Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

I would really like to see some follow-through on this if Harris wins. (Needless to say, Trump will make sure it never happens if he does.)

Senate Finance Committee Chair Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) and House Committee on Oversight and Accountability Ranking Member Jamie Raskin (D-M.D.) called today on Attorney General Merrick Garland to appoint a special counsel to investigate possible violations of the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) by Jared Kushner, son-in-law and former senior White House advisor to ex-President Donald Trump.

As part of investigations launched last Congress by House and Senate Democrats, Senate investigators have uncovered that since the end of the Trump administration through mid-2024, Kushner’s firm Affinity Partners has received as much as $157 million in fees from foreign clients—including $87 million from the Saudi government—while generating no return on investment, paying zero earnings to investors, and investing only a small fraction of funds it has received from the sovereign wealth funds of Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates.

Public reports indicate that Kushner remained politically active throughout that time period, particularly on matters of U.S. foreign policy related to the Middle East. 

“While on the Saudi government’s payroll, Mr. Kushner is simultaneously serving as a political consultant to former President Trump and acting as a shadow diplomat and political advisor to Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman and other foreign principals. Despite being engaged in plainly political activities, Mr. Kushner has not made FARA disclosures to DOJ related to the millions of dollars he receives annually by entities owned and controlled by the governments of Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Qatar,” Wyden and Raskin wrote. “The scale of these undisclosed foreign payments to Mr. Kushner coupled with the national security implications of his apparent ongoing efforts to sell political influence to the highest foreign bidder are unprecedented and demand action from DOJ.”

FARA is designed to ensure that the American public and lawmakers are made aware of foreign efforts to influence U.S. public opinion and political activities, and requires individuals acting as an “agent of a foreign principal” to register with DOJ. In their letter, Wyden and Raskin cite multiple examples of political activity Kushner engaged in while being paid by the Saudi government and other Gulf states without registering under FARA, in possible violation of federal law:  

Advising the Saudi Crown Prince on U.S. foreign policy; 

Advising former President Trump and his presidential campaign;

Selling geopolitical advisory and political advocacy services to foreign government clients through his private equity fund;

Arranging meetings on foreign policy with the Qatari prime minister on U.S. soil;

Engaging in political fundraising in support of Trump’s campaign; and

Influencing members of Congress on domestic and foreign policy.

He is 100% corrupt and has been messing in foreign policy just as much as Trump with his chats with Bibi every night.

I worry that the Democrats are going to do one of their patented “lets not look in the rerview mirror” thing again and it is completely unacceptable. It’s because they did that going back decades that we are where we are today. If they want the rule of law to be respected and useful, they have to hold these criminals accountable.

We don’t have to think about this right now. But after the election it’s going to be a very live topic and there will be massive pressure to let bygones be bygones to “bind up the nation’s wounds, blah,blah, balh.” No. Just no. Not this time.

Maryland Rep. Jamie Raskin, the top Democrat on the House Oversight Committee sent out a statement this week drawing attention to the fact that the Trump campaign is dragging its feet with respect to the presidential transition process in which both candidates are expected to participate in anticipation of a possible win in November. Generally they start months ahead of time to get a head start on vetting people for staffing the large number of political appointee jobs throughout the administration and coordinating with the current staff to ensure a smooth transition to the new presidency. So far, the Trump team has missed two important deadlines to sign agreements to get it started.

Trump, you may recall, doesn’t respect this process very much, having fired his first transition team right after the election in 2016. And he prevented the Biden team from accessing the process in 2020 while he contested the election dangerously delaying them from getting started. However, one might think it’s a bit odd for them to do that this time since once you sign the papers you have access to money and services that make the whole thing easier.

But it doesn’t take a very stable genius to figure out why they are refusing. According to the NY Times, until all the documents are signed they can avoid the rules limiting private contributions to their transition and certain ethics rules that bar conflicts of interest. The Trump team doesn’t care for such restraints.

Trump has refused to take the usual security briefings, giving the excuse that he doesn’t trust the Biden administration (or the “deep state”) not to leak and blame it on him so at least we don’t have to worry about that. But we can see by this early decision to delay this standard bureaucratic process that our impression that they don’t plan to play by any of the usual rules is correct. The corruption that characterized the first term is already evident.

The Trump transition team is headed by Howard Lutnick, a longtime personal friend of Trump’s of the Wall Street firm Cantor Fitzgerald and Linda McMahon, Trump’s director of the Small Business Administration and former wife and business partner of Vince McMahon who ran World Wrestling Entertainment.

According to the NY Daily News, McMahon has just been accused of “knowingly allowing the grooming, exploitation and sexual abuse of young boys throughout the 1980s and ’90s,” from when she was helping to run the WWE, according to a new lawsuit filed on behalf of five alleged victims. This would probably be cause for her to resign from any other presidential transition but considering his own history of sexual abuse it’s unlikely that Trump would care about such mundane accusations. It’s par for the course in any Trump administration,

Politico reported that Lutnick is causing quite a bit of consternation among Trump loyalists who believe that he’s edging out members for the first administration so that he can place his own people in the White House for his personal benefit. Republicans on Capitol Hill are likewise sounding the alarm due to the fact that he seems to be leveraging his position to lobby on behalf of Canter Fitzgerald among other investments including some very controversial crypto projects.

But Lutnick has a very important ally in Donald Trump Jr who is taking an important role in transition planning. He has said that he expects to have veto power to “block the guys that would be a disaster. He told Axios’ Mike Allen:

I want a veto power to cut out each and every one of those people,” he said, adding that an “advantage” of a second Trump term is that “now we know” who possible administration officials are.

He claims to trust Lutnick implicitly to pick the right people, telling Politico, “there’s nobody more loyal and capable than Howard, which is why my father picked him to help put together the greatest collection of talent to ever serve in the United States government.”

Lutnick claims that any complaints are all sour grapes coming from people associated with Project 2025 who have apparently been excommunicated from Trump’s inner circle for making the former president look bad. But the NY Times reports that there’s a different, much more secretive group that’s been putting together a very similar project, called “The America First Agenda” produced by the America First Policy Institute, a group formed four years ago in the wake of the 2020 election. Unlike Project 2025 this group is working directly with the Trump campaign, preparing for the second term. As it happens one of its directors is Linda McMahon, the co-chair of the Trump transition.

According to the Times, this agenda isn’t as voluminous as the 900 page Project 2025 and doesn’t feature some of the more sensational policies like outlawing pornography and prohibiting the mailing of abortion pills but it’s MAGA all the way. It calls for policies like mandatory ultrasounds for medication abortion and establishing only two legal genders along with a bunch of standard issue conservative movement policies going back decades. They claim to have already drafted nearly 300 executive orders ready for Trump’s signature.

There is one issue they take even further than Project 2025, however. It calls for “the elimination of nearly all civil service protections for federal workers by making them at-will employees .” That aspect of the plan is being implemented by none other than Howard Lutnick who has apparently frozen out all those Project 2025 Trump lackeys who signed on with the wrong team.

So you can see why the campaign doesn’t feel the need to bother with a traditional transition process. They are already vetting hundreds of MAGA faithful and planning to start dramatically expanding executive power the minute Trump takes power. But as with everything else associated with Trump, the whole project appears to be one part grift and one part vengeance with loyalists already backstabbing each other and currying favor with the Dear Leader. Some things never change. 

Salon

Tyler Perry’s analogy

We are a quilt in this country, Tyler Perry told a Kamala Harris rally in Atlanta on Thursday. A nation of immigrants. “We are all shapes, sizes and colors, but we are one.”

Look, unless you are a Native American, you and your people came from somewhere else. And even indigenous people on this continent came from somewhere else. Just over 20,000 years before Donald Trump and his America Firsters arrived. I mean, if we’re claiming privilege based on who was here first? But no. MAGA wants it all.

Perry launched a pointed barb against Donald Trump and his MAGA movement, saying he voted for a candidate who understands that America is a quilt.

“And I could never stand with a candidate who wants America to be a sheet.”

Perry paused to let the dual meaning sink in. The crowd didn’t miss it in Atlanta, Georgia.

Tyler Perry’s quilt vs sheet analogy is probably the line of the night. pic.twitter.com/KAPObHsXsW

— Renee 🪷 (@PettyLupone) October 24, 2024

Biennial Republican celebration

October is normally leaf-looker season here in the Cesspool of Sin. But after Hurricane Helene’s tragic visit last month, not this year. (We can’t drink the water yet and victims are still missing.) But neither rain, nor snow, neither darkness of heart nor climate change-spawned natural disaster will stop MAGAland’s celebration of migrant caravan season.

Republicans celebrate biennially, like clockwork, observes The New Republic’s Greg Sargent. Caravan season may not be an October surprise these days, but it is an October miracle.

Rep. Elise Stefanik of New York is chair of the House Republican Conference. And by Jiminy, she will “stop the madness” by electing a madman.

A Customs and Border Patrol spokesperson tells Newsweek: “We are aware of recent reports of a migrant caravan that has materialized in Southern Mexico, as we hear about several times per year.”

This is pretty shocking:

In the past five weeks, Trump’s operation has spent more than $29 million on TV ads criticizing Vice President Kamala Harris for supporting transgender surgeries for inmates and illegal immigrants in detention, according to data from the media tracking firm AdImpact. That makes the topic, by far, the biggest focal point when it comes to Trump’s ad spending—one of the best barometers of messaging priority there is. By contrast, the campaign has spent $5 million over that same time period on TV ads on the economy, making that topic their fifth-most emphasized.

The campaign’s elevation of transgender issues above the economy constitutes one of the biggest bets in presidential politics. The former rates as among the least important to voters according to public opinion polls; the latter their top concern. The trans-heavy focus also seems to conflict with months of insistence—from the Trump campaign to the pundit class—that the ex-president will win because of inflation and jobs.

Executing such a gambit at this late stage of the campaign represents a major roll of the dice: one that could either reset culture war politics for years to come in presidential races or, if Trump loses, go down as a major, even historic, tactical blunder.

I’m going to guess the latter. I really doubt that most people are going to be persuaded to vote for Trump because of this. The ads are so cruel and stupid it makes me want to throw my coffee cup at the screen:

Trump strategist and pollster John McLaughlin says that this is “asymmetrical political warfare” in that modern campaigns aren’t about policies, they’re about character.

He’s not wrong. But this kind of crude bullying and scapegoating of a very small and vulnerable minority says everything about the character of the people who are doing it. I suspect that even many of those people who are uncomfortable with transgender girls competing in sports aren’t moved by this cruel message. Sure, the racists and the xenophobes and homophobes like it, but they’re already voting for Trump. I can’t imagine this is persuading anyone who isn’t already a hateful MAGA voter.

By the way, out of tens of thousands of prisoners, there is a record of only 2 inmates ever having this surgery (as required under the law.)

The New York Times reports on Trump’s latest “policy” proposal:

During a Fox News segment on Monday, Mr. Trump took questions at a barbershop in the Bronx. When asked if the United States could potentially end all federal taxation, Mr. Trump said the country could return to the economic policies in the late 19th century, when there was no federal income tax.

“It had all tariffs — it didn’t have an income tax,” Mr. Trump said. “Now we have income taxes, and we have people that are dying. They’re paying tax, and they don’t have the money to pay the tax.”

In June, Mr. Trump floated the idea of replacing federal revenue from income taxes with money received from tariffs. Mr. Trump has not provided specific details of how that would work, and it is unclear if he wants to eliminate all federal taxes, including corporate income taxes and payroll taxes, or only end the individual income tax.

Either way, both liberal and conservative experts have dismissed his idea as mathematically impossible and economically destructive. Even if Republicans control Congress, lawmakers are unlikely to dismantle the income tax system. Yet Mr. Trump’s combination of tax cuts and tariff increases has been central to his political pitch.

“There is a way, if what I’m planning comes out,” Mr. Trump said of ending income taxes.

My cat has a better understanding of history and economics than Donald Trump. Here’s history professor Eric Rauchway, the author of Murdering McKinley: The Making of Theodore Roosevelt’s America writing about Trump’s tariffs for the Bulwark:

“Our country,” he says of that decade, “was probably . . . the wealthiest it ever was because it was a system of tariffs.”  His love of the era has become so pronounced that it’s now a fixture of his stump speech, meant to defend the massive tariffs now central to the economic platform he’s promising in a second term. There’s just one problem: Trump’s comments are historically oblivious, evincing no awareness of the depression of the 1890s, whose severity was owed, in part, to the protectionist tariffs he praises. 

He goes on to lay out the full history of the disastrous tariff policy of the era. Here are just a couple of highlights:

For as long as there had been Republicans and longer—even during the days of their predecessors, the Whigs—a high tariff had proudly occupied a place in their platforms. In the era before the Sixteenth Amendment, a tariff—a tax on imports—was a major source of federal income. But Republicans wanted tariffs not for revenue, but for protection, as they liked to say: a tariff so high it would render foreign imports undesirable to the consumer. U.S.-based manufacturers could then raise their prices to levels just shy of these tax-induced heights and still appear competitive in the marketplace. Consumers would not buy imports; tariff revenue to the U.S. Treasury would actually fall; the higher prices Americans paid would go into the pockets of American companies.

In theory, these domestic industries would plow their tariff-produced profits into research and development, improving their products and paying higher wages to workers. In practice, this trickle-down theory worked no better in the nineteenth century than it did a century later, and tariffs helped make the owners of U.S. factories into the richest of men.

Through a series of cascading events (including a disastrous pander to western constituencies that undermined confidence in the dollar) these tariffs precipitated a massive depression that lasted for years.

Before the Republicans decided on this course of action, the economy was booming. As has been the continuing pattern ever since, they took that as an opportunity to adopt a trickle down policy so they could line the pockets of the already wealthy while average citizens paid the price. I understand why Trump and his Billionaire Boyz Club like it. I can’t imagine why anyone else would by such an obvious con:

The right thing to do on the heels of the boom on the 1880s and the government surplus might well have been to lower tariffs. But the McKinley Republicans wanted to give something to their Eastern supporters while they were wooing their Western supporters. And, in the way of nineteenth-century Republicans, they thought tariffs were a beautiful thing. They reduced government income, they increased government expenditure, and they undercut foreign investors’ confidence in U.S. reliability, leading to catastrophic effects for ordinary Americans.

Trump is preparting to do the same thing if he gets the chance. Don’t count on his essential stupidity to prevent it. He’s got a whole bunch of billionaires whispering in his ear. He’ll do what they tell him.

Harvard professors Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, experts on democratic systems and authors of “Tyranny of the Minority” have a great essay in today’s NY Times today about the various ways a society can protect itself from anti-democratic forces. I am including a gift link so that you can read the whole thing.

Here’s the intro:

Democratic self-rule contains a paradox. It is a system premised on openness and competition. Any ambitious party or politician should have a shot at running for office and winning. But what if a major candidate seeks to dismantle that very system?

America confronts this problem today. Donald Trump poses a clear threat to American democracy. He was the first president in U.S. history to refuse to accept defeat, and he illegally attempted to overturn the results of the 2020 election. Now, on the brink of returning to the White House, Mr. Trump is forthrightly telling Americans that if he wins, he plans to bend, if not break, our democracy.

Mr. Trump tells us he plans to prosecute his political rivals, including Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, Liz Cheney and other members of the Jan. 6 Select Committee; deploy the army to repress protest; and order the deportation of 15 to 20 million people, including some legal immigrants.

We have been studying democratic crisis and authoritarianism for 30 years. Between the two of us, we have written five books on those subjects. We can think of few major national candidates for office in any democracy since World War II who have been this openly authoritarian.

They outline five different approaches to combatting assaults on democracy with examples of how it’s worked in other countries. It’s happened here too but in the past we quelled it with what they call “partisan gatekeeping”

In the absence of legal tools to block extremist threats, the responsibility for fending off such threats falls to political parties. In a healthy democracy, party leaders police their own ranks, expelling antidemocratic elements or refusing to nominate extremists or demagogues for public office.

American parties were effective gatekeepers throughout the 20th century. In the early 1920s, Henry Ford, the plain-spoken founder of Ford Motor Company, who was admired by many Americans but whose extremism and anti-Semitism was embraced by Hitler and the Nazis, considered running for president as a Democrat. Early polls showed him leading the pack of potential candidates. But Democratic leaders never seriously considered him. Finding the party’s gates closed, Ford abandoned his presidential aspirations.

Half a century ago, Republican leaders engaged in self-policing when they joined in congressional investigations into wrongdoing by President Richard Nixon. When Mr. Nixon’s abuse of power was brought to light, key Republican leaders supported impeachment. Their actions shifted public opinion in important ways. It was not until a group of Republican lawmakers came out in favor of impeachment beginning in late July 1974 that a clear majority of Americans supported Mr. Nixon’s removal from office.

We all know how that’s worked out with this current threat. Trump tried to stage a coup and incited a violent insurrection and his party refused to use the one tool that could have prevented him from ever doing it again: conviction in the second impeachment trial. They are accomplices now.

Right now we’re trying what they call a “containment strategy” which is to try to create a popular front consisting of ideological opponents coming together to stop this illiberal movement. That’s the strategy of people like Liz Cheney and others to work with a very unified Democratic coalition to defeat Trump. It’s difficult because most Republicans are cowards and traitors:

But containment is hard in a polarized two-party system. Most of the prominent Republicans who have not endorsed Mr. Trump, including Senator Mitt Romney, former Vice President Mike Pence, and former President George W. Bush, declined to back Ms. Harris, opting instead to remain on the sidelines. Other leading Republicans who declared Mr. Trump unfit for office after 2020, such as Senator Mitch McConnell, the minority leader, and Nikki Haley, a former South Carolina governor and U.N. ambassador, who ran against Mr. Trump this year, now support him. As long as Republican leaders who privately view Mr. Trump as a grave danger refuse to go public, most Republicans voters will remain unmoved.

There are more options, none of which are currently on the menu mostly because many people who should know better still don’t seem to see the threat.

These assaults on democracy have been happening with some frequency around the world so it says something that these authors say they’ve rarely seen major national candidates as openly authoritarian as Trump. It sent a chill down my spine to read that. After I read how lamely we are resisting it, I felt another one. This may very well be our last chance.

There’s a lot of chatter about the early vote with Donald Trump changing his tune and suggesting that the GOP is breaking all early vote records. (“Nobody’s ever seen anything like it!) It does appear that the early vote is going well but it’s worth taking a look at some analysis as to what it means.

Tom Bonier is the early vote data guy and he wrote this on his substack today, discussing why this year is different:

Well, for one, we’re not in the peak of a deadly pandemic. The 2020 election saw the biggest liberalization of access to early voting as states adapted to the realities of the pandemic. And it was a great success, with over 100 million Americans safely casting their vote before Election Day. Of course, there was an asymmetry here. Democrats were more covid-conscious, and therefore more likely to cast an early vote (take Pennsylvania, where registered Democrats outnumbered Republicans in the early vote by an almost 3 to 1 margin). And at the same time, Republicans largely abandoned voting by mail, due to Donald Trump claiming that mail voting was fraudulent.

Republicans acknowledge that their failure to drive their voters out early in 2020 put them at a strategic disadvantage, and have since committed significant resources to turning that around in this election. Just yesterday the New York Times reported “Republicans have spent months and millions of dollars on an effort to push former President Donald J. Trump’s most loyal supporters to change their minds about voting early.”

It is also important to keep in mind that many states have changed access to early voting. Michigan added early in person voting, while North Carolina put stricter voter ID laws in place. Georgia put additional regulations into place on mail voting. 

All of these changes will make any comparisons in the current early vote to 2020 numbers extremely difficult, at best.

With Democrats shifting from early voting to Election Day, and Republicans doing the opposite, it is safe to say the expectation is that the early voting will skew much more Republican than it did in 2020. So at what point can we draw conclusions as to which side has an intensity advantage? We may not be able to, though when the results in a state defy expectations (as they currently appear to in Michigan and Wisconsin, where partisan models suggest the early vote is actually more Democratic than it was at this point in 2020), that is noteworthy. 

He goes on to discuss the specifics in North Carolina, Nevada and Pennsylvania which is very interesting. He concludes with this:

While banking votes early is obviously important, it’s also important who is voting. The early evidence is that Republicans are cannibalizing likely Election Day voters, not turning out lower propensity voters early, which is always the priority. As a matter of fact, across the battleground states, 92% of voters who have cast their ballot so far also voted in the 2020 election. 

In short, it means that something that was already difficult before the massive vote-mode shifts we’re seeing happening this year will be exponentially more difficult. And in turn, we are seeing exponentially more flawed analyses, so buyer beware. As I noted earlier, my general approach this cycle is to stay in this context of expected vote-mode shifting, so when the early vote looks close to 2020 (or better) for Democrats, that is a very good sign, and when it looks worse for Democrats, like in North Carolina, we are left with the question of how much worse is problematic. 

As I’ve mentioned before, I have been taken in before by early vote euphoria and I’m very resistant to making too much of it one way or another. As Bonier points out, comparisons are very dicey since the rules are changing and more and more people have availability (and, I would guess, the Republicans are making it harder in some places.) This is still a new thing and we just don’t have much to go on.

Update:

Bonier: They’re not creating new votes at this point… what we’re really looking for are signs of intensity and enthusiasm from each base. Where that comes from is looking at new voters or infrequent, lower-propensity voters and who’s turning out more of them.

In Pennsylvania,… pic.twitter.com/Hk1aiDjTKo

— Acyn (@Acyn) October 24, 2024

Trump declares he will pardon January 6 criminals who violently assaulted police officers “on day one”.
pic.twitter.com/IEi7YbNJAE

— The Intellectualist (@highbrow_nobrow) October 24, 2024

Of course he will. And he’ll do this too:

Former President Donald Trump said Thursday that, if elected to a second term in November, he would immediately fire special counsel Jack Smith, who brought two federal indictments against Trump.

Conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt asked Trump if he plans to pardon himself or fire Smith on the day he would take the oath of office.

“It’s so easy — I would fire him within two seconds,” said Trump, who added that he got “immunity at the Supreme Court” and called Smith a “crooked person.”

Last year, Trump warned that Smith and other Justice Department officials would wind up in a mental institution if he’s re-elected.

He’s going to be a dictator on day one. He’s made that clear.