Month: January 2023

Here he goes again:

Donald Trump’s presidency was filled with low points, but his 2018 summit with Russia’s Vladimir Putin in Helsinki stood out as especially indefensible. After a private meeting with the autocratic leader, in which the American president took interpreters’ notes for reasons that were never explained, the Republican held a disastrous press conference in which Trump defended an American adversary, took cheap shots at his own country, and sided with Putin over the judgment of American intelligence professionals.

Soon after, The New York Times reported that U.S. intelligence officials “were unanimous in saying that they and their colleagues were aghast at how Mr. Trump had handled himself with Mr. Putin.” One official summarized a consensus view, concluding that it was clear whose side Trump was on, and “it isn’t ours.”

As regular readers might recall, in the aftermath of the event, Axios spoke to one of Trump’s own former National Security Council officials who described the situation as “a total [effing] disgrace,” adding, “The president has lost his mind.”

In June 2021, three years after the Helsinki meeting, the former president wanted Americans to know that he had no regrets — and he stood by his decision to side with the Russian leader over U.S. intelligence officials. Yesterday, as my MSNBC colleague Ja’han Jones noted, Trump thought it’d be a good idea to once again publicly side with Putin, publishing this missive to his social media platform:

Remember in Helsinki when a 3rd rate reporter asked me, essentially, who I trusted more, President Putin of Russia, or our “Intelligence” lowlifes. My instinct at the time was that we had really bad people in the form of James Comey, McCabe (whose wife was being helped out by Crooked Hillary while Crooked was under investigation!), Brennan, Peter Strzok (whose wife is at the SEC) & his lover, Lisa Page. Now add McGonigal & other slime to the list. Who would you choose, Putin or these Misfits?

It’s obviously a problem that Trump sided with the Russian authoritarian over his own country’s intelligence agencies and law enforcement officials. But the fact that Trump keeps doing this, for no apparent reason and to no apparent benefit, makes matters vastly worse.

What’s more, there’s a larger context to the Republican’s rhetoric, which he’s no doubt aware of. Indeed, Trump has occasionally been sensitive to the fact that his public praise for his political benefactor in Moscow has raised difficult questions about his loyalties. While in office, his own director of national intelligence feared that Putin “had something” on Trump that the Kremlin could use as leverage, and House Speaker Kevin McCarthy famously joked that Trump was secretly on the Russian leader’s payroll.

With this in mind, it stands to reason that the former president, who went to almost comical lengths to make Putin happy while in office, would go out of his way not to appear beholden to the Russian, especially in the midst of atrocities in Ukraine.

There is continuous shrieking from certain quarters on the nominal left that the whole Russia scandal was a liberal conspiracy theory, some kind of modern McCarthyism.
I don’t know why they can’t see that this behavior by Trump causes anyone with a brain to wonder why in the hell he keeps doing this. It’s bizarre, especially since Putin is an authoritarian wingnut who invaded his neighbor and is committing horrifying atrocities as we speak.

It’s possible to be skeptical of the government police and intelligence agencies without excusing Trump’s inane bs and suggesting that Russia is an innocent party being unfairly maligned by the evil neo-libs. These are ridiculous intellectual gymnastics and frankly embarrassing for those are doing it.

The Bulwark did some polling specifically to look at how many Republicans are intractable Trump supporters. As it turns out, he’s pretty weak in the party as a whole but there is a strong minority who are still do or die. And that’s a problem:

But, as Sarah notes, we need some historical context here. Even though most Republican voters want to move on from Trump, his solid core of support might be enough to win him early, winner-take-all-primaries. She reminds us what happened in 2016:

Iowa 24.3 percent (Trump came in second)
New Hampshire 35.3 percent (Trump came in first)
South Carolina 32.5 percent (Trump came in first)

Trump then went on to dominate the field in Nevada with 45.9 percent of the vote before catapulting into Super Tuesday with enough momentum to win 7 of the 11 states. And with the GOP’s “winner take all” or “winner take most” delegate apportionment rules, in a big field of candidates, devoted pluralities can be telling.

The Always Trumpers

Here’s the dilemma for the GOP.

Despite clear evidence of Trump Fatigue, the “Always Trump” faction of the GOP will follow Trump to the gates of Hell.

One question that Sarah was anxious to test with this poll was “how many ‘Always Trumpers’ would follow Trump if he lost the GOP primary and launched an independent bid for president.”

And according to our poll, that 28 percent of Republican primary voters already locked in for Trump say they’ll support him even if he ran as an independent in the general election.

This is why it is dangerous to under-estimate Trump. Sarah writes:

[Even]though Trump is as weak as he’s ever been, even though he is beset by legal peril, and even though there are alternative candidates turning the heads of a large majority of GOP primary voters (and donors), Trump still has an awful lot going for him:

-100 percent name ID.

-A devoted base that will follow him on an independent run and potentially split the GOP vote. (And even if Trump doesn’t launch an independent bid, does anyone think he’s going to be a loyal Republican who supports the nominee if it isn’t him?)

-A big primary field of candidates who are scared of him and his base and therefore more likely to attack each other than Trump.

-New revelations that Biden and Pence also had classified docs at their homes and offices, nullifying Trump’s political (if not legal) vulnerability.

-An imminent return to Facebook and Twitter allowing him to fire up his small-dollar fundraising machine and push himself back into the news cycle.

None of that makes Trump a lock to win the nomination. But it’s certainly enough assets to make it possible.

I don’t know if Trump would run an independent race but I wouldn’t put it past him, would you? And I don’t think anyone should count on him being a good sport about losing and telling his cult to vote for the winner. Frankly, I’m not sure if they would do it even if he did. Many of them are in politics because of Trump and they don’t really see it as a serious civic duty.

If I were the Republicans I’d just cut my losses, let him win the nomination, lose the general and then do a total reset in 2028. They’re screwed as long as he’s in the mix. But I’m not a Republican. Obviously.

The son of Indian immigrants,convicted drug dealer, Bannon acolyte and George Santos staffer.

You have to read this whole thing because it is literally unbelievable. These excerpts alone are enough to make you grab for the tequila bottle. I pick it up in the middle:

During his college years, Burra built what he described to TPM as a drug dealing “empire.” It came crashing down in mid-2014 when he was busted with over two pounds of marijuana and a small amount of hallucinogens. Burra said he got into the business in pursuit of “respect.”

“I wanted people to realize that I was the best in the room,” he explained. 

Not long after Burra’s drug bust, Trump launched his first presidential campaign. Burra found himself increasingly pulled to the world of Republican politics. Trump’s contradictory brand of hypercapitalist anti-establishment populism spoke to Burra. 

“I’ve had my own red pilling experiences slowly over time, but it all clicked with Trump,” Burra said, using an online right phrase for awakening. 

Criminals do tend to be attracted to him. He explains that he went against all his family and friends and lo ed the feeling and decided to go all MAGA:

Shortly after Trump took office in 2017, Burra got in deeper. He went to his first meeting of the Staten Island Young Republicans, and also checked out the New York Young Republican Club, which bills itself as the nation’s “oldest and largest” and touts its connections to presidents Lincoln and Taft. The organization was also recently in the headlines for hosting a December 2022 gala at which Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), Donald Trump Jr., Roger Stone, and Steve Bannon brushed shoulders with PizzaGate promoting conspiracy theorist Jack Posobiec and white nationalist couple Peter and Lydia Brimelow. Also in attendance: A just-elected member of Congress from Long Island who would soon cause a good deal of controversy. The next week, the New York Times would publish its expose that began the deluge of questions about George Santos’ resume and revelations about the shifting and largely fabricated life story he told while campaigning.

But the organization that hosted that gala was not the same organization Burra joined. Not yet. In Burra’s telling, despite its storied history, the New York Young Republican Club was “underutilized” at the start of the Trump era and suffering from stuffy, sparsely attended events. 

“That’s where I started making my plans, and my moves, and started using my street smarts and my guile to like organize and get in front of people … just kind of like showing that I’ve got the verve, I know what you want, and you’ve got to roll with me to get it,” said Burra. 

In that 2022 YouTube interview, Burra suggested booze was a key part of that strategy. 

“One thing I do understand about New Yorkers is we love to party, and we love to get together and drink, hang out, and have fun,” Burra said. “That’s a way to organize young people that I know works personally. … I could organize 50 people around eating a Snickers bar in New York if you told them there’s a cocktail.” 

Inside the club, Burra teamed up with Gavin Wax, an activist that he has called his “partner in crime.” By 2018, the pair managed to take over the club’s leadership, with Wax becoming president and Burra being named vice president. In an emailed statement to TPM, Wax brushed off criticisms of the organization’s associations with white nationalists and praised Burra. 

“The New York Young Republican Club takes pride in being a forum for open and constructive dialogue. We host speakers of diverse viewpoints at our events, and we do not deny access to guests based on thoughtcrimes the media alleges them to have committed,” Wax wrote. “I have been proud to work alongside Vish to make the New York Young Republican Club the largest and most successful organization of its kind. We are proud of our objective successes, and we are undeterred by our opponents’ critiques.”

Their ascendance shocked members of the city’s more traditional GOP establishment. In an op-ed published that year, John William Schiffbauer, the former deputy communications director for the New York Republican State Committee, linked Burra and Wax with a leadership change at the Metropolitan Republican Club and said it meant the organizations that “form the backbone of the Manhattan GOP’s voter and volunteer base” were “now firmly under the control of Trumpist alt-right acolytes.”

Burra, who is currently the executive secretary of the New York Young Republican Club, has claimed the new leadership drove a surge in membership. Along with alcohol, their strategy involved leaning into militant rhetoric and aligning the organization openly with controversial far-right figures. While this may have scandalized more moderate Manhattan Republicans, it helped Burra win friends in Washington including Steve Bannon. Burra claims he first met Bannon through a “mentor” who he declined to identify saying he prefers to keep their relationship “close to the vest.” In November 2019, Bannon spoke at the Young Republicans’ annual gala where he invoked Napoleon: “When you set out to take Vienna, take Vienna,” he declared. 

Bannon and Burra, who both tend to rush towards the spotlight and dramatically cast their strategies as military tactics, make a natural pair. Burra said he made an impression on the former Trump White House strategist and one month after that bash, he became a founding producer on Bannon’s podcast, “War Room.” He worked on the show for much of 2020, as it chronicled the pandemic, protests and Trump’s final year in office.

“I consider myself a man blessed with many mentors, but Steve is probably my greatest mentor, considering I was quarantined with him all through 2020,” said Burra. 

Bannon declined to comment on this story. 

Get a load of this:

Working on the show gave Burra a front-row seat as Bannon and Rudy Giuliani acquired a laptop that had belonged to then-candidate Joe Biden’s son, Hunter Biden. Burra has said he served as a “navigator” and used past experience as a software professional to make copies of the laptop as Bannon and Giuliani gave the data to reporters and others in an effort to generate stories criticizing the Biden family’s foreign business dealings and Hunter’s substance abuse. In his conversation with TPM, Burra described the episode as “one of my most proudest projects and accomplishments.”

He’s involved with Matt Gaetz too:

His time on Bannon’s “War Room” also connected Burra with leading figures on the MAGA right including Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL). Last April, after Gaetz placed a copy of the laptop into the congressional record, he had Burra on his own podcast to talk about the laptop affair. 

“You were essentially Bannon and Giuliani’s Indian tech guy,” Gaetz quipped.

“I was their IT guy,” said Burra with a laugh.

Gaetz, according to Burra, admired his ability to “work with Steve and keep him happy.” The pair became close and Burra joined Gaetz’s congressional staff in mid-2021. A spokesperson for Gaetz did not respond to a request for comment. 

There’s a whole lot more and it’s all astonishing.

This guy is now working for George Santos.

This is the Republican party.

Will DeSantis hold a press conference surrounded by his election police force?

Nope, sorry:

All four residents of The Villages charged with voting twice in the 2020 election have now admitted to the crime, court records show.

John Rider, 62, recently entered into a pre-trial intervention program that will allow him to avoid potential prison time if he successfully completes court-ordered requirements and refrains from violating the law.

Rider acknowledged his guilt as part of the agreement with prosecutors.

“The Parties agree that the first step in rehabilitation is to the admission of his wrongdoing,” the contract states.

Rider indicated in court papers that he plans to “buy out” his requirement of completing 50 hours of community service at a cost of $10 per hour.

Three other residents of The Villages accused of voting twice signed similar pretrial intervention contracts last year.

All four were facing a maximum of five years in prison if a jury convicted them of a third-degree felony.

As part of their agreements with the state, Joan Halstead, Charles Barnes and Jay Ketcik were required to complete a 12-week adult civics class based on the textbook “We the People; the Citizen and the Constitution.”

Under the pretrial intervention contracts, prosecution of the defendants will be deferred for a period of 18 months, with the possibility that it will be permanently deferred if they successfully complete the court-ordered requirements.

Florida’s secretary of state first learned about three of the alleged double voting cases after receiving anonymous emails from a self-described “citizen election integrity analyst.”

Wait. You can “buy out” your community service in Florida? How convenient for people with money.

These people all voted for Trump twice, by the way. But it’s fine. They only arrest and try Black people for this kind of crime in Florida. White Republicans just take a class and “buy out” their sentence.

The great media critic Margaret Sullivan is now writing a column for the Guardian and this one is very welcome. (Those of you who read this blog regularly know that I’ve been saying the same thing for quite a while.)

On Sunday morning, NBC’s Chuck Todd hosted the Ohio Republican congressman Jim Jordan on Meet the Press, where the querulous conservative ranted about President Biden’s sloppy handing of classified documents.

Todd showed more tenacity than usual in challenging this combative guest (he “incinerated” Jordan, applauded the Daily Kos) but Jordan nevertheless managed to drive home his ill-conceived accusations through sheer volume, repetition and speed.

Jordan’s real victory was being given the chance to do so, at such length, on national TV. Meanwhile, over on Fox News, the Texas Republican senator Ted Cruz was trying his sneering best to connect Hunter Biden to the document dustup, and the rightwing network was helping by showing various file photos of the president’s troubled and troubling son, always with a crazed look in his eye. And social media, of course, overflowed with memes about Corvettes stuffed with boxes, a not-too-subtle shot at classified papers discovered in Biden’s Delaware garage.

Deprived of Trump-style excitement by a mostly competent, sometimes boring president, the news media has greeted the supposed scandal of Biden’s mishandling of classified documents with breathless glee. CNN has devoted hours of coverage to chewing it over. The broadcast networks have, in some cases, led their evening newscasts with it.

Finally, all this coverage seems to say, a chance to get back to the false equivalence that makes us what we truly are! And make no mistake, any effort to equate Biden’s sloppy mishandling with former president Trump’s removal of hundreds of classified documents to his Florida hangout at Mar-a-Lago is simply wrong.

As Todd pointed out, Biden has cooperated with the justice department’s search for documents, while Trump has obfuscated and resisted. And although much of the news coverage has pointed this out, it has nevertheless elevated the supposed Biden scandal by giving it so much time, attention and prominence.

It might even remind you of the media’s appalling obsession with Hillary Clinton’s email practices during the 2016 presidential campaign – an obsession that may have affected the election’s outcome, helping to give us four years of a president with no respect for the democracy he was elected to lead.

Why does this keep on happening?

No one has described the cause better than two thinktank scholars in a 2012 Washington Post opinion piece (and the italics are mine): “We understand the values of mainstream journalists, including the effort to report both sides of a story. But a balanced treatment of an unbalanced phenomenon distorts reality. If the political dynamics of Washington are unlikely to change any time soon, at least we should change the way that reality is portrayed to the public.”

The scholars – one from the conservative American Enterprise Institute, the other from the progressive Brookings Institution – were Norman Ornstein and Thomas Mann, who had written a book, It’s Even Worse Than It Looks, about the rise of Republican party extremism and the resulting threats to American democracy. That movement has only metastasized over the past decade, helped along by Trump’s chaotic term and aftermath.

Typical of the media’s “both sides” tendency is this equalizing line in a 2021 Washington Post story about the congressional investigation of the January 6 attack on the US Capitol: “Both parties have attacked the other as insincere and uninterested in conducting a fair-minded examination.” Well, sure, but only one party was consistently resisting efforts to get at the facts and do something about the horrendous attack on American democracy.

It’s debatable if Biden’s mishandling of documents – and more recently that of former vice-president Mike Pence – warrants much attention at all, much less the full-bore media blitz it’s getting.

“The bigger scandal here,” said Jameel Jaffer, executive director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, is the over-classification of information; the US government puts its classified stamp on 50m documents a year. In an interview with the Guardian’s David Smith last week, Jaffer called that system of secrecy “totally broken in ways that are bad not just for national security, but for democracy”.

Even so, Jaffer didn’t intend to let Trump off the hook.

As Todd rightly pointed out to his combative guest, Biden and Pence didn’t make a fuss about handing over what they shouldn’t have had. (“They raided Trump’s home. They haven’t raided Biden’s home,” Jordan charged. “Because Biden didn’t defy a subpoena,” Todd aptly shot back.) But such challenges are no match for the vast over-coverage of what isn’t all that much of a story, and which is only getting so much attention because of the media’s defensive desire to appear fair and because of its ratings-driven lust for conflict.

Happily, Americans are capable of putting this trumped-up scandal in context, at least according to a recent CBS poll that shows the president’s approval rating unmoved by the wall-to-wall coverage, and in which the vast majority of respondents believe it’s the norm for former office-holders to have classified documents in their homes.

The public, it seems, can respond to hyperbole with a yawn. If only the news media could be as wise.

They can’t, unfortunately. It seems to have penetrated to their lizard brains. This example is relatively trivial but think about how they went absolutely nuts over the withdrawal of Afghanistan as if they had spent the last decade on the ground telling the story of the plight of the Afghan people. There was a story, to be sure. But it was this impulse that led to them to screaming condemnation of Biden for doing … exactly what he said he would do. By making the difficult choice that the previous two president’s had ducked (while reaping the rewards of allegedly being “anti-war”) he got creamed by the media which offered virtually no context or explanation. And it was mostly due to the dynamic Sullivan discusses.

Your mileage may vary

Yglesias is not someone I pay much attention to, but this Monday tweet caught my attention.

Partisanship is amazing pic.twitter.com/bbtcJJn3PK

— Matthew Yglesias (@mattyglesias) January 30, 2023

So you don’t have to click over:

“Interesting comparing to the DJI,” one respondent tweeted with the chart at top.

Next Florida will mandate yellow WOKE badges

Woke is a four-letter word, a conservative all-purpose epithet as meaningless as the f-word.

“You woking wokers get that woking thing out of my woking sight!”

Meaningless or not, it serves Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’s purposes: to divide and inflame. Republican politicians, conservative pundits, and Fox News anchors attach their slur to anyone to the left of submitting to them on their knees.

Writing in Roll Call, Mary C. Curtis  believes the term’s vagueness in Florida’s “Stop Woke Act” is deliberate.  DeSantis means to erase Black history without expressly erasing Black history.

A federal judge ruling on the act in November stated that Florida’s actions strike “at the heart of ‘open-mindedness and critical inquiry.’” By so doing, “the State of Florida has taken over the ‘marketplace of ideas’ to suppress disfavored viewpoints.”

If you have to ask, “disfavored by whom?” you might be part of the problem.

The Florida Department of Education rejected the College Board’s AP African American studies course as “inexplicably contrary to Florida law and significantly lacks educational value.” Its use of “inexplicably” is telling. Florida has no idea what’s objectionable about it. Vagueness in the “Stop Woke Act” is a feature, not a bug. DeSantis “has mastered this dark art.”

The vagueness of rules enforced by his “election integrity” task force in the wake of an amendment voters passed to restore voting rights to ex-felons is also deliberate. Even law enforcement officers are “puzzled about the details of the law the terrified, targeted citizens were supposed to have broken,” Curtis explains:

Charges may have been dropped in most cases, but do you think minority folks with a former brush with the law would risk another by voting?

Call it a pattern of intimidation by obfuscation.

First it was non-white voters. Now it is teachers. DeSantis is banning books in schools; teachers are covering up or removing classroom libraries. Which books will earn teachers death threats? Or “up to five years in prison and a $5,000 fine“? Who can say?

Now, many school librarians who stuck it out are confused about which books and magazines they are allowed to order, especially when lawmakers, citizen panels, school board members, loud parents and occasionally people without a child in the school or community have the final say.

So, they’ve stopped. No new books for school libraries that need them, for students who present lists of titles they are eager to read. Will discouraged young people give up on reading altogether when they can’t see themselves in literature, when they are denied anything that might excite them or introduce them to something surprising?

Janai Nelson, president and director-counsel of the Legal Defense Fund (LDF), writes in the New York Times:

Mr. DeSantis’s “Stop WOKE” law relegates the study of the experiences of Black people to a prohibited category. The canceling of any students’ access to accurate, truthful education that reflects their diverse identities and that of their country should chill every American. Not only do these laws offend First Amendment freedoms of speech and expression; to the extent they harm certain groups on the basis of race, gender or other protected status, they also violate principles of equal protection. And they are a chilling precursor to state-sponsored dehumanization of an entire race of people.

That is just what DeSantis is selling, and white supporters love him for it. He’s running for president on it.

The commissars are in charge now in Florida, writes Tom Nichols in The Atlantic:

Florida’s governor, Ron DeSantis, has set out to ruin one of Florida’s public colleges. He’s appointed several board members to the ideologically progressive New College of Florida with, apparently, a mandate to somehow rebuild it and thus save it from its dreaded wokeification. Helpfully for the cause of screwing up a college, most of the new overseers aren’t from Florida and don’t live there; one of them, in fact, is Christopher Rufo, a young man from the Manhattan Institute who has no actual experience in higher education but does have a genuine talent for rhetoric that he seems to have gained at the Soviet Higher Institute of Pedagogy somewhere in Moscow or Leningrad circa 1970.

Bristling at criticism from the Harvard professor Steven Pinker, Rufo fired back on social media. “We’re in charge now,” he tweeted, adding that his goal was “constitutionally-mandated democratic governance, to correct the ideological corruption of *public universities.*”

As they would have said during those old Party meetings: The comrade’s remarks about implementing the just and constitutional demands of the People to improve ideological work in our educational collectives and remove corruption from the ranks of our teaching cadres were met with prolonged, stormy applause.

Education itself is now in the right’s crosshairs. Florida could pass a constitutional amendment tomorrow to abolish state universities. “There’s no national right to a college education, and if Florida wants to unleash a battalion of Guy Montags on its own state colleges and their libraries—well, that’s up to the voters.” But the “Sovietization of the New College” is about more:

Something has changed on the American right, which is now seized with a hostility toward higher education that is driven by cultural resentment, and not by “critical race theory” or any of the other terms that most Americans don’t even understand. College among conservatives has become a kind of shorthand for identifying with all kinds of populist grievances, a ploy used even by Republicans with Ivy League educations as a means of cozying up to its non-college-educated and resentful base.

GOP attitudes about education have changed fast. As recently as 2015, most Republicans, by a wide margin, thought of universities as a positive influence on the United States. Four years later, those numbers flipped, and nearly 60 percent of Republicans saw universities as having a negative impact on the country.

The world is complex. Its problems complex. Its history more nuanced than Bible stories and fables. Right-wing distrust of “experts” and elites stems from an inability to cope with that complexity. A bonfire is simpler. Burn it all down and start over.

First books. Then democracy.

UPDATE: It’s not just Florida.

The UNC Board of Trustees passed a resolution on Thursday to “accelerate” the creation of the School for Civic Life and Leadership.

Faculty Chairperson Mimi Chapman said the faculty had no involvement in the creation of the resolution.https://t.co/ncJsvUzxuZ

— The Daily Tar Heel (@dailytarheel) January 31, 2023

The Daily Tar Heel:

“The board doesn’t have any ability to propose a class, to propose a degree, or — for God’s sake — to propose a school,” Holden Thorp, who served as UNC’s chancellor from 2008 to 2013, said.

He said the BOT’s resolution is an example of the “worst governance” he thinks he’s ever seen.

Mimi Chapman, chairperson of faculty, said she was “flabbergasted” in response to the exclusion of faculty input in the decision, which she said she considers to be an attack on shared University governance. 

[…]

Chapman said she thinks the School is opportunity for donors to fund programs against what they perceive is the indoctrination of liberal ideology at the University — a phenomenon that Chapman said she doesn’t believe exists.

The “dogma” that higher education is submitting to progressive politics is unfounded, Chapman said.  

“I absolutely disagree with that,” Chapman said. “I do not think that is true in any way, shape or form.”

This would be the same outfit that denied tenure to UNC alum Nikole Hannah-Jones who won a Pulitzer for the “1619 Project,” now a docuseries on Hulu:

In April 2021, Ms. Hannah-Jones was announced as the Knight Chair in Race and Investigative Journalism at the university’s Hussman School of Journalism and Media. She was offered a five-year contract as a professor instead of the usual tenured position, and her appointment drew criticism from conservatives who took issue with her involvement in The Times’s 1619 Project, which re-examined slavery in the United States.

The university’s failure to approve Ms. Hannah-Jones’s tenure drew intense backlash from faculty and students, as well as academics and journalists outside the school. Ms. Hannah-Jones said she was considering legal action on claims of discrimination. Under pressure, the board of trustees backtracked and granted her tenure a month later.

Ms. Hannah-Jones, who received a master’s degree at U.N.C. in 2003, then announced that she would no longer be joining the university and would instead join the faculty of Howard University.

I’ve said this many times: Republicans who know that Trump is a liability are basically just hoping that he goes to jail or dies because that’s the only thing that will shake loose the base (and there’s no guarantee that an indictment or jail term would do that either.)

McKay Coppins in the Atlantic takes a look at that pathetically weak position:

Press them hard enough, and most Republican officials—even the ones with MAGA hats in their closets and Mar-a-Lago selfies in their Twitter avatar—will privately admit that Donald Trump has become a problem. He’s presided over three abysmal election cycles since he took office, he is more unstable than ever, and yet he returned to the campaign trail this past weekend, declaring that he is “angry” and determined to win the  GOP presidential nomination again in 2024. Aside from his most blinkered loyalists, virtually everyone in the party agrees: It’s time to move on from Trump.

But ask them how they plan to do that, and the discussion quickly veers into the realm of hopeful hypotheticals. Maybe he’ll get indicted and his legal problems will overwhelm him. Maybe he’ll flame out early in the primaries, or just get bored with politics and wander away. Maybe the situation will resolve itself naturally: He’s old, after all—how many years can he have left?

This magical thinking pervaded my recent conversations with more than a dozen current and former elected GOP officials and party strategists. Faced with the prospect of another election cycle dominated by Trump and uncertain that he can actually be beaten in the primaries, many Republicans are quietly rooting for something to happen that will make him go away. And they would strongly prefer not to make it happen themselves.

“There is a desire for deus ex machina,” said one GOP consultant, who, like others I interviewed, requested anonymity to characterize private conversations taking place inside the party. “It’s like 2016 all over again, only more fatalistic.”

The scenarios Republicans find themselves fantasizing about range from the far-fetched to the morbid. In his recent book Thank You for Your Servitude, my colleague Mark Leibovich quoted a former Republican representative who bluntly summarized his party’s plan for dealing with Trump: “We’re just waiting for him to die.” As it turns out, this is not an uncommon sentiment. In my conversations with Republicans, I heard repeatedly that the least disruptive path to getting rid of Trump, grim as it sounds, might be to wait for his expiration.

Their rationale was straightforward: The former president is 76 years old, overweight, appears to maintain the diet of a college freshman, and believes, contrary to all known science, that exercise is bad for you. Why risk alienating his supporters when nature will take its course sooner or later? Peter Meijer, a former Republican representative who left office this month, termed this strategy actuarial arbitrage.

“You have a lot of folks who are just wishing for [Trump’s] mortal demise,” Meijer told me. “I want to be clear: I’m not in that camp. But I’ve heard from a lot of people who will go onstage and put on the red hat, and then give me a call the next day and say, ‘I can’t wait until this guy dies.’ And it’s like, Good Lord.” (Trump’s mother died at 88 and his father at 93, so this strategy isn’t exactly foolproof.)

Some Republicans are clinging to the hope that Trump might finally be undone by his legal troubles. He is currently the subject of multiple criminal investigations, and his detractors dream of an indictment that would derail his campaign. But most of the people I talked with seemed resigned to the likelihood that an indictment would only boost him with the party’s base. Michael Cohen, who served for years as Trump’s personal attorney and now hosts a podcast atoning for that sin titled Mea Culpa, grudgingly told me that his former boss would easily weaponize any criminal charges brought against him. The deep-state Democrats are at it again—the campaign emails write themselves. “Donald will use the indictment to continue his fundraising grift,” Cohen told me.

Others imagine a coordinated donor revolt that sidelines Trump for good. The GOP consultant told me about a private dinner in New York City that he attended in the fall of 2021, when he saw a Republican billionaire give an impassioned speech about the need to keep Trump from returning to the Oval Office. The man said he would devote large sums of money to defeating the former president and urged his peers to join the cause. The others in the room—including several prominent donors and a handful of Republican senators—reacted enthusiastically that night. But when the consultant saw some of the same people a year later, their commitment had waned. The indignant donors, he said, had retreated to a cautious “wait and see” stance.

This plague of self-deception among party elites contains obvious echoes of Trump’s early rise to power. In the run-up to the 2016 Republican presidential primaries, a fractured field of feckless candidates spent time and money attacking one another, convinced that the front-runner would eventually collapse. It was widely believed within the political class that such a ridiculous figure could simply never win a major party nomination, much less the presidency. Of course, by the time Trump’s many doubters realized they were wrong, it was too late.

I don’t know if he can win the nomination but I think there’s a very good chance he will. GOP base voters are still batshit crazy and I don’t think anyone out there can out-crazy Trump. But you never know. Maybe DeSantis or Mike Pompeo will take the primaries by storm and Trump will suffer an ignominious fall. (Of course then they have to hope he doesn’t take his voters and go home — and you know he will.)

GOP officials could take the blow from their base and do what’s necessary to get rid of him. They might lose power for a while and it would be ugly but they could do it.The man isn’t invulnerable. But they won’t do it because they would have to make some sacrifices and that’s not on the menu.

Coppins concludes with this sad comment on the so-called “moderate” Republican official:

When I asked Rob Portman about his party’s Trump problem, the recently retired Ohio senator confidently predicted that it would all sort itself out soon. The former president, he believed, would study the polling data, realize that other Republicans had a better shot at winning, and graciously bow out of 2024 contention.

“I think at the end of the day,” Portman told me, “he’s unlikely to want to put himself in that position when he could be more of a Republican senior statesman who talks about the policies that were enacted in his administration.”

I let out an involuntary laugh.

“Maybe that’s wishful thinking on my part,” Portman conceded.

Ya think????

That what budget talks are for

Josh Marshall makes an important point about the reasons the Democrats cannot negotiate around raising the debt ceiling. It’s not that they won’t ever negotiate. It’s that they can’t negotiate with people who think they can hold the world economy hostage in order to get their way:

No one — not the White House or any Democrats on Capitol Hill — is saying they won’t negotiate the federal budget or how much the country should be spending on this or that priority or how much debt the country should take on. Kevin McCarthy is right when he says, albeit disingenuously: you can’t say you won’t negotiate. That’s what democratic governance is. That’s true. In the last Congress Democrats’ had a tenuous but complete control of Congress as well as the White House. Now Republicans hold the House by an equally tenuous but real margin. By definition, that means fiscal policy will move in the Republican direction during the next two years. That’s the democratic process. The extent of the shift is what negotiation is about. Each side has its own set of tools at its disposal.

… if there’s one thing ‘regular order’ is not about it’s the kind of debt ceiling hostage taking Republicans now believe and want others to accept as a normal part of the legislative and particularly the legislative budgetary process. That’s not negotiation. That’s extortion. Do what we say or we will try to force the country into default — bankruptcy in plain terms — to force our will.

[…]

These extortion tactics are also integrally connected to the Republican embrace of minoritarianism. Republicans were expected to win control of both houses of Congress. They hope to do that in 2024 along with the White House. If that happens, then they will be able to largely dictate federal policy on fiscal policy, abortion, health care insurance policy and most else. But that didn’t happen in 2022. They gained only a small foothold of power. But that’s not enough. With only a foothold of power at the federal level they want to be able to dictate fiscal policy, not only going forward but they actually want to reach back and change the decisions already made in the previous Congress. In other words, Republicans want the fruits of control of Congress with only a tenuous control over one chamber of Congress.

That last is very important. Republicans believe that regardless of the narrowness of their win, when they are in the majority in either house of congress, or in the White House for that matter, they are entitled to enact their entire agenda by any means possible. They claim a “mandate from the American people” as if the rest of us don’t exit. (This is similar to the braindead rioters on January 6th screeching “this is my house!” when they rampaged and ransacked the Capitol, as if it belongs to them personally and isn’t shared by the rest of the American people.)

Some of them literally don’t seem to know that winning a vote in the House requires a Senate vote and a presidential signature to become law:

No, they didn’t fire 87,000 IRS agents. That’s just a ridiculous lie. They not only didn’t “fire” 87,000 IRS agents, the party line House vote that will not become law only rescinded funding for future IRS hires — most of whom would not be “IRS agents.” But whatever. In GOP Bizarro World they just put 87,000 people out of work and they’re bragging about it. And note Lindsey Graham standing there clapping like a trained monkey even though he knows very well that it’s a ridiculous lie.

Minoritarian rule is almost by definition authoritarian. It certainly isn’t democracy. Sadly, these people have been schooled in this a number of time over the past 30 years now but the old guard refuse to admit they screwed up and the new guard has to learn the lesson for themselves. (They don’t read much…)

So here we are. Everyone needs to send out strong vibes to the Biden administration not to budge. You cannot count on them refusing to take yes for an answer as they have in the past. If you give this particular bunch of legislative terrorists an inch they’ll take a mile.

apparently …

I confess that I find this a little bit hard to understand. Why have they decided that it’s worth pursuing now? But fine. He’s a crook, go after the crimes:

The Manhattan district attorney’s office on Monday will begin presenting evidence to a grand jury about Donald J. Trump’s role in paying hush money to a porn star during his 2016 presidential campaign, laying the groundwork for potential criminal charges against the former president in the coming months, according to people with knowledge of the matter.

The grand jury was recently impaneled, and witness testimony will soon begin, a clear signal that the district attorney, Alvin L. Bragg, is nearing a decision about whether to charge Mr. Trump.

On Monday, one of the witnesses was seen with his lawyer entering the building in Lower Manhattan where the grand jury is sitting. The witness, David Pecker, is the former publisher of The National Enquirer, the tabloid that helped broker the deal with the porn star, Stormy Daniels.

As prosecutors prepare to reconstruct the events surrounding the payment for grand jurors, they have sought to interview several witnesses, including the tabloid’s former editor, Dylan Howard, and two employees at Mr. Trump’s company, the people said. Mr. Howard and the Trump Organization employees, Jeffrey McConney and Deborah Tarasoff, have not yet testified before the grand jury.

The prosecutors have also begun contacting officials from Mr. Trump’s 2016 campaign, one of the people said. And in a sign that they want to corroborate these witness accounts, the prosecutors recently subpoenaed phone records and other documents that might shed light on the episode.

A conviction is not a sure thing, in part because a case could hinge on showing that Mr. Trump and his company falsified records to hide the payout from voters days before the 2016 election, a low-level felony charge that would be based on a largely untested legal theory. The case would also rely on the testimony of Michael D. Cohen, Mr. Trump’s former fixer who made the payment and who himself pleaded guilty to federal charges related to the hush money in 2018.

Remember, Trump signed the checks paying back Cohen when he was president. He paid hush money payments from the White House. I’ve never understood why people who complained about Obama’s brown suit and believed Clinton defiled the oval office are able to look at themselves in the mirror after defending this man. But then, there are a thousand examples of that so whatever.

I’ll be interested to see if there’s something new in this case that came up recently. It’s hard to understand why they’ve picked it up otherwise.