Month: March 2024

They are one big reason why the country has been brainwashed to believe the economy is terrible

I’m not really in the space where I devote a lot of time to critiquing the centrist Democrats these days what with the rise of fascism and all. And that may not be the best idea since they are often fascist enablers, like Joe Lieberman (who isn’t really even a centrist anymore.) This piece by Zack Carter in Slate spells out why.

He asks why it is that despite the roaring economy and Biden’s undeniably excellent performance on that issue which is always at the forefront of people’s minds unless we are in the middle of a war,that the administration isn’t getting more credit for it. We’ve all heard about the fact that people really are hurting from inflation (which peaked almost two years ago and has been retreating ever since) and I think we can all agree that the media narrative has been miserable for Biden and continues to this day. But Carter sees another reason and I think he’s right, especially since that may be the main reason for the media’s relentless negativity: the Democratic think tanks, nonprofits, academic experts and journalists that “regulate the liberal intellectual atmosphere”:

While Biden himself has certain centrist tendencies on issue like police reform and immigration (and, obviously, Israel) on economics he has been the most progressive president since Roosevelt. And that, he argues, has incited a a “centrist revolt” that “established a narrative of failure” which seems impervious to reality:

From his first day in the Oval Office, Biden has embraced nearly every progressive criticism of Barack Obama’s approach to the economy, and translated those critiques into policy. Obama scoffed at labor unions; Biden walked a picket line and appointed the most pro-worker National Labor Relations Board in decades. Obama’s Education Department screwed over student debtors; Biden has canceled $138 billion in student debt. Obama defended big business; Biden has been an antitrust warrior. Obama was a free trader, while Biden subsidizes domestic manufacturing. Obama offered to cut Social Security; Biden just torched Republicans during his State of the Union for planning the same thing.

The list goes on. But the most important economic distinction between Biden and Obama is on crisis relief. The unemployment rate was high and rising when Obama entered office, escalating to 9 percent by April 2009, a level it would not retreat below for more than two years. When jobs did eventually return, most of those that were created paid poverty wages. The abysmal labor market made his presidency synonymous with the Great Recession.

The chief lesson Biden’s advisers took from this miserable experience was that the government didn’t spend enough in Obama’s 2009 stimulus package to get unemployment under control. More money would have meant more jobs, and more jobs would have put upward pressure on wages.

So Biden opted to spend much bigger out of the gate—$1.9 trillion to Obama’s $800 billion—and continued to secure additional rounds of support right up to the 2022 midterms. Obama began calling for budget cuts with unemployment still stuck above 9 percent, but Biden never pivoted to austerity, and ultimately secured well over $1 trillion in additional public investment after his initial stimulus bill had been enacted.

All this fiscal support resulted in a much stronger labor market. The unemployment rate fell below 5 percent by September 2021—a level Obama did not enjoy until the final days of his presidency—amid record wage growth for low-income workers. The economy never recovered all the manufacturing jobs it lost during the Wall Street crash. Biden had recovered all of those lost in the COVID collapse by May 2022. The COVID crash was sharper, deeper, and more physically disruptive to global trade than the 2008 Wall Street meltdown was, but the U.S. economy rebounded faster, stronger, and more equitably thanks to Biden’s more aggressive relief effort.

But not everyone was happy about this strategy at the time. When Biden signed his first economic relief bill into law in March 2021, former Obama adviser Larry Summers declared it “the least responsible macroeconomic policy we’ve had in the last 40 years” and upbraided “the Democratic left” for preventing a smaller package. All this spending, Summers claimed, risked a run of inflation. People were going to have too much money on their hands, and this excess spending power would lead to higher prices that made everyone poorer. When prices did indeed begin rising in the second half of 2021, the business press hailed Summers as a prophet, and a host of liberal commentators began tipping their hats to him.

Inflation arrived when the national mood was already in the toilet. Deadly car accidents were up, road rage incidents were soaring, and murder rates were rising. More people died from COVID-19 in 2021 than in 2020, even though vaccines were widely available. In monthly Gallup polling, Biden’s approval rating fell from 56 percent in June 2021 to 40 percent in January 2022, and all of this negativity made progressive institutions increasingly reluctant to claim credit for his approach to economic relief. Voters didn’t seem to care about Biden’s strong labor market—they were mad about inflation and everything else.

And so the economic commentary field remained open to Summers and the expert doomsayers—including some with politics well to Summers’ left. Economics dominated the news cycle in a way that it hadn’t since the banking crash, and seemingly everyone had something terrible to say about it. Biden wasn’t creating enough union jobs. His spending was really just a corporate welfare extravaganza. He was stealing jobs from Europe. There were too many regulations on manufacturers. There weren’t enough regulations on manufacturers. A recession was coming. A recession was already here. Some high-profile Democrats even insisted that a recession was necessary—on CNBC, former Obama and Clinton adviser Jason Furman argued that millions of workers would have to be laid off to get inflation back under control. Summers even floated the possibility of 10 percent unemployment.

To give all these haters their due, it really is hard to understand what is happening in the economy in real time, and even the best economists sometimes make predictions that look silly in retrospect. But what is remarkable about the Biden era is the degree to which critics on the left, right, and center basically agreed with one another beneath all the ideological dross. Almost everyone had come up with a way to argue that Biden had engaged in wasteful spending that left ordinary people behind.

Almost everyone. Throughout all this ugliness, a niche discourse continued in the econosphere about whether Summers had correctly nailed the cause of inflation. If Americans really were victims of overspending, then the only way to get inflation back down would indeed be to cause a recession. The problem, according to Summers and Furman, was that everyone had too much money. The solution was to take that money away.

But another camp argued that this was the wrong way to look at an economy that had just emerged from a massive shock like the COVID-19 pandemic. In this telling, inflation was driven not so much by an excess of consumer demand as by a dearth of product supply. It was a lot harder to make and distribute a whole host of goods when businesses around the world kept shutting down, and even once everything had fully reopened, it took a long time for companies to reestablish sources and connections. If supply shortages were indeed responsible for higher prices, then Biden’s spending was a feature, not a bug—it was the only thing standing between American households and the economic abyss.

(By the way, Paul Krugman was among those making that argument from his high perch on the New York Times but for some reason the beltway intelligentsia seems to think Larry Summers is the only guy worth listening to.)

The centrists believed interest rate hikes would naturally induce job losses and then inflation would come down and we could all have a stiff drink and go home. (Too bad about the workers but sometimes you’ve just gotta take one for the team, amirite?) Well…

The layoffs, however, refused to materialize. When inflation peaked at 9.1 percent in June 2022, the unemployment rate stood at 3.6 percent. Today, using the same metrics, inflation is just 3.2 percent, and unemployment is at just 3.9 percent. For 12 of the previous 19 months, the jobless rate has held steady at or below its June 2022 level, while inflation has been running below 4 percent since June 2023. Economists are still debating why the Fed’s higher rates didn’t translate into job losses, but the important point is that millions of people were not, in fact, fired. Moreover, millions of people did not need to be fired in order to fix inflation. As Mike Konczal concluded in a report for the Roosevelt Institute in September 2023, the vast majority of inflation during the Biden years was driven by pandemic-related supply problems. Whatever was going wrong in 2022, it wasn’t because you were too rich.

Carter wrote the book on John Maynard Keynes so he knows his stuff on this subject. And we can chalk this one up in the Keynes column for sure. But if this incredible, if poorly understood, economic victory is not politically rewarded I wonder if it will matter. Certainly the Republicans will ignore any data that doesn’t fit their preconceived belief in tax cuts uber alles. Trump is thinking of making that supply-side wack job Arthur Laffer the Fed Chair so I think we know how that’s going to go.

The good news is that, as Carter concludes, there may be a tiny bit of hope for the Democratic Party. Maybe…

There is some evidence that the economic commentariat is coming to its senses as the 2024 election approaches. Some of the same centrists who ripped Biden’s stimulus package in 2021 are now applauding his recovery. The anti-Biden left has largely abandoned the economic playing field, finding cleaner grounds for criticism on other subjects. Contrary to the narrative abuse directed at Biden over the past few years, the economic numbers across his presidency tell a simple, optimistic story about the art of government in the democratic world. The American economy is strong today for the same reason that the labor market has been strong throughout Biden’s presidency: the U.S. government spent a ton of money to support workers and their families. Biden has not only established a blueprint for successful crisis management, but he has achieved something on the economy that pessimists across the ideological spectrum have been declaring impossible for much of the 21^st century: He learned from the government’s prior mistakes and found a way to govern better.

In order for this victory to stick, Biden has to win the election. Some of the long term fruits of Bidenomics will only start to show up in the next term as the infrastructure projects get up and running and people settle down about the inflation they already endured during the pandemic. Otherwise, Trump will get credit and the wingnuts and the centrists will all just go back to their failed beliefs and rituals as we wait for the next crisis to hit without having learned anything from this one.

Of course, if Trump wins we’ll have bigger problems so at that point this whole thing will be moot…

I was tough on Jon Stewart for his “both sides” first episode back on the Daily Show. But this from his earlier show was quite good:

Last night she released a ridiculous order requiring the prosecution that may end up getting her removed from the case. Joyce Vance wrote about it in her newsletter:

Late in the day, Judge Cannon gave an order in the Mar-a-Lago case that has a lot of people shaking their heads. In an order that consisted of two pages and three footnotes, the Judge gave both sides until April 2 to “file proposed jury instructions limited to the essential elements of the offenses charged in Counts 1 through 32.” The trial is scheduled for May, and the Judge still has key motions to consider. This is a short deadline for a Judge who has been comfortable keeping far more pressing matters on a back burner.

Although the order is only two pages, it’s perplexing. I read it several times, trying to figure out what it means. It turns out it’s two pages of crazy stemming from the Judge’s apparent inability to tell Trump no when it comes to his argument that he turned the nation’s secrets into his personal records by designating them as such under the Presidential Records Act. After failing to reach a final decision on that motion last week, she is now presenting the parties with two “legal scenarios,” each of which seems to assume that the Presidential Records Act gives Trump the ability to morph national secrets into personal papers. Her two scenarios involve two different ways the Presidential Records Act could help Trump out, but they’re both wrong. The Presidential Records Act isn’t a way around the rules for handling classified information. Just like when the Eleventh Circuit reversed her when she tried to prevent the government from using the items seized during the search of Mar-a-Lago in its investigation, Judge Cannon misses the fact that these items were government property, not Trump’s personal possessions.

In her order, the Judge writes, “understanding that juries are judges of the facts, not the law, the proposals shall take care to specify … exactly what factual questions are reserved for the jury on Counts 1 through 32 in light of the recently argued motions to dismiss.” Then, she goes on to say, “With respect to the proposed language pertinent to the issue of “unauthorized possession” specifically, the parties must engage with the following competing scenarios and offer alternative draft text that assumes each scenario to be a correct formulation of the law to be issued to the jury, while reserving counterarguments.”

First off, juries indeed decide issues of fact not issues of law. So the Judge should be doing the heavy lifting here. Instead, she seems to want to pass this off as a quasi-factual issue, asking the lawyers to figure out how she can let the jury decide whether Trump transmogrified classified documents into personal property. (Even if he pulled off that feat, it wouldn’t prevent Trump from being prosecuted for violating a criminal law that protects National Defense Information, because Trump can’t magically change the nature of the information contained in the documents recovered during the search of Mar-a-Lago.)

Second, lawyers don’t write hypothetical jury instructions. They propose the instructions they believe are correct and the judge makes a final decision about how to instruct the jury as to the law it must apply, once the jury decides what the facts are. I’ve never had a judge say, “you know, I have no idea what the law is here, so lets make a couple of different assumptions about it, and even though they’re both wrong, give me some ideas.”

The assumptions in Judge Cannon’s two scenarios virtually direct the jury to find Trump not guilty, by suggesting that a president can hold onto any government property he wants to as long as he designates it as personal before he leaves office. The only questions she leaves open is whether anyone can second guess a former president who pinky promises he decided something was personal before he went back home. For instance, in the first one, she directs the lawyers to assume that juries get to examine each item a former president is charged with retaining and decide whether the government has proven that it is personal or presidential. So, it’s up to the jury to decide what’s personal and what isn’t.

In her second scenario, she writes, “A president has sole authority under the PRA to categorize records as personal or presidential during his/her presidency. Neither a court nor a jury is permitted to make or review such a categorization decision. Although there is no formal means in the PRA by which a president is to make that categorization, an outgoing president’s decision to exclude what he/she considers to be personal records from presidential records transmitted to the National Archives and Records Administration constitutes a president’s categorization of those records as personal under the PRA.” In other words, Judge Cannon believes Trump has a magic wand that could turn the nuclear codes into his personal notes as long as he says he did it, and no one has the right to tell him no.

So Judge Cannon, who didn’t rule for Trump on the specious Presidential Records Act motion last week, essentially acknowledged she intends to do so today. She’s wrong about the law, offering two options, one that is really bad and one that is worse. Under option one, if only one juror thought a record had been designated by Trump as personal, he’d be acquitted. But under option two, as long as Trump says they’re personal records, the government is entirely out of business. Presumably, the Judge would take the case away from the jury and dismiss the charges. And that’s nuts, because, I’ll say it again, it means Trump (and any future president) can take documents clearly marked as Top Secret and containing information about matters like nuclear codes, U.S. battle plans, or information that identifies highly placed human sources putting their lives at risk, declare them to be his personal papers and walk out of the White House with them.

The government can’t play ball here with Judge Cannon’s bad interpretation of the law. Expect their response to be hard-hitting. The bottom line is that the Presidential Records Act doesn’t forgive Trump for violating criminal laws regarding handling of national secrets.

If you watched Weissmann in the video above you know that he thinks Smith will take it to the 11th circuit forthwith and ask for Cannon to be removed. She is in the tank for Trump and over her head and this case concerns some really important issues which the courts just can’t let slide because Trump is such a special boy. Well, I say “can’t” advisedly. They can do whatever they want and there’s nothing we can do about it. Let’s just hope they don’t.

Somebody woke up on the wrong side of the bed…

That sounds like a very stable genius, just the kind of person you want in the most powerful job in the world.

He doesn’t want to sell his assets, probably because they’re already mortgaged to the hilt. Sad!

And here we thought he had so much cash…

“I didn’t even need the loan you can see the kind of cash I have. I have a lot of cash, I have a lot of everything” #TrumpIsBroke https://t.co/Uh7E2Jlpkj pic.twitter.com/D98ag0YL7L

— The Lincoln Project (@ProjectLincoln) March 19, 2024

Insurrectionist-in-Chief to hire money-launderer?

“Trump is not being fair to the new generation of crooks, the new generation of fraudsters, the new generation of traitors.” – Van Jones on CNN

When former Trump campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, drew federal charges seven years ago this week writes Steve Benen, Donald Trump pretended to barely know him. Before leaving office, however, Trump pardoned him. Now it seems Trump is considering rehiring him.

Let’s review (via American Bar Association, March 2019):

Manafort had accepted a plea deal in the case in September 2018, admitting to money laundering, tax fraud and illegal foreign lobbying connected to his years working for Ukrainian politicians. Manafort also admitted lying to investigators and under oath before a grand jury about his contact with a Russian associate during the 2016 campaign, breaking the plea agreement.

Last week, he was sentenced in Virginia to 47 months in prison for financial fraud convictions. In D.C., Judge Amy Berman Jackson sentenced Manafort to 73 months, with 30 months to be served concurrently with his Virginia sentence. 

The New Republic explains:

Donald Trump may soon bring back his former campaign manager Paul Manafort to help with the 2024 reelection campaign, a move that could resurrect accusations of Russian collusion in the former president’s favor.

Manafort was convicted of tax and bank fraud in 2018 under Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election. Trump, who pardoned Manafort in the final days of his presidency, is expected to bring him back on board as a campaign adviser, The Washington Post reported Monday.

Manafort’s role will likely focus on the Republican convention in July and on fundraising for Trump’s campaign, the Post said, citing four anonymous sources. Those four people said that nothing has been officially decided yet, but Trump is determined to bring Manafort back onto his team and is widely expected to hire him.

Former Clinton administration official Van Jones responded to the news with mock allegations of ageism.

“Trump is not being fair to the new generation of crooks, the new generation of fraudsters, the new generation of traitors,” Jones told CNN’s Kaitlan Collins. “What about the young liars who are coming up who want to sell American secrets, who want to lie to judges? They deserve a chance.”

3.18.24 935 pm ET CNN's @TheSourceCNN Anchor Kaitlan Collins @kaitlancollins with CNN Senior Political Commentators
About Paul Manafort

Van Jones @VanJones68 "Trump Is not being fair to the younger crooks, these young traitors and fraudsters deserve a chance"

David Urban… pic.twitter.com/uBuTAVmTMQ

— Jeff Storobinsky (@jeffstorobinsky) March 19, 2024

Marcy Wheeler responded with outrage, “Every single person who cares about democracy SHOULD be hyperventilating that Trump wants to hire a confressed money launderer to work on his cash-strapped campaign. This is insanity!”

Wheeler dashed off a thread:

Here’s a Q: If @maggieNYT, @jonathanvswan, @jdawsey1 don’t even MENTION that Paul Manafort is a confessed money launderer, if @kaitlancollins suggests we don’t have to start hyperventilating over his hire yet, how do they think voters would find out if Manafort did it again? 

That is, if journos are provably incompetent in describing how Manafort engaged in money laundering in the past to hide that his influence operations were really paid for by RU-backed oligarchs, who would tell us if he did it this go-around? 

The risk to Manafort joining the Trump campaign, in ANY capacity, is that he has proven adept in the past at hiding Russian & Ukrainian oligarchs bankrolling his political work, & he did so PRECISELY to pretend it was real democratic persuasion. He confessed to this! 

And both Manafort and Trump walk into this relationship believing if they can pull off victory again, they’ll have impunity for any crimes they commit–including accepting foreign donations–to win. Hell, FEC has NEVER held Trump accountable for campaign finance crimes. 

I get that some of you have relied on Manafort as a source before and that impairs your judgment abt what he actually confessed to, abt who he is. I get that at least one of you has downplayed his past crimes.

But show the least little concern about Russia running this election? 

And y’all saying, “Well, if he only works the Convention, that’s not a big deal” are naive as fuck. For two reasons.

First, Trump doesn’t need help at the Convention this time. Never-Trumpers are worried abt assassination threats, not winning delegates. 

Second the same journos who didn’t mention he’s a confessed money launderer ALSO falsely believe Manafort only came in, at first, 8 years ago, to run Convention.

That’s not what Ukrainian Oligarchs understood. They knew IN DECEMBER 2015 (per Sam Patten) he’d run the campaign. 

Yesterday was a test of whether journalists would respond, appropriately, with flashing sirens 🚨🚨🚨 if Trump did something to show he might let Russia run his campaign. And NYT and WaPo failed that test, miserably. They’re not up to the job of defending democracy. 

Are the rest of us?

Trump is in hock for half a million dollars and running for president. “I predict that Trump will become the first ex-president since Ulysses S. Grant to declare personal bankruptcy,” Timothy Noah believes. “No matter what happens, I think he’s going to go bust.” It’s just a matter of when. Unless his autocratic besties in Moscow and elsewhere can bail him out without us finding out. That seems highly unlikely.

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Biden allies pledge over $1 billion

Lefty social media is having a field day.

Once upon a time, Republicans and their Mighty Wurlitzer ran messaging circles around Democrats. They own the media outlets. Republicans have revanchist billionaire oligarchs funding them. Hand it to the GOP, they are better than Democrats at finding a message and staying on it, repeating it, drilling it into people’s head until it sticks. Donald “91 Counts” Trump is still doing that with his stolen election fiction. His Freak chorus sings it for him from coast to coast. Except off-key.

Lately, Republicans can’t seem to turn around without stepping on a rake. When Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.) rhetorically asked a press conference, “Are you better off today than you were four years ago?” she stepped on a big one. Sen. Katie Britt (R-Ala.) echoed it in her Stepfordesque response to Joe Biden’s the State of the Union address 10 days ago.

The Bulwark reacted to Stefanik with “AFKM?” and statistics. “At this point in 2020, a few hundred Americans were dying every day from COVID. By April 2020 that number would be over 2,000 dead per day.“

Jedis these guys are not.

Even more stunning is the fact that Republicans, including the Insurrectionist-in-Chief, haven’t stopped using the line and pretending COVID-19 never happened. Social media is not letting them forget it.

📺 NEW MEIDAS VIDEO

Yes, we are better off than we were four years ago. And it’s not even close. pic.twitter.com/E92Yd0gBSB

— MeidasTouch (@MeidasTouch) March 18, 2024

Better off? “Our president is no longer telling us to ingest bleach,” replies Keith Roysdon from Knoxville.

The Trump campaign keeps asking, “Are you better off now than you were 4 years ago?”

So, let’s answer that question. Are you better off now than you were on March 13, 2020? pic.twitter.com/YLf5IT63wX

— All In with Chris Hayes (@allinwithchris) March 14, 2024

Trump’s support may not be be crumbling, but the cracks are widening.

Paul is a former Trump voter from Florida who will never vote for him again:

“It’s clear to me that he is a traitor. He is a seditionist. He is an insurrectionist…In 2024, there is no chance I will vote for anybody but Joe Biden.” pic.twitter.com/L25JPQ4a75

— Republican Voters Against Trump (@AccountableGOP) March 18, 2024

Weirdly, the Biden reelection campaign seems to be finding its groove in hitting the GOP square in the jaw and not letting Americans forget the Trump years.

"American carnage" wasn't a Trump complaint.
It was a Trump promise. https://t.co/Go2a0xLBx1

— @TomSullivan@mstdn.social (@BloggersRUs) March 18, 2024

The Biden social media team is on top of rapid response even if his team’s TikToks need work.

Left: Trump just now posting, “ARE YOU BETTER OFF THAN YOU WERE FOUR YEARS AGO?”

Right: Trump’s America four years ago, filled with unemployment lines, food lines, empty shelves, supply shortages, disease, and death pic.twitter.com/sfWANSy7gS

— Biden-Harris HQ (@BidenHQ) March 18, 2024

Literally every woman in the country should see this video.

Share it everywhere! #SaveWomensHealthCare pic.twitter.com/OZChA4FP5p

— Nick Knudsen 🇺🇸 (@NickKnudsenUS) March 18, 2024

Democrats do not have the billionaire oligarchs Republican do. But the GOP struggles to raise funds while Trump cannot secure the half-billion bond for his New York civil fraud case, Biden has more cash on hand than any Democratic presidential candidate at this point in the race and his allies are rallying to supply over a billion dollars more (New York Times):

A new $120 million pledge to lift President Biden and his allies will push the total expected spending from outside groups working to re-elect Mr. Biden to $1 billion this year.

The League of Conservation Voters, a leading climate organization that is among the biggest spenders on progressive causes, announced its plans for backing Mr. Biden on Tuesday, at a moment when his Republican challenger, former President Donald J. Trump, is struggling to raise funds. Mr. Biden’s campaign, independent of the outside groups, expects to raise and spend $2 billion as part of his re-election bid.

[…]

The pro-Biden outside money originates from nearly a dozen organizations that include climate groups, labor unions and traditional super PACs. There are left-wing groups like MoveOn and moderate Republicans like Republican Voters Against Trump.

The largest spenders so far are Future Forward, the super PAC blessed by the Biden campaign, which has reserved more than $250 million in television advertising; the Service Employees International Union, which said last week that it would spend $200 million to back Mr. Biden and fellow Democrats; and American Bridge, the Democratic research organization that said in January that it planned to spend $140 million on an anti-Trump advertising campaign in battleground states.

“The sheer scale of what we’re talking about has never been seen before in our country’s history,” said Tiffany Muller, the president of End Citizens United, the government reform advocacy group working to limit the ability of these types of outside groups to spend unlimited sums on elections.

More of that, please.

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Trump is lying more than ever

This Washington Post fact check is worth reading if you aren’t following all the latest Trump lies:

Trump frequently recycles false claims of achievement from when he was president that we have repeatedly fact-checked, including:

-He created the greatest U.S. economy in U.S. history (not by any metric).
-He passed the biggest tax cut in history (it ranks 8th).
-He did more for Black people than any president but Abraham Lincoln (not by any metric).
-He defeated ISIS in four weeks (it took the United States and coalition partners more than two years after he took office).
-He was the first president to impose tariffs on China (China has faced U.S. tariffs since George Washington first enacted them in 1789).He increased government revenue even though he cut taxes (False).

But there are always new lies. Here are a few:

Biden was declared ‘incompetent’ to stand trial in documents case

“He’s [Biden] at great jeopardy, really, but they said: ‘Look, he’s incompetent to go to court but he can be president.’ Figure that one. In other words, he can’t represent himself at court because he’s incompetent.” (Fox News town hall, Feb. 20)

“Well, Joe Biden had more boxes than any human being ever, and they let him off. Of course, I wouldn’t want to be let off that way. They say: ‘He’s incompetent, we’ll let him off.’” (rally in Richmond, March 2)

“He has no clue, like with the documents hoax. How about that? He’s not competent to stand trial, but he’s allowed to be the president.” (rally in Rome, Ga., March 9)

Trump faces a criminal trial for hoarding classified documents after he left office and refusing to return them. But Biden also discovered that he had retained classified documents at his home and office. He returned them, but a special counsel was appointed to see if he, too, should face criminal charges. The special counsel, Robert K. Hur, concluded that it would be tough to win a case — because Biden had reasonable defenses, the facts were occasionally murky and Biden (unlike Trump) had cooperated fully with the investigation. In a controversial passage, he wrote that jurors probably would view Biden as “a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.”

Trump has now absurdly twisted this sentence to falsely claim that Biden was not competent to stand trial — which under the law means a person is incapable of understanding or assisting in their defense. In reality, Hur was making the point that, if a case were brought to trial, Biden could make a credible case he did not willfully retain the documents, especially because he cooperated. In many cases, the special counsel decided that the documents were mishandled by mistake — or were not especially important anymore, despite the classification level.

During a congressional hearing on his report Tuesday, Hur was asked if he found that the president was senile and exhibited a decline of cognitive ability. “I did not,” Hur said. “That conclusion does not appear in my report.”

In his report, Hur addressed the difference between the Trump and Biden document cases. “Several material distinctions between Mr. Trump’s case and Mr. Biden’s are clear,” Hur wrote. “After being given multiple chances to return classified documents and avoid prosecution, Mr. Trump allegedly did the opposite. According to the indictment, he not only refused to return the documents for many months, but he also obstructed justice by enlisting others to destroy evidence and then to lie about it. In contrast, Mr. Biden turned in classified documents to the National Archives and the Department of Justice, consented to the search of multiple locations including his homes, sat for a voluntary interview and in other ways cooperated with the investigation.”

Prisons are being emptied around the world to flood U.S. borders

“The prison population all over the world is at the lowest point it’s been in many decades because they’re dumping their prisoners into our country.” (Richmond)

“When you look at the people that are being allowed to come all over the world, they’re emptying their prisons. They’re emptying their mental institutions into the United States of America.” (Rome, Ga.)

This claim is an echo of Trump’s notorious comment in his 2015 speech announcing he would run for president — that Mexico was “sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists.” Illegal immigration by Mexicans has fallen sharply, so now Trump claims the entire world is sending criminals to the southern border. Sometimes he even riffs that it’s a cost-saving maneuver by world leaders — “nothing more expensive than storing a prisoner in a jail for 60 years.”

This is poppycock. Immigration experts know of no effort by other countries. As someone who came to prominence in the late ’70s and early ’80s, Trump appears to be channeling Cuban leader Fidel Castro’s 1980 Mariel boatlift. About 125,000 Cubans were allowed to flee to the United States in 1,700 boats — but there was a backlash when it was discovered hundreds of refugees had been released from jails and mental health facilities.

Helen Fair, research associate at the Institute for Crime & Justice Policy Research in Britain, which tracks the world prison population (except for a handful of countries), says the numbers keep growing. In 2013, 10.2 million people were in prison — and that had grown to 10.77 million in 2021. A preliminary estimate for February 2024, not ready to be published, indicates the population has grown even more. “In short, I would disagree with Donald Trump’s assertion,” she said.

Congo has released murderers into the United States

“Last night they had four from the Congo. Where in the Congo do you live? I wonder what beautiful place do you live in the Congo? ‘We are from prison.’ What did you do? ‘Murder.’ They’re in the United States right now, right? This is what they’re allowing.” (Richmond)

“The Congo — very big population coming in from the jails of the Congo.” (speech at Eagle Pass, Tex., Feb. 29)

“The other day from Africa, the Congo, they had numerous prisoners caught from the Congo.” (Rome, Ga.)

As part of his falsehood on prisons being emptied, Trump often conjures up another bit of fiction — that a conflict-riven country in Africa, the Democratic Republic of Congo, is shipping murderers to the United States. Fair says no such decline in Congo’s prison population is shown in the data. Instead, the DRC’s prison population keeps growing.

When Trump was president, he greatly restricted refugee admissions, stranding Congolese who had been waiting in camps seeking to reunite with relatives already in the United States. Still, Customs and Border Protection data show that during his presidency there was a surge in undocumented arrivals from the Democratic Republic of Congo. In 2017 and 2018, no one from Congo sought to cross either the southern or northern border, but in 2019 and 2020, that changed, with 614 and 267 encounters, respectively.

That one is particularly odious. He just had to make sure he scratched that racist itch by claiming that crazy, criminal Black Africans were coming to kill all the white women in their beds.

15 million migrants have entered the United States under Biden

“They’ve let in 15 million people … and I think it’s going to be 18 million by the time we get the worst president in our history out of office.” (Richmond)

“I think the number is 15 million people already, I think it’ll be 18 to 20 million people by the time we get rid of this guy. Think of it, that’s bigger than New York state. I think it’s going to be close to 20 million people.” (Rome, Ga.)

“This is the worst invasion probably. We’ve never had anything like it. No country has ever had anything like it. The number today could be 15 million people, and they’re coming from rough places and dangerous places.” (Super Tuesday remarks.)

Trump never met a number that he could not double, triple or quadruple. Here, he manages to take a real number — 4 million to 5 million migrants arriving during Biden’s presidency — and increase it threefold. Then he offers a prediction to make it sound even larger.

Here’s the reality: Customs and Border Protection recorded about 8.5 million “encounters” between February 2021, after Biden took office, through December of last year. But that does not mean all those people entered the country illegally. Some people were “encountered” numerous times as they tried to enter the country — and others (about 4 million of the total) were expelled, mostly because of covid-related rules that have since ended.

The inflation rate under Biden is 50 percent

“But the fact is, under Biden, we have a three-year inflation rate of almost 50 percent. Under me, you had no inflation. You had no inflation.” (Rome, Ga.)

“We have cumulative inflation of over 50 percent. That means people are, you know, they have to make more than 50 percent more over a fairly short period of time to stay up.” (interview on CNBC, March 11)

The monthly inflation headlines are often about the year-over-year inflation rate, as measured by changes in the consumer price index. It reached a high of 9 percent during Biden’s presidency, largely because of supply chain issues after the pandemic. Annualized inflation has dropped since then. The year-over-year figure in February was 3.2 percent.

Wages have also gone up under Biden, helping to mitigate the impact, though many workers have not seen their paychecks keep up with inflation. Average hourly earnings are up 15.5 percent during Biden’s presidency and the Employment Cost Index is up 14 percent. Since early 2023, wage growth began to outpace inflation, with the gap expected to fully close sometime this year.

Native-born Americans have lost 1 million jobs to immigrants

“In February alone, nearly 1 million jobs held by native-born Americans disappeared. Think of that. You lost a million jobs. Black people, that’s who lost the jobs. Hispanic people, that’s who lost the jobs.” (Rome, Ga.)

Here, Trump seizes on a confusing (and exaggerated) number to make a misleading claim. The latest Bureau of Labor Statistics employment report shows that the number of native-born workers with jobs fell from 129.8 million in January to 129.3 million in February 2024, for a decline of about 500,000. So Trump doubled the actual figure. Meanwhile, the number of foreign-born workers, meaning people who were not citizens at birth, grew from nearly 30 million to 31 million — an increase of more than 1 million.

But that does not mean that U.S. citizens have “lost” those jobs to immigrants. Monthly changes in employment don’t tell you much — and this report is not seasonally adjusted, meaning temporary holiday hiring and a winter slowdown in construction can affect the numbers at the start of the year. The BLS report shows the unemployment rate is lower for native-born Americans — 4.0 vs. 4.7 percent. That’s the more important figure. Moreover, according to the Economic Policy Institute, the share of prime-age (ages 25-54) employment-to-population ratio (EPOP) for U.S.-born individuals was 81.4 percent in 2023, up from 80.7 percent in 2019 — for its highest rate since 2001. Indeed, native-born workers have gained more than 6 million jobs during Biden’s presidency — as have foreign-born workers.

If you want to see some inflation, just wait until Trump takes office, deports all the immigrants and slaps 100% tariffs on foreign made cars and other goods. Should be fun. But by then he’ll have successfully destroyed democratic institutions so there’s not much any of us will be able to about it.

Click over to see the rest of the fact check.

Ankush Khardori at Politico takes a look at some polling on Trump’s legal problems:

Eight months out, we had questions. Among them: If Trump is convicted of a crime, how will it affect his chances of returning to the White House? What do Americans make of his claim that he should be immune from prosecution even if he actually perpetrated a criminal scheme to steal the last election? Does the public trust the Supreme Court to decide that issue fairly?

To find out, we worked with Ipsos to poll the American people — and we discovered some surprising answers to all of these questions, and several more.

The bottom line is that a conviction in Manhattan may not doom Trump, but it would do real damage.

More than a third of independents said a guilty verdict would make them less likely to support Trump’s candidacy. In a close race, that might matter.

It also cuts against the conventional wisdom, as analysts have sometimes doubted the political impact of the prosecution in Manhattan, which concerns Trump’s alleged falsification of his company’s business records in connection with a hush-money payment to the adult film star Stormy Daniels. The trial, which was set to start March 25, was delayed on Friday by at least three weeks to allow more time to review records from federal prosecutors.

As for Trump and the Supreme Court, the results are legitimately remarkable in a time of intense political polarization and distrust of the justices. A whopping 70 percent of the country rejects Trump’s claim that presidents should be immune from prosecution for alleged crimes they committed while in office. Less than a quarter of the respondents, meanwhile, said that they trust the Supreme Court to issue a fair and nonpartisan ruling on the matter.

Key findings.

Half of the country believes Trump is guilty in the Manhattan prosecution

Fifty percent of respondents said that they believe Trump is guilty of the alleged crimes charged in Manhattan.

There was a predictable and sizable partisan split, with only 14 percent of Republicans reporting that they believe Trump is guilty, while 86 percent of Democrats held that view. Among independents, 54 percent said that Trump is guilty.

What arguably stands out most is the fact that the number of people who said that they believe Trump is guilty here was nearly identical to the results when we asked respondents to consider Trump’s guilt in his other three criminal cases — the Justice Department’s prosecution in Washington over the 2020 election (49 percent said he is guilty), the department’s charges against Trump in Florida over his retention of classified documents (52 percent: guilty), and the Fulton County District Attorney’s case against Trump in Georgia over the 2020 election (49 percent: guilty). These numbers also roughly track Trump’s unfavorability ratings among the American population.

All of this suggests at least two possibilities worth bearing in mind, and they are not mutually exclusive.

First, it is possible that at least some Americans — perhaps very large numbers of them — are not clearly distinguishing the cases against Trump from one another or do not care about the sorts of distinctions that have occupied some legal commentators, including yours truly. Second, their opinions on Trump’s guilt may be a proxy for their views on Trump more generally and more evidence that we live in a 50-50 politically polarized country.

44% said that a conviction wouldn’t affect their support. But among those who said it would. Trump has a problem:

By a more than 2-1 margin, respondents said that a conviction would make them less likely to support Trump (32 percent) as opposed to more likely (13 percent). Notably, more than a third of independents said it would reduce their likelihood to support Trump. Not surprisingly, the vast majority of respondents who said that a conviction would bolster their support were Republicans. (The numbers were similar when we asked about a potential conviction in the federal prosecution for undermining the 2020 election.)

The one problem is that much of the case hinges on Michael Cohen which actually helps Trump since 38% said it would make the case weaker while the rest either said it would make the case stronger or have no effect. We’ll have to see if that skepticism applies to a jury.

The good news is that the American people haven’t completely lost their bearings: the overwhelming majority does no believe that a president should have total immunity as Trump is insisting:

Seventy percent of respondents rejected this position, including a large plurality (48 percent) of Republicans. Only 11 percent of all respondents endorsed Trump’s position that presidents should have criminal immunity for conduct while in office, and they were largely Republicans.

Unfortunately, half the country doesn’t trust the Supreme Court to issue the correct ruling:

A sizable plurality (46 percent) expressed that view, while about a quarter of the respondents (24 percent) took the other side. About a third (29 percent) said that they do not know whether they trust the court on this issue.

It doesn’t give us which people believe that but I would guess it’s a little of both. MAGA is high on its persecution complex and Democrats can already see that the high court is delaying the trial to help Trump so…

But the public isn’t swayed by that:

The odds of a Trump trial in Washington this year may have gone down, but that has not deterred the public.

Fifty-nine percent of respondents said that Trump should stand trial in the Justice Department’s 2020 election subversion case before Election Day. Ninety percent of Democrats expressed that view, as did 65 percent of independents and even 26 percent of Republicans. These figures have largely held steady since we asked the question last August and are in line with the results from at least one other recent poll.

As I said earlier, perhaps the majority of Americans haven’t abandoned all common sense after all. Will it make any difference? I doubt it. But they are the ultimate jury so let’s hope all those people come out and vote in November whether or not Trump has to face a courtroom jury before then.

Trump says Israel should “finish the problem”

Because he’s a big peacenik, dontcha know:

Former President Donald Trump called on Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to end the war in Gaza quickly during an interview with Fox News Channel’s “MediaBuzz.”

 This is the first time Trump has called to end the war in Gaza since the Hamas attack in Israel on October 7.

Trump’s comments in Sunday’s aired interview follow calls he made on Friday with FNC’s “Fox and Friends” host Brian Kilmeade that Israel should “finish the problem.”

“You had a horrible invasion. It took place. It would have never happened if I was president, by the way,” he added Friday.

On Sunday, the former president didn’t mention hostages or any other conditions that he would back to broker a ceasefire.

 “You have to finish it up and do it quickly and get back to the world of peace. We need peace in the world…we need peace in the Middle East,” Trump said when asked by “MediaBuzz” host Howard Kurtz what he would tell Netanyahu about the war in Gaza.

No word on what he thinks Netanyahu could do to “finish the problem” quickly. Perhaps someone could have asked him what he would do to “finish the problem.” It might be interesting to know that. Of course, he would default to “it never would have happened if I had been president” because nothing bad can possibly happen when he’s our Dear Leader. (Well, except for a deadly pandemic that killed over a million Americans.) Does he think he could make a “deal” with Hamas like he plans to force Ukraine to do with Russia — unconditional surrender? Sure, that’ll work.

But thinking that October 7th and the responding invasion never would have happened if he were president is just daft. Does he think Hamas is so afraid of him that they wouldn’t have attacked Israel? His narcissism knows no bounds.

This line of his: “we need peace” translates into “do what the tyrants tell you and you won’t have a problem. Otherwise, they’ll have to finish it — finally — if you know what I mean.”

Four years ago today, as the pandemic raged on with a shortage of testing supplies due to government inaction, Trump went on national TV to brag about himself: We’re handling this very, very professionally pic.twitter.com/mj48sKy1JL

— Biden-Harris HQ (@BidenHQ) March 18, 2024

The stock market stopped trading during that press conference.

Here’s what I wrote that day:

President Trump’s Oval Office speech last week was a massive dud and the stock market took a huge dive last Thursday. So Trump decided to take the bull by the horns and held a press conference in the Rose Garden with a group of CEOs just before closing time the next day. The market made a sharp upward turn as he spoke and the president was extremely pleased with himself. Numerous reports about the deliberations within the dysfunctional White House over the past week, however, have made it clear that was the only thing that pleased him.

According to the New York Times, it’s been an extremely chaotic time with infighting among the various task force members, Jared Kushner stepping all over everyone’s toes and incompetent leadership from the top. In other words, it’s been business as usual in the Trump administration. Unfortunately, this time this bumbling White House is confronting its first real crisis and one of the most serious global challenges in decades.

On Sunday, Trump appeared in the White House briefing room to announce that the Federal Reserve had cut interest rates virtually to zero, but on Monday the market dropped precipitously again. Although Trump obviously thought that he could turn it around with another end-of-day press conference, it didn’t work. The market closed down nearly 3,000 points, and every bit of news about the coronavirus was so bad that even Trump dialed down his bragging a notch and avoided the incessant happy talk that had pervaded all his other appearances.

One thing the president had noticed, apparently, was that Vice President Mike Pence was getting good reviews in the media for his daily briefings, with newspapers and cable news pronouncing that his serious tone was welcome and necessary in the crisis. It is, therefore, no surprise that Trump led the briefing again on Tuesday, shoving Pence to the background. Why let the veep hog all that good press?

As Dan Froomkin noted this week in Salon’s Press Watch column, many members of the media remarked on the change in Trump’s “tone” on Monday, although by the end of the briefing the president had reverted to form:

But Trump being Trump, he couldn’t bring himself to apologize for the many lost weeks of insufficient federal response, nor admit even the tiniest flaw: He rated his performance a 10 out of 10. And soon enough, he was back to sending out vile tweets about the “Chinese Virus” and attacking “failing” governors who had the audacity to critique the federal response.

Froomkin pointed out that the press, for the most part, has looked for leadership among other players in this crisis, particularly health experts, governors and mayors who have stepped into the breach both in terms of actual response and delivering the clear public information required in an emergency such as this. After Tuesday’s briefing, a reporter asked the president why he’d changed his tone on Monday. Trump said that he hadn’t changed it at all, adding, “I have seen that people actually liked it.”

The truth is that he’s not the only one who has changed his tone. Fox News and other right-wing media have made an abrupt pivot as well, and as has been the case throughout the Trump presidency, it’s a chicken-and-egg question as to who went first.

This compilation by the Washington Post illustrates the change:

How Fox News has shifted its coronavirus rhetorichttps://t.co/iWGZqoprvY pic.twitter.com/L9nITMkV6F

— The Fix (@thefix) March 17, 2020

Some right-wing commentators are now saying that Trump has made “a sharp pivot to a “wartime” footing,” taking command of the crisis. Former Trump communications director Jason Miller said, “This is a war unlike anything we’ve faced in American history and it’s going to take an unconventional president who isn’t trapped by preconceived notions of doing things the way they’ve always been done to lead us through this.”

His leadership has certainly been “unconventional” up until now:

“Trump didn't cause the pandemic. What he did was squander America's only advantage—a lag time during which to prepare for the crisis—thus encouraging the spread of the disease when it might have been contained. He has, in real and material ways, made this crisis worse.” pic.twitter.com/dpfEqH02uI

— Sarah Longwell (@SarahLongwell25) March 17, 2020

Trump likes the war metaphor.

The world is at war with a hidden enemy. WE WILL WIN!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 17, 2020

I felt a little sense of déjà vu as I read those pieces and watched the media response to Trump’s appearance on Tuesday. It recalled an earlier episode in which a president looked like a deer in the headlights during a crisis and was then elevated to heroic status by the press when he appeared at Ground Zero with a bullhorn and spoke to the assembled rescue workers:

I can hear you! I can hear you! The rest of the world hears you! And the people — and the people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon!

The ecstatic reaction from the media fully activated the impulse to rally around the president, and that was the end of virtually all skepticism about the American response to the 9/11 attacks for the next year. The media made George W. Bush into a “wartime” leader that day, and granted him all the power that came with it.

We are once again facing a national crisis. This time it’s not just hitting a couple of cities, as devastating as that was. This is affecting everyone in the country. The economic fallout stands to be even worse than the 2008 financial crisis. And once again, you can sense that the media is longing to anoint a leader to perform some ostensibly heroic ritual to make us all feel better.

That’s why my antennae went up when I heard all the TV commentators making so much of Trump’s new “tone” and how he seemed to be a different, more serious president. This comment by Dana Bash at CNN was so effusive that the Trump team sent it out to their followers:

Watch CNN's Dana Bash praise President @RealDonaldTrump's leadership on the coronavirus:

"He is being the kind of leader…that people need and want and yearn for in times of crisis and uncertainty." pic.twitter.com/gvKSqWN6ge

— Trump War Room (@TrumpWarRoom) March 17, 2020

The AP headlined an article, “Trump changes his tone, gets real on the coronavirus threat.” CNN published one called “What drove Trump’s newfound somber tone on coronavirus.” In fairness, both articles feature plenty of skepticism and don’t soft-soap Trump’s failures so far. But as this crisis deepens there is a danger that mainstream media commentators and pundits will fall into the same trap they fell into after 9/11.

Trump won’t be able to hold his big rallies for the foreseeable future. They were key to his success in 2016, but it wasn’t the rallies themselves as much as all the free TV exposure they gave him. I think he has figured out that he will be able to hold these televised press conferences, surrounded by experts, and appear to be in command and look presidential instead.

Recall that he reportedly told a group of GOP donors at Mar-a-Lago just a week or so ago:

They’re trying to scare everybody, from meetings, cancel the meetings, close the schools — you know, destroy the country. And that’s ok, as long as we can win the election. But I really believe that if they see that the Trump administration is handling this virus in a professional, competent way, I don’t believe that’s going to hurt us.

Trump’s feral survival instincts have kicked in, and they’ve saved him many times before. If he can manage to control himself even a little bit, his supposed nemesis, the media, may give him the boost he needs to win again.

He didn’t win, thank God. But we wonder why people don’t blame Trump for the monumental failure of his COVID response today?

Back in 2000 when Donald Trump first tested the waters of a presidential campaign , giving a series of speeches as a possible Reform Party candidate, he famously told Forbes Magazine, “It’s very possible that I could be the first presidential candidate to run and make money on it.” He was speaking at the time about a weird deal he had going with motivational speaker Anthony Robbins in which he timed his political appearances around paid seminars that Robbins paid him a million bucks to give. By the time he decided to run for real in 2015 he didn’t publicly suggest that he could make money campaigning but he did make the case that he was incorruptible saying, “I don’t need anybody’s money.” (He’d obviously figured out that that real graft was to made once he was in the White House.)

He pledged to spend a hundred million of his own money on his run but ended up only giving about $66 million out of $398 million so Trump didn’t “self-fund” by a long shot. In 2020 he didn’t use any of his own money at all instead raising $774 million for the campaign with the RNC and his Super PACs raising much more. (The 2020 election was by far the most expensive in history, doubling the record breaking 2016 campaign.) His spending in that campaign was so profligate that it ended up having a cash crunch in the months before the election.

Still, the myth persists among the MAGA faithful that Trump is incorruptible because he’s allegedly a self-made billionaire and doesn’t need anyone’s money. (And even though they believe this, they’ve been sending him their own hard earned cash just because they love him so much.) Back in 2019, Politico reported on research showing that this myth has had some pretty serious political consequences:

Using a 2017 University of Maryland Critical Issues Poll, we found that believing Trump was not born “very wealthy” leads to at least a 5-percentage-point boost in the president’s job approval, even after considering the many factors that can influence public approval ratings. This shift is rooted in the belief that his humble roots make Trump both more empathetic (he “feels my pain”), and more skilled at business (he is self-made and couldn’t have climbed to such heights without real business know-how).

When voters were informed of the truth, that Trump was born with a silver spoon in his mouth and had to be bailed out repeatedly by his father, there were “noticeable and statistically significant effects on evaluations of Trump’s character” losing 10 percentage point from Republicans on empathy and 10 points on business acumen. The researchers said, “our research shows that the basic information plugged-in elites take for granted is not known by many Americans, and can be consequential in political evaluations.” Imagine that.

The following video has gone viral on social media the last couple of days and it shows what might have been if all journalists had been as aggressive as Barbara Walters was in 1990 when she confronted him with his recent business failure (just one of many more to come) and the lies he was telling the public:

You’ll notice that his persecution complex was in full effect even then, as he whines to Walters that nobody’s ever been treated as unfairly as he has been.

Trump has been dancing as fast as he can for decades, trying to stay one step ahead of bankruptcy and the law and he has been successful at doing it, apparently leading him to truly believe that he could always prevail by sheer force of will. When the 2020 election didn’t go his way, his fragile psyche couldn’t take it and he simply created an alternate reality in order to cope.

Now he’s faced with the greatest challenge of his life, and he has to make one great hail mary pass in order to keep himself from going broke and out of prison. He has to win the presidency and he desperately needs money to pay his own legal expenses and finance his campaign. It’s not going all that well.

The wheels of justice are grinding infuriatingly slowly, largely due to some judges (and Justices) who seem to be happy to help Trump out of his immediate criminal jam. But the civil judgments against him add up to more than half a billion dollars and nobody knows exactly what kind of collateral he’s having to put up to post the required bonds or who might be acting as his benefactor. The potential for corruption is so immense it’s stunning that anyone could have the chutzpah to run for president under these circumstances. But then again, this is Trump we’re talking about and the White House is his guaranteed get-out-of-jail free card.

But what about his campaign? Considering his precarious personal financial situation there’s no way that Trump will be self-funding any part of it and he’s commandeered the RNC for his personal use, most likely to help him pay for any lawyers who won’t allow him to stiff them. So, according to the New York Times, he’s having to hustle like crazy for campaign donations:

One of the most pressing issues facing Mr. Trump is the financial disparity he and allied groups now face with Mr. Biden and the Democratic Party. Mr. Biden’s campaign announced on Sunday that it entered March with $155 million cash on hand with the party, after raising $53 million in February. The Trump operation has not released a more recent total, but his campaign account and the Republican National Committee had around $40 million at the end of January.

He’s having to hit up billionaires and Wall St more than ever before and it sure looks like he’s making some deals, such as his abrupt turnaround on TikTok last week after meeting with one of their major investors. This is because so far, his small donor base appears to finally be a little bit tapped out. The campaign claims that February will be their strongest month for small dollar fund-raising which would beat the $22.3 million in August. But as the Times pointed out, the Biden campaign is seeing a massive rush of small donor money, raising more than $10 million online after the State of the Union, more than doubling Trump’s much ballyhooed haul of $4.2 million from his ignominious mug shot.

How can it be that Biden is raising so much more money when we are told daily that Trump voters are overwhelmingly excited while Biden’s are disconsolate and depressed? Well, money isn’t everything and incumbency always has an edge in the money game but it does seem odd that with Trump holding a slight lead in many of the polls that he would be having trouble raising money while the Democrats are awash in cash.

Perhaps Biden voters are more enthused than is commonly recognized or, just as likely, are more terrified of another Trump term. But maybe it’s also the case that Trump’s rapturous followers aren’t as representative of Republican voters as they would have us believe. And just maybe people have heard a few things about Trump being indicted on 91 felony counts in several different criminal cases and being hit with over half a billion dollars in fines. Is it possible that people are still telling pollsters that they plan to vote for Trump but they aren’t putting their cash where their mouths are? I wouldn’t be surprised. Sometimes money speaks louder than words.

Salon

Update: