Skip to content

Month: May 2024

Trump’s Mini-Me Messed Up Bigly

Published by digby on May 22, 2024

Even the Sopranos weren’t this dumb

On the last day of testimony in Trump’s NY hush money case, a dozen or so grasping Trump sycophants dressed in the official elite MAGA uniforms of a red tie and blue suit (the troops wear the red hats) all gathered in the Manhattan court house to show their solidarity with their Dear Leader. The group included the Texas Lieutenant Governor of Texas Dan Patrick who weirdly excoriated “the ruling class” of which he and Donald Trump are very much members. SNL alum Joe Piscopo showed up as did former White House physician and current oddball congressman Ronny Jackson. Donald Trump Jr was there for the first time as well, apparently inspired to attend as a MAGA follower rather than a family member in support of his father. It’s become a daily self-abnegation ritual for those yearning to be on the inside of Trumpworld and that apparently includes his own son.

If it weren’t for the boring blue suits and red ties, the daily tableau would be more reminiscent of a criminal gang than a political party. The groveling for the attention and approbation of “the Boss”, the willingness to do absolutely anything for him (under threat of ex-communication or worse), the macho posturing and preening for each other and the public all looks like mobbed up behavior. In fact, one member of the group was an ex-con named Chuck Zito, founder of the New York Nomads chapter of the Hell’s Angels, which was linked to the Gambino mafia crime family. He obviously felt quite at home. He showed up two days in a row.

Trump himself has often drawn comparisons of himself to mob bosses, proudly declaring that he’s been indicted more than the “the late, great Alphonse Capone” all over the campaign trail. He often makes a point at his rallies that Capone “was seriously tough” as if to say he’s even tougher. Tim O’Brien, one of his biographers, has said that Trump openly admires figures such as as New York boss John Gotti and he’s actually using some of his tactics in his court cases:

The thing he respected about Gotti was that he … sat there in court and he looked at the jurors and he looked at the judge with a big F-U on his face.

He’s selling that mug shot F-U on t-shirts which the MAGA faithful have turned into their version of the Che Guevara shirt from the 1960s.

Underlying all this is something serious, however. The threats to judges, prosecutors, witnesses and jurors is very real and the courts where Trump is being tried are all having to put in place protections, including a gag order, to keep the former president from threatening all those people. He was sanctioned 10 times for violating that in the NY case until he came up with the novel tactic of having his red-tied capos do the threatening for him. He even got the Speaker of the House to go before the cameras and personally put the judge’s daughter in the cross hairs.

Tuesday marked the end of the presentation of evidence in the Trump hush money trial. All that’s left is the summations, scheduled for next Tuesday and then the deliberations will begin. Trump had boasted repeatedly that he was going to testify but of course he didn’t. He hasn’t explained why just yet but I’m sure he’ll come up with an absurd excuse eventually. In reality even he knew it would have been a terrible idea because it would have required him to studiously prepare and he can’t do that. So he did the next best thing.

Last week he no doubt saw a lawyer by the name of Robert Costello testify before a hastily called hearing before the House Sub-committee on the “Weaponization of the Federal Government” to slam Michael Cohen who was in the midst of a days long examination in Trump’s trial. He claimed that he was Cohen’s attorney for two months and that “virtually every statement he made about me was another lie.”

At the time, most people didn’t believe Costello would be called by the defense because the lawyers knew he would be a terrible witness but after his bravura performance, it’s fair to guess that Trump pushed them to call him. It would be the next best thing to having Trump on the stand himself. Unfortunately for Trump, just like the goombahs in the red-ties, Costello was preening for the boss and Trump couldn’t tell the difference. As with his good friend Giuliani, he’s just an out of his depth tough guy way past his sell-by date. His performance on the stand this week was a disaster.

He insulted the judge and caused a scene, almost getting cited for contempt. He was rude to the prosecutor, ordering her to speak into the microphone as if he was in charge of the court room. The judge even cleared the courtroom briefly to admonish him.

Trump probably thought he did great though, really showed them who was boss but the consensus is that he did very serious damage to the defense with his testimony. Trump’s lawyers had done a pretty good job of dirtying up prosecution witness Michael Cohen over the course of a grueling cross- examination and the prosecution had rested on a bit of a sour note. And then along came Costello to turn the whole thing upside down by making Cohen seem like a nice honest fellow by comparison.

Emails between Costello and Cohen were read aloud to leave the indelible memory in the minds of the jurors that Trump and Giuliani were conspiring with Costello to make sure Cohen didn’t cooperate with the government. There is even an email from Costello to Cohen saying, “Rudy said this communication channel must be maintained…sleep well tonight, you have friends in high places,” and one from Costello to his law partner saying, “Our issue is to get Cohen on the right page without giving the appearance that we are following instructions from Giuliani or the President,” (which they clearly were.) When Cohen didn’t sign on with him right away he told his law partner Cohen was “slow-playing us and the President…What should I say to this asshole? He’s playing with the most powerful man on the planet.” Didn’t he know who he was messing with?

Cohen had testified that he never retained Costello because he didn’t trust him. It turns out he was right. By the end of the cross examination, the prosecution had turned the defense argument that Cohen was just seeking revenge against Trump because he didn’t get a job in the White House to Costello seeking revenge against Cohen for refusing to hire him to defend him and make him valuable to Donald Trump.

Trump the mob boss has always been careful not to put anything in writing and to speak in code to underlings so he never gets caught giving direct orders. Unfortunately, his soldiers aren’t quite as careful. This one got him in real trouble by making it very clear that Donald Trump had leaned on Michael Cohen to keep his mouth shut. Why would an innocent man do such a thing?

Salon

But Does It Have Electyrolytes?

Published by Tom Sullivan on May 22, 2024

Just a grift before I go

Is it possible that the same affinity for conspiracy theories on the right (yes, the left has its own) accompanies the gullibility that makes conservatives fall for grifts?

Charlie Kirk is selling Blackout Coffee, you know, for when “The world is in flames, and Bidenomics is a complete and total disaster,” and the liberal zombie apocalypse comes to turn you gay. There are some brands that cater to lefty sensibilities, writes Ali Breland at The Atlantic. But it’s the expansion of niche products for the conservative paranoid that has caught his attention:

The ads reflect the new paradigm of advertising. In previous decades, ads had to appeal to whole segments of the population—and products were made with that in mind. That some readers of Vanity Fair might want a Givenchy handbag, and some readers of Sports Illustrated might want Callaway golf clubs, was as targeted as ads could get. Now the country has fractured into partisan subgroups, and companies have access to reams of analytics that enable them to target ever more precise demographics. Through shows like Kirk’s, brands such as Blackout Coffee and Patriot Mobile can reach their relatively niche audiences more easily than ever. (Blackout Coffee and Patriot Mobile did not respond to my requests for comment.)

But something else is happening too. Kirk and the rest of the conservative-podcast ecosystem aren’t just selling wares. The ads, with some exceptions, are not like ads for beer or pickup trucks that detract from the action while one watches, say, a football game. Rather, conservative ads are constitutive. They enhance and reinforce the arguments that Kirk and others are already making on their podcasts—that Black people are prone to crime, whiteness is getting excised, abortion is murder, and the United States is unstable and on the verge of collapse. The commercial breaks are the final screws needed to construct a self-contained conservative chamber. Kirk has ensconced himself in a world in which he’ll likely never face external pressures to self-moderate in the way that, say, Rush Limbaugh occasionally did when he went too far beyond the tastes of mainstream advertisers.

I’m not sure the Spocko Method would work on these guys. The advertisers are marketing to the crazies.

When you’re listening to Kirk talk about Blackout Coffee, you can also look down and see the steam coming off your own cup of Blackout Coffee, and relax while its caffeine helps you “be awake not woke.” You can open a new browser tab and check in on your portfolio, whose wealth managers are endorsed by Kirk, and then look at the price of gold and think about your own supply procured from a company that Kirk himself vetted “from top to bottom.” You can even stop listening to Kirk, go out to your backyard, and make a call, knowing that you’re doing so as a freedom-loving conservative with your Patriot Mobile phone plan.

It’s a world as self-contained as a megachurch or a Christian home-school cooperative.

“Rest assured knowing that you’re ready for whatever the globalists throw at us next,” Kirk said at the end of one ad for medical-emergency kits.

The fringe left has it’s share of hucksters, I know too well. But this grifting comes from the top down and become accepted as part of our culture.

Update: Fresh Grift! Right here!

● ● ● ● ● ● ● ●

For The Win, 5th Edition is ready for download. Request a copy of my free countywide GOTV planning guide at ForTheWin.us.

Thugocracy

Published by Tom Sullivan on May 22, 2024

You gotta laugh to keep from crying

https://youtu.be/t9ygaj8eSls

One of MSNBC’s commentators remarked Tuesday on the “thugocracy” on display at Donald Trump’s criminal trial. A parade of characters has pilgrimaged to Lower Manhattan to display their fealty to Boss Trump. On the day his defense rested, they included Chuck Zito, former convict and former leader of the New York chapter of the Hells Angels motorcycle gang. Trump likes his “heavies.”

Rachel Maddow remarked:

The Hells Angels leader is a very large man wearing a very flamboyant suit with a big, dyed-black pompadour, and huge, gaudy jewelry on very large hands. And he’s sitting next to Boris Epshteyn, who kind of looks like his body double.

And there’s Alan Dershowitz, and there’s other recognizable people. And there’s members of Congress and well-known lawyers. And everybody seems sort of, there is a sort of performative aspect to the way they’re behaving in court. It is very noticeable for those of us who are there observing as journalists. I don’t know if they’re catching the jury’s attention so much. It’s a little, I mean, it’s not a Star Wars bar scene, but it’s a little bit of a cast of characters.

Forbes provides a short list of those characters that includes former Trump advisor, Hungarian Nazi-adjacent Sebastian Gorka.

But it was Texas Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick who fronted Tuesday’s red tie brigade formation outside the courthouse. Patrick has been mentioned as a potential attorney general pick in a second Trump administration. However, he could not stick the landing on his “Banana Republic/if it can happen to Trump, it can happen to you” lecture about the ruling class coming down on poor Donald Trump:

Patrick: What happens when the courts come after you because you said something that the ruling class didn’t like? That’s what these other countries are all about. They shut down the ruling class. They want to be sure that anyone who speaks up against ruling class disappears

Reporter. Isn’t the former president a member of the ruling class?

Define irony — a bunch of idiots in matching blue suits and red ties many of whom traveled to Lower Manhattan to stand around idly during work hours on a workday lecturing working journalists about their opposition to the ruling class.

Reinforcing the thugocracy theme over the last two days was Robert Costello, Rudy Giuliani’s lawyer and one of only two defense witnesses. Former Trump “fixer,” Michael Cohen (who knows something about being a thug), testified previously that he didn’t trust Costello. Described by Fox News’ Jonathan Turley as a “killshot witness,” Costello’s testimony on Monday did not go as Team Trump planned:

The judge promptly lost his patience with Mr. Costello, a prosecutor turned defense lawyer and a fixture in New York’s legal world. When Mr. Costello scoffed at one of the judge’s rulings — “jeez,” he said, before mumbling a retraction — the judge grew irate.

Excusing the jury, the judge, Juan M. Merchan, lectured Mr. Costello: “If you don’t like my ruling, you don’t say ‘jeez,’ and you don’t say ‘strike it,’ because I’m the only one who can strike testimony in court,” he said, adding, “Are you staring me down?”

He ordered the courtroom cleared, briefly ejecting reporters and other onlookers, while allowing Mr. Trump’s supporters to remain. When those told to leave did so, according to a transcript, he told Mr. Costello that his conduct was “contemptuous” and said, “If you try to stare me down one more time I will remove you from the stand,” adding, to the defense lawyers, “I will strike his testimony, do you hear me?”

Several litigators surveyed by CNN and MSNBC said in all their years they’d never seen a judge order a courtroom cleared. Cross-examination did not go any better on Tuesday. The state’s attorney dismantled Costello’s testimony by reading back his own emails. As Digby put it:

Calling Giuliani’s lawyer Robert Costello to the stand would be legal malpractice if it weren’t for the fact that it was probably because Trump demanded it. The cross examination today was just brutal. Basically the prosecutors just read all of Costello’s emails to Cohen in which he was clearly trying to keep him from turning on Trump when he very briefly became the “back channel” between Rudy Giuliani (Trump) and Cohen. The whole thing sounbds like nothing short of an episode of the Sopranos.

The defense rested without calling Trump. The accused, who for months complained that he’d been muzzled and declared his eagerness to testify in his own defense, was a no-show.

It’s important to note the kind of people with which Trump surrounds himself, and who flock to his presence like moths to a flame. As commentators have noted and prosecutors may in their summation, Trump chose these unsavory characters, not prosecutors. And the behaviors he models are spreading through the cult of personality that once was the Republican Party.

As experienced litigators said of Judge Merchan’s clearing the courtroom, I’ve attended Democratic meetings for decades and have never seen anything like this catfight below. (Yes, I know.)

Infiltrators, obviously. Conservatism never fails.

Thugocracy 101: 1. Attack. Attack. Attack. 2. Admit nothing. Deny everything. 3. Claim victory and never admit defeat. Never take responsibility.

● ● ● ● ● ● ● ●

For The Win, 5th Edition is ready for download. Request a copy of my free countywide GOTV planning guide at ForTheWin.us.

The Apprentice

Published by digby on May 21, 2024

I can’t wait for the new movie about Trump and Roy Cohn. Trump has threatened to sue but nobody seems too exercised about that. One of the investors, Dan Snyder owner of the Washington Commanders (formerly the Redskins), has been gnashing his teeth about it, although he doesn’t appear to have any say in the final cut. It’s controversial to say the least.

The script is by Gabriel Sherman who writes for Vanity Fair and had hit with the movie about Roger Ailes called The Loudest Voice starring Russell Crow. This one is about Trump and Roy Cohn — Trump is the apprentice in this one. (I wrote a little bit about their relationship just the other day.)

Anyway, this sounds really interesting. It stars Jeremy Strong, who played Kendall Roy in Succession, as Cohn. Perfect. Here’s a little bit of the review in The Hollywood Reporter:

Beyond the specific portrait of the man identified by his vanity plates as DJT (Sebastian Stan) and the barracuda who took him under his wing, Roy Cohn (Jeremy Strong), the movie takes a broader view of the corruption of the American soul.

It stretches from the crooked end of the Nixon years, a boon for sourness and cynicism, through the Reagan presidency and the ascendancy of corporate greed. That time span consecrated the supremacy of the “winner” and the contemptuous mockery of the “loser,” one of the most obnoxious commonplace denigrations in American life. The chief tenet Trump learns from Cohn takes the distinction one step further, asserting that the world is divided into killers and losers.

Sherman’s script zooms in on Trump when he’s a lieutenant in the employ of his real estate baron father, Fred Trump (Martin Donovan, scary), collecting rent from tenants who obviously loathe the landlord and his policies. The family business is under attack in a civil rights suit alleging violations of the Fair Housing Act, stemming from Trump Sr.’s discriminatory policies against Black prospective tenants. “How can I be racist when I have a Black driver?” bellows Fred.

Donald is eager to get out from under the old man’s shadow. The opening sequence shows him striding through the heart of Manhattan, a less graceful version of Tony Manero in Saturday Night Fever, at a time of rising crime and fiscal disaster, when the town’s reputation had gone from “Fun City” to “Fear City.” His eyes are fixed on the crumbling Commodore Hotel by Grand Central Station, the site of his first luxury development.

Cohn:

The lawyer who proudly sent the Rosenbergs to the electric chair and was a key force in the McCarthy witch hunts is a great role for Strong. He makes the character suitably icy, a fast talker with a withering stare and an almost inhuman intensity. The actor has fun with the hypocrisy of an unapologetic dirty trickster who claims unwavering fidelity to “truth, justice and the American way.” Sherman makes sure we see how the entire Trump playbook was forged out of their alliance.

It’s somewhat predictable that when Cohn early on explains his three cardinal rules, Trump will later claim credit for them as his own credo: 1. Attack. Attack. Attack. 2. Admit nothing. Deny everything. 3. Claim victory and never admit defeat.

While there are faint glimmers of a moral conscience in some of Stan’s early scenes, such concerns are quickly swept aside once Donald starts seeing the results Cohn gets with bullying chicanery. His gaze hardens, along with his lacquered hair, as he begins to construct a persona based on Cohn’s teachings.

It goes into the marriage with Ivana, (which Cohn was against.) There is apparently a rape scene, which was on the record and Trump is reportedly livid about it. Sorry dude — she testified to it in your divorce.

It might be considered a cheap shot to show Trump undergoing liposuction and a hair transplant in queasy detail at a grave moment for someone close to him. But that kind of disconnect from anyone else’s suffering is a key part of the portrait. What Abassi’s film reveals most of all is the extent to which the toxicity that’s now an inescapable part of our contemporary reality was shaped by the unholy alliance between two men half a century ago.

This sounds fascinating. I can’t wait.

More Classified Documents At Mar-a-lago

Published by digby on May 21, 2024

And one was even scanned for Trump’s PAC for some reason

Axios:

Former President Trump’s attorneys found classified documents in his bedroom four months after the FBI searched Mar-a-Lago, per court documents unsealed Tuesday.

The revelation comes as part of a newly unsealed opinion that U.S. District Judge Beryl Howell cited last year when she found that prosecutors brought forward sufficient evidence to show Trump mishandled classified documents.

The former president’s classified documents trial in Florida was indefinitely postponed earlier this month, with the judge citing the number of outstanding pre-trial motions.

An empty folder and “another mostly empty folder marked `Classified Evening Summary'” were found when Trump lawyers searched his properties following the FBI’s August 2022 raid on the former president’s Florida home.

The judge wrote in an 87-page opinion that, “Notably, no excuse is provided as to how the former president could miss the classified-marked documents found in his own bedroom at Mar-a-Lago.”

By the way:

A witness scanned the contents of the box containing the classified materials and stored them on a laptop in her possession owned by Trump’s Save America PAC, according to a footnote in the opinion.

Fergawdssake.

It’s really depressing that they can’t get this trial done before the election. It just makes it more important that Biden wins in November. Unless the supreme court holds that Trump is immune from ever being held accountable for being a traitor this case should go forward at some point.

The Fascist Deportation Nightmare

Published by digby on May 21, 2024

The Horror

This excellent piece by Radly Balko at his newsletter on Trump’s fascist immigration is sobering. Like him, I don’t think people are taking this seriously enough. It’s a nightmare in the making and a percolating international crisis when most of the rest of the world rises up in horror at the most powerful nation on earth enacting a massive policy of ethnic cleansing.

Some excerpts:

 Trump has made 15 million deportations a central part of his 2024 campaign. And he’s stepped up the dehumanizing of immigrants he’ll need to get a significant portion of the country on board.

Even if Trump gets distracted, it’s likely he’ll put Stephen Miller in charge of the plan. Miller is the only non-relative senior staffer who served the entirety of the first Trump term. And Miller won’t be distracted. Ridding the country of non-white immigrants has been a core part of his identity for his entire life.

Miller himself has long made clear that the distinction that matters most to him is not between “legal” and “illegal,” but between white and non-white immigrants. Both prior to and after joining the Trump campaign in 2016 and White House in 2017, Miller sent hundreds of emails to far-right outlets like Breitbart touting racist literature like Camp of the Saints, and links to unabashed white nationalist sites where writers argue that nonwhite immigrants are of lower intelligence, and are disease-ridden, parasitic, and predisposed to criminality.

(It shouldn’t need saying, but immigrants and their children contribute far more to the economy than they take from it, are less likely to commit crimes than native-born citizens, interracial IQ comparisons are based on a false premise and have few real-world implications, and provided there’s some basic screening at the border, there’s zero evidence that immigrants threaten public health.)

In November, Miller offered the details of his plan in an interview with Charlie Kirk. Miller plans to bring in the National Guard, state and local police, other federal police agencies like the DEA and ATF, and if necessary, the military. Miller’s deportation force would then infiltrate cities and neighborhoods, going door to door and business to business in search of undocumented immigrants. He plans to house the millions of immigrants he wants to expel in tent camps along the border, then use military planes to transport them back to their countries of origin.

That’s not all:

Miller also wants to end birthright citizenship (more on that in a moment), and during the first Trump administration pushed a “denaturalization” program to strip naturalized immigrants of their citizenship.

Last year, a coalition of MAGA factions put together “Project 2025,” their blueprint for a second Trump term. It’s basically a roadmap to autocracy. And they make no secret of the fact that they want to do away with legal immigration — and nonwhite legal immigration in particular.

The Project 2025 plan would end the only legal way for seasonal and agricultural workers to come to the U.S. to work. It would also effectively end the H1-B visas that allow immigrants to work in fields like tech, engineering, and medicine — most of whom come from India or China. They want to end humanitarian programs that grant sanctuary for refugees fleeing war or natural disasters, and suspend all visas to any country that the administration deems uncooperative in accepting deportations. They want to screen visa applicants for ideology, barring entry and terminating the visas of people Miller considers politically impure. Miller told the New York Times that the administration would also invoke a 1798 law that allows federal officials to deport immigrants without due process during wartime, taking the broad view that drug cartels are waging a war against the United States.

The Project 2025 plan also calls for cutting all federal aid to colleges and universities that provide financial aid to undocumented students, including DACA recipients — the undocumented immigrants brought to the U.S. as children. It would cruelly tie all sorts of unrelated federal aid — including emergency aid after natural disasters — to state and municipal cooperation on immigration enforcement. The plan would require at least 70 percent of the staff of any federal contractor to be U.S. citizens — not legal residents, but U.S. citizens. As the Niskanen Center puts it, “the Mandate aims to demolish the American immigration system, coerce states and localities into cooperating with administrative schemes, and intimidate immigrants present in the United States.”

It is a nightmare. Even aside from the utter moral depravity and betrayal of everything American ideals are supposed to stand for, there are more practical considerations as well:

Deporting even a fraction of 15 million people would also wreck the economy. Inflation would soar (especially when combined with Trump’s plan to slap a 10 percent across-the-board tariff on imports), and the U.S. would likely spiral into a recession, possibly a depression.

Naturally, House Speaker Mike Johnson has expressed his enthusiastic support.

Balko says that it is logistically impossible to round up and deport that many people although they could make a good stab at it. But just imagine:

The pre-World War II Jewish population of Europe — including the Soviet Union — was about 9 million. So just in terms of transporting people, we’re looking at an operation that would need to be two thirds larger than the Nazi transport of Jews during the Holocaust — if they’d managed to get to every Jewish person on the continent…

The Trump immigration plan would be the second largest forced displacement of human beings in human history, on par with Britain’s disastrous partition of India, and second only to total forced displacement during World War II.

What would it cost? In 2017, ICE estimated that it cost an average of $10,854 to deport one person, or about $14,000 in today’s dollars. Under this calculation, Trump’s plan to deport 15 million people would cost about $210 billion, or about 14 percent more than the annual budget of the U.S. Army.

There’s much more and I urge you to read the whole thing. if they are able to even accomplish a fraction of what they plan, the United States will effectively be a fascist state when all is said and done. It’s incredibly chilling.

In Case You Were Wondering

Published by digby on May 21, 2024

Anyone who is “looking at that” is someone who is contemplating taking away the right to contraception.

For years people like me have been raising the alarm about birth control. All you have to do is read what the anti-abortion extremists have been saying. They will take it step by step (they say that too) and now that they got Roe v. Wade overturned they know that it works. They will not stop.

Abortion and phony sexual morality are among the most important organizing principles of the right. Trump being their exalted leader, an adjudicated rapist and admitted sexual assaulter, five children with three different women, shows (just as it does with the plethora of other cult leaders, religious and otherwise) that patriarchy is the real basis of it.

I suspect that Trump is going to come up with a “solution” on birth control that will look very much like his answer to the abortion problem. He will endorse “states’ rights” and say that’s what everyone has always wanted and he will deliver it. By deliver it, he means they will enforce using the Comstock Act (also known as the “chastity laws”) which prohibits the delivery of contraception (as well as abortion medication) across state lines although I don’t know if he will ever spell that out.

I hope he does. It will hand the Democrats yet another weapon with which to beat him.

Update: After he said he was “looking at” restricting contraception and says we’ll all find it interesting, now he posts this:

Right. Believe whatever you want to believe I guess.

“An Act Of Madness”

Published by digby on May 21, 2024

Israel takes another step down the road to becoming an official rogue state:

Israeli officials seized broadcasting equipment belonging to the Associated Press on Tuesday, arguing it was used to illegally provide a live feed to Al Jazeera, whose Jerusalem bureau was shuttered by officials earlier this month following the passage of a new foreign broadcast law.

Press advocates have warned that the law creates a dangerous precedent for censoring independent news outlets in the region amid the ongoing war with Hamas.

Israeli lawmakers passed the measure last month, empowering Israel’s communications minister to take action against any foreign media network that it says poses a national security risk.

Today’s seizure has already garnered sharp criticism, with Israeli opposition leader Yair Lapid calling it “an act of madness.”

AP reported that it “complies with Israel’s military censorship rules, which prohibit broadcasts of details like troops movements that could endanger soldiers.” It said the live shot “has generally shown smoke rising over the territory.”

In a statement, an AP spokesperson said the wire service “decries in the strongest terms” the actions of the Israeli government.

“The shutdown was not based on the content of the feed but rather an abusive use by the Israeli government of the country’s new foreign broadcaster law,” communications executive Lauren Easton said.

There’s nothing else to say but reiterate that it is ” an act of madness.” And they do this on the day after the ICC recommends arrest warrants for Netanyahu? They clearly want to be a pariah state. It’s just mystifying.

The Defense Rests

Published by digby on May 21, 2024

Haha. He’s constantly batting back memes these days. “I don’t use a teleprompter!” “I don’t sleep during the trial!”

Calling Giuliani’s lawyer Robert Costello to the stand would be legal malpractice if it weren’t for the fact that it was probably because Trump demanded it. The cross examination today was just brutal. Basically the prosecutors just read all of Costello’s emails to Cohen in which he was clearly trying to keep him from turning on Trump when he very briefly became the “back channel” between Rudy Giuliani (Trump) and Cohen. The whole thing sounbds like nothing short of an episode of the Sopranos.

He first met Cohen in person and told him how close he was with Giuliani, which Cohen denied on the stand. The prosecutor Susan Hoffinger made him look at the email he sent two days later: “I told you my relationship with Rudy which could be very very useful to you.”“Doesn’t that mean you mentioned that to him at the first meeting?” Hoffinger asked. “No,” Costello absurdly answered.

Hoffinger showed another email in which Costello wrote that Giuliani had a position with the White House that made it “all the more reason” for Cohen to hire him “which I mentioned at our meeting.” Costello again denied that it meant what it clearly meant and was reportedly annoyed at the question. (Didn’t he review any of these emails?)

Costello repeatedly denied being a ” backchannel” and has said that the emails spoke for themselves and he was right. They say that he’s a lying piece of work. One of them even showed that Costello wrote to Cohen to tell him that Giuliani “said thank you for opening this back channel of communication.” Hoffinger asked him if that email speaks for itself and he wouldn’t answer saying that he had an explanation as to what it really meant. She moved on.

Over and over again she showed the emails proving that they had pressured Cohen not to cooperate with the government. It really could not be more obvious. He was under investigation by the FBI and Costello reminded him “sleep well tonight, you have friends in high places.” Costello admitted that he was talking about Trump.

She then confronted him with an email to his law partner that said “our issue is to get Cohen on the right page.” Hoffinger asked him, “the email speaks for itself, correct?” He replied, “sometimes.”

According to reporting inside the courtroom he kept trying to interrupt and slag on Cohen and was repeatedly told by the prosecution to answer yes or no. After the strong admonishment by the judge yesterday he was forced to comply even though he was obviously upset.

The prosecutors finally questioned him about why he went to congress last week to testify that Cohen was a dirty, no good liar while he was on the stand in New York. She asked him if it was a tactic to intimidate a witness and he said that was ridiculous.

Was it? With every MAGA freakshow traipsing up to New York, dressed in a Trump costume, to sit behind Trump in the courtroom every day, is it really too much to believe that the House extremists called him to a hastily convened hearing to testify publicly about Michael Cohen while he was testifying? Their whole clown show is about fealty to Dear Leader and intimidation of anyone who crosses him.

The real question is why they thought it was a good idea to put Costello on the stand as well. They had to know about the emails. They had to realize that he’s right up there with Giuliani with the black drips pouring down his face. The only reasonable explanation is that Trump loved his blustering spittle last week in that hearing and thought it would be great to have it in the court room. He’s an idiot.

The defense then rested its case. No Trump testimony. After all, he is also a coward.

Calling Out The Bad Guys

Published by Tom Sullivan on May 21, 2024

“If you’re not pissing ’em off, you’re not doing it right”

Joe Biden’s strongest performances pissed off Republicans big time. One was his September 1, 2022 speech at Independence Hall in Philadelphia. “On the Continued Battle for the Soul of the Nation” called out “MAGA Republicans” for their anti-American beliefs and behaviors. Did it turn the November 2022 red wave into a red ripple? Maybe. A second performance was Biden’s State of the Union speech on March 7. It was “Fiery Biden” (Washington Post). And “In-Your-Face Biden” (New York Times). Republicans were pissed. Viewers approved.

Digby (March 8):

Biden came out swinging and knocked the Republicans so far back on their heels that they had to completely abandon the image of him they’ve been building since 2020 — that he’s so old and feeble that he can’t even feed himself — and instead whimper like a bunch of little old ladies that he offensively aggressive. 

More than not looking feeble, Biden looked like a leader in command. Biden needs more of that. Yes, it is protocol to refrain from commenting on the Trump trial, but Biden’s “make my day” taunt about debating Trump is more snarky than dominating. Like it or not, many among the electorate measure their leaders by perception of strength. It’s a gut thing, not a head thing.

Salon’s Chauncey DeVega interviews UC Berkeley professor M. Steven Fish on his book, “Comeback: Routing Trumpism, Reclaiming the Nation, and Restoring Democracy’s Edge.” What crowds find attractive about Trump, a blithering idiot, is his “high-dominance political style.”

Fish:

Donald Trump is all dominance, all the time. My research finds that his dominance game, much more than his policies or appeals to racism, is his most formidable political asset. He largely ignores the polls and tells you what he thinks, while low-dominance leaders tell you what they think you want to hear. His disdain for optics and polls isn’t a sign of real courage. Instead, they’re products of his narcissism combined with a lack of impulse control. But his congenital political gift is that the way these character defects manifest what looks like bravery, at least to a substantial minority. It’s what creates the perception that he’s his own man (however sociopathic) and acts on his own convictions (even if they’re nothing but ego-driven ambitions and resentments).

Trump’s dominance style is what separates him from every other politician and explains the ardor he elicits among those who thirst for strong leadership. And it’s what’s enabled him to retain his grip on his party, even as he’s proven to be a liability in elections. To many people, it makes him look indomitable—and other politicians like panderers by comparison.

The problem is that the Democrats don’t unmask Trump’s essential cowardice and overmatch his dominance game. Liberals often seem to think that people just need to evolve past their need for dominant leaders and get on with creating a world in which everyone gets along, and nobody seeks to dominate anybody else. But as the eminent psychologist Dan McAdams notes, our desire for commanding leaders is baked into our DNA. It isn’t all we seek in our leaders, but seek it we do, and that isn’t going to change anytime soon. McAdams argues that no American president has tapped into what he calls “the primal psychology of dominance” as effectively as Trump has. In fact, McAdams suggests that Trump has little but dominance going for him.

We like to think ourselves evolved, but deep down we are still animals that respond to subtle cues about who’s dominant in any social situation. In Trump’s case, he’s never subtle.

Biden needs to show he can be forceful without being an asshole. When he does, his poll numbers jump. He just doesn’t sustain it. When he backs off, so do his approval ratings. Aggressiveness doesn’t come as naturally to Scranton Joe as it does for, say, Rep. Jasmine Crockett, the Democrat from Dallas.

Fish says, “If Democrats can beat Trump on dominance, his area of greatest strength, we can crush the Trumpian menace before it crushes our democracy. This does not mean they have to emulate Trump. Our greatest liberal heroes have been high-dominance, but in distinctly liberal ways and to liberal ends, whether it be Frederick Douglass and JFK, or Nobel Laureate Maria Ressa and Eleanor Roosevelt.”

I’m not buying everything in Fish’s criticisms of Democrats, but “when they go low, we go high” does seem naive in the Trump era. Biden needs to be more forceful more often, and willing to upset Republicans. It works for him when he does it.

“If the master narrative doesn’t alienate about 30 percent of the electorate, it isn’t a good narrative,” Drew Westen wrote in “The Political Brain” (2007) about Democrats’ messaging. “About a third of the electorate won’t turn left under any circumstances, and if the Democrats’ story doesn’t make them angry, there’s something wrong with it. A substantial minority of Americans hold authoritarian, intolerant ideologies driven by fear, hate, and prejudice that are fundamentally incompatible with Democratic (and democratic) principles. They are the antagonists of the Democratic story, and if they aren’t antagonized by it the same way liberals are antagonized by listening to George W. Bush’s storytelling, the Democratic story isn’t getting its message across.”

That was 2007.

Westen chuckled when I told him a key lesson I took from his book came down to: If you’re not pissing ‘em off, you’re not doing it right.

● ● ● ● ● ● ● ●

For The Win, 5th Edition is ready for download. Request a copy of my free countywide GOTV planning guide at ForTheWin.us.