If only …
I doubt it will happen, unfortunately. I wish these two were moderating instead of Tapper and Bash.
"what digby sez..."
Digby's Hullabaloo Posts
It’s never a good bet
Well, this is eye-catching from Jeet Heer:
“In other words, a significant portion of America’s economic elite are either autocrats, cowards, or so single-mindedly rapacious that they are indifferent to the survival of democracy.”
Heer begins:
While Donald Trump’s felony conviction for falsifying business documents is hurting him with independent voters, it has only increased his popularity with a demographic cohort that is much smaller in number—but still has an outsize role to play in election outcomes: the super-rich. Axios reports that a Morning Consult poll shows that 49 percent of independent voters think Trump should drop out of the presidential race because he is a felon. This strong negative result is already in evidence in polls showing that Trump’s persistent lead over rival Joe Biden has shrunk and the presidential race is now dead even.
But this bad news for Trump, the BBC reports, has been countered by another development: “Ultra-wealthy Republican donors are rallying behind former US President Donald Trump following his historic trial and criminal conviction.” Indeed, for some tycoons, Trump’s courtroom troubles are reasons for supporting him. For Shaun Maguire, a partner in the powerful Silicon Valley firm Sequoia Capital, Trump’s long list of indictments was a “radicalizing event.”
“Bluntly, that’s part of why I’m supporting him,” Maguire wrote in a long post on X (formerly known as Twitter) announcing a $300,000 donation to Trump’s campaign. “I believe our justice system is being weaponized against him.” Aside from Maguire, the BBC lists other extremely wealthy Trump supporters, including casino owner Miriam Adelson, hedge fund manager Bill Ackman, fracking pioneer Harold Hamm, and Blackstone Group CEO Steve Schwarzman. Some of these moguls, notably Schwarzman, had previously been critical of Trump for his instigation of an attack on the Capitol as part of scheme to overturn the 2020 election results. But in recent months, they and other members of the 1 percent have decided to put their money on Trump. As a result, Joe Biden’s once formidable financial lead over Donald Trump is rapidly shrinking. In the month of April—for the first time in this election cycle—Trump started raking in more money than Biden.
In response to the rich rallying to Trump, The Economist published a polemic by LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman arguing that investors should realize that Trump’s return to the White House would undermine the rule of law, an essential prerequisite for capitalist health. Hoffman acknowledges the “lamentable” reality “that a growing number of America’s corporate and financial leaders are opening their wallets for Donald Trump.”
Here’s some of what Hoffman wrote:
He and his ideological allies have been quite explicit: upon regaining power, they intend to corrupt the legal system to use the state against political opponents. Some American elites support this autocratic agenda because in such a Trumpist regime they expect to be the new oligarchs. Others fear that opposing Mr. Trump will bring retaliation, so seek safety by pledging loyalty.
Most conventionally, of course, there is the simple siren promise of a second Trump term’s lower corporate-tax rates and softer regulatory enforcement.
That’s right. They hate paying the cost of the civilization that made their businesses rich so much that they’ll bet on an autocrat who would make the country unsafe for doing business. (Do they teach basic logic in business schools or just wealth maximization?)
But, ooooh, we could be the new oligarchs! Like Russia’s oligarchs. Think of the money to be made selling defenestration insurance! (We ourselves will never need that, of course.)
Heer suggests that Hoffman’s warnings are lost on Trump’s wealthy supporters because “they are as inherently autocratic as Trump himself.”
Stay with me.
Marley’s ghost carried the chains he unknowingly forged in his life. Seems to me we rarely recognize the traditions and habits of mind passed down for so many generations that they’re almost genetic. Patriarchy for one. Race animosity is another. When friends insist on labeling economic harms a product of late-stage capitalism or neoliberal policies, I wince. Those views are too 20th-century. I’d look further back, Much further.
It’s why readers may be tired of me branding flag-draped MAGAs royalists, not colonists. Some habits of mind, some personality types even, run deeper than modern economic analysis. Caste runs deeper. (India banning it didn’t make it go away.) And antisemitism. It took Russia barely a decade from the fall of the USSR to revert to being a nation of oligarchs and peasants, not unlike what it had been before the October Revolution.
What we see today is feudalism trying to reassert itself. It did not vanish with the Magna Carta and The Enlightenment. It just went underground for a few centuries. It was present in the “Cotton is King” days under slavery in the South. It popped up again for a time during the Gilded Age before Progressive Era reforms. It’s been trying to crawl out from under its rock ever since FDR.
Our 21st century plutocrats were only waiting, biding their time.
Arguing for economic populism, Heer concludes, “Trump-loving plutocrats are a threat to democracy, and there is political capital to be reaped by highlighting that fact and promising to rein in their outsize economic power.”
Joe Biden warns, “It’s never ever a good bet to bet against America.” Look where these guys are placing bets and call them out for it. For what they’re doing. For who they really are.
● ● ● ● ● ● ● ●
For The Win, 5th Edition is ready for download. Request a copy of my free countywide GOTV planning guide at ForTheWin.us.
Momma always said feral is as feral does
Yes, it’s true that just over a third of Republicans are unaware that their party’s nominee has been indicted for conspiring to overturn the 2020 election. But that says more about them than it does about Joe Biden’s and Democrats’ prospects for November. Even most of the third-plus that are aware of Trump’s indictments will vote for him anyway. It’s the slow bleeding of support that’s begun that will doom Trump’s reelection. Why do you think he’s working more systematically than ever to prepare his minions for overturning democracy and instituting authoritarian rule when he loses in 2024? He doesn’t need a majority to do it, just general American complacency and numbness to his nuttiness.
Yes, Trump rants like someone you’d cross the street to avoid. But it’s not the unwell, conscious parts of his brain plotting authoritarian rule. That’s his feral instincts at work, the ones that have kept him out of jail into his late seventies.
Adam Parkhomenko lays out how authoritarianism-by-numbers works for Los Angeles Magazine:
Donald Trump will be a dictator from Day One. He will seek revenge against his adversaries. He will fire civil servants not loyal to him. He will pardon insurrectionists and terminate the constitution.
He’s said as much to fawning right-wing interviewers, and he makes these statements by design, Parkhomenko explains:
An age-old gambit from the authoritarian playbook, the strategy behind Trump’s statements is one that worked in Nazi Germany, in the Soviet Union, and in other repressive regimes throughout history. Evil intentions are floated. Reactions are assessed. Weaknesses are exploited. Intentions are repeated. Wrongs become desensitized. Scapegoats are named. Opposition is divided and conquered. Power is grabbed. Distractions are created. Dissent is squashed. Then, with the groundwork complete, what was once considered unthinkable becomes reality.
Trump, like aspiring authoritarians before him, is fostering a national environment in which his self-first vision of governance can be achieved. He is conditioning and reconditioning Americans to tolerate central tenets of authoritarianism. Sadly, the sinister strategy is thus far working. Each time he speaks of eroding the norms of American governance, our national and individual alarm bells ring a little quieter than the time before. Numbness permeates about the grave danger he represents.
In addition to Republicans not being aware of Trump’s indictments, Rachel Bitecofer warns that Americans in general are unaware of what the Trump Reorganization’s Project 2025 has planned in its roadmap to autocracy.
What you don’t know can hurt you. And what you think you know and thus stopped paying attention to can as well.
As Trump’s repeated authoritarian statements wear out moderate voters’ emotions, they also provide tantalizing red meat to his base. MAGA diehards are thrilled by Trump’s every suggestion of upending norms in America because they wish to live in a country in which Trump is their all-powerful leader. They want Donald Trump as their Vladimir Putin or their Kim Jong Un.
“We have no king but Caesar!” cried the Hebrew chief priests to Pontious Pilate in rejecting Christ. Jesus-shmesus. Who needs freedom of religion and self-governance?
“Donny Trump stashed his Kim Jong Un love letters with his passports,” Marcy Wheeler (emptyweheel) tweeted this morning. He so wants an invitation to their autocrats club, even as they laugh at him like other world leaders.
But recognize that while Trump’s conscious mind is scrambled eggs, the feral parts still have agency and focused purpose that can do great harm. Think Frankenstein’s monster:
Former president and convicted felon Donald Trump has told America who he admires, who he is, and how he intends to destroy the foundations of our republic. After years of conditioning, many voters will dismiss the former president’s statements as hyperbole and nothing more than ‘Trump being Trump.’ Others will wrongly believe that sweeping changes could never come to pass in America, even if he is elected. Millions adopted a similar mindset throughout history, and like authoritarians before him, Trump is counting on mass complacency.
Authoritarian regimes come to power when the population fails to take threats to their freedoms seriously, or when the population fails to recognize emerging authoritarianism until it is too late. To stop Donald Trump from becoming the dictator he wishes to be, the American people and our institutions must recognize what he is doing and be vigilant enough to stop him. We must defeat him on November 5.
Don’t let others save the republic for you. It’s not a private fight. Anyone can join.
● ● ● ● ● ● ● ●
For The Win, 5th Edition is ready for download. Request a copy of my free countywide GOTV planning guide at ForTheWin.us.
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) warned that the “progressive movement is undermined” when criticism of the Israeli government turns to antisemitism.
Ocasio-Cortez, along with other members of the progressive congressional “Squad,” has called for a ceasefire in the Israel-Hamas conflict amid thousands of civilian casualties in Gaza. Israel has said strikes will continue until Hamas is eliminated following the terror group killing more than 1,0000 and kidnapping hundreds in an Oct. 7 attack.
Ocasio-Cortez hosted a talk on Monday with Jewish Council for Public Affairs CEO Amy Spitalnick and public policy strategist and activist Stacy Burdett centered on rising reports of antisemitism in the United States amid college campus protests condemning Israel’s government.
The New York congresswoman stressed that criticism of Israel is not automatically antisemitic, but stressed that antisemitism is “on the rise.” When rhetoric “crosses a line,” she argued, into hateful speech then it “undermines” the “progressive movement.”
“Criticism of the Israeli government is not inherently antisemitic and criticism of zionism is not automatically antisemitic. That being true does not mean that we should not recognize criticism and when that criticism crosses a line into real harms against our Jewish community,” she said. “Antisemitism is an assault on our values as Americans and especially as progressives.”
“Acknowledging” that antisemitism is on the rise, she added, “does not take away from fights for liberation.”
“When the Jewish community is threatened, the progressive movement is undermined,” Ocasio-Cortez said. “That’s why it’s so important that we reject it as fiercely as we reject and look for misogyny, Islamophobia, or any form of bigotry and discrimination in any space that we occupy.”
She is a true leader. The best.
Nobody has been more critical of Israel and the Biden administration over Gaza. But she’s absolutely right to admonish people about antisemitism which is definitely in the rise and is being commonly wielded by people who apparently don’t know better. She is the right person to carry this message.
Later that day:
Fascist scum John Kelly on the record:
“What can I add that has not already been said?A person that thinks those who defend their country in uniform, or are shot down or seriously wounded in combat, or spend years being tortured as POWs are all ‘suckers’ because ‘there is nothing in it for them.’ A person that did not want to be seen in the presence of military amputees because ‘it doesn’t look good for me.’ A person who demonstrated open contempt for a Gold Star family – for all Gold Star families – on TV during the 2016 campaign, and rants that our most precious heroes who gave their lives in America’s defense are ‘losers’ and wouldn’t visit their graves in France.
“A person who is not truthful regarding his position on the protection of unborn life, on women, on minorities, on evangelical Christians, on Jews, on working men and women. A person that has no idea what America stands for and has no idea what America is all about. A person who cavalierly suggests that a selfless warrior who has served his country for 40 years in peacetime and war should lose his life for treason – in expectation that someone will take action. A person who admires autocrats and murderous dictators. A person that has nothing but contempt for our democratic institutions, our Constitution, and the rule of law.
“There is nothing more that can be said,. God help us.”
Just 35% of Republicans say they’re familiar with Trump being indicted for conspiring to overturn the 2020 election. Nearly as many — 34% — say he has not been indicted for that. That’s ridiculous. Have they heard of Jack Smith who Trump called a “dumb son-of-a-bitch” at his rally yesterday? Probably not. They just know generally that Trump is being persecuted like Jesus and it’s all a rigged hoax.
Some do know about his NY case though. And it thrills them apparently:
After all that he now figures he has them in the bag and doesn’t have to brag about it anymore. They love him more than Jesus, after all:
Hours before Donald Trump was expected to make a virtual address to a Christian advocacy organization that wants to ban all abortions and calls the procedure “child sacrifice,” the former president’s campaign said Monday that he would only give a pre-recorded welcome message lasting less than two minutes — in which he does not say the word “abortion” at all.
Trump was scheduled to make a virtual “address” Monday at an event hosted by the Danbury Institute, an organization that also seeks to ban same-sex marriage and use the Bible to guide public policy, according to its website. The organizers, who promoted Trump as a speaker, noted on X the event sold out.
But in his remarks, obtained first by POLITICO, Trump doesn’t make mention of “abortion.”
“We have to defend religious liberty, free speech, innocent life and the heritage and traditions that built America into the greatest nation in the history of the world,” Trump is expected to say, according to a script of his remarks provided by his campaign. “I know that each of you is protecting those values every day — and I hope we’ll be defending them side by side for the next four years.”
You would think that he’d want to take a victory lap with this group, of all groups. But he’s very nervous about abortion at this point and worries that he’ll be tied to a group that seeks to ban all abortions nationally.
I’m sorry, it’s too late. He is the guy who’s spent the last two years bragging about ending abortion rights and his fatuous claim that sending it to the states was what ‘everyone” always wanted is ridiculous. This one’s on him and he can’t escape it no matter how much he tries to distance himself from the anti-abortion extremists. They may accept his wink and nod but nobody else will.
I can’t say that I’m surprised the Republicans are working hard to undermine and rig the vote in every swing state. I am a little bit surprised they are openly admitting it:
THE PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION this year will come down to seven states — but there’s one that Donald Trump and his most committed lieutenants see as a blueprint for corrupting future local and national elections: Georgia.
The Peach State is unique — it’s the sole battleground state in which the Republican Party has total control over the levers of power: a trifecta in the state House, Senate, and governorship. Over the past four years, Trump-loving elements of the Georgia GOP have wielded that advantage in a crusade to convert discredited election-conspiracy theories into policies well ahead of Election Day 2024. It is an alarmingly anti-democratic experiment that Trumpland and much of the GOP hope to take national.
“Georgia is our laboratory,” a source close to the former president tells Rolling Stone. “If you can get this up and running in Georgia, you get a road map for other states, maybe the country as a whole.”
[…]
Republican operatives have remade Georgia’s state election board, executive branch, Legislature, and legal ecosystems, all in Donald Trump’s image. Conservatives in the state Assembly have unleashed thousands of voter eligibility challenges on county election boards — an effort that will be turbocharged with a new election law. Lawmakers also worked to limit Raffensperger’s role in overseeing elections, while sapping resources for election administration.
Conservative activists heckle election officials on a regular basis with the conspiracy theories Trump birthed, and an indicted election denier — now the state’s lieutenant governor — pushes Trump’s agenda in the Assembly as he eyes higher office. Trump sits atop this sprawling network, receiving updates on progress from political advisers and other MAGA acolytes.
Lawyers close to Trump are already preparing for the former president to claim fraud in Georgia and challenge the results of the election — even in the event that he wins — just to prove a point about imaginary “fraud” in Democratic areas. “There’s massive fraud, so that should be … solved, no matter who wins in Georgia or any state,” says one lawyer and conservative-movementarian who has discussed the matter with Trump, although they present no evidence to back such claims. “You can’t let the left get away with it just because their cheating did not work.”
He challenged results in places he didn’t win last time. And he certainly did it in 2016 when he formed a voter fraud commission to investigate the election. (They didn’t find anything, of course.)
Trump tells his people that he actually won the popular vote in both 2016 and 2020. I have no doubt that he will say the same thing this time. The Republican party is now institutionalizing his delusional sore-loserism. I don’t know what it will take to change the minds of the sad sack whiners who believe this tripe.
Over the weekend The Washington Post’s Beth Reinhard published an excellent article about one of Donald Trump’s most visionary advisers, a man virtually no one has heard of by the name of Russ Vought. He was a boring GOP bureaucrat who served as director of the Office of Management and Budget from July 2020 until Trump left office after having served as deputy director and acting director before that. Prior to his stint in the White House he was at Heritage Action, the activist arm of the Heritage Foundation and worked as budget director for the Republican Study Group in the congress. In other words, for years he was a numbers cruncher providing far right Republicans with their specious arguments about the government going broke and the need to drastically cut the safety net.
Who knew that such a person also had big ideas about how to destroy the United States government from the inside out? He’s a self-described Christian Nationalist who is spearheading plans for a rapid expansion of executive power under a theory he calls “radical constitutionalism” (which is an oxymoron but it sure sounds snappy.)
He has been working for a conservative network called Center for Renewing America which is full of Trump acolytes, many of whom will likely be in a future Trump administration. That includes Vought himself who is often discussed as a likely Chief of Staff.
Reinhard writes:
“We are living in a post-Constitutional time,” Vought wrote in a seminal 2022 essay, which argued that the left has corrupted the nation’s laws and institutions. Last week, after a jury convicted Trump of falsifying business records, Vought tweeted: “Do not tell me that we are living under the Constitution.”
Vought aims to harness what he calls the “woke and weaponized” bureaucracy that stymied the former president by stocking federal agencies with hardcore disciples who would wage culture wars on abortion and immigration. The proposals championed by Vought and other Trump allies to fundamentally reset the balance of powerwould represent a historic shift — one they see as a needed corrective.
Vought has been named by the Trump RNC as the policy director for the 2024 platform committee. He wrote the chapter on the executive office of the president for Project 2025. He is said to be in charge of planning for the first 180 days of a new Trump administration.
Vought is an Evangelical Christian who has adopted the Trump credo of the ends justify the means. When he was in the White House he saw people who balked at illegal and unethical activity as squishes and whenever he could his office was helping Trump do end runs around the law and regulations, from re-appropriating funds for his border wall to helping him to blackmail the Ukrainian president in exchange for slandering Joe Biden, which got Trump impeached. He’s the one who came up with the notorious Schedule F, the plan to eliminate the civil service and replace government employees with Trump lackeys. They didn’t have time to fully implement it in Trump’s first term but you can bet they’ll get it done asap if he wins in November,
Trump’s only agenda is to prove he’s not a loser, keep himself out of jail and wreak revenge on his enemies. Whatever else they have planned for his second term is fine with him and Vought has plans, big ones. His “radical constitutionalism” is an extreme reinterpretation of what the American system and rule of law stand for.
For instance, according to Reinhard, he seeks to redefine immigration as an “invasion” which would allow the president to invoke wartime powers. He’s on the same page as Trump with respect to mass deportation because he doesn’t believe that most immigrants can understand America’s Judeo-Christian worldview. He calls this “rethinking the legal paradigms that have confined our ability to return to the original Constitution.”
He is one of the primary influences in right wing circles pushing hard to eliminate any independence of agencies in the executive branch starting with the Justice Department. On a recent podcast he backed Trump’s call to prosecute Trump’s enemies saying, “it can’t just be hearings, it has to be investigations, an army of investigators that lead to firm convictions.” He supports invoking the Insurrection Act, banning medical abortions and implementing policies to boost the birthrate. (Yes, he’s one of those guys too.) In other words he is an authoritarian nightmare.
Whenever I read about extremists like Vought and others who are plotting to overturn the Constitution, like so many others, I can’t help but think about 1930s Germany. The parallels aren’t perfect but they are way too close for comfort. The Nazi Big Lie was about the supposed “stab in the back” that led ordinary Germans to buy into the idea that Germany didn’t actually lose WWI but were instead betrayed by Jews, Marxists, democrats, and internationalists. Trump’s Big Lie is that he didn’t lose the election (so typically all about him) but it’s had the same motivating effect on his followers.
In both cases, there is a fairly pathetic attempt to overthrow of the government and the political establishment subsequently fails to take the legal steps available to prevent them from making a comeback. This facilitates the growth of an authoritarian movement, infused with racism and grievance and although this movement never achieves a majority in the country over time its leaders learn that there are better ways of achieving its goals by exploiting weaknesses in the system which had previously gone undiscovered.
This form of revolution doesn’t rely on violent overthrow but it does require intimidation and threats of violence against political enemies. And it cannot succeed without the enabling and cooperation of establishment politicians and officials who either believe they can control the extremists in their midst or simply sign on for their own ambition uncaring of the consequences.
Vought is in the latter category, an opportunist who sees Donald Trump as the ticket to a Christian Nationalist America. Whether he is a MAGA true believer is immaterial. He’s an efficient bureaucrat, trained in the right wing fever swamps who knows how to get things done. And what he wants to do is horrifying.
And the Declaration is not even the New Testament
Steve Benen offers this recollection. I’d already forgotten:
In 2017, on the 4th of July, NPR published a series of tweets with the text of the Declaration of Independence. It seemed like a simple, patriotic gesture to help celebrate our Independence Day. A surprising number of Republicans didn’t quite see it that way.
The more NPR published portions of the Declaration of Independence, the more rank-and-file conservatives — who apparently didn’t recognize the words of the document — assumed that the media outlet was publishing anti-Trump “propaganda.”
“A Prince whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people,” one tweet read, sparking particular outrage from the right, who assumed the missive was directed at the then-Republican president.
It was an early reminder, just six months into Donald Trump’s term, that many of his followers, when confronted with core American principles, would simply assume they were anti-Trump criticisms.
Republicans reacted similarly to Joe Biden’s remarks at the 80th D-Day anniversary:
Republican Sen. Rick Scott of Florida called the remarks “disgusting.” A Fox Business host also accused the Democrat of “taking veiled shots” at Trump. As New York magazine’s Jon Chait noted, some other prominent voices from conservative media had similar reactions.
That’s because no matter how much red, white and blue merch they own, Cult of Trump supplicants do not believe in core American principles. In spirit, they are royalists not colonists. If not outright idolaters.
Perhaps this clip from the chair of the Nevada Republican Party is poor phrasing. Perhaps it is a Freudian slip. But call a political rally worship?
Rep. Marge Greene of Georgia goes a step further. She likens her worship of Jesus to her fealty to Donald Trump.
I was raised Catholic. A criticism Protestant fundamentalists always raise is that with all of Catholics’ statues and saints, the line between “venerating” saints (as the catechism would have it) and worshipping them and their images is uncomfortingly fine (Mrs. O’Donnell joke).
Naturally, Trump cultists seem to have no such uneasiness about their own affections toward their orange-caked savior.
It is clear from what transpired on Jan. 6, 2021; and from the actions of GOP-controlled legislatures across the country to ignore the will of the people; and from MAGA Republican efforts to place Trump above the laws of men; and from the shameless declarations of Christian nationalists to transform the U.S. into a theocracy; and from anti-abortion activists’ intentions to reduce women to birthing vessels; that they have, in biblical terms, sold their American birthright for a mess of Trumpage.
● ● ● ● ● ● ● ●
For The Win, 5th Edition is ready for download. Request a copy of my free countywide GOTV planning guide at ForTheWin.us.