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The Dull Trump Show

Published by digby on July 18, 2024

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.

Houston We Have A Problem

Published by digby on July 18, 2024

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.

Whither The Ohio GOP Of Yesteryear?

Published by digby on July 18, 2024

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.

The Martyred Messiah

Published by digby on July 18, 2024

This is a good piece by Sidney Blumenthal in the Guardian about the effects of Trump’s assassination attempt. It’s truly sickening:

The attempted assassination of Donald Trump has transformed the theology of Trump. He has long portrayed himself as an innocent lamb falsely accused, the target of slings and arrows to bear the suffering of believers. Now the bullet and the blood of Butler, Pennsylvania, have sanctified him for the faithful and brought forth a new gospel.

Earlier this month, the Republican National Committee endorsed the party platform, a document that contained a plank pledging to create a new federal agency to defend Christian nationalism: “To protect Religious Liberty, Republicans support a new Federal Task Force on Fighting Anti-Christian Bias that will investigate all forms of illegal discrimination, harassment, and persecution against Christians in America.” The document casts Christians as though they are a sect still persecuted by the Romans, about to be dragged into the Colosseum to face ferocious beasts.

But after the shooting, there was no mention of a platform. There was no reference to the political party. Trump had not simply survived crucifixion. He was not only resurrected. He became his own second coming. He was washed in his own blood. Divine intervention proved he was destined to return. All that is required from followers are declarations of faith. The return is a restoration of the grand course of events that was unjustly detoured by a stolen election. Trump is now a martyr, resurrected and the second coming all at once. All power is invested in the messiah on day one.

“The doctor at the hospital said he never saw anything like this, he called it a miracle,” Trump explained. “I’m not supposed to be here, I’m supposed to be dead. By luck or by God, many people are saying it’s by God I’m still here.” He was reborn.

His sanctification has produced a new narrative by those who wish to be seen as his most fervent apostles. They compete to proclaim the new gospel. “GOD protected President Trump yesterday,” tweeted House speaker Mike Johnson. “God’s hand of protection” held Trump safe, the Rev Franklin Graham told Fox News. “The devil came to Pennsylvania holding a rifle,” said Senator Tim Scott, Republican of South Carolina. “Listen, if you didn’t believe in miracles before Saturday, you better be believing right now.” They are the chosen messengers of the chosen one. The fervor with which they tell the story reveals more than their faith, but also establishes their seat at the table of the apostles.

There’s more at the link.

This display has the media in a massive swoon, unfortunately. They can’t stop talking about the “split-screen” between the grand love affair between Trump and his people at the RNC and Joe Biden walking haltingly up the stairs of Air Force One all alone, a broken man. (He has COVID so it’s not surprising that he’d be halting — and alone.) Trump the martyr and spiritual leader has them in his pocket at the moment. And it’s terrifying.

Crimes Against Capitalism?

Published by Tom Sullivan on July 18, 2024

The Midas Cult strikes back

Rick Perlstein has been punishing himself reading a copy of Project 2025. He’s plowing through the internal contradictions so you don’t have to.

His second installment uncovers needles in that haystack as well as dirty needles in plain view. Among them:

  • They want to get rid of vehicle fuel efficiency standards, a major reason why cars made in the 1970s got under 20 miles to a gallon, but ones made now get over 40. The Heritage Foundation, in a detour to Alice’s Wonderland, says fuel efficiency has “negative consequences for air quality.”
  • They blame the deadly, underregulation-driven failure of the nation’s only independentpower grid, in Texas in 2021, on “pressure to use 100 percent renewables,” which somehow forces installation of power lines that can’t access electricity from any other source. The solution? Support diversity by sticking to “coal, nuclear, and natural gas.”
  • “Eliminate or Reform the Dietary Guidelines,” because those tables we used to read on the sides of cereal boxes when we were kids might become Trojan horses for “objectives unrelated to the nutritional and dietary well-being of Americans” such as “the health of the planet.”
  • “Transition the Safer Choice program”—a voluntary perk allowing companies to slap a label on cleaning products indicating they meet EPA safe product standards—”to the private sector.” On the bright side: If industry chooses the standards, many more will volunteer to participate.

“Discrimination is singled out as a bad thing, to be sure,” Perlstein finds. “Heritage would just render it impossible to fight” by not measuring it. Simply “prohibit racial classifications.” Problem solved! Becasue racial tracking of employees is a crime against “the diversity of the American workforce.”

There’s plenty of weirdness authored by “the reactionary wing of … the Holy Roman Catholic Church.” Perlstein makes this observation on how the faith insinuates itself into policy.

One of the ways Catholicism builds its influence within so many diverse societies around the globe is “syncretism”: emphasizing church teachings that resemble sacred beliefs of its host culture—like enslaved Brazilians being told that Catholic saints were a lot like the panoply of spirits in the local version of West African religion. Here, Heritage deploys a Catholic version of our sacred symbol: individualism. Not the good, liberal kind, where people choose their values from their own experience and self-reflection; that’s a heresy. 

I’ve reflected plenty on our need to sanctify profit-making, another sacred belief of American culture. It’s a principle reason the Midas Cult is determined to divert the hundreds of billions collected for Social Security or spent each year on public education to the private sector:

It’s bad enough that states are not providing education on at least a not-for-profit basis. But it’s far worse than that. They’re giving it away! That’s a mortal sin. A crime against capitalism. The worst kind of creeping socialism. Hundreds of billions of tax dollars spent every year in a nonprofit community effort to educate a nation’s children, and the moguls are not skimming off the top. The horror.

That perspective is reflected in Project 2025 as well. The Project 2025 team will move to privatize more taxpayer-funded services and (one way or another) make them fee-for-service. Among them, free weather reports:

Charging for popular services that were previously free isn’t generally a winning political strategy. But hard-right policy makers appear poised to try to do just that should Republicans gain power in the next term. Project 2025—a nearly 900-page book of policy proposals published by the conservative think tank the Heritage Foundation—states that an incoming administration should all but dissolve the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, under which the National Weather Service operates. Donald Trump has attempted to distance himself from Project 2025, but given that it was largely written by veterans of his first administration, the document is widely seen as a blueprint for a second Trump term.

[…]

Privatizing the weather is not a new conservative aim. Nearly two decades ago, when the National Weather Service updated its website to be more user-friendly, Barry Myers, then executive vice president of AccuWeather, complained to the press that “we work very hard every day competing with other companies, and we also have to compete with the government.” In 2005, after meeting with a representative from AccuWeather, then-Senator Rick Santorum introduced a bill calling for the NWS to cease competition with the private sector, and reserve its forecasts for commercial providers. The bill never made it out of committee. But in 2017, Trump picked Myers to lead NOAA. (Myers withdrew his nomination after waiting two years for Senate confirmation.)

Michael Lewis in his 2018 book “The Fifth Risk” explains that government manages a portfolio of risks that requires “mission-driven” careerists, experts with a dedication to the work, not to making big money from it:

Donald Trump’s administration came to Washington to upend that system. Not to improve it, but to exploit it for profit. They abandoned data collection on anything Trumpers opposed, the New York Times review explained, “like climate change or food safety regulations, or that they didn’t care about, like poverty, or stuff that they assumed were government boondoggles, which was most everything not involving the Pentagon.”

And next the National Weather Service. Lewis followed the Barry Meyers-NWS saga in “The Fifth Risk.” Severe thunderstrorm warnings you get for free on any of your devices (at a cost of roughly $4 per person per year) could disappear if a Project 2025-driven second Trump administration has its way. Kiss those hurrcane warnings goodbye too, Floridians and Gulf-dwellers. Perhaps Heritage will spin off management of the GPS system from the Department of Defense to Barry Meyers. Because in Heritage world there’s no public good but the private good.

Something to look forward to under the dictatorship of the MAGAtariat.

As Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi says: Don’t agonize, organize.

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“We’re 1933”

Published by Tom Sullivan on July 18, 2024

While the republic burns, the press chases clicks

Watching Day 3 of RNC convention coverage last night on a couple of channels, I found most of it as horrible as Donald Trump finds Milwaukee. Republican speakers shamelessly spewed lies, distortions and smears. (Daniel Dale deconstructs just a few for CNN.) Republican conventioneers held signs reading MASS DEPORTATION NOW! (CBS reports it was, in part, a deliberate troll intended to “make heads explode.”)

The convention’s message is horrible, yes, but so is the coverage.

But what made my head spin was a promo during a commerical break on MSNBC, the kind featuring a snappy clips of recent coverage. The montage was all Biden is old, will he or won’t he drop out, etc. Nothing about the stakes in this election for women and for international order and democracy. Nothing about Donald Trump’s incoherence, the GOP’s rejection of the rule of law, Project 2025 plans for terminating our republic (with extreme prejudice), our country teetering on the edge of dictatorship.

The days of news divisions being loss leaders for TV networks were gone decades ago. The Fourth Estate is no longer interested in fulfilling its role of informing the public. What once was news (print included) now is infotainment. Drama is entertaining. Joe Biden is old and could be forced out of the race is entertaining. It draws eyeballs and clicks and sells soap (yes, I’m that old).

Jennifer Rubin has noticed. Networks have moved on from the Trump phenomenon to “Biden is old” because they’ve become bored with Trump.

“The media … has done an abominable job of prioritizing what’s important and what’s not. We are on the brink of going down the road of a dictatorship,” Rubin warns. “That is more important than anything else. I know it’s attractive. You can say people have gotten used to Trump. Why have they gotten usded to Trump? Because the press has gotten used to Trump, because the press does not cover his insanity.”

Sharks and motorboats and Hannibal Lechter, etc. The press got bored with it, says Rubin. Getting bored is not the job of a free press in a free country, she adds. The job is informing the public.

But in a country that places making a buck above all else, that’s fallen by the wayside.

Reporters focusing on the drama surrounding Biden “is not reporting what is there. This is driving a narrative because they think it’s exciting, because it is exciting, and because they are personally offended that they weren’t told that [Biden] has bad days.”

Rubin is “shouting that we should pay attention because we’re 1933. We’re not 1938. We have the chance to stop the train.”

MASS DEPORTATION NOW! suggests the train (of boxcars?) and detention camps might soon be real, not metaphorical. The spectacle will show the world that the U.S. has abandoned its democratic heritage for xenophobia, grievance, and dictatorship. Our global adversaries must already be thrilled.

This morning, George Conway is launching Anti-Psychopath PAC in an attempt to refocus attention on the threat the MAGA movement and its dangerous, lunatic figurehead represents. Trump is “a sociopath or psychopath.”

Laugh or cry as you will, but get busy beating this threat to everything you hold dear.

Update: Just spotted this from last night. “We’re absolutely killing our nominee and our chances of winning.”

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Who’s “They”?

Published by digby on July 17, 2024

Eric isn’t the only one. Virtually every speaker at the RNC is suggesting that the Democrats tired to kill Donald Trump. Even though the guy who did it was a Republican. Philip Bump writes:

There is no evidence that Crooks shot at Trump because he had been influenced by anti-Trump political rhetoric, and there is no evidence that Crooks was literally or figuratively part of a collective effort to sideline or kill the former president.

It’s important to point this out explicitly because, in the days since the attack, allies of Trump have repeatedly suggested both that Democratic rhetoric is to blame or that the shooting was done by some nebulously defined “they” — a group that is generally meant to include Trump’s political opponents.

Speaking to Fox News host Laura Ingraham from the Republican National Convention on Monday night, Rep. Cory Mills (R-Fla.) suggested that the shooting was a continuation of a pattern of hostility to the former president. “The bottom line is this: First, they tried to censor and silence President Trump. Then they tried to indict and imprison President Trump,” Mills said. “Now they tried to kill President Trump.”

Mills went on to suggest that, from his experience, “this seems intentional” — presumably meaning the security failures that allowed Crooks to open fire. On Tuesday morning, Mills made similar comments to right-wing commentator Charlie Kirk. (Mills also blamed diversity initiatives for unspecified reasons, saying, “D-E-I means D-I-E.”)

The congressman wasn’t Ingraham’s only guest to suggest that “they” tried to take out Trump.“They have done everything to strip him of his wealth and of his fame. They’ve tried to break up our family and done everything to try to get him and kill him,” Trump’s son Eric Trump said on the same program. “And they literally tried to kill him this week.” He made a similar claim on CNN on Tuesday afternoon.

Earlier on Monday, former congressman Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.) suggested that calls for “unity” were dubious, given the moment. “My question, not trying to be cynical, is what is it going to take for that unity to last more than just one news cycle?” he asked. “They tried to kill the leading candidate for president!”

[…]

That framing is why all of this has emerged. Trump’s campaign has been centered on portraying him as a victim from the outset. That he was targeted by a shooter folds into that presentation neatly.

There’s just that one nagging little problem: There’s no known connection between the known shooter and the broad, nebulous galaxy of opponents Trump and his allies envision. Crooks wasn’t carrying a left-wing newspaper in his pocket or listening to a liberal podcast. He wasn’t a contract employee of the CIA or a staffer for the Justice Department. He wasn’t even a Democrat.

I haven’t noticed the media generally issuing a correction on this. They just say it and that’s that. At this point, for many people, it’s probably accepted as the truth.

Polls, polls, polls

Published by digby on July 17, 2024

A bunch of polls out today showing that a huge majority of Democrats want a different presidential candidate but the race is still within the margin of error. So, as I have said before, Democrats will walk over hot coals to vote for a fetid pile of garbage over Donald Trump;. The question remains how many of those independent swing voters and 3rd party types will do the same. The race is still stuck. This is the NBC poll:

In case you’re wondering whether Harris does better well, yes and no, depending:

[T]he poll showed Trump doing slightly better among white voters when matched up with Harris instead of Biden, leading her by 16 points among these voters, compared with his 14-point advantage here against Biden.

(These subgroups of voters, however, all have substantially larger margins of error than the poll’s overall margin of error, which is plus or minus 3.5 percentage points.)

Among other demographics — by age, by gender, among Latino voters — there was very little difference between Biden or Harris.

But the biggest differences between Biden and Harris in the matchup against Trump go well beyond demographics.

Among the roughly quarter of Republican voters who say they are unsatisfied with Trump as the GOP’s nominee, Trump is ahead of Biden by 46 points, 63% to 17%.

When Trump’s opponent is Harris, however, more of these dissatisfied GOP voters flock to Trump. The Republican’s lead with that group grows to 57 points, 73% to 16%.

However…

Meanwhile, among the voters who prefer a third-party candidate in the poll’s multicandidate ballot test, Trump and Biden are virtually tied with these voters in a head-to-head matchup: Trump 32%, Biden 31%, with a plurality declining to make a two-way choice, saying they were undecided, would pick another candidate, or something else.

But when Harris is the choice against Trump, more of those respondents made a pick in the two-way ballot test. The vice president leads Trump among these “other” voters, 46% to 39%, suggesting a higher upside with voters considering a third-party candidate.

Anyone who says they know the answer on this is full of it. It’s simply not obvious by the data, history offers no clues and the “vibes” are very unreliable. I guess those of us watching it from afar just have to sit back and let it unfold.

Adam Schiff asked for Biden to step aside today. Unless this is a precursor to Biden dropping out on Trump’s big night and completely wrecking his narrative, this seems like unfortunate timing to me.

Anyway, I may be having an early cocktail or two tonight. I have to watch JD Vance speak anyway.

QOTD: JD Vance

Published by digby on July 17, 2024

Vance has said many, many repellent things in his quest to be MAGA’s favorite little boy. But this one really takes the cake:

“This is one of the great tricks that I think the sexual revolution pulled on the American populace, which is the idea that like, ‘well, OK, these marriages were fundamentally, you know, they were maybe even violent, but certainly they were unhappy. And so getting rid of them and making it easier for people to shift spouses like they change their underwear, that’s going to make people happier in the long term. And maybe it worked out for the moms and dads, though I’m skeptical. But it really didn’t work out for the kids of those marriages.”

Yeah, watching your dad beat the hell out of your mother or getting beaten yourself is a super healthy thing for kids.

Everyone says he’s super smart. I’m not convinced. He’s slick. But he has said some really stupid things even by MAGA standards. Perhaps this kind of thing might appeal to cult leaders but I honestly don’t think more that a small minority religious zealots believe anymore that women must stay in violent marriages “for the sake of the children.” This is way out on the fringe.

The Funniest Thing You’ll See Today

Published by digby on July 17, 2024

“It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be a proud American.”

Does he think it’s about “white pride” and “racial prejudice”? Does he know that Jane Austen was a childless, single woman and a Brit to boot? I’d guess not.

The poor kids of Florida. I honestly fear for their futures.