I wonder if that actually penetrates the minds of the average Fox viewers.
"what digby sez..."
Digby's Hullabaloo Posts
Here we go
As Donald Trump’s criminal trial continues in Manhattan, it appears we will hear today from the adult-film actress at the heart of the hush-money payments allegedly covered up by Trump and his convicted “fixer’ Michael Cohen: Stormy Daniels (Stephanie Clifford) . What made the payments criminal, prosecutors allege, was disguising repayments to Cohen as legal fees. The scheme was intended to influence the 2016 presidential election.
Forget the sex. Check out those titillating invoices at the Trump hush money trial, Politico reported.
The Associated Press noted on Monday that the prosecution presented the jury with documents from the Trump Organization and testimony from former controller, Jeffrey McConney, who heard about payments to Cohen from Trump CFO Allen Weisselberg. But he was unaware of what they were for:
A bank statement displayed in court showed Cohen paying $130,000 to Davidson, Daniels’ lawyer, on Oct. 27, 2016, out of an account for an entity Cohen created for the purpose.
Weisselberg’s handwritten notes about reimbursing Cohen were stapled to the bank statement in the company’s files, McConney said.
Those notes spell out a plan to pay Cohen a base reimbursement of $180,000 — covering the payment to Davidson and an unrelated technology bill. That total was then doubled or “grossed up” to cover the state, city and federal taxes Weisselberg estimated Cohen would incur on the payments.
Weisselberg then added a $60,000 bonus, for a total of $420,000, according to the notes. That money was to be paid out in 12 monthly installments of $35,000 each.
This morning, prosecutors questioned Sally Franklin, a VP and executive managing editor for publisher Penguin Random House about a Trump title: “Trump: How to Get Rich.”
Trump’s pomposity and Roy Cohn-schooled belligerence may come back to bite him.
● ● ● ● ● ● ● ●
For The Win, 5th Edition is ready for download. Request a copy of my free countywide GOTV planning guide at ForTheWin.us.
The degenerating saga of the GOP’s mind virus
The best minds of the MAGA generation were not destroyed by madness. They’re empowered by it, revel in it, slather themselves in it. The T-partiers were pikers by comparison. They pretended that their beef with Barack Obama was taxation and his birth certificate. Alt-right street fighters tacked “based” to the front of their monikers to signify their antipathy towards their fellow Americans. The Party of Trump is an orgy of debasement.
The talent competition at Donald Trump’s VP pageant over the weekend involved limbo. How low could they go? Lick his shoes? Lick the bottom of his shoes? Digby profiled some of the contestants on Monday.
Then we come to the dog-executing, based governor of South Dakota, Krispi Gnome, and her latest memoir. And its anecdotes and edits. And her “Face The Nation” interview.
James Parker proposes additional memoirs and their edits (in her voice) at The Atlantic :
It has been brought to my attention that my memoir The Truth: My Life, How It Really Happened, and What It Means for America—for which I conducted more than 500 hours of interviews with myself—contains an anecdote in which the late Samuel Beckett mails me his Nobel Prize for Literature medal and insists, in a long and heartfelt letter, that I deserve it more than he does. This anecdote has been adjusted.
It has been brought to my attention that my memoir Just the Facts: Everything I Ever Did and the Order I Did It In—for which I embedded with myself on a series of dangerous solo military missions—contains an anecdote in which, after a boozy lunch with King Charles III, I invent the iPod. This anecdote has been adjusted.
It has been brought to my attention that my memoir You Better Believe It: All My Realest Adventures—for which I accompanied myself on many trips to palaces, embassies, medieval mountain hideaways, global HQs, elite conferences, celebrity meditation retreats, and secret underwater laboratories—contains an anecdote in which I win Season 14 of Survivor but turn down a subsequent offer (from Jeff Probst himself) to host the show. This anecdote has been adjusted.
It has been brought to my attention that my memoir The Honesty Gospel—for which I observed myself over seven sessions of ketamine therapy, supervised by myself—contains an anecdote in which I am visited by the archangel Gabriel. No adjustment has been made to this anecdote.
It has been brought to my attention that my memoir No BS: Straight Talk From the Mouth of Reality—for which I spent several months on the set of a documentary about me, directed by me, and starring (as me) both Steve Martin and Eva Longoria—contains an anecdote in which I ask the late J. Robert Oppenheimer, “Listen, Bob, are you sure you want to split the atom?” This anecdote has been adjusted.
The CDC really should be looking at whether this GOP mind virus is contagious. We know already it is a clear and present danger to the republic.
● ● ● ● ● ● ● ●
For The Win, 5th Edition is ready for download. Request a copy of my free countywide GOTV planning guide at ForTheWin.us.
Trump cares nothing for the party, only himself:
You may have heard about this:
Rep. Henry Cuellar (D-Texas) and his wife were indicted last week on conspiracy and bribery charges. The Justice Department alleged that Cuellar took nearly $600,000 in bribes from an Azerbaijani government-controlled oil company and a Mexican bank. In return, prosecutors allege that Cuellar agreed to “influence U.S. foreign policy in favor of Azerbaijan” and advance the bank’s interests in the U.S., per the indictment.
You would think that would make Trump very happy and he’d be calling for Cuellar to resign immediately in order to help the GOP congress maintain their at least a two vote margin. (They only have one at the moment.)
But no.
Trump’s rare defense of a vulnerable Democratic lawmaker runs counter to Republicans’ desire to pressure Democrats to call for Cuellar’s removal. The National Republican Congressional Committee plans to accuse Democrats of a double standard if they stay mum on Cuellar following their pressure on ex-Rep. George Santos (R-N.Y.) to resign, Politico reports.
Cuellar, who has denied wrongdoing, said that he still plans to run for re-election. I wouldn’t be surprised to see Trump endorse him.
As Dave Weigel observes, the “law and order candidate” has a big soft spot for crooked politicians — except his rivals, of course (who aren’t actually criminals.)
Since Feb. 2020, when Trump commuted the sentence of disgraced former Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich, the Republican presidential nominee has shown support and empathy for Democrats convicted or charged with public corruption.
Days before he left office, Trump commuted the sentence of former Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick; now a resident of Georgia, Kilpatrick attended a Trump rally in Michigan last week. He considered pardoning the late former New York legislative leader Sheldon Silver, then in prison on corruption charges, and only stopped after an overwhelming backlash from state Republicans. In September, Trump called last year’s indictment of New Jersey Sen. Bob Menendez an “attack” by Biden, “because he wasn’t getting along too well with the Democrats.”
And over the weekend, Trump welcomed Blagojevich to donor events in Palm Beach, Fla., where the self-proclaimed “Trumpocrat” shared a stage with potential Trump running mates and got singled out for praise in a speech first reported on by the New York Times. Trump repeated an argument he’d made for years about Blagojevich: He had the right enemies.
“A lot of people thought it was unfair,” Trump said in Aug. 2019, when he was considering commuting most of the 14-year sentence Blagojevich got after soliciting bribes for a U.S. Senate appointment. “And it was the same gang, the Comey gang and all these sleazebags, that did it.
He’s not a party man. He’s a Trump man and he sees any politician accused of crimes as a mirror of himself — obviously innocent and railroaded by the Deep State — unless they are opposed to him personally. He’s a criminal and he relates to other criminals.
Kristi Noem really loved that puppy murdering story
Kristi Noem’s story about killing her dog made headlines across America. But it wasn’t news to people who worked on her first book, where the tale made it into a draft of the memoir before the publishing team nixed it.
Then, as now, Noem wanted the story in because it showed a decisive person who was unwilling to be bound by namby-pamby niceties, while others on the team — which included agents, editors and publicists at Hachette Book Group’s prestige Twelve imprint, and a ghostwriter — saw it as a bad-taste anecdote that would hurt her brand. The tale was ultimately cut, according to two people involved with the project…
It’s been a busy week for that communications team, and not just for Cricket-related reasons. The book’s fact-checking has also been called into question: Last week, the Dakota Scout reported on a passage of the book in which Noem claims to have met the dictator of North Korea while she was serving as a backbencher in Congress. The improbable meeting never happened.
That first book did very well, setting her up as a national figure. Now she has a different team and a new right wing imprint. Apparently, they agreed with her assessment that dog-killing is an awesome way to demonstrate blood-thirsty Trumpism — and Trumpian lies — and they let her freak flag fly.
She has said that there will be corrections, implying that she knew nothing about this, but has no explanation as to why she read the book aloud for he audio book and didn’t correct it then.
The author of this piece is a political editor at Politico and he goes in depth into the world of campaign books and it’s pretty gross. You should read it all.
Noem’s new book — which doesn’t officially publish until May 7 — meets that standard: Whatever you think of putting down a dog for attacking a neighbor’s chickens, the decision to keep the story in the book also seems to show a political culture so devoted to shocking establishment nostrums that it fails to recognize how loving dogs is a pretty mainstream piece of American culture. (I wrote an entire book about the lengths Americans will go to for their pets, and found it’s the rare factor in our national life that knows no party.)
And beyond the Cricket story, possibly making up an easily disprovable memory about meeting Kim Jong Un — or else confusing one of the world’s most recognizable tyrants with some random other person — is a quality-control problem altogether different from the usual one in which pols fill books with lame cliches. Newspapers and magazines stand behind the things they put out, but in book-publishing, the veracity of a work is entirely on the writer.
[…]
If I were editing a memoir by some public figure in or out of politics, and it included a story about intentionally killing their dog, I would absolutely include it — it’s a fascinatingly unusual tale, so different from the typical self-aggrandizing autobiographer, one that raises huge questions and reveals something about character. I bet audiences would agree.Of course, thinking of the audience in terms of readers rather than voters is why I’m a writer, not a PR ace.
It remains to be seen if this brouhaha turns the book into a best seller and if it does you can bet the publisher will be happy about it. I assumed that Noem’s political career has been grievously harmed by this and not just because of the book but because of her bizarre media appearances trying to defend it. However, I must admit that I’m not entirely sure about it now. Trump effusively praised her over the weekend and Fox didn’t seem overly concerned. This may just make her more beloved than ever among the MAGA cultists because she’s seen as really sticking it to the libs, especially when she said Biden’s dog should be shot as well. Of course, a lot of MAGAs also love their dogs so who knows?
And there’s also the fact that she’s a woman and GOP women are always trying to walk that line between being hard and remaining feminine. Her Real Housewife of Mar-a-Lago makeover was designed to give her cover for the latter but puppy killing may have veered too far into the “hard” category.
In a normal world, this wouldn’t be a question and my instinct has been to say that she’s toast. But now I’m wondering. Could it make her more popular than ever? It’s actually possible.
Can you see it?
The joke is that Trump’s family finally showed up to support him. Lol.
It’s actually viral marketing for this movie. I think it’s pretty clever.
When Trump took over the RNC and purged all the suspected disloyal employees they hire two new lawyers to oversee “election integrity.” That hasn’t worked out so well. Benen writes:
One of the attorneys hired at the RNC was Christina Bobb, who was tapped to serve as the party’s senior counsel for election integrity. It wasn’t long, however, before an unfortunate problem emerged: Bobb was recently indicted for alleged election-related crimes.
The other attorney was longtime Republican lawyer Charlie Spies, who was hired to serve as the RNC’s chief counsel. At least, that was the idea two months ago. NBC News reported over the weekend:
Republican National Committee chief counsel Charlie Spies is parting ways with the party apparatus just months after stepping into the role. He was “pushed out,” according to a source familiar with the move.
After the news was made official, Trump turned to his social media platform to celebrate the developments. “Great news for the Republican Party. RINO lawyer Charlie Spies is out as Chief Counsel of the RNC,” the former president wrote, denouncing the experienced Republican lawyer who’d been hired by his own RNC team.
What did this highly experienced GOP lawyer do to deserve such a scathing put down?
NBC News’ report added, for example, that in 2021, Spies publicly contradicted false claims about voting machines switching votes. When asked during a Conservative Political Action Conference panel what he’d do about voting machines switching votes, he pushed back against the false conspiracy theory that has been backed by Trump allies.
“I may get booed off the stage for this, but I have to say that’s simply not true. There is just zero evidence that’s true,” Spies said at the time.
Indeed, a Washington Post report over the weekend noted that the lawyer’s RNC career was cut short, at least in part, because Trump “grew angry about his criticism of the former president’s false claims that the 2020 election was stolen.”
That sort of reality-based commentary is simply not allowed in Trump’s orbit. He said so in his TIME Magazine interview and his VP wannabes have all demonstrated that they must twist themselves into a pretzels on this subject if they want to be considered.
I fully expect Spies to endorse Trump and encourage people to vote for him anyway. These people have no pride.
This newsletter by Robert Reich spoke to me. I hope he doesn’t mind if I share it with you:
Friends,
My students are graduating at a tremulous time.
The largest campus protest movement of the 21st century. The first criminal trial of a former U.S. president. The most restrictive abortion laws in the nation. Two horrific wars.
All of this coming after a pandemic that claimed the lives of a million Americans. And after the first attack on the U.S. Capitol in history, provoked by the first president who refused to accept electoral defeat.
Perhaps most troubling, the nation is bitterly split. Americans are demonizing those on the other side whom they disagree with. (For two weeks in April, “Civil War,” a dystopian film about a bloody alternative reality where America is at war with itself, topped box office charts, grossing more than $50 million.)
My graduating students are exhausted and anxious.
They are repulsed by the slaughter in Gaza, and angry by the responses of university administrators around the country to the student protesters.
They’re cynical about politics.
They tell me they don’t want to have children and bring them into a world imperiled by conflict and climate change and authoritarianism.
They have lived through mass shootings and culture wars.
They recall a Trump administration spewing hate and bigotry and giving tax cuts to the wealthy, and fear another President Trump who’s even less constrained.
I tell them that the year I graduated from college, in 1968, America also felt tremulous and chaotic. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Bobby Kennedy were assassinated. American cities were burning.
And the Vietnam War was claiming the lives of tens of thousands of young Americans and hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese.
I was appalled at the unnecessary carnage in Vietnam. I was incensed that the first world, white and rich, was randomly killing people in the third world, mostly non-white and poor. As an American, I felt morally complicit.
I was angry at college administrators who summoned police to clear protesters – using teargas, stun guns and mass arrests. The response only added fuel to the flames.
America was deeply split. My graduation speaker urged us to resist the draft and seek refuge in Canada. His words caused parents in the crowd to boo. I saw several engage in fistfights.
The anti-Vietnam war movement became fodder for rightwing politicians like Richard Nixon, demanding “law and order.” The spectacle also appalled many non-college, working-class people who viewed the students as pampered, selfish, anti-American, unpatriotic.
I vividly recall the anti war demonstrations at the 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago, and the brutality of the Chicago police and Illinois national guard – later described by the National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence as a “police riot”.
As the anti-war protesters chanted “The whole world is watching,” network television conveyed the riotous scene to what seemed like the whole world.
I had spent months working for the anti-war presidential candidate Eugene McCarthy. The convention nominated Hubert Humphrey. That November, America elected Richard Nixon as president.
I wondered whether the nation could sink any lower. How could we survive?
I ask my students to hold on. To use their lives and careers to make America better. To try to heal the world.
History, as it is said, doesn’t repeat itself. It only rhymes.
The mistakes made at one point in time have an eerie way of re-emerging two generations later, as memories fade.
\
I’ve noticed that a lot of people get irritated when older folks evoke the Vietnam protests when discussing our current situation. I get it. But there are certain parallels even if we aren’t currently dealing with horrific political assassinations and experiencing 2200 American deaths and almost 12,000 injuries as we did during the the month of May, 1968. Or Kent State — at least not yet.
Reich is right. Each new generation has to do what it can to heal the world. And that’s what they’re trying to do right now.
Donald Trump whines constantly about not being able to campaign around the country because he’s stuck in a New York courtroom facing trial on felony charges. Court is only convened four days a week and he has his own plane so he could certainly be out every weekend if he chose to. He did hold a couple of rallies last week in Wisconsin and Michigan since court was only in session for three days but on his days off he’s usually playing golf at and angrily tweeting rather than glad-handing the MAGA crowd out on the stump. And he’s holding a lot of fundraisers at his Mar-a-Lago beach club.
This past weekend, rather than heading out to Arizona or even next door to Pennsylvania, Trump was back in Florida regaling 400 wealthy donors at a $40,000 a ticket with an extended whine about his legal problems and the stolen election of 2020, among other MAGA greatest hits. He also said that the Biden administration is “the Gestapo” and called Special Prosecutor Jack Smith a fucking asshole. He was obviously enjoying himself.
The event was wrapped around an annual Republican retreat conveniently held in Palm Beach (the center of the GOP universe now) where his campaign managers and pollsters gave a presentation to the wealthy supporters explaining why Trump is a shoo-in in November. According to the NY Times, the presenters reported that there are really only three swing states, Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania, with the others that everyone else usually puts on that list — Arizona, Nevada, Georgia and North Carolina — already in the bag for Trump. They even went so far as to add Minnesota and Virginia as pickups. None of this comports with any known reality in the public polling which currently shows an extremely tight race in the six most important swing states. But this was really a pitch for money so they have to sound optimistic.
Trump’s team also reported that they raised $76 million in April but we’ll have to wait for the FEC reports later to see if that’s correct. Since that would presumably include the $50 million he allegedly raised in one night, it would mean the rest of his fundraising is still pretty anemic. So these big money fundraisers are more important than ever. It’s possible they really have bled their base dry with eight years of constant haranguing for money. (This week they even begged for donations for the $9,000 fines imposed by the judge in his NY criminal trial for breaking the gag order.)
The big event of the weekend was the big money Mar-a-Lago luncheon which brought in a long list of Vice Presidential contenders who Trump paraded before the assembled donors as if it was his Miss Universe pageant. Luckily they were all spared a swimsuit competition but I’m quite sure the group would have been happy to oblige if Trump had demanded it. It seems there is no limit to what they will do to curry favor with their Dear Leader.
Axios reported that Trump called each of them up on the stage one by one:
That comment about Byron Donald and “diversité” is something else.
He also gave a big shout-out to Speaker of the House Mike Johnson who was in attendance, which must have Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene fuming. One wonders if she’s really going to go through with her threat to call for the motion to depose Johnson this week as promised since her leader has praised him so fulsomely. If she had any hope to be on the VP list, her hopes were dashed this weekend. It appears she wasn’t invited.
Five of the hopefuls went on Sunday shows to display their sycophancy skills for the Big Man and we all know how important that is to him. The most stunning performance came from Kristi Noem, Gov of S. Dakota, who had left the luncheon early and didn’t make it up on stage with the others. Still trying to spin her way out of the mess she made with her new book’s tale about shooting her puppy and a blatant lie about meeting North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un it was a disaster.
She later posted that it was all fake news. You can see for yourself it was not.
Meanwhile, S. Carolina Sen. Tim Scott repeatedly refused to say if he would accept the results of the election if Trump lost, insisting that Trump was going to win (one way or another.)
The billionaire N. Dakota Gov. Doug Burgham continued to practice his Mike Pence imitation but ended up sounding like Mitt Romney when he took umbrage at the term “wealthy donors”
Florida Sen. Marco Rubio continued his self-abasement crusade by piggy-backing on Trump’s outrageous comments about Democrats wanting to “abort” babies after they’re born and demanding that non-citizens who protest in America be deported.
Elise Stefanik stridently defended Donald Trump. Of all the groveling wannabes on the Sunday Trump suck-up tour, her defense was probably the most aggressive and he does like that.
I thought Noem was the likely choice until the doggie debacle. Now I think Scott is probably the front runner. He’s got the Penceian adoration act down pat and I think Trump would really enjoy having a Black Senator from South Carolina in that subservient position. Why Scott, an accomplished man and important elected official in his own right, would want to do that is truly mystifying.
Trump really let down his hair at this luncheon obviously feeling very comfortable with the wealthy donors who were there to give him lots of money. In fact, aside from his usual rants about how nobody knows the trouble he’s seen, he couldn’t stop talking about it
The Washington Post reported that in he complained about having to take selfies with donors and said he wouldn’t do it unless they give him more cash. He said that a wedding would get preference over the donors because they were paying more per person. He also “bragged about his golf game extensively, citing tournaments at his own clubs that he ostensibly won” and claimed that Mar-a-Lago is the center of the universe. You might think that these wealthy individuals would be a little bit put off by this inane braggadocio but apparently they love his narcissism and pathological lying as much as the MAGA faithful at his rallies.
Hobnobbing with rich people begging to give him large sums of money must have been a soothing balm to the once and possibly future president. But it couldn’t last. This morning he is back in that dingy, cold courtroom in New York facing criminal charges and he’s being treated like he’s just another citizen no better and no worse. On days like this it must feel as if Mar-a-Lago is a million miles away. Maybe that’s why he closes his eyes and drifts off to sleep during the testimony. He wants to retreat to his fantasy world where he’s more important that everyone in the room and nothing bad can touch him. The gritty reality of having to face accountability for his reckless criminality is just too much for him to bear.