Props for the “aganda”
MAGA Republicans did not pause even for a news cycle to milk Saturday’s assassination attempt for maximum political advantage. The Boss had other ideas. Rather than use Saturday’s aborted attack to raise his polling from the toilet, Donald Trump pivoted immediately to promoting the gilded ballroom he wants built where the East Wing once stood.
MAGA took the cue to unleash propaganda. It’s a matter of national security!
“Come-bye“
Border collies are not this quick to respond.
The Guardian reports that the Department of Trump heard the whistle too:
The US Department of J (DoJ) has used the weekend shooting in Washington DC to pressure a preservation group to drop a lawsuit seeking to halt the construction of Donald Trump’s White House ballroom.
Several Trump administration officials, including the president, seized on the incident at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner to advance their case for the completion of the controversial $400m project, for which the White House’s East Wing was suddenly demolished, arguing the new ballroom was needed as a “safe space”.
On Sunday night, Todd Blanche, the acting attorney general, posted on social media a letter to lawyers representing the National Trust for Historic Preservation (NTHP) calling the trust’s lawsuit “frivolous”. It demanded that the organization voluntarily withdraw it or face a new dismissal motion from the Department of Justice (DoJ).
Brian Beutler comments at Off Message. Republicans’ “sudden enthusiasm for joining this particular political fight has less to do with any supposed threat to Trump than with resetting the game board after a series of recent defeats. Most pointedly, the gerrymandering race-to-the-bottom Trump kicked off in Texas last year.”
And Iran. And dormant land mines in the Epstein files. Remember them?
The GOP’s redistricting loss in Virginia is “a huge threat to their authoritarian project,” Beutler writes. So even though Trump pivoted from the WHCA attack, the GOP can use the ballroom to smack Democrats about the head and shoulders:
Now, I suspect they’d be clamoring for Trump’s ballroom today whether or not the Virginia referendum went well for Democrats. But knocking Democrats back on their heels is a huge ancillary benefit. I suspect (though I may be wrong!) that they will try to force votes to authorize Trump’s ballroom in short order, on a bet that frontline Democrats will splinter—fearful that Republicans will equate opposition to the ballroom with support for violence against Trump.
This would be yet another huge lie. But, if Democrats don’t embrace their fighting spirit quickly and refuse to be bullied, it will probably work as intended.
Besides, “A ballroom on White House grounds should not ever be the venue for a professional association’s annual gala. The White House press corps does not work for the White House.”
It’s not clear to me that the public so consumed with bearing the burdens of the Trump economy, and so pissed off over Trump’s Iran debacle, will even rise to the bait here. It’s Trump who’s compromised national security and people’s pocketbooks with his Persian Gulf misadventure. The public is more consumed with the costs of gas and food. Will they buy the transparently non-connection between the assassination attempt and the ballroom project? I think not.
“The ballroom talking point—echoed now by senators and the acting attorney general and all those braindead mouthpieces above—is the definition of a non-sequitur,” writes Beutler.
Any Democrat who allows themselves to be bullied into voting to authorize this monstrosity will be voting for corruption out of fear. They might tell themselves it’s a savvy, low-stakes maneuver, but they’ll quickly find they’re unable to explain themselves to their supporters.
My bet is that they won’t have to. Earlier in his commentary, Beutler advised Democrats to bask in the “feeling of strength” from their Virginia gerrymandering win and in “how good it feels to not simply roll over.” Let’s hope that they don’t.
Let Trump’s minions act like border collies this time.