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Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

They Just Love Him No Matter What

Published by digby on May 13, 2024

Nothing can shake them

Here was Trump’s economy in 2020. Massive unemployment, food lines, tens of thousands of deaths with no end in sight.

He only cares about himself. And they love him for it. They love him so, so much

Michael Tomasky took a look at this issue today and it’s mind-boggling:

Politico and Morning Consult asked respondents a series of questions about all the major economic legislation Biden has signed. Majorities know little or nothing at all about the infrastructure bill, the CHIPS act, the American Rescue Plan, and the Inflation Reduction Act. And get this: While 40 percent said Biden has done more than Trump on infrastructure, 37 percent said Trump had done more. In January, NBC found that Trump has a 22-point advantage over Biden on the question of whom voters trust more with the economy—up 15 points from the same poll in 2020.  

How can this possibly be? Fine, we know that most people pay scant attention to politics. But even scant attention should produce some knowledge. I pay scant attention to pop culture events aimed at people younger than I am, but even I know that Drake and Kendrick Lamar are fighting and that Kendrick appears to have public opinion on his side. Stuff seeps through.

It’s not just Fox, unfortunately:

As for the mainstream, “liberal” media, they’ll report on these things, but they’ll usually do so in a way that gives plenty of space to views from Republicans like Rubio. Read, for example, this Associated Press report on Biden’s Wisconsin visit. Its first half is largely positive toward Biden. But then it quotes RNC Chair Michael Whatley and the Wisconsin House Republican in whose district the event occurred and describes what Trump was up to that day. 

Yes, the AP, and all mainstream journalism, is supposed to be balanced. But it’s also supposed to be accurate. Whatley was quoted as saying, in part, that “manufacturing has stalled, and family farms are shuttering,” as if these things are Biden’s fault. Actually, manufacturing jobs are higher under Biden than Trump, which it took me about four seconds to ascertain. And while the family farm is in decline, it has been for many years: There are a lot of reasons for this, several of them centered around the lobbying power of corporate agribusiness.

Trump voters know all this they just won’t admit it because they adore Trump. It’s really that simple. So it’s all about that small slice of the electorate that’s persuadable and they are mostly the people who aren’t paying close attention and are simply floating on the zeitgeist created by the media that says Trump is this vital man articulating the outrages of our time while Biden is an old, tired, cipher plodding along with a bunch of boring policies. It’s possible that Biden can reach some of them by relentlessly pushing the economic argument and hoping that local media will make up for the lack of national attention. But there’s little guarantee that any traditional approach will work in this environment.

There are also a few persuadable Republicans who care about abortion rights, democracy and are upset that Trump is a criminal but many of them are women and they are under pressure from people around them to vote the straight GOP ticket. There is no doubt the campaign is going to be focusing on them like a laser. They are key and the economic argument could have an effect in combination with the rest of the agenda.

It’s depressing to read that comment from the Wisconsin voter in the screenshot at the top. The guy knows Biden did it. He just loves Trump so much that nothing Biden could do for him personally will shake him. This is not about politics or government. It’s a cult and they worship Donald Trump. I don’t think they can be deprogrammed.

Coordinated Whine

Published by digby on May 13, 2024

This obviously coordinated “mental anguish” and “torture” line seems like a double edged sword to me. Plenty of Americans have been involved with the legal system and those who haven’t have seen trials, both real and fictional, portrayed on television for years. They’ve even been exposed to the Manhattan courts in the “Law and Order” series for decades. They know what this process looks like. Saying Trump, the alleged alpha male, is being tortured by having to endure it isn’t exactly a compliment. If it’s true then someone needs to tell Trump to man up. His surrogates are making him sound like a wimp.

But if the shoe fits…

Oh, and by the way, Tuberville going after the jury is really something. That guy is brain damaged — and evil.

What happens when they lose?

Published by digby on May 13, 2024

It’s not going to be pretty

via twitter

The mainstream press has finally turned its focus to what a second Donald Trump administration will look like should he win the White House in 2024. Salon has been covering this since Trump first flew off to Mar-a-Lago in 2021 and it was obvious that unless something happened to his health, Trump would be the 2024 nominee and the rest of the GOP would be developing a multi-faceted program to grant themselves unlimited power. None of this was anything but predictable once we saw what they were capable of during the post election period of 2020 and the events of January 6th.

The mainstream media has caught up and over the past few months has produced in-depth features and front page articles on the new MAGAfied Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, Schedule F, Agenda 47 and the details within all of those and other plans which reveal an authoritarian, anti-democratic crackdown on Americans’ rights and a full rollback of safety regulations and vital programs. The proposals for foreign policy and national security are even more horrifying. Trump is as narcissistic as ever and his motives remain purely personal but he’s got a full crew of authoritarian lackeys ready to take the wheel who are prepared to serve him well as they transform the United States into a full-blown autocracy for their own purposes.

So kudos to the media for doing what they need to do. Informing the public of Trumps plans should he win is job one. But we should probably also prepare ourselves for what they will do if he loses. I think we all know that he will not gracefully concede and quietly retire to play golf and cash in his political chits. In fact, he recently told TIME magazine, “If we don’t win, you know, it depends. It always depends on the fairness of an election” and elaborated in a later interview, “If everything’s honest, I’ll gladly accept the results…If it’s not, you have to fight for the right of the country.” Does anyone doubt that he believes there is no such thing as a fair election that he loses?

It’s important to remember that he won’t be the incumbent president as he was in 2020 and will not have the same tools at his disposal. He cannot try to deploy the Justice Department to illegally interfere in process on his behalf and while his henchmen could theoretically plan another fake elector scheme, as long as Vice President Harris performs the constitutional duty of counting the electoral college votes they wouldn’t get anywhere with it. He also won’t be able to draw up plans to seize voting machines or declare martial law and his bully pulpit will be limited to sore loser press conferences carried live on Fox and Newsmax.

However, Trump also has some advantages he didn’t have the last time, the first being that virtually the entire Republican establishment has bought into the lie that the 2020 election was stolen and are clearly ready to back Trump’s claims that it will have been stolen in 2024:

Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance told CNN that he’ll accept the results if they’re “fair and free” and previously said that if he were VP he’d tell states to send in alternate electors, apparently so that he could personally pick and choose which ones to accept as legitimate.

South Carolina Senator and top VP contender Tim Scott famously evaded the question on Meet the Press earlier, saying that he wouldn’t answer hypothetical questions.

The Republican National Committee, now run by Trump’s family and personal henchmen, will not hire anyone who doesn’t avow that Trump actually won the 2020 election. I think it’s indisputable that if Trump loses, they will all rise up to declare once again that it was stolen. You can’t have a democracy if one party is unwilling to accept that they lost.

The Washington Post reports that the Trump campaign is planning a “leaner” and “more efficient” operation this time out because Trump has “told them to not worry about getting out the vote since he could do it himself. He told them to ‘focus on the cheating.'”

To that end, it appears that Trump and the party are preparing to turn the election itself into a chaotic mess. Starting last December, Trump began employing a phrase used by his disgraced former National Security Adviser and QAnon adherent Michael Flynn: “guard the vote” telling his supporters to “go into” cities including Detroit, Philadelphia and Atlanta to “watch those votes when they come in.” This tactic was tried in the 2022 election when armed citizens staked out lock boxes, intimidating voters as they attempted to drop off their ballots. We can expect more of that driven by outside groups and Trump’s exhortations at his rallies.

The new RNC chair Lara Trump announced that the party is building a massive “election integrity” unit with a program to send 100,000 poll watchers all over the country who will be able to “protect the vote and ensure a big win.” She said, “We now have the ability at the RNC not just to have poll watchers, people standing in polling locations, but people who can physically handle the ballots.” (Actually, they cannot.)

In other words, the party is doubling and tripling down on voter suppression in order to win. Unfortunately, that’s unlikely to have the effect that it used to have back in the old days when the GOP had to be put under a consent decree after it was successfully sued for intimidating racial minorities at the polls. Today we have early voting and vote by mail (and Trump has trained his flock to mistrust those methods.) That’s why they have also concentrated on intimidating election workers and plan to do more of it during the counting process.

If all that doesn’t work to ensure him a win, he will obviously challenge the vote count. They plan to have lawyers stationed in every swing state to prepare the charges of voter fraud in the event he does come up short. He won’t be relying on the likes of Rudy Giuliani or Sidney Powell this time. Now that the whole GOP establishment has been completely absorbed into the MAGA universe, they’ll have higher quality legal minds working on overturning the results. It’s a good career move.

And then if all else fails, they will have their violent mob ready to explode and that possibility will be hovering over every other tactic they deploy. Trump said recently,  “if I don’t get elected, it’s going to be a bloodbath for the whole — that’s gonna be the least of it. It’s going to be a bloodbath for the country” and “If this election isn’t won, I’m not sure that you’ll ever have another election in this country.” This are very thinly veiled threats in a climate where his followers are being brainwashed by his lies into believing that he has a massive, unbeatable lead in the polls which is entirely untrue. And according to WIRED, the militia movement is on the rise again. One recent Facebook post shows where their thoughts are leading:

“When the government tries to steal the election again and they think we’ll just sit and take it … It won’t be like the last time … Just remember, they started it … We just wanted to be left alone … We prefer ballots over bullets … But …”

The sad reality is that the worst of all possible worlds is that Trump wins the election in November. But Trump won’t go quietly into this good night if he loses and neither will his followers. Either way, the election itself is just the beginning.

Salon

Twenty Cents On The Dollar

Published by Tom Sullivan on May 13, 2024

You are one-fifth of a person to Donald Trump

Donald Trump “fixer” Michael Cohen is trestifying this morning in Trump’s Manhattan criminal trial. He’s begun by explaining how Trump would would instruct him to pay creditors twenty cents on the dollar. Take it or get nothing. Even for struggling small, family businesses. Screw you.

Yeah, we know about that.

Anna Bower (Lawfare correspondent) tweets (thread):

Before Cohen moved over to Trump Org, Cohen presented Trump with a bill for 100K, which Trump owed for work Cohen’s firm did on a real estate transaction. Trump told Cohen to come work for Trump Org, and Cohen agreed. Later, when Cohen mentioned the bill owed to his law firm, Trump said “Do you want to get fired on your first day?” The bill never got paid, Cohen says.

Cohen said that he always reported directly to Trump. There were times when he asked Cohen to negotiate payments or bills. He provides an example: Trump University ran into trouble, and there were vendors who were unpaid. Cohen contacted the vendors, negotiated a reduction in what was owed.

Mens rea on two legs

Trump did not use email. Trump once commented to Cohen: “There are too many people who have gone down as a direct result of having emails.”

Cohen testifies that Trump warned him that when his presidential campaign was announced, a lot of women would be coming forward.

Around the time that the campaign began, Trump expressed concern about negative stories coming out about him. He told Cohen: “There’s going to be a lot of women coming forward.”

Trump would not treat people to whom he owed money as even three-fifths of a person. This guy has no interest in representing Americans in the White House.

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Tantrum Nation

Published by Tom Sullivan on May 13, 2024

Resisting the right’s fit of pique

I’m trying not to repeat the mistakes of 2016. I really am. There was no way the country was crazy enough to elect Donald Trump president, I told myself. “He’s mentally unstable,” I told my parents one night while visiting for dinner. One well-heeled Bernie Sanders supporter, unnerved by Trump signs sprouting like weeds out in the county, printed and fabricated his own quarter-sized Clinton signs by the thousands in response. They went like the proverbial hotcakes.

Then I spent the afternoon of Election Day 2016 greeting voters outside a nearby polling station standing a few feet away from Talks To The Sky. You know what happened later. This fall, she might be proudly wearing adult diapers outside her pants in solidarity with her king.

Sadly, Americans are crazy enough to elect Donald “88 Counts,”professional huckster. They proved that once already. They left him in charge ahead of a global pandemic and got American carnage and the sacking of the U.S. Capitol. But if it’s not prion disease and it’s not an outbreak of brain worms — I was reminded yesterday that a friend once picked up one while living in Nepal; she’s fine — what’s behind it? Yes, a political and religious cult is at work, but what’s behind that?

Something Dave Weigel posted to BlueSky this morning gets to some of it:

Lots of Project 2025’s recommendations boil down to: “Democrats have effectively used this executive branch power to enact policy, it must be reversed until the 5th Circuit can stop it.”

Honestly a very useful guide to how the center-left does things when it has the presidency.

The center-left Weigel references actually believes in progress, in using the U.S. government to improves people’s lives, in promoting “the general Welfare” and in securing “the Blessings of Liberty” for everyone. That’s the government’s goal, stated explicitly. But it’s not everyone’s.

What Trump personifies is a multi-year, national tantrum that intensified with the election of Barack Obama in 2008. But the tantrum did not start with that. Wealthy movement conservatives have worked to roll back the 20th century for decades. Movements demanding equality for marginalized Americans incensed men (mostly) more obsessed with their marginal tax rates than with realizing the more perfect union imagined in the Preamble. So long as they could maintain their Brahmin status working within the system, they could tolerate “created equal” as a rhetorical flourish they never really believed and could forestall. Once challenged, however, they redoubled their efforts and mobilized the grievances of those lower down the social ladder against those nearest the bottom, and against their silly advocates whatever their castes.

The United States has often been considered a young democracy, even if a long-lived one. Until this century, it seemed the country was finally emerging from adolescence. What the backlash to demographic shifts and the Trump cult prove is that that assessment was premature. What a spoiled child does when asked to share his toys is to throw a tantrum and break them. MAGA Republicans mean to break America. They’ve made a formal project of it. They should turn in their flags.

I want to believe that the fever will break, that there is still enough good-old Protestant shame and Catholic guilt in the land among mature adults to resist donning Donnie diapers and throwing bricks through the nation’s windows in a fit of pique. I want to believe that Trump is bleeding support. It’s just not yet showing up in polls. But I’m not counting on it, nor should you.

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Yes, Trump Is A Threat To The Whole World

Published by digby on May 12, 2024

His parochial obsessions are going to get us all killed

There has been some serious push back on social media to the belief that MAGA peacenik Donald Trump could start WWIII from both the right and the left. Apparently, Joe Biden is a violent warmonger for providing material support to America’s traditional allies while Donald Trump is a dove because he only oversaw a war with American troops on the ground in Afghanistan and ramped up the drone war to unprecedented heights throughout the world. But whatever. Facts aren’t really relevant at the moment. We’re all about feelings and vibes and because Trump has indoctrinated massive numbers of Americans with the lie that the whole world respected and feared him so much that they all bowed down to him and we have world peace for the first time in history. And yes, a number of lefties are similarly deluded about Trump because they haven’t closely observed what he is or what he has planned.

Here’s one little example:

If Donald Trump wins a second term in the White House in November, NATO may fall apart, a recent wargame found.

As a presidential candidate, Trump has threatened to quit NATO unless European allies contribute more, and should he carry it out Europe may decide to go it alone on defense, the game suggests. “A US policy of frustrating NATO has the potential to cause the alliance to collapse, with the EU as a candidate for eventually replacing NATO’s ultimate function — defending Europe from Russia,” wrote Finley Grimble, the British defense expert who designed and ran the game.

The US doesn’t have to withdraw from NATO to imperil the 75-year-old alliance. Technically, the US is barred from leaving NATO after Congress voted in 2023 to prohibit withdrawal without congressional approval.

But the game showed how Trump — the presumptive Republican presidential nominee who said on the campaign trail that he’d encourage Russia to “do whatever the hell they want” with NATO allies who spend too little on their militaries — could undermine NATO simply by doing as little as possible to support the alliance. “What Donald Trump can do is just really hollow out what NATO does,” Grimble told Business Insider. “He doesn’t need to leave NATO to ruin it. He can ruin it from within.”

Now maybe you think that NATO isn’t important anyway and who really cares if this happens? Well, we just spent almost an entire century, from 1917 to 1989 fighting wars in Europe, both hot and cold. That really wasn’t that long ago in the great scheme of things and the residual effects of those wars are still reverberating in Ukraine and Israel where hot wars are raging. It’s really not a great idea to let Europe turn into chaos. That doesn’t end well.

And chaos is exactly what happens in the game when the fictional Trump takes office in January 2025.

The new administration immediately attempts to broker a peace deal — without European help — between Ukraine and Russia. After the mediation fails, Trump slashes aid to Ukraine.

It is the first domino to fall. Trump then drastically reduces US participation in NATO, including redeployment of 50 percent of American military assets in Europe, where more than 100,000 US troops are based, to the Indo-Pacific theater. The Trump administration also institutes a new policy called “dormancy.” This includes a variety of go-slow tactics, such as less US participation in NATO exercises. A particularly damaging move is to bar the Supreme Allied Commander Europe (SACEUR) — the second-highest military position in NATO, and always a US officer — from acting without prior consultation with Washington.

“Ultimately, SACEUR is answerable to the president of the United States,” said Grimble. “So he [SACEUR] can start slowing things down, or prevent things from happening. The US can just take the funding from NATO programs and they will collapse.”

The article goes into all the possible scenarios that could result and the conclusion is chilling:

By the end of the game, the effects of a US pullback from NATO are global. China realizes that the US has really shifted its focus from Europe to the Pacific, which deters Beijing from invading Taiwan. Yet this doesn’t reassure Japan, Australia and South Korea — US allies whose forces and bases are essential to efforts to counter China — which worry that Trump might change his mind and abandon them too. Iran becomes emboldened to assert its power in the Middle East, which spurs an arms race with Saudi Arabia.

Do we really need this? To be sure, this is not a prediction but rather an experiment to game out the possibilities. It sure sounds probable to me.

It’s one thing to re-evaluate America’s role in the world in light of various changing circumstances. I don’t think anyone argues with that. But if we have an emboldened white, Christian nationalist US leadership, led by a narcissistic imbecile who still has no clue what he’s doing so the only thing he can do is babble on about Europe “taking advantage” and not “paying its dues” we will have chaos. And that’s the last thing anyone should want in a nuclear world.

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Such Dignity, Such Honor

Published by digby on May 12, 2024

Remember when Republicans used to call for the smelling salts because Bill Clinton wore jeans in the White House and Bush ran his campaign promising to “restore honor and dignity” to the presidency? Yeah, that was a while ago. It’s a whole different story today.

He also gave am extended shout out to “the late, great Hannibal Lecter” for some reason.

Never mind. Totally normal stuff. Very cool. Nothing to worry about.

Another “populist” grifter for US Senate

Published by digby on May 12, 2024

Do they all just blatantly lie about everything?

Ohio Senate Candidate Bernie Moreno

The Ohio race for Senate is pivotal. And the GOP has put up yet another phony:

He is running for the Senate as an immigrant who made good, reaching out to Ohio voters with a stirring, only-in-America bootstraps story: arriving as a child from Colombia, taking a risk on a struggling business, and then turning it into a smashing success and himself into a millionaire 100 times over.

Running under the banner of Donald J. Trump’s populist political movement, Bernie Moreno, the Republican challenging Senator Sherrod Brown, humbly calls himself a “car guy from Cleveland” and recounts the modest circumstances of his childhood, when his immigrant family started over from scratch in the United States. “We came here with absolutely nothing — we came here legally — but we came here, nine of us in a two-bedroom apartment,” Mr. Moreno said in 2023, in what became his signature pitch. His father “had to leave everything behind,” he has said, remembering what he called his family’s “lower-middle-class status.”

But there is much more that Mr. Moreno does not say about his background, his upbringing and his very powerful present-day ties in the country where he was born.

Mr. Moreno was born into a rich and politically connected family in Bogotá, a city that it never completely left behind, where some members continue to enjoy great wealth and status. While his parents left Colombia in 1971 to start over in the United States, where Mr. Moreno fully transplanted, some of his siblings eventually returned. One of his brothers served as Bogotá’s ambassador to the United States. Another founded a development and construction empire that stretches across the Andes from the Colombian interior to its Caribbean shores.

Give me a break. He didn’t come from “communist Cuba” where they confiscated the wealthy citizens’ fortunes. He came from Colombia and they obviously had plenty of financial support from the family back in the home country.

All these richie riches pretending to have pulled themselves up by their bootstraps is absurd and I’m sure plenty of Ohio Republicans see through it — and most of them just don’t care. They admire liars. It means they’re smart. But maybe some of those vaunted Independents might be a little bit skeptical of this sort of lie and will stick with Sherrod Brown as they have since 2007. I would hope so. Brown is a real populist, in his bones, and in the best sense of the word. I hope at least a few of those blue collar indies recognize that. He really is their champion. This dishonest scion of a wealthy Colombian family is anything but.

From The “You Can’t Make This Up” Files

Published by digby on May 12, 2024

The “election integrity” party has a little problem with voter fraud.

The Georgia GOP went MAGA. And look what happened:

Georgia’s Republican Party has removed one of its officers after an administrative law judge found he voted illegally nine times after moving to the state.

The state Republican Committee voted 146-24 on Friday to remove Brian K. Pritchard, its first vice chairman, state Chairman Josh McKoon said after the closed meeting.

Georgia is one of a number of state Republican parties that have experienced turmoil as supporters of Donald Trump have taken over at the grassroots level, ousting previous leaders and demanding that the party prioritize Trump’s false claims of fraud in the 2020 election.

Many established Georgia Republicans including Gov. Brian Kemp have walked away from the state party organization. Kemp, for example, doesn’t plan to appear at the state Republican Convention next week in Columbus.

And yet:

But the fervor is having an impact, and demands for “election integrity” have translated into multiple changes to Georgia election law. Earlier this week Kemp signed a law that could ease the removal of people from the voting rolls through challenges to voter eligibility.

Yes, he stood up to Trump’s entreaties to overturn the election in Georgia in 2020. But like most Republicans it hasn’t stopped him from continuing on with the vote suppression efforts that have been the goal of white supremacists American politics since 1864 — which was what set the table for a demagogue like Donald Trump.



Another Good Trump Christian

Published by digby on May 12, 2024

In case you don’t want to watch that video, it’s Trump’s top aide talking about how he carries some fake five dollar bills that he gives to panhandlers which he says they will then try to spend and get arrested. Hahaha.

As Max VonSydow said in “Hannah and her Sisters”, if Jesus came back today he would never stop throwing up.”