President Biden on Saturday night said he expects the winner of this year’s presidential election will likely have the chance to fill two vacancies on the Supreme Court – a decision he warned would be “one of the scariest parts” if his Republican opponent, former President Donald Trump, is successful in his bid for a second term.
Biden made the remarks at a fundraiser that his campaign said raised a record $28 million. The event featured Hollywood stars like George Clooney and Julia Roberts, as well as former President Barack Obama.
Late-night host Jimmy Kimmel moderated a conversation with Biden and Obama, and the two presidents talked about the impact that Trump had on issues like abortion rights by naming conservative justices to the Supreme Court.
“The next president is likely to have two new Supreme Court nominees. Two more. He’s already appointed two that have been very negative in terms of rights of individuals,” Biden said. Trump named three justices during his term – Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanagh and Amy Coney Barrett – cementing the conservative majority on the bench.
Biden, who flew to Los Angeles on the heels of attending the G7 summit in Italy, did not expand upon how the two vacancies on the court would come about.
I can expand on it. If Trump wins and they take the senate Thomas and Alito will happily retire. Thomas will make some real big bucks on wingnut welfare and Alito will openly embrace his fascist activism. Trump will replace them with young fascist jurists handpicked by Leonard Leo and they will rule the court for another generation.
Martha-Ann Alito made that pretty clear when she told Lauren Windsor that she told her husband that when he is “free of this nonsense” she plans to let her freak flags fly and nonsensically mentioned a five year statute of limitations on defamation. It sure sounds like she doesn’t think he’s going to be on the court all that much longer.
Until this court is re-balanced there will be no more progress. The only thing we can hope for is to keep a majority in the congress and hold the presidency to offset their worst impulses. Letting Trump put two young Nazis on it to replace the two old wingnuts would be a tragedy.
The only thing Trump gets in return is destruction of America’s alliances a nuclear arms race and possibly Europe. Win-win for both parties I guess:
Former U.S. President Donald Trump on Saturday blasted the scale of U.S. support for Ukraine and said that if he is reelected in November he would immediately “have that settled.”
At a campaign rally in Detroit, Trump criticized Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, calling him “the greatest salesman of all time” for Kyiv’s push to secure U.S. support in its effort to defend Ukraine against Russian aggression more than three years after Moscow’s all-out invasion.
“He just left four days ago with $60 billion, and he gets home, and he announces that he needs another $60 billion. It never ends,” Trump said.
“I will have that settled prior to taking the White House as president-elect,” said Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee in the U.S. election.
Trump said again the other day that he would also have secured the release of Evan Gerskovich as president-elect. He’s very specific that he will do that and that he will force the end of the Ukraine war immediately upon his election. It’s hard to say if he’s signaling to Putin that he’s going to withdraw aid immediately or if an actual deal has already been struck but really, what difference does it make?
Welcome to today’s special edition of #ImagineIfBidenDidIt. Trump boasts of passing a cognitive test but can’t remember the name of the White House doctor who supposedly administered it. https://t.co/aCT2GMHGld
That wasn’t all. He did his weird schtick about shower heads too:
for the second straight campaign cycle, Trump is out here ranting about water pressure and the right to use lots of water when you take a shower pic.twitter.com/dVQffgVLuX
Lewis Rothschild : People want leadership, Mr. President, and in the absence of genuine leadership, they’ll listen to anyone who steps up to the microphone.
Donald Trump steps up to the microphone a lot. But to Americans too busy to listen, too overworked to devote their precious free time to political news, they hear only the loudest voices and feel how the world feels. To them.
They’ll be asked this fall to hire leaders. From the president on down to the local school board. What they want in their leaders are people who will fight for them. It’s not just what you say. Words are cheap. It’s what you do. And voters need to see you doing it.
Anat Shenker-Osorio had a long essay in Rolling Stone yesterday, not so much about messaging (her specialty) but about voter attitudes she sees in her focus groups:
If my colleagues and I took a shot everytime someone in these groups decried the Democrats as doing nothing on the fascism front, we’d have cirrhosis.
As one disaffected Democratic white woman from Arizona said in April, “I don’t think any of them care really. Even if Democrats won the House, the Senate, the presidency, they’ve had it before — didn’t do anything then.” The video player is currently playing an ad.
Last month, a disaffected white Democratic man in Pittsburgh pointed out that “Biden ran in part on protecting Roe v. Wade,” and noted that Democrats stalled for weeks on legislation codifying federal protections for abortion, despite the early leak of a draft Dobbs decision overturning the landmark high court decision. “Not that I have a womb,” he went on to say, “but materially for me as an individual and as a voter, it doesn’t really matter whether the Republicans are actively taking the rights away or the Democrats are allowing them to be taken away because they’re being corroded regardless.”
"A record-high percentage of voters told Gallup that abortion is the issue that will determine their vote this election cycle. Nearly three-quarters of those single-issue voters are pro-choice" https://t.co/QppHHegzSJ
Joe Biden may go down in history as the most effective Democratic president since FDR. But people don’t remember what he and federal Democrats accomplished as much as what they didn’t. Failures they remember. “You’re only as good as your last picture,” as they say in Hollywood.
Like Lewis Rothschild said in The American President, people want leaders. Right now many are ready to elect a wannabe autocrat who plays one on TV. Frustrated others want nothing to do with him, but don’t see Democrats as prepared to fight for them with more than empty words.
“Democrats had a governing trifecta for two years and failed to codify Roe or pass voting rights legislation that would have combated state-based efforts to seize people’s most fundamental freedoms over our bodies and our ballots,” Shenker-Osorio says of her higher-information subjects.
Biden is rebuilding your bridge, but he’s only as good as his last win. Voters have longer memories for what they didn’t get, and what they had taken from them while Democrats seemingly stood by.
Is it any wonder there’s a lack of belief in the efficacy of voting, especially among disaffected Dems, who feel that they were told to turn out in 2020 to stop terrible things from happening, only to see those terrible things happen anyway? It’s challenging to sell voters on the same premise this year.
Things could get far worse under a second Trump presidency, but that message is not getting to most voters, Shenker-Osorio finds.
The kitchen table is on fire
There’s a 900-page plan from the Heritage Foundation for Trump 2.0 called Project 2025. It calls for gutting the civil service and replacing it with MAGA toadies, “restricting contraception, dismantling the Department of Education, eliminating labor and environmental protections,” and more. But most people haven’t heard of it. When study subjects get briefed on Project 2025, they soundly reject it.
Where we run into problems is that when voters learn for the first time of these horrors, many wonder why Democrats don’t seem to be speaking out about them or fighting back. In an online group across battleground states on June 11, one swing Latina participant summed up these sentiments, saying that “the Democrats have to step it up. Where is the counter agenda?” More darkly, Asian-American disaffected swing men the same night didn’t like MAGA’s plan but noted that at least they have one.
Democrats lack the messaging infrastructure that right-wing media owners provide gratis to Republicans. And the both-sides mainstream press offers more coverage of the Trumpist clown show because it’s more colorful and attracts eyeballs and clicks.
But that means Democrats running on kitchen-table issues, an idée fixe among old-guard Democrats like Rep. Nancy Pelosi [timestamp: 1:17:00], get little or no traction in the minds of a distracted electorate. A laundry list of accomplishments doesn’t lodge in people’s brains the way a good story with heroes and villains does. Democrats aren’t telling one. It’s not voters’ fault that they don’t know what they don’t know. It’s a challenge Democrats are struggling to meet. And the kitchen table? The kitchen table is on fire.
The widely reported fact of Biden bleeding support from key 2020 constituencies including young people and people of color merits a cold hard look at causation. Pundits pounced to attribute these drops to some sudden onset of Trump-attraction and insist Biden has to moderate. But in reality, most of those moving away from Biden are either utterly unaware of or refuse to credit MAGA’s well-laid plans to control our lives and our livelihoods. The erosion in support isn’t driven by the lure of Trump and cannot be cured by Biden adopting lite versions of his policies. It stems from lack of awareness of what Trump and the rest of the MAGA mob say and intend; thus the only way forward is to ensure voters hear the alarm bells and believe the emergency is real.
It’s both accurate and entirely fair to lay much of public ignorance and incredulity at the media’s door. But we cannot expect voters to believe that the house is indeed on fire, that the threat of fascism is neigh, if the firefighters, that is our current leaders, aren’t attempting to put out the blaze.
How many Rocky movies did Stallone make? And they’re all the same movie. So why do people keep going? Because so many Americans themselves feel like underdogs. We want to root for the little guy with heart. Facing insurmountable odds. Risking it all. We want to feel the thrill up our spines and in the tops of our heads when Bill Conti’s trumpet fanfare introduces the training sequence. We want to hear that. Wait for it. Cheer for it. Pay for it. Over and over and over.
Say what you’re for, Shenker-Osorio insists. Paint the beautiful tomorrow. But words are not enough. They need to see you fighting for what you believe and for them. They’ll be inspired by it. That says leadership more than speeches. That’s what they’ll vote for.
You’re only as good as your last picture. Paint one.
New York City’s 2024 Tribeca Film Festival is running through June 16th. The festival (co-founded by Robert De Niro, Jane Rosenthal, and Craig Hatkoff in 2001) features a variety of media platforms, including film, TV, music, audio storytelling, games, and XR. I’m doing virtual coverage; as much as I’d love to be skipping down the streets of my birth city (well…technically Queens), physical mobility issues have made travel too uncomfortable. At any rate, I’ll be sharing reviews over the next couple weeks. The good news is that you can virtually attend as well-the festival is offering select titles via the “Tribeca at Home” online portal. Check out the website for more info. Let’s dive in!
Brats (U.S.) *** – Linndrums, teen angst, and synths…oh my! If you are of a certain age, you may recall a distinctive sub-genre of of films that propagated in the early-to-mid 80s. More often than not, they were directed by John Hughes, targeted to appeal to a mid-teens to early 20s audience, and featured mix-and-match ensembles of fast-rising young Hollywood stars like Rob Lowe, Demi Moore, Emilio Estevez, Ally Sheedy, Molly Ringwald, John Cryer, Judd Nelson, et. al.
In 1985, 29 year-old pop culture writer David Blum did a lengthy profile in New York magazine that was initially intended to focus solely on Emilio Estevez. However, after carousing for a few days with Estevez and some of his contemporaries, he came up with a hook for his piece, christening this core group as “The Brat Pack”. The term stuck, becoming ingrained into he pop culture lexicon.
One of those young actors was Andrew McCarthy (Class, St. Elmo’sFire,Pretty in Pink, Less Than Zero). For his engaging documentary, McCarthy set out to track down some of his fellow Brat-packers to get their take on how this reductive labeling affected their subsequent careers; was it a curse, a blessing, or a little of both?
While it’s fun to watch McCarthy and his fellow actors sharing war stories and commiserating on the ups and downs of early stardom, the most interesting segment is toward the end of the film, when he sits down with a wary and defensive David Blum. To his credit, McCarthy keeps it civil; that said, he does share his feelings with the writer vis a vis how hurtful the “Brat Pack” labeling was to him personally, asking him if he thought it was “mean”. Blum’s pragmatic response reminded me of the sage advice given to the budding journalist in Almost Famous: “Never make friends with the band.”
Boys Go To Jupiter (U.S.) **½ – Well, you know what they say: “Boys go to Jupiter to get more stupider, girls go to college to get more knowledge.” Truth be told, I was completely oblivious about the existence of that (alleged) children’s rhyme until I consulted Mr. Google a few moments ago (I never went to college, you see). 3-D animator Julian Glander’s musical comedy fantasy (set in Florida between Christmas and New Year’s) centers on a teenage odd-jobber named Billy 5000 (voiced by Jack Corbett) who is laser-focused on making $5,000.
His pals think he works too much; chiding him for not chilling with them at the beach. When Billy stumbles across an alien creature that resembles a purple donut, he is forced to reassess his raison d’être. Toss in a subplot about an evil orange juice company out to take over the world (or something), and there you have it. Fitfully amusing, in the vein of Clerks and Slacker (the light social satire and absurdist anarchy reminded me of The Firesign Theatre at times). I enjoyed the music soundtrack, which has a pleasant dream pop vibe. For a niche audience.
Hacking Hate (Denmark/Sweden/Norway) ***½ – Move over, Lisbeth Salandar…there’s a new hacker in town, and she’s stirring up a hornet’s nest of wingnuts. Simon Klose’s timely documentary follows award-winning Swedish journalist My Vingren as she meticulously constructs a fake online profile, posing as a male white supremacist. Her goal is to smoke out a possible key influencer and glean how he and others fit into right-wing extremist recruiting.
Vingren is like a one-woman Interpol; her investigation soon points her to U.S.-based extremist networks as well, leading her to consult with whistle-blower Anika Collier Navaroli (the former Twitter employee who was instrumental in getting Trump booted off the platform) and Imrab Ahmed (another one of Elon Musk’s least-favorite people, he was sued by the X CEO for exposing the rampant hate speech on the platform).
This isn’t a video game; considering the inherently belligerent nature of the extremist culture she is exposing, Vingren is taking considerable personal risk in this type of investigative journalism (she’s much braver than I am). Especially chilling is the shadowy figure at the center of her investigation, who is like a character taken straight out of a Frederick Forsyth novel. In light of the high stakes of our own upcoming presidential election and the ancillary right-wing extremist threats, this could be the most important documentary of 2024.
Don’t You Let Me Go (Uruguay) ***½ – The protracted opening scene of Ana Guevara and Leticia Jorge’s drama (set at a wake) is so drenched in sorrow and raw emotion that it becomes something akin to grief porn. But just as I was beginning to wonder if this was going to be some kind of endurance test, one insular young woman breaks away from the proceedings to catch some air. Her name is Adela, and the recently departed was Elena, her closest friend since childhood. Adela is heading for her car when she espies a bus that seems to have appeared from nowhere. Intrigued, she boards it.
From this point onward, the narrative shifts from temporal to metaphysical concerns-as this is no ordinary bus (thank you driver for getting me here). Abracadabra …Adela has been transported to a weekend summer idyll with Elena and a mutual friend at a beach cottage. Whether this is a sense memory or a wishful conjuring on Adela’s part is not clear (shades of Tarkovsky’s Solaris). What begins as a sobering meditation on grief and loss becomes an uplifting fable about friendship, love, and savoring every morsel of joy that comes your way.
Restless (U.K.) *** – Writer-director Jed Hart’s audacious and blackly comic debut feature is driven by a terrific performance by Lyndsey Marshal, who plays a mild-mannered elder care nurse who likes nothing better than spending her off-hours baking, listening to light classical music, and settling in with her cat for some reading and quiet time. Imagine her chagrin when it becomes abundantly clear that her new next-door neighbor likes nothing better than hosting all-night ravers…every night of the week. Her first few polite requests (usually made around 4am) for the young man and his friends to keep it down are initially met with bemusement, but the situation takes a more sinister turn once she threatens to call the police. The woman’s steady descent into madness and desperation turns a “neighbor from hell” story into a modern Edgar Allan Poe tale. A satisfying revenge fantasy for anyone who’s “been there”, and a solid reinforcement for the old adage, “Watch out for the quiet ones.”
S/He is Still Her/e: The Official Genesis P-OrridgeDocumentary (U.S.) *** – The title of David Charles Rodrigues’ documentary is a mouthful, which is somehow appropriate because the subject of his film was a real handful. My previous awareness of P-Orridge was only through their involvement with the bands Throbbing Gristle and Psychic T.V., but this unblinking portrait reveals that there was a hell of a lot more going on in that noggin (performance artist, poet, occultist). A fascinating and eye-opening look at someone who not only lived for their art, but over the course of a lifetime, literally molded themselvesinto a piece of living art.
I have mentioned this before but I want to put it out there again in case some of you missed it. This issue in The New Republic on what an American fascism would look like is a must read. It’s worth the subscription.
Here’s an excerpt of editor Michael Tomasky’s intro which begins by noting that there is a lot of reluctance in our political discourse to draw this comparison as if it’s hysterical to acknowledge the threat:
We have trouble seeing the hysteria. We chose the cover image, based on a well-known 1932 Hitler campaign poster, for a precise reason: that anyone transported back to 1932 Germany could very, very easily have explained away Herr Hitler’s excesses and been persuaded that his critics were going overboard. After all, he spent 1932 campaigning, negotiating, doing interviews—being a mostly normal politician. But he and his people vowed all along that they would use the tools of democracy to destroy it, and it was only after he was given power that Germany saw his movement’s full face.
Today, we at The New Republic think we can spend this election year in one of two ways. We can spend it debating whether Trump meets the nine or 17 points that define fascism. Or we can spend it saying, “He’s damn close enough, and we’d better fight.”
US House races. When asked about their House district race, likely voters choose the Democratic over the Republican candidate by a wide margin (62% to 36%).
In the 10 competitive districts (as defined by the Cook Political Report), support is higher for the Democratic candidate than for the Republican (59% to 39%).
Nine in ten or more Democratic and Republican likely voters would choose their party’s candidate, while independents are more divided. Across demographic groups and in the coastal regions, majorities favor the Democratic candidate over the Republican.
Preferences in the US House race were similar in April (60% Democrat, 38% Republican). Thirty percent of likely voters are “extremely” or “very” enthusiastic about voting for Congress this year. Fewer than four in ten across parties, regions, and demographic groups hold this view. In the competitive House races, 37 percent are “extremely” or “very” enthusiastic about voting for Congress this year.
Congressman Ted Lieu tweeted this out saying that Democrats are going to flip the House . If this holds up they may very well. Democrats are going to come out to vote against Donald Trump and here in California there are a whole lot more of them.
The Democratic National Committee is launching billboards in 10 locations across Milwaukee on Friday featuring former President Trump’s reported diss of the city that’s the site of the Republican National Convention next month.
Why it matters: Trump reportedly used “horrible” to describe the city in the key swing state during his closed-door meeting on Capitol Hill on Thursday with House Republicans, though his campaign and Republican lawmakers dispute this account…
Butthe Biden campaign and Democrats seized on the comments.
Biden posted a photo on the social media platform X and wrote, “I happen to love Milwaukee.”
Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers wrote on X, “add it to the list of things Donald Trump is wrong about.”
The billboards will run in 10 different locations across Milwaukee, the most populous county in the state and a Democratic stronghold, Axios has learned.
[…]
Donald Trump has made his contempt for Wisconsinites and their home clear,” DNC Deputy communications director Abhi Rahman said in a statement.
“The dislike is mutual – in 2020, Wisconsin handed Trump a one way ticket back to exile in Mar-a-Lago and sent President Biden to the Oval Office,” Rahman said.
“Trump hates Milwaukee because Milwaukeeans know exactly who he is – a sore loser who they’re going to make a two-time loser this November,” Rahman said.
The desperate scramble by Republicans to rationalize what he said tells the whole story. They know that Wisconsin is key. And they are freaking out about Trump insulting the state like this, especially since theb local news was all over it across the state:
“He was talking about how terrible crime and voter fraud are,” said campaign spokesperson Steven Cheung.
In another statement, the campaign wrote that it was a “total lie” that Trump called Milwaukee a “horrible city.” However, they went on to add, “President Trump was explicitly referring to the problems in Milwaukee, specifically violent crime and voter fraud,” suggesting he did make comments about the city, just not in the way some were interpreting it.
The campaign then includes a series of tweets from Republican members from Wisconsin inside the room who agree with the campaign’s description that Trump was not making a blanket disparaging statement about the city.
Republicans — including those from Wisconsin — quickly jumped to Trump’s defense, insisting the former president was talking about crime and election security.
“@realdonaldtrump was specifically referring to the CRIME RATE in Milwaukee,” Rep. Derrick Van Orden posted on X after the meeting.
Rep. Glenn Grothman told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel that Trump “was concerned about the election” and “felt we need to do better in urban centers around the country.”
Rep. Bryan Steil claimed on X that Trump “did not say this” in the conference meeting.
“There is no better place than Wisconsin in July,” Steil said.
He said it and he meant it. Just like he means the insults he makes toward any place or any person that doesn’t worship him. He hates most of America.
Remember when the Republic ans spent an entire year wailing that refrain over Clinton’s affair with Monica Lewinsky?
I like that this video loops the felony conviction in with Epstein, Access Hollywood, etc etc etc — it’s a great entry point into a wider conversation. pic.twitter.com/gJSc0zl6TP
