I wish there were more reporters willing to speak this way.
"what digby sez..."
Digby's Hullabaloo Posts
I had some hope last night while watching that dumpster fire of a convention speech by Donald Trump that the media was going to finally take a look at his cognitive abilities and give them the same obsessive focus as they have done with Joe Biden. In social media many of them were aghast at what they saw and weren’t being shy about saying it.l
So imagine my surprise when I wake up this morning and find that the papers never changed their “unite headlines” in the face of his incoherent, divisive freak show of a speech and the news networks are back to the Biden deathwatch without even a moment’s pause. It’s just hopeless.
Joe Alsop at Columbia Journalism review has some thoughts:
Last weekend, Salena Zito became the first journalist to interview Donald Trump after a gunman tried to assassinate him at a rally in Pennsylvania, a conversation published in the Washington Examiner under the headline: “Trump rewrites Republican convention speech to focus on unity not Biden.” Trump told Zito that he had been preparing a “humdinger” of a speech, but that he’d ripped it up. “It is a chance to bring the country together,” he said. “I was given that chance.” As the Republican National Convention proceeded in Milwaukee, Trump’s team continued to push the unity theme and members of the media echoed it, with varying degrees of skepticism. In a piece quoting allies as saying that Trump had become “serene” and “emotional” in the wake of the shooting, Politico noted that, while he had since posted some unstatesmanlike things online, he had also “leaned into the notion of faith and divine providence, lending credence to allies’ private claims that he is engaging in deep reflection.” Last night, before Trump took the stage for his speech, Scott Jennings, a right-wing pundit on CNN, said that he’d already seen a chunk of it. “Buckle up,” Jennings advised, “because he’s about to blow the doors off and rise to the occasion.”
Finally, Trump appeared, framed by a giant sign spelling his name out in lights. (When the New York Post splashed the headline “Everything’s coming up TRUMP” on Tuesday, it surely didn’t imagine that the reference to Gypsy would soon be quite so visual.) As he spoke, he only mentioned Biden’s name once. (Well, technically twice, but the second time was to underline that he would only be saying it once.) “Typically Fiery Trump Calls for Unity at Republican Convention,” one headline read in the aftermath; “Trump urges unity at final night of the RNC,” read another. A news analysis in the New York Times noted that Trump had “attempted a politically cunning transformation.” Sure, he had proved unable to resist “a handful of exaggerations and personal attacks on Democrats”—claiming that Democrats cheated in 2020; calling Nancy Pelosi “crazy”; repeatedly referring to an “invasion” of immigrants and comparing them to “Hannibal Lecter.” But “open threats and nakedly vicious imagery were largely absent from his address,” as he exhibited both a “newfound temperance” resulting from his near-death experience and a “new approach” that “poses fresh challenges for Democrats.”
Even that article, though, seemed to be arguing with itself. (Headline: “Trump Struggles to Turn the Page on ‘American Carnage’”; subheading: “Trump promised to bridge political divides, and then returned to delighting in deepening them.”) And other major outlets seemed unconvinced by the whole unity thing. The Washington Post reported that Trump “wrapped a fresh gesture toward unity around his usual dark view of American decline and loathing for political opponents and immigrants”; other headlines read “Trump Calls for Unity but Shifts to Familiar Attacks,” and “Donald Trump called for unity at the top of his speech. Then he went after Democrats.” When Trump finally stopped talking—after an hour and thirty-two minutes—CNN’s Jake Tapper said that he had “started off with what we were told was the new tone of unity,” but then, “and I hope this doesn’t sound harsh, it pretty much became the kind of speech we generally hear from Donald Trump at rallies.” Chris Wallace added that he’d thought “we’re off to the races here, this is really gonna be a different Donald Trump,” only to come away disappointed. In between, they paused to take in what Trump claimed was “the biggest balloon drop in the history of balloons.”
[…]
The conversation put me in mind of an old cliché from the 2016 election—one coined by Zito, who also interviewed Trump back then and famously concluded that, while his fans take him “seriously, but not literally,” the press “takes him literally, but not seriously.” Coverage of Trump has evolved since then, of course, but as I see it, the literally/seriously balance remains something of a puzzle. His speech last night is a case in point. We now have a Trump record to assess—one that indicates that, when he talks about supposed Democratic election cheating and “invasions” of immigrants, he is being very serious, even if talk of Hannibal Lecter might not be literal. His promises of unity, on the other hand, were literal but didn’t deserve to be taken seriously at all; at least, not in the absence of evidence. Earlier in the week, Sargent suggested that “if media figures are so eager to depict Trump as unifying, then let’s lay down a hard metric”—that, before indulging such claims, Trump must clear “the absolute minimum threshold” of renouncing his election denialism and “authoritarian designs” for a second term. This is a welcome idea. In the absence of his doing so, the designs must remain the biggest story.
He’s actually being more generous that I think is necessary. Trump was a train wreck last night with his flamboyant bandage on his head, kissing the helmet of the dead fireman, going on and on about the shooting trying to portray himself as some sort of hero but really sounding like an old man talking about his gall bladder surgery. The rest was a low energy rally speech and as embarrassing as they all are only this time it was in front of the whole country. Most people were appalled. But the news media is assiduously sweeping it under the rug and back on the Biden candidacy deathwatch this morning.
I’m very worried. The Democrats aren’t just up against MAGA and the right wing media in this election. Even if Biden does drop out, as seems more and more likely, the media appears to be completely unable to properly cover Donald Trump. As Alsop points out elsewhere in his piece, they were working at getting Project 2025 out into the ether and now it’s disappeared again in the wake of the shooting, the convention and the Biden story. Whenever there’s choice, the tough coverage of Trump drops by the wayside for the next shiny object which is often generated by Trump himself. (This idea that he’s a changed man because of the assassination attempt is a perfect example. Please.)
If the Dems ever get their act together the story line might change in a more positive direction but until then we’re stuck in this feedback loop.
They’re going to stop certification of the votes
I said a couple of weeks ago that if President Biden decided to withdraw from the race it would awesome if he would do it on the night Donald Trump accepted the GOP nomination. That didn’t come to pass last night but the news media did spend the whole day speculating that it was about to happen which no doubt irritated Trump almost as much since he always wants to be the center of attention even when his opponents are doing his job for him.
It’s obviously helpful to him that the Democrats fighting each other over the fate of their candidate just three months from the election but the drama around Biden potentially withdrawing from the race has stepped on Trump’s martyr story line even as he’s ostentatiously sporting a bizarrely large bandage on his right ear and cynically playing the sympathy card. But he made up for it with a smarmy opening to his acceptance speech in which he gave a mournful minute by minute recitation of the assassination attempt. At one point he indulged in some truly embarrassing schmaltz by kissing the helmet of the fireman who was killed at that rally on Saturday which just seemed …. weird. One suspects that he’s been talking about this non-stop ever since it happened and is obviously still very much obsessed by the event.
That part of the speech was reportedly written by Trump himself and I think that’s obviously true. He’s been dying to share the dramatic story of his allegedly brave reaction to the terrifying experience and this was his chance to take as long as he wanted to do it. (Brushing it off and saying “”honey I forgot to duck” as Reagan did isn’t exactly his style).
Unfortunately, he also had to talk about other stuff. It was a major political event after all. And despite the billing of the speech as a call for unity, the rest of it was a flat rendition of his usual rally speech although he did curtail the profanity, eschewed the crude impressions of his political opponents and managed not to insult too many Republicans seeing as it was the RNC and all.
If social media is any indication, the speech seemed to shock many observers who have forgotten that Trump lies constantly and is incoherent and ignorant even when he’s at his best. And he was definitely not at his best. Despite the long winded delivery of all his greatest hits going back to 2016, he’s definitely lost a step.
MSNBC’s Chris Hayes astutely described what we all saw last night:
“This is not a colossus, this is not the big bad wolf, this is not a vigorous and incredibly deft political communicator. This is an old man in decline who’s been doing the same schtick for a very long time and it’s really wearing thin.”
The substance, to the extent there was any, was delusional and frightening. From bragging that when he was president he “could end wars with a phone call” to the endless lies about his accomplishments while in office, he assiduously avoided speaking specifically about 95% of his agenda as laid out in Project 2025 and his own Agenda 47. But he did say one thing that caught my attention and should catch the attention of every American. After admonishing Joe Biden for saying he’s a threat to democracy earlier in the speech, he said in passing “we had that horrible, horrible result that we’ll never let happen again, the election result, we’re never gonna let that happen again.”
One might think that was just another example of Trump’s cognitive decline. But that was actually a very straightforward comment and one that is backed up by ample evidence. The Republicans who are backing Trump (virtually all of them) have a fully developed plan to ensure that if the Democrats win in November, they will contest the results regardless of any evidence of fraud. When Trump says “we’re never going to let that happen again” he means we’re never going to let the Democrats win again.
And he’s not talking about getting out the vote. Trump has been quoted repeatedly telling his troops:
[W]e don’t need votes. We got more votes than anybody’s ever had. We need to watch the vote. We need to guard the vote. We need to stop the steal. We don’t need votes. We have to stop — focus, don’t worry about votes. We’ve got all the votes. I was in Florida yesterday — every house has a Trump sign. Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump. We have to guard the vote.
The NY Times took a long look at the Republican plan and it’s not good news.
Mr. Trump’s allies have followed a two-pronged approach: restricting voting for partisan advantage ahead of Election Day and short-circuiting the process of ratifying the winner afterward, if Mr. Trump loses. The latter strategy involves an ambitious — and legally dubious — attempt to reimagine decades of settled law dictating how results are officially certified in the weeks before the transfer of power.
At the heart of the strategy is a drive to convince voters that the election is about to be stolen, even without evidence.
The article quotes numerous GOP officials saying that fair elections are impossible under the current laws so they have set out challenge and change them in the swing states that are decisive in our bizarre electoral college system. Most concerning is their plan to give local elections officials the power to hold up certification of the vote.
Certification was never a matter of contention before 2020 having always been seen as a largely ceremonial non-partisan part of the process. But the Republicans and their allies have decided this is a useful tactic to disqualify results that don’t go their way. In some states, like Georgia, they’ve even empowered right wing activists who are now members of the election boards to “investigate” voters to determine if the votes are legal. In Nevada a similar law has already caused chaos in primary elections which are still in limbo due to board members contesting the reseults. These cases are wending their way into the courts, delaying the certifications.
At the RNC this week, Chris LaCivita, Trump’s campaign manager, made it clear that they don’t plan to accept any loss or concede the race even after the votes are counted:
Donald Trump Jr says it more plainly even than that:
This is the assault on democracy that the Biden campaign is talking about. It’s not just rhetorical. They are literally assaulting the democratic process by changing laws at the local and state level that will make it possible for them to contest the certification of the election results all the way up until January 6th and, apparently, beyond.
Trump is beatable as demonstrated by that bizarre performance at the RNC. He is not a well man. It’s clear that he and his team know this which is why they are pulling out all the stops to contest the results of an election that hasn’t even happened yet. These are not the actions of a confident campaign. But keep in mind that this now goes way beyond Trump and his massive ego. He’s shown the Republicans the weaknesses in the system and they’re going to exploit them. As he said “we’re never going to let that happen again.” This problem will exist long after 2024 whether Trump ultimately gets back into the White House or not.
Salon
This is not a drill
Republicans and their allies “are engaged in an unprecedented legal campaign targeting the American voting system,” a “wide-ranging and methodical effort … to contest an election that they argue, falsely, is already being rigged against former President Donald J. Trump.”
You heard multiple speakers claim that this week in Milwaukee. It’s not just rhetoric (gift article):
But unlike the chaotic and improvised challenge four years ago, the new drive includes a systematic search for any vulnerability in the nation’s patchwork election system.
Mr. Trump’s allies have followed a two-pronged approach: restricting voting for partisan advantage ahead of Election Day and short-circuiting the process of ratifying the winner afterward, if Mr. Trump loses. The latter strategy involves an ambitious — and legally dubious — attempt to reimagine decades of settled law dictating how results are officially certified in the weeks before the transfer of power.
That’s on top of state legal challenges to Democrats changing candidates in midstream if thatn happens.
Stuart Stevens looks back on his days in Republican politics in Ohio for The Atlantic and ponders how that state went from having a “high-functioning party with a boringly predictable pro-business sentiment” to electing J.D. Vance as senator. The sad truth is “that the old guard surrendered to forces contrary to what it had espoused as lifelong values.” Ohio Republicans have a lot of company from the Atlantic to the Pacific.
“The once staunchly midwestern, mainstream Ohio GOP has now given us the first vice-presidential nominee who has pledged not to follow the Constitution if it stands in the way of political victory,” Stevens writes.
It’s the conclusion that should draw your attention:
As historians frequently observe, autocrats are skilled at using the tools and benefits of democracy to end democracy. In the preface to their brilliant How Democracies Die, the Harvard professors Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt wrote, “Blatant dictatorship—in the form of fascism, communism, or military rule—has disappeared across much of the world. Military coups and other violent seizures of power are rare. Most countries hold regular elections. Democracies still die, but by different means.”
You’re watching that happen in real time … if you let it.
Stevens is watching too.
Stevens is not alone.
But let’s let someone (formerly) close to Donald Trump speak plainly to what’s at stake. BTW, her uncle “is currently out on bail in three jurisdictions.”
“Please, vote accordingly,” says Mary Trump.
But more importantly, do more. Don’t sit on your asses while members of a fascist movement march the streets and run for office where you live. It’s not someone else’s job to defend the republic. It’s yours. With your money, with your time, and with your sweat. That’s my daily public service announcement.
● ● ● ● ● ● ● ●
For The Win, 5th Edition is ready for download. Request a copy of my free countywide GOTV planning guide at ForTheWin.us.
AOC lays out the stakes
In an hour-long live-stream, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) attempts to lay out the plusses and minuses of Democrats swapping out their presidential candidate (Joe Biden) this late in the election season. The election isn’t in November, she reminds viewers, it’s in September when the first ballots go out. The end of September to early October.
She’s not seeing Beltway influencers gaming out the consequences of swapping out a presidential candidate without closely examining their watches and their calendars.
Making a radical decision like this based on July polling, she reminds viewers, is unwise. She’s won elections where polling showed her down by double digits.
An open convention at this point is convention is “crazy.” People considering one are not gaming out how that would play out.
I’ve said repeatedly here to those who say, “Joe needs to go,” get back to me with a candidate and a plan and we’ll talk. AOC is in some of the rooms where these discussions among leading Democrats take place. When she asks the “Joe needs to go” faction for their plan, she gets back blank stares. If there’s a plan, she’s not hearing one.
IF Joe Biden were to step aside, VP Kamala Harris is the only logical alternate candidate. Her name is already on state ballots. She’d have access to the $100 million campaign war chest. (Others wouldn’t.) Harris and Biden have been “campaigning their butts off.” But she also worries — she works around Hill Republicans — that Republicans have plans to fight any ballot change in court, especially in key swing states. Guess where those cases will end up?
AOC’s base is working-class voters. Some colleagues are more responsive to their donors than they are to their constituents. These decisions should not be made through theoretical discussions made by people obsessed with polls, a class of elite Democrats and big donors behind the scenes, some of whom want to replace both Biden and Harris.
Me now. Black voters are the backbone of the Democratic base. Many would be pissed to see Biden forced out. Passing over Harris as an alternative sounds both tactically and politically suicidal.
AOC repeats, if you think the people pushing the “Joe must go” narrative are defaulting to Harris as a Biden replacement, “you would be mistaken.”
We must win, says AOC. All the “we’re going to lose” talk irritates her, as it does me. Her constituents cannot afford for Democrats to lose. They cannot afford to weather the storm if we don’t. They are the first deported, the first sent to war, the first sent to Rikers Island.
Americans want to vote for winners. For God’s sake, start talking like winners!
● ● ● ● ● ● ● ●
For The Win, 5th Edition is ready for download. Request a copy of my free countywide GOTV planning guide at ForTheWin.us.
Women in America, even the majority of pro-lifers, do not think they should be forced to give birth to their abusive father’s child. They don’t think they should be denied medical care when they’re having a miscarriage or carrying a fetus with fatal anomalies . They don’t think they should be denied IVF if they want to have a family. They don’t think they should be treated as if they are nothing more than a vessel for the purpose of birthing some man’s offspring. We stopped believing all that a very long time ago.
Whatever happens in the next few days with this election, it’s important that we all keep in mind the stakes. We’re not up against Trump alone. He is the figurehead for a fascist movement that places natalism and patriarchy as one of their highest priorities.
Here’s just one example of what we’re dealing with:
“Because liberal states have now become sanctuaries for abortion tourism, [the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services] should use every available tool, including the cutting of funds, to ensure that every state reports exactly how many abortions take place within its borders, at what gestational age of the child, for what reason, the mother’s state of residence, and by what method,” notes [Project 2025.].
The Biden administration proposed the expanded privacy rule in April 2023 in the wake of the Supreme Court’s Dobbs v. Jackson decision, which overturned Roe v. Wade and ended federal abortion protections. The proposed rule expanded upon the long-established Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act’s Privacy Rule, which requires appropriate safeguards to protect individuals’ health information.
While these privacy laws do not usually apply in the case of a criminal investigation, the proposed rule prohibited health officials from divulging records related to reproductive health care — including for fertility issues, contraception, and miscarriages — even if requested by law enforcement.
The following month, Vance and 28 other conservative lawmakers sent a letter to Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra demanding the department withdraw the draft rule. They argued that the Biden administration had overstepped its constitutional bounds and unlawfully infringed on congressional power.
“Abortion is not health care,” they wrote. “It is a brutal act that destroys the life of an unborn child and hurts women.”
I don’t think there’s anything nuanced about that. Keep in mind, that’s after Roe was overturned. Trump silly “states’ rights” argument don’t hold water (and they’re bad enough.)
It could have been worse:
I expected more, I must admit
The best dispatch from the GOP convention so far comes from Salon’s Andrew O’Hehir. It has seemed to me that the convention is a bit boring and listless all things considered. You’d think with their main man wandering around with a bandage on his head after an assassination attempt, the energy would be off the charts. And I would have assumed that the Really Big Showman would have orchestrated a much more exciting program even aside from that. But it doesn’t seem to be. There’s a good reason the man himself is falling asleep every night in front of everyone. It’s boring.
You have to read O’Hehir’s vivid (and hilarious) prose to get the real flavor of what’s going on there but I think this observation is important to understand what’s really going on:
The Republican Party under Trump — and someday soon under Vance or some other heir or usurper — isn’t really a party and has no guiding ideology or sense of its own history. My colleague Amanda Marcotte observed this week that the conventional wisdom describing the new GOP as a cult of personality slightly misses the point. She meant that Donald Trump is the funnel through which MAGA energy flows and the wizard who conjured it forth, but he has never truly controlled it.
If Trump wins this election, he’ll be a lame-duck president in his 80s. More specifically, he’ll be the beloved but decrepit figurehead of the semi-normal popular front of a fascist movement whose darkest and most compelling energies lie elsewhere. That’s what the official, above-ground Republican Party is now. Their convention is a deliberately boring dumb show, listless late-Soviet political theater meant to lull you and me — and most of its actual participants, for that matter — into believing that Trump 2.0 is nothing more than what it says on the box.
Yup. As weird as it seem to say it considering all the drama on both sides, I’ll just say again that the election isn’t really about either of the old guys at the top of the ticket. This is about the battle of two coalitions. And their coalition is fascist.
Meanwhile:
I have serious doubts the Democrats can win with this dynamic. I don’t know that it will change if Biden gets out but it’s guaranteed that it won’t if he stays in.
This isn’t the first time the press has put its thumb on the scale of the Democratic choice for president. We know that. In fact, they do it more often than not. Maybe this time it’s for the best but it doesn’t make it right. It usually doesn’t work out well for the good guys.
Stuart Stevens knows Ohio. He worked for John Kasich, Rob Portman and focused on the state for George W. Bush and Mitt Romney. This piece in the Atlantic about what’s happened to the state since then is a fascinating look at the fascist takeover of the GOP:
What happened to the Ohio GOP? For generations, it was the epitome of a sane, high-functioning party with a boringly predictable pro-business sentiment that seemed to perfectly fit the state. Today, it has been remade in the image of native son J. D. Vance, the first vice-presidential candidate to sanction coup-plotting against the U.S. government.
In a speech to the Republican National Convention tonight that was virtually devoid of policy, he railed against corrupt elites and pledged his fealty to the man he once compared to heroin, suggesting that the American experiment depended on former President Donald Trump’s election.
But don’t make the mistake of thinking this transformation was the result of a hostile takeover; that implies there was a fight. The truth is that the old guard surrendered to forces contrary to what it had espoused as lifelong values.
Ohio was the home of Standard Oil, Dow Chemical, Goodyear Tires, and Procter and Gamble. Garrett Morgan, a co-founder of the Cleveland Association of Colored Men, devised an early version of the stoplight, a symbol of a state that thrived on normalcy. The Wright brothers invented the airplane in Dayton.
The Taft family defined the Ohio Republican Party. Cincinnati-born President William Howard Taft went to Yale, belonged to Skull and Bones, and was anointed by Theodore Roosevelt to succeed him. He trounced the populist William Jennings Bryan. His son Robert was “Mr. Republican,” a senator from 1939 until his death, in 1953. His son Robert Jr. followed him to the Senate. His son Robert III was Ohio governor from 1999 to 2007. That’s a 100-year run of one family dominating the state Republican Party. There’s nothing else like it in American politics. You could argue that this dynasticism was stifling, but you could also say that it was the result of a desire for stability above all else.
He goes on to talk about the ordinariness of the candidates he worked for noting that they all resisted Trump — and failed:
Kasich put up the strongest resistance, but it was ineffective. He refused to support Trump when he won the nomination in 2016. In 2020, he endorsed Joe Biden. After Trump received a Department of Justice letter notifying him that he was a target in the January 6 investigation, Kasich urged his co-partisans “to stand up and say something. And I’d like to see the donors step up and help them. The problem we have now is many people don’t want to make a winner; they want to be with a winner,” Kasich said.
In 2016, Portman was running for reelection in the Senate and tried to stay away from Trump, kayaking Ohio rivers while the Republican convention was held in Cleveland. After the Access Hollywood tape came out, Portman announced that he would not support Trump but added, “I will be voting for Mike Pence for president.” That was a head-scratcher. In 2020, he endorsed Trump. After January 6, he voted not to convict Trump in his Senate impeachment trial. And when Vance ran to replace Portman, the retiring senator remained neutral in the primary and then endorsed Vance.
Gov. Mike DeWine, the last of the “establishment” Republicans in the state has endorsed Trump as well.
Could the trinity of Kasich-Portman-DeWine have saved the party if they’d persisted? We’ll never know. But the emergence of J. D. Vance, the first Ohioan to be on a national ticket since John Bricker ran with Thomas Dewey in 1944, has a Guns of August feel: that of powerful players sliding into a war no one desired or imagined. The once staunchly midwestern, mainstream Ohio GOP has now given us the first vice-presidential nominee who has pledged not to follow the Constitution if it stands in the way of political victory.
As historians frequently observe, autocrats are skilled at using the tools and benefits of democracy to end democracy. In the preface to their brilliant How Democracies Die, the Harvard professors Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt wrote, “Blatant dictatorship—in the form of fascism, communism, or military rule—has disappeared across much of the world. Military coups and other violent seizures of power are rare. Most countries hold regular elections. Democracies still die, but by different means.”
It’s a case study in how establishment Republicans basically let their party be taken over by charlatans and con-men who saw the already brainwashed rank and file of the GOP as a group of very easy marks.