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Author: digby

Pants On Fire

Published by digby on April 30, 2024

David Pecker testified:

During his visit to the White House, Pecker said President Trump asked him about Karen McDougal.

“As we walked out, President Trump asked me ‘How’s Karen doing, how’s Karen doing?’ So I said ‘She’s doing well, she’s quiet, everything’s going good.'” Pecker said.

Trump asked about her numerous times. Of course he knew her.

And as for Stormy:

[Trump assistant Rohna]Graff was a Trump Organization employee who, while there, kept contacts for both Stormy Daniels and Karen McDougal in the company’s computer system. She testified today that she had a “vague recollection” of once seeing Daniels in an office reception area of Trump Tower, and “assumed” it was because Trump was considering her as a contestant on his Celebrity Apprentice reality TV show.

And why would he pay her off if he didn’t know who she was? He didn’t pay off the rest of the women who came forward:

Rudolph W. Giuliani, the former New York mayor and a recent addition to President Trump’s legal team, said Wednesday night that Trump made a series of payments reimbursing his attorney Michael Cohen for a $130,000 settlement with adult-film actress Stormy Daniels — despite Trump’s assertion last month that he was unaware of the payment.

“The president repaid it,’’ Giuliani told Fox News Channel’s Sean Hannity.

Trump “didn’t know about the specifics of it, as far as I know. But he did know the general arrangement, that Michael would take care of things like this, like I take care of things like this with my clients,” Giuliani said. “I don’t burden them with every single thing that comes along. These are busy people.’’

They’re going to say that Trump knew nothing about the Stormy Daniels agreement and that he legitimately thought he was just paying Cohen for legal services even though he was aware that there was a “general agreement” that Cohen would “take care of things like this.” Can they convince a jury of that beyond a reasonable doubt? I wouldn’t think so because it defies common sense but we will have to see.

The Kennedy Effect

Published by digby on April 30, 2024

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.

He’s Soooo Tired

Published by digby on April 30, 2024

“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.

Party Like It’s 1999?

Published by digby on April 30, 2024

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.

Unsung Achievements

Published by digby on April 30, 2024

Here’s one:

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.

Big Plans, Little Action

Published by digby on April 30, 2024

Those gold sneakers are the extent of Trump’s grassroots outreach.

Donald Trump says he wants to hold a major campaign event at New York’s Madison Square Garden featuring Black hip-hop artists and athletes. Aides speak of Trump making appearances in Chicago, Detroit and Atlanta with leaders of color and realigning American politics by flipping Democratic constituencies.

But five months before the first general election votes are cast, the former president’s campaign has little apparent organization to show for its ambitious plans.

His campaign removed its point person for coalitions and has not announced a replacement. The Republican Party’s minority outreach offices across the country have been shuttered and replaced by businesses that include a check-cashing store, an ice cream shop and a sex-toy store. Campaign officials acknowledge they are weeks away from rolling out any targeted programs.

Basically, Trump’s saying “you’re on your own” to his Black MAGA endorsers.

“To be quite honest, the Republican Party does not have a cohesive engagement plan for Black communities,” said Darrell Scott, a Black pastor and longtime Trump ally who co-founded the National Diversity Coalition for Trump in 2016. “What it has are conservatives in communities of color who have taken it upon themselves to head our own initiatives.”

I honestly don’t think Trump believes any of that is necessary. All he needs is rallies and free media interviews. That’s what won the election for him in 2016 and he figures everyone hated Biden as much as they hated Hillary and Bob’s your uncle.

He may be right. Those gold sneakers are so fly.

Four Years Ago Today

Published by digby on April 29, 2024
How’d that work out?

“Conviction Sensitive” Persuadables

Published by digby on April 29, 2024

Are they the new soccer moms and NASCAR dads?

Dan Pfeiffer looks at the latest (outlier) CNN poll that has the whole beltway gasping with excitement over the prospect that Biden is in the dirt with young people, Black and Hispanic voters. He noted that the polls shows that 25% of Trump voters are what he calls “conviction sensitive” voters who might be persuaded to abandon him if he’s convicted of a crime:

Even more interesting, the topline numbers are the characteristics of these conviction-sensitive voters. According to CNN:

They tend to be younger than other Trump supporters (64% are younger than 50 compared with 37% of those who would not reconsider), are less likely to be White (49% are people of color compared with 17% of those who would not reconsider), are more apt to report being Biden voters in 2020 (20% of them say they backed Biden in 2020 vs. 6% of those who would not reconsider) and are likelier to acknowledge that Biden legitimately won enough votes to win the presidency four years ago (63% vs. 22% among those who would not reconsider). They are also more apt to be political independents (49% vs. 31%) and ideologically moderate (50% vs. 38%).

In other words, these are the exact voters who propelled Trump to his very narrow lead in the polling average. Younger voters, independents, Black and Latino voters are groups Trump struggled with in 2020 but is doing better with now.

You would think that all voters would be “conviction sensitive” but we live in a world in which corrupt, criminal politicians are revered because they’re very stable geniuses so being a felon who committed massive fraud, assaulted a woman and then defamed her, paid off a porn star, stole classified documents or tried to steal an election makes you “smart.”

Pfeiffer makes the case that at least some of these voters are persuadable and contends that this poll reveals “two broader truths about this election”:

First, Trump’s putative lead is fragile. He is propped up by people who don’t like him, disagree with him on most issues, and have a long history of voting for Democrats. Holding on to this coalition for the next six months would be a challenge for any candidate, let alone a megalomaniacal narcissist with little impulse control and 88 felony indictments.

Second, I am glad to know that some people would have some qualms about making a convicted felon president, but this is more than a conviction. These voters have some doubts about supporting Trump and are looking for an offramp. In other words, they are persuadable. Because everything seems so polarized and this election is a rematch, most assume there are no persuadable voters. That could not be further from the truth. If this poll is accurate, a historically large group of voters is willing to listen to our case.

It’s going to be a long hot summer and events may have more to do with this than anything. But you do have to wonder if the Young, Black and Hispanic voters will really be willing to vote for Trump once they get a good look at him again. It’s up to the Democrats, and all of us, to make sure they do.

Are They Going To Get Away With This?

Published by digby on April 29, 2024

Probably

Politicians who have faith in their leadership don’t need to lie as easily as they breathe.

“It’s All Too Easy To Fall Into Reflexive Habits”

Published by digby on April 29, 2024

Stephanopoulos brought the fire:

No American president had ever faced a criminal indictment for retaining and concealing classified documents. No American president had ever faced a federal indictment or a state indictment for trying to overturn an election, or been named an unindicted co-conspirator in two other states for the same crime. No American president has faced hundreds of millions of dollars in fines for business fraud, defamation, and sexual abuse.

Until now, no American presidential race had been more defined by what’s happening in courtrooms than by what’s happening on the campaign trail. The scale of the abnormality is so staggering, that it can actually become numbing. It’s all too easy to fall into reflexive habits, to treat this as a normal campaign, where both sides embrace the rule of law, where both sides are dedicated to a debate based on facts and the peaceful transfer of power. But, that is not what’s happening this election year. Those bedrock tenants of democracy are being tested in a way we haven’t seen since the Civil War. It’s a test for the candidates, for those of us in the media, and for all of us as citizens.

Indeed it is. And unfortunately, so far, the media is only sometimes meeting the moment. Steph meets it here but far too often the savvy DC press corps retreats into its cynical corners. Too many reporters obviously can’t stand Biden — he’s old and boring. And as a result they are not willing to be clear about the stakes or, perhaps even more importantly, fairly tell Biden’s story, which should have people emerging more decisively from their post-pandemic funk. It’s going to be hand to hand combat and journalists need to start telling the truth about just how fucked up this really is.