Gachnar: “I am the dark lord of nightmares! (Buffy tries not to laugh) The bringer of terror! Tremble before me. Fear me!”
C’mon, MAGAstinians. Buy another ticket for the Trump Train. Buy some more crappy merch! Sink a few more of your boats! It’ll be fun. Your enemies will tremble as Trump makes the flag you wrap yourselves in mean fascism instead of freedom. C-O-O-L, huh?
Lara Trump promises “four years of scorched earth when Donald Trump retakes the White House” (if he stays out of jail). It’s a helluva campaign pitch:
Trump has been persuaded to turn down the volume on the threats of vengeance, but his allies are continuing to advance this message. Lara Trump, the candidate’s daughter-in-law whom he installed as co-chair of the Republican National Committee because the incumbent merely cast doubt on the 2020 election without going so far as to conclusively say Trump won, unleashed this terrifying promise:
He showed us a whole lot that we didn’t know was going on — within the media, within Washington, D.C. He exposed a lot of people. So they have to do everything they can to keep him out of that White House ’cause they know Donald Trump gets in for four more years, the jig is up for them. The gloves are off. There are no holds barred here. He is going full-throttle. He’s not worried about winning another election. It’s four years of scorched earth when Donald Trump retakes the White House.
Doesn’t that sound like fun? People are tired of the toxicity of national politics, I get it. Enough to stay home and not get their shiny, white vinyl souls tainted by voting this November. Remind them what MAGA is selling.
Just minutes after the full jury was selected in Donald Trump's New York hush money criminal trial, someone appears to have set themself on fire outside the courthouse, per CNN's @thelauracoates. pic.twitter.com/skRj1dXD9t
JV Last writes about one of the most profoundly depressing aspects of this election — half the country’s willingness to reward Trump with another term despite his performance as the worst leader in a national crisis in memory.
There’s a Churchill quote that goes something like this: The after effect from the extreme prostrations of war—even a successful war—is ennui.
He was explaining that in democratic societies, wars begin with drums and parades, but ends with public disaffection.3
There might be a corollary to this rule concerning pandemics because it is pretty clear that COVID broke something deep in the American psyche.
It’s why people went crazy for two years, screaming at strangers in the grocery store about masks.
It’s why we have a mass economic delusion in which people aren’t able to accurately perceive the state of the economy.
It’s why we got the meme-stock phenomenon.
It’s why our popular culture has largely chosen to ignore COVID and pretend that the pandemic never happened.4
And it’s why Americans have made themselves so willfully blind about what happened in 2020 that they are seriously considering reelecting the man who managed the greatest failure of the federal government in a century.
There’s something about a pandemic that’s different from an economic collapse. Herbert Hoover could never have gotten reelected after the economy collapsed on his watch. People fixated on the cost of his mistakes and were determined never to go back again.
But a pandemic is different. No one wants to think too deeply about 2020. They want to look away. They want to not remember it.
And this willed amnesia has made the unthinkable possible.
He’ right and it’s terrifying, especially since the world is in a major state of transition and putting someone as incompetent as Trump in charge should be unthinkable.
Last linked and excerpted a great article by Stephen Robinson who put all of Trump’s COVID atrocities in one place. It’s hard for me to understand how people can forget all this but apparently they have.
Remember that Trump dismantled most of the government’s pandemic preparedness prior to COVID:
The first recorded case of covid in the US was in January 2020. A few weeks later Judd Legum at Popular Information posted on Twitter, “I feel like more people should be talking about the fact that Trump fired the entire pandemic response team two years ago and then didn’t replace them.”
Indeed, the Trump administration gutted the infectious disease defense infrastructure through shortsighted cost-cutting measures starting in 2018 — a year after passing a trillion-dollar tax giveaway for his billionaire buddies. The administration specifically canned the executive branch team that would’ve coordinated a response.
Trump then spent most of February 2020 minimizing covid’s threat. He called the coronavirus Democrats’ “new hoax” at a campaign rally in South Carolina. By April, when everything was going to hell, he lamented that the pandemic was “something that nobody expected.” However, former President George W. Bush had warned in 2005 that “if we wait for a pandemic to appear, it will be too late to prepare.” Bush compared a pandemic to a forest fire: “If caught early it might be extinguished with limited damage. If allowed to smolder, undetected, it can grow to an inferno that can spread quickly beyond our ability to control it.”
Bush paved the way for pandemic planning, which the Obama administration continued. Only Trump was simultaneously arrogant and stupid enough to demolish what his predecessors had built.
Then-presidential candidate Joe Biden warned on October 25, 2019, that “we are not prepared for a pandemic.
Last archly observes:
Honestly, this is like a president dismantling a system that would have dealt with a sneak attack on Pearl Harbor, then having a rival say, “This is dangerous! Pearl Harbor could be attacked and it would be catastrophic!” And then Pearl Harbor gets blown to hell and . . . people think about electing the first guy again.
Trump and the masks. He gestured limply at the guidance and then did everything he could to persuade people not to wear them:
By the summer of 2020, even such Republicans as Sen. Rick Scott from Florida, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, and Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey publicly encouraged wearing masks and social distancing. Trump not only refused to promote masks but told the Wall Street Journal that they were possibly more trouble than they were worth.
“People touch them,” he said. “And they grab them and I see it all the time. They come in, they take the mask. Now they’re holding it now in their fingers. And they drop it on the desk and then they touch their eye and they touch their nose. No, I think a mask is a — it’s a double-edged sword.”
Trump consistently undermined any mask-wearing guidance from his staff.
“We have urged Americans to wear masks, and I emphasized this is a patriotic thing to do,” he said in August 2020 but added, “Maybe they’re great, and maybe they’re just good. Maybe they’re not so good.”
This was the worst:
One of the important functions of the federal government during a pandemic is to control and centralize the procurement and distribution of critical equipment so that individual states don’t end up competing against one another and creating suboptimal allocations. Trump failed in this task.
And as he was failing he tried to blame not just Democratic governors for the shortages that arose, but frontline medical personnel.
[T]here was an ongoing shortage of vital personal protection equipment in hospitals, and Trump openly accused doctors and nurses of “hoarding” masks and ventilators. He expected governors, especially Democrats, to sing his praises publicly in exchange for him doing his job, and states were pitted against each other for the equipment, which only drove up costs.
“It’s a source of frustration that there’s not more of a national strategy on procurement of these critical pieces of equipment that everyone across our country is going to need,” Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer told NBC News in April 2020. “And when we’re bidding against one another and the price keeps going up, then we can’t count on the national stockpile to meet our needs, it creates a very dangerous situation.”
Trump responded by denigrating Whitmer, and it took him a week to approve a disaster declaration for Michigan.
For Trump it was all about his re-election
By September 2020, Trump openly blamed “blue states” for the escalating covid death toll. He obviously didn’t back this up with data. He just suggested that if you excluded the dead from “blue states,” then the US numbers overall would’ve been more in line with other nations. . . .
This is especially sickening because Vanity Fair reported that the Trump administration had dismissed a national pandemic plan as bad politics. It was deemed preferable to let the virus rage through blue states — where it was disproportionately killing people of color — and blame the Democratic governors. Trump’s advisers had to tell him directly that the virus was hurting “our people” — white MAGA voters in Republican-run states.
How about trump’s first Big Lie. You know, the one that resulted in hundreds of thousands of avoidable deaths?
Bob Woodward revealed in his book “Rage” that Trump was fully aware that the coronavirus was more than just a bad flu. As early as January 28, his national security adviser Robert O’Brien warned Trump that covid would become “the biggest national security threat you face in your presidency. This is going to be the roughest thing you face.”
“This is deadly stuff,” Trump told Woodward on February 7. “You just breathe the air and that’s how it’s passed. And so that’s a very tricky one. That’s a very delicate one. It’s also more deadly than even your strenuous flus.”
Trump’s public statements often contradicted his public health advisers and created confusion. He repeatedly claimed the US had the virus “under control,” when this simply wasn’t true.
Trump administration officials insisted he was simply being “optimistic” when he’d claim the virus would “disappear” miraculously. His interview with Woodward, however, made it clear that he understood how dire the situation was. . . .
“I wanted to always play it down,” Trump told Woodward on March 19. “I still like playing it down because I don’t want to create a panic.” . . .
Yet he admitted to Woodward that the virus was a growing threat to the nation.
“Now it’s turning out it’s not just old people, Bob. But just today, and yesterday, some startling facts came out. It’s not just old, older … young people, too, plenty of young people.”
“Slow the testing down, please”:
“When you do testing to that extent, you’re gonna find more people, you’re gonna find more cases. So I said to my people slow the testing down, please,” Trump told his mostly mask-less supporters at a campaign rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma — the very same one where Herman Cain likely contracted covid and later died.
Trump’s careless disregard for public health precautions led to him contracting the virus in late September. Former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows revealed that Trump tested positive on the same day as the White House’s gloating superspreader event in honor of Supreme Court Justice nominee Amy Coney Barrett.
Trump was already experiencing symptoms and should’ve quarantined for 10 days, but visibly unwell, he still attended the first screaming match debate with Biden. At least 11 covid cases were linked to that event, including Trump’s debate prepper Chris Christie, who was hospitalized. Fortunately, Trump failed to spread the virus to his political opponent, but he kept his condition secret for days. When close aide Hope Hicks tested positive, he announced he and First Lady Melania Trump were entering quarantine, implying that Hicks had exposed them to the virus. He even attempted to scapegoat military personnel and law enforcement for infecting Hicks and other members of White House staff.
Read it all and then ask yourself how it’s even possible that we are having to fight like we’ve never fought before to ensure that this man is not ever allowed near the White House again. Nothing makes me feel as disoriented as this does.
The Republican Party has been in such a state of pandemonium for so long that it’s hard to imagine what new turns it can take. Yet from week to week it always does. The 2020 election tantrum and insurrection was certainly the pinnacle of Trumpish anarchy but the GOP congress has been working hard to emulate their Dear Leader ever since they won the majority in 2022. It’s a bad idea to make sweeping statements about them finally jumping the shark since they always manage to outdo themselves but this week is certainly one for the books if only because the stakes are so very high and they have sunk so very low.
As I wrote a couple of days ago, House Speaker Mike Johnson was caught in a trap between his fellow right wing zealots led by Marjorie Taylor Greene who have appropriated Donald Trump’s hostility to Ukraine and the rest of his caucus which is more reluctant to see the world blow up. The events in the middle east last weekend were a sober reminder that the United States’ role in global security isn’t the best issue to use as leverage for parochial electoral advantage. It can get real very quickly.
Johnson had indicated that he was going to bring four separate votes to the floor — Ukraine, Israel, Taiwan and a bill to require Russian assets to be confiscated for Ukraine along with a ban on Tik Tok unless it is sold to a different entity, among other things. This caused a huge uproar among the MAGA fanatics who were distraught that they didn’t get their way. (They claimed they wanted funding for a massive border crackdown but everyone knows that Trump ordered that nothing should be done so he could use it as an election issue.) It was unclear if Johnson’s deals would ever make it to the floor and hovering over all of this is the fact that Greene has been holding the threat of deposing Johnson over his head for weeks.
So that’s where we stood on Wednesday morning and it didn’t look very promising. Then suddenly, out of the blue, Mike Johnson had what he would no doubt call a “come to Jesus” moment and he went before the microphones that afternoon to declare that he didn’t care if they threw him out of the Speaker’s office, he was going to do the right thing. He went on to give a stirring speech about how he believes the intelligence he’s seen and the danger of allowing Ukraine to fall.
So, I think that Vladimir Putin would continue to march through Europe if he were allowed. I think he might go to the Balkans next. I think he might have a showdown with Poland or one of our NATO allies. To put it bluntly, I would rather send bullets to Ukraine than American boys… this is not a game, this is not a joke.
.@SpeakerJohnson (R-LA): "My philosophy is you do the right thing and you let the chips fall where they may. If I operated out of fear of a motion to vacate, I would never be able to do my job." pic.twitter.com/YfJYu0Nyln
It’s hard to say what happened to bring that about. He’s been stalling this necessary funding for months and could have suspended the rules and allowed the Senate package to come to the floor and it would have passed easily. Instead he allowed Trump and Greene to dictate this course and it’s been a disaster. Maybe it was that intelligence finally convincing him that this was leading to a very bad outcome or perhaps he just sees the upside to being a profile in courage instead of a MAGA toadie. Who knows? Maybe he got word from a higher power reminding him that Donald Trump isn’t really the Big Guy In Charge.
All day Thursday there were reports of intense infighting in the caucus over rumors that Johnson and members of the leadership were going to back a rules change that would require more than one member (like Greene) to call for a motion to vacate the chair, the deal with the devil that his predecessor made that ultimately took him down. Some members are clearly getting tired of these antics:
Rs say it's time to marginalize hardliners blocking agenda
GOP Rep. Mike Lawler says three Rs on Rules — Roy, Norman and Massie — should be "removed" if they don't advance conference's position.
D'Esposito calls for "repercussions" Bacon backs changing motion-to-vacate rule pic.twitter.com/KS8cnuIY5I
The extremists went ballistic over this, cornering Johnson on the floor and he eventually shot down the rumor, saying the rule would not be changed.
You get the feeling that Johnson has just put himself in the hands of fate at this point. And fate looks a lot like Marjorie Taylor Greene:
Marge Gone Wild: “I don’t care if the Speaker’s office becomes a revolving door … The days are over of the old Republican Party that wants to fund foreign wars and murder people while they stab the American people in their face!” pic.twitter.com/yUrQ814Nwp
With Democrats staying cool (or as Minority leader Hakeem Jeffries called it “united and frosty”) there is every reason to believe she will be thwarted if she tries it so I remain skeptical that she will. She enjoys the attention she gets wielding it as a threat. But any member could do it and some sound so incensed that one might just decide to go for it.
On Thursday night Democrats on the rules committee broke with all precedent and stepped in to save the bills, voting to move them to the floor.. It’s expected that Democrats will likewise vote to proceed and the bills will pass with bipartisan support in both houses. That’s unless something happens to derail it which could easily happen because Republicans are crazy.
What does the leader of their party say about all this? Well, he’s on trial in New York and is unable to watch TV or tweet any instructions. Trump has had some luck with intimidating jurors already (with the help of Fox News) by suggesting that there are liberal plants in the jury pool lying to get chosen so they can stick it to him as usual. One juror has already asked to be excused and it’s possible others will follow once it becomes clear that Fox is intent upon identifying the ones about whom Trump has suspicions.
He’s also very upset that he has to sit in the freezing courtroom from morning until night (It’s common for the elderly to get cold easily…)
Trump: It is a shame. I am sitting here for days now from morning until night in that freezing room. Freezing! All for this. This is your result. It is very unfair. pic.twitter.com/K0cjplq9nH
As for what’s going on in Washington, much less the rest of the world, he’s not really engaged. He doesn’t know what to say about anything to do with foreign policy anyway except “it wouldn’t have happened” if he were president and complain about how nobody else is paying their fair share. That’s pretty much all he had to say about Johnson’s plan in one perfunctory Truth Social rant on Thursday. He’s focused on the biggest issue: himself.
This may explain why Johnson is finally going to get this done — Trump is out of commission and unable to meddle in things he doesn’t understand. His being on trial may end up being the best thing that’s happened to our politics in a very long time. As long as he’s tied up in court he’s irrelevant when it comes to anything important.
Anytime a glass-half-empty progressive launches into how they refuse to vote for “the lesser of two evils,” don’t even argue the point. Reject the false premise. It’s not an invitation to debate anyway. The framing is intended to shut down debate.
Want to see how it’s done? Behold AOC:
What a smart and succinct answer. She’s not getting enough credit for forcefully articulating the progressive case for Biden. Such an important message and messenger. https://t.co/8QqfRpVlyH
Actually, she didn’t articulate a progressive case for Biden in that clip, exactly. She advocated for a progressive perspective larger than the presidential race and the war in Gaza.
Here’s where AOC understates the point. It’s not just hundreds of elections at issue in November, it’s tens of thousands in 50 states and the territories. There are 914 elections in North Carolina alone, and that number doesn’t include hundreds of municipal races. That’s one state. And the entire NCGOP council of state slate is a horrorshow.
Polling seems to be swinging President Joe Biden’s way, for what that’s worth. While he’s out in the field promoting his accomplishments, Donald Trump is stuck in a New York courtroom. The problem for Biden is that Trump’s courtroom antics are getting the headlines. Trump is the living embodiment of conservative disrespect for the rule of law when applied to them: “For my friends, everything; for my enemies, the law.”
Trump models himself after mobsterJohn Gotti, says Tim O’Brien, Senior Executive Editor at Bloomberg Opinion, and has compared himself to Al Capone. The would-be tough guy believes it’s appropriate to stare down jurors and look at the judge, as Gotti did, “with a big FU on his face.” His attempts to (successfully, it seems) intimdate jurors and to repeatedly violate the gag order imposed by the court should land him, finally, in jail, Andrew Weissmann, former Department of Justice official, told “Deadline White House.”
The judge cannot tolerate Trump’s behavior lest the message it sends to his MAGA base that they too can violate the law with impunity. “The road to hell in this country is going to be thinking that you should not apply the exact same rules to Donald Trump as wou would to any other defendant,” Weissman said on Thursday.
Ian Bassin struck me to the core with his observations about certain people rejecting a rules-based society for a state of nature where might makes right.
“If you’re strong enough to go punch another kid in the schoolyard and take their milk money, you go ahead,” says Bassin, Executive Director of Protect Democracy. “Some people have no compunction that way. They have no scruples. For the rest of us, we don’t want to live in that state of nature where we’re constantly fighting everybody for a scrap of food. We would like a system in which we are protected, our property is protected, our safety is protected. We would like there to be a system of rules. Those are the two fundamental different ways that we can organize society.”
Guess what MAGAstan looks like? Trump operates in that world. He sees it in his interest to attack every set of rules the rest of us depend on to protect us, even as he dupes his followers into believing they can count on him to protect them in a world of no rules he wants to create.
What Trump is engaged in at his trial in lower Manhattan, Bassin continues, is “an attack on the rules, an attack on courts, an attack on judges, an attack on jurors, an attack on witnesses, because they all represent contraints on what a bully can get away with. And it’s woe to all of us if he is able to succeed in undermining the system that protects us all to be secure and free.”
The International Criminal Court may be considering issuing international arrest warrants in the relatively near future against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and other top officials for alleged war crimes, N12 reported Thursday night.
Around 125 countries are members of the ICC, including essentially all of Europe, and are bound by treaty law to honor the ICC’s arrest warrants, though there have been examples of countries protesting such warrants and refusing to honor them.
Underminers Union spokesman, Tom Cotton, is displeased.
They're scared.
(The ICC has an arrest warrant out for Putin, and I am 110% sure the Prosecutor will seek warrants against Hamas leaders along with Israeli leaders) pic.twitter.com/2WpVKur6Cq
They didn’t get one. As NBC News reported, the Senate Democratic majority dismissed both of the articles against the DHS chief just hours after the proceedings began.
The speed of the impeachment trial was an embarrassing blow to Republicans who had threatened to gum up the Senate and delay the proceedings in a bid to highlight what they argue is Mayorkas’ failure to secure the border and stop the flow of thousands of undocumented migrants at the border. However, Democrats, who control the upper chamber, easily dispensed with the pair of impeachment articles — as well as several motions to adjourn the Senate.
There were a series of procedural votes, but ultimately it came to a relatively straightforward question: Did senators consider the impeachment articles against Mayorkas to be constitutionally legitimate? In votes that the GOP minority could not filibuster, it took 51 votes to reject the articles and end the process.
Yesterday, both articles received 51 votes, with the entirety of the Senate Democratic conference united.
The case against the Homeland Security secretary, in other words, has run its course, ending in predictable fashion.
But before the political world moves on, it’s worth considering just how weak the Republicans’ talking points were. To hear GOP senators tell it, (a) the Democrats’ rejection of the case against Mayorkas reflects a lack of seriousness about border policy; and (b) Democrats have set a dangerous new precedent by refusing to hold an impeachment trial in response to the House-passed articles.
“It doesn’t make any difference whether our friends on the other side thought he should have been impeached or not. He was,” Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said. “And by doing what we just did, we have in effect ignored the directions of the House, which were to have a trial. No evidence, no procedure — this is a day that’s not a proud day in the history of the Senate.”
Republican Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri added, “So this will be the precedent going forward. Impeachment as a constitutional matter is effectively dead now. They just they just killed it.”
[…]
First, at no point in recent months have GOP lawmakers in either chamber treated this process with even a hint of seriousness. The entire impeachment ordeal was a cheap stunt, and Senate Republicans all but admitted that they wanted a trial as part of an election-season public-relations gambit.
Second, if GOP officials want to talk about which party is serious about border policy, perhaps they can explain why they were so quick to kill the bipartisan border plan they requested.
Third, many of the Senate Republicans who insisted that the institution was required to conduct a full impeachment trial in response to House-backed articles are the same Senate Republicans who tried to forgo a full impeachment trial in response to House-backed articles three years ago after Donald Trump’s second impeachment.
As for the idea that Senate Democrats have set a dangerous precedent by dismissing impeachment articles without a trial, the GOP appears to have this backwards. The impeachment crusade against Mayorkas was itself a radical and unprecedented scheme. Republicans sought evidence of high crimes, failed to find any, and decided to nevertheless impeach a sitting cabinet secretary — without cause — for the first time in American history.
