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Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

RIP

Those of you who’ve been reading me for 20 years know how I have felt about Joe Lieberman.

I’ll just leave this here:

Trump And The Hush Money Case

Merchan hit him with a gag order. Not that he cares. But maybe someone should look into a straight jacket.

Update:

John Eastman Disbarred

The judges didn’t buy his defense of the coup attempt

David Kurtz at TPM:

With the Jan. 6 case against Donald Trump ground to a halt and the no real prospect of the Georgia RICO case against him reaching a verdict before November, yesterday’s ruling against Trump co-defendant John Eastman in California may be the closest we get to a taste of a Jan. 6 verdict before Election Day.

In recommending that Eastman be disbarred for his role in the conspiracy to overturn the 2020 election, a state judge issued a blistering ruling that treated the autocoup with the historic seriousness it deserves. It came after a full evidentiary record was developed over months and extensive legal argument, like a full-blown trial. Eastman plans to appeal, and ultimately the state Supreme Court will decide whether he’ll be disbarred, but in the meantime he is suspended from practicing law.

Some highlights from the 128-page ruling by state Judge Yvette Roland:

“Most of his misconduct occurred squarely within the course and scope of Eastman’s representation of President Trump and culminated with a shared plan to obstruct the lawful function of the government.”

“The evidence clearly and convincingly proves that Eastman and President Trump entered into an agreement to obstruct the Joint Session of Congress by unlawfully having Vice President Pence reject or delay the counting of electoral votes on January 6, 2021.”

In sum, Eastman exhibited gross negligence by making false statements about the 2020 election without conducting any meaningful investigation or verification of the information he was relying upon.

A bonus reference to Watergate figure Donald Segretti, whose own disbarment case in California was cited:

The scale and egregiousness of Eastman’s unethical actions far surpasses the misconduct at issue in Segretti. Unlike Segretti whose offenses occurred outside his role as an attorney, Eastman’s wrongdoing was committed directly in the course and scope of his representation of President Trump and the Trump Campaign. This is an important factor, as it constitutes a fundamental breach of an attorney’s core ethical duties. Additionally, while the Segretti court found compelling mitigation based on his expressed remorse and recognition of his wrongdoing, no such mitigating factor is present with Eastman.

A couple of years ago, as the bar proceedings against various Trump world figures were getting underway, I confess I grew impatient when my reporting team kept getting excited about this or that procedural development. Disbarment is weak tea for what we’re dealing with here, I would insist. And yet here we are with only the bar proceedings having provided anything like a modicum of accountability in a timely fashion.

It’s better than nothing …

The Shadow Presidency

Trump has “envoys” going around the world:

After an anti-corruption crusader unexpectedly won last year’s presidential election in Guatemala, democracy teetered on the edgein the Central American country. Amid law enforcementraids on election offices and threats of violence, the Biden administration worked feverishly to lay the groundwork for a peaceful transfer of power.

But not Richard Grenell, a former diplomat and intelligence official in Donald Trump’s administration, who arrived in Guatemala in January, days before the new president was to be sworn in — and threw his support behind aright-wing campaign to undermine the election.

Grenell met with a hard-line group that sued to block the inauguration. The group thanked him for his “visit and trust.”He defended Guatemalan officials who had seized ballot boxes in an effort to overturn a vote declared “free and fair” by the United States and international observers,and he attacked the U.S. State Department’s sanctions against hundreds of anti-democratic actors.

“They are trying to intimidate conservatives in Guatemala,” Grenell said in a television interview. “This is all wrapped into this kind of phony concern about democracy.”

Grenell’s intervention highlights the extraordinary role he has carved out in the three years since Trump left the White House. From Central America to Eastern Europe and beyond, Grenell has been acting as a kind of shadow secretary of statemeeting with far-right leaders and movements, pledging Trump’s support and, at times, working against the current administration’s policies.

It’s unusual for a former diplomatic official to continue meeting with foreign leaders and promoting the agenda of a presidential candidate on the world stage.Grenell’s globe-trotting has sparked deep concern among career national security officials and diplomats, who warn that he emboldens bad actors and jeopardizes U.S. interests in service of Trump’s personal agenda. In the process, Grenell is openly charting a foreign policy road map for a Republican presidential nominee who has found common cause with authoritarian leaders and threatened to blow up partnerships with democratic allies.

“I think Trump and Grenell would upend American leadership of the free world, from Truman on the left to Reagan on the right, and replace it with something much darker,” said Daniel Fried, who spent four decades in top State Department posts, including as an assistant secretary of state andadirector of the National Security Council. “It’s transactional. Democratic values are irrelevant, and it’s isolationist.”

[…]

His profile is rising in Trump’s MAGA movement, which hails him as a champion of the “America First” platform. Trump and his supporters view a second term as an opportunity to elevate his most loyal backers, who potentially would test traditional guardrails against abuse of executive power.

The former president’s son, Donald Trump Jr., in an online chat with Grenell last month, touted his record as ambassador to Germany and called him a “top contender for secretary of state.”

“Your name comes up a lot in some very high levels. You’re in there with the base,” Trump Jr. said, adding that Grenell was “probably the only ambassador who spoke truth to power.”

Grenell calls himself a diplomat but acts as a rapid-response, war-room director, perpetually exalting Trump and trolling his political foes on social media and in interviews.

Grenell was nothing more than an internet troll when Trump lifted him into an ambassadorship and then Acting Director of National Intelligence. He was vert active in the coup attempt flying into Nevada to try to overturn the results. He is on par with Stephen Miller for sheer evil.

I don’t know what laws can be deployed to stop this unprecedented behavior but you would think there would be something you could do about a person who had a top security clearance as the Director of National Intelligence running around the world in opposition to the elected US Government. If there isn’t, there should be.

This person will be hugely important in a new Trump administration. Just think of it.

Criminal Minds

“That’s because you don’t have a criminal mind”

Back in my table-waiting days, a customer who had just signed his credit card receipt asked for the carbon copies (yes, that long ago). Noticing the quizzical look on my face, he explained it was because of reports of thieves dumpster-diving for credit card numbers. That never would have occurred to me, I told him.

“That’s because you don’t have a criminal mind,” the customer smiled.

On that, Ed Kilgore considers what steps Donald Trump took to steal the 2020 election. Several tactics he used four years ago are now “off the table.” But considering he would not admit defeat in 2020 and what he demonstrated he was capable of, what else might he try if he loses a 2024 reelection effort premised on keeping himself out of prison?

Rolling Stone is reporting that the Biden campaign is examining a ‘comically long’ list of ‘nightmare scenarios’ that might develop. To be forewarned is to be forearmed, to a considerable extent,” Kilgore writes.

Trump won’t have the presidency this time, nor access to the Department of Justice or Department of Defense, nor to invoking the Insurrection Act.

“It’s easier to hold power than to seize it,” Kilgore advises. He runs through a list of tools Trump-the-challenger won’t have for turning an election loss into a stolen win.

Getting to the nub of it, Kilgore explains:

So what new election-coup tactics could Trump pursue in 2024? There is one terrifying possibility: the deployment of MAGA bravos to disrupt the casting or counting of Election Day votes in order to justify nondemocratic methods of determining the presidency. To put it another way, the more legislators and judges close off nefarious legal methods of subverting an adverse election result, the more Trump and his supporters may be tempted to resort to good old-fashioned ballot-box-stuffing violence. It would be immensely helpful to secure as many pledges against this lurch into open authoritarianism as possible among Republican elected officials and party leaders. And as an added safeguard, Joe Biden might want to win by a landslide.

Brynn Tannehill’s long Twitter thread considered what Trump and his MAGA allies might do to turn the U.S. into a Trumpistanian dictatorship if Trump gets elected. But my old customer reminds me that it’s not so easy for someone without a criminal mind to anticipate what Trump & Co. might cook up to seize dictatorial power after losing. The Biden-Harris “comically long” list of “nightmare scenarios” is likely not long enough.

They might have to hire former felons to thwart prospective felons.

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Unclean!

On casting stones at patients in distress

Consider where the American Taliban wants to take this country. For anyone who missed it, this clip below is the Republican nominee for governor of North Carolina. He may sound like he is a member of the lunatic fringe, but he is not. Mark Robinson is just shoutier.

The lunatic fringe right has gone mainstream. In fact, they’ve made it to the U.S. Supreme Court several times already. Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern comment on Tuesday’s oral arguments in FDA v. Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine (AHM). They write:

In public, the plaintiffs in this case—a group of doctors and dentists seeking to ban medication abortion—have long claimed they object to ending “unborn life” by finishing an “incomplete or failed” abortion at the hospital. But in court, they went much further. Their lawyer, Erin Hawley, admitted at oral argument that her clients don’t merely oppose terminating a pregnancy—they are pursuing the right to turn away a patient whose pregnancy has already been terminated.Indeed, they appear to want to deny even emergency care to patients whose fetus is no longer “alive,” on the grounds that the patient used an abortion drug earlier in the process. And they aim to deploy this broad fear of “complicity” against the FDA, to demand a nationwide prohibition on the abortion pill to ensure that they need never again see (and be forced to turn away) patients who’ve previously taken it. This is not a theory of being “complicit” in ending life. It is a theory that doctors can pick and choose their patients based on the “moral distress” they might feel in helping them.

That is, AHM wants to define patients at risk of bleeding to death as medically untouchable based on subjective perceptions of their moral purity. No, they’re not joking.

The plaintiffs say they are terrified that one day, a patient may walk into their emergency room suffering complications from a medication abortion prescribed by some other doctor. This patient may need their assistance completing the abortion or simply recovering from the complete abortion, which these plaintiffs deem “complicity” in sin. And they say the solution is either a total, nationwide ban on mifepristone, the first drug in the medication abortion sequence, or a draconian (and medically unnecessary) set of restrictions that would place mifepristone out of reach for many patients. (The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit ruled to reinstate those restrictions at their behest.)

It is a twisted line of logic, one that should never have reached the Supreme Court in the first place. But it is also a product of the court’s past indulgence of outlandish claims about moral “complicity.” As was made plain in the oral arguments and briefing,activist doctors are no longer satisfied with personal conscience exemptions already granted under state and federal law; they now insist that nobody, anywhere, should have access to the abortion pill, in order to ensure that they themselves won’t have to treat patients who took one. At a minimum, they say, they should be able to radically roll back access to the pill in all 50 states to reduce the odds that one of these handful of objectors might someday encounter a patient who took it. This extremist argument lays bare the transformation of the idea of “complicity” from a shield for religious dissenters to a sword for ideologues desperate to seize control over other people’s lives and bodies.

Unclean!

Lithwick and Stern cover some of the back and forth of the arguments. This trend in the religious far right demanding the rest of America live by its most restrictive definition of fundamentalist freedom is not new:

All this is reminiscent of Little Sisters of the Poor, a case about a Catholic charitable group that was afforded an exemption from the Affordable Care Act’s contraception mandate. The Little Sisters were asked to check a box signaling to the government that they could not comply with the mandate, at which point the government would step in to cover their employees. But the Little Sisters refused, viewing this action—the checking of a box to opt out of coverage—as “complicity” in abortion because it would in turn trigger government payment for contraception (which they viewed as abortifacients). The Supreme Court and the Trump administration ultimately indulged the Little Sisters’ claim.

Here, we have emergency room physicians asserting that they will not participate in lifesaving medical intervention unless they approve of the reason for the pregnancy loss. Presumably, if the pregnant patient is an unwed mother, or a gay or transgender person, the doctor would be similarly complicit in sin and decline service. Seen through this lens, since one can never know which sins one is enabling in the ER, each and every day, a narrow conscience exemption becomes a sweeping guarantee that absolutely nobody in the country can ever have access to basic health care, let alone miscarriage management. (Of course, these plaintiffs might focus only on one set of “sins” they see as relevant.) In a country effectively governed by Kacsmaryk and his plaintiff friends, a gay person suffering a stroke could be turned away from any hospital because of his sexual orientation, all to spare a doctor from a glancing encounter with prior sin. As Tobias Barrington Wolff, a professor of law at the University of Pennsylvania Law School, put it to us in an email, this unbounded view of complicity “is part of enacting the social death of people and practices you abhor, which in turn can contribute to the material death of people and practices you abhor.”

Only the pure deserve to live, and that’s not you if you’re not them. You’re unclean, an untouchable.

One of the most exhausting lessons of post-Roe Americais that being “pro-life” definitively means privileging the life of the presumptively sin-free unborn—or even their “dead” remains—over the life of the sin-racked adults who carry them. This is why women are left to go septic or to hemorrhage in hospital parking lots; it is why C-sections are performed in nonviable pregnancies, at high risk to mothers; it’s why the women who sued in Texas to secure exceptions to that state’s abortion ban are condemned by the state as sinners and whores. And it’s why—in the eyes of the Alliance for Hippocratic Medicineit is a greater hardship for a physician to “waste precious moments scrubbing in, scrubbing out” of emergency surgery, as Hawley put it, so long as they don’t believe that the emergency warrants their professional services, than it is for a pregnant person, anywhere in the country, including in states that permit abortion, to be forced to give birth.

Heaven forbid doctors should ritually cleanse themselves only to have to touch a female patient who may or may not have engaged in acts that render them biblically unclean. Stoneable.

These arguments are, of course, untangleable from the right’s less-public demand that the traditional male hierarchy be reinstated to assuage conservative men’s damaged sense of being atop it, and that Christianity, a specific, radicalized variety, be formally declared the official state religion. You will live by their code, one way or another, and women will know their places. Ask Mark Robinson.

Robert Reich opined on the Alabama “frozen embryo” case last month:

According to a new survey from the Public Religion Research Institute and the Brookings Institution, more than half of Republicans believe the country should be a strictly Christian nation — either adhering to the ideals of Christian nationalism (21 percent) or sympathizing with those views (33 percent).

This point of view has long been prominent among white evangelicals but is spreading into almost all reaches of the Republican Party, as exemplified by the Alabama Supreme Court’s ruling.

It is also closely linked with authoritarianism. According to the survey, half of Christian nationalism adherents and nearly 4 in 10 sympathizers said they support the idea of an authoritarian leader powerful enough to keep these Christian values in society.

During an interview at a Turning Point USA event last August, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., said party leaders need to be more responsive to the base of the party, which she claimed is made up of Christian nationalists.

“We need to be the party of nationalism,” she said. “I am a Christian and I say it proudly, we should be Christian nationalists.”

Think they won’t impose their will at the point of a sword, or a bayonet? Look back at the Christian nationalist banners dotting the Jan. 6 mob and the violence now excused as patriotism by Trump.

Invest now in burkas.

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“A Lack Of Judgment”

What BS

Former White House counsel Pat Philbin testified at Jeffrey Clark’s disbarment hearing and talked about the chaotic post-election period at the White House:

“I tried to explain to him that it was a bad idea for multiple reasons,” Philbin recalled Tuesday at a long-delayed disbarment hearing for Clark. “He would be starting down a path of assured failure … If by some miracle somehow, it worked, there’d be riots in every major city in the country and it was not an outcome the country would accept.”

It was Philbin’s first public testimony about the chaotic final days of the Trump presidency since he left the White House. Though Philbin has spoken to both the Jan. 6 select committee and the federal grand jury that indicted Trump for his effort to seize a second term, no transcript or recording of his remarks has even been released.

Philbin’s description of his interactions with Clark shed new light on the frenzied effort by Trump to remake the Justice Department into a tool of his bid to cling to power despite losing the election — a remarkable new account more than three years after a mob of pro-Trump rioters stormed the Capitol in his name. His testimony followed Richard Donoghue, a former acting deputy attorney general.

Together, the two men described a White House that had let down all guardrails, with conspiracy theories about election fraud reaching Trump, who was an eager recipient of even implausible claims of fraud. Clark, too, embraced some of those claims, they said.

Philbin described feeling relief in the first days of January 2021 when he heard that Trump had ditched plans to appoint Clark as acting attorney general. But he quickly learned in discussions with his boss, Pat Cipollone, and two top DOJ officials — acting attorney general Jeff Rosen and his deputy Richard Donoghue — that the effort had been revived. The men agreed that Philbin should speak to Clark, owing to their decadeslong relationship, and attempt to discern what was happening.

Philbin, who testified for about two hours on Tuesday, described Clark as wildly misinformed about claims of election fraud — countenancing a theory about “smart thermostats” being used to manipulate voting machines — and not sufficiently cognizant of the havoc it would wreak on the country if his plan succeeded. But he said Clark seemed “100 percent sincere” in his beliefs.

“I believe that he felt that he essentially had a duty,” Philbin said. “I think Jeff’s view was that there was a real crisis in the country and that he was being given an opportunity to do something about it.”

When Philbin warned Clark that there would be riots in every major American city if Trump reversed the outcome of the election, Clark responded, “Well, Pat, that’s what the Insurrection Act is for,” Philbin recalled.

Clark, in Philbin’s telling, was referring to a 19th-century federal law that permits the president to use the military to quell civil unrest, an indication that he recognized the grave implications of his efforts. Though it was Philbin’s first time publicly discussing the exchange, the conversation was captured in special counsel Jack Smith’s indictment of Trump — without naming either Philbin or Clark, though the identities of both speakers were easily discerned. On Tuesday, Philbin was asked to elaborate on this discussion.

“I don’t think I said anything on the phone. I just thought that that showed a lack of judgment,” he said. “Triggering riots in every major city in America, you’ve got to be really sure about what you’re doing and have no alternatives … In my estimation, that was not the sort of situation we were talking about.”

No, no, no. This was not a “lack of judgement.” The election was on the up and up. Courts all over the country looked at it. There were recounts and audits and Republican officials validated the results. These ideas were batshit crazy and they were solely due to the fact that Donald Trump is a malignant narcissist with a psyche so fragile that he could not accept that he had lost. That’s all it was.

The rest of those nutbags like Clark are either brain damaged or cynical opportunists who saw that Trump has a talent for making people believe lies simply by repeating them over and over again. Either way, there was never any merit in any of this and Philbin obviously knows that and yet is still soft-peddling just what a monumental crime these people perpetrated on the American people.

Are You Now Or Have You Ever Been Delusional?

No? Then you need not apply to the RNC

Trump is making “You can believe me or you can believe your lying eyes” a litmus test to work at the Republican Party.”

Those seeking employment at the Republican National Committee after a Trump-backed purge of the committee this month have been asked in job interviews if they believe the 2020 election was stolen, according to people familiar with the interviews, making the false claim a litmus test of sorts for hiring.

In recent days, Trump advisers have quizzed multiple employees who had worked in key 2024 states about their views on the last presidential election, according to people who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private interviews and discussions. The interviews have been conducted mostly virtually, as the prospective future employees are based in key swing states.

“Was the 2020 election stolen?” one prospective employee recalled being asked in a room with two top Trump advisers.

The question about the 2020 election has startled some of the potential employees, who viewed it as questioning their loyalty to Trump and as an unusual job interview question, according to the people familiar with the interviews. A group of senior Trump advisers have been in the RNC building in recent days conducting the interviews.

The questions about the 2020 election were open-ended, two people familiar with the questioning said.

“But if you say the election wasn’t stolen, do you really think you’re going to get hired?” one former RNC employee asked.

“Candidates who worked on the front line in battleground states or are currently in states where fraud allegations have been prevalent were asked about their work experience,” RNC and Trump spokeswoman Danielle Alvarez said in a statement Tuesday. “We want experienced staff with meaningful views on how elections are won and lost and real experience-based opinions about what happens in the trenches.”

RNC staffers were told en masse in early March that they were being let go but could reapply for jobs, and the application process has included an interview with the Trump advisers. The Trump advisers this week are vetting both former employees and some laid-off employees — whose last day is Friday — to decide how many can either return or stay with the RNC.

Doug Heye, a longtime GOP strategist who worked as communications director at the RNC, said the party had long expected staffers to mimic the positions of its presidential candidates. “You’re there for that specific reason,” he said, “to back the candidate up and go along with the worldview.”

But nominees other than Trump wouldn’t make such outlandish claims, he said, or put employees in such an uncomfortable spot.

“The problem with Trumpism is that despite bringing in very smart and very capable people, if you want to play Trump’s game, you have to back him up on everything he says. Claims about the election being stolen is kind of the last frontier of that,” Heye said.

Other questions have included what they believe should be done on “election integrity” in 2024, along with basic questions about their job responsibilities, their previous employers and their opinions on how things are going at the RNC.

Instead of having employees based in Washington, Trump advisers have told prospective employees that many will be expected to move to Palm Beach, Fla., to be near Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Club, hollowing out the RNC headquarters. RNC officials have said it is about combining the operations of the campaign and the committee for maximum use ahead of the general election.

It’s only a matter of time before they’re required to make a formal oath of loyalty to Donald Trump and say “Hail Trump!” when he enters the room. And I’m not kidding. That could easily happen. He’s already got them saluting to the “January 6th choir” at his rallies.

He’s Just Ron

DeSantis has turned Florida into a Banana Republic. No wonder the whole Trump family lives there now.

The biggest donors in Republican politics largely shunned Ron DeSantis after his presidential campaign began to falter last summer. So his allies turned to donors the Florida governor still held sway over because of his day job.

A state coronavirus response contractor, CDR Enterprises, gave $1 million to his aligned super PAC Fight Right in the final weeks of the campaign. The DeSantis administration has issued purchase orders to the company worth $158 million to help distribute vaccines, treat patients and provide other services,sometimes through no-bid contracts, according to state records.

Herzog Railroad Services — a Missouri company the DeSantis’s team hired to build a $35 million Orlando commuter rail extension — gave $250,000 around the same time to Never Back Down, another aligned super PAC.

And a casino magnate, Jeffrey Soffer, gave $1 million in late July — on the same day that the campaign announced massive layoffs. DeSantis came out in support of Soffer’s controversial bid to transfer a casino license to his Fontainebleau Hotel in Miami Beach weeks after leaving the presidential race.

People involved in the DeSantis fundraising effort described the dependence on donors with business before Florida as part of a strategic shift born of necessity. Lobbyist friends and fundraisers of DeSantis called Florida clients asking them to contribute to the super PACs paying for television ads and field operations — and many of those people gave, according to people familiar with the situation who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private discussions. The pitch, according to one person who received a call, was that DeSantis was likely to remain a powerful governor in the state.

DeSantis had entered the presidential campaign as the richest candidate in politics, with $82.5 million in state campaign funds that seeded one of his super PACs, Never Back Down. But the governor raised relatively little from major donors between June 30 and the end of the year, when most deep-pocketed Republicans who play in national politics looked elsewhere, eventually settling on the campaign of former U.N. ambassador Nikki Haley.

Only 11 percent of the $147 million raised in 2023 by Never Back Down and Fight Right came in the second half of the year, according to campaign finance records. Many of the biggest donations had deep interests in Florida. Never Back Down, which raised nearly all of the funds, took in 37 percent of its haul from Florida-based donors in the first half of the year, not counting the transfer from the governor’s own political committee, according to campaign finance filings. The group raised 57 percent of its funds from Florida-based donors in the second half of the year.

James Uthmeier, DeSantis’s chief of staff and former campaign manager, said in response to a request for comment that “the premise of your article is entirely false.”

“Anybody working closely with the governor, such as I do, knows he is a man of unwavering principle and he would be the last person to grant access or state favor in exchange for political support, as your article suggests,” he said in a statement. “However, it is the case that many people who work in and around Florida supported his campaign because they genuinely believed he was the best candidate, and many have seen firsthand the incredible results of his leadership in our state.”

Uh huh. The system is corrupt, at every level. But these Republicans don’t even try to hide it. They just take vast sums of cash and then scream “I know you are but what am I!”

The Ship Has Started Its Turn

It remains to be seen if it’s been done in time

The Daily Beast reports on what they call the “quiet” Biden plan to “ambush” Trump.

For the first time in a long time, there’s good news for Biden on the polling front. Gradual improvements in the battleground states along with an uptick in his approval rating led one Democratic strategist, Simon Rosenberg, to declare “the Biden bump.”

The boost is at the very least correlated with Biden’s fiery State of the Union address on March 7, when he repeatedly went after his “predecessor” and made sure to mix it up with Republicans in the chamber on a few occasions.

Since then, Biden’s team has continued the punchy, combative tone on display that night, using press releases to cheekily slam their legally challenged opponent as “Broke Don.”

On top of that, the Biden campaign has continued to flex what has always been its core strength: fundraising.

With a $53 million haul in February, the Biden campaign built on their already impressive financial advantage over Trump, who brought in only $20 million over the same period. The Biden campaign has $71 million in cash on hand, compared to just $33.5 million for Trump.

The tide is turning, a Biden adviser argued to The Daily Beast, and although they aren’t putting too much stock into any recent polling upticks, the president’s team is ready to seize upon April and May as a crucial time to ambush a wounded Trump campaign.

“It’s aggressive,” a source within the Biden campaign said, requesting anonymity to speak candidly of the mood inside the re-election team. “There’s a lot of travel, there’s a lot of work. It’s all exciting. We’re heading into this final fundraiser of the month with the former presidents [Obama and Clinton], but it’s aggressive.”

Taking advantage of a substantial fundraising lead, the Biden campaign is focusing on two key areas: travel and organizing.

Since his State of the Union, Biden has visited every major battleground state—typically pairing official White House stops with separate private campaign events—in an effort to demonstrate his ability to keep an energetic schedule.

Trump, on the other hand, has only done a rally in Ohio and another in the battleground state of Georgia since Super Tuesday. Otherwise, he’s mostly been confined to his Mar-a-Lago estate as he prepares to spend the second half of April and most of May stuck in a Manhattan court four days a week for the upcoming Stormy Daniels hush money trial.

Second, the Biden campaign is going full steam ahead on hiring in the battleground states, approaching 100 field offices with more than 130 staffers spread across eight major battleground states: Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Georgia, Arizona, and Nevada, as well as North Carolina and New Hampshire.

Such investments mean that Biden can begin the crucial work of mobilizing voters early. The Trump campaign, by comparison, could not tell The Daily Beast whether they have made any additional hires or opened any field offices in the battleground states, beyond shifting over the same team focused on early primary and Super Tuesday states.

In an election which will likely be decided by less than tens of thousands of votes in a handful of battlegrounds, the Biden campaign is focusing on gaining as much as they can at the margins now to catch up to Trump.

Ramping up their field organizing, along with getting Biden on the road and in front of cameras to show he still has the energy to campaign at full throttle, is an opportunity they can’t afford to miss while Trump remains mired in legal and financial problems.

[…]

Not to worry. They’ve taken over the RNC and have Lara Trump on the case:

Lara Trump is releasing a new single called “Anything is Possible.” Tom Petty’s family must be thrilled that Lara Trump, who has released two versions of “I Won’t Back Down,” is moving on to different music.

Lara Trump plays the piano on the track, and, according to Breitbart News, the song contains a line from Lara Trump’s CPAC speech earlier this year. Lara Trump told Breitbart News that she plans to continue pursuing music even while serving as the new RNC co-chair:

I guess it’s just a part time job. The Trump team is nonetheless very optimistic:

Chris LaCivita—a top Trump campaign adviser who is also the chief operating officer of the Republican National Committee—rejected the idea that the former president’s team should disclose its organizing plans.

“By combining forces and operations, The Trump campaign and RNC are deploying operations that are fueled by passionate volunteers who care about saving America and firing Joe Biden. We do not feel obligated however to discuss the specifics of our strategy, timing and tactics with members of the News Media,” LaCivita told The Daily Beast.

“Democrats want to talk process because they don’t want to talk about Broken Braindead Biden and his absolute failure,” LaCivita argued. “The media should not do Democrats’ bidding and should focus on the issues the American people care about.”

The polls are starting to move toward Biden which doesn’t mean much when they are so close but it’s not as if Trump is putting it away:

The Biden campaign is eyeing the late spring and early summer to start focusing their messaging on persuading undecided voters, according to the senior aide, with the present focus continuing to be building out their door knocking infrastructure to make sure core voters show up to cast their ballot no matter what.

“That’s what matters at this point in the cycle,” Munoz said. “And I think we have a very good story to tell, not only on the operation we’re building, but also on the issues that we’re fighting for. These are the issues that when Americans go to the ballot box, they care most about, and Donald Trump is running on an agenda that people actively root against when they go to the ballot box.”

The Trump campaign’s answer to that is … well, nothing:

“The Trump campaign will raise the money, deploy the necessary assets, and win because President Trump will secure the border, make American families more prosperous, and make our nation respected on the world stage,” Trump campaign spokesperson Danielle Alvarez said in a statement to The Daily Beast.

Whatever. The truth is that the race is close and there are warning signs for both campaigns:

Jim Messina, who served as Barack Obama’s 2012 campaign manager, argued that Biden is in a stronger position to win than Trump given the cards they’ve been dealt.

“I like to play poker and I would simply much rather have Biden’s cards than Trump’s,” Messina said.

Biden’s two key advantages, according to Messina, are on the economy and the legal front.

“The economy is improving and people are feeling it, Biden has an affirmative message, and Trump will continue to remind independents why they voted against him in 2020 by campaigning from a courtroom,” he said.

Matt Grossman, a political scientist with Michigan State University, said it very well could be the case that March marks the nadir of Biden’s polling woes, but added a note of caution for the president’s campaign.

“My question has been what kind of message is likely to work this time,” Grossman said. “In 2020 we had strong evidence people had already made up their mind about Donald Trump, but not Joe Biden… Now we have two very well-known candidates, so it would make me expect the efficacy of any persuasion effort would be less.”

With two such well-known candidates and some 70 percent of the public weary of a 2020 rematch, the little things could count even more this time around.

“If it’s close to a 50-50 election, then minor things can still move the outcome. And certainly overall, there’s evidence that more contact is better, to deliver both turnout and persuasion messages more is better,” Grossman said.

I’m going with the value of incumbency and the fact that the Republicans are fielding a man who has twice lost the popular vote for president, was impeached twice, attempted a coup, incited an insurrection, was found liable for sexual assault and business fraud to the tune of half a billion dollars — and is facing 91 felony counts in four different jurisdictions. I’ll admit that it’s shocking that it’s even a race but it doesn’t change those basic facts. I think if that man becomes president of the United States again it means we actually have bigger problems. It will mean that our society has completely lost its bearings and as individuals we will all have to make some hard decisions.