Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

The Supremes are talking. Oy:

In a conversation in Austin with Chief Judge Priscilla Richman of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit, Kavanaugh acknowledged the polarization in the country over political and legal issues, especially since the Supreme Court in 2022 overturned the legal right to an abortion established decades earlier by Roe v. Wade.

He said judges and Supreme Court justices must clearly explain their interpretation of the law and apply those legal principles in a uniform fashion. “Individual decisions don’t have to be popular. … The losing party has to respect the decision,” Kavanaugh said at the 5th Circuit Judicial Conference.

“Consistency builds respect,” he continued. “It’s showing up every day in the courtroom and trying to be respectful to the parties, to write your opinion in a way that’s clear and understandable, to get out when you’re speaking and try to explain, to the bar, the judicial process, to try to be transparent and to be impartial as a judge.”

How about consistency with precedent, which they promised to do in their confirmation hearings? In fact, how about consistency with their promises in general in their confirmation hearings? (Although, I guess Kavanaugh has done that — he did promise that we’d reap the whirlwind and a whole lot of women are doing just that today.)

Consistently extreme rulings aren’t going to gain respect from the majority of Americans, sorry. It’s making that majority hold the Supreme Court in roughly the same esteem as a street gang.

He went on to say:

“Real lives are being affected. Real people are being hurt or helped. You can’t lose sight of that. It’s polarized. I get it. I’m part of the system. I understand. I see it.”

If anyone knows, it Kav. He’s been a political operative his whole career and still is.

But Kav wasn’t the only one spouting BS at that conference:

After facing harsh questions about his judicial decisions and acceptance of lavish gifts from a billionaire, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas forcefully pushed back at his critics Friday — saying he and his wife,Virginia “Ginni” Thomas, have endured “nastiness” and “lies.”

Thomas targeted the maelstrom he has facedin Washington, offering some of his most extensive comments since news broke last year of travel and real estate deals paid for by Republican donor Harlan Crow,and since he has faced calls to recuse himself from cases related to the 2020 election because of his wife’s involvement with efforts to block Joe Biden’s victory.

“What you are going to find, especially in Washington, is that people are going to pride themselves on being awful,” Thomas said during the hour-long conversation with U.S. District Judge Kathryn Kimball Mizelle, a former clerk of his, at a judicial conference on the Gulf Coast, hundreds of miles from the nation’s capital. “It’s a hideous place.”

The justice went on to say that he maintains his positivity in work and life despite the tribulations. Still, he told his audience that he wished he had remained a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit and that he “had no interest in public life” but felt called to it by God. He did not address any recent decisions by the court.

Another whining wingnut. Do they ever stop?

These wingnuts are all convinced that they were chosen by God. Actually, Thomas was chosen by George Bush Sr and he was definitely not God. But he is right about Washington being full of people who pride themselves on being awful. He is their leader.

Alito spoke at a Catholic university commencement and told the graduates not to abandon their beliefs, perhaps assuming they all agreed with him. Polling suggests they do not, at lest when it comes to his odious abortion decision.

Bloody peasant!

What do I keep saying about royalists?

I bet nobody had “Laura Ingraham producer is a loathsome, obnoxious, entitled and hate filled piece of shit” on their bingo cards.

Poor little @clegg1776 must be feeling some heat since he already locked up his account. https://t.co/XRDw1GSkTd

— Bob Clendenin (@DoctorTomG) May 11, 2024

MeidasTouch News:

Connor Clegg, a producer at Fox News according to his LinkedIn, posted a racist attack on a law enforcement officer to Twitter. Clegg has since locked his twitter account.

Clegg complained about being stopped by a traffic officer with an accent because he was blocking an alley and his tags were expired on his vehicle. The Fox News producer’s description was laced with racist language and superiority.

Fox News Producer Locks Twitter Account After Posting Racist Attack on Police – MeidasTouch News https://t.co/2fE9S0yJ4A

— TLIC (@Tamaraciocci) May 10, 2024

Here is what Fox News Producer Connor Clegg’s ranted on Twitter late Thursday night:

Just had a “parking enforcement” office who barely spoke a lick of English attempt to load my car onto a tow truck because I was (allegedly) blocking some type of *very important* alleyway where I was parked.

He said “we have to move your car”

Told him, “no need, sir, l’ll move it myself, thanks, sorry for the trouble!” – very polite!

He then says, in his broken tongue, “yes but your plates are also expired…you have to follow law, sir, we have to tow, it’s too late, you can’t move car” in an accent and diction so thick and faulty it was nearing aboriginal levels.

I proceeded to get in my car and leave because, as someone descended from those who formed the very concept of law he meekly was attempting to enforce, that is my birthright, and there’s not a damn thing a foreigner with a tin badge and poorly tailored pants can do to stop me.

How we got to the point where foreigners are given the privilege to enforce this nation’s “laws” unto citizens is beyond me but l’ve had damn near enough of it.

You can respectfully reason your way out of trouble – at least out of parking violations – with a fellow countryman; I’ve done it dozens of times in my life… But a tyrannical foreigner with no concept of western rites and tradition wielding the Longsword of the Leviathan is completely out of bounds and why we tolerate it as a nation is well beyond me.

“There are only nine meals between mankind and anarchy,” journalist Alfred Henry Lewis told Cosmopolitan Magazine in 1906.

Don’t kid yourselves. Feudalism is even closer.

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A second Trump term could fulfill the right’s darkest fantasies

After Donald Trump won election in 2016, some friends and colleagues in the progressosphere began moving off social media platforms and to more secure communications channels. The fear was that Trump and his lieutenants would crack down on dissenters using state surveillance. In the end, while damaging, the early Trump administration was too bungling and incompetent, too unfamiliar with where the levers of power were and how to work them. That may not be true in a second Trump administration. Project 2025, and all that.

When he’s not seething inside a cold courtroom, Trump is signaling his second term will be more corrupt that his first, and more blatant about it. His promise to supporters, Greg Sargent satirizes, is a simple promise: I have seen elite corruption and self-dealing from the inside, and I will put that know-how to work for you.

Sargent writes:

A new Washington Post report that Trump made explicit policy promises to a roomful of Big Oil executives—while urging them to raise $1 billion for his campaign—is a powerful story in part because it wrecks what’s left of that mystique. In case you didn’t already know this, it shows yet again that if Trump has employed that aforementioned knowledge of elite corruption and self-dealing to any ends in his public career, it’s chiefly to benefit himself.

More worrisome is how newer, bluer meanies in his employ might direct executive power against political enemies. Trump views power more as a means to wealth and criminal immunity. His allies see power itself as their primary goal and money as a perk. Disarming the left not simply through electoral shenannigans but in every way imaginable could be how they do it. Not unlike how the right has attacked education in red states during the Biden administration, only more so and nationwide.

Michelle Goldberg considers:

In a letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland this week, the Republican senator Josh Hawley demanded a federal investigation into dark money groups subsidizing “pro-terrorist student organizations” holding anti-Israel protests on college campuses. He cited Politico reporting linking big liberal philanthropies to some pro-Palestinian organizers. Open Society Foundations, for example, founded by the oft-demonized George Soros, has given grants to the anti-Zionist Jewish Voice for Peace, which has an active university presence. Hawley noted that an I.R.S. ruling denies tax-exempt status to organizations that encourage their members to commit civil disobedience, calling nonprofit funding for the groups behind the anti-Israel demonstrations “almost certainly illegal.”

Even if Garland doesn’t act on Hawley’s request, the attorney general in a second Donald Trump administration probably would. That’s one reason I fear that the backlash to the pro-Palestinian campus movement — which includes lawsuits, hearings and legislation — could help Republicans wage war on progressive nonprofits more broadly.

If they do, the right would be following a well-worn authoritarian playbook. In addition to repressing critical voices in academia and the media, the autocratic leaders Trump admires have regularly tried to crush the congeries of advocacy groups, think tanks, humanitarian organizations and philanthropies often referred to as “civil society.” Hungary, for example, passed what it called the “Stop Soros” law, which criminalized helping refugees and migrants apply for asylum. More recently, Hungary enacted a “sovereignty law,” which, as a report from the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace put it, “offers the ruling party and the Secret Service vast powers to accuse and investigate any groups or individuals that influence public debate and may have had foreign training or contact for any part of their work.”

That Carnegie report, written by Rachel Kleinfeld and published in March, offers a stark warning that something similar could happen here. In fact, Kleinfeld argues, it’s already started.

Titled “Closing Civic Space in the United States,” the report describes a wide array of efforts to curb organizing and assembly. Kleinfeld criticizes the left as well as the right, citing, for example, the pandemic-era rules that kept churches closed even after bars had reopened. But as she writes, “the vast majority of efforts to close space currently come from the illiberal right,” which is integrated into the Republican Party, and thus into government, in a way that has no analogue on the left.

In “Minority Rule,” Ari Berman leads readers through a mind-bending array of tactics Republicans have employed to secure their power in a time when their political base is shrinking steadily. Most are familiar to Hullabaloo readers. But the walk down memory lane is still unnerving. My God, the number and deviousness of them. Inventiveness that might be put to work solving social problems and improving people’s lives is instead dedicated to f#cking with democracy in ways I would never have conceived.

“That’s because you don’t have a criminal mind,” as an old restaurant customer smiled.

What concerns Goldberg is how pro-Palestinian protests are spurring those criminal minds to more inventiveness and, as one nonprofit consultant put it, giving Republicans “a Hamas-sized terrorist wedge to go after our entire infrastructure.” Legislation is in the works.

Goldberg concludes:

None of us, presumably, want to finance evil. The question is whether you want the government, particularly one controlled by Trump’s Republican Party, deciding what evil is. Mike Johnson, the House speaker, recently suggested that the F.B.I. investigate Soros’s role in the protests. A Trump F.B.I. wouldn’t need to be asked twice.

Ponder that.

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Baby elephants are the best

Hilvarenbeek, February 20, 2024 – African elephant Punda has become the mother of a healthy elephant calf after a 22-month pregnancy. This is the third calf born in the Safari Park @Beekse-Bergen in four months. Never before have three African elephants been born in a European zoo in such a short time. The young elephant is a girl and has been named Tendai. Head zookeeper Yvonne Vogels says: “Everything is falling into place! Mosi means firstborn: the first of the three calves. Ajabu stands for ‘radiant’.

It’s wonderful to see how the premature baby, because she was born two months prematurely, is now strengthened and how we see this reflected in her character. And now there is Tendai, which means grateful. Thankful for all the healthy happiness in the herd. We are completely over the moon!”

The zookeepers of the African elephants were alert for the arrival of the calf for several days. Vogels: “On Wednesday we saw a change in the blood values and in principle the calf would be born within 48 hours.” The zookeepers monitored the webcam for five nights, taking turns and every hour. “We regularly thought that the moment had arrived. On Sunday evening, Punda was very restless. The keepers and I decided to spend the night in a room next to the elephant enclosure. The little one was born on Monday morning, February 19 at 9.10 am,” says Vogels.

To allow mother and daughter to recover in peace, the elephant stable will be open to a limited extent in the coming days. Matriarch At 32 years old, Punda is the matriarch of the elephant herd in Safari Park Beekse Bergen. It means that as the eldest of the herd, she plays an important role within the elephant family. When the two previous calves were born, her essential role was visible: she taught her daughters how to care for their young calves.

Punda arrived at the Safari Park with her offspring in 2015 as part of the management program. The management program ensures a healthy reserve population of this species. Elephant bull Yambo came to Beekse Bergen from Spain in 2021 to make his contribution. And with success, because not much later the zookeepers saw the first mating.

More space Through the Wildlife Foundation, Beekse Bergen supports the Save the Elephants organization with the Northern Corridors Project. The project will ensure that nature parks in Kenya are connected with each other with corridors. A corridor is a safe passage for wild animals, such as elephants. The passages are necessary because the population of Africa is growing and the elephant habitat is becoming fragmented, resulting in human-animal conflicts. The aim is to finance one corridor: 60,000 euros are needed for this. More than half of this amount will be collected through an adoption plan for the young elephants. The rest of the amount will be supplemented with other initiatives.

Republicans are running a skeleton campaign

I’m sure many in the media will say this must mean that Joe Biden is in trouble. Isn’t everything? But it just ain’t so. This is not good news for Trump I don’t care what anyone says:

Donald Trump’s 2020 campaign called itself a “juggernaut” in May of that year, on par with a planet-destroying Death Star that was “firing on all cylinders.”

Trump’s 2024 campaign has traded Star Wars metaphors for talk of a “leaner” and “more efficient” operation, with less real estate, fewer employees and greater dependence on outside groups.

“We’re focused on quality over quantity. I mean, how novel a concept,” top strategist Chris LaCivita told the crowd of top donors May 4 at Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, Fla., according to attendees.

The shift comes as President Biden’s campaign and its allies, buoyed by incumbency, have been moving in the opposite direction, building a more expansive operation sooner than in 2020. Strategists for both major parties expect Democrats to raise and spend more than Republicans over the coming months, a dynamic that has been magnified by the significant legal costs Trump’s fundraising apparatus has absorbed to defend him in state and federal courts.

Trump trying to bribe the oil industry for a billion dollars is more evidence of this “quality over quantity” strategy, amirite?

Trump won spending less money than Clinton in 2016 so the conventional wisdom is that he has some magical abilities that make him beyond any of the usual campaign necessities and requirements. But that was then and this is now. Trump is a known quantity today, the media is treating him critically, he’s been sued for half a billion dollars for fraud, is indicted on very serious charges and is not running against a woman that many voters loathed with a singular passion usually reserved for serial killers. It is a different day and I’m not sure that Trump failing to put together a real campaign is the put-away shot too many people think it is.

can't make it up — with Comer's investigation fizzled out, Steve Scalise says House Republicans are now drafting articles of impeachment against Biden for not supporting Israel staunchly enough. Note that even Varney is skeptical. pic.twitter.com/BN4lKKPSWu

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) May 10, 2024

You may recall that the House Republicans held up aid to Ukraine, Taiwan and Israel (and blew off a very expansive border bill on Trump’s orders) for months. These Republicans attempting to impeach Biden over this issue is mind-boggling.

I’ve heard several wingnut commentators compare Biden’s actions to Trump’s when he told Zelensky that he would withhold weapons unless he came up with dirt on Joe Biden. I don’t think I need to point out how ridiculous that comparison is. If they disagree with Biden’s decision that’s completely legitimate. They can try to write some legislation to stop him or someone on their team could file a lawsuit. But there are decades of precedents that say presidents have the authority to make a decision like this on the basis of the national interest (often at the behest of Republican hawks who argue for unlimited presidential power.) Trump, on the other hand, used his authority to advance his personal political interest. You’ll recall that Alan Dershowitz fatuously tried to argue that a president’s personal political interest is by definition in the national interest — another example of l’etat c’est moi.

Presidents have often made dubious decisions in this area and there are good reasons to dial back their unrestrained authority. But impeaching Biden over this is absurd and they know it.

Trump claims that RFK Jr has just been pretending to be against the covid vaccine these past few years to draw support away from Trump’s people for political reasons. pic.twitter.com/1HJjqmDWZP

— Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) May 9, 2024

“For those of you that want to vote because you think he’s an anti-vaxxer, he’s not really an anti-vaxxer. That’s only his political moment. So, RFK, his views on vaccines are fake, as is everything else about his candidacy.”

MSNBC:

In a striking video on Truth Social, Donald Trump criticizes Robert F. Kennedy Jr., dismissing him as a ‘radical left Democrat’ amid polls indicating Kennedy is siphoning votes from Trump’s campaign. Emphasizing the urgency, Trump states he would prefer Joe Biden over ‘Junior,’ arguing that the country would fare better under Biden’s administration than the ‘immediate collapse’ he predicts with Kennedy.

Trump could theoretically put him away quickly if he wanted to:

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has challenged Donald Trump to a head-to-head debate for when both address a Libertarian convention later this month, a move that comes as the presumptive GOP nominee has ramped up both criticism of Kennedy’s independent bid and demands that President Joe Biden meet him on a debate stage.

Arguing that he is “drawing a lot of voters from your former supporters,” Kennedy said to Trump in an open letter posted Tuesday to X that the Libertarian convention provides “perfect neutral territory for you and me to have a debate where you can defend your record for your wavering supporters.”

Trump is taunting Joe Biden every day now to debate (knowing that he won’t agree to do it until the fall because he’s the president not some gadfly.) But he refused to debate any of his primary rivals and he’s not going to do this either.

But it is telling that he’s going after Kennedy so hard and that he’s decided to go after him by pretending that he’s not the foremost anti-vax activist in the country and has been for years. (He’s really all-in on the idea that he has the power to change reality simply by saying something.) They must have some very disturbing poll numbers for him to do this. This is one of his only weaknesses with the cult and the last thing he wants is to have Kennedy out there reminding everyone that he’s the guy who touted the COVID vaccine as one of his great achievements (until he was booed at one of his rallies.) It’s a weak spot and he’s obviously very worried about it.

This is how half the country becomes inured to blatant corruption:

Fox: Trump reportedly just made a big promise to oil executives. He told them, ‘give me a billion dollars, and I will cut Biden's environmental protections’ pic.twitter.com/Q83yyCgKlv

— Biden-Harris HQ (@BidenHQ) May 10, 2024

That is Fox News blithely normalizing Trump’s flagrant corruption. No biggie. Just Trump trying to bribe the oil industry into giving him a billion dollars. What’s the problem?

It’s not that this sort of quid pro quo wasn’t implicit in the past. But they used to couch it in the idea that they were ideologically aligned and never made such a blatant pitch for specific “deliverables” in exchange for cash. You have to love the fact that the “oil man” told this reporter that a billion dollars in exchange for destroying regulations isn’t really a good deal. I guess they’re negotiating.

But hey, why not? There’s no further need to pretend that the Republican party has any integrity. It’s all for sale and they’re fine with it.

Where are all of his ecstatic supporters?

There have been a lot of raised eyebrows over the fact that with the exception of one appearance by his son Eric, Donald Trump’s family is not present to support him at his criminal trial in Manhattan. Normally you would see the wife and the adult kids lined up behind the defendant to show a united front, even if the subject at hand was uncomfortable. After all, there really isn’t such a thing as a pleasant criminal trial but it’s just something that is commonly done and I would certainly have thought that it would be wise in this case, since he’s running for president and all. It would have been especially useful to at least see Melania and Ivanka playing the trad-wife and loyal daughter suggesting by their presence that their man can do no wrong in their eyes. They’re supposed to be Republicans, after all.

But how could they? Everyone knows that his cultivated image of a wealthy playboy who wined and dined beautiful women like he was some kind of matinee idol is another one of his lies. This man had a casting couch routine more in the mold of a creepy Harvey Weinstein than a glamorous Tony Stark and they know it.

Trump is intensely frustrated over the fact that because of the judge’s gag order, he is no longer allowed to verbally assault and threaten the witnesses or the jury. But since the judge told him this week that he will have choice but to jail him for contempt if he violates it one more time, he’s managed to keep it together and confine his insults and threats to the judge, the prosecutors and Joe Biden. But you can feel the tension in him when he makes his frequent forays into the strange echo chamber hallway where he rants about the proceedings and reads clippings from Fox News personalities saying the trial is a travesty.

One can imagine how the thought of going to jail petrifies him. This is a man who has been pampered his entire life. His elaborate morning ablutions with the hair and the make-up routine alone make any kind of imprisonment unthinkable. But he really, really wants to go after Stormy Daniels, so much so that he had his lawyers ask the judge to lift the gag order for her specifically since she is now finished testifying, (The judge said no, that he was preserving the integrity of the court.)

For Trump this goes against every fiber of his being, as was not so coincidentally conveyed to the jury yesterday afternoon when one of his book publishers testified and was asked to read aloud some passages from his books, including this charming commentary:

“For many years I’ve said that if someone screws you, screw them back. If somebody hurts you you just go after them as viciously and as violently as you can. Like it says in the Bible, an eye for an eye.”

Trump will just have to let his allies in the right wing media do that for him for the moment and they are more than eager to comply.

It’s doubtful that Trump wanted his family to be there to hear all these sordid details in person anyway. But he reportedly was quite upset that his political allies weren’t in attendance during the first two weeks of the trial. According to NBC News, he whined “no one is defending me” and pouted over the fact that there wasn’t a big crowd of protesters outside. He lied about that, of course, and said on camera that there were hundreds of people blocked from protesting.

Look around everybody on mute 🦗🦗🦗 pic.twitter.com/HuBFGy9hoa

— The Lincoln Project (@ProjectLincoln) April 23, 2024

He actually called for his followers to come to the trial on his Truth Social platform — “GO OUT AND PEACEFULLY PROTEST. RALLY BEHIND MAGA. SAVE OUR COUNTRY!” — but other than a dozen or so kooks, they haven’t shown up. From the very beginning of his legal travails he’s issued threats that he people “won’t stand for it” saying as far back as 2022, “If these radical, vicious racist prosecutors do anything wrong, I hope we are going to have in this country the biggest protest we have ever had … in Washington, D.C, in New York, in Atlanta and elsewhere because our country and our elections are corrupt.”

Why they haven’t turned up to support him in his moment of need when there always seems to be a few thousand who like to go to his rallies is a mystery but it clearly has him feeling down in the dumps. So now he’s got some of his employees, political cronies and right wing media personalities attending the trial to give him a little boost.

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, who Politico reports hangs around Trump as much as possible, was among the first to heed the call. Also showing up despite having much more important things to do were campaign managers Susie Wiles and Chris LaCivita along with advisor Boris Epshteyn and Natalie Harp who the NY Times describes this way:

Called “the human printer” by colleagues, Ms. Harp often carries a portable device so she can quickly provide Mr. Trump with hard copies of mood-boosting news articles and social media posts by people praising him.

That’s just pathetic.

The lawyer who has lost several cases for Trump but who defends him vociferously on TV, Alina Habba, has appeared in the courtroom. And on Thursday former judge and current Fox News member of The Five, Jeanine Pirro was in attendance. The big name, however, was Florida Senator Rick Scott who went the extra mile and held a press conference. He compared Trump to himself:

Scott: I'm fed up. I watched what happened to me and my company. I've talked to business people over the years and what's happened to them when you have political persecution. pic.twitter.com/hMJ04gp13L

— Acyn (@Acyn) May 9, 2024

His company paid $1.7 billion in fines to settle charges of rampant Medicare fraud, at the time the largest ever imposed, and Scott has previously said, “as I have said repeatedly, Columbia/HCA made mistakes, and I take responsibility for what happened on my watch as CEO.” Today he says he’s a victim of the deep state.

The ambitious senator is said to be angling for the VP slot or Senate Majority leader and he knows that whining like a five year old about being victimized is the quickest way to Donald Trump’s heart. Scott’s the first contender to be there in his time of need and I’m sure Trump noticed. If the rest of them haven’t figured out by now that job one is defending Dear Leader and singing his praises then they’d better just take their names off the list right now. Look for the whole crew to traipse up there over the next few weeks. Donald Trump needs cheering up and nothing makes him happier than lackeys begging for his favor.

Salon

Cowardly, yes

Donald Trump is not invincible in spite of MAGA mythology, explains Jamelle Bouie:

In the folk wisdom of recent American politics, Donald Trump is a figure of herculean invulnerability to traditional scandal. What lands as a crippling blow to most politicians leaves nary a scratch on Trump, who effortlessly deflected the slings and arrows of the 2016 presidential campaign and paid no discernible price for the “Access Hollywood” tape, his racism or his general incoherence.

There has long been a “please don’t hit me” reflex among established Democrats, a conditioned, abused-spouse behavior. Don’t make Daddy mad. Don’t impeach him. Don’t hold him accountable. You’ll just make him stronger. And madder. Bouie offers some examples.

Now on trial in Manhattan, Trump is grinding his teeth to nubs over humiliating descriptions of his sexual encounter with Stormy Daniels, about the age of his daughter Ivanka. Yet the myth of his invulnerability is rising again, like the South.

Even so:

Let’s look at the situation as it stands. Despite his best efforts, Trump has not been able to summon the grass-roots activity that signals political strength. There are no febrile crowds demanding justice for Trump at the courthouse door, no mob poised to wreak havoc in Trump’s name — not that he didn’t try to make one appear. And the broader public does not appear to have a problem with either the trial or the prospect of jail time for the former president.

A majority of Americans — 54 percent in the latest poll conducted for NPR and PBS NewsHour — say that the hush money trial and other investigations into Trump to find out whether he broke the law are “fair.” Forty-two percent of Americans, according to a CNN poll released last month, say that Trump’s conduct in his Manhattan trial has been “mostly inappropriate.” Twenty-five percent say that his behavior has been “mostly appropriate.” And according to a January Reuters/Ipsos poll, 71 percent of Americans — including 55 percent of Republicans — say that if Trump did break the law, he should be prosecuted, and if convicted, sentenced to prison.

If there were any sign that this trial was an asset for Trump — any sign that it put him on stronger ground with the voting public — you would find it in national polling. It’s not there. What we see, instead, is a steady head-to-head between Trump and President Biden.

There is also the evidence of the Republican presidential primaries, in which voters are still casting ballots. On Tuesday, nearly 22 percent of Republican primary voters in Indiana pulled the proverbial lever for Nikki Haley, who left the race in March. She won 16.6 percent of the vote in the Pennsylvania primary two weeks earlier. The trial, in other words, has not even rallied dissident Republicans toward the party’s standard-bearer and away from a failed challenger.

Trump is not yet toast, but he’s browning.

Since 2015, there has been this strong desire to make Trump more complicated than he is, as if his power and influence mean that he must have depth and substance. But he doesn’t. Trump is a glorified bully. And like all bullies, he wilts in the face of anyone willing to stand up and say no.

Joe Biden has been hitting Trump hard on social media, but his momentum has slowed since the Gaza protests have focused press attention there.

Brian Beutler complains:

But the current election, and to some extent the unexpectedly narrow margin of the 2020 election, are demoralizing to liberals because that element of naïveté is gone, and yet Trump remains formidable. Democrats are worried about what another Trump presidency would mean, but they’re also stunned by what the numbers keep telling them: We’re losing to that?

I’d encourage liberals who feel this way to imagine what would happen in a mass-market Hollywood film about a well-meaning protagonist who came to the same realization. Would he just keep doing the same thing over and over again, expecting better sense to prevail? Or would he switch tactics, and come up with a new plan to stage a comeback?

My longstanding frustration with Democrats stems from the fact that they’re doing the first thing. I’m relieved to see Biden chastise journalists for underplaying the most important stakes of the election (the media really should do better!) but he and (more importantly) the other leaders of his party are simply not providing any of the high drama they know political media relies on to fuel stories into firestorms.

(At the ground level, getting Yellow Dogs to adopt new tricks is the story of my life.)

Democrats should be doing more to spin Republicans’ foilbles into major controveries., Beutler suggests. Republicans are pros at it, and used their skills to make the most of the campus protests.

But this was about Trump’s invincibility.

In this situation, Trump is not in control for once, and that’s bad news for him. He hates it. Late on Thursday, he had his lawyers ask the judge to lift his gag order with regard to Stormy Daniels once she’d finished her testimony. He wanted to savage her for the cameras outside the courtroom, but lacked the guts to take the stand and testify under oat that, as he claims, the encounter never happened.

Daniels herself taunted him for that.

Real men respond to testimony by being sworn in and taking the stand in court. Oh…wait. Nevermind.

— Stormy Daniels (@StormyDaniels) May 9, 2024

Make the most of that, Democrats.

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