Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

Judgment’s coming

There’s no telling what the Manhattan jury in the Donald Trump falsified records trial will do. Summations are due to start today. Right-wing media outlets claim there is no there there. Leftier services make it clear that the evidence against Trump is solid. Neither set of pundits gets a vote in the jury room.

CNN‘s Stephen Collinson:

The summations mark the climax of a trial that started more than a month ago. They are expected to last all day Tuesday and could stretch into the following day. After Judge Juan Merchan instructs jurors on the law, Trump and the rest of the country will be held in suspense to see whether he will become the first ex-president and presumptive GOP nominee to be convicted of a crime after allegedly falsifying financial records to hide a hush money payment to an adult film star in 2016.

The verdict will reverberate far beyond the courtroom and Trump’s personal life since the case has become intertwined with his bid to reclaim the White House. The stakes are especially high since this is likely to be the only one of four pending criminal trials expected to go to a jury before November’s election. The former president appeared to be in a bitter mood on the eve of his return to the courtroom, lashing out at opponents he called “Human Scum” in a message on social media marking Memorial Day.

It’s easy to dismiss Trump’s raging about “Human Scum” as his usual impotent bluster, but his increasingly crazed rants send messages that his cult members could act on whether or not he is convicted. His followers heard those messages loud and clear after the 2020 election did not go his way. They flocked to Washington, D.C. at his beckoning on January 6, 2021, for the “Stop the Steal” rally he promised would be “wild.” Many came prepared and equipped for the wilding that followed. Not since the British burned the Capitol on August 24, 1814, a date largely forgotten, has the seat of government been so violated. Not even during the Civil War.

Trump may be out of power at the moment, but his army of believers means he is not powerless. What might he do with real power if Americans are foolish enough to hand it to him again?

Greg Sargent cautions readers not to dismiss Trump’s raging as just that:

On Sunday, Donald Trump posted video of a man raging and cursing uncontrollably at MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough outside what appears to be an airport in New York. This generated a flurry of attention on social media, with some pointing out that Trump’s fury at Scarborough has a history dating back to the Morning Joe host’s public turning against Trump, which includes Trump falsely suggesting Scarborough murdered a young MSNBC intern.

Scarborough and the whole Morning Joe crew have been stern Trump critics for years, but I’d like to focus on something beyond Scarborough here: The video’s declaration that if Trump wins the presidency, “liberals” are “done.”

As the man delicately puts it:

He’ll get rid of all you fucking liberals. You liberals are gone when he fucking wins. You fucking blowjob liberals are done. Uncle Donnie’s gonna take this election—landslide. Landslide, you fucking half a blowjob. Landslide. Get the fuck out of here, you scumbag.

By posting this video, Trump appears to be endorsing that sentiment about not only Scarborough but about liberals generally. Shouldn’t that be pretty big news in and of itself?

Well, no, because the press has acclimated to Trump being Trump. Trump may fume, but two-thirds of the country is not conditioned to the permanent state of froth to which right-wing talk radio and television have addicted their audience. Another 20 percent tunes in each day for a “fix.” The rest of us grow too weary of the hair-afire rhetoric for the mainstream press to dish it out as relentlessly.

Besides, this is all performative. Sure, Trump re-Truths this stuff, but he and his followers are just cranks, right? Ask the scarred Capitol Police about Trumpish cranks.

Sargent caustically observes:

There is a mini-cottage industry of punditry that is forever on the lookout for the merest hint of disrespect toward conservative voters, particularly rural and working-class white ones. But the fact that the GOP nominee for president approvingly posted a video that declares a large ideological subgroup of Americans “done” and “gone” if he is elected—never mind the vile epithets directed at them—appears to have garnered almost no headlines. Few if any top shelf pundits have scowled with disapproval.

This is not intended as whataboutism. Rather, the point is that allowing such moments to remain decontextualized makes it easier to evade grappling with their true underlying intent. After all, it is undeniable that a central rationale of Trump’s presidential run is the threat to use state power to persecute and target—in a newly aggressive way—a large albeit ill-defined class of Americans who are designated as enemies of Trump and his MAGA movement.

Importantly, this vow is not merely rhetorical. As CNN’s Oliver Darcy shows, Trump’s threat to “investigate” the media exists in the form of a concrete program, with ideas about prosecuting media figures now discussed openly by Trump loyalists who are expected to serve in a second Trump administration. This talk has taken a truly dangerous turn.

What was it Dubya once observed? “Fool me once”? The Confederacy lost the Civil War but won the peace. Southerners refused to accept Lee’s surrender the way MAGA refused to accept Trump’s 2020 loss. Whites reasserted control, sabotaged the Reconstruction amendments, instituted Jim Crow, and enforced it with a reign of terror that lasted decades. Indeed, it took 100 years to pass the Civil Rights and Voting Rights acts over southern objections.

Trump’s MAGA movement is simply civil war by other means, a backlash with a long history. Sargent asks, “What if some subset of Trump supporters continues backing him not in spite of his efforts to place himself above our institutions and the law—not in spite of his threats to unleash punishment and suffering on other large groups of Americans—but precisely because of those things?”

Do not dismiss his raging, or his cult’s, as impotent bluster. Not as long as Trump has followers who will believe up is down if he says so.

“South Carolina is too small for a republic, but too large for an insane asylum,” said James Louis Petigru of Charleston, South Carolina in December 1860, after secession. That’s true today of MAGAstan.

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He is very stupid. But I suppose this whine will be persuasive to his cult followers.

Trump pulls up to the NASCAR race today and acts like the crowd is cheering for him so his propaganda film crew can do a nice edit later. pic.twitter.com/Fp7AW7AwzC

— Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) May 26, 2024

He’s saluting during Amazing Grace today. pic.twitter.com/XsVAYJhqkU

— Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) May 26, 2024

He’s just walking around saluting everything today. He salutes during Amazing Grace. He’s saluting people. Saluting airplanes. pic.twitter.com/25mmY4ntSR

— Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) May 26, 2024

Is this all staged for some campaign film? I don’t know. But all the saluting is just plain weird.

I think Nikki had it right the first time:

MSNBC plays montage of Nikki Haley calling Trump out for being unfit for office, saying he is too unstable and unhinged to be president pic.twitter.com/NWCympplIy

— Biden-Harris HQ (@BidenHQ) May 24, 2024

Not bloody likely

This piece by Punchbowl is yet another “red tsunami” horse race piece designed to give Democrats heartburn. (Fun for MAGA and Villagers alike!)

We’ve talked a lot during the past two years about the group of a dozen-plus vulnerable House Republicans who hold districts President Joe Biden won in 2020. But what if these Republicans aren’t as endangered as we thought?

We’re in southern California all week talking to candidates running in competitive races that may decide control of the House. In conversation after conversation, we found rank-and-file Republicans increasingly ready to embrace former President Donald Trump in toss-up seats. Trump lost California by roughly 30 points in both 2016 and 2020, so this is a significant development.

There are five Republican incumbents in the Golden State who represent seats that Biden won. Given the razor-thin GOP House majority, if Democrats flip all these seats they could win the chamber back this fall. But it’s not so simple.

Much has changed since 2020 when Biden beat Trump in a popular vote and Electoral College landslide. Biden is currently trailing Trump in the polls nationally. He’s stuck with a 38% average approval rating. So in the mind of these at-risk Republicans, tying yourself to a well-known challenger when Biden is broadly unpopular isn’t the worst idea, despite Trump’s obvious downsides.

“I think the base is more excited than ever. The more they try to lock up President Trump, I think it does the opposite of whatever they’re trying to do,” Rep. Young Kim (R-Calif.) told us. “So there is more enthusiasm, there is more energy that’s going to help the base to come out.” Biden won Kim’s district in 2020 by just under two points. She faces Democrat Joe Kerr in November.

Farther south, Republican Matt Gunderson is challenging Rep. Mike Levin (D-Calif.) in a San Diego-area seat Biden won by double digits four years ago. But Gunderson insisted the math is different this time around. “Right now in our polling, Biden’s lead has diminished to 5.7%. So it’s almost half his tally last cycle,” Gunderson said. “That Trump drag impact’s not going to be the same as it has been in the past.”

Democrats are also targeting longtime incumbent GOP Rep. Ken Calvert (R-Calif.) to the east of Los Angeles. Trump won by the district around a point in 2020, and Calvert is eagerly endorsing the former president in 2024.“My opponent’s going to be supporting Joe Biden, and I’m comfortable with that. He can support Joe Biden. I’ll support Trump, and I think the district will vote accordingly,” Calvert said. Calvert narrowly defeated Democrat Will Rollins in 2022, and two are locked in a highly-anticipated rematch this cycle.

The acknowledgment that Biden’s political standing is eroding in swing seats isn’t a radical assessment. Even in deep-blue California, there are still pockets of opposition to Biden as residents unhappy with rising crime, illegal border crossings and sky-high costs make their displeasure known.For example, Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom recently faced a recall effort and there’s fury at progressive district attorneys like George Gascón in Los Angeles County.

FFS. A bunch of republicans running for re-election are saying they have a good chance to win? Stop the presses!

Yes, there are red districts in California. They may win re-election and they may not. But there is nothing in this article to suggest that this is a given or that anything in California’s current political environment indicates this. Certainly, the fact that Gavin Newsom was subject to a recall three years ago, in which he prevailed by well over 60 % and then went on to win re-election the next year with similar numbers, says nothing!

This is exactly the kind of reporting you get when the “Republicans are winning!” narrative takes hold. And yet the national polls actually have the presidency essentially tied and the swing state polls are all over the place. Sheesh.

Ric Grenell: from internet troll to Trump’s twisted foreign policy guru

If you have the time to read just one long piece today, read this one about Grenell, on tap to be Trump’s Secretary of State or something equally horrifying. He will serve as one of Trump’s top deputies in any case:

Richard Grenell’s quest to be secretary of state in a second Trump administration began late on Election Day in 2020, when the defeated president dispatched loyalists to run shambolic “stop the steal” operations in battleground states.

President Donald J. Trump tapped Mr. Grenell — his combative former ambassador to Germany, acting national intelligence chief and special envoy to the Balkans — to fly by private plane to Nevada, where Mr. Grenell ensconced himself, his dog Lola, lawyers and a crew of activists in a suite at the Venetian Resort, which served as the group’s war room in Las Vegas. In a days-long spectacle, the Trump team filed a lawsuit and aired false accusations of fraud, including one wrongly implicating hundreds of members of the military.

It was all a sham. Mr. Grenell told the team in the war room, two G.O.P. operatives recalled, that the Nevada vote was not, in fact, stolen. The operatives, who asked not to be named for fear of reprisal from Mr. Grenell, said he told the team that the goal was simply to “throw spaghetti at the wall” — the operatives described Mr. Grenell making a theatrical tossing gesture as he spoke — to distract the media from calling Nevada while the election battle in neighboring Arizona played out.

In retrospect, one of the operatives said, the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol should have subpoenaed everyone in the room, including the operative himself.

Somebody could have stepped forward at the time but then Grenell is a particularly nasty piece of work:

This article is based on interviews with 40 people, including nearly three dozen Republicans. Most asked for anonymity because they did not want to harm their chances of roles in a future Trump administration or to unleash the wrath of Mr. Grenell, who frequently savages those he disagrees with on social media. One Republican former operative said that after a recent disagreement, Mr. Grenell combed five years’ worth of the operative’s tweets to fuel an online attack that lasted for weeks

He first came to GOP prominence as an internet troll so that makes some sense. But he’s been a full-blown Trump troll since trump came on the scene:

To his detractors, Mr. Grenell is a caustic opportunist of modest achievement who scaled the heights of an administration in which pit bull partisanship was prized. Susan E. Rice, President Biden’s former domestic policy adviser and a former national security adviser to President Barack Obama, has called him “one of the most nasty, dishonest people I’ve ever encountered.” Brad Chase, Mr. Grenell’s former business partner, who fell out with him over his conversion to Trumpism, said he was a “soulless, shameless sellout.”

To his supporters, Mr. Grenell is a loyal, tireless messenger for Mr. Trump who transmits the former president’s demands with an efficient bellicosity that stifles naysayers.

“President Trump trusts him as a pair of safe hands in deconstructing the administrative state and confronting the deep state,” Stephen K. Bannon, the former Trump strategist and host of the “War Room” podcast, said in a brief interview. “There’s so much that’s got to be taken apart and jettisoned.”

Here’s his foreign policy vision:

Mr. Grenell has spent the past three and a half years leveraging his Balkan contacts in business ventures, including with an important partner — Jared Kushner, Mr. Trump’s son-in-law — and that he brings a bombastic bravado to American diplomacy held in high regard by the former president.

“If you want to avoid war, you better have a son of a bitch as the secretary of state,” Mr. Grenell said in a March episode of “Self Centered,” a current events podcast. America needs a “tough” chief diplomat, he said, “who goes in to these tables and says: ‘Guys, if we don’t solve this here, if we don’t represent peace and figure out a tough way, I’ve got to take this file, go back to the United States and transfer it to the secretary of defense, who doesn’t negotiate. He’s going to bomb you.’”

Here’s a NY Times gift link to read the rest of this, which includes his massive conflicts of interests, particularly in the Balkans and other places in the Russian sphere of interest. It’s worth your time. He’s a monster and he’s going to be in charge of Trump’s foreign policy and any other dirty work Trump wants done if he wins.

… when they want to

Trump only got 6 write-in votes at the convention. He put this out yesterday:

The crowd “enthusiastically” booed him which anyone who saw the footage can see. But this is for the cult which won’t see it because they live in a hermetically sealed bubble. If they come across it they’ll say it’s all fake. He has fully indoctrinated his followers. But it’s still shocking that he doesn’t care that the rest of us can see the truth with our own eyes. Utterly shameless.

Memorial Day Executive Mansion,
Washington,
Nov. 21, 1864.

Dear Madam,

I have been shown in the files of the War Department a statement of the Adjutant General of Massachusetts that you are the mother of five sons who have died gloriously on the field of battle.

I feel how weak and fruitless must be any words of mine which should attempt to beguile you from the grief of a loss so overwhelming. But I cannot refrain from tendering to you the consolation that may be found in the thanks of the Republic they died to save.

I pray that our Heavenly Father may assuage the anguish of your bereavement, and leave you only the cherished memory of the loved and lost, and the solemn pride that must be yours to have laid so costly a sacrifice upon the altar of Freedom.

Yours, very sincerely and respectfully,

A. Lincoln.

A reminder of how Trump communicated with the widows of fallen soldiers when he was president:

That’s the man who constantly claims he did more for Black people than Abraham Lincoln.

For every holiday he has a similar message

As usual, there is nothing on earth that isn’t all about him:

He thinks it’s cute.

He’s so brain damaged.

By the way, here’s the boring old guy:

“you’ll forever prefer the music of your late teens”

The Washington Post (gift link):

The plucky poll slingers at YouGov, who are consistently willing to use their elite-tier survey skills in service of measuring the unmeasurable, asked 2,000 adults which decade had the best and worst music, movies, economy and so forth, across 20 measures. But when we charted them, no consistent pattern emerged.

Until they charted them by generation. “Age, more than anything, determines when you think America peaked.”

The good old days when America was “great” aren’t the 1950s. They’re whatever decade you were 11, your parents knew the correct answer to any question, and you’d never heard of war crimes tribunals, microplastics or improvised explosive devices. Or when you were 15 and athletes and musicians still played hard and hadn’t sold out.

[…]

The closest-knit communities were those in our childhood, ages 4 to 7. The happiest families, most moral society and most reliable news reporting came in our early formative years — ages 8 through 11. The best economy, as well as the best radio, television and movies, happened in our early teens — ages 12 through 15.

There are certainly marketing implications behind the research, especially for streaming music services. There is too much more to go into in detail here. See the link and enjoy your holiday.

---

My online friend, musician and Navy veteran Stephen Bensen, is sharing his hummingbirds with passersby this weekend. “people just walking by, see the hummingbirds and want to be a part of it. i love being able to do this.”

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Service and self-sacrifice

I’ve shared before a tale about the first Memorial Day in 1865 in Charleston, South Carolina, a remembrance of “slavery’s terrible legacy.” The focus of that ceremony and of most on Memorial Days since is on the fallen. Less featured are the stories of those left behind.

The Fayetteville Observer ran an op-ed a few days ago by Rebekah Sanderlin. She calls out Donald Trump for his dismissal of soldiers who fell in battle in Europe as “suckers and losers.” She spotlights the burdens borne by the wives of U.S. soldiers lost in Afghanistan thirteen years before Trump’s snubbing:

I started leading Care Teams in 2005, only we didn’t call them that then. We didn’t call them anything back then. We just helped. We, military spouses, showed up after the soldiers in dress uniforms notified someone just like us that the person she loved most in this world was never coming home. As the wife of an enlisted U.S. Army Special Forces soldier who spent more time deployed than home, my husband’s friends were the ones dying, and my friends were their widows.

Sometimes we were there to simply be a friend to a woman who didn’t have any friends nearby, but mostly we quietly did all the little things life requires of people, things people can’t do when they’re in shock and grieving. Because most military families live far from their hometowns, they rarely have a local network to lean on during a tragedy. We became their local network. 

We vacuumed, we washed dishes, we walked their dogs. We prepared their houses for the stream of people who were about to appear. We bought groceries, arranged meal trains, picked up their family members from the airport and met their kids at the bus stop, fully aware — though those children weren’t yet — that they were having the last normal moments of their entire lives. 

Early in 2005 I learned to always bring toilet paper with me. When the widow wasn’t looking, I would sneak a few rolls into her bathroom. It seems like a tiny, insignificant thing, and it was, but I quickly saw that the last thing anyone needs when their world has collapsed is to also be out of toilet paper. Some of those years, the casualties came often enough that I just kept a giant pack in my car.

Service is what Trump expects wherever he goes. It’s not a thing he does, nor is self-sacrifice in his limited vocabulary. Trump’s comments left Sanderlin and others “furious and disgusted”:

I was still leading Care Teams and still carting around toilet paper in November 2018 when then-President Trump called the U.S. Marines who died at Belleau Wood “suckers” and the American soldiers buried at Aisne-Marne American Cemetery “losers.” I was furious and disgusted even though, like everyone else, I had become conditioned to our President saying horrible things. But there were some lines that even the most ardently anti-war protestors were too decent to cross, and this man — the President of the United States — had just spit on those lines. But I didn’t have time to stay mad then. We were at war, and we were still getting new widows. 

In the months following President Trump’s callous insult, my husband’s unit would lose six more soldiers in Afghanistan. I had the privilege of knowing most of them before the deployment and there was not a sucker or a loser among them. They were committed, proud, well-trained and highly competent patriots, and they were some of the greatest people I’ve ever known. 

Sanderlin’s story evokes We Were Soldiers, the 2002 Mel Gibson film, sure to be streaming this Memorial Day weekend. Based on the Battle of la Drang on November 14, 1965, first major battle of the Vietnam War, the film’s depictions of battle are brutal. So brutal that unlike most war films this one is thought with caveats to “get it right.” Although it lays on the patriotic symbolism pretty thick, scenes that flash back to the wives comforting each other as news of their husbands’ deaths arrives as the battle rages are a gut-punch. Sanderlin’s Care Teams have lived it.

Unlike in the film, the practice today is for uniformed soldiers to deliver death notices.

In military communities, and in most civilian communities, we revere the people who gave their lives for our country. We honor them and we take care of their families. Not because there’s something in it for us, but because it’s the right thing to do. We do it because when they saw a need, they stepped up, and we owe them at least that much. We do it because we know our large, diverse country is held together only by an understanding of shared sacrifice. 

Trump’s “what’s in it for me” nation

Sanderlin concludes:

How did we get to a place where mocking our nation’s war dead is not an immediate disqualifier for a Commander in Chief? Why would any young person agree to wear a military uniform knowing that even their President does not honor their service? And why would anyone who has served in our military ever forgive Donald Trump for denigrating their brothers who were killed in action? 

The irony in Trump’s Make America Great Again slogan is that, in the years since Trump entered politics, he has remade our country in his own image, a what’s in it for me nation where mocking the very concept of sacrifice carries no political repercussions. 

If we elect him again, we are the suckers and losers.

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