Month: January 2024

And he may reward her with the big enchilada

Is it possible Trump will actually choose Stefanik? I still doubt it. She’s not out of central casting after all, at least not in the way Trump thinks is important. But apparently he’s talked about it”

During a candlelit dinner with Mar-a-Lago members in late December, former President Donald Trump walked around the table as the conversation turned to one of the biggest decisions he’d have to make should he become the Republican nominee: Whom should he pick to be his running mate? 

That’s when Rep. Elise Stefanik, the hard-charging upstate New York Republican, came up, according to a person at the dinner table. Attendees around Trump raved about her viral moment just weeks before, when she grilled three university presidents at a congressional hearing about antisemitism on campus. 

At the thought of Stefanik as a possible choice for vice president, Trump nodded approvingly.

“She’s a killer,” Trump said, according to the person at the event. 

Ever since then, Trump and a growing group of allies have started to look more closely at Stefanik as a running mate, according to eight people familiar with the matter, including people in Trump’s orbit, Stefanik fundraising bundlers and former Trump administration officials. 

At the time, the 39-year-old congresswoman was at the crest of a wave of national publicity after taking on the top leaders of Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Their answers to the question, “Does calling for the genocide of Jews violate [your college’s] rules on bullying and harassment?” eventually resulted in two of them resigning and brought a firestorm of criticism on the schools. 

But Stefanik was on Trump’s radar long before that hearing, because she possesses one of the key attributes he’s looking for in a 2024 running mate: loyalty. That, mixed with her ability to drive the news on key issues, may be an irresistible mix for a vice presidential pick.

“Stefanik is at the top,” said Steve Bannon, who was Trump’s chief strategist in the White House and the architect of his 2016 campaign strategy. 

“If you’re Trump, you want someone who’s loyal above all else,” a Republican campaign operative said. “Particularly because he sees Mike Pence as having made a fatal sin.”

Stefanik won’t make that mistake. She has shown herself to be completely without morals or principles of any kind.

I’m not sure she brings anything other than that to the table (which, granted, may be all that counts to Trump.) She’s just not a very likable politician and I suspect she could be as polarizing in her own way as Sarah Palin was in the 2008 race. I just don’t think she would bring in any of those suburban moms they’d really like to have back in the fold.Why else put a woman on the ticket in the first place? It’s not like they care about “diversity, equity and inclusion.”

I just want you to take a minute and contemplate what a Stefanik presidency would be like (just in case Trump falls face first into the omelette station at Mar-a-Lago.) She might be the most craven politician I’ve ever seen and that’s saying something. What the hell would she do if she finally got what she wanted?

Keep this in mind when you hear that Trump has changed his spots and “won’t have time for retribution.” It’s what he lives for:

Former President Donald Trump and people in his inner circle have told down-ballot Republican candidates not to hire Republican strategist Jeff Roe or his political consulting firm after Roe worked to elect Ron DeSantis, according to four people familiar with the conversations.

The admonition against hiring Roe represents an attempt to choke off revenue for his consulting firm, Axiom, in an act of political retribution. Roe was a top strategist for the DeSantis super PAC, Never Back Down. Roe resigned in mid-December after the Washington Post published a story detailing backbiting at the super PAC.

Candidates have been warned that hiring Roe could create a political problem for them with the Trump team.

“It’s an open secret that candidates who want to stay on President Trump’s good side should not hire Axiom,” said one of the four people, an influential Republican strategist who was granted anonymity to speak candidly. “They are enemy No. 1.”

Democrats: Trump wants to be a dictator

Trump: I want to be a dictator

Republicans: Democrats are being hysterical

— Matthew Yglesias (@mattyglesias) January 18, 2024

He wants to be a dictator. And they know it.

We must allow presidents to be dictators

Funny how this never came up until we elected this corrupt monster.

President Joe Biden on Wednesday dispatched his chief of staff to call the former Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson and apologize for a dig the Democratic National Committee took at him a day prior, just after he had dropped his campaign for president.

Hutchinson had been one of Donald Trump’s biggest critics from the right in his failed campaign, which he ended less than 24 hours after he finished a distant sixth in the Iowa caucuses.

The DNC looked to make light of Hutchinson’s performance in a statement sent to reporters shortly after his exit Tuesday, writing, “This news comes as a shock to those of us who could’ve sworn he had already dropped out.”

Karine Jean-Pierre, Biden’s press secretary, revealed during a Wednesday press briefing that Jeff Zients made the phone call after she was asked about the DNC’s statement.

Jean-Pierre said Biden has a “deep respect” for the former governor and “admires the race he ran.”

“The president knows him to be a man of principle who cares about our country and has a strong record of public service,” Jean-Pierre said. “This morning, the chief of staff here, Jeff Zients, called the governor to convey this and apologized for the statement that did not represent the president’s views.”

Via Daily Beast

It’s totally fair to hit people like Trump. He’s a monster. But punching down to hit someone like Hutchinson is just an unnecessary nasty bully boy tactic.

Yeah, good luck with that

Democrats cannot let women forget what MAGA Republicans and Christian nationalists (to the extent they don’t overlap) think of them.

My God, Rep. Matt Gaetz says it right out loud:

“This is the blue collar realignment of the Republican Party and what I can tell you is for every Karen we lose, there’s a Julio and a Jamal ready to sign up for the MAGA movement, and that bodes well for our ability to be more diverse and to be more durable as we head into not only the rest of the primary contest, but also the general election.”

Gaetz explains why Republicans don’t need women voters: “For every Karen we lose, there’s a Julio and a Jamaal ready to sign up for the MAGA movement.” pic.twitter.com/IqZcSYQGbg

— Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) January 18, 2024

Yeah, good luck with that.

In case you missed testimony by Jessica Valenti (Abortion Every Day) on Wednesday before some Senate Democrats, her prepared statement was appalling. In part:

Right now, there is a quiet but well-funded campaign led by the most powerful anti-abortion groups in the country that is focused entirely on pressuring and forcing women to carry doomed pregnancies to term. 

They’re not only trying to do away with exceptions for nonviable pregnancies—they’re trying to eradicate prenatal testing altogether. It’s a lot easier to force women to carry a dying fetus to term if they never get diagnosed to begin with. 

When I tell people about this, the question I get asked most often is why? Why would anyone want to deliberately create a world where women are forced to be “walking coffins”?  

It is inexplicable, until you understand that this has nothing to do with families or babies, but enforcing a worldview that says it’s women’s job to be pregnant and to stay pregnant, no matter what the cost or consequence.

But because Republicans don’t have the bravery to admit that truth—and because they’re afraid of voters, who are more pro-choice than ever—they lie. 

Here is Valenti delivering those remarks:

Republicans don’t have the bravery to admit the truth on abortion—they’re not only trying to do away with exceptions for nonviable pregnancies—they’re trying to eradicate prenatal testing altogether.

Watch my briefing to @SenateDems: pic.twitter.com/3GUaFLYmXc

— Jessica Valenti (@JessicaValenti) January 17, 2024

Valenti’s full statement is here, including her account of “a 21 year old woman in Texas who was denied an abortion even though her fetus developed without a head, and a hospital worker in South Carolina who watched a college student die after attempting to end her own pregnancy.”

She has been following what I called the anti-abortion underground for some time, but it has been mainly on her substack.

Great question from @SenCortezMasto in today’s @SenateDems briefing who drilled into the ways Republicans are undermining federal law on abortion.

My response, and the bottom line: when Republicans make clear they don’t care about our lives, we should believe them. pic.twitter.com/6CR2UAOMNV

— Jessica Valenti (@JessicaValenti) January 17, 2024

NBC News:

“I was thrilled to be pregnant for the fifth time,” said Dr. Austin Dennard, a Texas OB-GYN and plaintiff in a lawsuit brought against the state by people denied abortions since the Dobbs decision. “Then, a routine ultrasound showed devastating — the brain and skull had not formed. It was anencephaly. The most severe neural tube diagnosis. Although relatively rare, this is fatal,” she said, holding back tears.

Under Texas law, Dennard had to flee her state to get an abortion.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Center for Reproductive Rights (@reprorights)

But don’t worry, “Karen,” MAGA Republicans are cocksure they can hold power without you.

Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.) posted the entire 2-1/2 hr hearing on YouTube.

Selling the fantasy

“If you could have one superpower, what would it be?” is a familiar conversation-starter. Flying? Invisibility? Super strength?

Marvel built a media empire around that fantasy. DC Comics too. Before Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster created Superman, If I Had a Million (1932) considered what Average Joes would do if they came into a sudden financial windfall.

Donald J. Trump, heir to daddy Fred’s fortune, has been selling a fantasy his entire life. When he came to prominence in New York City in the 1970s, he conned New York Times reporters into believing he owned properties his father actually owned. Even the chauffeured Cadillac he ferried them around in during the interview was leased by Fred.

In If I Had a Million , several recipients of million-dollar checks use the money to get even with those who’ve done them wrong. W.C. Fields buys eight cars to crash into “road hogs” he encounters. Others find out great wealth does not make them invulnerable.

In addition to living a gilded fantasy, Trump has used his money for the former his whole life. He has so far evaded the latter “through sheer shameless and sociopathic behavior,” MSNBC’s Chris Hayes observed Wednesday night.

“Immunity, complete immunity, total supremacy over everyone and everything, even the law,” Hayes suggests, is the fantasy Trump is selling even now. “Even the law itself cannot hold him and cannot restrain him, that he is sovereign over it.” If you could have one superpower? That’s the fantasy that by the millions Trump’s MAGA followers have bought like a limited-offer household product sold on late-night TV.

What would they do with their superpower? Like Fields, get even and get away with it.

Hayes says:

Getting away with it? That’s the fantasy he is selling to so many people that a lot of people really want to buy into. Plenty of people daydream about what they might do without restraints, what they would say or do to their boss or their coworker or their sister-in-law. They want to imagine a world in which they, like Trump, can transgress in any way they want to, in which they can say whatever they want to whoever they want and not face consequences. In which they could lie, cheat, and steal — maybe even use force. A sort of seductive mythos, particularly to a certain kind of man, as the polling bears out. A seductive mythos that he is selling and selling openly when he tells people, “I am your retribution.”

To be supreme, unchallenged, beyond the law, a law unto themselves is the MAGA myth. Tied up, yes, with white Christian nationalism, a people chosen by God (and their leader, too) to rule a land founded by and for white Europeans where all others exist to serve them.

If I had a rocket launcher…I’d make somebody pay, sings Bruce Cockburn.

“Even the law itself cannot hold him and cannot restrain him, that he is sovereign over it,” is Trump’s pitch. Follow me and live like the rich and powerful. That’s the freedom he’s selling.

For Trump’s entire life he has gotten away with it. He has flouted the law and bought his way out of trouble more times than we can count. One of the biggest reasons to hold Trump accountable now, finally, says Hayes, is to puncture the myth.

But one reason it is such an easy sell for Trump is that everyone knows the rich live by a different set of rules. Equal justice under law is itself a myth that has eaten away at the Constitution and the American ideal of equality since our founding by wealthy, white men. The second Gilded Age has driven that truth home with Trump as an icon, rendering the law a joke and our other institutions as well. Bringing him to justice is an imperative. Torches and pitchforks are the alternative.

Axios’s “Vibe Survey” found that people are feeling quite good about the economy. Imagine that:

Americans overall have a surprising degree of satisfaction with their economic situation, according to findings from the Axios Vibes survey by The Harris Poll.

That’s in spite of dour views among certain subsets of the country — and in contrast to consumer sentiment polls that remain stubbornly weak, partly because of the lingering effects of 2022’s inflation.

The Axios Vibes poll has found that when asked about their own financial condition, or that of their local community, Americans are characteristically optimistic.

It’s broadly understood that economic well-being influences electoral outcomes. By the same token, however, political affiliation influences the responses that Republicans, in particular, give when they’re asked about the economy.

So asking about personal finances rather than the broader economy can reveal optimism not seen in consumer-sentiment polls.

Axios Vibe Check: How people feel about their economic prospects: 😁

What the data show about the overall economy: 😁

-GDP growth is the highest in the developed world, inflation is headed back down to optimal levels, and consumer spending keeps on growing.

-63% of Americans rate their current financial situation as being “good,” including 19% of us who say it’s “very good.”

[…]

Americans’ outlooks for the future are also rosy. 66% think that 2024 will be better than 2023, and 85% of us feel we could change our personal financial situation for the better this year.

That’s in line with Wall Street estimates, which have penciled in continued growth in both GDP and real wages for the rest of the year.

77% of Americans are happy with where they’re living — including renters, who have seen their housing costs surge over the last few years and are far more likely than homeowners to describe their financial situation as poor.

Indeed, a substantial majority of renters are happy renting, with 63% of them saying they’re not interested in homeowning and having a mortgage.

The reality is similarly upbeat. Asking rents finally started falling rather than rising recently. That, of course, is great news for renters.

Meanwhile, most mortgages carry very low interest rates of below 4%, and homes have soared in value — so homeowners are sitting pretty too.

More than half of Americans say that if they lost their job tomorrow they’d be OK; that they could find an equivalent or better job quickly; and that “my employers need me more than I need them.”

63% of respondents describe their job security as “a sure thing.”

That shouldn’t be surprising, given that the number of job openings in America is still much higher than at any point before the pandemic.

The bottom line: Americans who believe their community’s economy is strong outnumber those who think it’s weak. They’re right.

I’m sure this must be bad news for Biden, right?

All joking aside, it’s important that CW purveyors like Axios start sending this information around to the journalists who read them every day. It’s important that they absorb it so they stop disseminating the disinformation the right has been pushing for the last three years.

DeSantis in Hampton NH, taking his 9th (!) town hall Q here: “Every booster you get, you’re more likely to get COVID.”

— David Weigel (@daveweigel) January 17, 2024

That’s what it’s come to. He’s just spreading disinformation for fun now. He’s not going to win anything in New Hampshire.

I thought this was an interesting look at what happened to his once vaunted campaign from Marc Caputo. An excerpt:

There’s dispute about whether Trump was ever beatable in a GOP primary. But there’s little disagreement among connected political pros about the multiple problems with the campaign of DeSantis, an aloof not-ready-for-primetime candidate who didn’t know what he didn’t know and was arrogant about it, according to more than a dozen insiders who shared their insight to The Messenger since March. They spoke on condition of anonymity, many out of fear of retribution from DeSantis or his aggressive army of social media followers on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter.

DeSantis’s prickly personality estranged one-time allies, donors and political pros. His likability problems turned off many voters. The $47 million spent against him by the super PACs of Trump and Nikki Haley damaged him. And the spring and summer criminal indictments of Trump changed the trajectory of the race.

“We had to be perfect and lucky. And we were neither,” said one adviser.

Still, the DeSantis downfall was striking in light of polls showing him ahead of Trump a year ago. He received fawning coverage from conservative media. He had the backing of big-dollar donors who helped stuff his Never Back Down super PAC with $130 million at the beginning.

Much of that money was spent in Iowa, where DeSantis made sure to campaign in all 99 counties. Iowa instead became a field of nightmares for DeSantis. The more he built his campaign there, the more voters didn’t come. He lost every county Monday. 

At 45 years old, DeSantis had no close senior advisers older than he, and he had a reputation for disregarding advice and data that conflicted with his opinions (on abortion, for instance). Known for demanding loyalty he doesn’t frequently reciprocate, DeSantis established a top-down campaign structure designed to give him information he wanted to hear. 

Critical voices didn’t last in the campaign.

“The DeSantis campaign was too much of a DeSantis fan club,” said one disillusioned consultant who worked to elect DeSantis.

Said another: “Ron is the smartest guy in the room. Everyone else is an idiot. No one tells him he’s wrong. So it didn’t happen that often.”

Only two staffers held senior positions in a prior presidential race, but they had tensions with DeSantis’s first campaign manager before she was replaced in a summer shakeup.  The campaign then had disputes with the Never Back Down super PAC, which was staffed with more seasoned political pros. They didn’t last after multiple departures in recent months.

There’s more about all the money they flushed down the toilet too.

He was living in the wingnut bubble:

An avid X user, DeSantis campaign speeches were stuffed with acronyms on heady topics that thrilled the very-online intellectual right, but the concepts just weren’t top of mind for the older not-very-online early state voters who didn’t have alphabet-soup fluency with CRT, DEI or ESG (Critical Race Theory, Diversity Equity & Inclusion and Environmental Social Governance). 

DeSantis ignored calls early on to stay more laser-focused on the economy and sound more positive. But he only started to do that after his needed campaign reboot.

DeSantis fashioned himself as a different type of candidate. So he decided to have a different type of campaign launch on Twitter Spaces with billionaire Elon Musk on May 25. It became a glitch-filled disaster on May 24, an easy metaphor for his troubled candidacy. When the sound finally worked in the event, DeSantis was somehow talking about heady topics like the Chevron Deference, DEI and ESG without explaining what any of it was.

The DeSantis campaign’s response: it was great.

“We broke the internet,” his campaign said.

No DeSantis aide dared publicly admit it was a campaign catastrophe or that he should have listened to the advisers who wanted him to have a traditional campaign launch with his telegenic family onstage at the baseball diamond in his hometown of Dunedin, Florida where his athletic skills led his team to the Little League World Series and led him to Yale University to play ball.

DeSantis also wanted to break another convention: he completely stiff-armed the mainstream media at first. In hindsight, conservative writers have detailed what a mistake it was.

But DeSantis had built a national political brand by refusing to cow to the “corporate media” in the face of unremitting negative coverage when he kept Florida open during COVID. With the exception of conservative Fox and hand-picked conservative outlets, DeSantis kept the media at bay heading into his 2022 reelection. It worked. He notched a historic win of 19.4 percentage points in what used to be a swing state.

“He wanted to run the reelect for president because it worked for him,” said one Republican who has discussed DeSantis’s campaign with him privately. “But that’s not how this works.”

This is a lesson in what you see is what you get. DeSantis appears in public to be a weird, fascistic, asshole and it turns out that’s what he is. Surprise.

When Trumpists talk about his great economy, they play 3-card Monte. When it comes to jobs and growth, they pretend his admin ended January 2020. When it comes to prices, they cite numbers from 2020, when demand was severely depressed. Eg unemployment and gas prices pic.twitter.com/VVu1yAPIgd

— Paul Krugman (@paulkrugman) January 17, 2024

That’s how they roll. Heads I win tails you lose. And sadly, the press let’s them do it.

From Scott Rosenberg’s Hopium Chronicles (to which you should subscribe for a little bit of political positivity.)

As we often discuss here the central dynamic in American politics since Dobbs in the spring of 2022 has been Dem overperformance, Republican struggle in race after race, all across the country. We saw it in the battlegrounds in 2022, as we improved our standing over 2020 in AZ, CO, GA, MI, MN, NH, PA; and got all the way up to 59% in CO, 57& in PA, 55% in MI, 54% in NH. We saw it all throughout 2023 as we took away Colorado Springs and Jacksonville, two of the largest GOP held cities; the Supreme Court seat and rancid gerrymandering in WI; the six week abortion ban in OH; the Virginia Assembly and the fantasy that the 15 week abortion ban would be a safe haven for Republicans; and so much more, all across the country.

When I started Hopium in early 2023 I wondered whether this dynamic that we saw in 2022 would continue in 2023, and it did. 2023 was really a blue wave year across the US. And here in early 2024 we’ve been wondering would this same dynamic carry over to this year? And look what we’ve seen this week:

Iowa – huge sums spent, competitive race, unprecedented investment in ground operations, lots of candidate time, and overall GOP turnout was abysmal, coming in at 110,000, down from 186,000 in 2016, and the lowest 24 years. If Rs were fired up, ready to take on Biden they would have shown up and voted. They didn’t. It’s another sign of this ongoing GOP struggle we discuss aboe.

Don’t let weather be an excuse here – the drop was much too big to be explained by weather; the test of the strength of a campaign or party is whether they can get their voters to show up – and here they didn’t; this GOP enthusiasm problem is something that just keeps repeating all across the country in election after election.

Florida – Dems flip this GOP held seat, despite all the advantages Republicans currently have in Florida. Another sign of Dem heightened performance, GOP struggle, another Dem takeaway of something Republicans hold.

In his piece yesterday, he gave some reasons why this is happening. I think this is Particularly compelling:

I think the GOP has been struggling since Dobbs because this MAGA, Trumpy party is deeply unattractive even to many Republican voters. Trumpy candidates in the 2022 battlegrounds saw their party splinter, Republicans vote for Democrats and they lost, some times by enormous margins. Democrats then took away important things from Republicans in 2023 due to this ongoing GOP electoral struggle – a SCOTUS seat and outrageous gerrymandering in WI; Colorado Springs and Jacksonville – two of the largest GOP held cities in the country; the six-week abortion ban in Ohio; the state House and the hope of the 15 week abortion ban as a safe heaven in VA; and cities, city councils, state legislative seats and school board races across the US.

The fundamental problem Republicans face in 2024 is that their Presidential candidate and party are more unattractive than they’ve ever been. They’ve brought unprecedented chaos and extremism to Congress, and a historic appeasement of genocidal Putin; dozens of their leaders across the US have been indicted for supporting a party wide effort to overturn an election and end American democracy; they are content to leave pregnant women to die on a hospital table, denying them the life saving care they need; they are refusing to pass common sense reforms to make it easier for the US government to manage our border and rising immigrant flows. They want more dead kids in schools, the planet to warm faster, to strip health insurance from tens of millions, establish mass deportation camps, and to keep taking away freedoms and rights common throughout the modern world……

And then there’s Trump. More degraded, extreme, dangerous than 2016 and 2020. His performance on the stump is far more erratic and wild. He keeps making big, consequential unforced errors due to his mental decline and mania. And there are the things he’s done that voters did not know about last time – his rape of a woman in a department store dressing room; his decades-long financial fraud; his leading of a party-wide effort to overturn an election and end American democracy for all time; his being more responsible for ending Roe and stripping American women of rights and freedoms than any other single person; his rancid stealing of America’s secrets and sharing them with others; his taking of more money from foreign governments than any politician and political family in history. None of these things were known in 2020. Any one of them could disqualify him with voters. Taken together it’s an unprecedented basket of awfulness, and it’s just hard to imagine how he survives it all.

I can easily imagine how he survives it all. However, people do get burned out on endless chaos and his problems are numerous so it may be taking a toll.

There is no denying that Democrats have been on a roll in 2022 and 2023. And this first race of 2024 down in Florida, which Tom posted, is yet another surprise. Will it hold up? Who knows? But this recent history is promising. As much as the media loves to laud the alleged enthusiasm of Trump’s cult, results indicate that there has been a quiet, determined resistance to MAGA at work since 2018.