EVERY. SINGLE. EVENT. has been exactly the same, every single time, for 18 months. Fast food restaurant-Speech-Cops on Tarmac. Just like his interviews, speeches, and clothes – the same thing every time, over and over and over. pic.twitter.com/uKRcuWEda4
I have often wondered about this. There really is a stale sameness about Trump aesthetics and I wondered why more people just don’t get sick of seeing it. He’s been doing this since 2016, down to the same suit and tie and many of the same lines. It seems to me that it should be hitting the point that it’s a nostalgia act for a one hit wonder.
But that’s just looking at it from a normal person’s standpoint. The MAGA cult is built on relentless repetition (indoctrination) and any deviation from that familiar cant is going to cause dissonance. These repetitive mantras, slogans and chants, the sameness of the events, Trump dressed exactly the same, the weird hypnotic nature of his speeches (which are now set to music) are what gives MAGA its power.
I guess my bigger question is, to the extent there are any normal Republicans left, why aren’t they tired of it and loathe to sign on for four more years of it? Even more pertinent, why aren’t they creeped out by it? This whole thing is becoming more and more ritualized and devotional. Do they relate to this? I guess many of them don’t take this stuff seriously but they’re going to find out just how serious it is if Trump pulls this off.
I know it’s somewhat trite to evoke the rise of fascism in the 1930s but there have been many books written about the power of the Nazi aesthetic and how it worked on the citizenry. There were many people at the time who thought it was ridiculous but it was actually an intrinsic part of its appeal so I don’t think we should underrate that in this case just because the clothing is so silly or the leader isn’t wearing a military uniform. This is 21st century America and Trump’s aesthetic is powerful to a whole lot of people.
Steve Bannon no doubt thought he was being deviously clever. Speaking with The New York Times this week, he elaborated on a sophisticated plan that Donald Trump’s allies have developed for boosting third-party candidates, so they siphon votes from President Biden.
A key part of this scheme, Bannon noted, entails boosting expected Green Party candidate Jill Stein by highlighting oil production under Biden to pull environmentally concerned voters away from him. As Bannon put it:
No Republican knows that oil production under Biden is higher than ever. But Jill Stein’s people do. … Stein is furious about the oil drilling. The college kids are furious about it. The more exposure these [third-party candidates] get, the better it is for us.
Whoa, that’s some serious 11-dimensional chess, Steve! Except for one thing. If you think for a second about Bannon’s quote—that “oil production under Biden is higher than ever”—it entirely undermines one of Trump’s biggest lies: the claim that Biden’s effort to transition the United States to a decarbonized economy has destroyed the nation’s “energy independence,” leaving us weak and hollow to our very core.
This saga captures something essential about how MAGA-world fights the information wars. You’ll note that Bannon is not even slightly troubled by the idea that telling the truth about Biden’s record to one set of voters—left-leaning, green-minded ones—might contradict one of Trump’s most frequent lies to countless others.
It isn’t just that for Bannon, assertions should be evaluated purely for their instrumental usefulness. It’s also that he apparently has total confidence that voters who really need to hear the truth he uttered—those in the industrial and Appalachian heartlands who are the targets of Trump’s propaganda—never, ever will, even if he admits to it right in the paper of record.
And he knows that if they do hear it, they will dismiss it as fake news because they’ve been indoctrinated by Donald Trump into believing that anything that contradicts or challenges their worldview is by definition, fake.
“Just stick with us, don’t believe the crap you see from these people, the fake news,” Mr Trump said as the crowd erupted in boos. He later added: “Just remember, what you’re seeing and what you’re reading is not what’s happening…” https://t.co/DPyaAjFbWM
It’s a lesson drawn from demagogues around the world: When the press as an institution is weakened, fact-based journalism becomes just one more drop in the daily deluge of content—no more or less credible than partisan propaganda. Relativism is the real goal of Trump’s assault on the press, and the more “enemies of the people” his allies can take out along the way, the better. “A culture war is a war,” Steve Bannon told the Times last year. “There are casualties in war.”
This attitude has permeated the president’s base. At rallies, people wear T-shirts that read rope. tree. journalist. some assembly required. A CBS News/YouGov poll has found that just 11 percent of strong Trump supporters trust the mainstream media—while 91 percent turn to the president for “accurate information.” This dynamic makes it all but impossible for the press to hold the president accountable, something Trump himself seems to understand. “Remember,” he told a crowd in 2018, “what you’re seeing and what you’re reading is not what’s happening.”
Moreover, the MAGA people don’t care if it’s true or not. They love Trump even if they know he’s lying and they hate everyone else even if they know they’re telling the truth. It’s not about facts, truth or reality with these people.
But that isn’t the only issue. I wish I had faith that lefties wouldn’t take the bait on this and would look at the big picture but they won’t. We’ve seen this time and again and we have other candidates to fill this role beyond Jill Stein. As you know, Bannon’s the one who pushed RFK Jr into the race too.
It won’t take much to throw the election to Trump in those swing states. 2000 and 2016 are two perfect examples of how well this strategy can work. Bannon’s not reinventing the wheel here.
Back in 2022, when it looked as if the Supreme Court would soon overturn Roe v. Wade, Senate Republicans’ campaign arm sent out a memo encouraging GOP candidates to get their messaging right.
The former president on Wednesday responded to the Arizona Supreme Court’s reviving a harsh 1864 abortion ban — which indeed threatens abortion providers with two to five years in prison — by punting on this basic issue.
Asked whether doctors who provide abortions should be punished, Trump allowed that certain states could do that.
“I’d let that be to the states,” Trump said. “You know, everything we’re doing now is states and states’ rights. And what we wanted to do is get it back to the states, because for 53 years it’s been a fight. And now the states are handling it. And some have handled it very well, and the others will end up handling it very well.
Making 10 year old girls give birth to their brother? Don’t ask me, it’s up to the states. Denying pregnant women emergency medical care because a legislature is scientifically illiterate? What can I say? It’s up to them. Burning women agt the stake? Hey, this is a state matter, it has nothing to do with me.
He obviously thinks he’s off the hook with this “I’m proud to have overturned Roe vs Wade and now it’s up to the states, buh bye” routine but it’s not going to fly. His proud Roe moment is what led to these atrocities in states around the country and simply shrugging his shoulders and saying it’s not his problem isn’t going to solve it.
President Biden has announced an order forgiving more student loans. It hasn’t been easy since the right wing Supremes knocked down his big initiative, but they’ve kept at it, chipping away, bringing relief to many people’s debt burden. They say they aren’t done yet.
The wingnuts are having their usual fit about anything that might benefit people other than the rich and the fascist, caterwauling that it’s not fair to other Americans who didn’t take out loans or who paid them back already. Why shouldn’t they get a break too?
Guess what?
They’re special people who deserve it, we know that. The American people should be proud to subsidize them — they’re all millionaires, of course. Those scofflaws who haven’t paid back their student loans need to be taught a lesson.
it does not matter how many times he has been caught not telling the truth, Trump can always count on the press to carry his water. https://t.co/T5mdw6QVqQ
Arizona Republicans refused to vote on a bill to repeal the state’s extreme abortion ban Wednesday, a day after Republicans—including President Donald Trump—attempted to distance themselves from the decision.
State Rep. Matt Gress (R) moved Wednesday to bring a Democratic bill repealing the ban, which outlaws all abortions except to save the life of the mother, to a House vote. Before a vote could be called, Rep. David Livingston motioned for a recess and all Republicans in the House—including Gress—voted to table the proceedings.
Democrats in the House chanted “Shame!” at their Republican counterparts as voting rapidly came to a close.
In a livestream after the session ended, Rep. Analise Ortiz (D) said Republicans moved to recess so they “would not have to be on the record voting to repeal the abortion ban.”
Looks like Donald Trump picked the wrong week to quit snorting Adderall (ABC News):
There are multiple Jeremy Rosenbergs in New York City, as former President Donald Trump’s attorneys found out Tuesday after they sent a subpoena to the wrong one.
Last month, Trump’s attorneys in his criminal hush money case [Ed: falsifying business records, to be correct] in Manhattan sought to subpoena the Jeremy Rosenberg who was a supervising investigator in the Manhattan district attorney’s office.
Instead, according to court filings revealed Tuesday, the subpoena went to another Jeremy Rosenberg living in an $8 million Brooklyn home.
A crack team of attorneys Trump has there, and I mean that crack. It’s led by one Todd Blanche.
“I don’t have any files for you,” the apparently bemused Brooklynite wrote back, according to a filing from the former president’s legal team.
He added: “PS – The phone number you provided was disconnected.
“PPS – I’m keeping the fifteen dollars,” he added, referencing the money Mr Trump’s lawyers had sent him to help pay for sending the documents.
(I once got onto the chain-mail list of a Republican state senator(?) from Alabama. She only relented after I wrote back that, no, I couldn’t send her that chicken recipe she liked so much. I was not the Tom Sullivan she thought I was. Former Colorado governor, John Hickenlooper, called me by accident twice in a week in September 2019 thinking I was Colorado state Rep. Tom Sullivan. It happens.)
Still, Trump’s attorneys were clueless even after that snarky reply:
Mr Blanche had complained earlier this week that the man that he believed the former investigator Mr Rosenberg had displayed a “flippant and dismissive approach” to his subpoena “despite ample experience with the criminal justice system that should have instilled in him respect for this process and a criminal defendant’s rights”.
But in fact, Mr Trump’s lawyers had simply served court papers on the wrong man, prosecutor Matthew Colangelo wrote.
“The people believe the defendant has served the incorrect person,” Mr Colangelo said in a court filing.
Give Donald Trump the nuclear codes and he’ll attack the wrong country.
Biden launches ad blitz after Arizona abortion ruling
“Donald Trump did this,” Team Biden declares.
Perhaps you’ve noticed. The Democratic president Donald “Now 88 Counts” Trump once called “Sleepy Joe” is hammering MAGA Republicans over their post-Roe revocation of women’s reproductive freedoms in state after state.
Biden “plans to pummel Trump on abortion” (Politico):
Joe Biden’s campaign plans to hammer Donald Trump for his role in erasing abortion rights largely by enlisting ordinary American women who have suffered from restrictions on the procedure, elevating their voices in place of the president’s own.
This approach was immediately on display this week in a Biden campaign video featuring the story of a Texas woman released after Trump announced he would defer to state-level abortion laws, some of which impose draconian limits on women and physicians. Biden himself made no appearance in the ad, except to deliver a standard campaign finance disclosure line.
As the reporters frame it, Biden is taking a back seat here because of his “complicated history” on abortion. This, rather than Politico conceding that women are their own best advocates for reproductive freedom. The power of women’s first-person accounts was clear in recent elections in Ohio and in Gov. Andy Beshear’s reelection campaign in Kentucky.
Biden advisers took particular note of an ad Beshear ran in the closing stages of his campaign featuring the testimonial of a woman, Hadley Duvall, who had been raped and impregnated by her stepfather when she was a child, and who would have been forced to carry the pregnancy to term under policies favored by Kentucky Republicans, including Beshear’s opponent.
Eric Hyers, a Democratic strategist who managed the Beshear campaign, said Duvall’s message had echoed across Kentucky, including in constituencies that do not ordinarily lean to the left.
“The voters who moved the most when hearing messages like Hadley’s were the opposite of the voters you might think,” Hyers said. “It was rural voters, male voters, older voters, Republican voters, non-college educated voters.”
Messaging expert Drew Westen (“The Political Brain”) has long insisted that the central issue in the national abortion debate is not choice or justice but freedom. It’s about whether, when (and with whom) to have a child. Republicans “believe every rapist has the right to choose who has their child. We believe that’s a family choice.” Duvall made that message as clear as a punch in the gut.
Working the eye
The national alarm over the Arizona Supreme Court’s reanimating the Arizona Territory’s 1864 abortion ban, Republicans and Trump himself are staggering and attempting to walk back their extremist positions. The Biden campaign means to keep them backed into a corner fending off blows (MSNBC):
President Joe Biden’s re-election campaign launched a paid media blitz about reproductive rights in Arizona on Thursday, two days after the state’s Supreme Court upheld a near-total abortion ban dating to 1864.
The seven-figure ad buy focuses on former President Donald Trump’s latest abortion stance, in which he again took credit for overturning the landmark Roe v. Wade ruling because of the justices he appointed to the U.S. Supreme Court and said states should decide abortion policy.
The move is part of a larger, more aggressive strategy to seize on Trump’s record on abortion, with the Biden team quickly mobilizing to respond on an issue it sees as the most motivating one for voters in November.
The Biden campaign released these ads before Tuesday’s ruling in Arizona.
This is a painful story that so many families around America now know too well: Amanda was denied the medical care she needed, and it nearly took her life.
More than 1 in 3 women in America now lives under an abortion ban, with more on the way.
This is exactly what Democrats need to be doing now: showing voters some fight. Trump won the fealty of his MAGA base by appealing to white Christian conservatives’ persecution complex and convincing them he was their champion. Now it’s Democrats’ turn. Post-Roe assaults on women’s reproductive freedoms means, as Hyers noted, that the audience for Democrats willing to fight back for them is far larger than Trump’s.
The famously teetotaling Trump and his MAGA allies are on their way to punch-drunk with the abortion backlash Democrats mean to exploit.
“This week, women across the state of Arizona are watching in horror as an abortion ban from 1864 with no exceptions for rape, incest, or the health of a woman will soon become the law of the land for Arizonans,” campaign manager Julie Chavez Rodriguez said in a statement Thursday. “This nightmare is only possible because of Donald Trump.”
Team Biden means to make Trump own it with their media buys and social media blitz.
A Pulitzer Prize-winning political photographer resigned Tuesday from the board of the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Foundation, blasting the group for cowardice in rejecting Trump critic Liz Cheney as the recipient of its top yearly award.
David Hume Kennerly claimed in a letter to fellow trustees that Cheney’s nomination for the Gerald R. Ford Medal for Distinguished Public Service was nixed largely out of fear that Trump would retaliate against the organization if he’s reelected. Cheney, herself a trustee, was rejected three separate times, Kennerly wrote, as other potential honorees declined the award.
Former Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels will receive the 2024 medal in June, according to an email that Gleaves Whitney, the foundation’s executive director, sent to trustees Wednesday, after POLITICO broke news of Kennerly’s resignation.
Whitney said in a statement sent ahead of the Daniels announcement that the foundation’s executive committee, guided by legal counsel, believed it was not “prudent” to give the medal to Cheney given her flirtations with a presidential run.
Giving her the medal during the election cycle, Whitney said, “might be construed as a political statement and thus expose the Foundation to the legal risk of losing its nonprofit status with the IRS.”
Kennerly, who served as Ford’s White House photographer and is longtime foundation trustee, attacked that argument in his letter: “The historical irony was completely lost on you. Gerald Ford became president, in part, because Richard Nixon had ordered the development of an enemies list and demanded his underlings use the IRS against those listed.”
“If the foundation that bears the name of Gerald R. Ford won’t stand up to this real threat to our democracy,” he added, “who will?”
Kennerly is right:
A fellow board member, speaking on condition of anonymity to be candid, said the board was “really terrified” of losing their IRS tax-exempt status if they had given the award to Cheney. “They’re really, really, really concerned. It’s insanity,” the person said. It was Kennerly who first nominated her back in October, according to a second person familiar with the matter.
I’ll just add that Ford’s pardon of Nixon was the beginning of this descent into flagrant presidential impunity. Big mistake. Huge.
Trump’s allies are trying to reassure the Supreme Court that if you give Trump total immunity he would never order an enemy to be killed as was posited in the appeals court hearing. And anyway, even if he did, nobody would carry it out. So it’s all good.
As the Supreme Court gets ready to hear oral arguments in Donald Trump’s presidential immunity case, the former president’s allies are working to tamp down any concerns the justices might have about one of the more absurd and disconcerting arguments offered by any Trump lawyer ever: that a president would have to be impeached and convicted before he could be prosecuted if he were to, hypothetically, order the assassination of a political rival.
The America First Policy Institute, a think tank led by former top Trump advisers and allies, filed an amicus brief with the Supreme Court last month arguing that the justices should not consider this hypothetical in their decision, because the military would never follow such a command. “A president cannot order an elite military unit to kill a political rival,” says the brief, adding: “The military would not carry out a patently unlawful order from the president to kill non-military targets.”
The organization’s brief was filed on behalf of former Veterans Affairs Secretary Robert Wilkie, retired Lt. General Keith Kellogg, and retired Lt. General Jerry Boykin. Kellogg added in a press release that “my time with [former] President Trump allows me to state without equivocation, he would never issue or consider such an action.”
Unfortunately, according to Trump’s former Defense Secretary Mark Esper, he as president did suggest to senior administration officials that they should order U.S. troops to open fire on some of his political enemies — namely, street protesters.
“Can’t you just shoot them?” Trump asked, regarding Black Lives Matter demonstrators and others who were protesting around the White House in June 2020, according to Esper. “Just shoot them in the legs or something?” (Trump has denied this account.)
This wasn’t just some idle thought: Esper wrote in his memoir that he had to legitimately talk Trump down from the idea. “The good news — this wasn’t a difficult decision,” Esper wrote. “The bad news — I had to figure out a way to walk Trump back without creating the mess I was trying to avoid.”
Two sources, including a former senior Trump White House aide, who’ve spoken to the former president regarding his ideas about troops shooting civilians tell Rolling Stone that when Trump talks about this, he’s eager to wound — not kill — potential targets. Sometimes, he’s been reminded, including by government officials, that shooting someone in the leg can easily kill them, a point he usually dismissed outright.
Last year, Trump publicly stated that another political foe — former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley, who has denounced Trump as a “wannabe dictator” — deserves to be put to “DEATH.”
AFPI, for its part, has repeatedly argued that the president should designate Mexican drug cartels as terrorists and use military force to eliminate them.
Trump has no limits. And he and his followers are now delirious with revolutionary zeal. Of course he would do it. And there is no guarantee that the military wouldn’t follow his orders. He’s going to make sure that the top brass are loyalists and there’s every reason to believe that the rank and file is full of Trumpers.
Also, he is a pathological liar and no one should ever ever take his word for anything.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said in a Tuesday interview that he does not need “primitive” ideas from former President Trump on ways to resolve the war with Russia.
In an interview with Axel Springer media outlets, including Politico, Zelensky said he was open to hearing Trump’s proposals for the war, but, he said, “If the deal is that we just give up our territories, and that’s the idea behind it, then it’s a very primitive idea.”
“I need very strong arguments. I don’t need a fantastic idea. I need a real idea because people’s lives are at stake,” Zelensky added.
The interview comes after The Washington Post reported this weekend that Trump has privately said his plan to end the war in Ukraine would include pressuring the war-torn country to give up territory, including Crimea and the Donbas border region, to Russia.
That’s actually a nice way of putting it. The more precise word is “stupid.” I don’t know if Trump thinks he can just tell Ukraine what to do but I wouldn’t be surprised. He might even think they’ll happily go along with his brilliant “idea” (also called surrender) just because he’s got such huge hands that they can’t deny him anything he wants. In reality, his “plan” is nothing more than capitulation and a green light to Vladimir Putin to “do whatever the hell he wants” as Trump once said he would encourage.
Zelensky shows a lot more spine than most Republicans. Saying this publicly is risky what with the funding on the line and the Republicans shoving each other out of the way to lick Trump’s boots. But good for him. It’s refreshing to hear it.
