can't make it up — with Comer's investigation fizzled out, Steve Scalise says House Republicans are now drafting articles of impeachment against Biden for not supporting Israel staunchly enough. Note that even Varney is skeptical. pic.twitter.com/BN4lKKPSWu
You may recall that the House Republicans held up aid to Ukraine, Taiwan and Israel (and blew off a very expansive border bill on Trump’s orders) for months. These Republicans attempting to impeach Biden over this issue is mind-boggling.
I’ve heard several wingnut commentators compare Biden’s actions to Trump’s when he told Zelensky that he would withhold weapons unless he came up with dirt on Joe Biden. I don’t think I need to point out how ridiculous that comparison is. If they disagree with Biden’s decision that’s completely legitimate. They can try to write some legislation to stop him or someone on their team could file a lawsuit. But there are decades of precedents that say presidents have the authority to make a decision like this on the basis of the national interest (often at the behest of Republican hawks who argue for unlimited presidential power.) Trump, on the other hand, used his authority to advance his personal political interest. You’ll recall that Alan Dershowitz fatuously tried to argue that a president’s personal political interest is by definition in the national interest — another example of l’etat c’est moi.
Presidents have often made dubious decisions in this area and there are good reasons to dial back their unrestrained authority. But impeaching Biden over this is absurd and they know it.
Trump claims that RFK Jr has just been pretending to be against the covid vaccine these past few years to draw support away from Trump’s people for political reasons. pic.twitter.com/1HJjqmDWZP
“For those of you that want to vote because you think he’s an anti-vaxxer, he’s not really an anti-vaxxer. That’s only his political moment. So, RFK, his views on vaccines are fake, as is everything else about his candidacy.”
In a striking video on Truth Social, Donald Trump criticizes Robert F. Kennedy Jr., dismissing him as a ‘radical left Democrat’ amid polls indicating Kennedy is siphoning votes from Trump’s campaign. Emphasizing the urgency, Trump states he would prefer Joe Biden over ‘Junior,’ arguing that the country would fare better under Biden’s administration than the ‘immediate collapse’ he predicts with Kennedy.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has challenged Donald Trump to a head-to-head debate for when both address a Libertarian convention later this month, a move that comes as the presumptive GOP nominee has ramped up both criticism of Kennedy’s independent bid and demands that President Joe Biden meet him on a debate stage.
Arguing that he is “drawing a lot of voters from your former supporters,” Kennedy said to Trump in an open letter posted Tuesday to X that the Libertarian convention provides “perfect neutral territory for you and me to have a debate where you can defend your record for your wavering supporters.”
Trump is taunting Joe Biden every day now to debate (knowing that he won’t agree to do it until the fall because he’s the president not some gadfly.) But he refused to debate any of his primary rivals and he’s not going to do this either.
But it is telling that he’s going after Kennedy so hard and that he’s decided to go after him by pretending that he’s not the foremost anti-vax activist in the country and has been for years. (He’s really all-in on the idea that he has the power to change reality simply by saying something.) They must have some very disturbing poll numbers for him to do this. This is one of his only weaknesses with the cult and the last thing he wants is to have Kennedy out there reminding everyone that he’s the guy who touted the COVID vaccine as one of his great achievements (until he was booed at one of his rallies.) It’s a weak spot and he’s obviously very worried about it.
This is how half the country becomes inured to blatant corruption:
Fox: Trump reportedly just made a big promise to oil executives. He told them, ‘give me a billion dollars, and I will cut Biden's environmental protections’ pic.twitter.com/Q83yyCgKlv
That is Fox News blithely normalizing Trump’s flagrant corruption. No biggie. Just Trump trying to bribe the oil industry into giving him a billion dollars. What’s the problem?
It’s not that this sort of quid pro quo wasn’t implicit in the past. But they used to couch it in the idea that they were ideologically aligned and never made such a blatant pitch for specific “deliverables” in exchange for cash. You have to love the fact that the “oil man” told this reporter that a billion dollars in exchange for destroying regulations isn’t really a good deal. I guess they’re negotiating.
But hey, why not? There’s no further need to pretend that the Republican party has any integrity. It’s all for sale and they’re fine with it.
There have been a lot of raised eyebrows over the fact that with the exception of one appearance by his son Eric, Donald Trump’s family is not present to support him at his criminal trial in Manhattan. Normally you would see the wife and the adult kids lined up behind the defendant to show a united front, even if the subject at hand was uncomfortable. After all, there really isn’t such a thing as a pleasant criminal trial but it’s just something that is commonly done and I would certainly have thought that it would be wise in this case, since he’s running for president and all. It would have been especially useful to at least see Melania and Ivanka playing the trad-wife and loyal daughter suggesting by their presence that their man can do no wrong in their eyes. They’re supposed to be Republicans, after all.
But how could they? Everyone knows that his cultivated image of a wealthy playboy who wined and dined beautiful women like he was some kind of matinee idol is another one of his lies. This man had a casting couch routine more in the mold of a creepy Harvey Weinstein than a glamorous Tony Stark and they know it.
Trump is intensely frustrated over the fact that because of the judge’s gag order, he is no longer allowed to verbally assault and threaten the witnesses or the jury. But since the judge told him this week that he will have choice but to jail him for contempt if he violates it one more time, he’s managed to keep it together and confine his insults and threats to the judge, the prosecutors and Joe Biden. But you can feel the tension in him when he makes his frequent forays into the strange echo chamber hallway where he rants about the proceedings and reads clippings from Fox News personalities saying the trial is a travesty.
One can imagine how the thought of going to jail petrifies him. This is a man who has been pampered his entire life. His elaborate morning ablutions with the hair and the make-up routine alone make any kind of imprisonment unthinkable. But he really, really wants to go after Stormy Daniels, so much so that he had his lawyers ask the judge to lift the gag order for her specifically since she is now finished testifying, (The judge said no, that he was preserving the integrity of the court.)
For Trump this goes against every fiber of his being, as was not so coincidentally conveyed to the jury yesterday afternoon when one of his book publishers testified and was asked to read aloud some passages from his books, including this charming commentary:
“For many years I’ve said that if someone screws you, screw them back. If somebody hurts you you just go after them as viciously and as violently as you can. Like it says in the Bible, an eye for an eye.”
Trump will just have to let his allies in the right wing media do that for him for the moment and they are more than eager to comply.
It’s doubtful that Trump wanted his family to be there to hear all these sordid details in person anyway. But he reportedly was quite upset that his political allies weren’t in attendance during the first two weeks of the trial. According to NBC News, he whined “no one is defending me” and pouted over the fact that there wasn’t a big crowd of protesters outside. He lied about that, of course, and said on camera that there were hundreds of people blocked from protesting.
He actually called for his followers to come to the trial on his Truth Social platform — “GO OUT AND PEACEFULLY PROTEST. RALLY BEHIND MAGA. SAVE OUR COUNTRY!” — but other than a dozen or so kooks, they haven’t shown up. From the very beginning of his legal travails he’s issued threats that he people “won’t stand for it” saying as far back as 2022, “If these radical, vicious racist prosecutors do anything wrong, I hope we are going to have in this country the biggest protest we have ever had … in Washington, D.C, in New York, in Atlanta and elsewhere because our country and our elections are corrupt.”
Why they haven’t turned up to support him in his moment of need when there always seems to be a few thousand who like to go to his rallies is a mystery but it clearly has him feeling down in the dumps. So now he’s got some of his employees, political cronies and right wing media personalities attending the trial to give him a little boost.
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, who Politico reports hangs around Trump as much as possible, was among the first to heed the call. Also showing up despite having much more important things to do were campaign managers Susie Wiles and Chris LaCivita along with advisor Boris Epshteyn and Natalie Harp who the NY Times describes this way:
Called “the human printer” by colleagues, Ms. Harp often carries a portable device so she can quickly provide Mr. Trump with hard copies of mood-boosting news articles and social media posts by people praising him.
That’s just pathetic.
The lawyer who has lost several cases for Trump but who defends him vociferously on TV, Alina Habba, has appeared in the courtroom. And on Thursday former judge and current Fox News member of The Five, Jeanine Pirro was in attendance. The big name, however, was Florida Senator Rick Scott who went the extra mile and held a press conference. He compared Trump to himself:
Scott: I'm fed up. I watched what happened to me and my company. I've talked to business people over the years and what's happened to them when you have political persecution. pic.twitter.com/hMJ04gp13L
His company paid $1.7 billion in fines to settle charges of rampant Medicare fraud, at the time the largest ever imposed, and Scott has previously said, “as I have said repeatedly, Columbia/HCA made mistakes, and I take responsibility for what happened on my watch as CEO.” Today he says he’s a victim of the deep state.
The ambitious senator is said to be angling for the VP slot or Senate Majority leader and he knows that whining like a five year old about being victimized is the quickest way to Donald Trump’s heart. Scott’s the first contender to be there in his time of need and I’m sure Trump noticed. If the rest of them haven’t figured out by now that job one is defending Dear Leader and singing his praises then they’d better just take their names off the list right now. Look for the whole crew to traipse up there over the next few weeks. Donald Trump needs cheering up and nothing makes him happier than lackeys begging for his favor.
Donald Trump is not invincible in spite of MAGA mythology, explains Jamelle Bouie:
In the folk wisdom of recent American politics, Donald Trump is a figure of herculean invulnerability to traditional scandal. What lands as a crippling blow to most politicians leaves nary a scratch on Trump, who effortlessly deflected the slings and arrows of the 2016 presidential campaign and paid no discernible price for the “Access Hollywood” tape, his racism or his general incoherence.
There has long been a “please don’t hit me” reflex among established Democrats, a conditioned, abused-spouse behavior. Don’t make Daddy mad. Don’t impeach him. Don’t hold him accountable. You’ll just make him stronger. And madder. Bouie offers some examples.
Now on trial in Manhattan, Trump is grinding his teeth to nubs over humiliating descriptions of his sexual encounter with Stormy Daniels, about the age of his daughter Ivanka. Yet the myth of his invulnerability is rising again, like the South.
Let’s look at the situation as it stands. Despite his best efforts, Trump has not been able to summon the grass-roots activity that signals political strength. There are no febrile crowds demanding justice for Trump at the courthouse door, no mob poised to wreak havoc in Trump’s name — not that he didn’t try to make one appear. And the broader public does not appear to have a problem with either the trial or the prospect of jail time for the former president.
A majority of Americans — 54 percent in the latest poll conducted for NPR and PBS NewsHour — say that the hush money trial and other investigations into Trump to find out whether he broke the law are “fair.” Forty-two percent of Americans, according to a CNN poll released last month, say that Trump’s conduct in his Manhattan trial has been “mostly inappropriate.” Twenty-five percent say that his behavior has been “mostly appropriate.” And according to a January Reuters/Ipsos poll, 71 percent of Americans — including 55 percent of Republicans — say that if Trump did break the law, he should be prosecuted, and if convicted, sentenced to prison.
If there were any sign that this trial was an asset for Trump — any sign that it put him on stronger ground with the voting public — you would find it in national polling. It’s not there. What we see, instead, is a steady head-to-head between Trump and President Biden.
There is also the evidence of the Republican presidential primaries, in which voters are still casting ballots. On Tuesday, nearly 22 percent of Republican primary voters in Indiana pulled the proverbial lever for Nikki Haley, who left the race in March. She won 16.6 percent of the vote in the Pennsylvania primary two weeks earlier. The trial, in other words, has not even rallied dissident Republicans toward the party’s standard-bearer and away from a failed challenger.
Trump is not yet toast, but he’s browning.
Since 2015, there has been this strong desire to make Trump more complicated than he is, as if his power and influence mean that he must have depth and substance. But he doesn’t. Trump is a glorified bully. And like all bullies, he wilts in the face of anyone willing to stand up and say no.
Joe Biden has been hitting Trump hard on social media, but his momentum has slowed since the Gaza protests have focused press attention there.
But the current election, and to some extent the unexpectedly narrow margin of the 2020 election, are demoralizing to liberals because that element of naïveté is gone, and yet Trump remains formidable. Democrats are worried about what another Trump presidency would mean, but they’re also stunned by what the numbers keep telling them: We’re losing to that?
I’d encourage liberals who feel this way to imagine what would happen in a mass-market Hollywood film about a well-meaning protagonist who came to the same realization. Would he just keep doing the same thing over and over again, expecting better sense to prevail? Or would he switch tactics, and come up with a new plan to stage a comeback?
My longstanding frustration with Democrats stems from the fact that they’re doing the first thing. I’m relieved to see Biden chastise journalists for underplaying the most important stakes of the election (the media really should do better!) but he and (more importantly) the other leaders of his party are simply not providing any of the high drama they know political media relies on to fuel stories into firestorms.
(At the ground level, getting Yellow Dogs to adopt new tricks is the story of my life.)
Democrats should be doing more to spin Republicans’ foilbles into major controveries., Beutler suggests. Republicans are pros at it, and used their skills to make the most of the campus protests.
But this was about Trump’s invincibility.
In this situation, Trump is not in control for once, and that’s bad news for him. He hates it. Late on Thursday, he had his lawyers ask the judge to lift his gag order with regard to Stormy Daniels once she’d finished her testimony. He wanted to savage her for the cameras outside the courtroom, but lacked the guts to take the stand and testify under oat that, as he claims, the encounter never happened.
Daniels herself taunted him for that.
Real men respond to testimony by being sworn in and taking the stand in court. Oh…wait. Nevermind.
It’s election year again, so voter fraud fraudsters are again flinging smoke bombs into newsrooms and shouting, “Fire!” By the time the smoke clears and no fire is found, they’ve gotten their headlines and reinforced the notion among viewers that all-but-nonexistent voter fraud is a huge problem.
Speaker Mike Johnson (R), flanked by other Republican election integrity patriots outside the Capitol Wednesday, announced a bill to make voting by noncitizens illegaler than it is already. In apparent exchange for Donald Trump’s blessing, the Louisiana congressman committed to addressing the non-problem in a manner, writes Philip Bump, that “blends two of Trump’s favorite strawmen: illegal voters and immigrants.” He offered several “incorrect or misleading” reasons for the proposed legislation.
First, he said, there is “no current mechanism to ensure only those registering or voting are actually citizens.” This isn’t true; as PolitiFact outlined when Trump elevated this concern in 2020, numerous states have processes that validate whether voters are citizens.
Second, Johnson claimed that “I believe the number is close to probably, at this point, 16 million” immigrants who entered the country illegally since President Biden took office. This is wildly inflated. There have been about 7.7 million encounters at the border, according to Homeland Security data, but that includes millions of immigrants who were quickly deported. In January, The Washington Post reported that 2.3 million immigrants had been released into the United States. This excludes immigrants who evaded detection, but there are fewer such immigrants than before the expansion of border barriers.
Johnson has no evidence to prop up his strawman. But among voter fraud promoters, absence of evidence is never evidence of absence. That voting by noncitizens is a problem is not a matter of fact, but a matter of intuition — Truthiness. It’s something Johnson knows not with his head but with his gut.
Reporter: “Are you saying that there are currently non-U.S. citizens voting in federal elections? … Do you have an estimate of how many?”
House Speaker Mike Johnson: “It's not been something that is easily provable. We don't have that number.” pic.twitter.com/vBVSaO2uLM
“We all know, intuitively, that a lot of illegals are voting in federal elections. But it’s not been something that’s easily provable. We don’t have that number,” Johnson said.
“Here’s an intuition for you,” tweeted Pulitzer Prize-winning author T.J. Stiles. “People terrified of contact with government because they don’t want their lives destroyed by deportation don’t register to vote illegally and then vote illegally for the reward of having a tiny tiny influence on federal electoral outcomes.”
Bump offers more, but his colleague Aaron Blake followed up with this observation on Johnson’s “We don’t have that number” comment:
It’s at least somewhat transparent. It also undercuts the leader of the Republican Party, former president Donald Trump, who has ridiculously pegged the number of illegal votes by undocumented immigrants in the 2016 election at 3 million to 5 million (just enough, as it happens, to explain away his 2.9 million-vote loss in the popular vote). After the 2020 election, Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani also ridiculously pegged the number of such illegal votes in Arizona alone at between 40,000 and 250,000 — as many as 1 out of every 14 votes cast.
There is precisely no evidencethat this is a problem on any significant scale. The idea that large numbers of people who are in this country illegally would take the risk of being detected to cast a single vote in a presidential election is nonsensical on its face.
Donald Trump is nothing if not nonsensical. He already believes he is invincible. The only way he can lose is for someone else (or lots of brown-skinned someones) to out-cheat him. Trump has likely heard the rumor (I won’t repeat) about noncitizen voter registration that the Associated Press felt obliged to debunk a month ago.
I’ve written before that the “Republican argument” here is quite different when it comes to addressing gun violence. There is no need for additional “gun laws criminals will simply ignore; we just need to enforce laws already on the books. Except when it comes to voting restrictions, we need new laws on top of those they complain the state is already not enforcing.”
We need new laws, Republicans argue, to restore people’s confidence in elections Republicans have spent decades undermining.
Nice, decent white people wake up on Election Day, shower, dress, eat breakfast, then go the polls to do their patriotic duty by casting their votes. OTHERS — Poors numbering in the invisible millions — are not like US. They go instead to commit felonies punishable by five years in prison and a $10,000 fine for each offense just to add a single extra vote to their team’s total.
Rep. Chip Roy (R-Tex.) took the podium and said without apparent irony, in support of Johnson’s bill, “The most fundamental thing you can do to destroy the rule of law and to destroy our republic is to undermine faith in elections and undermine the integrity of our elections, and to destroy this republic by making it unclear as to who’s voting.”
It’s pretty clear by now that destroying the republic is a central plank of the MAGA platform defined by one word: Trump.
We used to call Don Jr and Eric Uday and Qusay and it fell out of fashion probably because nobody remembers Saddam Hussein anymore. But Trump’s dictatorial practice of installing family members in political roles certainly should seem familiar to those of us who have been around a while:
After years in which his privacy has been fiercely guarded and he has been kept out of the political arena, former President Donald J. Trump’s youngest son, Barron, was chosen to be one of Florida’s delegates to the Republican National Convention.
Barron, who turned 18 earlier this year and will graduate high school this month, will be one of 41 at-large delegates at the party’s national meeting in July, when the G.O.P. is expected to officially nominate his father as the Republican presidential candidate. His selection was reported earlier by NBC News.
The youngest Trump will be joined in the delegation by his two more politically active brothers, Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr., both of whom have appeared on the campaign trail or done interviews to support their father’s candidacy. Mr. Trump’s younger daughter, Tiffany, will also be a Florida delegate. Ivanka Trump, his eldest child, was not on the list.
Lara Trump has been made the Chair of the RNC and Don Jr’s girlfriend Kimberley Guilfoyle and Tiffany’s husband are also delegates along with some big Trump donors. Too bad about the Florida activists who spend their time working for him and the GOP year in and year out. Oh well.
And by the way, Ivanka is floating trial balloons about a possible return to the White House. I am quite sure that she will be in the cabinet if he wins. Secretary of labor? Oh hell, why not VP? She’s got the looks and she’d actually be better than Kristi Noem. She hasn’t murdered any puppies as far as I know. Plus it would be a great way to help Jared grow their billions. Don’t be surprised….
The NY Times’ Thomas Edsall looked into this question of why liberals are allegedly so much unhappier than conservatives.
Why is it that a substantial body of social science research finds that conservatives are happier than liberals?
A partial answer: Those on the right are less likely to be angered or upset by social and economic inequities, believing that the system rewards those who work hard, that hierarchies are part of the natural order of things and that market outcomes are fundamentally fair.
Those on the left stand in opposition to each of these assessments of the social order, prompting frustration and discontent with the world around them.
Ok. I would put it slightly differently. Conservatives don’t have empathy for anyone who doesn’t look like them. And many of them take joy in their enemies’ suffering so these inequities make them happy since they consider people of color, LGBTQ, feminists etc their enemies. Lots to celebrate if that’s how you see the world.
Edsall sort of agrees:
Citing a wide range of polling data and academic studies, [Vox’s Zack] Beauchamp found:
* More than twice as many Republicans (39 percent) as Democrats (17 percent) believe that “if elected leaders won’t protect America, the people must act — even if that means violence.”
* Fifty-seven percent of Republicans consider Democrats to be “enemies” compared with 41 percent of Democrats who view Republicans as enemies.
* Among Republicans, support for “the use of force to defend our way of life,” as well as for the belief that “strong leaders bend rules” and that “sometimes you have to take the law in your own hands,” grows stronger in direct correlation with racial and ethnic hostility.
… [They] respond to adversity and what they see as attacks from the left with threats and anger, while a segment of the left often but not always responds to adversity and social inequity with dejection and sorrow.
As I said, they have no empathy for anyone who isn’t a mirror image of themselves — which explains their worship of Donald Trump. He is the biggest asshole on the planet and they love him for it. Look at how much fun they have at his rallies.
Stormy Daniels appears to have done very well on the stand today. According to observers I head on TV, she was composed and poised under withering questioning from Trump lawyer Susan Necheles basically slut shaming her and claiming that she’s a nutty, grifter who extorted Trump with a lie. Most people seem to think that may have not landed well.
The reason she was called was to testify that the even actually happened which, if Trump had just stipulated that they did have sex, would not have happened. (As Andrew Weissman has said, she was essentially an exhibit in the case, not a witness to actual crime. ) But he couldn’t. He says that none of the women who have accused him of wrongdoing every happened. None of it. They are all liars and so is Daniels. I doubt anyone believes that.
The classic moment from the morning:
Necheles: You have a lot of experience making up phony stories about sex.
Daniels: That’s not how I would put it. The sex in the films is very much real, just like what happened to me in that room.
Then, she added that had she written the scene with Trump for a movie, she “would have written it to be a lot better.”
They tried to take her down on the stand and she stood tall.
Trump embarrassed himself far more by insisting that he didn’t do it than by just admitting it. But then nothing is more humiliating to him than admitting he did something wrong. He just can’t do it.
Nikki Haley won 22% of the vote (over 150,000 people) in the Indiana GOP primary this week. It’s an open primary so it’s possible that a bunch of them were Democrats meddling, but that would mean that Democratic turnout was very high. She was out of the race before early voting began so it’s not that. There are Republicans who are still protesting the Trump nomination in pretty high numbers.
Nikki Haley is easing back into public life after dropping out of the Republican presidential race in early March, but has no immediate plans to endorse Donald Trump.
The former South Carolina governor is attending a retreat in Charleston, S.C., on Monday and Tuesday to thank about 100 of her biggest donors, a person close to Haley told The Wall Street Journal. She isn’t expected to discuss her political future or encourage them to give to other campaigns.
The person said there is no pending endorsement of Trump, the former president and presumptive Republican nominee. The two didn’t speak when she got out of the race on March 6 and haven’t done so since, this person said.
Eric Tanenblatt, a longtime GOP fundraiser and strategist in Georgia who plans to attend the donor meeting, said he hopes the 52-year-old Haley runs for the presidency again.
[…]
Tanenblatt said he could see Haley endorsing Trump, if he made a greater effort to reach out to her and her supporters. “It’s now up to President Trump to unite the Republican Party by demonstrating to Nikki supporters that they have a place under the tent,” he said.
I don’t see Trump forgiving her. She betrayed him by running and then trashed him in the waning days of her primary campaign. And unlike Ron DeSantis, she hasn’t endorsed him. In other words he requires that she crawl to him and lick his boots before he will ever “reach out.” Will she?
Unless she is convinced that he will lose and the party will demand new leadership that isn’t associated with the cult, she probably will. It will be interesting to see what bet she finally makes.
