Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

Of course you’ve heard about Noem’s disgusting tale about gleefully shooting her puppy. And it’s possible that you’ve heard that she claims in her book to have “stared down” Kim Jong Un, which is a blatant lie. And now here’s another one.

She says that Nikki Haley threatened her. Playbook reports:

The way Noem tells the story, in the summer of 2021 she “was hauling a trailer full of horses” when she got word that Haley wanted to talk.

Here’s how Noem recounts the conversation:

“‘Hi, Governor, this is Ambassador Nikki Haley, and I just wanted to introduce myself and have a conversation. I just wanted to let you know that I follow you quite a bit. I have heard quite a bit about you, and you are doing a good job there in South Dakota. I was thinking that maybe you might like a mentor, and maybe I could be someone who could do that for you. Because you’re a governor, you’ve gone through some challenging things that I did as well. I would be more than willing to be a mentor, because you’ve never been in this type of role before.’

“She went on to tell me about her life story, her résumé, and some of the challenges she faced in her legislature as governor and as ambassador to the United Nations reading daily talking points from the State Department. Once again, I recall, she offered to mentor me, as she was sure I was facing some decisions and situations I’d never seen before. …

“After what seemed to me a bit of an awkward pause, she added, ‘I … just … also want you to know one more thing … I’ve heard a lot of really good things about you. But I also want you to know that if I hear something bad … I will be sure to let you know.’

“There was a long pause.

“‘Um, well, thanks for that, Ambassador.’

“‘Let me be clear,’ she added. ‘I’ve heard many good things about you. But when I do hear bad things, I will make sure that you know. I’ve enjoyed talking to you. We will visit soon. Goodbye.’ Click.”

She says she took a few minutes and then called her assistant:

“‘I think I was just threatened by Nikki Haley?’

“‘What?!’

“‘Yeah, I’m pretty sure I was just threatened by Nikki Haley. It was clear that she wanted me to know that there was only room for one Republican woman in the spotlight. It was weird.’

“Unsurprisingly, I never received any calls or ‘mentoring’ from her, but the message was clear. I’m the alpha female here, and you should know your place. I actually felt a little sad for her.”

Playbook reports:

Contacted for comment, Haley spokesperson Chaney Denton was befuddled. She said the two women did talk, but — looking back at Haley’s calendar — found that it was in 2020, not 2021.

I had thought she had the best chance for the VP nod because she checked all the boxes. Then we found out that she had an affair with that miscreant Corey Lewandowski and she did that weird infomercial for her Texas dentist. Now this book. I don’t know that Trump absolutely won’t pick her anyway because he does what he wants but the consensus is that she’s toast. I hope so. This is a very weird person.

I have recently begun to think that Trump is leaning heavily toward her North Dakota neighboring Governor Doug Burgham because he’s made a very impressive show of Penceian sycophancy on television. We know how much Trump loves that. And it would actually be a smart move because they could bill themselves as the “billionaire businessmen” ticket coming to save America. That might appeal to those deluded cultists who still think Trump is a genius businessman.

I think Trump truly wanted to choose a woman but there just aren’t any good ones. Isn’t that always the problem?

His Big Lie is the gift to the Democrats

Donald Trump was all over the place in his big TIME Magazine interview this week but there is one issue on which he’s never wavered. When asked if he thought there would be violence around the election this fall he said, “if we don’t win, you know, it depends. It always depends on the fairness of an election.” On Wednesday he went even further, telling the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, “if everything’s honest, I’ll gladly accept the results. I don’t change on that. If it’s not, you have to fight for the right of the country.” It’s pretty clear that in his mind and the minds of his followers there is no such thing as an honest and fair election that doesn’t result in a Donald Trump victory so there’s little doubt about what to expect if they don’t get their way in November.

Over the past three years Trump’s Big Lie has become the main organizing principle of the Republican Party. There had been a festering sense of grievance and resentment among the GOP base for decades which Trump skillfully tapped into. But ever since his flukey win in 2016, his insistence that the succession of losses the party has suffered under his leadership were all the result of rigged elections, has taken a toll. Among the Republican faithful these days are quite a few who question whether it’s even worth it to participate.

A local Pennsylvania GOP organizer named Milo Morris told Antonia Hitchens of the New Yorker that he was confronted with a lot of suspicion and distrust from his own voters who say to him “this whole game is just ridiculous and I’m not going to participate anymore.” He said, “the skepticism is hurting us. A lot of people are disenfranchised by the fraud allegations.” Gosh, I wonder where they are getting those crazy ideas?

Trump’s campaign and his supporters in the media begged him to stop talking about the Big Lie and insisting that it was going to happen again. They knew that this relentless drumbeat going into another election was counter productive. But he won’t stop and they’ve apparently accepted that fact and are now trying desperately to compensate for it. Unfortunately, he’s sabotaging those efforts as well.

Trump has been disparaging early voting and mail in voting since before the 2020 election when he correctly surmised that he was going to have trouble getting re-elected. States were changing some of their election procedures to deal with difficulties getting to the polls due to the pandemic and if he lost he saw that he could use that as an excuse to challenge the election. He and his henchmen (such as Attorney General Bill Barr) spend months suggesting that the mail-in votes were rife with fraud and told his voters not to use that method or trust the results where it was was used. This formed the basis for his claims that the election was stolen despite no evidence that anything untoward had happened.

But that has presented a big problem for the party in subsequent elections. Early voting and vote by mail boost turnout. They are convenient methods for people to participate and they like using them but by insisting that Republicans should only vote on election day, some voters just don’t make it to the polls. Moreover, it makes it much more difficult for the people running the ground game to focus their get out the vote efforts. State and local Republicans are desperate to get their people to use these methods and are working to persuade voters to forget what they’ve been told in the last two election cycles and vote early. Unfortunately, they keep running into one big orange roadblock.

Trump is hooked on the idea that elections should only be held on one day and that they should be done with paper ballots and hand counted. He reiterated that this week in Wisconsin. He told Fox News’ Laura Ingraham in February, “If you have mail-in voting, you automatically have fraud.” (He has also stated in the past that he thinks the counting should be stopped at midnight, which is certifiably insane.)

Trump has also posted on Truth Social that people should vote absentee or early, but it’s obviously something he did under duress. After all, it’s almost as if he’s admitting he was wrong about something and that simply cannot happen.

There are various groups working to persuade voters to essentially forget that Trump has been instructing them for years to only vote on election day because it’s the only way they can be sure their vote will count. Last month the NY Times published a big, sexy profile of Turning Point Action’s get-out-the-vote program called “chase the ballot” which they characterize as attempting to fix this problem. But Axios recently quoted the COO of the organization, Tyler Bowyer, saying “we’re not trying to encourage more people to get on the early voting list. If you vote too early, you’re basically telling Democrats how many votes they need to win” which is simply bizarre since it would do no such thing. (Bowyer, by the way, is also one of the fake electors who was indicted in Arizona last week so he is something of an expert on voter fraud.)

Donald Trump has no one to blame but himself for this problem. But it’s unclear whether the Republican party is really putting its efforts into getting out the vote anyway. From what we hear from the new Chair of the RNC, Trump’s daughter in law Lara Trump, the real efforts are going toward something else entirely: vote suppression and intimidation.

Lara Trump: We now have the ability at the RNC not just to have poll watchers… but people who can physically handle the ballots… pic.twitter.com/xd06medJal

— Acyn (@Acyn) April 24, 2024

This comes from the top. Trump has said for years now that “sometimes the vote counter is more important than the candidate.”

Openly, as usual, suborning election theft. https://t.co/XWfpma4AnM

— Barton Gellman (@bartongellman) January 15, 2022

His daughter in law didn’t mince words when she said that they will have people in the polling places “handling the ballots” and issuing threats of prosecution. Why bother with trying to maximize turnout when you can intimidate the election workers and manipulate the vote count?

This is really their last resort. Their leader has spent the last several years basically telling their voters that their votes are irrelevant because the system is rigged and now they’re having to scramble to try and convince them they should vote anyway, even as he’s still saying it’s probably pointless. Their only option is to turn election day into a chaotic circus and hope that somehow they can find a way to disqualify enough votes to eke out a win in the electoral college. That’s what they like to call “election integrity.”

Maybe we need a movie?

We suffer from a failure of imagination, Tom Nichols argues, about what a second Trump administration would actually look and feel like. It’s not that the clues aren’t there. They are. Trump told us again in his Time interview this week:

In the interview, Trump once again promised to pardon the January 6 insurrectionists; once again, he vowed to use the Justice Department as his personal legal hit squad. He said he will prosecute Joe Biden, deport millions of people, and allow states with newly strict abortion regulations to monitor pregnant women. He will kneecap NATO and throw Ukraine to the Russians.

[…]

Nostalgia and presentism are part of politics. But a second problem is even more worrisome: Americans simply cannot imagine how badly Trump’s first term might have turned out, and how ghastly his second term is likely to be. Our minds are not equipped to embrace how fast democracy could disintegrate. We can better imagine alien invasions than we can an authoritarian America. The Atlantic tried to lay out what this future would look like, but perhaps even words can’t capture the magnitude of the threat.

Or perhaps non-political junkies don’t read The Atlantic? Dan Pfeiffer remarked again on Thursday that “the vast majority of Americans … do not actively engage with politics and the news.” Or what they do hear is not news, but infotainment.

Eugene Robinson shouts into the hurricane of Fox News disinformation and reality TV:

Imagine the National Guard, perhaps aided by active-duty military units, fanning out across the country to round up and deport all undocumented migrants, believed to number roughly 11 million. Imagine these men, women and children being held pending deportation in vast detention camps.

[…]

Imagine the National Guard also being sent into cities to fight crime, whether or not governors request such assistance. When Time correspondent Eric Cortellessa noted that violent crime is declining across the country — homicides fell by 13 percent last year, according to the FBI — Trump insisted, without evidence, that the data is rigged. “It’s a lie,” he claimed.

Think about what our lives would be like if Trump even tries to do those two things. This is not the kind of country where troops in military gear set up highway checkpoints and raid residential neighborhoods, demanding to see everyone’s papers. This is not a country where camo-clad soldiers patrol shopping malls and nightlife districts. Not yet, that is.

I recall times traveling outside the country and seeing police and soldiers with automatic weapons patrolling airports and beaches, and two dudes with a pistol and a shotgun standing guard outside a Mexican bank, and thinking, “Toto, I’ve a feeling we’re not in Kansas anymore.”

Nichols suggests maybe a movie could help Americans grasp that reality:

… Americans had a hard time conceiving of a nuclear war until 1983, when ABC showed the made-for-television movie The Day After. The movie (as I wrote here) made an impact not because anyone thought a nuclear exchange would be a walk in the park but because no one could really get their head around what would happen if one took place. (That’s despite how thoroughly fears of nuclear war had otherwise permeated the culture.) The movie includes a stomach-churning scene of people watching a football game at a stadium, looking up to see the contrails of American missiles in the sky, and realizing that the world as they’ve known it would last for another 30 minutes at most. This was not Dr. Strangelove; it was a moment people could see happening to themselves.

BTW, The Day After is set in Kansas, Toto.

Filmmakers might want to throw in scenes of entire coastal communities disappearing under swiftly rising seas. Don’t expect MAGA Republicans to do anything to stop that.

It’s clear Trump won’t do anything to restore women’s reproductive rights, either. (That’s Joe Biden.) Trump is still taking credit for women’s rights being revoked. How about imagining Dr. Bleach-and-Light Enemas in charge of another pandemic should one occur? Surely the mass graves from the last one haven’t entirely disappeared down the memory hole.

Maybe the cost of living could rouse non-political junkies? It’s technical, but Catherine Rampell warns of inflation spikes under a second Trump administration:

Donald Trump, the presumed Republican presidential nominee, wants to kneecap the Federal Reserve. This should be a five-alarm fire for anyone who claims to care about inflation.

The former president and his advisers keep finding new ways to outdo themselves on bad economic ideas. Should Trump be granted a second term, he plans to slash the labor supply by ratcheting down immigration (including legal, work-authorized immigration). He wants to devalue the dollar. He’d levy worldwide tariffs of 10 percent or higher, plus perhaps a 100 percent tariff on some Chinese goods, apparently failing to notice that the costs of his previous tariffs fell almost entirely on American consumers.

Now, according to a Wall Street Journal scoop, Trump also wants to strip the Fed of its political independence. Proposed changes include enabling the president to fire the Fed chair at will, or even play a role in setting interest rates himself.

Uh-huh. The guy who bankrupted his Atlantic City casinos and was just fined $355 million for defrauding lenders to get favorable interest rates for himself wants to set interest rates for the country. Brilliant idea for making America great again.

Imagine this. Nobody knows more about setting interest rates than Donald Trump, many people are saying.

With tears in their eyes.

● ● ● ● ● ● ● ●

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

“Monarchy shit”

A Jon Stewart clip from March resurfaced that echoes what I’ve been arguing for years. The underlying ethos of conservatism in this country is not patriotism but “monarchy shit.” Neofeudalism, to use a pointy-headed term. It’s not freedom or liberty, but a desire to bow and scrape before people believed to be your superiors by birth. Among people who fancy themselves superior by birth and their willingly supplicants.

Ask Donald Trump about his genes and step back. Quickly. And don’t scratch a MAGA Supreme Court justice too deeply either. Or one of the Masters of the Universe on Wall Street. They aspire to being “a nation unto themselves” under a system of government by hereditary royalty and landed gentry where the hired help doesn’t get uppity. (I’m “reading” Ari Berman’s “Minority Rule,” what can I say?)

Stewart’s monologue was a response to Sen. Katie Britt’s (R-Ala.) “widely mocked rebuttal” to President Biden’s State of the Union address:

Stewart suggested it was “just one more entry in the Republican mythology that they are the inheritors of the American revolutionary tradition, that they somehow are more American-y than non-Republican Americans.”

For those Republicans claiming to be the true "patriots," Jon Stewart suggests a tiny wardrobe adjustment pic.twitter.com/5TpCzgYUxd

— The Daily Show (@TheDailyShow) May 2, 2024

Turn in your flags.

● ● ● ● ● ● ● ●

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

Not that there was any question

Pathetic: Coward Trump backs out of his earlier claims that he'd testify, makes up an excuse. https://t.co/PKLyTQGiga

— MeidasTouch (@MeidasTouch) May 2, 2024

He still has a constitutional right to testify in his own defense. Obviously. I have no idea why his lawyer is bobbing his head up and down in agreement.

Ron DeSanctimonious is back!

This is completely ridiculous. The same people who are freaking out about the government pushing non-gas stoves is telling people they are not allowed to be vegetarians who like to eat impossible burgers at Burger King. FREEDOM!!!!

Today, Governor Ron DeSantis signed SB 1084 to prohibit the sale of lab-grown meat in the state of Florida. Florida is taking action to stop the World Economic Forum’s goal of forcing the world to eat lab-grown meat and insects, “an overlooked source of protein.” While the World Economic Forum is telling the world to forgo meat consumption, Florida is increasing meat production, and encouraging residents to continue to consume and enjoy 100% real Florida beef.

“Today, Florida is fighting back against the global elite’s plan to force the world to eat meat grown in a petri dish or bugs to achieve their authoritarian goals,” said Governor Ron DeSantis. “Our administration will continue to focus on investing in our local farmers and ranchers, and we will save our beef.”

“Florida is taking a tremendous step in the right direction by signing first-in-the-nation legislation banning lab-grown meat. We must protect our incredible farmers and the integrity of American agriculture. Lab-grown meat is a disgraceful attempt to undermine our proud traditions and prosperity, and is in direct opposition to authentic agriculture,” said Florida Commissioner of Agriculture Wilton Simpson.

Ron DeSantis remains one of the worst people in the world. He learned absolutely nothing.

Everything is rigged — unless he wins.

Donald Trump claimed the 2016 election was rigged and refused to accept the popular vote total.He established a commission to investigate it and claimed for years that illegal immigrants had tipped the popular vote to Hillary Clinton. (The commission was disbanded because they found no proof of it and they “turned the investigation over” to the DHS, which never found anything either.)

We all know what he did in 2020. He set up the whining excuse for his loss months in advance by claiming that mail in voting was fraudulent and the vote had been rigged in the swing states.

So what’s he saying today about the 2024 election?

Former President Donald Trump on Wednesday didn’t commit to accepting the results of Wisconsin’s presidential election in November if he does not win and again promoted the falsehood that he won the Badger State in 2020.

In an interview with the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, the former president said he would accept the results of the November election showing he lost “if everything’s honest.”

“If everything’s honest, I’d gladly accept the results,” Trump said in an interview Wednesday. “If it’s not, you have to fight for the right of the country.

“But if everything’s honest, which we anticipate it will be — a lot of changes have been made over the last few years — but if everything’s honest, I will absolutely accept the results,” he said.

We all know that he believes no election can be fair in which he doesn’t win. He’s made that very clear. It will be no different this time.

Dan Pfeiffer’s newsletter today answers one big question:

The biggest divide in politics is not between Left and Right; it’s between political junkies and everyone else. There is a massive chasm between those who actively seek out political news and the vast majority of the country. The gap has been exacerbated by tectonic shifts in the media environment. I summarized the changes that led to this “News Gap” in a recent post:

It has never been more difficult for voters to follow the news or for politicians to get attention. The traditional political media is at its nadir in influence, reach, and credibility. Audiences are declining and becoming more ideologically homogeneous. All but the most engaged voters have tuned out political news altogether.

Social media used to be a major conduit for news — no more. Elon Musk rendered Twitter utterly unusable. Facebook, once the most dominant media platform in the world, moved away from news and politics. TikTok emerged as a major news source for younger voters, but the information on that platform is often present without context; and credibility can be impossible to divine.

Readers (and the writer) of this newsletter have barely noticed the changesy. We watch cable news, we download podcasts, subscribe to newsletters, and (some of us) still use Twitter to track current events. We are junkies. We seek out political news at every opportunity. But for the vast majority of Americans, who do not actively engage with politics and the news, these changes significantly altered their media diets and what they know about politics and politicians.

Pfeiffer says that 3 polls this week address that phenomenon and somewhat answer the question about why this race is so close. Navigator Research showed that people aren’t hearing about the Inflation Reduction Act — and if they do they support it:

A CBS poll found that people have no idea about all Biden has done on climate change:

As Pfeiffer makes clear, this isn’t just a matter of Democratic messaging, it’s a structural problem. People who pay attention back Biden:

The massive differences in news consumption may also be driving political support for the two candidates according to a fascinating NBC News poll:

Biden holds an 11-point lead among traditional news consumers in a head-to-head presidential ballot test, with 52% support among that group to Trump’s 41%. But it’s basically a jump ball among digital media consumers, with Trump at 47% and Biden at 44%. 

And Trump has a major lead among those who don’t follow political news — 53% back him, and 27% back Biden. 

The more news you consume, the more likely you are to back Joe Biden. I don’t want to make the classic causation/correlation mistake. Biden does better with older and college-educated voters and those cohorts tend to be more avid news consumers. Do people approve of  Biden because they are more informed about politics or do people with similar value systems to Biden just pay more attention to the news? This is a “chicken or the egg” situation, so there is no simple answer but there are reasons to believe that the “News Gap” is shaping political opinions.

And this is relevant too:

This would explain why the Biden campaign remains on TikTok despit agreeing to ban the platform if they refuse to divest. They cannot afford not to.

Pfeiffer doesn’t seem to have any bright ideas about how to deal with this but is instead just making the point that the old style of communicating through ads, direct mail and earned media isn’t going to get it done. I have no idea either. Nobody wants to get thousands of emails or texts and I would guess that most people don’t read them anyway. Door knocking? Sky writing? I just don’t know.

Maybe people will tune in as the election looms but I wonder. People are so turned off that they just don’t want to think about politics anymore. Score one for Trump. He’s made it all so toxic that he’s made half the country recoil in horror.

As everyone wrings their hands over campus protests let’s take a look at the leader of the Republican youth movement’s top leader:

Trump operative Charlie Kirk on Martin Luther King Jr.:

“I can say declaratively… This guy is not worthy of a national holiday… In fact, I think it's really harmful.” pic.twitter.com/F0S4NAY4l7

— PatriotTakes 🇺🇸 (@patriottakes) May 2, 2024

Yeah. I think we can all afford to take a deep breath and remember that campus protests are among America’s foremost liberal traditions and calm down about it. (I say that to myself as much as anyone.)

And we’re not yet over the PTSD from COVID-19

As if America needed another reason not to hand the White House again to Donald “88 Counts” Trump. Do we really want Dr. Bleach-and-Light Enemas recommending quack remedies and maskless Everydays should we face another deadly pandemic?

NPR:

Officially, there is only one documented case of bird flu spilling over from cows into humans during the current U.S. outbreak.

But epidemiologist Gregory Gray suspects the true number is higher, based on what he heard from veterinarians, farm owners and the workers themselves as the virus hit their herds in his state.

“We know that some of the workers sought medical care for influenza-like illness and conjunctivitis at the same time the H5N1 was ravaging the dairy farms,” says Gray, an infectious disease epidemiologist at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston.

“I don’t have a way to measure that, but it seems biologically quite plausible that they too, are suffering from the virus,” he says.

Dr. Irwin Redlener (remember him from 2020?) is concerned:

Mostly dramatically speeding up and ramping up vaccine development and production.
And making sure we have sufficient supplies of face masks, hospital equipment and planning for pandemics reviewed by all health care systems and providers. https://t.co/Ev0bGfMe1e

— Irwin Redlener, MD (@IrwinRedlenerMD) May 2, 2024

NBC News:

The U.S. has two vaccines ready should the strain of bird flu circulating in dairy cows begin spreading easily to people, federal health officials said Wednesday. They could begin shipping doses widely within weeks, if needed.

So far, there’s no evidence that H5N1 is spreading person-to-person, although one dairy worker in Texas who worked closely with infected cattle had a mild infection and developed conjunctivitis, or pinkeye, in April. 

At a briefing Wednesday, government health officials said they are preparing for a potential scenario of H5N1 jumping from animal to person — or person to person. The virus has taken off in dairy cows, infecting at least 36 herds across nine states, raising concerns that it could acquire mutations that would make it easier to spill over into humans.

Studies “suggest that the vaccines will offer good cross-protection against cattle outbreak viruses,” Demetre Daskalakis, director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, said on the call Wednesday.

I’m still running into friends I haven’t seen since COVID-19 hit.

● ● ● ● ● ● ● ●

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