And a very, very lame one
What did I just watch? A Real Housewife of Mar-a-Lago singing some operatic version of MAGA stupidity? Hookay…
"what digby sez..."
Month: March 2024
Lol
The 77-year-old took to Truth Social and Instagram to share the news, writing: “A great honor to have won both the Club Championship and the Senior Club Championship this week at Trump International!”
I wrote this a few years back about Trump’s “championships.” The man never, ever fails to prove himself a cheater and a liar. No matter what:
Trump is the most famous and powerful man on earth. He has tens of millions of people who worship him like a god. But it’s not enough. It’s never enough.
Donald Trump takes great pride in his golf game. Shinzo Abeand Tiger Woods and countless others can tell you about that. He once tweeted “I don’t cheat at golf” but added that Samuel L. Jackson does and “with his game he has no choice.” The president’s official USGA handicap index is listed as 2.8, though he seldom posts scores. Any visitor to the ornate men’s locker room at his club here, Trump International Golf Club, can see small rectangular brass plaques on his locker, recognizing him as the 1999, 2001 and 2009 club champion, and the 2012 and 2013 senior champion.
And now there’s a new plaque on his locker, screwed into its stained wood with two small Phillips head screws, to commemorate his latest title. It reads:
2018 MEN’S CLUB CHAMPION
President Trump’s locker at Trump International in West Palm Beach, Fla.Yes, Trump was president of the United States for all of 2018.
Yes, Trump turned 72 last year, which would be an impressive age to win even a senior club championship.
But there the plaque is, identifying Trump as the reigning club champion at his spectacular Trump International course.
His most recent win brings Trump’s club-championship haul — all won at clubs bearing his name — to an even 20. That includes senior and super-senior titles, too.
But to be precise about it, the plaque on his locker is two letters short of accurate. Trump is not actually the men’s champion at the club. He’s the co-champion. While that distinction is not found on his locker, it is made elsewhere at the club.
As for Trump’s path to No. 20, it was not conventional.
Originally, a man named Ted Virtue, the 58-year-old CEO of a New York investment firm called MidOcean Partners, had the 2018 club championship title all to himself.
[…]
After Virtue won the championship, Trump ran into him at the club, according to multiple sources who recounted the story. Having some fun with him, Trump said something like, “The only reason you won is because I couldn’t play.” The president cited the demands of his job, although he was able to make 20 visits to the club in 2018, according to trumpgolfcount.com. Trump then proposed a nine-hole challenge match to Virtue, winner-takes-the-title.You could say there wasn’t much in it for Virtue, and you could argue that this is not how these matters are typically, if ever, settled. But consider these factors:
1. Trump owns the course;
2. Trump is the president of the United States;
3. Trump is not your typical golfer.
Virtue said yes.
They played match play (each hole as its own contest) and straight up (no shots were given). As in nearly all amateur golf rounds, no rules official was on hand. Golf’s tradition calls for players to police themselves and, if necessary, one another.
Trump won.
In victory a magnanimous Trump said to Virtue something like, “This isn’t fair — we’ll be co-champions.”
He is such a disturbed individual.
The hard right Republican Study Committee thinks it’s groundhog day:
A new budget by a large and influential group of House Republicans calls for raising the Social Security retirement age for future retirees and restructuring Medicare.
The proposals, which are unlikely to become law this year, reflect how many Republicans will seek to govern if they win the 2024 elections. And they play into a fight President Joe Biden is seeking to have with former President Donald Trump and the Republican Party as he runs for re-election.
The budget was released Wednesday by the Republican Study Committee, a group of more than 170 House GOP lawmakers, including many allies of Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump. Apart from fiscal policy, the budget endorses a series of bills “designed to advance the cause of life,” including the Life at Conception Act, which would aggressively restrict abortion and potentially threaten in vitro fertilization, or IVF, by establishing legal protections for human beings at “the moment of fertilization.” It has recently caused consternation within the GOP following backlash to an Alabama Supreme Court ruling that threatened IVF.
The RSC, which is chaired by Rep. Kevin Hern, R-Okla., counts among its members Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., and his top three deputies in leadership. Johnson chaired the RSC from 2019 to 2021; his office did not immediately respond when asked about the new budget.
For Social Security, the budget endorses “modest adjustments to the retirement age for future retirees to account for increases in life expectancy.” It calls for lowering benefits for the highest-earning beneficiaries. And it emphasizes that those ideas are not designed to take effect immediately: “The RSC Budget does not cut or delay retirement benefits for any senior in or near retirement.”
The new budget also calls for converting Medicare to a “premium support model,” echoing a proposal that Republican former Speaker Paul Ryan had rallied support for. Under the new RSC plan, traditional Medicare would compete with private plans and beneficiaries would be given subsidies to shop for the policies of their choice. The size of the subsidies could be pegged to the “average premium” or “second lowest price” in a particular market, the budget says.
The plan became a flashpoint in the 2012 election, when Ryan was GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney’s running mate, and President Barack Obama charged that it would “end Medicare as we know it.” Ryan defended it as a way to put Medicare on better financial footing, and most of his party stood by him.
It will end Medicare as we know it. Social Security too. And IVF. And everything good and decent in this world.
These people may be MAGA but they don’t buy Trump’s simple-minded “populism” for a minute. They know he’s an imbecile who only cares about himself and they believe (probably correctly) that now that they’ve figured him out they can get him to do whatever they want. And what they want is to end vital government programs, cut taxes for rich people and deliver for religious zealots who want to bring back witch burning.
That Haley faction isn’t dissipating
Although former President Donald Trump has attained more than enough delegates to secure the Republican Party’s nomination for the 2024 presidential contest, his primary election numbers are likely worrying his campaign team.
On Tuesday night, Trump easily won all five Republican contests. But he isn’t winning near-universal support from GOP voters, as a significant number of those taking part in the primaries are opting for alternate candidates.
In Ohio, for example, more than one in five voters (20.8 percent) chose to vote for an option other than Trump. In Arizona, 22.1 percent of voters opted for other choices. Kansas saw nearly a quarter of all voters taking part in the Republican primary voting against Trump, with 24.5 percent choosing someone else. In Illinois, 19.3 percent voted against him.
Even in Florida, a state with a closed primary — where voters who are not registered as Republicans are barred from taking part — Trump still struggled slightly, with 18.8 percent of GOP voters selecting options other than the presumed nominee.
Exit polling data out of Ohio’s primary shows that dissatisfaction with Trump as the Republican nominee could seriously impact his chances in the fall. According to an ABC News exit poll, 18 percent of voters in the primary said they wouldn’t be voting for Trump in November, with 10 percent saying they’d back Biden and 8 percent saying they simply wouldn’t vote.
Looking at the 2020 presidential election results from Ohio and extrapolating the exit poll data from this week’s primary, if 10 percent of voters who selected Trump that year chose to back Biden instead this year, it would mean Biden would win by around 155,000 votes — and that’s not even counting the 8 percent who say they won’t back Trump if he’s still the nominee come November.
National polling data is indicating that Trump is currently beating Biden — just slightly and within most polls’ margins of error — according to an average of polling data, with the GOP nominee ahead by around 2 points. However, there’s another problem facing Trump: In several contests so far, he has underperformed in primaries compared to what polls predicted. In the New Hampshire primary, for example, Trump was expected to defeat his Republican opponents by 19.3 points; in the end, that spread dropped by 8.1 points.
Even if Trump underperforms by just a fraction of that rate, particularly in swing states, it could spell doom for his chances at the White House come November.
It’s notable that even as he’s secured the nomination this many people are still voting for other candidates. We’ve been told that in the open primaries it’s all Democrats meddling to sabotage Biden but yesterday, in his adopted home state of Florida, the same pattern emerged even though the primary was closed. This is a phenomenon even if the press is downplaying it as not very important.
Oh and by the way, there have been several post State of the Union polls that show Biden’s number ticking up against Trump.
Until the big media polls show this, I doubt the narrative that Trump is a juggernaut will change. And the polls either way are garbage right now anyway — this race is close and a couple of points plus or minus doesn’t mean much. Still, it’s always good to show movement in the right direction.
Uhm, nope:
Look what’s already happening:
Nigeria reported two cases of chloroquine poisoning after U.S. President Donald Trump praised the anti-malaria drug as a treatment for the novel coronavirus.
Health officials are warning Nigerians against self-medicating after demand for the drug surged in Lagos, a city that’s home to 20 million people. Two people were hospitalized in Lagos for chloroquine overdoses, Oreoluwa Finnih, senior health assistant to the governor of Lagos, said in an interview.
“Please don’t panic,” she said via text message. “Chloroquine is still in a testing phase in combination with other medication and not yet verified as a preventive, treatment or curative option.”
Nigeria’s Centre for Disease Control warned that the World Health Organization hasn’t approved use of the drug against the virus. Africa’s most populous country reported 22 infections as of Saturday.
Trump said Thursday that chloroquine and its less-toxic cousin hydroxychloroquine had shown “tremendous promise” to treat the new illness. Hospitals in the U.S. are rushing to stockpile the drug.
The president doubled down on Saturday, telling his Twitter followers that hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin “taken together” could be “one of the biggest game changers in the history of medicine.” He urged they “be put in use IMMEDIATELY.”
The Food and Drug Administration hasn’t approved the antimalarials to treat Covid-19, the respiratory illness caused by the coronavirus.
While chloroquine is no longer used to treat malaria in Africa, some pharmacies still stock it for patients who are resistant to other anti-malaria drugs.
After his White House Coronavirus Campaign Rally this morning, during which he once more flogged this “treatment” hard, he tweeted more misinformation:
This guy is a 26 year old “entrepreneur” who just posted this:
This is from his website:
Michael Coudrey was born in Long Island, New York and began his business career when he was just 14, creating a sunglasses e-commerce business and later selling it to a Miami based company for an undisclosed sum. At age 20, he moved to Los Angeles, California to further his career; launching multiple product businesses, a digital media company, and a real estate development firm. Michael Coudrey has made significant contributions to the digital media efforts in United States politics, offering social media and “digital information warfare” services to political candidates across the country. He is a philanthropist, having donated to political and educational causes, stating “we have a moral obligation to guide those who are willing to learn”.
This is the expert, Donald Trump is tweeting out to his millions of cultists.
He might as well be telling them to drink kool-aid at this point.
—————————————————————————————————————
They did drink the kool-aid and the hydroxychloroquine and the ivermectin and for all we know some of them drank disinfectant and shined a flashlight in their orifices to kill the virus because the stable genius whose uncle taught at MIT told them to. A whole bunch of them died unnecessarily. The ones who lived are excited to relive those glory days apparently and are excited to put Trump back in the presidency.
They think they are, but they’re not
Journalist John Hendrickson, who wrote that incredible piece about Joe Biden’s stutter for the Atlantic went to a Trump rally and asked the attendees how they felt about his repeated mocking of people with disabilities. They professed that they didn’t think it was very nice, but that’s just how it goes and they’ll vote for him anyway. There is no awareness of what it says about his character as a man or a leader. They just don’t care:
On Saturday, as we awaited Trump’s arrival by private plane, my colleague Hanna Rosin and I spent the day wandering the grounds of Wright Bros. Aero Inc., asking rally attendees uncomfortable questions about what they’re comfortable with. Virtually everyone was bothered by specific examples of Trump’s recent bullying. But as they unpacked their thoughts, they continually found ways to excuse their favored candidate’s behavior. Many interviewees repeatedly contradicted themselves, perhaps because of a particular variable: I’m a person who stutters, and that day, I was asking real people how they felt about Trump making fun of stuttering.
Amarried couple from Dayton, Todd and Cindy Rossbach, were waiting in a long, snaking line to take in their sixth Trump rally. “He’s the best president I’ve ever seen in my lifetime,” Todd said. “Probably Reagan comes in second.” I asked him if he had seen Trump’s comments during the Georgia rally, and specifically, if he had seen Trump imitate Biden’s stutter. He saw it all. “I think he’s got every right to do whatever he wants to do at this point,” Todd said. “The level of, uh, cruelness, may seem tough, but they’re being very cruel with him, so it seems justified.”
His wife spoke up. “I disagree, because I think when you make fun of people, it just makes you look bad,” Cindy said. “It’s not the Christian way to be,” she added a little later. “I just feel like it makes Trump look bad, when he’s probably not a bad person. But he is just stooping to their level, and I don’t like it.” Nevertheless, neither of them felt that Trump could do anything between now and November to make him lose their vote.
Farther back in line was Cheryl Beverly, from Chillicothe, Ohio, who said she works locally trying to get children out of homelessness. Beverly shared that she has a learning disability and has trouble spelling. Even as an adult, she’s regularly ridiculed. “It does hurt my feelings at times,” she said. She acknowledged that it’s hard to “see a lot of people make fun of people with disabilities,” and pointed to the risk of suicide and addiction among members of the community. “We’ll just go in a dark secret hole and not come out,” Beverly said. Yet she also said she still planned to vote for Trump this fall. She was able to separate Trump’s taunts from her personal feelings by chalking his behavior up to politics. If a child asked her about Trump’s belittlement, she imagined that she would liken it to playing a game: “You’re just finding a way for you to become the winner and they become the loser,” she offered. “It’s just trash-talking.”
Near a food truck inside the venue, I struck up a conversation with a woman from Cincinnati named Vanessa Miller. She was wearing a T-shirt that read jesus is my savior, trump is my president, and a dog tag inscribed with the serenity prayer. She hadn’t seen, or heard about, the clip of Trump mimicking Biden. “Trump is a good man,” Miller said. “He’s not perfect. Biden is not handicapped. He’s just an ass, and he does not care about this country.” She went on, “If Trump made fun of Biden, well, like I said, he’s not perfect, but it wasn’t about a disability. It was about how he has made this country dysfunctional, not disabled.”
A bit later, she told me that “Biden doesn’t stutter; he’s mentally incapable of running this country.” But then she did something surprising: She reached out and grabbed my arm in a maternal fashion. “And I feel what you’re—I feel what you’re saying,” she said, acknowledging my own stutter. “People that are unkind to people with disabilities, it’s shameful. It’s awful. Absolutely disgusting. And I guess I understand that, like, in an election, you know, it gets ugly, and elections get competitive, and people say things, people do things.”
I unlocked my phone and showed her a video of Trump’s stuttering impression. She turned her focus to the mainstream media in general. She said that “for the press to inflame and use disabilities to get people riled up is exactly what they want.” Nothing would stop her from voting for Trump.
This pattern continued in nearly every interaction that day: skepticism, a momentary denouncement, then an eventual conclusion that Trump was still a man worth their vote. A woman named Susie Michael, who runs a Mathnasium tutoring center, told me, “I don’t appreciate the making-fun-of part, but he doesn’t have to be my best friend. He just has to do the best job for the country and for me. So I have to overlook that, because everybody has their good points and their bad points.”
Shana, a special-education teacher from Indiana who did not give her last name, told me, “I would still support him because I feel like people make mistakes. They say things they shouldn’t say. And I feel like God is the judge on that, you know, and that we’re to forgive him.” She noted that if Trump were to mock Biden’s stutter at this rally, she’d be inclined to write him a letter saying that “everybody was born of God and that we shouldn’t be making fun of anybody.”
I don’t think I have to point out that they are totally unwilling to give anyone but Trump that benefit of the doubt, not even other Republicans who fail to toe the MAGA line. They don’t really care what he says or does. I’m sure they wouldn’t even be truly offended if they knew he had disabled soldiers removed from his presence because he didn’t want them in the shot with him. They just love him. But then I guess that’s what all cult members feel about their leader.
This may be the most depressing thing I’ve read in a while. Their empathy is an eighth of an inch deep and last only as long as it takes their minds to come up with a rationale to excuse this disgusting behavior. They’re not good people.
NC Republicans run another conpiracy theorist
Esquire‘s Charlie Pierce began describing this place as “the newly insane state of North Carolina” in early 2015 (as far as I can tell) in honor of state voters selecting “Tea Party boy-toy Thom Tillis” for Senate over Democratic incumbent Sen. Kay Hagan. This was before Trump and before Madison Cawthorn replaced Rep. Mark Meadows in NC-11 in the same election in which Mark Robinson brought Christian nationalism to the office of lieutenant governor.
Joining Robinson on the ballot this fall is Michele Morrow, who you’ve already met. Morrow expects Tar Heels to put her in charge of the state’s public school system she doesn’t believe in.
A CNN reporter caught up with the elusive Morrow in a parking lot to ask for comment on her postings recommending execution for President Barack Obama and others.
Via WGHP:
“I prefer a Pay Per View of him in front of the firing squad,” Morrow said of Obama in a May 13, 2020, post on X, formerly Twitter. “I do not want to waste another dime on supporting his life. We could make some money back from televising his death.”
She’s referenced the QAnon conpiracy at least seven times, according to Media Matters reporting, Morrow as at the Jan. 6 rally/insurrection but claims she never entered the U.S. Capitol.
Multiple times on social media, Morrow has voiced concerns about a Satanic agenda and alleged that transgender people and Islam are linked to larger conspiracies.
Satan
On Jan. 21, 2019, on X, she described someone identified only by the name Alyssa as a “minion” of Satan. Preceding posts have since been deleted, and it is unclear who she is describing.
“Alyssa is not Satan…just a minion of his,” Morrow said. “Being manipulated and used by him, along with all of the liberal lunatics who are demanding the murder of children, praising the psychological disorder of gender confusion, promoting pediphelia (sic) and spewing hate! Satan is real.“
Globalists, adrenochrome, New World Order, it’s all there. But this allegation was new to me:
While advocating for a bill to ban puberty blockers and other gender-affirming healthcare for anyone under 18 in North Carolina, Morrow claims that “Big Pharma” is behind the existence of transgender people in a conspiracy to “make our children unable to reproduce.”
“The medical community is being lured into these practices through political threats and promises of huge cash payouts,” she said. “This is a disgusting plan of Big Pharma to make our children unable to reproduce and permanent patients, dependent on pharmaceuticals for their entire lives and needing multiple surgeries to deal with the painful and dangerous repercussions of trying to achieve an impossible goal of changing their God-given gender.”
See, Big Pharma wants to keep people from reproducing and so shrink its base of future customers.
Mo Green, Morrow’s Democratic opponent, has actually been a county superintendent of the third largest district in North Carolina. Here’s his ActBlue page.
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For The Win, 5th Edition is ready for download. Request a copy of my free countywide GOTV planning guide at ForTheWin.us.
Trump is in a hole and won’t stop digging
Republicans operatives from out of state were bankrolling ads promoting Durham D.A. Satana Deberry ahead of North Carolina’s March 5 Democratic attorney general primary. Supporters of Rep. Jeff Jackson, her main opponent, warned that a vote for Deberry could aid the GOP-funded effort to upset TikTok maven Jackson.
Let them waste their money, I replied. If donations are a measure of support, it was no contest. Jackson had raised around $1.7 million to Deberry’s not-quite $45,000. Jackson bested Deberry by 22 points.
So for those fretting about every presidential poll this far out from November, consider the fundraising status of the two majors (CNN):
Donald Trump’s campaign saw an uptick in donations in February but failed to match the accelerating fundraising pace set by Joe Biden, whose political operation widened its already substantial financial advantage over his Republican rival as it entered March and the general election showdown, new filings show.
The February financial reports filed Wednesday night also underscore the continued steep price of Trump’s legal troubles: Legal bills alone outstripped the money Trump’s leadership PAC took in last month.
[…]
The new filings, which cover only a portion of the committees associated with each presidential contender, continue to show Biden’s early fundraising dominance.
The president ended February with $71 million in available cash in his principal campaign account – more than twice the $33.5 million in cash reserves held by Trump’s campaign. Biden expanded the gap seen at the end of January when his campaign had nearly $56 million in available funds to Trump’s roughly $30.5 million.
The filings also show that the Democratic National Committee ended February with more than twice the cash on hand as its Republican counterpart, buttressing Democrats’ financial edge over a political operation that Trump is working to build with the national GOP now that he is the party’s presumptive nominee.
Team Biden is kicking it. Better now?
Yes, conservative dark money groups will be a factor this election season. God knows what role Russian intelligence efforts will play. And fundraising isn’t everything. But it could be as good a measure of support as horse-race polls even as an increasingly desperate Trump begs supporters for help to pay his $464m bond in the New York fraud case ahead of a Monday deadline.
Since Digby invoked the late Texas Democrat Gov. Ann Richards, I will rip off one of her most memorable lines. Poor Donald. He can’t help it. He was born with a silver foot in his mouth. Trump can’t stop himself from making the election a referendum on Trump.
Trump cleans up remarks about ‘cutting’ Social Security and Medicare
Trump signals support for 15-week national abortion ban
Trump’s comments on Jews who vote for Democrats draw outrage
Keep digging, pal.
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For The Win, 5th Edition is ready for download. Request a copy of my free countywide GOTV planning guide at ForTheWin.us.
Did you know that Judge Scott McAfee delayed his written order on Willis and Wade for a week because he had been receiving threats? He needed time for proper security to be in place for him and his family. The ONLY source that I found who mentioned this was Kyle Griffin at MSNBC.
This really PISSES ME OFF. I try to be all logical about the reasons the threats keep working and point to solutions, but I’m really sick and tired of the BS excuses by law enforcement when it comes to dealing with threats from the MAGA base to the judges, prosecutors, witnesses, jurors AND THEIR FAMILIES, in Donald Trump’s legal cases.
I’m a fast talker but slow writer so I dictated my thoughts to Otter.AI (a service I use to transcribe videos). It has a feature to summarize what you said and provide action items. It worked surprisingly well!
Spocko is frustrated with the lack of action taken by law enforcement to address threats made against judges and their families. He argues that local law enforcement should have anticipated and prepared for these threats, but their failure to do so is driving him ‘nuts.’
Spocko highlights specific instances where media attention and public pressure led to action being taken, but notes that more often than not, there is a lack of response or prosecution.
He questions why law enforcement is failing to take these threats seriously and why they are not doing more to address them.
It even came up with Action Items for the Georgia law enforcement based on what I said:
- Anticipate and prepare for threats ahead of time to allow for quick response
(Georgia law enforcement FAILED!) - Intercept, trace, find, arrest, and prosecute people making threats
(Georgia law enforcement FAILED!)
I had action items for Georgia government: - Investigate reasons for failure to anticipate and respond to threats
- Analyze past examples of effective law enforcement response to threats
I had action items for the people in comms in Georgia government: - Serious question: Do you want threats to stop? Because when there are no arrests for threats, the message being sent to the people making them is that they are fine.
The Failure To Protect The People from MAGA Domestic Terrorists
Every week i talk with Glenn Kirschner about what can be done about threats. He got REALLY PISSED that Trump’s BLOODBATH comments aren’t going to land him in pretrial detention. He asks,
“Will the criminal justice system writ large receive this latest deadly threat with a yawn? Or will they apply the law as it is intended to be applied? ”
Glenn Kirschner on Trump’s promise of a “bloodbath” if he loses the election?
I’m always looking for solutions, but I’m also looking at people to blame when they have refused to act over and over again when it comes to threats. Did you know Georgia law enforcement never arrested ANYONE for the threats to Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss?!
Check out this great Reuters report
Trump campaign demonized two Georgia election workers – and death threats followed
Cobb County Police said no one was arrested in response to the reported threats and declined further comment. …
On Jan. 25, Barron emailed Fulton County police chief Wade Yates and other officials. The family needed protection, he said. “Can we do anything to help her and her family with security?” he asked, referring to Moss, in the email, reviewed by Reuters. Yates suggested hiring an armed guard at a cost of $22.50 per hour, according to an email. “We can work out funding details next week,” he said.
Asked why Freeman and Moss didn’t receive a security detail, Fulton County Police said in a statement that it can’t approve budgeting in such a case and referred questions to the county government.
The county government said it did not provide security for the women because the messages they received did not rise to the level of criminal threats that could be prosecuted. The decision was not financial in nature, it added.
Reuter’s Special Report: Campaign of Fear by Jason Szep and Linda So Dec. 1, 2021
[The Reuters reporters talked to multiple experts who said the threats DID rise to the level of criminal threats.]
You would THINK that considering it was a Judge who is white and a Republican, Georgia law enforcement would have prepared for threats ahead of time to allow for a quick response. Georgia cops should have announced arrests IMMEDIATELY after the threats, to show they were prepared.
It’s almost as if law enforcement WANTS anyone involved in Trump cases to be AFRAID of political violence. As I said, I’ve investigated failure and successes when it comes to threats online. I could point to good communications about threats (like from New York’s Judicial Threats Assessment Unit that informed the media about the scale and scope of the threats to Judge Engoron and his clerk.)
That report got through to people in the media like Chris Hayes, who I’ve seen conflating criticism of elected officials with threats over and over again. Watch this clip of Lisa Rubin talking about the 275 pages of transcribed threats from voice mail, that finally got to him.
I know that the media have a big role to play in making sure the people understand what is happening and who is benefiting from a failure to act on threats. So I wrote to Kyle Griffin at MSNBC.
Kyle:
Could you please dig into threats made to Judge McAfee? Your March 15 tweet was the ONLY place I saw anyone saying McAfee delayed the Willis/Wade order because of the threats to his family.
This sounds like a massive failure of Georgia Law enforcement.
Could you do a Weekend segment on this failure of law enforcement? I know there ARE laws that can deal with these threats, but they aren’t a priority. I don’t want to hear the lame excuses. Please get someone to expose the reasons behind the failures, and what must be done to fix it.LLAP, Spocko
@spocko@mastodon.online
Yes, he really should be worried about it.
I wrote about Trump’s mortal fear of getting dementia because he watched his father deteriorate with Alzheimer’s disease because he watched his father mentally deteriorate with Alzheimer’s disease. In today’s Washington Post (gift link) they tackle that subject in depth:
Donald Trump invited his extended family to Mar-a-Lago in the mid-1990s. As the clan gathered at the palatial Florida estate, though, his father was badly struggling, according to Mary L. Trump, Donald’s niece.
Fred Trump Sr., the pugnacious developer then in his late 80s, didn’t recognize two of his children at the party, recalled Mary L. Trump, who attended the gathering. And when he did recognize Donald, the family patriarch approached his son with a picture of a Cadillac that he wanted to buy — as if he needed his son’s permission.
The incident, Mary L. Trump said, left Donald Trump visibly upset at his father’s descent into dementia, which medical records show had been diagnosed several years earlier.Trump reflected his anguish in an interview around that time, with Playboy in 1997 reporting that seeing his father “addled with Alzheimer’s” had left him wondering “out loud about the senselessness of life.”
“Turning 50 does make you think about mortality, or immortality, or whatever,” Trump, who had recently reached that milestone, told the magazine. “It does hit you.”
Today, as the 77-year-old Trump seeks to return to the White House, he is still focused on the ravages of dementia — but this time he is using the condition as a political weapon, alleging without medical proof that President Biden, 81, is “cognitively impaired.” Those attacks follow a long pattern for the former president, who for years has bashed enemies as mentally frail while boasting in public about “acing” the Montreal Cognitive Assessment, a basic test that flags signsof early dementia.
Trump regularly claims to have passed the test twice, but through a spokesman, his campaign declined to release his test results or to specify when he most recently took it. Rep. Ronny Jackson (R-Tex.), the former White House physician, said in an interview this monththat he administered it to Trump once, in January 2018. Trump in November released a three-paragraph letter in which Bruce Aronwald, a doctor of osteopathy, said that Trump’s health was excellent and that “cognitive exams were exceptional” but provided no details. Aronwald did not respond to a request for comment.
Ziad Nasreddine, the neurologist who created the test, said in an interviewthat if an individual in their 70s had not taken the Montreal test since 2018, the results would not be valid to cite today.
Trump’s longfixation on mental fitness followed years of watching his father’s worsening dementia — a formative period that some associates said has been a defining and little-mentioned factor in his life, and which left him with an abiding concern that he might someday inherit the condition. While much remains unknown about Alzheimer’s, experts say there is an increased risk of inheriting a gene associated with the disease from a parent.
“Donald is no doubt fearful of Alzheimer’s,” said a former senior executive at the Trump Organization, who worked for years with Trump and saw him interact with Fred Trump Sr., and who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe a confidential relationship. “He’s not going to talk about and not going to admit to it. But it’s relevant because every day he is hitting Biden with whether or not he is capable mentally of doing the job.”
Trump’s father’s condition also drove a wedge into his family, which fell into years of lawsuits that alleged in part that Donald Trump sought to take advantage of his father’s dementia to wrest control of the family estate — litigation that introduced reams of medical records detailing Fred Trump Sr.’s condition.
The full story of Trump’s father’s illness, and the family turmoil it sparked, casts new light on his views of an issue that’s become central to the presidential campaign, with pollsters finding a majority of voters have concerns about the mental fitness of both Trump and Biden. Those concerns have sharpened as both candidates have had lapses on the trail, with Biden mixing up the names of the leaders of Mexico and Egypt and Trump confusing former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley with former speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, and warning that the United States could face “World War II” under Biden.
Ok, wait a minute. Biden misspoke and said the wrong country in a passing comment which I’ve done myself while Trump very, very weirdly kept saying the name of Nikki Haley over and over again as he was campaigning against her and it was very unclear if he was literally blaming her for failing to stop the insurrection. They are not the same at all.
Try this one on for size:
Anyway:
In the early 1970s, as Donald took a leading role in the firm, Fred Trump Sr. told the New York Times that “Donald is the smartest person I know.”
By 1990, though, the claims of Trump’s business genius were being questioned as he fell into desperate financial condition. He eventually filed six corporate bankruptcies, and he faced the prospect of personal bankruptcy as his first wife, Ivana, sought $1 billion in a divorce settlement. His high-profile casinos in Atlantic City were badly faltering.
That’s when Trump sought to change his father’s will.
Trump arranged for a lawyer to write an amendment called a codicil giving him control over the estate and to protect his inheritance from creditors.He then had two of his father’s most trusted associates deliver it to Fred Trump Sr. as if it were a formality. ButTrump’s mother, Mary MacLeod Trump, forbade Trump’s father from signing it immediately. Trump’s sister, Maryanne Trump Barry, later said in a deposition that her father didn’t like how the effort to change the will was being done “behind his back.”
Trump later admitted in a deposition that he hoped the gambit would rescue him from financial problems by giving him significant control over the estate. “It was a very bad period of time and if for any reason I was not able to come out of this well, then this would be giving me a trust to protect” his inheritance, Trump said.
That effort failed — but Trump’s actions would expose his father’s deteriorating mental state.
‘Obvious memory decline’
In October 1991, around the timeFred Trump Sr. turned 86 years old, hevisited his doctor, C. Ronald MacKenzie. In a report about that visit, the physician wrote that he had “significant memory impairment” with “early signs of dementia” and “obvious memory decline in recent years,” according to records disclosed in the court case.
Months later, a second doctor wrote in a neuropsychological evaluation that Fred Trump Sr. “did not know his birth date, was unsure of his age, and turned to his son [Robert] for help in responding to questions.” The exam by Rajendra Jutagir found that Fred Trump Sr.’s cognitive ability was below the 15th percentile for a person in his age group. He could only recall three of the previous nine U.S. presidents and could not draw the hands of a clock to show the time.
Those detailed medical reports, later entered into court filings, paint an early picture of what would be a long decline for Fred Trump Sr. — one that his son claimed not to notice for years.
“Do you recall your father suffering from any memory lapses in 1991?” an attorney asked Trump in a deposition conducted in 2000.
“No,” Trump responded.
“Do you recall him being diagnosed as having senile dementia in 1991?” the attorney said.
“No, I don’t,” Trump said in the deposition. To the contrary, Trump said that his father was “very, very sharp.”
Mary L. Trump said those claims were contradicted by other family members. Robert Trump, Donald’s younger brother, said that their father was in “notable decline” by 1990, as recounted by Mary L. Trump in a lawsuit over the will. Trump’s sister, Maryanne Barry, later was secretly recorded by Mary L. Trump as saying that “it was basically taking the whole estate and giving it to Donald” at a time when “Dad was in dementia.” (Maryanne Barry, who died last year, did not respond to a request for comment when The Post first revealed the secret tapes in 2020; Robert died in 2020.)
Regardless, by the mid-’90s even Donald Trump was publicly acknowledging the truth: that his father’s dementia was rapidly advancing.
A few years after his father’s diagnosis, Trump was driving down Fifth Avenue with his father when they passed by the Empire State Building, the iconic 102-story office tower, a landmark known well by both men. As Trump later recalled to the New York Times, his father said, “That’s a tall building, isn’t it? How many apartments are in that building?” Trump thought his father was “kidding” but eventually realized this was a sign of Alzheimer’s, he told the newspaper.
Around the same time, Trump held the family gathering at Mar-a-Lago, where Mary L. Trump says Fred Trump Sr. did not recognize her or two of his children, Robert and Maryanne. After the incident in which Fred Trump Sr. seemed to ask permission to get a new Cadillac, Robert said it would be taken care of, but “Donald just walked away, like, ‘Oh, God, get him away from me. He’s so annoying.’ He had no patience, none whatsoever,” recalled Mary L. Trump, who has more recently become an outspoken political opponent of her uncle, including writing a book that called him “the world’s most dangerous man.”
The former senior executive at the Trump Organization recalled Trump bringing his father to a party in the mid-1990s when it was clear the elder Trump was suffering from dementia. Hesaid Donald Trump had an abiding fear of germs and diseases.
“I remember distinctly he brought his father to the party and Donald was either holding his hand or close to him physically, and he introduced me to him and you could see his father wasn’t comprehending much of anything,” the former executive said. “Donald was not the type to show affection. It was just Donald being matter-of-fact that his father had Alzheimer’s.”
Trump later said in an appearance with television personality Mehmet Oz that his father in his last few years had developed what was “probably” Alzheimer’s, “which was very hard for us because he was such a smart guy, such a wonderful guy and, you know, that’s a rough thing.”
Trump’s father died at 93 years old in June 1999, eight years after the first formal diagnosis of dementia.
Mary Trump and her siblings sued Trump over the will and there was a settlement. The article goes on to recapitulate the Trump cognitive test story in which he claimed on TV that he could memorize five words, “person, woman, man, camera, TV” (all of which he was looking at in the moment) which meant that his mind was sharp as a tack.
Trump has long emphasized his belief in the importance of genetics. He has said he is a “super genius” because of his “great genes.”
Trump’s niece, Mary L. Trump, said such beliefs are noteworthy. “If intelligence is a genetically inherited state” as Trump believes, she said, “then something like dementia, Alzheimer’s, which do have very strong genetic components, is more of a concern to somebody who is directly related to Fred Trump Sr. as Donald is. I’m not saying he has dementia, but you can’t say the one thing and not also acknowledge the other.”
Experts said much remains unknown about how people get Alzheimer’s, but research has shown that genetics may play a role. […]
Forty to 65 percent of people who have the diseaseinherited a gene particularly associated with increased risk, according to Allison Reiss, who studies the gene and is a member of the Alzheimer’s Foundation of America’s Medical Scientific and Memory Screening Advisory Board. That risk can further increase depending on whether an individual has the gene from one parent or from both, she said. (There is no indication that Trump’s mother had dementia.)
Reiss, who stressed she was speaking in general and not about any individual, said that a blood test can determine the presence of the gene. Experts said it is important to note that having the gene or other potential markers does not mean that a person will get the disease; nor does the absence of them mean a person won’t get Alzheimer’s.
Trump has not said whether he has taken a number of specialized tests for Alzheimer’s, including genetic testing. Such exams can also include brain scans, cerebrospinal fluid tests and blood tests, according to the Alzheimer’s Association.
Trump has not released a full medical report during the campaign, so far providing only the brief assessment from his physician, Aronwald.
Of course he hasn’t taken any of those tests. I’m not convinced he ever took the simple one that Jackson signed off on either. He’s such a sycophant that he could easily have just told Trump what was on the test so he could brag that he aced it. Trump’s given some weird descriptions of it.
It’s natural that Trump would be worried. I think anyone would be. What’s not natural is that he’s such a narcissistic sociopath that he’s accusing Joe Biden of having the disease that he’s so terrified of having himself. Has there ever been a more obvious example of projection? The bigger question is why so many in the media are determined to let him do it.