Salon caught Trump’s latest late night freakout. He seems upset:
Donald Trump began his Monday raging about the slew of civil and criminal trials mounting against him, bemoaning specifically local trials like the New York criminal case set to start at the end of March. The former president recently attended a hearing in that case, which was brought by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg and charges him with 34 felony counts related to alleged hush-money payments he made to an adult film actress in 2016. The presiding judge denied Trump’s request to dismiss the case and set a March 25 trial date.
Despite a triumphant Saturday following his win in South Carolina’s GOP primary, Trump’s slate of legal troubles seemed to take center stage for him Sunday. Just before midnight, he took to Truth Social to praise a Fox News show he was viewing about his New York state fraud case, in which he was ordered to pay $355 million in penalties — now $454 million with interest, and encouraged his followers to watch the rerun at 3 a.m. Eastern time. “Wow! The Mark Levin Show just showed how Unconstitutional and unfair the NYSAG CASE against me is,” Trump said in the post. “A TOTAL HOAX — ELECTION INTERFERENCE AT THE HIGHEST LEVEL!”
Trump hopped back on the app at 6:30 am Monday to demand all trials, including Bragg’s, be “halted” and falsely saddle President Joe Biden with blame for his prosecution. “Why didn’t they bring these FAKE Charges THREE YEARS AGO? That would have solved all of their problems,” the former president wrote in part. “(The answer is that they AIMED for the various trials to come up during my campaign for President, 2024!).”
“In other words, all of these FAKE POLITICAL PROSECUTIONS (PERSECUTIONS!) OF CROOKED JOE BIDEN’S POLITICAL OPPONENT MUST BE IMMEDIATELY HALTED!” he concluded. In addition to the nearly three dozen felony charges against him in New York, Trump faces 57 other criminal charges from two federal cases and a Georgia racketeering case.
They must all be halted!!! Trump Has Spoken!!!
I know he does this stuff as a schtick and it’s a way of pounding home the propaganda that he’s being persecuted. But really, this is much more about Trump’s stunning emotional immaturity, verbal incontinence, lack of impulse control, narcissism etc. This is him having a meltdown in the middle of the night as he often does. And for some reason his followers don’t think there’s anything weird about it.
Catherine Rampell tweeted this short thread that I think expresses the fundamental political message that the Democrats have to hammer home: political FREEDOM.
The more significant political fallout of this IVF discourse may not be revelation that GOP is often anti-family (surprise!), but rather the undermining of narrative that Dems are merely “pro-abortion” (rather than pro-reproductive freedom)
Subtext (or text) of Repub attacks on Dem abortion positions is that they’re driven by childless elites who want to kill babies.
IVF debate suggests Ds are promoting not abortion, but freedom—specifically, reproductive freedom, to choose when to begin or expand your family
If Dems are smart, this is the angle they’ll play up — perhaps taking a page from @SecretaryPete’s 2020 campaign, about how Dems should reclaim “freedom” as a rhetorical device.
Don’t let anybody tell you that the other side is the side that’s got a handle on freedom. We are the party of freedom and we shouldn’t be afraid to go out there and say it. pic.twitter.com/2lTcEtoaah
His message should be even more compelling today, as one party considers putting an authoritarian in office.
2024’s political “freedom” fight isn’t about mask mandates. It’s about when citizens can freely dissent, what books kids are free to read, whether women have bodily freedom.
Meanwhile, this loser is spouting GOP rhetoric from 1987 like it’s still relevant:
Well, except for pregnant women, parents, teachers, non-Christians, foreigners, immigrants and businesses. But sure, other than that, they’re all about tolerance.
“When you see Trump with Putin, as I have on a few occassions, he’s like the 12-year old boy that goes to high school and meets the captain of the football team. ‘My hero!’ It’s really creepy.”
DNC vice chairman Ken Martin and N.C. Democratic Party Chairwoman Anderson Clayton. (Photo: William West, Rocky Mount Telegram)
“Wisconsin may be stepping back from the abyss,” writes Bill Leuders at The Bulwark. New maps passed by the Republican-controlled legislature and signed by Wisconsin’s Democratic governor, Tony Evers, mean Wisconsin’s legislative races will be the most competititve in years. Republicans previously engineered years’ worth of lopsided representation in a state in which Democrats like Evers can win statewide races. Now, “more than forty incumbent lawmakers, mostly Republicans, [have] to either move or run against each other.”
The change is not because Republicans have had a change of heart. So why did Republicans who rejected Evers’ appointments and refused funding for the University of Wisconsin’s diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts go along now? Because Democrats wrested back control of the state Supreme Court last April when voters statewide “overwhelmingly elected liberal Janet Protasiewicz” to the court:
They feared that the state supreme court’s new liberal majority would choose maps that were even less friendly to their side. “It was a matter of choosing to be stabbed, shot, poisoned, or led to the guillotine,” explained Republican state Sen. Van Wanggaard. “We chose to be stabbed, so we can live to fight another day.” He was speaking figuratively.
Having leverage counts. Ask Donald “91 Counts” Trump. Using it while you’ve got it counts more.
On Saturday at North Carolina Democrats’ State Executive Committee meeting in Rocky Mount, Democratic National Committee vice chairman Ken Martin, also chair of Minnesota’s Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party (DFL), urged the assembled choir to cheer up:
Ken Martin, who was the featured speaker for the state executive committee’s winter meeting, said Saturday that he believes Democrats have the tendency to be the “woe is me” and “the half-glass empty” party.
At the meeting, held at Rocky Mount High School, Martin spoke of hearing party members saying, “This Democrat is too young. This Democrat is too old. This Democrat is too progressive. This Democrat is too conservative.”
Those complaints are hurting the party, he noted.
“We’ve got to stop that,” Martin said. “We’ve got to stiffen our spine, raise our heads, be proud to be Democrats — and we have to start evangelizing and stop agonizing.”
Martin said that the Democratic Party has an amazing story to tell — “and that’s each of your jobs as party leaders,” he added.
What the Rocky Mount Telegram does not report is Martin’s celebration of the DFL’s progressive policy wins in 2023 with a one-seat Senate margin, control of the House, and Democrat Tim Walz in the governor’s mansion. Democrats delivered “huge investments, tax rebates, paid leave, and abortion rights” and more. CBS News reported:
Legislative majorities are fleeting, Martin noted. It is crucial to use them while you have them. Don’t hold back. Underreach is worse than overreach.
“It is essential that we step back and recognize the tremendous progress we’re making. We need to celebrate our successes — and we need to make sure everyone else knows about them as well,” Martin insisted. “You see, if we’re not willing to take joy in our accomplishments, how can we expect anyone else to?”
Look what Biden has accomplished with his one-seat Senate margin and a House Republican blockade.
“You can’t grow like this with just the native workforce. It’s not possible,” says Pia Orrenius, vice president and senior economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas.
The Washington Post’s online front page this morning blares that immigration is fueling the “roaring” U.S. economy. And you thought there was a border crisis, a crisis hyped by Republicans who believe it can wait for the November election.
“About 50 percent of the labor market’s extraordinary recent growth came from foreign-born workers between January 2023 and January 2024, according to an Economic Policy Institute analysis of federal data,” The Post reports. By the middle of 2022, rapid growth in the foreign-born labor force “closed the labor force gap created by the pandemic“:
Immigrant workers also recovered much faster than native-born workers from the pandemic’s disruptions, and many saw some of the largest wage gains in industries eager to hire. Economists and labor experts say the surge in employment was ultimately key to solving unprecedented gaps in the economy that threatened the country’s ability to recover from prolonged shutdowns.
Even so, apprehensions of migrants at the southern border topped 2 million in fiscal 2023 for the second straight year.
Washington is deadlocked on a solution to the crisis. Senate Republicans and a handful of Democrats voted down a sweeping $118 billion national security package that included changes to the nation’s asylum system and a way to effectively close the border to most migrants when crossings are particularly high. House Republican leadership called the legislation “dead on arrival,” which seemed all but guaranteed after former president Donald Trump came out strongly in opposition.
Opinion polls show that voters widely disapprove of Biden’s handling of the border, and Trump, who is closing in on the Republican nomination, is touting plans for aggressive deportation policies if he wins in November. Republicans have increasingly campaigned on the idea that immigrants have hurt the economy and taken Americans’ jobs. But the economic record largely shows the opposite.
It’s a presidential election year, so Republicans are playing all their greatest xenophobic hits for their conservative base.
Border apprehensions are not an issue Joe Biden can ignore, however. Perception is reality in politics. Both Biden and Donald “91 Counts” Trump, his likely Republican opponent this fall, will visit the border today to blame each other.
Biden will visit Brownsville, making his second trip to the border since becoming president. His trip is part of a recent effort to take the initiative on the issue of illegal immigration, which polls suggest has been politically damaging for him.
Trump, the leading Republican presidential contender, will visit Eagle Pass, a city that has become a symbol of Republican defiance against Biden’s handling of immigration. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, a Republican, seized a park in the city earlier this year, shutting out U.S. Border Patrol agents who had long used it as a staging point.
Biden’s visit underscores his political vulnerability after enduring sustained Republican attacks over record levels of migrants at the border. Biden recently embraced a tough bipartisan Senate proposal on immigration, saying he would use its provisions to shut down the border if crossings reached a certain level.
Republicans, who had demanded that border enforcement measures be added to a foreign aid package, blocked the measure after opposition from Trump, who said he feared its passage would help Biden address a political liability.
Biden is exploring executive actions available for slowing the migration and asylum volume, but his authorities are limited. The booming U.S. economy is both a product of and an irresistible draw for migrants not just from Mexico, Central and South America, but from elsewhere in the world. Biden cannot remedy political and economic instability south of the border nor the impacts of climate change with a pen stroke. But as president, he’ll get the blame. He just cannot seem to win credit for the booming economy.
The same is true of Biden’s limited leverage over the wars in Gaza and Ukraine. The U.S. has defense commitments with Israel going back over half a century that it will not abandon because Israel’s temporary leader is acting like a monster. Biden has won blame for not cutting off the Netanyahu government cold turkey, and little credit for non-public and as yet unsuccessful efforts to stop the slaughter of innocents. Ukraine may not be a NATO country, but U.S. military aid to fend off Russian aggression is cheap and in ours and NATO’s interests, yet a Republican-controlled House wants none of it. How quickly Russophiles among the Party of Trump have forgotten “fight them over there so we do not have to face them in the United States of America.” And Ukrainians are not asking us to do any of their fighting.
Biden wanted to be president. This is what it’s like.
If Republicans hate the immigrant flow now, just wait until Vladimir Putin’s troops move farther west.
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott is calling on “licensed professionals” and “members of the general public” to report the parents of transgender minors to state authorities if it appears the minors are receiving gender-affirming medical care.
The directive was part of a letter Abbott, a Republican, sent Tuesday to the Department of Family and Protective Services, calling on it to “conduct a prompt and thorough investigation” of any reported instances of minors undergoing “elective procedures for gender transitioning.”
Abbott’s letter follows an opinion released Monday by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, which stated that allowing minors to receive transition care such as puberty blockers, hormone therapy and surgery is child abuse under state law.
Paxton issued the opinion after the Legislature failed last year to pass a bill that would have made it a felony alongside physical and sexual abuse to provide such care to minors. An opinion is an interpretation of existing law; it does not change the law itself but can affect how it is enforced.
In Tuesday’s letter, Abbott tasked licensed professionals who work with children — including teachers, nurses and doctors — and “members of the general public” with reporting such claims. He added that state law “provides criminal penalties for failure to report such child abuse.”
[…]
Adri Pèrez, policy and advocacy strategist for LGBTQ equality at the American Civil Liberties Union of Texas, said Paxton is trying to distract from the problems plaguing his campaign. He is awaiting trial for a 2015 indictment on charges of securities fraud, and he is under investigation by the FBI over allegations of bribery and abuse of office. Paxton’s office did not return a request for comment.
“There’s no court in Texas or the entire country that has ever found that gender-affirming care can constitute child abuse,” Pèrez said.
Brian Klosterboer, a staff attorney at the ACLU of Texas, said in a statement that neither the opinion nor the letter have a legal effect and “cannot change Texas law nor usurp the constitutional rights of Texas families.”
“But they spread fear and misinformation and could spur false reporting of child abuse at a time when DFPS is already facing a crisis in our state’s foster care system,” Klosterboer stated. “The law is clear that parents, guardians, and doctors can provide transgender youth with treatment in accordance with prevailing standards of care. Any parent or guardian who loves and supports their child and is taking them to a licensed health care provider is not engaging in child abuse.”
Spreading fear is the whole point.
Here’s a post from the Adam Smith Institute, a right wing think tank considered to have been the intellectual foundation of Margaret Thatcher’s program in the 1980s:
The opening of its files after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of Communism staggered the world with the scale of its operations. It was estimated to have had 500,000 informers, although a former Stasi colonel put the figure as high as 2 million if occasional informants were included.
Its purpose was to stamp out ruthlessly any dissent in the German Democratic Republic, described by Sir Alec Douglas-Home as “neither German, nor Democratic, nor indeed is it a republic.” It was in fact a totalitarian Communist dictatorship, like the other Soviet satellite states of Eastern Europe. Its secret police infiltrated most aspects of East German life, such as schools, universities and recreational organizations such as sports and computer games clubs.
Its agents filmed people though holes drilled in hotel rooms or in their apartments. It intercepted people’s mail and telecommunications. It had a Division of Garbage Analysis that searched garbage for signs of Western foods or other suspicious items. It stored people’s scents so that sniffer dogs could track their movements. It trained, armed and sheltered Western terrorists such as the Baader-Meinhof gang. It ran prison camps for political dissenters. It funded neo-Nazi groups in West Germany to desecrate Jewish sites in a bid to discredit the West.
The activity of spying on, intimidating and imprisoning their own citizens is something that had been practised by all Communist governments, including the Soviet Union, its Warsaw Pact allies, Communist China, and Cuba—which received help from the Stasi in setting up its own secret police. More recently it has been done in Venezuela. This is not something that just happens to be done; it is part and parcel of Communist totalitarianism that it cannot tolerate dissent and has to seek out and expunge it, no matter what the cost is to the human rights of their citizens.
It’s not the Commies anymore, is it? They have become what they once despised.
If President Joe Biden has any advantage going into the 2024 presidential election, it’s that former President Donald Trump’s legal fees and primary challenges are a significant drain on the Trump campaign’s finances.
Indeed, with money playing an increasingly prominent role in political campaigns, particularly presidential contests, both Trump and Biden are facing a very similar problem, albeit for different reasons, and to varying degrees. While both are raisingless money than past candidates, and both are spending considerable sums, only Trump has to split his spending between politics and rapidly mounting legal costs.
Despite worrisome poll numbers in ahead-to-head matchup with Trump — Biden trails 44 percent to 46 percent according to the RealClearPoliticsaverage — and just 40 percent of Americansapproving of Biden’s job performance, by the end of January, Biden and his various campaign arms haveaccumulated $130 million in cash, raising $42 million over the last month alone, according to Federal Election Commission filings.
Moreover, 97 percent of all of Biden’s donations are coming from donors giving less than $200, and in January alone, more than 420,000 individual donors made contributions, underscoring the small-money, grassroots support Biden can count on.
To be sure, Biden’s numbers are staggering compared to the Trump campaign, previously considered a fundraising behemoth after raising$774 million in the 2020 cycle. Today however, FEC filings show that Trump has about$30.5 million cash on hand and raised a dismal, if not extremely concerning,$13.8 million over the last month.
Worse, Trump’s campaignspent nearly $3 million more than it raised in January, taking in just under $9 million, but spending more than $11 million, as they continue spending on the Republican primary and his mounting legal fees.
Notably, over the last two months, the Trump campaign’s biggest expense was$4.7 million in Iowa and New Hampshire fending off Nikki Haley’s primary challenge. Not far behind, a Trump-connected PAC doled out$2.9 million to pay for the former president’s legal fees just in January alone.
These rising costs come at the same time Trump’s personal fortune is set to take a massive hit. In recent weeks, he lost two civil trials for fraud and defamation, amounting to$438 million in penalties that, due to campaign finance laws, he cannot use campaign funds to pay.
In 2019, Trump’s campaign committee collected $72 million in donations of $200 or less, according to OpenSecrets.
That amount represented a portion of the more than $378 million that was raised from around the time Trump filed to run for reelection in 2017 through Dec. 31, 2020, from small-dollar donors, according to the data. Much of that funding from small-dollar donors arrived in the election year 2020, with the campaign reeling in more than $264 million over the course of those 12 months from people who gave $200 or less to Trump.
But fast forward several years, and from November 2022 through the end of last year, Trump’s presidential campaign collected just $27 million in donations from those who gave $200 or less, according to the data.
That’s a difference of $45 million, and represents a 62.5% drop in small-dollar donations, from the year before the 2020 election, to the year before the 2024 election.
I’m sure he’ll end up raising a lot of cash and he’ll be able to get suckers to pay for his legal fees too. But it’s telling that he, of all people, is falling way behind Biden in the money wars. What this say to me is that there is more enthusiasm on the Democratic side than people think and that includes people with a lot of money and many small donors.
I think the so-called enthusiasm gap is a “vibe” and not a very meaningful one. No, Democrats aren’t running around with gigantic Biden flags and they don’t deck themselves out in Biden gear from head to toe (or buy their way into his beach club, dressed like low-rent Real Housewives) like a bunch of teenage Swifties.
What they do is vote and they’ve been crawling over hot coals to vote since the 2018 election.
That ad is from Gov. Gavin Newsom’s Campaign for Democracy. T
The ad from Campaign for Democracy, which was shared first with NBC News’ “Meet the Press,” features a young woman handcuffed to a hospital bed, screaming for help while a narrator tells viewers, “Trump Republicans want to criminalize young women who travel to receive the reproductive care they need. Don’t let them hold Tennessee women hostage.”
“These guys are not just restricting the rights, self-determination to bear a child for a young woman, but they’re also determining their fate as it relates to their future in life by saying they can’t even travel,” Newsom told “Meet the Press” on Saturday.
Campaign for Democracy plans to run the ad in Tennessee because of two bills active in the state legislature — one in the state House and one in the state Senate — that would create the crime of “abortion trafficking,” or helping minors obtain abortions without parental consent.
The bills propose that any violation of the law, which would criminalize “recruiting, harboring, or transporting a pregnant minor, within the state, for the purpose of concealing an abortion from the minor’s parents,” would constitute a Class C felony, which carries a mandatory minimum six-year prison term.
“These travel restrictions [are] modeled after a version that passed and Idaho is now being proposed in Tennessee and Oklahoma and Mississippi,” Newsom said.
“That’s how serious this moment is. And we need to be even more aggressive,” he continued.
Those laws are the stuff of Handmaid’s Tale nightmares. This is happening in America in 2023.
With the news that the House Judiciary Committee Republicans are a bunch of useful idiots, those former intelligence officials who sounded the alarm about this whole Hunter Biden smear campaign feel vindicated:
The allegation that Smirnov was spreading new falsehoods about Joe Biden with an election looming hearkened back to an episode from the 2020 election, when the question of whether Russian spies were trying to smear Joe Biden was first raised.
Derogatory information, purportedly from Hunter Biden’s laptop, had surfaced in a New York Post article. Soon afterward, 51 former intelligence officials signed and blasted to the media a letter warning that the laptop story “has all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.”
The letter continued: “We want to emphasize that we do not know if the emails … are genuine or not and that we do not have evidence of Russian involvement — just that our experience makes us deeply suspicious that the Russian government played a significant role in this case.”
The laptop data included embarrassing photos of Hunter Biden with prostitutes — and emails that detailed his business dealings in Ukraine and China. The mainstream media largely ignored it, while Twitter and Facebook put restrictions on the sharing of the New York Post story.
After mainstream news organizations verified portions of the laptop material, the letter became a focus of anger among Donald Trump and his supporters. They branded the group of mostly Biden supporters as “spies who lie” and accused them of election interference, saying their letter suppressed coverage of a story that reflected poorly on their candidate.
The House Judiciary Committee hauled some of them in for sworn interviews, and in May published a report titled, “How senior intelligence community officials and the Biden campaign worked to mislead American voters.” Some received death threats.
No public evidence has emerged pointing to a Russian government role in how the laptop materials were made public. But the former officials say the materials fueled stories consistent with Russian efforts to accuse Biden of corruption that persist to this day — and that therefore they were justified in sounding the alarm.
Ken Dilanian tweeted this further explanation this morning:
A lot of folks are having a hard time grasping that the letter never challenged the authenticity of the Hunter Biden laptop material. And that Russian information operations typically make use of material that is mostly true. https://t.co/t8K2obU4xp
Russia is already spreading disinformation in advance of the 2024 election, using fake online accounts and bots to damage President Joe Biden and his fellow Democrats, according to former U.S. officials and cyber experts.
The dissemination of attacks on Biden is part of a continuing effort by Moscow to undercut American military aid to Ukraine and U.S. support for and solidarity with NATO, experts said.
A similar effort is underway in Europe. France, Germany and Poland said this month that Russia has launched a barrage of propaganda to try to influence European parliamentary elections in June.
With Donald Trump opposing U.S. aid to Ukraine and claiming that he once warned a NATO leader that he would “encourage” Russia to attack a NATO ally if it didn’t pay its share in defense spending, the potential rewards for Russian President Vladimir Putin are high, according to Bret Schafer, a senior fellow at the Alliance for Securing Democracy of the German Marshall Fund.
“Not that they didn’t have an incentive to interfere in the last two presidential elections,” said Schafer, who tracks disinformation efforts by Russia and other regimes. “But I would say that the incentive to interfere is heightened right now.”
Biden’s national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, said Sunday on NBC News’ “Meet the Press” that there’s “plenty of reason to be concerned” about Russia’s trying to interfere in the 2024 election but that he couldn’t discuss evidence related to it. He added: “We’re going to be vigilant about that.”
U.S. officials and experts are most concerned that Russia could try to interfere in the election through a “deepfake” audio or video using artificial intelligence tools or through a “hack and leak,” such as the politically damaging theft of internal Democratic Party emails by Russian military intelligence operatives in 2016.
The details of what they are doing should motivate all of us to take our bullshit detectors in for a tune-up. We’re going to need them to be working perfectly.
