He actually doubled down on his stupidity.
"what digby sez..."
Month: April 2024
The Trumpers have already “won” the immunity case:
Donald Trump‘s inner circle doesn’t expect the Supreme Court to go along with his extreme arguments about executive power in the immunity case before the justices. But what the high court does now is almost beside the point: Trump already won.
Three people with direct knowledge of the matter tell Rolling Stone that many of the former president’s lawyers and political advisers have already accepted that the justices will likely rule against him, and reject his claims to expansive presidential immunity in perpetuity. Bringing the case before the court — after a federal appeals court in Washington, D.C., shut down their arguments on executive power — was a delaying tactic designed to push Trump’s criminal election subversion trial past Election Day this fall. The strategy paid off so much more than MAGAworld anticipated.
“We already pulled off the heist,” says a source close to Trump, noting it doesn’t matter to them what the Supreme Court decides now.
Trump’s lawyers and other confidants had widely expected — and had told the former president as much — that the court maneuver would delay the election subversion trial, but perhaps only to around the summer. For months, Trump attorneys were actively preparing themselves and their client to face a trial, over his efforts to overturn the 2020 election and his role in the violent Jan. 6 assault at the U.S. Capitol, right around the time of the Republican Party’s nominating convention, the sources add.
If the federal trial were to proceed during this election year, much of Team Trump had predicted it would be significantly more damaging politically to the presumptive Republican presidential nominee than, for instance, his ongoing criminal hush-money trial in Manhattan.
“We planned for that exhausting schedule and split screen,” says a person involved with the planning.
But the Supreme Court’s conservative supermajority, which Trump built as president, came through for him in a way that many Trump advisers didn’t believe was probable. When news broke in late February that the court would take up Trump’s claims of vast immunity, Trumpland was so elated that a lawyer close to Trump told Rolling Stone they were “literally popping champagne.”
They are banking everything on his winning in November. I hate to tell them but if this unfolds the way they think, if he loses this case will go forward and he is going to be tried. They won’t be popping champagne when that happens.
It’s going to be up to the American people to beat him at the polls to hold him accountable. After that, the legal system should carry on and hold him accountable for his crimes.
What is he, three?
Philip Bump did a nice rundown of the “tortured” right wing rationalizations over Trumps criminal behavior. (gift link)If you don’t watch Fox you will be surprised at just how stupid it really is:
If last week is any guide, somewhere north of 2 million people tuned in to Jesse Watters’s prime-time show on Fox News on Monday night to hear him moan that Donald Trump was being tortured. That the treatment the former president was experiencing during his criminal trial in New York was equivalent to — or perhaps worse than? — that experienced by at Guantánamo Bay.
“Donald Trump, been on the move his whole life,” Watters told viewers after describing the purported leniency Democrats had offered those detainees. “Golf. Rallies. Movement. Action. Sunlight. Fresh air. Freedom. This isn’t lawfare. It’s torture.”
He played a clip of a podcast hosted by Trump’s former attorney Michael Cohen — expected to testify against Trump in the Manhattan hush money case — and whimpered about how unfair it was.
“The star witness, who went to prison for lying,” Watters said, “is torturing Trump and bossing the judge around.”
Both of those things are, in fact, happening in equal measure when Cohen says things on his podcast. Which is to say that neither is happening at all, for obvious reasons.
But Watters was simply building to his central point: that the Manhattan case was simply a function of a personal vendetta against Trump and not, per his own interpretation of state statutes, a violation of the law.
“There’s nothing wrong with the nondisclosure agreement,” Watters told the camera. Then: “Can you believe the Democrats still can’t get over the 2016 election? It’s now a crime to beat Hillary.”
That was the text on the lower third of the screen, too: “IT’S NOW A CRIME TO BEAT HILLARY.”
There’s more, much more, and you should click over to read the whole thing.
A few hours before Watters’s show, “Fox & Friends” host Ainsley Earhardt dug a little deeper on this idea.
“Does this set a precedent for other people who want to run for president?” she fretted. “What if they’ve done something like this in the past?” She offered a slippery-slope example: If someone “paid off a girl when they were 30 years old, then that was election interference.”
The short answer is no, of course: If you’re not actively a candidate, you’re not subject to campaign finance rules. But also, is Earhardt — who positions her Christian faith as a central element of her identity — really worried that guys who tried to cover up allegations of extramarital affairs with porn stars might be dissuaded from running for president? That’s the concern? That this unacceptably narrows the field of possible leaders of the country?
Trump has long benefited from his allies excusing or downplaying his behavior and comments. Tuesday is the fourth anniversary of his wondering during a news conference whether we couldn’t inject light or disinfectant into people to combat the coronavirus — comments incorrectly distilled as his saying that people should inject bleach but fairly dismissed as unworkable and bizarre. Watters, like many others, has waved those comments away not by defending them but by criticizing the exaggerated criticisms of it.
For nearly nine years now, Trump has been the driving figure on the political right. Over that time, he and his allies have developed robust tactics for dismissing or sidelining criticism. We see them now deployed in a much more challenging context: against a criminal justice system that is predicated on distilling truth from fiction.
The cult will buy anything, obviously. But he’s in court now, with all kinds of rules (which he whines daily are unfaaaaaair!) that apply to all of us. The right wing caterwauling isn’t going to help him there.
Except for the police unions, the unions are putting some real muscle behind Biden in this election:
The Bulwark’s JV Last with a very interesting historical observation:
In taking in the testimony of David Pecker, it is tempting to say that he was the Joseph Goebbels of the MAGA movement, but that’s not quite right. Pecker is much closer to Dietrich Eckart.
Let’s talk about this villain.
Dietrich Eckart was a German “journalist” who co-founded the German Worker’s Party, which was the precursor to the Nazi Party.
Eckart met Adolf Hitler in 1919 and saw in him a kindred spirit. They became friends and Eckart was something of a mentor. He believed that Hitler was the man to lead German workers to power. To that end, in 1920 he convinced some Nazi financial backers to purchase a tabloid newspaper, the Völkischer Beobachter (the “People’s Observer”).
Eckart became the paper’s editor and this former tabloid suddenly started functioning as the house organ of the Nazi Party. The Völkischer Beobachter was not sympathetic to the Nazi Party. It did not have goals and beliefs aligned with the Nazi Party.
It took direction from the Nazi Party.
Which is precisely what David Pecker started doing with the National Enquirer in 2015.
Here’s the Washington Post describing parts of Pecker’s testimony:
In mid-April 2016, the National Enquirer published a story alleging that Cruz’s father, Rafael, had been working with Lee Harvey Oswald in the days before Oswald assassinated President John F. Kennedy. This was a ridiculous claim . . . But Trump seized on it the following month after Rafael Cruz attacked him. . . .
Cruz’s “father, you know, was with Lee Harvey Oswald prior to Oswald’s, you know, being shot,” he said in an interview on Fox News’s “Fox & Friends,” mixing up the details a bit. “What was he doing with Lee Harvey Oswald, shortly before the death?” he added. “Before the shooting? It’s horrible.”
That story, it turns out, ran with the blessing of Michael Cohen, Trump’s attorney-slash-fixer. . . .
Cohen would at times pitch stories, Pecker testified, and the magazine would share stories before they ran to get Cohen’s thoughts. Pecker insisted that he didn’t work with Trump on the stories; whether Trump was apprised of the stories by Cohen can be evaluated based on other evidence. . . .
From the witness stand, Pecker identified other stories targeting Trump’s primary opponents in that cycle: one about neurosurgeon Ben Carson—that the doctor essentially admitted—and one making a similar claim about an alleged extramarital dalliance by Sen. Marco Rubio.
How blatant was the fabrication process? This blatant:
Manhattan prosecutor Joshua Steinglass asked Pecker about the [Cruz-Oswald story’s] origins during the trial Tuesday in Manhattan. Pecker said that then-National Enquirer editor-in-chief Dylan Howard and the tabloid’s research department got involved, and Pecker indicated that they faked the photo that was the foundation for the story.
“We mashed the photos and the different picture with Lee Harvey Oswald. And mashed the two together. And that’s how that story was prepared — created I would say,” Pecker said on the witness stand.
I want to emphasize this again, because it cannot be stressed enough: There is no precedent for this in modern American politics.
We have an ongoing debate here about whether Trump is the logical extension of existing trends in conservative/Republican politics, or something new. And obviously, the truest answer is both.
But it’s worth appreciating that Trump’s relationship with Pecker and the National Enquirer was a genuine innovation. Trump took the media model used by by authoritarian movements in twentieth century Europe and imported it to America.
It really could happen here. In fact David Pecker just testified, under oath, how he made it happen.
He goes on to add this, which really is creepy:
Lest you think I’m exaggerating, here’s a headline from this morning:
Luckily, they are both imbeciles.
Think about this:
In his first questions of the day, Associate Justice Neil M. Gorsuch asked Turner to parse exactly how close a patient needs to be to death under Idaho’s law. He asked whether the law would permit an abortion in the case of a molar or ectopic pregnancy — both of which are nonviable and can be life-threatening — but deny one in a case where a patient would probably die at some point, but not imminently.
“It doesn’t matter whether it happens tomorrow or next week or a month from now?” Gorsuch asked.
“There is no imminence requirement,” Turner said. “This whole notion of delayed care is just not consistent with the Idaho Supreme Court’s reading of the statute and what the statute says.”
This is what these monsters are discussing in the Supreme Court today. They are actually turning over in their minds when it’s acceptable to let women die for their grotesque ideology. This whole argument is just horrifying.
From what we have learned, it appears that the Supreme Court majority believes that states have the right to completely deny health care to pregnant women, even if it means they will die.
Joe Biden’s the big winner — on policy anyway
While most of the country was riveted by recaps of Donald Trump’s sordid hush money trial on Tuesday, something amazing was happening in Washington: the US Senate debated and then passed the national security package that’s been consuming the capitol for the last six months. With a lopsided vote of 79-18 the bills with aid for Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan among some other things will finally be behind us. Notably, there is no increased funding for the border because Donald Trump ordered the Republicans to reject it so that he can keep demagoguing the issue during the campaign. It’s a big win for President Joe Biden and the Democrats.
The GOP infighting has escalated in the wake of the House’s months long tantrum led by the far right extremists who seemed to truly believe that they could hold their breath until they turned blue and they would eventually get everything they wanted. Leading MAGA rebel Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., left town without calling for Speaker Mike Johnson to vacate the chair, demanding instead that he resign, which isn’t going to happen. Podcaster Steve Bannon and a couple of fellow right wing sad sacks, Thomas Massie,R-Ky., and Paul Gosar, R-Az., joined the call but it’s clear that however frustrated some of them might be there is no appetite for any more internecine fights, at least for the moment. And the rest of the party is obviously sick of the kooks.
GOP Sen. Tom Tillis of North Carolina pulled no punches, talking about Greene’s malign influence, calling her “uninformed” and “a terrible leader” and complaining that she’s “dragging our brand down.”
Republican Rep. Tony Gonzales probably speaks for many in his party who are too cowardly to say it as plainly as he did when he called the wild extremists in the GOP “scumbags”
They all might want to take a look at the big orange guy who’s actually pulling the strings but then even he’s turning his back on Greene and continuing to support Johnson, telling a radio host:
Look, we have a majority of one, OK? It’s not like he can go and do whatever he wants to do. I think he’s a very good person. You know, he stood very strongly with me on NATO.
It was a bit low energy but it’s pretty clear that he’s not going to back any play to oust the speaker so Greene is sidelined, at least for now.
It’s been a bad run for Trump and for Greene these past few weeks. But you know who’s having a great run? President Joe Biden. His poll numbers are edging up but it’s still incomprehensibly tight considering how much policy success he’s had with a congress that is so dysfunctional. Somehow, he and the Democrats have made it work for them.
I think we’re all familiar with Biden’s big legislative wins in the first two years with the American Rescue Plan which set the table for a very positive economic recovery, the big infrastructure bill which is just coming online all over the country, the first major gun safety bill in decades, capping prescription drug costs for seniors and much more. And it was all done with razor thin majorities in both houses with most passed with bipartisan votes despite what is arguably the most toxic political environment since the 1850s. It was a remarkable feat but I think most observers assumed that was going to be the end of it when the Republicans managed to eke out a tiny victory in House in 2022. How could anything get done with Donald Trump pulling the strings and crazed right wing extremists dominating the caucus?
They had their fun with the Hunter Biden farce and the various “investigations” into the so-called Biden Crime family which have gone nowhere. And immigration has been a genuinely vexing problem that the GOP has exploited as they always do. But as it turns out, while the House Republicans ran around in circles causing chaos on a weekly basis, the important sausage kept getting made. And despite all the drama, the Biden White House ended up getting most of what it wanted without having to give up much of anything in return, at least in part because the Republicans wouldn’t take yes for an answer when concessions were offered.
The biggest achievement was avoiding a costly debt limit/government shutdown and I wouldn’t have bet that would happen. But former speaker Kevin McCarthy and the White House negotiated a spending deal that served as the excuse to take down McCarthy. (As it turns out it was really about McCarthy refusing to stop an ethics investigation into Florida gadfly Matt Gaetz, but that’s another story.) McCarthy’s successor Mike Johnson kept the spending agreement in place and fought off another attempt to shut down the government. Just this past month they passed the FISA extension backed by the White House and now the big national security package, the ugliest sausage making extravaganza ever.
It’s been such pandemonium that it was hard to see exactly what was happening but now that the smoke is clearing it’s obvious that the writing was on the wall when former Speaker Kevin McCarthy gave so many concessions to the crazies during that bizarre speakers’ race at he beginning of the term. Handing the keys to that faction was a major mistake because those people are maximalists for whom politics is all or nothing and they can’t accept that having a tiny majority in one house of congress makes that impossible.
In the end it took the House Democrats being unprecedentedly united, despite some very real tensions within their own coalition, and a willingness for some moderate Republicans to finally stand their ground despite dilly-dallying around for months. Majority leader Schumer, kept his majority together without the centrist divas causing any trouble for once. Not only that, Senate Republicans who haven’t completely gone insane refused to follow the House model and came through on the important issues as well.
But there’s no doubt that it took a very steady hand in the White House to stay the course and keep working the legislative levers to get the job done. It wasn’t pretty but under the circumstances the achievements are very big wins at little cost. Meanwhile the Republicans are reeling with internal strife while their leader sits in a courtroom every day facing a jury in his criminal trial for paying off a porn star. You can’t ask for much more than that in an election year.
Salon
Let me count the ways
Good heavens, this garbled mess from RNC co-chair Lara Trump.
“We now have the ability at the RNC not just to have poll watchers… but people who can physically handle the ballots… So there was a moratorium for about 40 years on the RNC actually training people to work in these polling locations and the tabulation centers where the mail-in ballots come in. And last year, the judge who implemented that passed away, so that was lifted.”
“Poll observers are NEVER permitted to touch ballots,” tweets exasperated Democratic election protection attorney Marc Elias. “She is suggesting the RNC will infiltrate election offices.”
Observers physically handling ballots is BS, as Elias points out. But she’s just getting started on the wrongness.
First, some terminology. Poll watchers or observers are citizens pre-approved to be present inside a polling location as observers during voting. At most (at least in my state), they may bring to the attention of the chief judge any observed infractions or misapplication of voting rules, and that’s all. They are to sit quietly. No interactions with voters, verbal or physical. Poll workers are citizens approved and hired to administaer the actual election, issue ballots, check IDs, etc. Poll greeters or electioneers are political operatives who may interact with voters only outside the polling location’s marked electioneering boundaries.
The “moratorium” Lara Trump mentions was a standing court order enforcing a 1982 consent decree between the RNC and DNC. It limited the RNC, its agents’ and employees’ ability to engage in “ballot security” efforts without prior court approval. The RNC sued to get the decree rescinded after the election of Barack Obama. Third Circuit Appeals Court Judge Joseph Greenaway in his ruling noted, “the District Court has never prevented the RNC from implementing a voter fraud prevention program that the RNC has submitted for preclearance, at least in part, because the RNC has never submitted any voter fraud prevention program for preclearance.”
The RNC was never prohibited from appointing poll watchers, and did. Among other requirements, the RNC was probibited from engaging in a through g above. Observing vote counting has always been allowed, to my knowledge. I’ve watched mailed-in ballots be approved plenty of times.
I don’t have time to bird dog all of this, but per Wikpedia, Greenaway, 66, retired in 2023. He is still alive. District Court Judge Dickinson R. Debevoise issued the original 1982 ruling. He died in office in 2015, not last year. U.S. District Court Judge John Michael Vazquez (still alive) allowed the consent decree to expire in December 2017. Debevoise expiring had nothing to do with it.
Like her father-in-law, Lara Trump is way out of her depth.
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The popularizer of “fake news” conspired to create it
Projection. Long has the left used that term to describe conservative accusations against the left. When Republicans allege the left commits some infraction against, what — Decency? Patriotism? Rule of law? Election integrity? — then likely they themselves are secretly or more subtly doing the same.
Inoculation is the underlying purpose. Loudly and often accuse your opponent of misbehavior in which you engage so that if ever caught in the act you can both-sides the affair. “Well, they do it too.”
Fake news is another Donald Trump effort at inverting reality. Trump, authoritarian-in-training, has long attempted bending reality to his will. His inauguration crowd was not more bigly than Barack Obama’s? Photographs prove it? Fake news! His team would present “alternative facts” they knew were untrue but were the Trump-approved version of history. Period!
Now on trial on criminal charges in Manhattan, Trump has summoned the MAGA cult, as he did on Jan. 6, 2021, to come by the thousands to protest unfairness like you’ve never seen. Only a handful of pro-Trump protesters answered the call on Monday.
Ah, but that is fake news! Time to invert reality again.
Trump on Tuesday repeated his summons when supporters failed to show up for the second day of his trial. They were out there, Trump insisted, but complained that “for blocks , you can’t get near this courthouse.” By the thousands MAGA cultists were kept away from the courthouse by a massive police cordon!
Reporter Vaughn Hillyard captured what Tuesday actually looked like outside the New York courthouse.
Inside the courthouse, what testimony by David Pecker, former publisher of The National Enquirer, revealed is that Trump and Pecker conspired in 2016 both to suppress stories harmful to Trump and to publish fabricated stories harmful to his primary opponents.
From The New York Times:
Prosecutors called it the “Trump Tower conspiracy,” arguing that Mr. Pecker, Mr. Trump and Michael D. Cohen, who was then Mr. Trump’s personal lawyer and fixer, hatched a plot at the meeting to conceal sex scandals looming over Mr. Trump’s campaign.
Their effort led Mr. Pecker’s tabloids to buy and bury two damaging stories about Mr. Trump. Mr. Cohen purchased the silence of a porn star, a deal at the heart of the case against the former president.
Trump asked Pecker and his tabloids “to help the campaign,” to “catch and kill” stories harmful to Trump’s political fortunes. That was the suppress-the-truth part of the conspiracy. Then came the damage-opponents part:
The tabloid, for example, ran stories about Mr. Trump’s primary opponents, including Ben Carson, Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio. The prosecutors illustrated the point for jurors, posting several lurid headlines on screens: “Donald Trump Blasts Ted Cruz’s Dad for Photo with J.F.K. Assassin,” “Bungling Surgeon Ben Carson left Sponge in Patient’s Brain!” and, in a moment of ironic foreshadowing, “Ted Cruz Shamed by Porn Star.”
Stories Pecker fabricated on Trump’s behalf are, in Trump’s parlance, fake news. Trump’s fake news claims are, in Pee Wee Herman’s schoolyard vernacular, a case of he who smelt it, dealt it.
That is the supreme irony of what we have learned so far in the Trump trial. The man who popularized “fake news” for discrediting unfavorable stories, the man who insists on bending reality to his will, was himself complicit in creating and disseminating phony stories. Trump was accusing opponents of exactly what he and his confederates were engaged in.
That fact didn’t escape notice by comedian Trae Crowder, the “Liberal Redneck”:
I do think it’s kind of poetic that while [Trump] was out in public popularizing the concept of fake news, at that same time, behind the scenes he had a full fake news team making fake news arrangements with Big Fake News in an effort to fake as much news as possible. Just kind of sums him up, I think.
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He’s very desperate right now
Trump issued that call for his cult to protest at the courthouse last night. It’s not surprising. They haven’t shown up to protest for him on the courthouse steps or anywhere else.
This was from day 1.
There weren’t any more today after he made that call. So he lied:
He’s only been able to get a ragtag handful of weirdos to show up at the courthouse and it’s freaking him out.
His rallies aren’t drawing like they used to but it’s early in the campaign. The people who come to them at the moment are hard core cultists who love the ritual the same way Grateful dead fans used to follow them all over the world. I know people who follow Bruce Springsteen the same way. But there are no crowds coming to his trial and I would guess it’s because the rallies are a very specific kind of fun get together for the true believers. This isn’t that.