A smattering of commentary from the Trump right today:
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Because Donald Trump must always be seen as wielding absolute mastery over his hapless, flailing opponents, he and his propagandists want you to believe his hush-money trial in Manhattan has proven nothing but a smashing political success for him.
On Monday night, Trump posted a video on social media featuring Fox personality Jesse Watters gushing that his trial may win him the White House. Trump also promoted a video of Fox’s Jeanine Pirro insisting that it showcases his ability to “withstand pressure.” Other Fox figures have spun Trump’s buffoonish outbreaks of narcolepsy in court as proof he’s Owning the Libs: Certain of acquittal, he can do some power-napping while showing the trial the contempt it deserves.
Greg points out that Trump doesn’t seem quite as sanguine. According to the NY Times he’s been talking trash about Todd Blanche, his previously favorite attorney, because he isn’t being aggressive enough. (He’s also not happy with attorney’s fees…) Apparently, he’s venting that he doesn’t have “a Roy Cohn” again.
He knows that this trial is making him look small and vulnerable even though stooges like Watters try to say that the trial is great for Trump because it’s denying the media “an opportunity to twist Trump’s words.”
The reality is that Trump looks tired (very tired!) weak and vulnerable and the trial exposes him for the despicable creep he has always been. But not on Fox:
That’s far from the fearsome, dominant figure depicted in MAGA propaganda about the trial. Note that both Watters and Pirro insist Trump is shining in the role of defendant. They are trying to depict Trump as simultaneously a victim and a formidable warrior, one who is fighting back against corrupt, powerful forces that are persecuting him. Similarly, as Media Matters’ Matt Gertz details, Fox figures praising Trump’s courtroom naps are practically painting them as acts of heroic defiance against an illegitimate prosecution.
I guess that goes without saying. According to Fox, Trump can do no wrong. But as Gregg points out:
Trump is not wielding absolute mastery over events. Trump’s own lawyers are not treating his trial as fundamentally illegitimate. Voters outside the MAGA information universe regard the charges against him as serious, and they see the other prosecutions against him in a similarly grave light. A whole lot of people will likely see Trump’s sneering dismissal of these proceedings—the dozing off, the attacks on jurors, the rage fits against the supposed unfairness of it all—as whiny entitlement, as contempt for the very notion that he should ever be held accountable for anything.
You’d think he’d just act confident and self-assured about the outcome and treat the whole thing as a minor inconvenience instead of turning his whining up to 1. But then I guess he knows his cult better than anyone and understands that they love his whining and complaining more than anything. I can’t imagine why that is, but he seems to be right.
Yesterday, the Democratic leadership announced that they would vote to save Mike Johnson if Marjorie Taylor Greene went ahead with her threatened motion to vacate the chair. Marge is having a temper tantrum over it:
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene announced Wednesday she will move ahead with her attempt to oust Speaker Mike Johnson from the House’s top job — though her plan seems doomed to fail.
The Georgia Republican, who first introduced a motion to vacate the speaker’s chair in March, held a high-energy news conference outside the U.S. Capitol to say she will trigger a vote on the House floor next week.
“Mike Johnson is not capable of that job,” she said. “He has proven that over and over again.”
Greene, joined by Republican Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky, aired a litany of grievances she has with Johnson, who she described as a Democratic speaker working against former President Donald Trump’s agenda. At one point, Greene donned a red “Make America Great Again” hat as she addressed reporters and denied she was defying Trump, who hosted Johnson at Mar-a-Lago last month and said he was doing a “good job.”
Greene and Massie were flanked by two blown-up poster boards featuring photos of Johnson embracing House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries.
She criticized Johnson for working across the aisle to avoid a government shutdown, passing a FISA extension and his recent ushering of $95 billion in foreign aid to Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan through Congress. She called them three “betrayals” against the GOP caucus.
Johnson released a short statement in response to Greene’s continued threat to try to remove him.
“This motion is wrong for the Republican Conference, wrong for the institution, and wrong for the country,” Johnson said.
Greene’s press conference came one day after House Democratic leadership announced that if a motion to vacate Johnson is brought to the House floor for a vote, they would vote to table the effort — effectively saving the speaker from ouster.
The motion to vacate is unlikely to succeed as most Republicans have joined Democrats in vowing to spike it.
Greene has already passed up several opportunities to force a vote on her motion, which she said she initially filed as a warning to Johnson.
Still, Greene said she wanted lawmakers to go on record on this issue.
“I think every member of Congress needs to take that vote and let the chips fall where they may,” Greene said. “And so next week, I am going to be calling this motion to vacate. Absolutely calling it. I can’t wait to see Democrats go out and support a Republican speaker, and have to go home to their primaries and have to run for Congress again having supported a Republican speaker.”
Greene continued, “And I also can’t wait to see my Republican conference show their cards and show who we are because voters deserve it.”
Asked why Greene is pledging to move forward with this in defiance of Trump, Greene told ABC News’ Correspondent Elizabeth Schulze, “We have to have a Republican majority in January and under Mike Johnson’s leadership we are not going to have one.”
Apparently, she has a few votes to advance it to the floor but Democrats plan to help Johnson kill it before it ever gets there. I doubt this good deed will go unpunished by the House Republicans but I guess they figure it looks better for them if they are not seen as aiding and abetting Greene in her quest for attention.
I’m not really sure what she hopes to accomplish but it sounds as though she thinks they’re going to lose in November and she will be in a position to blame Johnson and other “RINOs” for it. Or something …
Here’s the showboater and her henchman Thomas Massie this morning:
Donald Trump has said many things that should have chased him out of politics a long time ago. But in an interview with Eric Cortellessa of Time Magazine this week he finally said something so outrageous that it could make a difference in this upcoming close campaign. When asked if states should monitor women’s pregnancies so they can know if they’ve gotten an abortion after the ban, Trump replied:
“I think they might do that. Again, you’ll have to speak to the individual states.”
In other words, he’s fine with whatever medieval torture a state might want to inflict.
That wasn’t all. He went on to say that states prosecuting women who get abortions is none of his concern and said that he would reveal his position on a possible national ban on the widely used drug Mifepristone in two weeks. (The two weeks have passed and when Time approached him to see if he had an update he extended it.) He may be waiting to see if the Supreme Court lets him off the hook with a ruling in the FDA v. Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine case which they heard last month. And he was unwilling to say whether he will vote to overturn the 6 week abortion ban that just went into effect in his home state of Florida just this week next November and, again, he said that it would be up to the state.
Trump thinks he’s brilliantly found a way to evade responsibility for the backlash by insisting that by turning it back to the states he solved the problem and it’s now off the table. He really seems to believe that by putting the words “states’ rights” on repeat, and constantly pushing the lie that ending Roe v Wade, for which he proudly takes credit, was what every expert and the majority of Americans wanted he can convince people the controversy is over. Here he is telling the press that people are very happy with what he’s done:
Trump believes, with some reason, that he can change reality just by saying something over and over again. His Big Lie is proof that there are tens of millions of people who are ready to believe anything he says. But this position that the Supreme Court ban is exactly what “everyone” always wanted is a lie too far, even for him.
Support for abortion rights has grown since the Supreme Court issued the Dobbs decision and there is no evidence that this fatuous “states’ rights” rationale means anything, especially since we all know that the extremists are planning to exhume archaic laws like The Comstock Act to further restrict reproductive rights on a federal level.
The Time interview comes on the heels of a flurry of belated reports in the press about his second term agenda which many of us have been screaming about for months. Project 2025 and Agenda 47 among other plans being pulled together by the MAGA establishment, which now includes venerable institutions like the Heritage Foundation and the Club for Growth, have been public for months but the media seemed to be reluctant to take them too seriously. Perhaps this was since Trump campaign officials Susie Wiles and Chris LaCivita put out several statements insisting that none of these plans were official campaign policies and any lists of personnel or plans were mere suggestions. But the election is just six months away now and it is long past time that Trump is confronted with what we’ve been hearing and this interview makes it clear once and for all that the candidate is on board with all of it and even has some extreme ideas of his own to add to the list.
For example, Trump confirmed in this interview that he plans to control the Department of Justice and ensure that his Attorney General does his bidding. He said that if the Supreme Court does not grant the president total immunity then Joe Biden will be prosecuted for a plethora of unnamed crimes. (He later said he didn’t want to hurt Joe Biden because he has respect for the office but essentially he blames Biden personally for all of his legal troubles and payback’s a bitch.)
He plans to round up millions of immigrants, put them in camps and deport them, using the military if necessary. If the local police won’t cooperate he’ll withhold federal funds from their cities until they comply. He will destroy the civil service as we know it and replace the personnel with loyalists and any member of his administration must swear that they believe the 2020 election was stolen. He’ll close the pandemic preparedness office (!) because he know how to deal with it without spending all that money.
On foreign policy he believes that the whole world is in awe of his awesomeness and that world peace will be achieved the moment he becomes president again. And if our allies don’t comply with his edicts, as he’s said on the campaign trail, their enemies “can do whatever the hell they want.”
Does Trump think there will be violence if he doesn’t win the election in November?
“I don’t think we’re going to have that. I think we’re going to win. And if we don’t win, you know, it depends. It always depends on the fairness of an election.”
That is a threat. (Nice little election you’ve got here…)As we all know, there is no such thing as a fair election that Trump doesn’t win. He’s made that crystal clear. And by saying over and over again to his people that he’s way ahead in the polls (not true) and that it’s impossible for him to legitimately lose, he’s setting the stage for more violence if it happens.
Cortellessa asked Trump if he thinks that his loose talk about dictatorship is “contrary to our most cherished principles” and Trump blithely replied, “I think a lot of people like it.” Well, he certainly does.
Trump and the MAGA establishment have laid out a vivid plan for a revolutionary imperial presidency, with no checks and balances. He’s said before that the Constitution can be suspended and repeatedly insisted when he was president that he had “an Article II” that gave him unlimited power. Now he’s got the Supreme Court contemplating giving him immunity from prosecution for any of his crimes. As Biden would say, it’s not a joke. He means it.
That’s nothing more than a threat., plain and simple. And we know he’ll carry it out because he did it before.
Campus protests have them hot and bothered
House Republicans want to launch investigations into federal funding for universities. Young-uns, like minority groups conservatives disfavor, ought to know their places and stay in them. But no. Around the U.S., students upset at the disproportionate carnage and destruction Israeli forces are visiting upon the Gaza Strip are acting out. Naturally, the Deputy Fifes in the House Republican caucus want to nip that in the bud.
The Associated Press reports:
House Republicans on Tuesday announced an investigation into the federal funding for universities where students have protested the Israel-Hamas war, broadening a campaign that has placed heavy scrutiny on how presidents at the nation’s most prestigious colleges have dealt with reports of antisemitism on campus.
Several House committees will be tasked with a wide probe that ultimately threatens to withhold federal research grants and other government support to the universities, placing another pressure point on campus administrators who are struggling to manage pro-Palestinian encampments, allegations of discrimination against Jewish students and questions of how they are integrating free speech and campus safety.
The House investigation follows several recent high-profile hearings that precipitated the resignations of presidents at Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania. And House Republicans promised more scrutiny, saying they were calling on the administrators of Yale, UCLA and the University of Michigan to testify next month.
“We will not allow antisemitism to thrive on campus, and we will hold these universities accountable for their failure to protect Jewish students on campus,” said House Speaker Mike Johnson at a news conference.
Reports of antisemitic behavior among some protesters is indeed appalling. Threats to Jewish students are unacceptable. But that’s not why Republicans are threatening to withold funds from the universities. The Gaza protests simply give them an excuse.
The people who argue that prosecuting Donald Trump for indictments brought by grand juries of his peers represents selective prosecution demand without blinking selective accountability for people they do not like. And they don’t like funding liberalizing institutions. See: Wisconsin. Also see: North Carolina.
Republicans are also turning to the issue at a time when election season is fully underway and leadership needs a cause that unites them and divides Democrats. The House GOP’s impeachment inquiry into President Joe Biden has fallen flat and the Republican conference is smarting after a series of important bills left GOP lawmakers deeply divided. Democrats have feuded internally at times over the Israel-Hamas war and how campus administrators have handled the protests.
Rep. Pete Aguilar, the No. 3 House Democrat, at a news conference Tuesday said that it was important for colleges “to ensure that everybody has an ability to protest and to make their voice heard but they have a responsibility to honor the safety of individuals.”
“For many of Jewish descent, they do not feel safe, and that is a real issue,” he said, but added that he wanted to allow university administrators to act before Congress stepped in.
But the Republican speaker promised to use “all the tools available” to push the universities. Johnson was joined by chairs for six committees with jurisdiction over a wide range of government programs, including National Science Foundation grants, health research grants, visas for international students and the tax code for nonprofit universities.
States’ rights and limited government go out the window when it’s politically expedient, don’t they?
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Trump’s persona is not even “truthful hyperbole”
Ahead of the 2016 election Donald Trump won, The New York Times cited a now-famous paragraph from Donald Trump’s ghost-written “The Art of the Deal.” David Barstow wrote:
“I call it truthful hyperbole. It’s an innocent form of exaggeration — and a very effective form of promotion.”
For example, in the now-infamous Trump University litigation, Mr. Trump was asked in a deposition about a script that had been prepared for Trump University instructors. According to the script, the instructors were supposed to tell their students the following: “I remember one time Mr. Trump said to us over dinner, he said, ‘Real estate is the only market that, when there’s a sale going on, people run from the store.’ You don’t want to run from the store.”
No such dinners ever took place, Mr. Trump acknowledged. In fact, Mr. Trump struggled to identify a single one of the instructors he claimed to have handpicked, even after he was shown their photographs. Nonetheless, Mr. Trump was not bothered by the script’s false insinuation of real estate secrets shared over chummy dinners. Asked if this example constituted “innocent exaggeration,” Mr. Trump replied, “Yes, I’d say that’s an innocent exaggeration.”
Trump’s entire life is hyperbole, like the book he did not write, the buildings he did not own, and the fortune he did not make. Theologians will tell you the Devil can tell the truth when it suits his purposes. It’s just not his preferred mode of communication. Nor is it Trump’s. Whatever he’s selling, Trump is always selling himself, and it’s always false advertising.
Heather Cox Richardson comments on the Time article posted Tuesday about Trump’s plans for a second presidency. To head off critics, Time included transcripts of interviews behind the profile, and fact checks on Trump’s claims. They demonstrate, Richardson writes, that his “narrative is based largely on fantasy.” The material reveals more about the right’s stance on the truth:
Trump’s own words prove the truth of what careful observers have been saying about his plans based on their examination of MAGA Republicans’ speeches, interviews, Project 2025, and so on, often to find themselves accused of a liberal bias that makes them exaggerate the dangers of a second Trump presidency.
The idea that truthful reporting based on verifiable evidence is a plot by “liberal media” to undermine conservative values had its start in 1951, when William F. Buckley Jr., fresh out of Yale, published God and Man at Yale: The Superstitions of “Academic Freedom.” Fervently opposed to the bipartisan liberal consensus that the federal government should regulate business, provide a basic social safety net, protect civil rights, and promote infrastructure, Buckley was incensed that voters continued to support such a system. He rejected the “superstition” that fact-based public debate would enable people to choose the best option from a wide range of ideas—a tradition based in the Enlightenment—because such debate had encouraged voters to choose the liberal consensus, which he considered socialism.
Buckley was not opposed to superstition, nor to self-creation. His bias was for his own, puffed up with a “preposterously mellifluous,” “patrician accent” filled with nouns, verbs and adjectives from the Oxford English Dictionary and a fondness for Latin.
Trump’s trial in Manhattan for falsifying business records and violating campaign finance laws is poking holes in the false image Trump has spent his life constructing with pufferey. Buckley’s heirs are frantically applying tape to those holes to keep the Trump balloon from deflating before everyone’s eyes.
Greg Sargent writes at The New Republic:
Because Donald Trump must always be seen as wielding absolute mastery over his hapless, flailing opponents, he and his propagandists want you to believe his hush-money trial in Manhattan has proven nothing but a smashing political success for him.
On Monday night, Trump posted a video on social media featuring Fox personality Jesse Watters gushing that his trial may win him the White House. Trump also promoted a video of Fox’s Jeanine Pirro insisting that it showcases his ability to “withstand pressure.” Other Fox figures have spun Trump’s buffoonish outbreaks of narcolepsy in court as proof he’s Owning the Libs: Certain of acquittal, he can do some power-napping while showing the trial the contempt it deserves.
In private, Trump appears less confident. “Indeed, this saga shows how deeply flimsy the vast illusion that MAGA propagandists have woven around Trump and his legal travails has truly become.”
Aided by his cultish fans, Trump must prop up the fiction that he is and always will be, in Seinfeld terms, master of his domain. What’s more buffoonish than Fox’s contortions are the lengths to which MAGAworld and Trump himself will go to reimagine the morbidly obese former president as impossibly ripped and powerful even as he nods off in court.
Sargent concludes:
Voters outside the MAGA information universe regard the charges against him as serious, and they see the other prosecutions against him in a similarly grave light. A whole lot of people will likely see Trump’s sneering dismissal of these proceedings—the dozing off, the attacks on jurors, the rage-fits against the supposed unfairness of it all—as whiny entitlement, as contempt for the very notion that he should ever be held accountable for anything.
That very survival of the republic could rest on bursting that Trump bubble.
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It’s the vaccines
Trump has downplayed his role in the vaccines ever since that incident even though he is dying to take credit for them. He impulsively waded into this again after the State of the Union address and it didn’t go well at all:
All hell broke loose:
It went on and on and on. There is obviously a group of anti-vax MAGAs who feel so strongly about this they are even willing to defy Dear Leader.
Aaron Blake at the Washington Post reports on a new poll about this question:
A Monmouth University poll Monday initially asked voters whether they would consider voting for Kennedy. Democrats were slightly more likely than Republicans to say they were.
But then the poll asked people whether they were aware that Kennedy “claims that autism is linked to vaccines” and that he has floated a theory that covid was targeted at certain races. (Neither claim is based in fact.) About half of Republicans said they were aware of this; about 6 in 10 Democrats said they were.
Then it asked again whether people, with this knowledge, would consider voting for him.Suddenly, the percentage of Republicans who said they would consider Kennedy rose by eight percentage points, nearly doubling to just shy of 1 in 5.
The percentage of Democrats who support him drops seven points to 1 in 10.
We haven’t seen many polls on this issue and it’s hard to know if this will make any difference. But I suspect that Trump’s campaign has polled it and they don’t like what they’re seeing. Trump’s been hammering Kennedy over the past few days on his Truth Social page:
If you can make sense out of that more power to you. But it’s clear that he’s agitated about RFK Jr. But he really needs to have a chat with Steve Bannon and top GOP donors who have been pushing this campaign from the beginning. They created RFK Jr. Now they have to live with him.
I honestly don’t know who Kennedy benefits or hurts in this thing. He’s a nut and he has high name recognition but I have to assume that the family coming out against his candidacy will erode any “Kennedy” nostalgia and his policies will become more salient. On the anti-Biden side is his environmental record which is laudable. But Biden has been excellent on that subject so it’s not one of his vulnerabilities. On the anti-Trump side it’s Kennedy’s anti-vax crusade — which has been the greater part of his career in recent years. There’s something for everyone to hate in RFK Jr.
“Trump appears to have fallen asleep while listening to testimony — at times appearing to stir and then falling back to sleep. Trump’s eyes were closed for extended periods and his head has at times jerked in a way consistent with sleeping.”
Meanwhile, Trump’s lawyers, at his instruction no doubt, refused to stipulate that certain tapes and testimony are admissible. So this is what the prosecution had to do:
They had to get the owner of the transcription service in the Carroll trial to testify too.
Here’s one of the CSPAN tapes they want admitted.
If this trial proves nothing else it shows his performative lies in living color. Just look at how adamantly he denies knowing these women. The trial proves he did.
Paul Krugman with a trip down memory lane:
You probably remember [the 1990s] as a time of prosperity — low unemployment and rapid economic growth combined with low inflation — marred by irrational exuberance in the stock market. Pets.com anyone?
What you might not realize is how closely the economy of early 2024 resembles that of the late Clinton years. People might not be feeling the prosperity — or at least they say they aren’t feeling it, because there’s a huge gap between Americans’ positive assessment of their personal financial situation and their negative assessments of the economy. But by the numbers, things look pretty good. Notably, unemployment is actually a bit lower now than it was at the end of the roaring ’90s.
He notes that inflation spiked in 2021-22 but that according to one good measure it’s actually come down to a level that’s barely above the Fed’s target rate.
What about interest rates? Well, people have forgotten that interest rates were higher during the 90s and mortgage rates were even higher than they are now:
Needless to say, the stock market was soaring as it is today. All of this leads Krugman to think that interest rates might remain high for longer that we might have thought.
[U]ntil recently it didn’t seem likely that the conditions that kept interest rates high a generation ago would re-emerge. The working-age population seemed set to stagnate or even shrink, given low fertility and the aging of the baby boomers. Technology continued to advance, but smartphones and video games didn’t seem to be generating a lot of business investment.
Then, suddenly, things seem to have changed.
He points out that weak demography was the reason for low interest rates prior to COVID. But while American fertility is still falling, a surge in immigration is changing that prospect.
He speculates that the rise in working from home has propped up residential investment and observes that there has been higher than expected business investment and that manufacturing driven by administration policies, has been soaring.
Krugman concludes:
So maybe we really are seeing a return to something like the economic conditions of the late 1990s — both the good, in the form of low unemployment and (maybe) strong productivity growth, and the not so good, in the form of persistently high interest rates.
I, for one, didn’t see this coming, and as far as I know, nobody did. But as the bumper stickers don’t quite say, stuff happens.
If he’s right, I suspect that inflation is the bigger political problem because it’s so immediate. Credit card interest rates have been high for ages and residential real estate rates haven’t been as big a problem as lack of housing. Let’s just hope there isn’t a new version of the Dot Com bubble on the immediate horizon.
And, by the way, that roaring economy led to a George W. Bush presidency (won by 587 votes in Jeb Bush’s Florida) and everything that came after.
Thanks to a provision in the Secure 2.0 Act, legislation aimed at improving retirement benefits nationwide, in 2024 employers will be able to start counting student loan payments as qualifying contributions toward retirement matching programs.
That means if your employer offers to match your 401(k) contributions, you could get that matched money without ever depositing funds in your retirement account. Instead, your monthly student loan payments would count as your “contribution.”
The benefit could be especially significant for recent graduates, who often have moderate incomes ($58,000 to start, on average) and high levels of debt (an average of $33,000 for federal borrowers aged 25 to 35).
Does anyone know about this? I hope so.
The Biden administration has created an unprecedented number of programs to help average people, increase manufacturing and jobs and generally expand the economy from the bottom up. And yet, most people are either unaware of it or frankly, don’t care. And yet all the polling says they do care about it and think Donald Trump is the guy who will give them the things that Biden has already done.
Remember “popularism”, the idea that Democrats should campaign on a strategy of focusing on issues that enjoy electoral popularity, such as focusing on economic issues over polarizing social and cultural issues? Well, Biden has delivered, and delivered and delivered on those issues. He saved the economy, doing far better than any other industrialized country and basically nobody seems to believe it.