This is pretty powerful:
I’m sure she had access to the best medical care in a state where her freedoms were preserved. But she went through this and can easily imagine what it would be like if that hadn’t been so. So can millions of other women, including many of the women watching that show.
So Trump came out of the trial today whining like an 8 year old that the big mean judge won’t let him attend Barron’s high school graduation — and all of MAGA world is having a full blown collective mental breakdown over it, calling the judge evil and screaming “Witch Hunt!!!!”
One little problem:
From CNN’s Marshall Cohen
After leaving court on Monday, former President Donald Trump repeatedly suggested that Judge Juan Merchan would prevent him from attending his son’s high school graduation in May.
“It looks like the judge will not let me go to the graduation of my son,” Trump said, before lamenting “that I can’t go to my son’s graduation.”
Trump’s son Eric Trump ratcheted up the rhetoric by tweeting, “Judge Merchan is truly heartless in not letting a father attend his son’s graduation.”
Facts First: The judge hasn’t ruled yet on Trump’s request to be excused from court so he can attend Barron Trump’s high school graduation.
Criminal defendants like Donald Trump are typically required to attend their case proceedings in person. Trump’s lawyers asked Merchan on Monday about whether their client could be excused for some events, including the graduation and the upcoming arguments in front of the US Supreme Court in one of Trump’s other criminal cases.
While Merchan didn’t let Trump attend next week’s Supreme Court hearing – because Trump has to be in New York for the trial — he said it was too early to rule on the graduation.
Needless to say, most criminal defendants don’t get to attend their children’s events during the trial. Why Trump and his cult think he should is simply daft. But that’s not he point. He lied blatantly when he said that the judge said no. He did not. And I’m sorry to say that the media is failing to report that lie for some reason, accepting Trump’s word that he said no.
Here’s a report from the Daily Beast:
Donald Trump will not be given a day off from being present at his criminal hush money trial to attend his son Barron’s high school graduation in Florida, Judge Juan Merchan said on Monday.
The former president had asked for the proceedings to be suspended on Friday, May 17 so he could be at the ceremony, but his request fell flat. If Trump plays hooky and attends the graduation anyway, he will be jailed, Merchan said.
After being told “no,” Trump addressed reporters in the hallway outside the courtroom.
Sigh…
Josh Marshall on the weekend’s events in the middle east:
The U.S. telegraphed more or less exactly what Iran was going to do via extremely good intelligence (reminiscent of the lead up to the invasion of Ukraine). It undoubtedly played a huge role bringing Jordan, Saudi Arabia and likely other Arab states into active and public armed action in defense of Israel. It positioned and deployed U.S. anti-ballistic destroyers and aerial assets to itself shoot down roughly a hundred of the estimated 300+ aerial devices Iran launched at Israel. Together, Israel, the U.S. and various allied Arab states took down 99% or more of all those devices. Iran launched a massive aerial bombardment and virtually none of it got through. And now the U.S. has managed to get Israel not to launch an immediate and inevitably escalatory retaliation.
It goes without saying that no administration works on its own. It comes to the game with the world’s most powerful military and major power status. It’s operating with Arab allies who have been gravitating toward a de facto anti-Iran alliance with Israel for years. And yet, anyone who knows anything about foreign or defense policy knows that most of it is all the endless number of things that can wrong and the one or two ways they can go right. Navigating the last week to this point today is a tour de force of international crisis management for the Biden White House.
As Marshall says, we’re not out of the woods yet and anything can happen. But I’m inclined to agree that this was a very hairy moment that does appear to have been successfully “managed” so as not to trigger a regional war. Maybe the Biden administration had little to do with that but according to all the reporting they, in coordination with allies, were able to keep a lid on it for all the reasons Marshall lays out.
Biden’s Israel policy has been intensely frustrating and downright inexplicable when it comes to Gaza. I’m not sure he’ll ever be able to adequately account for America’s position as we have watched that mass suffering unfold. But it’s also the case that he’s dealing with a corrupt monster in Netanyahu who is motivated to keep the war going as long as possible who it’s clear is working hand in glove with the Republicans to sabotage Biden at every turn. This makes the risks of it expanding across the region very acute. That doesn’t excuse anything the US is or isn’t doing, of course. But it does provide some context which we saw displayed this weekend as we were on the precipice of a war that could hurtle out of control very, very quickly. It was a near thing.
Last weekend’s bizarre digression on Gettysburg has gotten more coverage than usual. I would hope that more people are exposed to some of this. He’s not normal:
That day there were 62,000 reported deaths and yet:
Trump Says The U.S. Is Past Its Peak On New Coronavirus Cases
President Trump on Wednesday said that recent data suggest that the United States has made it through the worst of new coronavirus cases, as he seeks to reopen the pandemic-beaten national economy.
“The data suggests that nationwide, we have passed the peak of new cases. Hopefully that will continue, and we will continue to make great progress,” Trump said in the White House Rose Garden at the daily coronavirus task force briefing. The task force did not share the data they used to reach that assessment.
Trump said that more than 3 million tests for COVID-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus, had been completed and that researchers were on the verge of delivering an antibody test to determine whether a person has previously been infected with the virus.
He also said he would announce his path to reopening some states ahead of May 1. “These developments have put us in a strong position to finalize guidelines for states reopening,” he said.
Trump’s optimistic remarks come on the heels of a contentious week between the president and state governors, following an erroneous declaration earlier this week that he had ability to unilaterally decide when states would ease coronavirus restrictions.
“When somebody’s the president of the United States, the authority is total,” Trump said Monday. By Tuesday, he had reversed, saying he would guide the governors but allow them to decide when and how to re-open.
Wednesday’s briefing comes after an Easter weekend of COVID-19 fatalities that launched the U.S. death toll to the highest in the world.
Speaking of putting his name on fat, beautiful checks, here’s Trump today:
Aaaaaand:
He has to be there. He can’t speak. A lot of it is boring. Nobody’s licking his boots and telling him how great he is.
It hadn’t occurred to me before today but I wonder how he’s going to be able to sit through this five days a week for possibly two months. Can he do it?
The Good Liars seem actually to have sold a couple of Trump Bibles to MAGA suckers.
A pair of pranksters gave fans of Donald Trump a look at what a bible true to the former president might really contain.
“Thou shalt put no other person above Trump,” Davram Stiefler of The Good Liars read to MAGA fans waiting outside a recent Trump event.
“Thou shalt commit adultery,” read Jason Selvig, the other half other comedic duo.
Trump last month began hawking a “God Bless The USA Bible” ― which includes the Bible, lyrics to “God Bless The USA,” and copies of documents such as the Declaration of Independence ― to fans for $59.99.
“It’s a grift, right?” Stiefler said as he attempted to sell their version of the book for a much-reduced price of $10.
And in the fullness of time, the people were grifted and there was much rejoicing.
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Hush. It’s not about money. The Donald Trump trial that begins jury selection in Manhattan today is about what elevates payments funneled to a porn star through a shall company to the level of felony.
A once-skeptical Mark Joseph Stern explains at Slate, “The falsification of business records is, by itself, a misdemeanor under New York law, but it’s a felony when it’s done with the ‘intent to commit another crime or to aid or conceal the commission thereof.’” Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s pretrial briefing erased Stern’s doubts left over from the initial indictment.
Stern writes:
Bragg has argued, convincingly, that the former president intended to violate at least two election laws—one state, one federal. First, Bragg asserted that Trump and Cohen ran afoul of the Federal Election Campaign Act by making unlawful campaign contributions (in the form of a payoff) at the direction of a candidate (that is, Trump). Cohen already pleaded guilty for this very act in federal court, so it is hardly a stretch to accuse Trump of intending to break the law by participating in the crime. Second, Bragg argued that Trump ran afoul of a New York election law that forbids any conspiracy “to promote or prevent the election of any person to a public office by unlawful means.” The district attorney claimed that Trump intended to violate this statute by committing fraud in order to secure his own victory in 2016.
There is nothing especially creative about these theories; they are not an example of prosecutors stretching the law to its breaking point so it can fit over the facts of a questionable case. The application of both federal and state election codes, and their interplay with the underlying violation of New York’s business records law, is straightforward. Really, the only half-plausible argument that Trump could mount in opposition was that the Federal Election Campaign Act somehow preempted the use of New York’s own statutes to punish election-related record-keeping fraud, meaning he would be liable only for misdemeanor record-keeping violations. Two different judges rejected this claim: Juan Merchan, who’s overseeing the state trial, and Alvin K. Hellerstein, who shot down Trump’s short-lived play to remove the whole case to federal court.
Stern had hoped one of the other cases about the election would reach court first, and before this fall’s elections. But this case “is about the election—albeit the one in 2016, not 2020.” The other three cases against the slippery Mr. Trump have been delayed by “a corrupt judge, a foot-dragging Supreme Court, and a district attorney’s questionable conduct in an already complex case,” Stern explains, leaving this one to start this morning in a New York court “less susceptible to political interference than the federal courts” have proved.
Bragg’s prosecution stands for the simple proposition that a rich and powerful man like Trump cannot disregard his legal obligations as a candidate for office in a constitutional democracy. He cannot avoid consequences by asserting, under the thin guise of various legal doctrines, that he is forever immune from his day of judgment because he was once president, and he is rich.
Finding jurors capable of judging without bias a former president, the first ever in this country to face a criminal trial, begins this morning. Each prospect will have to answer 42 questions Justice Juan Merchan has prepared.
Politico explains the process and systematically walks readers through what deeper beliefs hope to tease out of prospective jurors:
A starting point is identifying prospective jurors with strong feelings about Trump, his presidency and the criminal cases he faces. Each side wants to figure out whether any potential jurors actually know Trump, worked for his businesses or have a direct relationship with him or his family members. But mainly, the lawyers are trying to suss out any inherently strong feelings — positive or negative — about Trump.
Merchan, on the other hand, says he wants to limit efforts to determine whether prospective jurors like or dislike Trump.
“Such questions are irrelevant because they do not go to the issue of the prospective juror’s qualifications,” he wrote in an order last week finalizing the questionnaire. “The ultimate issue is whether the prospective juror can assure us that they will set aside any personal feelings or biases and render a decision that is based on the evidence and the law.”
This is Donald Trump we’re talking about. Anything might happen. A jury might exonerate him. “But most experts don’t think it will,” Michael Tomasky writes at The New Republic.
Tomasky writes:
But faith in the jury system is high. That may well be especially so in a case like this one, which until this week has been, to your disinterested observer, a partisan circus. But a jury’s verdict has an authority and finality for these Americans that a Sean Hannity rant or a New York Times editorial lacks.
“So, with any luck, by Memorial Day or so,” Tomasky adds, “we’ll be able to write the phrase that has been crying to be written for about 35 years: ‘Convicted felon Donald Trump.’”
Trump himself is terrified, say those who know him. Even if he’s elected president — and it’s clear one of his major motivations for running is to keep from living out the rest of his life behind bars — presidential pardon power does not extend to state law. His base is already shaky. If he’s a convicted felon going into November, multiple polls show Trump’s support will erode further, and he knows it. Half the country already believes him guilty in the Manhattan case. Trump and his closest allies are already working up plans to declare the election stolen and seize power no matter how badly he loses.
Americans face a choice this fall not between two old men, but between two futures for our “government of the people, by the people, for the people.” They must decide whether or not it shall “perish from the earth.” Lincoln presented that choice at Gettysburg amidst a civil war for the preservation of the union. That conflict was between a new people dedicated to the theory (still unrealized today) that all are created equal and a faction of rump royalists unwilling to see feudalism die finally and for good.
The irony in the wake of Trump’s disjointed reflections on Robert E. Lee at Gettysburg over the weekend is that that civil war is still engaged. Trump’s “forces” on Jan. 6, 2021, fought a pitched battle on the steps of and inside the U.S. Capitol to undo what the Confederates conceded at Appomattox in 1865. Trump’s allies have surrendered any legitimacy as moral actors in this democracy, yet fight on to replace it with an older system of government by hereditary royalty and landed gentry. Or simply by a dictatorship.
They’re fine with dictatorship. Even if the dictator is in prison.
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The Washington Post reports on some of the MAGA faithful who are losing their nest eggs on Trump’s Truth Social stock:
Jerry Dean McLain first bet on former president Donald Trump’s Truth Social two years ago, buying into the Trump company’s planned merger partner, Digital World Acquisition, at $90 a share. Over time, as the price changed, he kept buying, amassing hundreds of shares for $25,000 — pretty much his “whole nest egg,” he said.
That nest egg has lost about half its value in the past two weeks as Trump Media & Technology Group’s share price dropped from $66 after its public debut last month to $32 on Friday. But McLain, 71, who owns a tree-removal service outside Oklahoma City, said he’s not worried. If anything, he wants to buy more.
“I know good and well it’s in Trump’s hands, and he’s got plans,” he said. “I have no doubt it’s going to explode sometime.”
Even the $3.5 billion loss in value since its debut last month hasn’t deterred them. Neither has the fact that it lost $58 million last year and only had 4 millionin revenues. And they’re fine with all the top executive making huge multi-million dollar salaries and bonuses.
This is so pathetic I can’t believe these people are allowed to operate a motor vehicloe or take care of childre:
But for some Trump investors, the stock is a badge of honor — a way to show their devotion beyond buying Trump merchandise, visiting Trump golf courses or donating to Trump’s presidential campaign.
[…]
Many of Truth Social’s investors say they’re in it for the long haul. Todd Schlanger, an interior designer at a furniture store in West Palm Beach who said Trump had been one of his customers, said he’s invested about $20,000 in total and is buying new shares every week.
Schlanger said he now watches his stock performance every day hoping for positive signs. In a Truth Social post last week, he encouraged “everyone who supports Donald Trump and Truth [Social to] buy a share everyday” and asked, “Do you think we have hit bottom?” (The stock slid nearly 10 percent after that post.)
He suspects the recent drops in share price have been the result of “stock manipulation” from an “organized effort” to make the company look bad. There’s no proof of such a campaign, but Schlanger is convinced. “It’s got to be political,” he said, from all the “liberals that are trying to knock it down.”
That range of emotions is on full display on Truth Social, where thousands of mostly anonymous accounts have flocked to meme-filled investor groups, one of which is emblazoned with a computer-generated image showing Trump pumping his fist on a Wall Street trading floor.
Some accounts there have recently encouraged traders to keep investing in a fight they said was about “good vs evil” — a way to defend Trump from the liberal elites laughing at him and, by extension, them. The user @BaldylocksUSMC said “the fight has been long and hard on most of us” and that “this stock is not for the weak,” but that one day they would triumph over critics who were “brainwashed beyond repair.”
After the billionaire media mogul Barry Diller called Trump Media a “scam” stock bought by “dopes,” one account, @Handbag72, claimed to have bought more shares, arguing Diller didn’t “get it” or was “at risk of [losing] $$$$.” The next day, the account shared a 2021 blog post from the investing forum Seeking Alpha saying Truth Social could be worth $1 trillion in the next 10 years.
[…]
Some users said they were “baffled” by the stock’s ups and downs, and one asked for advice on how to tell her husband she didn’t want to sell. One user posted a meme image saying, “If you’re worried about your Money, Remember This, DJT stock is about FREE SPEECH & Without FREE SPEECH Money won’t mean much.”
But other users saw such questions as displays of unacceptable doubt. When the user @seneca1950 asked whether anyone was concerned that the company’s upcoming plans to issue tens of millions more shares would sink the stock price, two accounts criticized the account for spreading “FUD” — fear, uncertainty and doubt.
“Are you a Fudster,” wrote a user named “Jesus Revolution 2024.” Wrote another, called Rabristol: “You must be short with no way out!”
[…]
Carol Swain, a prominent conservative commentator in Nashville who previously taught political science at Vanderbilt University, said she invested $1,000 in Trump Media stock earlier this month, at $48 a share, over the objections of her financial adviser, who predicted the stock would dive.
“If I lose it, fine. If I make a profit, wonderful. But at the end of the day, I wanted to show my support,” she said. “There’s such an effort to destroy him and strip his wealth away, and so much glee about it. I would like to see him be a winner.”
She, too, suspects stock manipulation, arguing that “the people who hate Donald Trump would do anything to try to hurt him.” As for Truth Social itself, she said she posts there only sparingly and prefers X, where she has 35 times as many followers. “I have always wanted not to just preach to the choir,” she said.
McLain, the tree service owner in Oklahoma, said he believes the stock could “go to $1,000 a share, easy,” once the media stops writing so negatively about it and the company works through its growing pains. The company’s leaders, he said, are being “too silent right now” amid questions about the falling share price, but he suspects it’s because they’re working on something amazing and new.
McLain is an amateur trader — he invested only once before and “lost [his] butt” — and said he hasn’t talked to his family about his investment, saying, “You know how that is.” But he believes the Trump Media deal is a sign he is “supposed to invest,” he said.
“This isn’t just another stock to me. … I feel like it was God Almighty that put it in my lap,” he said. “I’ve just got to hold on and let them do their job. If you go on emotion, you’ll get out of this thing the first time it goes down.”
I’d feel sorry for them if they were taken to the cleaners by any other con man. But there is plenty of information available about Trump’s history of conning people and this ridiculous company is obviously a joke. Come on.
Yes, it’s finally here and it confirms what all the other polls have been showing for the last month. Acknowledging that the NY Times Sienna poll is considered the gold standard among the cognoscenti, Dan Pfeiffer does a nice analysis of what it says about this moment in time:
The Democratic coalition is heading home. As the New York Times’ Shane Goldmacher wrote in his analysis of the poll:
Mr. Biden’s tick upward appears to stem largely from his improved standing among traditional Democratic voters — he is winning a greater share of voters who supported him in 2020 than he did a month ago. Then, Mr. Trump had secured the support of far more of his past voters compared with the president — 97 percent to 83 percent — but that margin has narrowed. Mr. Biden is now winning 89 percent of his 2020 supporters compared with 94 percent for Mr. Trump.
Biden had a 43-point lead with Black voters in February, now that advantage is 53 points. Among Hispanic voters, Biden trailed by six in February. He now leads by nine. The President also increased his lead with voters over the age of 65 by three points. Based on this data, we can assume that the movement is largely among older voters.
These are also the voters expected to shift after an event like the State of the Union and an aggressive, well-funded television advertising campaign. Engaging older voters is simply easier in this fractured media environment. They consume more traditional news sources and still watch linear television and are therefore easier to reach with television ads. Younger voters have mostly cut the cord and watch TV through streaming services some of which are ad-free and some of the ones that offer an ad-tier don’t allow political ads.
The fact that Biden’s coalition is beginning to come home is very good news. It’s evidence that he can win and a validation of the strategy to date.
The Path Forward
I want to emphasize that, in a race between a sitting President and a former President where the electorate already has strongheld opinions about both candidates, the race will shift very slowly. Absent a significant exogenous event (like one of them being sentenced to prison), we are unlikely to see any real swings. This campaign will be a game of inches all the way to election day.
To give a sense of how subtle some of these shifts are, Biden and Trump’s favorable ratings didn’t change at all from February to now. People’s view of the economy didn’t improve either. It actually got slightly worse, but that is likely statistical noise given the margin of error. Based on this poll, there are few areas of priority for the folks across the anti-MAGA movement.
Focus on Voters of Color: Biden’s gains with Black and Hispanic voters are important progress, but there is more to do to get back to his 2020 margins. According to Pew Research’s Validated Voter study, Biden won Black voters 92-8 and Hispanic voters 59-38. So, there’s work to do. Biden simply cannot afford much erosion from these core parts of the Democratic coalition.
Young Voters Are a Weak Point: Per this poll, Biden continues to struggle with young voters. Biden actually lost ground among voters 18-29 years old since the February poll. Now, the polling of young voters has been all over the map this cycle, so I am a little skeptical that the President lost 11 points with this cohort in two months. However, the picture painted by this poll — and most of the other polls — is that younger voters — particularly younger voters of color — is the group with whom the President has the most work to do. Given their opinions on the President’s age (87% think Biden is too old to be effective) and how he is handling foreign conflicts (only 4% strongly approve), this group will take a lot of persuasion and is the one that requires the most investment of time and resources.
The Economy is Trump’s Secret Sauce: For all of the focus on Trump’s nationalist, anti-immigrant rhetoric and policies, there is a simple reason why he has a real shot at the White House despite his 91 felony indictments and failed violent insurrection. It’s the economy. The New York Times/Siena poll asked whether voters approved of “the way Donald Trump handled each of the following issues when he was president.” Nearly two-thirds of voters approved including 66% of 18-29 year olds. 74% of Hispanic voters, and 69% of Independents. Heck, even 27% of Democrats give Trump positive marks. Biden’s economic approval is 32-67. For a host of reasons, I am skeptical that the President can — or needs to — beat Trump on the economy, but he has to narrow the gap. The Biden campaign will begin that effort next week with a major tour of Pennsylvania focusing on the economy.
Much of the punditocracy has felt that Trump has a significant advantage and that it’s his race to lose. However, this poll—and the overall polling trends since the State of the Union—show that the 2024 election is a very close, very winnable race. We just have to do the work. And for all of the understandable hate toward the polls, it’s the polls that give us a roadmap for victory.
Yeah, I’m still not sure about these polls. But they do provide information that you have to take into account.
As for the punditry believing that it’s Trump’s race to lose — well, that’s true and it’s shameful. Jonathan Martin at Politico said it right upfront:
Just as the stock market’s record gains this year have been driven by anticipation of interest rate cuts, Donald Trump’s prospects have been propelled by an irrational exuberance in the political markets.
This week demonstrated how the conventional wisdom around Trump’s inevitability has solidified — and why those assumptions, much like the ones around rate cuts, are due for a correction.
I would hope so. Trump has never been more than a couple of points ahead and he’s a corrupt, criminal sociopath. Playing the horserace betting game with this one has done real harm. Biden’s going to have to work twice as hard and it was already tough enough.
This man is the perfect emblem of the modern GOP
I have no words.
