Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

The much anticipated testimony by former Donald Trump lawyer Michael Cohen finally arrived this week and from the sound of many of the talking heads on television it’s been a huge disappointment. They were apparently expecting the former president’s one-time personal “fixer” to melt down on the stand in a fit of rage or lunge at his former boss but instead the carefully prepared Cohen was subdued and succinct, admitting his lies and misdeeds in service of Donald Trump with a sorrowful mien.

The prosecution’s case has been meticulously laid out through testimony from the people with whom Trump conspired to create fake news items about his political rivals in 2016 and their scheme to buy up negative stories about him. This was accompanied with testimony from his loyal, former assistants creating a timeline delineating what the former president knew and when he knew it.

And then there was Stormy Daniels, the adult film actress who received the hush money payoff, taking the stand to dramatically verify that the story they were trying to suppress was true. All of this has been backed up by a paper trail that even includes handwritten notes by Trump Organization Chief Financial Officer Allen Weisselberg on incriminating documents outlining the crime Trump is charged with committing.

But the full story is best told through Michael Cohen who ties all the various strands of the plot together. In the last two days of direct and cross examination he has woven the tale of a nefarious scheme hatched by Donald Trump, a tabloid smear merchant, women with whom the married Trump had sexual relationships along with some lawyers and accountants to illegally suppress information and cook the books to aid Trump’s presidential campaign in 2016. Most legal observers think he’s done a good job of it, in spite of the baggage he carries as a convicted felon. (As every TV lawyer has pointed out at least once, witnesses who flip on their co-conspirator bosses are, by definition, not pure and innocent but they testify for the government in courtrooms around the country every day.)

At this writing Cohen in still in the midst of cross examination by Trump’s defense lawyers who appear to be suggesting that Cohen is angry with Trump for failing to pick him for a plum position in the White House that he’s lying about his personal plot to spend his own money and lie for him repeatedly, which seems a bit strained. When asked by Trump’s attorney why he would have done such things, Cohen replied, “I was deep in the cult of Donald Trump.”

Considering where he is today, there’s certainly a lesson in that but it’s obvious that some people who should know better are not heeding it. I’m speaking of the elected Republicans who are now making pilgrimages to Manhattan to demonstrate their fealty to the Dear Leader, even down to their clothes and the placement of their flag pins:

Dressed by daddy. pic.twitter.com/2cfkCCG08E

— Brian Guest (@brguest20) May 14, 2024

Cults often have uniforms, The only thing missing is a red MAGA hat to make it complete.

I called this last week when I wrote about Florida Senator Rick Scott’s appearance in court, after Trump was reported to have complained that he was getting no support from the party in his time of need. I expected that the VP wannabes would be making the trek right quick, elbowing each other out of the way to gain his attention. Sure enough, this week we have seen contenders, J.D. Vance, R-Oh., Gov. Doug Burgam, R-N.D., Rep. Byron Donalds, R-Fl., and MAGA Trump superfans, Sen., Tommy Tuberville, Vivek Ramaswamy and last but hardly least, the Speaker of the House Mike Johnson. (S. Carolina Sen. Tim Scott and Marco Rubio of Florida had better step it up.)

These GOP luminaries are supposedly there to provide moral support to the Republican nominee for president. As J.D. Vance told Fox News:

“I mean, look, I was there to support a friend. Recognizing that sometimes it’s a little bit lonely to sit up there by yourself, I offered to come in and maybe just be a friendly face in the courtroom. And that’s all I wanted to do.”

Please. That’s not really what they’re there to do for Donald Trump. They come into the courtroom for about 45 minutes or so then they leave and hold a press conference outside. They rant about the trial being a witch hunt and a sham and say all the things Trump is precluded from saying because of the gag order imposed by the judge to stop him from putting the family members of the the court employees, the witnesses and jury members in danger. It’s a blatant act of defiance of the spirit of the law from a group of people who take an oath to uphold it.

Senator Tuberville, a man with absolutely no filter, told Newsmax that this is a coordinated strategy:

Hopefully, we have more and more senators and congressmen go up every day to represent him and be able to go out and overcome this gag order. And that’s one of the reasons we went, is to be able to speak our piece for President Trump.

Perhaps the most shocking performance of the group so far was Speaker Johnson, the man who is second in line to the presidency, who called the trial a sham and, like most of the others, even lied about the judge’s daughter putting her in the cross hairs of the crazy MAGA followers in defiance of the gag order. What a low, low moment for American politics.

Trump is naturally very pleased with this unctuous display of sycophancy. He came before the cameras on Tuesday and said “I have a lot of surrogates and they are speaking very beautifully.” If it could be proved that he “directed” them to do this, he would go to jail for violating the gag order but Trump’s mob boss style is well-understood. They all know very well what Trump wants them to say without him ever having to tell them.

All of these grasping sycophants are now “deep in the cult of Donald Trump” just as Michael Cohen was all those years ago. As MSNBC’s Chris Hayes so sharply observed yesterday,

You’re watching the next iteration of people auditioning to be the next version of that guy up on the stand … Here you have this set of people who seem to bear no connection to the ghost of Christmas future of the man on the stand who was himself this supplicant figure and you wonder which one of them is going to end up in the same position.

"There's a weird thing happening in that courtroom!"

WATCH: @Chrislhayes shares what it's like watching Trump, Cohen, Ramaswamy, Eric & Lara Trump and others from inside the courtroom. pic.twitter.com/ZuoykbJsf7

— MSNBC (@MSNBC) May 14, 2024

I think they all are in one way or another. No one escapes unscathed. They are all so blinded by ambition and the ecstasy of being in this exciting moment that they are failing to see that they are heading down exactly the same humiliating path that led Cohen to that witness stand this week having to confess to the whole world that he was a fool who destroyed his life trying to please this man who has never cared for anyone but himself.

He’s losing a troubling number of Republicans

It’s Wednesday, so Donald “88 Counts” Trump is not in court. He is free to golf and complain his criminal trial means he’s unable to campaign for president.

Tuesday featured three additional presidential primaries in Maryland, Nebraska, and West Virginia. Politico’s lede: “Donald Trump showed weakness in the suburbs in Tuesday’s primaries, while Joe Biden’s problem with the protest vote appeared to fade.”

Zombie Nikki is still a problem for Trump:

A week after Nikki Haley earned 22 percent of the vote in Indiana’s open GOP primary, the widespread expectation was that different rules in the states voting on Tuesday would take a huge chunk out of support for her zombie presidential candidacy.

That didn’t exactly happen. Even though Haley likely won’t end up matching her Indiana total in Maryland, Nebraska or West Virginia, there are still some warning signs for Trump in the results.

Unlike Indiana, where voters can pick any primary ballot they’d like, the GOP primary was open only to registered Republicans in Maryland and Nebraska, and registered Republicans and independents in West Virginia.

Despite its semi-open primary, West Virginia was the Trumpiest of the three states: The former president captured 88 percent of the vote there. But there were significant pockets of Trump resistance among Republicans in Maryland and Nebraska.

Bad news for Biden Trump

As for Joe Biden, another caveat to the Democratic fretting over the polls. Politico notes:

It’s been a paradox for Democrats fretting about Biden’s standing in the polls: Republicans are more likely to say they’ll vote for Trump in general-election polling than Democrats are for Biden, but there are more protest votes in the primaries against Trump.

That continued Tuesday in Maryland and Nebraska, where Biden outran Trump significantly by percentage. In Nebraska, Biden was breaking 90 percent of the vote against Rep. Dean Phillips (D-Minn.), even as Trump was stuck in the low 80s against Haley. And in Maryland, the “uncommitted” ballot line was poised to earn about 10 percent of the vote, with the greatest concentrations in the Republican counties of far Western Maryland.

There was still some “protest” vote for Biden in West Virginia, “with Jason Palmer, the surprising winner of the March caucuses in American Samoa, drawing more than 10 percent of the vote.” Ho-kay.

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Don’t lose your nerve, Joe

A friend who like others is permanently frustrated with “the Democrats” said Monday she wants them to show more fight. No argument here.

We saw feistiness from Joe Biden during and in the wake of his State of the Union address: a flurry of hard-hitting internet ads went after his wannabe fascist opponent. But as college protests proliferated over the body count in the Gaza Strip, it feels as if the Biden campaign has dialed it back. It’s not helping that some polls show him trailing Donald Trump in several battleground states.

Tuesday’s Axios story that claims Biden doesn’t believe he’s behind, writes Dan Pfeiffer, got “Democrats reverting to their natural state of worry verging on panic.” Pfeiffer argues that campaign is not in denial about current polling. Running a campaign. especially a presidential campaign, is largely about “mood management,” he explains. What makes it worse is Democrats vent their anxieties in public while you rarely see a poll unfavorable to Donald Trump on Fox News:

Of course, the Biden folks are putting their best face forward. What do these reporters want them to say? OMG, WE ARE LOSING!!! And then crawl under the nearest table and assume the fetal position? Of course, they are confident, but that’s not the same as cockiness or denial.

But what are they doing?

I doubt the campaign agrees Biden is down by such large margins in Georgia, Arizona, and Nevada. I also doubt the Biden Campaign agrees that Trump is winning historically significant shares of young, Black, and Hispanic voters. But if we focus on how the campaign is deploying resources, it is obvious this will be an incredibly close election that could come down to a few thousand votes in the six battleground states. The Biden Campaign is raising money and spending it at a frenetic pace. They are running millions of dollars in television and digital ads monthly. According to the Biden Campaign, by the end of this month, they will have 200 offices and 500 staffers across the six battleground states polled by the NYT and North Carolina.

The time and money spent shows that they aren’t in denial about the demographic challenges. This campaign is targeting Black and Hispanic voters much earlier than previous campaigns. Last week, the campaign announced major ad buys in Black, Hispanic, and AAPI media. Finally, over the last several months, the President has highlighted his efforts to cancel student debt, fight climate change, and decriminalize marijuana — all issues of particular importance to younger voters.

I have known the people running the Biden Campaign for decades. These are very smart, experienced, data-driven political operatives. They know what they are doing. They are not readying themselves for defeat. Whether you think the latest polls are right or wrong, the operatives are making perfect moves. I am not saying Biden will win. This is a very tough election and he is facing a lot of headwinds, But if he loses,, it won’t be because of complacency or denial on the part of his campaign.

That’s all reassuring. Mastering the mechanics is vital. But what the Biden campaign also needs to manage is my friend’s mood and yours. Elections are not about good policy. They are for better or worse about feelings. Lately, about vibes. About the economy, inflation, etc., yes, but about more.

Michael Tomasky scratches his head over Trump getting credit for Biden’s economic accomplishments. Part of the problem is the media’s need to balance any good news about Biden’s accomplishments with criticism (even up-is-down lies) from Republicans. The numbers are good for the Biden economy, but it’s people’s perceptions that drive them. It’s no good if Biden’s economic numbers are terrific and no one knows it.

The New Republic cautions that conservative plans for dismantling the government under a second Trump administration could roll back a century of progress on public health. Food that’s safe to eat, air that’s safe to breathe, water that’s clean, and access to medical care when you get sick is on the line. Democrats need to be seen fighting for them, not just touting their policies and statistics.

Republicans are the bad guys here, bent on tearing down the fabric of the country. Conservatives don’t like social changes over the last couple of decades? How will they feel about losing the health insurance Democrats won them? How will they feel about losing their Medicare and Medicaid, about having their Social Security benefits cut? How will the rest of us feel about seeing marginalized communties driven back into the closet?

Biden needs more than numbers. He needs a narrative, a story with heroes. And he needs to press the attack. In its absence, the right with its multi-tentacled media machine will advance its own and win the battle of public perceptions.

Remember Maverick losing his nerve near the end of Top Gun? But then he calls on his reserves — “Talk to me, Goose.” —and the radarman on the carrier calls out, “Maverick’s reengaging, sir.” Biden and “the Democrats” need to do the same.

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Those are responses to what Trump has been saying about the judge in his NY criminal trial:

On a recent Tuesday morning, a visibly frustrated Donald Trump sat through a tense hearing in the first-ever criminal trial of a former American president. During a break, he let rip on his social media platform.

New York Justice Juan Merchan, Trump declared on Truth Social, is a “highly conflicted” overseer of a “kangaroo court.” Trump supporters swiftly replied to his post with a blitz of attacks on Merchan. The comments soon turned ugly. Some called for Merchan and other judges hearing cases against Trump to be killed.

[…]

The April 23 post by Trump and the menacing responses from his followers illustrate the incendiary impact of his angry and incessant broadsides against the judges handling the criminal and civil suits against him. As his presidential campaign intensifies, Trump has baselessly cast the judges and prosecutors in his trials as corrupt puppets of the Biden administration, bent on torpedoing his White House bid.

[…]

The rhetoric is inspiring widespread calls for violence. In a review of commenters’ posts on three pro-Trump websites, including the former president’s own Truth Social platform, Reuters documented more than 150 posts since March 1 that called for physical violence against the judges handling three of his highest-profile cases – two state judges in Manhattan and one in Georgia overseeing a criminal case in which Trump is accused of illegally seeking to overturn the state’s 2020 election results.

Those posts were part of a larger pool of hundreds identified by Reuters that used hostile, menacing and, in some cases, racist or sexualized language to attack the judges, but stopped short of explicitly calling for violence against them.

This is so sick. It’s kind of a miracle that someone hasn’t been killed. Yet. Let’s hope that Mike Johnson’s verbal assault on the judge’s daughter today won’t have that horrifying result.

Ed Kilgore takes a look at the inconceivable result in the Times/Sienna poll showing that huge numbers of people remember the Donald Trump years as glory days for America.

[W]hen the New York Times–Siena polling outfit asked voters “to describe the one thing they remembered most from Donald J. Trump’s presidency, only 5 percent of respondents referred to Jan. 6, and only 4 percent to COVID.” 39 percent cited “Trump’s behavior” as most memorable, and another 24 percent named “the economy.”

Aside from the radical shrinkage of COVID and January 6 in the rearview mirror, what’s remarkable about this reaction is that it had little to do with what we normally think of as specific events, much less issue positions. As political scientist Seth Masket commented, complaints (mostly coming from Biden supporters) about “Trump’s behavior” may well stem from initial reactions to his conduct even before he became president, while positive assessments of “the economy” under Trump are vague:

“Behavior” covers quite a bit of ground, from racist rhetoric to fulfilling campaign promises to assault of women to just tweeting too much. But to an impressive extent, most of the responses in this category have little to do with the Trump presidency at all. Many of these things occurred when he was running for president in 2016 or even earlier.

Similarly, “the economy” is pretty broad terrain. It’s not completely fictitious — the economy, by most measures, was growing at a respectable pace with low unemployment and inflation during Trump’s first three years in office, even if those numbers weren’t notably different from the economy during Barack Obama’s second term … To a considerable degree, voters seem to be saying that things were pretty good for Trump’s first three years, and the fourth wasn’t his fault.

The Times’ own analysis of these rather startling numbers attributes them to “recency bias,” suggesting that voters are letting their current concerns (particularly about inflation) distort their memories of the not-so-distant past. But they also suggest that voters have formed a fixed opinion of Trump and his presidency that may be very difficult to change. If COVID and January 6 are not front of mind when voters think of 2020 and 2021, and the economy as it was in 2019 is recalled as Elysian, what does that say about the Biden campaign’s efforts to remind people of Trump’s responsibility for the reversal of Roe v. Wade? Will voters accept that a Very Bad Thing that happened long after Trump left office was actually his fault?

Unfortunately, many Americans are apparently massively uninformed:

As it happens, a new survey of registered voters was released last week from Navigator Research showing that a sizable number of Americans, incredibly enough, held Biden responsible for “the overturning of Roe v. Wade and the elimination of the federal right to an abortion.” That opinion was held by 34 percent of self-identified independents, 32 percent of Black voters, and 42 percent of Hispanic voters. It helps explain why the Biden campaign is devoting so much energy to connecting the dots between Trump’s Supreme Court appointments and the Dobbs decision. But it also suggests public perceptions of Trump are very hard to change, and that’s a big problem for Democrats.

Oy vey. I just don’t know what to say about that. It’s literally insane.

I guess we just have to accept that Americans want the Trump circus and blame Biden for all the bad stuff that goes along with it.

Jamelle Bouie has some thoughts on this as well. An excerpt:

… “The economy” under Trump is simply the one that existed from Jan. 20, 2017, to March 13, 2020, when the White House declared the coronavirus a national public health emergency. For everything else after that date, the former president gets a pass.

No other president has gotten this kind of excused absence for mismanaging a crisis that happened on his watch. We don’t bracket the secession crisis from our assessment of James Buchanan or the Great Depression from our judgment of Herbert Hoover or the hostage crisis in Iran from our assessment of Jimmy Carter. And for good reason: The presidency was designed for crisis. It was structured with the power and autonomy needed for handling the acute challenges of national life.

“Energy in the executive is a leading character in the definition of good government,” Alexander Hamilton argued in Federalist 70. “It is essential to the protection of the community against foreign attacks; it is not less essential to the steady administration of the laws.” And the most important ingredient that constitutes energy in the executive is “unity.”

“Those politicians and statesmen who have been the most celebrated for the soundness of their principles and for the justice of their views have declared in favor of a single executive and a numerous legislature,” Hamilton wrote. “They have, with great propriety, considered energy as the most necessary qualification of the former, and have regarded this as most applicable to power in a single hand.”

The point and the purpose of vesting a single elected official with the executive authority was to give the national government the ability to respond to national emergencies with alacrity and focus. We have made it a point to judge presidents on the basis of their ability to handle a crisis, whether war or internal rebellion or economic collapse.

Except, it seems, when it comes to Trump. With the notable exception of Operation Warp Speed — which he now disavows as he caters to anti-vaccine sentiment among Republican voters — Trump failed to handle his crisis, and the nation paid a steep price in lives as a result. But memories are short, and nostalgia clouds the senses. The voters who give Trump a pass for his final year in office may well put him back in the White House. Having failed to fulfill his responsibilities the first time, Trump may return to fail again.

This is beyond political analysis or polling. I think we need deep psychoanalysis to figure this out. As someone Bouie describes this way in the opening to his piece, it’s beyond me to figure it out:

For many millions of Americans, time seemed to move differently under President Donald Trump. There was no breathing room — no calm in the eye of the storm. From beginning to end — from the “American carnage” inaugural on Jan. 20, 2017, to the attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021 — it felt as though the country was in constant flux, each week a decade. We lurched from dysfunction to chaos and back again, eventually crashing on the shores of the nation’s worst domestic crisis since the Great Depression.

I get that the hardcore MAGAs don’t see it this way. But the amnesia on the part of moderates and Independents is mystifying to me.

Trump has brought his surrogates to the trial to violate his gag order for him:

As Trump walks into the courtroom, Speaker Johnson comes into focus and nods approvingly at Trump pic.twitter.com/ArAA53FRow

— Acyn (@Acyn) May 14, 2024

He went into the courtroom along with Byron Donalds, Doug Burgham and Vivek Ramaswamy. They stayed for about 45 minutes and then emerged and gave press conferences spouting all the crapola Trump isn’t allowed to say due to his gag orders.

Unbelievable:

Reporter: Mr. Trump, are you directing surrogates to speak on your behalf?

Trump: I do have a lot of surrogates and they are speaking very beautifully and they come from all over Washington… pic.twitter.com/oo2e7jusPY

— MeidasTouch (@MeidasTouch) May 14, 2024

🚨 #BREAKINGNEWS We now have the Speaker of the House Mike Johnson outside the courthouse attacking Judge Merchan Daughter.

They are attacking the Judges family for Donald Trump. They are literally violating Donald Trump's gag order for him. 🚨 pic.twitter.com/4OeuuPYn2G

— Ford News (@FordJohnathan5) May 14, 2024

.@DougBurgum: We know from the polls that President Trump is leading all over the country, and the conclusion is that the American people have already acquitted President Trump. pic.twitter.com/KDBbiZ4Ub7

— Trump War Room (@TrumpWarRoom) May 14, 2024

Felon Byron Donalds violates Trump's gag order for him…pic.twitter.com/Xhcr91yPHM

— Molly Ploofkins™ (@Mollyploofkins) May 14, 2024

"There's a weird thing happening in that courtroom!"

WATCH: @Chrislhayes shares what it's like watching Trump, Cohen, Ramaswamy, Eric & Lara Trump and others from inside the courtroom. pic.twitter.com/ZuoykbJsf7

— MSNBC (@MSNBC) May 14, 2024

Trump endorses Scarface, Hannibal Lecter, and hot dogs — and disses Bruce Springsteen in New Jersey. #ACloserLook pic.twitter.com/XtLP7TH7hv

— Late Night with Seth Meyers (@LateNightSeth) May 14, 2024

James Fallows has a fascinating analysis of that weird rally last Saturday:

Among Donald Trump’s virtues is that he does not drink. That is useful to remember in considering his current speaking style. On Saturday night Deb and I sat through the nearly two-hour entirety of his rally performance at Wildwood, on the Jersey shore, as televised by Fox. The whole thing is archived here, courtesy of Right Side Broadcasting.

To me this version of Trump sounded genuinely different from the crowd-pleasing showman who rode televised rallies to success (and big audiences for the cable outlets) in 2015 and 2016. Maybe it’s just that his material is now so familiar and tired. Maybe it’s that Trump has nearly exhausted the “what will he say next??” Evel Knievel-style suspense and excitement of his live shows. Maybe it’s that he goes on at such length. Whatever: the result is less “outrageous” than … boring.

It could also be that there is something more visibly wrong with him. In his interview last month with Eric Cortellessa of Time, Trump came across as extreme and under-informed, but more or less coherent sentence-by-sentence. In New Jersey two nights ago, he came across as the kind of person you’d move away from in an airport or at a bar. The kind of person you’d assume to be drunk if you didn’t know he teetotaled, or you’d think was in other ways disturbed.

I have not made a single political prediction since dismissing Trump’s chances in 2015. But I find it hard to picture the voter who—if not already a member of the MAGA minority—will get a fresh look at today’s Trump and think: Yeah, I’d like the next few years of news to be all about this! Jerry Brown told me years ago that shrewd politicians know that the public doesn’t always want to hear from them. Less is more. This is not Trump’s approach.

No kidding…

I have been saying that people actually need to see more of this lunacy and Fallows agrees. You have to see it to believe it.

He goes on:

Here are just a few samples of what Trump said this weekend. As far as I can see, they went unmentioned in mainstream stories about the event. (“That’s just Trump.”)

-Trump claimed at the start of the speech that “over 100,000 people” were there. “You can’t even see the end of the crowd.” Fox had earlier placed the attendance at “thousands” and, briefly, at “tens of thousands.” A huge crowd for a beach event would have been around 30,000.

-More than an hour into his talk, Trump said: “You guys! Not a single person has left.” Photos from that time showed that most of the crowd had long since bailed. (The screenshot below is from a Xitter video by Zac Anderson, showing the thinning crowd.)

-He riffed at length about hot dogs. Some parts of the speech included “policy points” and details; these Trump was obviously reading, reluctant-schoolboy style, from a prompter. But whenever a point struck him as interesting he would light up and freewheel into an aside like this one.

The hotdog section was a fair sample of his improvisations. This is my best effort at a cleaned-up transcription. What’s below was all part of the same continuous passage, with nothing cut out:

Hotdogs, let’s talk about hotdogs. I just had one actually. I just had one. It was very good. I hope it was. You know it was very good.

Frank Sinatra told me a long time ago, never eat before you perform. I said I’m not performing. I’m a politician. If you can believe it, I hate to be called a politician. I like ‘I’m a businessman’ much better. But I guess I’m a politician.

Because we did great in 2016. We did much better in 2020 A lot better. We had millions more of votes. So I guess, and this time, and I will say this, this spirit that we have this time blows both of them away. You know why?

Because you still like me. But you saw what the alternative is. The alternative. It’s just, the alternative is not a good thing.

But I just had the best hot dog, so I said, Frank, I’m sorry.

Now Pavarotti was a good friend. [Out of the blue,] He didn’t have that same. He ate all the time. He didn’t care.

But I just had a hot dog and it was very good. So the price of hot dogs is up 22%, chicken’s up 32%. Hamburgers are up 37%. That’s why I had the hot dog. It went up the least.

Eggs are up 50%, gasoline’s up 50%. Bacon is up 79% Bacon! That’s why I don’t have bacon anymore. So expensive. Not one thing is cheaper.

There’s not one thing anywhere, there’s not one item that’s cheaper. Energy is way up. That’s what caused the problem.

-The whole speech was like this. And I’m not even getting into the parts about Hannibal Lecter. Again, think if you encountered a person like this on the street. Also, remember the front-page coverage Joe Biden got for saying “President of Mexico” rather than “President of Egypt.”

-OK, here is one other part. It’s about how Joe Biden is no longer up to the job. I’m presenting it as one long paragraph, verbatim, because that is how it came across:

“He [Biden] doesn’t know what the hell he is saying. Don’t forget, he can’t put two sentences together. He can’t find the stairs off the stage. Let’s see this stage when I’m finished. I got stairs there. I got stairs there. I got a nice ramp there. I got stairs. If it got really dangerous, I could jump off the front. You ever seen him when he’s finished? He finishes the speech which usually lasts about a minute and a half. And he always goes like this [looking around] and then he doesn’t know where he goes. But you know we have great people. Secret Service, they always run up on the stage and they lead him off the stage. But he wants to let our tax cuts expire. And I don’t do that anyway. You know I don’t imitate him anymore. Because I called my wife, our great First Lady, and I said: First Lady [he actually said this], we had a big speech. By the way, not as many people as this! This is like big record stuff on television. Even from the haters. They said this may be the biggest rally they’ve ever seen, a political rally.”

As Fallows notes, we’ve all heard nonsense like this from dementia patients or the drunk guy at the end of the bar. But why in the hell do so many people want that rambling loon to be president of the United States again?

The Bulwark is featuring a fascinating piece today about Trump and fascism, a very urgent topic:

IN THE INITIAL, HEADY DAYS after Joe Biden’s 2020 victory over Donald Trump, many public commentators played down Trump’s threats of not leaving the White House quietly, with some outright dismissing concerns about his electoral lies.

Others, though, saw Trump for exactly who he was—and his actions for exactly what they were, even from the outset. One of those discerning voices was Federico Finchelstein, a professor at the New School who studies the history and dissemination of fascism. Just a few days into Trump’s refusal to concede, Finchelstein authored an op-ed in the Washington Post linking Trump directly to a series of previous authoritarians who clung to power, helping introduce Americans to the term auto-golpe (self-coup). It was one of the most prescient pieces of analysis of America’s post-election troubles—vindicated especially on January 6th, when Trump helped sic insurrectionists set on violently overturning the election results.

Now, Finchelstein has a new book out on the topic, focusing on what makes Trump, and the other budding autocrats rising alongside him, so dangerous. In so doing, Finchelstein hopes to cut through some of the definitional clutter of what Trump was, and still is. Trump is not, as his supporters would have him, simply a populist. But given his failures on January 6th and afterward to cling to power, he’s also not a classic fascist, at least as popularly understood. He is, rather, something else—something can be found in the title of Finchelstein’s book: The Wannabe Fascists.

[…]

Fascism, for Finchelstein, is “a global ideology with separate national movements and regimes,” an ideology whose “primary aim” is “to destroy democracy from within in order to create a modern dictatorship from above.” Implementing a “divine, messianic, and charismatic form of leadership that conceived of the leader as organically linked to the people and the nation,” fascism broadly “aimed to create a new and epochal world order through . . . extreme political violence and war.” With four primary characteristics—political violence, propaganda, xenophobia, and ultimate dictatorship—fascism took root around the world throughout the twentieth century, beyond just places like Mussolini’s Rome or Hitler’s Berlin.

Read the whole thing if you can. It’s fascinating. He says that MAGA and Trump fit the criteria in three ways, and I think you can see what they are: political violence, propaganda and xenophobia. I don’t think there’s any doubt about that. Obviously, the fourth is dictatorship and Trump is just a few votes in a couple of swing states away from achieving that.

There’s much more to this analysis, however, and it’s terrifying.

“Why Hannibal Lecter?”

And has a thing for “the late, great Hannibal Lecter,” a “wonderful man.” What a catch!

Cohen will be back to testify before this goes live, so I’m bailing. Enjoy.

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Who do we wish to be?

In conversation at The Ink, Eddie Glaude, Jr., Princeton professor of African American studies, ponders, in essence, “Who do we take ourselves to be?” in the wake of 50 years of Reaganism, Thatcherism, neoliberalism. That framework is collapsing. What kind of society have we created?

Madison and others insisted on the importance of character, that we had to be certain kinds of persons in order for democracy to work. And this 50-year run has exacerbated some of the distortions in what makes us who we are. We’ve always dealt with the dangerous and disfiguring effects of white supremacy, of patriarchy, of class ideology. But over the last 50 years, they’ve congealed in a particular sort of way.

For democracy to work, we have to admit that we have to become better people. If we are the leaders that we’ve been looking for, then we have to become better people. And if we’re going to be better people, we have to build a more just world, because the world as it’s currently organized actually distorts our sense of self, our relationship with each other.

Glaude considers the intractability of prejudice in a social system with roots in slavery.

Reaganism rode the backlash to greater equality for marginalized Americans that accelerated in the second half of the 20th century. It might be trite by now to cite, “when you’re accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression,” but it’s clear some of those formerly more privileged Americans are now aggrieved Americans. And less American for it. The progressive era sense of American purpose, of governing for the common good, has been rejected for the zero-sum view Heather McGhee described in “The Sum of Us,” intended to preserve historical stratification Elizabeth Wilkerson outlined in “Caste.”

Thus, it’s not just Reaganism breaking down, but the ties that once bound the country together, however imperfectly and inequitably. It’s one thing to wistfully imagine a more perfect union. It’s another to grapple with sharing it with people unlike yourself in a society that looks very different from the one in which you grew up.

And you knew who you were then
girls were girls and men were men

Those are real challenges. Practical challenges. There is a budding fascist movement springing from those anxieties that we cannot wish away among people who would rather break the country than share it. The kinds of people Madison thought necessary for a stable democracy have been depleted like the icecaps.

Rolling coal on America

Michele Goldberg has noticed:

John McEntee — who started out carrying Donald Trump’s bags and rose to become, in the chaotic final days of Trump’s presidency, his most important enforcer — has a TikTok account. In a video he published last week, he explains how he likes to keep “fake Hollywood money” in his car to give to homeless people. “Then when they go to use it, they get arrested, so I’m actually like helping clean up the community,” he said.

With his boyish face and slicked-back hair, McEntee, the former director of the White House Office of Presidential Personnel and a man likely to be central to staffing a future Trump administration, comes off a lot like Patrick Bateman, the homicidal investment banker played by Christian Bale in the 2000 film “American Psycho.” The clip’s smug villainy, I think, offers a clue to why South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem, thirsty for a bigger role in MAGA world, might have thought she could ingratiate herself by bragging about killing a puppy.

Right wingers often rain contempt on what they call virtue signaling, a performative kind of sanctimony epitomized by the “In This House” yard signs that once dotted progressive neighborhoods. Partly in response, they’ve developed what’s sometimes called vice signaling, the defiant embrace of cruelty and disdain for social norms. Think of “rolling coal,” the practice of modifying diesel engines to make them belch dark exhaust in an effort to trigger environmentalists, or the way George Santos’s promiscuous falsehoods endeared him to hard-core MAGA acolytes.

They wave American flags with a kind of Pythonesque “French taunters” flair. Thuggish displays of dominance stand in for statesmanship even among what Republicans now consider leaders and Madison might have considered barbarians.

In a show of force, Donald Trump summoned a gaggle of them to his Manhattan trial on Monday, the day former Trump thug Michael Cohen arrived to tesify against him. With Trump facing jail for further violations of his gag order, Sens. J.D. Vance (R-Ohio) and Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.) and Rep. Nicole Malliotakis (R-N.Y.) arrived to attack Cohen outside the courtroom.

I was a professional engineer, a PE. I’ve worked with PEs who were useless and PhDs who were clueless. Credentials do not impress me. Nor does it impress me that people with degrees from Princeton, Harvard and Yale — Vance, Tom Cotton, Ted Cruz, Josh Hawley, and others — threaten the republic from titled positions in Congress and on the U.S. Supreme Court. Nominally, they support the constitution they swore an oath to defend. In reality, they mean to renounce any application of the law to themselves or their sovereign now on trial.

Glaude considers what we must do in response:

I use this phrase in the book over and over again, “close to the ground,” and this is really coming out of my reading of Ms. Ella Baker. We have to understand the problems that are right in front of us. The local becomes the space where we do this work, right in our communities, where we are. So we can have this fight over education in our communities. We can have this fight, understanding that elections are important, but elections are really just one moment in the hard work that democracy requires of us. Part of what Ms. Baker taught is that those problems are right in front of our noses, and all we need to do is stop looking to D.C. and look where we are.

We have to be better people, better than the kind simply invested in securing power for power’s sake. Freedom? Liberty? They are mere shibboleths on the right, things to be individually hoarded not used to secure a more perfect union or for the common pursuit of happiness.

To overcome where we are we must recommit to who we want to be as Americans. What’s scary is who some of us are and like it.

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