Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

Dr Jeffrey A. Sonnenfeld, the president of the Yale Chief Executive Leadership Institute wrote this in the NY Times this week:

Recent headlines suggest that our nation’s business leaders are embracing the presidential candidate Donald Trump. His campaign would have you believe that our nation’s top chief executives are returning to support Mr. Trump for president, touting declarations of support from some prominent financiers like Steve Schwarzman and David Sacks.

That is far from the truth. They didn’t flock to him before, and they certainly aren’t flocking to him now. Mr. Trump continues to suffer from the lowest level of corporate support in the history of the Republican Party.

I know this because I work with roughly 1,000 chief executives a year, running a school for them, which I started 35 years ago, and I speak with business leaders almost every day. Our surveys show that 60 to 70 percent of them are registered Republicans.

The reality is that the top corporate leaders working today, like many Americans, aren’t entirely comfortable with either Mr. Trump or President Biden. But they largely like — or at least can tolerate — one of them. They truly fear the other.

The money talks, as you can see by the chart above. And that’s extremely weird considering that the Republican Party has been the party of Big Business for the last century. Not anymore.

According to Sonnenfeld, business didn’t like his “populist” image in 2016 but gave him a chance. (They liked the tax cuts, of course.) But he didn’t endear himself to them otherwise:

Several chief executives resented Mr. Trump’s personal attacks on businesses through divide-and-conquer tactics, meddling and pitting competitors against each other publicly. Scores of them rushed to distance themselves from Mr. Trump’s more provocative stances, resigning en masse from his business advisory councils in 2017 after he equated antiracism activists with white supremacists. Dozens of them openly called for Mr. Trump’s impeachment in 2021 after the Jan. 6 insurrection.

They aren’t all that fond of Biden either. They don’t like antitrust enforcement and his attacks on corporate greed. On the other hand, they like the infrastructure investment and CHIPs Act and they are giddy, as one might expect, over the roaring stock market and the US’s new status as the world’s largest oil and natural gas producer.

They’re very nervous about the fact that Trump will have MAGA extremists running things in the next administration and really hate some of his new policy proposals:

Mr. Trump and his team are doubling down on some of his most anti-business instincts, including proposing draconian 10 percent tariffs on all imports; unorthodox monetary and fiscal policies, including stripping the Federal Reserve Board of its independence; possibly putting in place yield curve control to force interest rates lower; and devaluing the dollar — all of which would drive inflation much higher. These Trump positions have more in common with Karl Marx than Adam Smith.

I don’t actually think Karl Marx has anything to do with it, but setting that aside, these execs seem to be sane enough to recognize that Trump is totally inept:

As such, it was hardly surprising that just as when Mr. Trump faced a chilly reaction from hundreds of top executives when he spoke at my Yale Chief Executive summit in 2005, he appeared to face a similarly frigid reception when he spoke to the Business Roundtable this month, with no noticeable applause at any point during his “remarkably meandering” remarks, according to CNBC’s Andrew Ross Sorkin, and with Mr. Trump assuming a subdued, if not hostile, posture. Chief executives are not protectionist, isolationist or xenophobic, and they believe in investing where there is the rule of law, not the law of rulers.

These are not my people, obviously, and I don’t look up to them as paragons. But they are practical enough to see that Trump is bad for business, just as he’s bad for the country as a whole. I appreciate any signs of GOP sanity wherever I can find it these days. It’s rare.

Since the wingnuts actually have the nerve to promote the psychopath Trump as an anti-war hero , John Fugelsang helpfully supplies a corrective:

Since the right wing MAGA guys are pulling the “There Were No Wars Under Trump” lie, let’s quickly cover this propaganda you’ll be hearing that Trump was the “Peace President.”

Because the same angry white guys who berated us for opposing the Iraq War, now berate us for not appreciating Donald Trump’s incredible commitment to world peace. And being blindly obedient, true MAGA males view critical thinking skills as “woke.”

1. Once in office, Trump massively increased the U.S. defense budget. He quickly escalated our existing wars in multiple theaters, which led to skyrocketing casualties.

2. Trump sent MORE troops to Afghanistan, ordered missile strikes on Syria in 2017 and 2018 & abandoned our Kurdish allies to slaughter.

3. In Afghanistan, the star of “Celebrity Apprentice” substantially increased the airstrikes, leading to a 330 % increase in civilian deaths. He bragged about dropping of the “Mother of All Bombs” (MOAB), the largest non-nuclear bomb in the US arsenal, on Afghanistan in 2017.

4. Trump also tore up a peace deal with Iran, which our own generals uniformly maintained Iran was honoring (I know, Real Christians love tearing up peace deals when it’s w/countries they’re allowed to hate).

5. Trump pardoned convicted war criminals, assassinated Iran’s top general, and was the 1st POTUS to order an attack on the Syrian govt.

6. Trump sent troops to take Syria’s oil — openly admitting he wanted to give the reserves to ExxonMobil. “We’re keeping the oil. I’ve always said that. We want to keep the oil. Forty-five million dollars a month? Keep the oil.” Oh, FOX didn’t tell you any of this? Did wee Ben Shapiro’s serious journalists at Daily Wire somehow forget to convey this info? Breitbart failed to bring this information to you as well? I’m shocked. Well, Hunter Biden affects your life more.

7. In Iraq and Syria alone, Trump’s drone strikes killed an estimated 13,400 civilians.

8. Trump carried out more airstrikes against Somalia than Obama did; Trump sold unguided “dumb” bombs to the Saudis to use against Yemen.

9. Trump negotiated to give Afghanistan to the Taliban, & freed 5,000 Taliban terrorists, which turned out great!

10. He even established “Space Force” so we can have war in brand-new places.

11. Donald Trump is so anti-war he put on a cheerleader skirt & pom poms for Putin’s murderous imperialist invasion of Ukraine, which Trump called “genius” & “savvy” you amoral knob. Trump called the invading army, killing children & raping women, “peacemakers.”

12. Trump wanting to remove our troops from Germany & S. Korea wasn’t “anti-war” – it was Donny’s most passionate hobby, “doing what Putin wants”

13. He withdrew from the Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces (INF) agreement & the Open Skies Treaty.

14. Oh and he’s already asked advisers for “battle plans” to invade Mexico so US troops can fight cartels. Having surrendered their critical thinking to a reality TV landlord with an addiction to too-much makeup, MAGA dudes know none of this. Donald Trump stole from US vets with a fraud online University. Stealing from vets – along with sexual assault – was not a dealbreaker for these good Christian folk.

The notion that Trump is a peacenik is a one of the most preposterous ideas they ever came up with.

They’ll turn back the clock more, then break it

A reminder from April 2003 (The Nation):

The [conservative] movement’s grand ambition—one can no longer say grandiose—is to roll back the twentieth century, quite literally. That is, defenestrate the federal government and reduce its scale and powers to a level well below what it was before the New Deal’s centralization. With that accomplished, movement conservatives envision a restored society in which the prevailing values and power relationships resemble the America that existed around 1900, when William McKinley was President.

[…]

Looking back over this list, one sees many of the old peevish conservative resentments—Social Security, the income tax, regulation of business, labor unions, big government centralized in Washington—that represent the great battles that conservatives lost during early decades of the twentieth century. That is why the McKinley era represents a lost Eden the right has set out to restore.

Oh, they won’t stop there.

Holy sh*t have you seen this video???

Spread this like wildfire. #VoteDemToRestoreRoe pic.twitter.com/KLvRnwruQU

— Nick Knudsen 🇺🇸 (@NickKnudsenUS) June 24, 2024

● ● ● ● ● ● ● ●

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

If only

Everybody’s got advice for Joe Biden on how to slay Donald Trump at this week’s debate. Obviously, don’t play Trump’s game and be sure to throw him off his.

Monica Alba and Carol E. Lee of NBC News suggest Biden should be prepared for whichever version of Trump takes the stage:

WASHINGTON — President Joe Biden is preparing to face a few different Donald Trumps on Thursday’s debate stage: the more bombastic and “unhinged” one known for his grievance-filled, stem-winding rallies, and a fairly disciplined version who largely refrains from tirades and sticks to policy.

If it’s more sedate than incensed, the goal for Biden will be to elicit what his aides see as “the true Trump,” according to three people familiar with Biden’s debate prep. 

[…]

“If I were advising Biden, I’d try to make fun of Trump,” former Republican vice president Dan Quayle told NBC News in an interview. “Try to ridicule him. That will get him mad.”

Obviously. The Great Manipulator melts into a puddle when flattered by an autocrat, but he’s also so thin-skinned you could slice him open with a butter knife. Insulted well, and with a smile, he’d have another sort of meltdown.

Oh, for the one Nicolle Wallace recommends. Punch him in the face with his own boasts.

Nicolle Wallace's debate advice for @POTUS Joe Biden is spot-on. 🔥🔥🔥 pic.twitter.com/xzmMPhgd9C

— Bill Madden (@maddenifico) June 24, 2024

● ● ● ● ● ● ● ●

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

Holy sh*t have you seen this video???

Spread this like wildfire. #VoteDemToRestoreRoe pic.twitter.com/KLvRnwruQU

— Nick Knudsen 🇺🇸 (@NickKnudsenUS) June 24, 2024

Today is the 2-year anniversary of the Dobbs decision. Today one third of American women have lost their rights.

It looks like CNN is planning to let Trump lie at will and they’ll only correct him after the debate is over. Great.

The role of a moderator is often in dispute, and David Chalian, CNN’s political director, said that Thursday’s live debate “is not the ideal arena for live fact-checking.” Instead, Ms. Bash and Mr. Tapper would focus on “facilitating the debate between these candidates, not being a participant in that debate,” he said, noting that CNN analysts would assess the veracity of the candidates’ comments immediately after the telecast.

Most people will tune out after the debate because the panel conversation is always tedious for anyone but the most addicted political junkies. The result will be that Biden has to correct the record and will spend most of his time doing that (and probably getting his mic cut because of the sheer volume of lies) and won’t be able to get his own message out effectively — or the lies will stand uncorrected.

It appears that CNN is simply planning to enable a freak show instead of doing its job as journalists. I hope the Biden campaign is fully prepared for that.

CNN knows Trump is playing games:

Trump is scared of President Biden. So cringe. Trump is humiliating himself. Sort of like pathetically begging for votes.

First clip, Trump says he will lose debate on purpose

Next, says President Biden will be a worthy debater

Then, wonders if he should obstruct debate pic.twitter.com/MQCaB5lMdM

— RiotWomenn (@riotwomennn) June 24, 2024

There was a time when the Republicans were constantly in a state of apoplexy over the deficit and the national debt (even though they always raise it more than Democrats do when they are in charge.)

As you can see, it wasn’t just COVID…

 The winner of November’s election faces a gloomy fiscal outlook, with rapidly rising debt levels at a time when interest rates are already high and demographic pressure on retirement programs is rising.

• Both candidates bear a share of the responsibility, as each added trillions to that tally while in office.
• But Trump’s contribution was significantly higher, according to the fiscal watchdogs at the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, thanks to both tax cuts and spending deals struck in his four years in the White House.

By the numbers: Trump added $8.4 trillion in borrowing over a ten-year window, CRFB finds in a report out this morning.

• Biden’s figure clocks in at $4.3 trillion with seven months remaining in his term.
• If you exclude COVID relief spending from the tally, the numbers are $4.8 trillion for Trump and $2.2 trillion for Biden.

For Trump, the biggest non-COVID drivers of higher public debt were his signature tax cuts enacted in 2017 (causing $1.9 trillion in additional borrowing) and bipartisan spending packages (which added $2.1 trillion).

For Biden, major non-COVID factors include 2022 and 2023 spending bills ($1.4 trillion), student debt relief ($620 billion), and legislation to support health care for veterans ($520 billion).

The article goes on to say “both sides” are more or less equally to blame, blah,blah, blah…. But the reality is that there is only one party that obsesses over “the deficit” when a Democrat is in charge and spends like drunken sailors when Republicans are in the White House. And it isn’t the Democrats.

I’m sure it won’t matter in this election because it’s very inconvenient for them due to Trump’s tax cutting spree which they want to continue if he wins. But they should at least be questioned about this whenever the media gets the chance.

The Heritage Foundation has outsourced the new MAGA SS to an operative in Kentucky who is putting together target list of enemy bureaucrats for crazies:

From his home office in small-town Kentucky, a seasoned political operative is quietly investigating scores of federal employees suspected of being hostile to the policies of Republican Donald Trump, a highly unusual and potentially chilling effort that dovetails with broader conservative preparations for a new White House.

Tom Jones and his American Accountability Foundation are digging into the backgrounds, social media posts and commentary of key high-ranking government employees, starting with the Department of Homeland Security. They’re relying in part on tips from his network of conservative contacts, including workers. In a move that alarms some, they’re preparing to publish the findings online.

With a $100,000 grant from the Heritage Foundation, the goal is to post 100 names of government workers to a website this summer to show a potential new administration who might be standing in the way of a second-term Trump agenda — and ripe for scrutiny, reclassifications, reassignments or firings.

“We need to understand who these people are and what they do,” said Jones, a former Capitol Hill aide to Republican senators.

The concept of compiling and publicizing a list of government employees shows the lengths Trump’s allies are willing to go to ensure nothing or no one will block his plans in a potential second term. Jones’ Project Sovereignty 2025 comes as Heritage’s Project 2025 lays the groundwork, with policies, proposals and personnel ready for a possible new White House.

Isn’t that great? Just don’t call them fascist because that would be very rude.

In case you were wondering who these people are, they are very well connected in establishment GOP circles:

The American Accountability Foundation (AAF) is a nonprofit launched by the far-right Conservative Partnership Institute (CPI), which refers to itself as a “government oversight and research organization” that uses “aggressive research and investigations to advance conservative messaging, rapid response, and Congressional investigations.” 

However, much of AAF’s work is actually focused on discounting and discrediting President Biden and his executive nominees through opposition research and negative, often factually inaccurate narratives. The organization uses the X handle @ExposingBiden to push its point of view. During the confirmation hearings for Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown-Jackson, for instance, AAF “put forward [the narrative] that she had supported lighter sentences for people who had been involved with child pornography,” according to journalist Maggie Severns.

AAF has released a number of reports to assist right-wing attacks on “woke capitalism” and ESG investing. In July 2023, it published Naming and Shaming: The ESG Movement’s Efforts to Defund Trade Associations and Put the Advocacy Community Out of Business. The report argues that ESG-related shareholder resolutions at public companies are actually “ideologically motivated to suppress the speech of conservatives and business groups,” specifically through defunding corporate lobbying.

In July 2023, AAF also produced Proxy Wars: Glass Lewis, a report claiming that the proxy advisory company Glass Lewis has an “overwhelmingly liberal” bias that has fueled the “implementation of ESG policies at major corporations.”

In April 2023, AAF published what it calls an investigative report titled None of It Is Our Money: An Introduction to the Leftist Activists and Liberal DC Insiders at BlackRock, Vanguard, and State Street Using Your Money to Advance Their Political Agenda. The report has been publicized by other anti-ESG groups such as the Independent Women’s Forum.

AAF’s anti-ESG research support was also cited in the March 2023 Consumers’ Research report titled Defeating the ESG Attack on the American Free Enterprise System. 

In February 2023, AAF joined other major anti-ESG groups in signing a group letter calling on U.S. senators to “stop Biden’s ideological embezzling of Americans’ retirement accounts.” The following month, it signed onto an Advancing American Freedom letter thanking senators who opposed President Biden’s “woke 401(k)” rule. 

AAF is led by Tom Jones, a former legislative director for Senator Ron Johnson (R-WI) and was head of opposition research for Texas Senator Ted Cruz’s 2016 presidential campaign. According to the Wall Street Journal, AAF has received funding from Leonard Leo’s Marble Freedom Trust, but the Center for Media and Democracy has not been able to document this.

AAF is being investigated by the IRS for violating its tax-exempt status, Politico reported in March 2024.

Of course it is.

This isn’t Trump, folks. This is the GOP establishment marshaling its forces to turn the US Government into an arm of the party. That’s what authoritarian regimes do. Even if Trump goes away, this party apparatus won’t. And the next guy — say, J.D. Vance who seems to really get the program will use it for their purposes.

The earliest general election presidential debate ever is coming up this week and it’s all anyone can talk about. And there’s actually a good reason for that for a change. This debate could be an important moment in an extremely high stakes campaign that’s ridiculously close and may very well stay that way all the way up until election day. Both campaigns are eager to try to shake things up and this is the first opportunity.

For much of the primary season, polling showed that some people were just not convinced that this re-run was actually going to happen. It seemed impossible to believe that the disgraced ex-president Donald Trump would become the nominee and that Joe Biden would not step aside for a younger successor. But here we are. And frankly it was where we were always going to be unless something happened to one or both of them. There was clearly no desire among the many Democratic presidential hopefuls waiting in the wings to primary the incumbent and the MAGA usurpers like Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis flamed out in the primaries while the establishment alternatives like Nikki Haley couldn’t get past Trump’s rabid base.

So, we’re going to party like it’s 2020 all over again (except without the thousands of people succumbing to a deadly virus as the rest of us watched in horror as the president said to drink bleach and “slow the testing down, please.”)

The NY Times reported that as, as usual, Trump doesn’t like to prepare with mock debates or reading briefing books so some people are informally showing up to chat about policy with him. I recall that in both 2016 and 2020, the scuttlebutt was that debate coaches like Chris Christie couldn’t get him to focus and inevitably Trump and his cronies would end up sitting around shooting the breeze so I’d guess that’s probably the case this time as well.

According to Jonathan Karl’s book “Betrayal: The Final Act of the Trump Show”, in the 2020 prep meetings Rudy Giuliani was obsessed with Hunter Biden to the point that one attendee said, “Rudy was being a disruptive force. No matter what we were talking about, all he wanted to do was talk about Hunter.” When Christie, playing Biden, retorted that “You have real nerve talking about relatives taking advantage of political power…Your family traded the influence they have in the White House to make tens of millions of dollars,” Trump got furious and told him, “I’m not going to sit here and put up with this shit … move on.” If he was that sensitive about his family, I’d guess no one is going to bring up his legal problems this time.

Trump gave a speech and held a rally over the weekend and at one of his pre-planned “spontaneous” restaurant stops he said that he considered that to be debate prep so it sounds like he feels that he’s ready to go. He asked the crowd at the rally if he should be “tough and nasty” toward Biden or  “be nice and calm and let him speak?” The crowd predictably indicated the former and Trump agreed.

He gave them a little taste of just how nasty he could be. He said that Biden had gone to a log cabin to study but “he’s sleeping now” and then claimed that just before the debate “he’ll get a shot in the ass” and come out “all jacked up.”

Trump on the debates: So, a little before debate time, he gets a shot in the ass. They want to strengthen him up. So he comes out. He'll come out. Okay. I say he'll come out all jacked up, right? pic.twitter.com/5p1tKxmwsX

— Acyn (@Acyn) June 22, 2024

That disgusting little prediction was slightly better than his earlier lie that Biden will be “pumped up” on cocaine because they found “hundreds of thousands of dollars worth” of it in the White House a month ago. (Just when you think he can’t sink any lower he always does.)

President Biden, meanwhile, is up at Camp David preparing for the debate. He’s no doubt doing what normal candidates do, studying policy papers, practicing with mock debates, running possible lines of attack. It’s clear they’re taking this very seriously and for good reason. It’s vitally important that the American people see the two candidates one on one.

The campaign has a big plan for the debate. Thousands of watch parties are being organized around the country with surrogates fanning out with the message they hope to convey. NBC reported that they have sent out a memo with the three main topics they hope to emphasize in the debate: reproductive rights, the threat to democracy and the economy. The memo states, “President Biden, who is fighting for the American people, and Donald Trump, who will walk on stage as a convicted felon fighting for himself” echoing their theme about Biden being for the people while Trump is only for Trump.

The assumption among the pundits and analysts that the debate is most important for Biden so that he can prove that he’s up for the job. Yes, he’s been president for three and a half years and has an excellent record of success which would normally be a clue but the fact that he looks old seems to override the reality of actual results. After months of the Republicans and the media portraying him as barely alive, at this point Biden’s main job is to not fall down or start drooling. (This explains Trump and his minions’ recent insistence that Biden is a hardcore speed freak.)

Trump, on the other hand, has to show that he isn’t the whining, self-serving, malicious and increasingly incoherent creep we all see at his rallies. It’s hard to imagine that he can do that but who knows? Maybe he’ll get a “shot in the ass” of some kind of tranquilizer and the debate will end up being between a jacked up Biden and a zoned out Trump.

Much of this will be determined by the moderators questions and how they handle the rules of the debate. The candidates’ mics will be cut off when they run out of time which will keep Trump from talking and yelling non-stop as he did last time. There’s no audience so the MAGA cult can turn it into a Trump rally and they will not be allowed to consult with their staff during the break for reasons which aren’t obvious to me. All of this will be an improvement over the usual spectacle we’ve come to expect.

But none of that will matter if the answers are not followed up and the lies aren’t corrected. The debate is on CNN so the two moderators have one of the best fact checkers in the business, Daniel Dale, who we must hope will be in their ears to correct Trump’s litany of lies. That will no doubt make the whole exercise awkward for them but there is no choice.

This debate is the real kickoff to the most important election any American alive has ever experienced. It’s surreal, it’s frightening and it’s oddly dull, all at once. But barring something unexpected, the advantage goes to Biden. After all, the most important thing is that he isn’t Trump, the sorest loser in human history. I’m betting that when people see them both together it won’t be hard to remember why he just keeps losing over and over again.

Salon

Trump had another one of those “episodes” this weekend:

Trump is MENTALLY UNFIT and it’s getting worse “The worst is your hair. I have this beautiful, luxuriant hair… They put on restricters where there’s so much water you don’t know what to do with it. It’s called rain.” This makes absolutely no sense. pic.twitter.com/1IROKna25m

— Harry Sisson (@harryjsisson) June 23, 2024

Here’s the rest of that weird rant until Fox News cuts him off:

Fox News cuts away from Trump in the middle of his unintelligible, confused rant about washing machines https://t.co/puJhTB4Lp2 pic.twitter.com/KCfdPuLtz2

— Biden-Harris HQ (@BidenHQ) June 23, 2024

“No water in your faucets. You ever try buying a new home and you turn on. You want to wash your hair or you wanna wash your hands. You turn on the water and it goes drip, drip the soap. You can’t get it off your hand. So you keep it running for about 10 times longer. You trying, the worst is your hair. I have this beautiful luxuriant hair and I put stuff on. I put it in lather. I like lots of lather because I like it to come out extremely dry because it seems to be slightly thicker that way. And I lather up and then you turn on this crazy shower and the thing drip, drip and you say I’m gonna be here for 45 minutes. What? There’s so much water. You don’t know what to do with it. You know, it’s called rain. It rains a lot in certain places. But, now their idea, you know, did you see the other day? They just, I opened it up and they closed it again. I opened it, they close it, washing machines to wash your dishes. There is a problem. They don’t want you to have any water. They want no water…”

He substituted words twice in that speech. There was that “washing machines to wash your dishes” and the even more bizarre “refuttal”

Trump: And my stupid people when I wanted to refute it, they said, sir, don't dignify it with a refuttal. Refutal or refuttal. What the hell word would that be? Refuttal. Watch, they’ll say he didn’t know refuttal or refutal but they don't know either pic.twitter.com/88N8k2ngBL

— Biden-Harris HQ (@BidenHQ) June 22, 2024

That one’s right up there with “oranges.”

Imagine what would be happening right now if Biden had come out today and said three times that someone should look into "the oranges" of the special counsel investigation. Trump escapes press scrutiny because no one in his cult is bothered by his decline pic.twitter.com/xgc9ViAk2q

— Robert Mackey (@RobertMackey) February 9, 2024

I don’t remember him doing this in 2016. He would ramble on but I don’t recall the strange word substitutions or the incoherent stream of consciousness rants. We’ve heard him whine about the showers and the low flow toilets before but the way he’s telling the story now is very disjointed and weird. It’s like the shark and boat battery thing.

I don’t know if it’s cognitive decline, dementia or just so much stress and distraction that he can’t think straight but something’s off. And it’s happening more often.