Month: January 2024

“The election was rigged, I won in a landslide!”

Reporter: “Are you thinking of trying to use campaign funds to pay some of the penalties?”

Trump: “What penalties?”

Reporter: “In the New York fraud case and the defamation case.”

Trump: “I didn't do anything wrong. I mean, that's been proven as far as I'm concerned.” pic.twitter.com/pmw7AJt4Fh

— Republican Voters Against Trump (@AccountableGOP) January 31, 2024

This is how Trump convinces his cult that up is down and black is white. He just says something that’s outrageously false, the polar opposite of the truth, with total confidence, over and over again. In fact, his deluded followers often tell reporters that the thing they admire about him the most is that he always tells the truth.

Has there ever been a demagogue in history who was so willing to lie so blatantly about clear, observable facts? They always lie, of course. And they are outrageous in their rhetoric. But this brazen defiance of reality seems to me to be pretty unique. I think religious cult leaders do this and get away with it with their flock. But I don’t know that political leaders have been able to get away with it like this. Obviously, it takes a supporting propaganda infrastructure and a monstrously stupid following. But still, give Trump his due. I think he may be the most flagrant, obvious liar in world political history and he’s succeeded in making tens of millions of people believe everything he says.

They’ve already seceded…

Scott Rosenberg’s Hopium Chronicles today provides a vivid description of what’s happened to the right wing in this country, beginning with the descent of Fox News into a full-blown propaganda machine that actually communicates in a discrete language spoken by the MAGA cult:

My friend Greg Sargent once referred to this fictional world as Foxlandia. It’s a place they go where Trump is a strong leader, the economy is in recession, eggs cost $27 a piece, inflation is still raging, Putin is an ally and the West is sinister, antifa is ISIS, dozens of American cities burned to the ground in 2020, vaccines give you COVID, insurrectionists are hostages, children carrying their rapist’s babies is a blessing, assault weapons bring freedom, etc. It is, to borrow from one of my favorite TV shows, Stranger Things, the upside down.

[…]

In thinking about it today what I am describing perhaps should be understood as a form of succession from the United States and our democratic heritage. MAGA may still be physically here in the US, but many of its followers have left our shared information space, and now live in their heads some place else – Foxlandia, the upside down, MAGA – a place of untruth, of strongmen, of Trumpian ding-ding, of danger for the rest of us.

That place of untruth is evident in the MeidasTouch clip above. Trump is no longer it appears even trying to make sense when he speaks. He is so far gone, and the movement is far gone, that you can’t even follow what he is talking about any longer. But this alternative world of untruth is not just a place where Trump lives, most of the Republican Party is there with him now. He is going to be their nominee, their leader, and consider what they are asking us to believe and accept as reasonable right now:

-that the border is a crisis, an invasion is underway, but they will not negotiate a solution to it, are disregarding a Supreme Court decision which would put the Federal government back in charge of the border, and seemingly want it to remain a crisis through the election and ensure millions of “terrorists and criminals” continue to pour into the country; and yes, then it will all be Biden’s fault, and yes we are Impeaching the guy in charge of the border while it is in crisis because he “doesn’t enforce” immigration laws – whatever the fuck that means – something by the way the state of Texas and MAGA are preventing him from doing right now (there may no greater place of right wing lunacy and untruth than on border and immigration issues)

-that their holding up of aid to Ukraine and Israel, their months of degrading both the Defense and State Departments, haven’t emboldened our enemies and caused our troops – somehow Biden’s “weakness” did that

-that we shouldn’t be spending money on Ukraine, but spending it here at home; and then of course they come out for massive cuts of spending here at home

-that Democrats are the party of debt and fiscal recklessness when the last 3 Democratic Presidents saw deficits plummet on their watch, and the last Rs saw them skyrocket

-that the country is being gripped by a crime wave when murder and violent crime rates are plummeting and are a fraction of what they were 30 years ago

-that Biden’s imaginary “war on energy” drove up gas prices/inflation and left us more dependent on foreign sources of energy when in fact oil and renewable production set records in 2023, leaving us more energy independent than in decades; and that high gas prices were actually caused by COVID and disrupted supply chains, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and OPEC’s repeated price hikes, and were of course not somehow caused by anything Biden did for he was doing the exact opposite of what they’ve claimed!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

-that Taylor Swift’s rise is somehow a plot by the deep state; that Hillary Clinton ran a “pedo” mill in the basement of a pizza place not too far from my house; that Biden somehow cheated and stole the 2020 election; that Russia never launched a massive campaign to get Trump elected in 2016;

I could go on for days on all this stuff. Lies. Invention. Untruth. Foxlandia. When you put it altogether it is truly shocking. How in the world did all of this happen? How did the GOP become so idiotic, so far gone, so full of cowards that they couldn’t stop this dramatic and ongoing betrayal of our democracy? How could they embrace Trump, the most unfit man we’ve all ever seen, and this insane agenda:

Republicans want Putin to win, the West to lose. The border to stay open. The economy to crash. Women, people of color to lose more freedoms and rights. The planet to warm faster. 10 year olds to carry their rapist’s baby to term, and for more women to die on an operating room table. Tens of millions to lose their health insurance. More dead kids in schools. A restoration of pre-Civil Rights era white supremacy. Big tax cuts for their donors, higher deficits and less for everyone else. Books banned across the US. Teenagers to work night shifts in meat packing plants and not go to school. The minimum wage to stay at $7.25. Mass arrests and mass deportations of immigrants long settled in the US. Insurrectionists to get pardoned. To end American democracy for all time…..

It is not hysterical to point this out. The stakes really are this high. The good news, as Rosenberg points out every day, is that the Democrats are doing much better than you think. They are winning elections and ballot initiatives all over the country and have been for years and the strong economy is finally penetrating the national consciousness. It’s going to take effort to beat them but it can be done.

It continues to let us down

These numbers appear to be promising:

The Bloomberg News/Morning Consult survey found that among voters in the swing states of Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, 53 percent of respondents said they were unwilling to vote for the former president if he is convicted in one of his multiple criminal cases.

Forty-six percent of respondents said they are “very unwilling” to cast their ballot for Trump if he is found guilty, while 7 percent said they are “somewhat unwilling.” Twenty-nine percent of respondents said they were “very willing” to vote for Trump if he is convicted of a crime, and 11 percent said they are “somewhat wiling.”

The survey found that female voters, voters over 65 and voters with a bachelor’s or post-graduate degree were more likely to say they were unwilling to vote for the former president if he is convicted.

Black and Asian voters were also more likely to say they would not vote for Trump if he is convicted. Three-quarters of respondents who identified as atheist said they would be unwilling to vote for Trump if he is found guilty

I would say that it’s hard to believe 40% of the country is willing to vote for a convicted felon but I do believe it. He could shoot someone on 5th Avenue, yadda, yadda, yadda.

But what happens if the court declares that he has immunity? Considering the long delay now in the District Court I think we have to entertain the real possibility that it might happen. At the very least I think we have to prepare ourselves for the idea that none of the major cases are going to reach a jury before the election. All we might get are the civil trials and maybe Stormy Daniels which is very likely to end in acquittal.

I hope I’m wrong. And if he loses the election hopefully he will face justice in the end. But counting on it to help ensure he doesn’t get re-elected is probably not worth investing too much emotional energy.

Michigan are you listening?

UAW President Fain to Fox: Trump killed organizing contracts and did nothing to support workers on strike. President Biden helped us save communities, bring plants back to life, and stood with members on the picket line pic.twitter.com/pwescnYJdl

— Biden-Harris HQ (@BidenHQ) January 31, 2024

Supposedly Fox viewers are working class Joe’s who just can’t stand the coastal elites who are ruining their livelihoods. Yet these people have never been particularly union friendly. But it’s a good thing for a union leader to go on Fox and make the case that Trump was bad for the working man, just in case some retired auto workers in Michigan might be watching. You never know …

WATCH: Shawn Sanders and Oneida Oliver-Sanders were in their living room Tuesday morning, less than 48 hours after learning that their 24-year-old daughter, Spc. Kennedy Ladon Sanders, was killed in a weekend drone attack on U.S. service members in Jordan. Then President Joe… pic.twitter.com/gCzus6kgBC

— Atlanta Journal-Constitution (@ajc) January 30, 2024

Heartbreaking.

Now recall:

Trump had the nerve to criticize Biden over the deaths of the three US soldiers from the done attack over the weekend. And his brainwashed cultists are all saying that he never lost a life while he was president.

Oh, and he’s also claiming that only he can bring world peace.

It’ usually the debt ceiling or the budget. This time it’s the border. Can this ritualized GOP stunt make Democrats pay this time?

Generally, it’s always fair to assume that the American right wing is 100% hypocritical in all things. They do not practice what they preach and they preach a lot. So, I think we would all have thought that while they desperately want to give Donald Trump dictatorial power, it’s the last thing they would want to grant President Joe Biden. And yet as these negotiations over immigration have played out, it’s clear they want Biden to seize dictatorial powers as well, at least on that issue. I guess we can say that they have some consistency after all.

After years of insisting that the congress must act to “protect the border” and browbeating the Democrats for their alleged failure to do it, they are now giving Joe Biden the green light to use executive orders the way Donald Trump used them. They once railed against such supposed usurpation of congressional prerogatives when a Democrat was in the White House but now they argue that they have no role to play and it’s all up to the president. (They say this, by the way, even as they whine incessantly over Biden’s attempts to relieve Americans of their crushing burden of student loan debt, claiming that he’s behaving like a tyrant.)

All of this is nothing but another right wing kabuki dance, staged by the Republican Party whenever they come close to getting what they’ve asked for. For them, this is all a game in which they believe they can strong arm Democrats into total capitulation. They put on quite a show but it never works.

In the past they tended to play this hand around economic issues, rending their garments over the deficit, demanding that Democrats slash domestic spending to the bone or they will refuse to raise the debt ceiling or fund the government. In fact, they have done just that in the past year which resulted in the ouster of former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy by the right wing when he negotiated a deal with the Democratic Senate and the White House to raise the debt ceiling and avoid economic catastrophe. This wasn’t the first time they did this and it also resulted in the resignation of an earlier GOP speaker. This tactic doesn’t hurt the Democrats, it hurts their own leaders.

The plan this year was to jam the White House in an election year over the budget to hammer home the allegedly terrible Biden economy in the run up to the election. But as it happens the economy has made a robust recovery from the mess created by the pandemic so that issue doesn’t look like it’s going to be the big winner they expected it to be. They’ve shifted their focus to immigration after having turned to issue into a roiling “crisis” by shipping migrants to Democratic run cities around the country to own the libs and inflame the xenophobic right.

The idea with the legislation was to up the ante by combining funding for more border security with the vital need for military equipment to Ukraine and further support for Israel and Taiwan. The thinking was that the bipartisan desire to help Ukraine and Israel would push through the border part but it didn’t turn out that way. When he finally started to see the writing on the wall, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell dryly said last week, “the politics have changed” but actually, they really haven’t.

The original concept that everyone would have something to love and hate in the bill and they’d all make their peace with it and move on is how negotiations are supposed to work and there are members who still think that’s how it should be, particularly in the Senate. The MAGA faction however, like the Tea Party before them, think negotiating is for losers. So the Republicans got tough and told Biden that he was going to have to swallow a terrible border deal that offers nothing to the Democrats in return for not allowing Russia to prevail in Ukraine and supplying more military aid for Israel.

Biden capitulated and they got what they said they wanted. And, surprise, it turns out it wasn’t what they wanted after all. Now they say they want Biden to unilaterally declare war on the border via executive order and are refusing to do any deal at all. They argue that the deal that’s being discussed authorizes the president to “close the border” when the number of crossings reaches a certain threshold and that’s just not good enough. Speaker Mike Johnson tweeted this utterly fatuous statement last night: “Any border “shutdown” authority that ALLOWS even one illegal crossing is a non-starter. Thousands each day is outrageous. The number must be ZERO.”

There has never been nor will there ever be “zero” migrant crossings on the US Mexico border. Nothing could be more absurd. But that makes it very clear that they have no intention of doing any kind of deal. They have shifted the responsibility completely on to Biden and that’s where they will leave it.

This is reminiscent of the budget negotiations back in 2011 when then VP Joe Biden got involved in the delicate budget negotiations and agreed to give away the store on Social Security only to have the Tea Party refuse to take yes for an answer. We ended up with a Rube Goldberg sequestration compromise that ended up serving the Democrats better than the Republicans, thankfully. There were no cuts to Social Security and the Republicans lost badly in 2012, largely because the country was appalled by their antics.

The question today is whether the dynamic has changed in their favor or if this issue is more potent than government shut downs and threats of economic catastrophe. This time, the real incentive for the Republicans to tank this negotiation is because Donald Trump wants them to. He has said so plainly, making it clear that doesn’t want the Democrats to have a win on this issue.

The last thing any of them want is to stop the bleeding and that includes the horror of children drowning in the Rio Grande because Trump ally Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, joined by 25 other red state governors, is provoking a constitutional crisis by defying the Supreme Court and refusing to allow the Border Patrol to do its duty. And they are about to put on a full-fledged spectacle by impeaching the DHS Secretary over policy differences, which even their own legal allies say does not fit the definition of high crimes and misdemeanors. And, as we know too well, there can be no conviction in the Senate without a 2/3rd majority so it’s really just another exercise in futility.

The big question is whether or not this latest stunt will succeed for the GOP where all the others have failed. The ongoing chaos in the House and Trump’s blatant demand to keep the issue for his election argue in favor of it ending with a whimper not a bang. But nothing can be taken for granted right now and we have to hope that somehow we find our way through this mess without too many people suffering and dying because of it. It’s not looking very hopeful at the moment.

Salon

As MAGAs pitch hissy fit over Taylor Swift and immigration

Axios reports this morning that our Biden-led, post-pandemic U.S. recovery is outpacing other G7 economies:

The United States economy grew faster than any other large advanced economy last year — by a wide margin — and is on track to do so again in 2024.

Why it matters: America’s outperformance is rooted in its distinctive structural strengths, policy choices, and some luck. It reflects a fundamental resilience in the world’s largest economy that is easy to overlook amid the nation’s problems.

By the numbers: U.S. GDP looks to have grown 2.5% in 2023, according to the IMF’s hot-off-the-presses World Economic Outlook, the highest among the G7 economies (Japan was second at 1.9%).

• IMF economists forecast similarly best-in-class growth this year, with 2.1% U.S. growth (second place: Canada at 1.4%).

The largest federal investments in infrastructure and manufacturing in decades, championed by the Biden administration, contributed significantly.

Growth in the U.S labor force also helped, Axios adds, “both due to more Americans choosing to enter the workforce and a surge in immigration.” Read that again.

Adam Posen, president of the Peterson Institute for International Economics (no, not that one) tells Axios:

• “The enormous labor market churn of COVID in 2020-21 had the unintended benefit of moving millions of lower income workers to better jobs, more income security, and/or running their own businesses,” Posen tells Axios.
• “We are reaping the benefits of it now in labor force participation, wage growth, and improved productivity,” which was “very different from Europe and Japan where most workers remained tied to their pre-COVID jobs.”

Meantime, House Republicans refuse to do productive legislative work for which you and I are paying them.

The GOP-led House Homeland Security Committee on Tuesday passed two articles of impeachment against Alejandro N. Mayorkas, Biden’s homeland security secretary, the New York Times reports, despite lack of evidence “of a crime or acts of corruption.” Republicans on the panel argue “that the Biden administration border policies he implemented ran afoul of the law. Legal scholars, including prominent conservatives, have argued that the effort is a perversion of the constitutional power of impeachment, and Democrats remained solidly opposed (New York Times):

In an 18-to-15 party-line vote, the panel endorsed a resolution charging Mr. Mayorkas with refusing to uphold the law and breaching the public trust by failing to choke off a surge of migrants across the United States border with Mexico.

That, as Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) refuses to take up any remedy for border security. Rep. Robert Menendez (D) of New Jersey let loose on his GOP colleagues.

Menendez: We have not lived up to our oversight obligation on this committee because you all bend the knee to the orange Jesus pic.twitter.com/kGjacyunOr

— Acyn (@Acyn) January 31, 2024

Clowns to the left of him, jokers to the right.

The GOP has no king but orange Jesus, and no policies to run on in 2024 except immigration and being against wholesome, Disney-esque romance.

Pennsylvania Supremes condemn Dobbs

While MAGA went gaga over Democrats’ secret plot “to turn Taylor Swift into an international pop star and the Kansas City Chiefs into a football dynasty so Swift could then date a Kansas City player and leverage the collective media coverage to get Joseph R. Biden, Jr. elected as President,” the Pennsylvania Supreme Court was throwing the Dobbs decision overturning Roe back in the U.S. Supreme Court’s faces.

Pennsylvania’s highest court ruled on Monday that a woman’s right to reproductive autonomy is “fundamental” (WHYY):

With four separate concurring opinions — three of which also dissented in part from the majority opinion — the 219-page decision in Allegheny Reproductive Health Center v. PA Department of Human Services is complex. However, the key — and unanimous — finding was that patients and abortion providers could challenge the state’s 1982 Abortion Control Act, which prohibits the use of Medicaid to cover funding for abortions.

The lower court, the Commonwealth Court, had previously said that access to abortion didn’t have anything to do with women’s rights or women’s equality and, therefore, the petitioners did not have merit to file the case — a decision the Supreme Court overruled.

“Justice Samuel Alito’s majority opinion rested largely on the views of dead white men who condoned the rape, beating, and murder of women to maintain female subjugation in every realm of life,” Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern write at Slate. Abortion restrictions, the Pennsylvania court ruled, amount to sex-based discrimination that is “presumptively unconstitutional” under the state’s equal protection amendment.

[Note: The Slate column misidentifies the link to the concurrence as the 219-page majority opinion.]

Justice Christine Donohue wrote, “the right to make healthcare decisions related to reproduction is a core important right encompassed by the enmeshed privacy interest protected by our Charter.”

Tori Oten writes for The New Republic:

The case will now return to the lower Commonwealth Court to determine if Medicaid should cover abortion and if abortion is constitutionally protected. The state government must prove that banning Medicaid from covering most abortions does not violate the ERA.

Lithwick and Stern lay out the implications:

The majority vehemently rejected Dobbs’ history-only analysis, noting that, until recently, “those interpreting the law” saw women “as not only having fewer legal rights than men but also as lesser human beings by design.” Justice David Wecht went even further: In an extraordinary concurrence, the justice recounted the historical use of abortion bans to repress women, condemned Alito’s error-ridden analysis, and repudiated the “antiquated and misogynistic notion that a woman has no say over what happens to her own body.”

The Pennsylvania Supreme Court’s decision thus spurned Dobbs in two ways. First, the majority held that laws regulating a woman’s body do discriminate on the basis of sex, a truth that has been widely understood by legal scholars for decades. And second, the majority explained that rooting women’s rights in the past is, itself, a form of sex discrimination, perpetuating misogynistic beliefs about gender inequality by judicial decree. As it was leaked and then published with almost no corrections to its myriad errors, Dobbs set off a firestorm of real-time criticism within the public, the legal academy, and the media, and that criticism is now finally returning to the courts—in the form of decisions that both defy and rebuke Dobbs’ chauvinistic logic.

Wecht took on Dobbs directly, describing it as myopic for disregarding “the broader guarantees” of the Constitution.

In his concurrence, Wecht explicitly linked Donohue’s equality-based argument to Dobbs’ flaws. “We cannot examine particular laws in their historical context without also examining the society in which those laws developed,” he wrote. “The Dobbs majority relied upon the patriarchal notions of eminent authorities of old English common law, including Lord Matthew Hale,” whose “beliefs were driven by his goal of keeping women from encroaching upon the rights of men.” Hale, “who presided over the hanging of two women accused of being witches,” thought that giving women “legally enforceable rights over their own bodies was a threat to the freedom of men.” He also insisted that marital rape “was never a crime because marriage amounted to the wife’s (but not the husband’s) irrevocable consent to sex.”

Those days are done, no matter what Samuel Alito thinks. What the Pennsylvania case demonstrates is that “state constitutions will be more essential than ever to protect against the misogynistic and revanchist efforts to restore women to subordinate and indeed powerless vessels,” Lithwick and Stern conclude.

Let’s hope more such cases in additional states challenge Dobbs based on equal protection provisions in their state constitutions. Guess we should have ratified that Equal Rights Amendment after all, huh?

Adam Serwer with an interesting observation on the Supreme Court’s decision in the Texas border case which Gov. Abbott and 25 other red state extremist Governors are openly defying:

There are many factors that led to this point. One is the reigning Republican ideology of Trumpism, which holds that only conservative electoral victories, conservative laws, and conservative governments are legitimate and must be obeyed—the ideology that led a mob to ransack the Capitol to overturn an election. Another is the steady drumbeat of catastrophizing right-wing propaganda about the recent rise in migrants at the border, which seeks to validate extreme responses, including violence and lawlessness. But even accounting for those two elements, the most significant proximate reason for Abbott’s response may be that four Supreme Court justices sent Abbott an implicit message that they agreed with him.

When the Court sided with the Biden administration, it was a 5–4 split, with Justices John Roberts and Amy Coney Barrett joining the three Democratic appointees. This should have been a unanimous ruling; for more than a century, the Supreme Court has held that the federal government has jurisdiction over immigration law in most cases and that the states cannot usurp that jurisdiction just because they disapprove of federal policy. Abbott is now thumbing his nose at the federal government and, by extension, the authority of the high court itself, and four Republican appointees—Brett Kavanaugh, Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, and Neil Gorsuch—are saying: Go right ahead.

That’s certainly how the right wingers interpreted it. Roberts and Barrett are RINO squishes and might as well be Nancy Pelosi’s bffs. The only ones who count are the Fascist Four and they said that defying the federal government was just fine.

Serwer points out that this is actually stupid on their part:

The four justices’ little act of sympathy with Abbott’s antics has created a problem for the Court. If states can openly defy Supreme Court orders, then the justices no longer have influence. All of the justices grasped this dilemma last September, when they smacked down an attempt by Alabama Republicans to refuse to follow a Supreme Court decision on the Voting Rights Act. Abbott’s reaction should give them some perspective: Their decision was not merely symbolic; it undermines their own power and legitimacy.

Conservatives may believe that they are the only ones entitled to play constitutional hardball and ignore the law if they don’t feel like following it. But the more the Supreme Court allows Republican politicians and GOP-run states to get away with defying the law, the less obligated their Democratic counterparts will feel to follow their dictates. And at that point, they won’t have any power at all.

They don’t believe that any Democratic state would dare to do that because their voters aren’t inclined to the kind of extremism that would lead to civil war. But things can change. They’re pushing it.

JV Last at the Bulwark points out that everyone needs to take a breath and remember that Nikki Haley is untrustworthy. All you have to do is look back at the way she’s been trying to have it both ways throughout the primary campaign to realize it. I would add that her decision to work for Trump and then sing his praises when she left the administration, promising to campaign for “this one” gesturing to Dear Leader was a low point.

Anyway, Last writes:

Nick Catoggio argues that Haley is trying to execute “the Half Liz.” He means that she’s attempting to thread the needle between the Liz Cheney and Ron DeSantis positions on Trump:

[Q]uestioning his mental stability and vouching for the defamation judgment are meaningful, if lesser, transgressions to GOP orthodoxy in their own right. By moving past policy to blame him for causing his own biggest problems, Haley is rejecting the first commandment. From “chaos follows him” to “he surrounds himself in chaos”: That’s the half Liz.

But Catoggio points out that what Haley is saying about Trump now will ultimately matter a lot less than what she says after she quits the race:

[W]hat Nikki Haley says about Trump after her campaign ends will be much more significant than what she says about him during its current “hospice care” stage. The half Liz strategy is fine for now—she’s earned the benefit of the doubt on her political instincts by overperforming in the primary—but if she turns around after exiting the race and supports Trump, she’ll have proved my critique correct. Unless it eventually progresses to the full Liz, the half Liz is ultimately just a “permission structure” to vote MAGA in the general election, albeit a bit more grudgingly than you otherwise might have.

I wouldn’t get my hopes up. Last notes that she is still trying to hedge her bets quoting her saying that despite all his problems, “I trust the American people to make good decisions.”

“I trust the American people to make good decisions” is tautological. It’s declaring that any decision which the public makes is, by definition, the good one.

But it’s not just tautology. It’s a permission structure. Haley is laying the groundwork to endorse Trump because, if the voters choose Trump as the nominee, then they must be correct. Nikki Haley has off-loaded her capacity to reach critical judgments concerning Trump. That’s simply in the hands of The People.

And who is she to tell Republican primary voters that they’ve made a terrible decision?

The logical contradiction is obvious. Here’s the first theorem:

IF, Nikki Haley trusts the American people to make good decisions . . .

AND in 2016 and 2020 one group of the American people—Republican voters—chose to nominate Trump . . .

THEN these must have been good decisions.

But how does that gibe with the second theorem:

IF in 2020 an even larger group of the American people decided that they preferred Joe Biden to Donald Trump . . .

THEN that was a good decision, too.

You can reconcile them by simply agreeing that Biden > Trump.

But Haley has to square it with a third theorem:

IF Republican voters decide to nominate Trump for a third time . . .

THEN this is a good decision . . .

AND People should vote for Biden this time, too . . .

BECAUSE Biden > Trump.

As Last concludes, she is certainly going to endorse Trump when all is said and done. It will be a total shock if she doesn’t.

Meaning that, again, this is a politicians who will simply say anything.

Of course she is. She will do anything to preserve her viability. But, in truth, she will have none. If he wins he will never forgive her. If he loses the base will never forgive her. She should probably go full-Liz in the hopes that somehow the GOP will come to its sense in the next few years and reward those who stood up. But she won’t. She’s cooked.