There was lots of talk this week about Nikki Haley losing to “none of the above” in a nevada primary that Trump didn’t participate in and Trump was in Nevada patting himself on the back for his so-called triumph in the rigged caucus that Haley didn’t participate in. It was, all in all, something of a shit show. But get a load of this:
Both Biden and Trump have the nominations locked up. Haley is a protest vote at this point, We don’t know how many Haley voters will hold their nose and vote for him next November but I would guess that most of them will. But the numbers he’s putting up in these primaries shows that he’s going to need every last one of them.
Maybe at some point we’ll see the media talking about that. Until then, tell a friend. That may be the only way they’ll hear about this.
Michael Tomasky’s leadership of the New Republic has been a breath of fresh air. If you haven’t given it a look in years you need to go back to it and check it out. I don’t think it’s ever been this good.And Tomasky himself is writing a lot and it’s all characteristically sharp. Take this insight which I think is right on, made in the wake of the monumentally embarrassing week for congressional Republicans:
Republicans today are consumed by this primal need for immediate gratification. They’re the party of the dopamine rush. Go read an article about the brain, and you’ll learn in five minutes that dopamine helps regulate pleasure, and pleasure is great, but too much dopamine leads to delusions, hallucinations, schizophrenia, psychosis. The entire party has a massive and collective mental disorder, a severe chemical imbalance in what remains of its collective brain, which explains why it kneels so slavishly before a psychotic man with the emotional regulation of a 5-year-old.
Like rutting ungulates, they are incapable of anything remotely resembling thought and respond only to the stimuli right in front of their noses. Deliberation, caution, calm reflection … these are the qualities that most of us have in more or less equal measure to the desire for gratification. These are the qualities that are most in harmony with the habits of democracy. To be small-d democratic is to deliberate; to think things through a little. This country’s Founders believed profoundly in this, which is why they built so many choke points into our democratic processes (too many, as it turns out). They wanted future generations to think stuff through.
But these people are stuck in the land of anti-thought. And because that’s where they live, it means that in many respects it’s where we all have to live, because that’s where a lot of our national debate plays out.
The border debate is a perfect example. There are a lot of problems with U.S. border policy. Undoubtedly some of them are the fault of Democrats. It’s reasonable that people should want more control over the border. But at the same time, it’s a complex problem, and any real solutions are complex too. Oklahoma Republican Senator James Lankford, to his credit, tried to acknowledge that reality. And what happened? He was brutally shut down. It was chiefly Donald Trump, but it wasn’t only Trump. One right-wing talk radio host threatened to “destroy” him.
But it’s not just the border. It’s everything. The Mayorkas impeachment. I suppose there are many grounds from a conservative point of view on which to think he’s doing a lousy job. That’s fine. But a high crime or a misdemeanor? Ridiculous. That doesn’t matter, though. The mere word impeachment makes the mules rut, and there ends the discussion.
James Comer and Jim Jordan are another primo example. They just go on Fox and Newsmax and say shit. It’s not about facts or methodically building a case. It’s all about the dopamine rush of being on national television and saying titillating things that rile people up and get the checks rolling in. When they have to walk it back two days later, nobody cares. In fact, they’ve accomplished what they wanted to accomplish, which is to add to the general picture of murkiness surrounding Hunter Biden or whatever. And they walk out of that studio feeling eight miles high.
And that’s where our political debate takes place now. It used to be that dopamine-rush politics was occasional. Both sides did it on issues that clearly worked to their advantage, as Democrats still do. But with the GOP today, that’s all politics is. The immediate gratification of having scored a point, trolled a lib, won a little wedge of Fox airtime—and most of all pleased Donald Trump.
All they care about is that sweet hit of dopamine they get in front of the cameras. This isn’t politics at all. It’s more like a sad little talent show.
Perhaps someday Democrats will learn their lesson but I’m not holding out much hope at this point. I’m referring, of course, to their inexplicable habit of allowing only Republicans to hold the job of Special Prosecutor. This has been going on for decades now and the results have been predictable.
The idea is to prove how noble and non-partisan they are in comparison to the hacks on the GOP side and it just ends up coming back to bite them. The habit goes back to Watergate after President Richard Nixon fired Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox, a Democrat, in the Saturday Night Massacre. Nixon had Cox replaced with one of his supporters, Texas Judge Leon Jaworski, whom everyone assumed would be sympathetic to the president. As it turned out he was appalled by what he saw and issued subpoenas for the tapes which wound up in the Supreme Court as US v Nixon. However, it was later revealed that Jaworski didn’t agree with the Grand Jury’s recommendation to criminally indict the president and resigned from the job just as the cover-up trials began. As we know, it all became moot when President Gerald Ford pardoned Nixon.
When the Reagan White House came under investigation for the Iran-Contra Affair a Republican judge named Lawrence Walsh was appointed by a three judge panel under the new Independent Counsel statute. He was a pretty zealous prosecutor and uncovered quite a bit of dirt but in the end was thwarted by President George H. W. Bush and his Attorney General William Barr who pardoned all the possible defendants just before Bush left office in 1992. Funny how that worked out for Republicans again.
During the Clinton years, Attorney General Janet Reno named Republican Robert Fiske as special prosecutor to investigate the Whitewater scandal and he was later replaced in the job by ultra conservative Republican judge Kenneth Starr after Clinton himself signed the re-authorization of the Independent Counsel Act giving a three judge panel of right wing partisans the ability to assign one of their cronies.
I’ll never forget when Newt Gingrich and the House Republicans put the Starr Report, sight unseen, on the internet only to find out that it was a downright pornographic romance novel (partly written by the man who became Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh) which had as much resemblance to a legal document as a grocery store receipt. It ushered in a new era in right wing hit jobs that ended up backfiring on the Republicans but not before causing massive damage to the lives and reputations of dozens of people.
Fast forward to 2016 and the Russia Investigation, headed by yet another Republican, former FBI Director Robert Mueller. The GOP Department of Justice knew it wouldn’t be right to have a Democrat investigate a Republican president. Why they might be partisan!
Special Counsel is a Republican job, no matter what. Until the appointment of Jack Smith who has been assiduously apolitical during his career, there has never been anything but Republicans in the job since Archibald Cox and it’s a problem.
I bring this up because yesterday the special prosecutor assigned to investigate whether President Joe Biden committed any crimes by retaining some classified documents from his time as a senator and Vice President announced that he was declining to prosecute for lack of evidence that Biden had willfully taken them or obstructed the investigation as Donald Trump had done. Like VP Mike Pence, it appears that he unknowingly took some classified documents when he left office which is apparently not all that uncommon. What is uncommon is for someone to try to hide them from the authorities and refuse to give them back as Trump has been indicted for doing.
But Special Prosecutor Robert Hur is a Republican, Trump-appointed Justice Department holdover who, once again, was appointed by a Democratic Attorney General in order to prove just how “non-partisan” the department is. So Hur wrote a voluminous 388 page report which most legal observers believe could have been done in 50, if not less. He could have simply said he declined to prosecute and left it at that but what he did was nothing less than a partisan hit job masquerading as a prosecutorial declination.
Despite laying out in detail that he could find no evidence that Biden committed any crime, making it clear that what he did do was far less egregious than what Trump is accused of doing and declaring that he would not prosecute Biden even if he were out of office, Hur wrote what amounts to a chatty little novel about what he thinks of Biden’s personality and mental capabilities. Perhaps his parents really wanted him to be a psychiatrist or a neurologist instead of a lawyer and this was his big chance to make them proud but it was entirely inappropriate.
He opens the report with what amounts to a character study of Biden that suggests he has delusions of grandeur because he saved papers early in his career because he thought he might be president someday. Then he embeds in the the report a fatuous rationalization that he personally believes that if he were to bring the case to a jury — a case which he has already stated he could not find the evidence to prove — they would feel sorry for Biden because he is a “well-meaning, elderly gentleman with a bad memory.” He dug deep to find a way to get that in there. He pretty much implies that the president is demented because he didn’t perfectly remember dates from the past, something which defense lawyers commonly tell their clients to be careful about trying to do under oath.
It’s a nasty piece of slander that Hur no doubt believed served the purpose of preserving his place in MAGAworld without him having to recommend charges based on nothing. As one of president Obama’s top advisers put it:
Let's be clear–the special counsel isn't a dummy and we should be very careful not to take the bait after Comey pulled this in 2016. Hur, a lifelong Republican and creature of DC, didn't have a case against Biden, but he knew exactly how his swipes could hurt Biden politically.
This reaction from Tennessee GOP Senator Marsha Blackburn is typical:
It’s hard to imagine House Republicans would use this heavily padded tome as the basis for an impeachment article since it would also put Trump’s stolen documents case back on the front burner again but they might just do it. Lord knows the rest of their case is going nowhere. If I were a conspiracy minded person I might even think that Hur took a page out of Ken Starr’s bodice-ripper and wrote it just for that purpose. If so, they might want to check in with Newt Gingrich about how well that worked out for them.
This was a shamefully inappropriate cheap shot against President Biden but in the end, despite the media’s febrile “but her emails” reaction, I doubt that this changes much in the dynamic as long as the Republicans are all genuflecting to the man whose memory is so bad that he mistakenly identified his rape victim as his former wife during a deposition. They have much bigger problems on their hands,
[M]istakes like these are nothing new for Biden, who has been mixing up names and places for his entire political career. Back in 2008, he infamously introduced his running mate as “the next president of the United States, Barack America.” At the time, Biden’s well-known propensity for bizarre tangents, ahistorical riffs, and malapropisms compelled Slate to publish an entire column explaining “why Joe Biden’s gaffes don’t hurt him much.” The article included such gems as the time that then-Senator Biden told the journalist Katie Couric that “when the markets crashed in 1929, ‘Franklin Roosevelt got on the television and didn’t just talk about the princes of greed. He said, “Look, here’s what happened.”’” The only problem with this story, Slate laconically noted, was that “FDR wasn’t president then, nor did television exist.”
In other words, even a cursory history of Biden’s bungling shows that he is the same person he has always been, just older and slower—a gaffe-prone, middling public speaker with above-average emotional intelligence and an instinct for legislative horse-trading. This is why Biden’s signature moments as a politician have been not set-piece speeches, but off-the-cuff encounters, such as when he kneltto engage elderly Holocaust survivors in Israel so they would not have to stand, and when he befriended a security guard in an elevator at The New York Times on his way to a meeting with the paper’s editorial board, which declined to endorse him. And it’s why Biden’s key accomplishments—such as the landmark climate-change provisions of the Inflation Reduction Act, the country’s first gun-control bill in decades, and the expected expansion of the child tax credit—have come through Congress. The president’s strength is not orating, but legislating; not inspiring a crowd, but connecting with individuals.
That said, although Biden’s Mexico mistake might not be a demonstration of dementia, it is a warning sign of a different sort that his campaign would be wise to heed. Recently, the White House declined to have Biden participate in the traditional pre–Super Bowl interview this coming Sunday. The administration framed this decision as part of a broader strategy favoring nontraditional media, but it was reasonably seen as an attempt to shield the candidate from scrutiny. The president’s staff is understandably reluctant to put Biden front and center, knowing that his slower speed and inevitable gaffes—both real and fabricated—will feed the mental-acuity narrative. But in actuality, the bar for Biden has been set so laughably low that he can’t help but vault over it simply by showing up. By contrast, limiting his appearances ensures that the public mostly encounters the president through decontextualized social-media clips of his slipups.
He has always been a gaffe machine. Always. Now it’s attributed to his age, a lie promulgated by the right and aided and abetted by the media jackels, as we saw at the press conference last night.
The press always complains about accessibility to the candidate/office holder. They were particularly brutal with Hillary Clinton on this subject, as I wrote here back in 2015. But they do it to all the candidates, particularly Democrats who are more often subject to their ire due to the pressure from the right wing propaganda machine. But in this case, I think Rosenberg is right. Biden is going to have to subject himself to this and show that he can take it. That’s what these political trials by combat are all about. Those who show resilience and toughness in the face of this sort of onslaught can often overcome the onslaught. Those who shy away from it invite more of it.
Biden’s mental faculties are fine. he’s no different than he always was in that way, which is a garrulous, rambling speaker whose mouth gets ahead of his brain. But he looks old and that’s what people are reacting to. It’s not relevant because all you have to do is look at his presidency to see that he is perfectly capable of doing the job. The Republicans know that which is why they are relying almost exclusively on this attack to neutralize the obvious problem they have with a corrupt, half-wit rapist at the top of their ticket.
The Democrats need to buck up right now and stop their whining on television about “the problem.” Biden’s old and there’s nothing they can do about it. He’s doing a good job and they need to make that case instead of this typical hand wringing. And I don’t know what to say about the political press. They are beyond hope I’m afraid. Their performance last night was as bad as any I’ve ever seen. I’m not the only one who thought so:
“Like sharks in a feeding frenzy”. Do the journalists in that room understand how awful they looked? Your blood lust was revolting. https://t.co/a0pzIyuaLf
Lincoln Memorial photo by Wally Gobetz (2009) via Flickr (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 DEED).
“When does a political fight over some people’s rights feel like some people’s fight — and when does it feel like everyone’s?” asks Anand Giridharadas at The Ink. His topic is “de-siloing” our struggle for rights for specific groups and instead universalizing their struggles.
We are too easily trapped in our own narrow narratives and sucked into right’s.
Special counsel Robert K. Hur knew he would catch hell from MAGA Republicans for his investigation concluding without indicting President Biden for his retention of privileged materials. So on Thursday Hur redirected the public narrative away from “no criminal charges are warranted” to Joe Biden is senile with a few poisoned adverbs and adjectives. No one will talk about Biden’s innocence now, or the remarkable achievments of a great president. They’re too busy stomping around in the right’s “he’s too old” framing.
What the left must do to de-silo their defense of liberties is less rhetorical jujitsu than speaking in terms that bring everyone into the fight. MLK chose the Lincoln Memorial for preaching his dream for a reason.
Take the fight for reproductive rights. Democrats avoided the A-word for years. “And, historically, there had been a choice to argue Roe on privacy rather than equity grounds,” Anat Shenker-Osorio writes. That left the right dominating the political battle space and made the issue a private one. The emphasis, she believes should be on generalizing the issue to freedom, something to which every man and woman of every age can relate:
So now here we are talking about freedom, and some people would say, “but that’s right-wing, too.” I strongly disagree with that. I think that freedom is a squarely contested concept and there is absolutely a left-wing instantiation of that concept that we have seen, with F.D.R., with the freedom to marry, with the civil rights movement. So now that abortion sits in this freedom frame, what I would argue it’s allowed us to do is, number one, make men understand how this is also going to rope them in.
Because what it does is it presents abortion not as off on its own but as something that is important to us all.
Now, this is a mistake we make a lot. We try to protect or defend or guard abortion or we try to protect and defend and guard immigrants or we try to protect and defend and guard trans kids or you name it, thereby helping out in the siloing of that issue.
Somewhere amidst electrons collecting dust there is an old post by Markos Moulitsas that almost gets here. He was criticizing the women’s movement for insisting that the right to an abortion was a fundamental principle of the Democratic Party. “Like hell, it is,” he wrote (IIRC). No, it’s the right to privacy, something more universal. Shenker-Osorio goes broader still. It’s freedom.
Get away from “my body, my choice” and make reproductive freedom everyone’s fight.
Here’s Anat’s reframing on that:
Hi friends, I know you thought that we were Chicken Little screaming, “The sky is falling!” when the sky was not falling. Guess what? They took a giant piece out of the sky. They really did. It was called Dobbs. And we promise you that this is their whole agenda. Their agenda is to take away your freedoms.
Today it’s abortion. Tomorrow it’s condoms. The next day it’ll be speech. Somewhere along the way it’s already books. After that, it’s whether your kid can go to school looking the way that they feel comfortable. Somewhere along the road it’s going to be your vote. It’s going to be your right to join together in a union. It’s going to be your right to wear the T-shirt that criticizes government.
Or — and I mean to get a little pointed here — it’s going to be your ability to yell when a political leader is giving a speech. If you disagree with what they’ve done and you speak out about it, do you get put in the gulag?
So that’s what this change in framing has allowed. It’s turned abortion from “We should care about abortion because abortion” to “We should care about abortion because abortion, and because this is an example of the agenda. This is the tip of the spear and the spear’s going to get you.”
Let the right rant about “they’re coming for your guns.” The left’s rallying cry should be “they’re coming for your freedoms.”
The press did not fail to learn from 2016. It learned what drew eyeballs.
Do reporters want to find themselves flung out of windows after January 20, 2025 under a Trump dictatorship? Seems so, the way they rushed to cover the poisoned special counsel report on “painfully slow,” old Joe Biden’s handling of sensitive materials. His exoneration was buried beneath coverage of a gratuitous, MAGA-reinforcing narrative in the report raising Biden’s age as an issue. The path the press chose, The New Republic subhead reads, “suggests we’re stuck in 2016 again.”
We know what Trump thinks of the media. We know he admires how Vladimir Putin and other world strong men control theirs. He dreams of ruling with an “iron fist,” like the Chinese president. We know what sort of second term he has in mind. A dictatorship, more or less, with himself unfettered by law to do as he pleases. Including to whom he pleases.
So, does the American media have a death wish? Apparently, but reporters will be making the owners money all the way to the sidewalk. Greg Sargent considers the media’s slant a poor choice:
Biden’s age is a real issue, and no one denies this. But the real rub here is that news analysis pieces elevating the material about his age did so by editorial choice. Other, better editorial choices were available.
But who gets to say what’s “better”? The bean-counters, that’s who.
Media critic Dan Froomkin tweets, “There are way more important questions the political press corps should be obsessing over than how Biden presents himself, namely: How is Biden governing? How would Trump govern? And which man is more dangerous?”
Again, who decides what questions are more important? The bean-counters, ultimately. They decided it was time for Sargent to leave the Washington Post, after all.
I doubt either Sargent or Froomkin were ever major stockholders in their former newpapers. They provided content, but the bosses held their leashes and the stockholders held theirs. And what Midas cult cares about are dividends, not the pursuit of truth or public service.
Sargent explores other (better) ways the media might have handled this report: “flatly factually.”
To be clear, one could choose news analysis topics that are highly unflattering to Biden while also being more informative to voters than age-focused analyses have been. A piece questioning how Biden could commit such missteps given his long experience in national security affairs would be fair game—damning and also more useful to voters deciding on who the next president should be.
It might better serve the new-consuming public, but would it generate more clicks, attract more media hits, raise ratings, sell more papers? News is not a service. It’s a business. Profitability trumps all else.
Sargent concludes:
All of this is a rerun of the Hillary emails fiasco in 2016: The new information that Republicans seized on was of uncertain importance, yet editorial decisions were made to give it outsize significance precisely because GOP attacks over it might impact the race, which itself became the news.
As Brian Beutler writes on Substack, Democrats should ponder why Republicans often use such details to manipulate the discourse so effectively, and think harder about how to showcase Biden’s fitness for the presidency. They should declare forthrightly that media coverage is being gamed by GOP manipulation, making GOP dishonesty part of the story. Imagine if they’d jumped on the Hur report’s contrast between Biden and Trump, directing the media herd in that direction?
Fortunately, this blowup occurred eight months before Election Day, as opposed to much later in the campaign season, as in 2016. But Democrats have been warned: This will happen again, and again, and again. As for the media, many still angrily reject the idea that anything was amiss in 2016. They’re wrong. And this time they should do better.
Don’t bet money on it.
Staggering lack of self-awareness as NYT's @adamnagourney writes of a possible future where "'But his age' may serve as his campaign’s epitaph — fairly or not."
It is still early, and Biden has time to turn this page of his campaign, and 2024 is different from 2016. Yet, if he is ultimately unsuccessful in his bid for a second term, “But his age” may serve as his campaign’s epitaph — fairly or not.
And it may. Other media feeding frenzies will follow. They won’t replicate 2016, but they’ll rhyme. Why? Because Trump is good for business in the attention economy. He drew eyeballs. Biden is competent, effective, and that’s boring.
After a second Trump inaugural, reporters had best truthfully exaggerate the size of his crowd or face the wrath of the resurgent MAGA mob. Reporters will breathlessly report on goons (Trump’s or others’) hauling away dissenters up until it’s time for their defenestration. They’ll have just enough time to ask “Why me?” before impacting the pavement.
Guess Tucker Carlson forgot to tan his balls before interviewing Vladimir Putin. The Russian dictator chewed him up and spit him out. It was “a consummation Devoutly to be wished” for the perpetually puzzled former Fox News host. Tucker, was it good for you?
Putin couldn’t care less.
Digby has long said of the American far right, “shamelessness is their superpower.” But how much of their behavior is shamelessness and how much is lack of self-respect? MAGAs less well-heeled than Carlson compensate for their deficits with large-capacity magazines and family-impoverishing personal arsenals. Carlson had his self-respect (in a phrase the right loves to use) “shoved down his throat” by the Russian strong man.
Few expected anything ground-breaking to emerge from Tucker Carlson’s sit-down with Vladimir Putin, conducted in Moscow on Tuesday and published on the conservative pundit’s website Thursday. Carlson met those expectations with his softball interview, failing to extract any stirring insights into the Russian president’s actual war aims, or hold him to account for his brutal invasion of Ukraine.
Putin, however, took full advantage of the opportunity to plant seeds of doubt about America’s aid for Ukraine and the U.S. political system.
By the end of the conversation, it was clear that Putin had no intention of ending his brutal war against Ukraine. But Carlson, who was sacked from Fox last year, seemed ready to surrender. Putin offered to keep talking. Carlson, evidently exhausted by the Russian leader’s long-winded conspiracy theories and grievances against the West, thanked him and called it quits — far short of the media coup that he had been touting.
[…]
Carlson spent most of the interview in silence, or looking confounded.
Confounded is a Tucker Carslon trademark like Derek Zoolander’s “Blue Steel.”
He did not ask a single question about Russia’s attacks on civilian areas or critical infrastructure in Ukraine, which have killed thousands. There was no mention of the war crime allegations facing the Russian leader or the forced deportation of Ukrainian children. Absent too were questions on Russia’s sweeping political crackdowns on Putin’s critics or the long jail sentences meted out to ordinary Russians staging antiwar protests.
Watch Tucker Carlson’s Two-Hour Vladimir Putin Interview is how Varietyteased the interview in my search results. But why would you? You have too much self-respect for that. Plus, Ron Filipkowski watched so you didn’t have to.
At the beginning of the interview, Putin launches into a 25 minute rant of historical reasons why Ukraine should be part of Russia. Tucker tries to interrupt, and is smacked down by Putin who mocks him like his little child. pic.twitter.com/mr2ivN5cXh
This is a hilarious shit show. Putin is now 28 minutes into his history lesson. This is the 3rd time Tucker tries to interrupt and Putin mocks Tucker for just being an entertainer and not a serious journalist. Tucker tries to fake laugh it off while Putin emasculates him. pic.twitter.com/ABLG3sVz0Q
Putin is just mocking Tucker at this point. He’s tried to interrupt this 30 minute speech 3 times, Putin let him know he better not interrupt again, and Tucker is sitting there in agony with all his questions and he has to listen to this old man ramble worse than Trump. pic.twitter.com/IGc4L0jw2v
46 minutes into his history lesson, Putin stops to mock Tucker for applying to the CIA when he was younger and getting rejected. pic.twitter.com/oyoADwytpI
Tucker is desperate trying to get Putin to say he wants peace to fit Tucker’s narrative, but Putin makes it clear that he won’t even discuss peace terms until the US cuts off aid to Ukraine forcing them to surrender, which is exactly what Trump said he would do. pic.twitter.com/y1t4SIYGc8
When Putin was claiming that the Poles collaborated w/the Nazis in WWII, I missed the part where Tucker interrupted to point out the Red Army parked outside Warsaw to allow the Polish resistance to be massacred, or when the Russians murdered Polish officers in the Katyn forest.
This is an excellent and comprehensive piece of journalism. Just a really well organized description, and ends with a bang. It’s worth your time. https://t.co/hSyhskPaI6
Donald Trump has spent much of the past week fixated, of all places, on Indiana, accusing elections officials here of conspiring against him to help his rival, Nikki Haley, in a Republican presidential primary that won’t take place until May.
The complaints are baseless, elections officials say.
Worse, they and Trump’s opponents warn, with the former president raising alarms even in a state like deep-red Indiana, they look like a test run by Trump and his allies to undermine confidence in the election in November.
“Trump is reinforcing a narrative where the only acceptable outcome is his victory, thus preemptively delegitimizing any electoral defeat,” said Joshua Claybourn, a Republican attorney from Evansville and former GOP delegate from the state. “It sets the stage for yet another crisis of legitimacy in the November general election.”
But Trump’s Indiana intel seems to be coming from one of his most loyal congressional allies: Rep. Jim Banks of Indiana, who is running for Senate, and who initially shared Trump’s Truth Social post about Indiana last week on X, formerly known as Twitter.
The actual crux of the issue is pretty straightforward. For days, Trump has been suggesting that Haley failed to qualify for the Indiana primary ballot, saying she was “scrambling in Indiana with democrat county clerk offices to ‘verify’ signatures” after the fact, or even that she had “forgot to apply.” He has gone so far as to have his campaign’s attorney threaten litigation to challenge Haley’s ballot status.
But Trump’s allegation is based on a distortion of Indiana law. While signatures to get ballot access were due by Jan. 30, the filing deadline isn’t until this Friday, meaning that Haley is still on track to qualify for the state’s ballot.
Even the longtime Republican voter registration board member at the center of the dispute told POLITICO in an interview that Trump appeared to have false information and that the process is designed to prevent the kind of conspiracy the former president is alleging.
“I think somebody gave him incorrect information based on lack of knowledge, and he went with what he was told,” said Cindy Mowery, the Republican board member on the Marion County Board of Voters Registration.
Haley has been less forgiving, with her campaign accusing Trump of being “confused” at best and “lying” at worst.
“This is more nonsense and confusion from Trump,” Betsy Ankney, Haley’s campaign manager, told POLITICO. “We have more than enough verified signatures in each congressional district, and we will be filing this week before the Feb. 9 deadline. You should be asking whether they are simply confused or whether they were lying and misleading people.”
But the episode isn’t just some bizarre subplot of the 2024 GOP presidential primary. It gets at one of the fundamental concerns election officials have had in watching Trump’s post Jan. 6 revival. Four years after he conditioned the GOP base to the false idea that the 2020 election was stolen, Democrats and some Republicans fear he is using Indiana to stoke distrust in the election processes in 2024.
“Making assertions that have no basis in fact even if they undermine your public faith in our institutions, including our elections, is of no consequence to him,” said David Axelrod, former President Barack Obama’s top political adviser. “So this is just one little signpost along the way.”
He knows what he’s doing here. Raising doubts about the integrity of the electoral system is how he saves face when it’s revealed that he’s the big loser that he is. He’s just preparing the ground for a possible loss in November. (He did the same in 2020, railing against mail-in voting.)
Trump’s calculus to wage war on Haley in a state he won by double-digit margins in 2016 and 2020 perplexed some Indiana Republicans, especially coming days before the deadline when it would become clearer whether she had actually qualified.
“Why put out the effort to challenge the Haley effort ahead of time when Trump knows he’s going to win Indiana no matter what?” said Mike Murphy, a former Republican member of the Indiana House of Representatives. “The bottom line is he’s completely unhinged. He is literally off his rocker.”
His psyche will shatter if he ever has to admit that he lost the election so this is just self-preservation. Too bad about the country.
