbered in the more numerous rural ones. This is what happens in statewide races. Candidates focus their efforts and funds where the large blocks of votes are.

The problem is that this strategy leaves local Democrats in smaller rural areas unsupported or under-supported. In Georgia, as in other rural states, many counties are thin on population, making it harder to recruit party leadership. Worse, if there is no Democratic committee there to lend support it is very difficult to recruit candidates for county commissions and city councils. The gray areas on my map in south-central Georgia correspond to the deep red areas where Republicans dominate. Guess why?

Democrats cannot win back state legislatures if they don’t show up to play. As we’ve seen, red state legislatures are where much of the mischief takes place.

UPDATE: Listen to live Moore v. Harper oral arguments here at a10 a.m. ET.

They call Trump’s legacy “pure poison”

CNN’s Ron Brownstein published an excellent analysis of the midterm focusing on the specific wall of resistance the Republicans are facing with Independent voters:

The highly touted red wave in last month’s midterm election failed to develop largely because it hit a wall of resistance among independent voters, especially across the key battleground states. And that presents difficult questions for Republicans looking forward to 2024.

The GOP’s disappointing showing among independents this year marked the third consecutive election in which the party has underperformed with those critical swing voters. Although Donald Trump ran competitively among independents in his first presidential race in 2016, since he took office, the GOP has consistently faced broad opposition among them, especially those who are women or hold four-year college degrees.

The GOP’s 2022 struggles with independents were especially striking because they came even as most of those voters expressed negative views of both President Joe Biden’s job performance and the state of the economy – sentiments that typically cause most swing voters to break for the party out of the White House. To many analysts in both parties, the reluctance of so many independents to support Republican candidates despite such discontent underscores how powerfully the Trump-era GOP has alienated these voters.

“There’s a huge lesson here, which is if you talk like Trump or remind voters of Trump, particularly at a personality level, it’s pure poison to independent voters,” John Thomas, a GOP consultant, said flatly. “It might have been effective in 2016 because voters were looking for something new and a change, but it hasn’t been useful since then.”

For Republicans, the results underscore the electoral risks of the party’s continuing refusal to repudiate Trump, even as he has openly associated with two antisemites who praised Adolf Hitler, praised the January 6, 2021, US Capitol rioters and publicly called for the “termination” of the US Constitution to restore himself to power.

In the election, fully 66% of independent voters said they had an unfavorable view of the former president while just 30% viewed him favorably, according to the results of the exit poll conducted by Edison Research for a consortium of media organizations including CNN. Among female independents, Trump’s ratings were even worse: just 23% favorable and 72% unfavorable, according to previously unpublished exit poll results provided by the CNN polling unit. Trump’s unfavorable rating hit a comparable 69% among independents with at least a four-year college degree. “I have a hard time seeing the Republican Party escaping the grasp of Trump with or without him on the ballot anytime soon,” says Tom Bonier, chief executive officer of TargetSmart, a Democratic data and voter targeting firm.

He warns that democrats shouldn’t do a victory dance, however. Indies don’t like them much either. It’s purely a contrast with the Trump Republicans. Nonetheless it says volumes that the Dems did as well as they did considering the historical weight of midterm elections for the party in power, especially in a time of economic turmoil.

Jenifer Fernandez Ancona, vice president and chief strategy officer for Way to Win, says concerns about the Trump era GOP’s commitment to basic rights, including abortion rights, and to democracy itself offset the usual tendency among independents to check the party holding the White House. “I think that the combination of the threats to democracy, the threats to freedom was a powerful antidote to that usual pattern,” she said.

Hogan was part of a bipartisan team (along with Tony Fabrizio, Trump’s lead pollster in 2020) that polled during the election for the AARP, the giant senior’s lobby. In a post-election survey of the 63 most competitive House districts, that pollster team also found that Democrats narrowly carried independent voters.

Like Ancona, Hogan says the key to that result was that as many independents in these districts said abortion rights and threats to democracy were the most important issues in their vote as cited inflation and the economy – a result that surprised him. Though many independents were negative on Biden’s job performance and pessimistic about the economy, he notes, they remained unwilling to entrust power to a Republican Party reshaped in Trump’s image.

Another measure of that hesitation came in the national exit poll. Overall the survey found that a virtually identical share of voters nationwide, just over half, said they viewed the GOP and the Democratic Party each as “too extreme.” But independents were much more likely to stamp that label on the GOP. While the share of independents who considered Democrats extreme exceeded the share who did not by a narrow four percentage points, the gap for Republicans was 18 points. Nearly two-thirds of independents with college degrees, and exactly three-fifths of female independents, said they viewed the GOP as too extreme, considerably more than in either group that identified Democrats in that way, according to detailed results from the CNN polling unit.

Paul Bentz, an Arizona-based Republican pollster and the 2010 campaign manager for former GOP Gov. Jan Brewer, believes that label severely hurt the GOP in that critical swing state. Bentz says the GOP’s 2022 slate of Trump-aligned candidates – led by gubernatorial nominee Kari Lake and Senate choice Blake Masters – systematically alienated not only independents but also a critical slice of moderate Republicans through their rigid opposition to legal abortion and embrace of Trump’s discredited claims of fraud in the 2020 election. “They did not appear to have any interest in targeting, identifying and communicating with independent voters,” Bentz says.

In Arizona and elsewhere, the GOP especially struggled among college-educated and female independents. The exit poll found that Democratic Sen. Mark Kelly, while beating Masters, drew 55% of female independents and 61% of independents (of both genders) with college degrees; Democratic governor-elect Katie Hobbs, in her win over Kari Lake, won almost exactly as many of each group.

They were hardly alone in dominating among both college-educated and female independents. In the national exit poll, Democrats carried exactly 54% of each group. In Michigan, Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer won 59% of the independents with degrees and 56% of women independents. Wisconsin’s Democratic Gov. Tony Evers virtually matched those numbers. In the Pennsylvania Senate race, Democrat John Fetterman carried over three-fifths of both groups in his comfortable victory; Democratic Sen. Maggie Hassan roughly equaled his performance while winning reelection by an even wider margin in New Hampshire. Democratic Senators Catherine Cortez Masto in Nevada and Warnock in Georgia both carried 53-55% of each group. Josh Shapiro, the Democratic-governor elect in Pennsylvania, set the pace by carrying over two-thirds of both female and college-educated independents in his landslide against far-right GOP nominee Doug Mastriano.

Results provided by Edison Research showed that Democrats also dominated among women and college-educated independents in the 2018 House races and 2020 presidential contest, races also heavily shaped by attitudes toward Trump.

If the issues are the reversal of basic rights and the erosion of democracy, then there’s no doubt which party is more extreme. Perhaps ormal people understand that much of the new churn in society that makes some of them uncomfortable is beyond the scope of politics.

So is it only about Trump? Frankly, I doubt it.

In both parties, many analysts see little chance for the GOP to reverse these trends if they nominate Trump for the presidency again in 2024. The bigger question may be whether another nominee would allow the GOP to climb out of the hole that Trump has opened beneath the party with independents.

Bentz, the Arizona-based GOP pollster, thinks the answer is yes. Bentz says the key to the state’s recent tilt away from decades of Republican dominance is the recoiling from the Trump definition of the party among well-educated, higher-income swing voters in the Phoenix suburbs. But he notes that outgoing GOP Gov. Doug Ducey, with more of a business-oriented and problem-solving image, twice ran well with those voters; that precedent, Bentz says, suggests that if Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis can fit that mold, he could recapture many of them in 2024.

“Trump would very much struggle in this state again,” Bentz says. “DeSantis, especially depending on who he chooses as his running mate, I think he could be competitive here.”

Less clear is whether DeSantis can present himself in that way. While he’s less personally bombastic and does not carry the association with election denial and violence that has stained the former president, the Florida governor has embraced a wide array of right-wing culture war causes, from limiting how teachers talk about race, gender and sexual orientation to targeting undocumented immigrants and restricting access to abortion.

With that resume, Fernandez Ancona says DeSantis is vulnerable to the same stamp of extremism and intolerance that has hurt Trump with independents-if Democrats do the work to define him. “I don’t think you can separate Trump from Trumpism,” she says. “And DeSantis is absolutely an acolyte of Trumpism … that’s a story we would have to tell.”

Thomas, the GOP consultant, is the founder and chief strategist of Ron to the Rescue PAC, a Super PAC promoting a 2024 presidential bid for DeSantis (who has not yet announced whether he’ll run). Like Bentz, Thomas believes DeSantis could improve on the GOP’s Trump-era performance among independents. For all DeSantis’ fervor as a culture warrior, Thomas argues, the Florida governor has also shown he can execute the nuts-and-bolts aspects of governing “that matter to independents.”

But Thomas doesn’t discount the risk Democrats could define DeSantis exactly in the manner Fernandez Ancona suggests – especially if the Florida Governor leans too far into what Thomas calls culture war “stunts” like his recent move to fly undocumented immigrants from Texas to Martha’s Vineyard. Thomas says he’s confident that if DeSantis runs, he can manage “the tightrope” of appealing to both independent general election voters repelled by Trump and base primary voters attracted to his belligerence toward liberals. But Thomas agrees if DeSantis’ “argument for voters is the stunts, I think that becomes too Trump-like at the end of the day.”

Republicans performed better among independents last month in states that already lean in their direction. Gov. Greg Abbott in Texas ran virtually even among those voters, and DeSantis carried them – as did Ohio GOP Gov. Mike DeWine and, even more decisively. J.D. Vance, the GOP’s Ohio senator-elect, also ran about even with them, the exit polls found.

But despite all the unhappiness with Biden and the economy, Republicans continued to struggle with independents in almost all gubernatorial and Senate races across the five states that decided the last presidential race by switching from Trump in 2016 to Biden in 2020 – Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Arizona and Georgia. (The only exceptions were the governor’s race in Georgia and Senate contest in Wisconsin where Republican incumbents Brian Kemp and Ron Johnson each ran about even among independents.)

That pattern suggests Republicans are unlikely to regain an Electoral College majority and recapture the White House in 2024 unless they can pry away more independents from the coalition that has now staunchly rejected Trump’s vision for America over three consecutive elections. And Democrats, watching the GOP again almost completely avoid direct criticism of Trump amid his latest provocations, see few signs Republicans are willing to do what that would likely require.

“I don’t think these fundamentals are going to drastically change,” says Fernandez Ancona. “The pieces are in place right now for us to be able to continue to grow this anti-MAGA majority.”

DeSantism is Trumpism with less flair and more strategy and they are stuck with it for the time being because the loons that make up the GOP base are all in. I think it’s going to take them losing some more elections before this burns itself out.

There are millions of these people out there

This article in the Texas Monthly about a family who went to DC on January 6th is a must read. Grab a cup of coffee and settle in, it’s amazing. Here’s an excerpt.

Amid this kaleidoscopic melee, another strange tableau unfolded, one that might have escaped notice but for the Capitol surveillance cameras. It occurred at 2:25 p.m., just twelve minutes after the first rioter breached the building and about twenty minutes before Babbitt was killed. A slender middle-aged man slipped through a broken window into the Senate wing of the Capitol. He wore a red sweatshirt, camouflage pants, and a black knit cap. Though the marble corridor was already crowded with rioters bustling along in both directions, the man lingered by the broken window. He helped a teenage girl wearing a camouflage coat climb through, taking care that she didn’t land on the shattered glass covering the floor. Then the man assisted a second teenage girl who was similarly attired. A third woman followed, slightly older and wearing a Trump flag as a cape. Then came a middle-aged woman, hooded and wearing sunglasses. Finally, a young man clambered through the window. The six of them then proceeded through the U.S. Capitol in tandem, as the American family unit they happened to be.

These were the Munns. Just over an hour earlier, they had stood among tens of thousands of Trump supporters at the Ellipse, watching on the JumboTron as the president had said, “We’re going to walk down to the Capitol,” adding, “Because you’ll never take back our country with weakness. You have to show strength and you have to be strong.” They had done exactly that, following other rallygoers all the way to the steps of the Capitol, in an atmosphere that Tom would later describe in an online post as “upbeat and patriotic.” Minutes later, his post continued, “everything suddenly became very ‘dark.’ I do not know how else to describe it. Eventually resulting in our entry of the Capitol Building”—past police barricades, with tear gas swirling and accompanied by a soundtrack of flash-bang grenades, security alarms, and the roar of the mob. Through the broken window, they entered the restricted area of the Capitol while federal legislators were convening to certify the presidential election.

The Munns’ movements over the ensuing 52 minutes were unremarkable. They wandered through the Capitol visitors center. They made their way into a Senate conference room, where the oldest sibling, 28-year-old Kristi, used her phone to record video of rioters confronting police officers. At one point, the father stood and lit a cigarette. At another, an officer who had been shoved by a rioter collided with Dawn, bruising her knee. Finally, at 3:17 p.m., the six Munns exited through a different broken Senate window. Throughout their nearly hour-long excursion, they were surrounded by fellow trespassers as well as police officers yet interacted only with one another. As Tom’s court-appointed attorney would later say, “They stuck together, as a family.”

That evening and into the next day, the Munns memorialized their activities on Facebook. “We went in and stormed capital,” the mother wrote. Declared the father: “I need to tell you all that the media is LYING TO YOU. . . . There was no violence in the capital building, the crowd was NOT out of control . . . they were ANGRY!!!” Maintained their only son, 23-year-old Josh: “It was super cool everything was cool till the cop used tear gas that is when people got mad but still never hurt anyone . . . I am still feeling the tear gas so ya I’m pissed.” Kristi wrote, “I was just thinking . . . tear gas tastes like freedom.” And eighteen-year-old Kayli, four months shy of graduating from high school, was ebullient in a message to one of her sisters in Wisconsin who asked how things were going: “F—ing great! Holy s— we were inside the
f—ing capital!”

Then, on January 7, the Munns piled back into the gray family van and began the long drive back to Borger.

Everyone thinks of this family as Texans but they actually just moved to Texas in 2017 from Wisconsin — because of gender neutral bathrooms. I’m not kidding.

They seem like such good people:

Two intertwining threads came to define the Munns over the years. One was their insularity. The eight children, who uniformly share their father’s gaunt appearance, lived under strict rules. For years, observing Halloween was forbidden. At one point, some of them were pulled out of public schools and enrolled in a small Christian school. 

The other constant was the parents’ tendency to spend and borrow beyond their means and then leave others holding the bag. In May of 1996, Tom and Dawn filed for bankruptcy, listing creditors that included J. C. Penney, Sears, and the Wisconsin Department of Revenue. Thirteen years later, in 2009, the Munns again filed for Chapter 7, after both Tom and Dawn had formed individual private construction companies, secured bank loans, and subsequently failed to make payments. Their liabilities totaled $168,001. Their debts included $6,569 in rent that the Munns had failed to pay their landlord in 2008.

During the 2009 bankruptcy proceeding, Tom declared his income as zero. By 2010, he had stopped working altogether. Dawn supported the family on her nursing income, with assistance from Tom’s father, Harvey. Despite their meager resources, in 2012 the Munns moved into a six-bedroom rental home out in the country, a few miles from Sparta, near the town of Cataract. The owner of the house, Don Crandall, did not see anything that aroused concern. Apart from the spent bullet casings littering the yard from family target practice and the fact that the children owned an alpaca named Q-tip that occasionally defiled the interior of the house, Crandall regarded them as decent tenants. Dawn faithfully deposited a $1,175 rent payment on the first and fifteenth of every month. But one day in 2016, Crandall received an alarming phone call.

The caller was Laura Bolden, the caretaker of Harvey, who was then living in Sparta and in his nineties, widowed and recovering from a debilitating stroke the previous year. When Crandall told Bolden that the Munns had been paying their rent on time, the caretaker warned that this would likely soon change. She explained that Tom and Dawn, who’d taken control of Harvey’s finances after his stroke, had moved almost all of the elderly Munn’s money out of his retirement account and into a checking account they had opened under his name. Where there had once been approximately $200,000, now there was only $700. Belatedly, Harvey closed the account and confronted Tom in the presence of Bolden. Tom didn’t deny he’d taken his father’s money. Instead, the son asked for more so that he could make next month’s rent. (The Munns were never charged with a crime over this, though Bolden said an investigator with the sheriff’s department suggested that Harvey hire an attorney and pursue his son in civil court. He chose not to.)

Sure enough, the Munns stopped paying their landlord. The family promptly held a yard sale made up of items that were in fact owned by Crandall. When the landlord arrived and asked what was going on, Tom first said he thought the objects were his. Then, according to Crandall, Tom said, “Well, you’re the one evicting us. We’ve got to raise money to get out of here.”

These are Trump’s people. These are the salt-o-the-earth folks to whom we’re all supposed to defer. This is MAGA — all American inmates running the asylum. Read the whole thing.

After the Capitol rioters were finally routed from the building and Biden’s victory was formally certified on the evening of January 6, a bitter and fearful despondency fell over much of the rural Panhandle. In the town of Fritch, thirteen miles west of Borger, Blaik Kemp, who had just been elected as Hutchinson County’s sheriff, convened a town hall. Kemp intended to discuss local law enforcement issues with his constituents. Instead, Kemp recalled, “I stood for maybe an hour and a half and just answered questions about not really local problems. ‘What’s going to happen at the border now? Are they going to come take all our guns?’ ”

Tom Munn was also consumed with discontent. On Facebook, he posted a photograph of two bare-chested men hugging, both ostensibly gay and one bearing a resemblance to Trump’s former vice president. “I’m still trying to figure out why Pence, would turn on President Trump?” he wrote. “Anyone got any ideas??” For months, he repeatedly told his followers that Biden was an illegitimate president and that Trump would be restored to his office. He also hinted at civil war. 

Facebook eventually identified him as a serial misinformer, and his account was permanently shut down. He took over the account of one of his younger daughters and unleashed a torrent of conspiracy theories, suggesting that one of the Capitol police officers who was attacked on January 6 had also posed as a rioter, and that the so-called New World Order, supposedly led by the Rockefeller family, might be responsible for the three 5G cell towers that had recently been erected in Borger. He wrote, “I really have to admit . . . I am really wishing we could see something, anything . . . I’M READY, JUST DO IT!!!” He responded to a follower’s approving comment with a photo of a man in a suit wearing a necktie shaped like a noose, writing, “Treason has a penalty.”

Is all this violent energy spent? Maybe when it comes to some of the more or less normal people. But people like this? I doubt it. Besides, there’s the grift to think of:

“American Family Needing Help,” blared the title of the GiveSendGo account established by one of the Munn daughters in the summer of 2022. The web page included a lengthy elucidation by Tom of how he had tried to instill in his children his deep commitment to the Constitution, often focusing on the First Amendment. He wrote that the 2020 election results had left him doubting the process. Following what he termed “a frustrating display of political maneuvering, to obstruct the verification of the vote,” Tom “felt compelled to let my voice be heard and obligated to demonstrate to my children, the vital importance of doing so.” He described a Gestapo-like raid by armor-clad federal agents on his peaceful home. He said that his family had lost friends and now struggled to find work. 

Tom’s synopsis of the family’s legal predicament was misleading at best. “Having no other ‘real’ recourse, we accepted the ‘plea deal’ offered by the prosecution,” he wrote. In truth, each of the Munns were provided free legal counsel from the federal public defender’s office. The children, beginning with Josh, eventually indicated their willingness to plead guilty. Though Tom and Dawn waited ten months to acknowledge their guilt, they offered no legal challenge to their indictment at any point. 

When the GiveSendGo page went live, Tom lamented that the Munns lacked the means to travel to Washington for their sentencing hearing in October, and as a result, “we are greatly fearing being held in contempt of court,” he wrote. This appeal, which raised the Munns more than $33,000 in donations, evoked a familiar trope, that of a patriotic and Trump-loving American family suffering under the bootheel of a deeply partisan criminal justice system. That sentiment was echoed by Clay Renick, the Borger-based director of the Hutchinson County Historical Museum. Renick is no fan of the Munns and doesn’t believe they’re at all representative of Borger, but a few days before their sentencing trial, he wrote in an email to me that “Justice in America today, isn’t much more than a fleeting concept under the liberal definition, and I feel certain that the punishment the Munns receive will be severe—just to make yet another point about the residents of ‘flyover’ country.”

The martyrdom runs deep. You can see why they all worship Trump.

Here’s a fun JV Last piece about the likelihood of Trump making it to the finish line this time. He quotes a sunny tweet thread from Bill Kristol:

Straightforward from here:

1. Tonight: Walker loses 53%-47%.

2. Tomorrow: McConnell says Trump can’t be the 2024 GOP nominee and he’ll help mobilize donors and voters to stop him.

3. In two weeks: Jan. 6 Committee report. Wave of GOP ‘Never Again Trump’ proclamations.

4. Early 2023: Trump indicted. More Maybe Trumpers move to Never Again Trump.

5. Spring 2023: Trump fading, Biden announces he won’t run in 2024, welcomes younger leaders to compete for Dem nomination.

6. The future: A new generation get to work building a better politics. END

Yeah right. And all this authoritarian, white nationalism and batshit lunacy will be instantly forgotten. Sure it will.

Last begs to differ:

Drink it in, my friends. Because it could happen. As I sit here with the Time Stone examining the 14,605,000 possible futures that are currently open to us, that is absolutely one of them.

And it’s not a long shot, either. Each of the items on Bill’s list is fairly likely. I’d call this something like a 1-in-10 scenario. Happy!

On the other hand . . .

Even if we get this happy scenario, it isn’t going to feel good.

For one thing, none of these Never Again Trumpers will make nice with people like you and me. In fact, they’ll have to kick down at every opportunity to signal that they’re not admitting fault and are still distinct from the RINO-cuck-libtard-grifters.

Always remember Albus Dumbledore: People easily forgive you for being wrong; they never forgive you for being right.

Then there’s the problem of what Never Again Trumpers will pivot to. They are not going to step back and welcome a robust exchange of ideas while encouraging a herd of Republicans to compete for ownership of the party. Because you can’t overthrow an existing boss with a bake-off. You need a champion. Someone to consolidate popular support.

Which is why the aspiring Never Again Trumpers are so into DeSantis. But even here, DeSantis is just a vessel. There is a theory for him, but it does not extend past “because he will win.”

So any successful Never Again Trump movement will need an animating idea. And let me tell you: Compassionate conservatism isn’t walking through that door.

Meaning that a Trump alternative probably has to be, at least as a rhetorical matter, more populist than Trump in order to hold traction with Republican voters. It can not be anti-Trump. It will have to stipulate that Trump is awesome and that he was a tremendously strong leader who, many people are saying, was probably the best president in history.

So that won’t be, you know, awesome.

But here’s why I ultimately think Bill’s optimism is a lower-probability scenario: He’s putting a lot of stock in the power of Republican elites to move voter opinion.

The invisible primary is underway and while Mitch McConnell has the power to sway (some) of the old Republican donor types, (1) his influence on the rank-and-file is limited, and (2) Trump doesn’t need institutional money or infrastructure. He’s the most establishment-proof presidential candidate in modern history.

Trump is going to live or die by the polls. It’s as simple as that. If he stays at or over 40 percent support, then he’s in a commanding position to be the Republican party’s nominee. Period. The end.

And as I’ve said before, near-term events—the debt ceiling fight, an indictment—are set to create a series of litmus tests in which other Republicans will have to choose between siding with Trump or the woke-socialists. That’s good for him.

---

Trump has a few major advantages.

The first is that in a primary matchup, he is skilled at fighting Republicans. His appeal has always been two-pronged: He triggered the libs and he was eager to throw down against the “bad” RINOs. (Like George W. Bush, John McCain, Mitt Romney, etc.) Arguably, it was this RINO-owning that Republican voters loved most.

DeSantis, on the other hand, has little experience in intra-party fights. He will be a creature of the establishment—the favored candidate of McConnell and the donor class. Which is not a helpful thing in a populist environment. And his go-to move for dealing with Trump has been duck-and-cover. That’s not an operable strategy for a primary fight.

The second advantage Trump has is that over the last few years Republican voters have signaled that in any primary contest, they want the craziest sonofabitch available.

How is DeSantis—or anyone else—going to outbid Trump on crazy?

Think about it: If Trump is so weak because of all of his stunts, then why didn’t DeSantis criticize him for having dinner with Kanye and Nick Fuentes?

The answer is: Because criticizing Trump for dining with Nazi-lovers would put DeSantis on the same side as Democrats and the Liberal Media. It would hurt him more than it would hurt Trump.

Meaning: Trump made a bid so high that DeSantis can’t match it—but also can’t criticize it.

Expect to see lots more of this.

He does see a silver lining: Trump is getting old, noting that he hasn’t held a rally since he announced. In fact, he hasn’t done anything except dine with Nazis and say stupid things on twitter.

I always assumed that Trump would sleep for 4 hours a night and live until he was 90. That he’d be like Castro. But maybe he’s slowing down, losing a step. If that happens—if he forgets how to dominate, or loses the will to log the miles, then maybe some other Republican can take control of the party from him.

That would be one of the only ways he’ll back off. He’s a fighter but combined with all the legal pressures he might just be too tired to do it all over again.

I’ll believe it when I see it.

absolutely absurd that Kevin McCarthy is speaking at an event commemorating law enforcement responders to January 6 pic.twitter.com/QQ2b8hRlpW

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) December 6, 2022

During Congressional Gold Medal ceremony for Jan. 6 police, representatives of those receiving awards shake hands with Schumer then walk past McConnell and McCarthy. pic.twitter.com/YGjKXRGtiZ

— Howard Mortman (@HowardMortman) December 6, 2022

I wonder how they feel about this. Are they proud? Probably.

You can’t be tired, Obama told Georgia

Difficult as it is to maintain a sense of optimism this holiday season, it lifts one’s spirits ever so slightly when someone like Bill Kristol sees light at the end of the tunnel and it is not another Trump train. Kristol breezily predicts a new generation “building a better politics.”

4. Early 2023: Trump indicted. More Maybe Trumpers move to Never Again Trump.

5. Spring 2023: Trump fading, Biden announces he won't run in 2024, welcomes younger leaders to compete for Dem nomination.

6. The future: A new generation get to work building a better politics.

END

— Bill Kristol (@BillKristol) December 6, 2022

But in Moore County, North Carolina the lights are still out. Gov. Roy Cooper calls last weekend’s power infrastructure attack “a new level of threat.”

Some generation or other does not want a better politics. It wants chaos and anarchy. That generation is not one Kristol intersects often, I’d wager. Someone tweeted that you risk being run off the road in Moore County for displaying a Biden bumper sticker.

Tens of thousands of people in a North Carolina county remained without power on Monday as authorities worked to repair two power stations damaged by targeted gunfire on Saturday night, an attack that Gov. Roy Cooper said raised “a new level of threat.” https://t.co/u4wGHa3XlQ

— The New York Times (@nytimes) December 6, 2022

Supporting Kristol’s premise, the party Donald Trump promised would get tired of winning keeps losing to Democrats’ lead attorney, Marc Elias. There’s that. Plus the fact that “normies” have had about enough of extremist-right bullshit that they gave the U.S. Senate back to Democrats last month.

Now we have to restore sanity to the Supreme Court and make loons like Marjorie Taylor Greene and Jim Jordan footnotes to history.

It’s a process. An exhausting process. But we can’t be tired.

“turns on the Moore petitioners’ inability to understand a dictionary”

There is an, um, minor runoff election in Georgia today. I’ll look at that tomorrow once (fingers crossed) results are known. Meantime, there is a potentially more consequential case going before the Roberts Supreme Court tomorrow (Wednesday) at 10 a.m. ET.

Moore v. Harper out of (where else) North Carolina arises because the state Supreme Court overturned yet another gerrymandered congressional map drawn by the GOP-controlled legislature. The surgically precise gerrymanders Republicans drew after the 2010 census faced court-ordered revision after court-ordered revision as Democrats and voting rights groups challenged the GOP in federal and state court over the last decade. Only in the final election cycle (2020) did the state have something closer to fairness.

The John Roberts Supreme Court dodged ruling that partisan gerrymandering is unconstitutional (Rucho v. Common Cause, 2019) and threw that matter back to the states. A three-judge panel in Superior Court in Raleigh subsequently ruled that it was forbidden under the state constitution.

But the GOP’s rigged maps survived most of the decade, so Wheee!!, why not have another go after the 2020 census, thought Republicans. Their 2021 gerrymanders went right back to court and, after legislators’ Trump-style strategic delays, the court ordered maps redrawn by a special master (for 2022 only). The result? Seven Republicans and seven Democrats will be seated in Congress in January and the GOP will be back at its map-rigging.

Will no one rid us of these troublesome courts? thought N.C. Republicans led by House Speaker Tim Moore. So they come to SCOTUS tomorrow bringing a truly inspired constitutional argument.

“The opening brief in Moore v. Harper, an extraordinarily high-stakes election case that the Supreme Court will hear December 7, is one of the least persuasive documents that I’ve ever read in any context. And I’ve read both Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, and Donald Trump’s Art of the Deal,” Ian Milhiser at begins at Vox:

The case involves the awkwardly named “independent state legislature doctrine” (ISLD), a theory that the Supreme Court rejected many times over the course of more than a century. It’s also a theory repudiated by many of the very same sources that the ISLD proponents rely upon in their briefs to the justices.

Under the strongest form of this doctrine, members of each state’s legislative branch have unchecked authority to decide how elections for Congress and the presidency will be conducted in their state — indeed, a state legislature could potentially pass a law canceling the presidential election in that state and awarding its electoral votes to Donald Trump. Any state constitutional provisions that protect the right to vote, that limit gerrymandering, or that otherwise constrain lawmakers’ ability to skew elections would cease to function. State governors would lose their ability to veto laws impacting federal elections. And state courts would lose their authority to strike down these laws.

“This entire case turns on the Moore petitioners’ inability to understand a dictionary,” Milhiser writes. I leave you to read his explanation.

Conservative legal elites including former federal judge J. Michael Luttig and Federalist Society founder and co-chair Steven Calabresi oppose the theory. Moore petitioners “flout core tenets of the American Founding,” Calabresi warns.

Democracy Docket spells out what’s at stake:

If the ISL theory is validated by the Supreme Court, state lawmakers would have remarkable power to set federal election rules without oversight from state courts or state constitutions. State courts could lose the power to do their jobs — interpreting state law and enforcing their state constitutions — in the sphere of federal elections. State legislatures could set federal voting and election rules and draw congressional maps without historically common and much-needed oversight. At its strongest, the ISL theory could also threaten gubernatorial veto power over federal election rules, citizen-led ballot measures changing election laws and independent redistricting commissions that draw congressional maps.

While this may sound absurd and far-fetched, the mere fact that the Court accepted this case on its merits docket should ring alarm bells. For decades, Republicans have been attacking voting rights from every possible angle, and now their fight made it to the nation’s highest court. With the power of state courts hanging in the balance, the stakes for democracy are immense. Moore v. Harper threatens the ability of individuals, organizations and states to combat suppressive voting laws and expand access to the ballot box through fair maps and inclusive voting practices. 

All of this legal discussion surrounding this landmark case — which accompanies yet another crucial voting rights case on the Court’s docket this term — should not distract from the fact that the decision the Supreme Court hands down in Moore will affect voters, specifically minority voters, in very real ways. And, if these litigation tools are obliterated by the Supreme Court, there will be even fewer legal options available to fight back.

Absurd? Far-fetched? Well, the Court on Monday heard 303 Creative v. Elenis, “a case testing whether the free speech rights of a web designer who wants to withhold her services from gay couples is in violation of that state’s public accommodations law,” writes Dahlia Lithwick at Slate. Except 303 Creative’s Lorie Smith was never asked nor has she refused to provide services to any gay couple. No gay couples were harmed in the bringing of this case. That comes later. The case is based on a hypothetical. And yet the Roberts Court chose to hear it.

“There is no trial record and there are no facts, and instead there is just a whole lot of spit-balling about things that could happen someday in a comedic civil-rights-free galaxy far, far away,” Lithwick continues. “And what rushes in to fill the vacuum is a host of increasingly deranged hypotheticals, and also what now passes for high comedy at the Supreme Court.”

Funny? Not funny. It is one thing for a frightened has-been in Florida to muse about terminating the U.S. Constitution. It is quite another for the highest court in the land to consider retconning American democracy to conform to a framework extant during the Gilded Age or perhaps to when judges wore powdered wigs.

Our friends down under have more recent experience with the latter:

Update on this Honest Government Ad: tomorrow (Dec 7) SCOTUS hears the case of Moore v Harper (aka the theory of independent state legislature, invoked in 2000 to hand the election to Bush). Keep an eye on it as it could have massive implications for the next US election 🇺🇸 pic.twitter.com/wzHYJNKaOY

— theJuiceMedia (@thejuicemedia) December 6, 2022

UPDATE: Marc Elias just posted his Moore v. Harper preview.

If they work fast, they might just get this done

A lot depends on whether they can get enough Republicans on board to defeat the inevitable filibuster. If they can it would be a real accomplishment:

For three straight election cycles, running as the party of “border security” has largely failed for the GOP. Though Republicans dumped enormous resources into painting migrants in the most lurid and threatening terms imaginable, Democrats won the House in 2018, ousted Donald Trump from the White House in 2020 and dramatically outperformed expectations in 2022.

Now, Republicans have a chance to do something new. Rather than treating the southern border as a blank screen upon which to project their storehouse of demagoguery, they can support an emerging compromise with an actual shot at achieving a more orderly border.

Sens. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) and Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.) have reached an agreement on a draft framework of immigration reform compromises, sources familiar with the situation tell me. They involve issues such as the fate of “dreamers” brought here as children and the processing of asylum seekers at the southern border. Will the 10 Republican senators necessary to overcome a filibuster go along?

A white paper laying out this Tillis-Sinema blueprint is circulating on Capitol Hill, congressional aides and advocates plugged into the talks tell me. Though the details are in flux, here’s a partial list of the major items it contains:

Some form of path to citizenship for 2 million dreamers.

A large boost in resources to speed up the processing of asylum seekers, including new processing centers and more asylum officers and judges.

More resources to expedite the removal of migrants who don’t qualify for asylum.

A continuation of the Title 42 covid-health-rule restriction on migrants applying for asylum, until the new processing centers are operational, with the aim of a one-year cutoff.

More funding for border officers.

The idea behind this compromise is this: It gives Democrats protection for 2 million dreamers and strengthened defenses of the due process rights of some migrants. It gives Republicans faster removal from the country of migrants who fail to qualify for asylum, a continued restriction on applications for the next year and more border security.

The boost in resources would hopefully reduce the strain at the border by moving migrants through the asylum application process more quickly.The processing facilities would be temporary detention centers, but additional lawyers would be present, enabling more robust representation.

On the flip side, if migrants fail the initial interview determining whether they have a “credible fear” of persecution if returned to their home countries, they’d be removed much more quickly. A “Title 42” health rationale, which is indefensible as a border-management tool, would be kept ostensibly to control flows while the reforms are implemented. The Government Accountability Office would have the authority to end it after one year if the processing centers are up and running.

It’s hard to say whether 10 Republican senators would back such a deal to get it past a GOP filibuster. This will become harder when former president Donald Trump and adviser Stephen Miller scream that it represents a massive betrayal by “elites,” as they undoubtedly will, and right-wing media propagandists such as Tucker Carlson amplify that toxic message to enrage the base.

If 10 GOP senators could support this, they’d be drawn from those who are retiring (Sens. Roy Blunt of Missouri and Patrick J. Toomey of Pennsylvania) or those willing to challenge the Trump wing of the party (Sens. Mitt Romney of Utah and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska).

A big question is whether these Republicans will see any advantage in genuinely trying to fix the problems at the border. They might decide that the GOP won’t get any credit even if the effort succeeds — that credit might go to President Biden — and that it’s better to retain the permanent “border crisis” as an issue.

I won’t hold my breath. I think there’s a very good chance that the Republicans would rather have this as a political weapon. But stranger things have happened …