Do we want to trust the nuclear codes to his “metrics” again? Come on.
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Digby's Hullabaloo Posts
It’s coming up on Monday. And he’s freaking out.
There’s been some talk lately about Donald Trump’s light campaign schedule compared to President Joe Biden’s who’s been visiting swing states constantly even as he’s handling some very thorny legislative and foreign policy problems. The contrast has been sharp. Trump is spending much more time on the golf course than holding rallies and even his appearances on friendly right wing media have been scarce.
Judging by his Truth Social feed, it’s fair to say that he’s stressed and it’s not about the campaign: he’s obsessed with the criminal trial that’s set to start next Monday. I suspect he never thought it would get this far — he’s tried every trick in the book to delay the proceedings and nothing so far has worked so he’s getting frantic, posting things like this throughout the day:
It would seem that these outbursts serve as some sort of self-soothing exercise.
He’s also becoming downright morose, fatuously declaring that it will be his honor to be the “modern day Mandela” and whining endlessly about the judges in his cases lamenting at one point, “How many Corrupt, Biased, Crooked Joe Biden-‘Protection Agency’ New York Judges do I have to endure before somebody steps in?” (What — and who — exactly do you suppose he has in mind when he says “step in?”)
Trump’s latest attempt to delay the trial was dispatched by a NY appeals judge who was not moved by his lawyers argument that he has a first amendment right to publicly assail witnesses and the judge’s family members and refused to lift the gag order. Likewise, his appeal for a change of venue was also denied. There are still a couple of cards he can play by asking the full appeals court to hear his argument but that won’t stop the trial from starting on Monday.
The case is referred to in the press as “the hush money case” but that’s not really what the legal case is about. We all know that Donald Trump conspired with the publisher of the National Enquirer, David Pecker, and his consiglieri Michael Cohen to keep a lid on any tales about his philandering during the presidential campaign by using what’s known as “catch and kill.” They would “buy” the rights and then not publish it — in other words they’d pay off the accuser. Early in the campaign they’d done just that with a former Playboy model named Karen McDougal who was paid $150,000 for her story.
This excellent recitation of the known facts in the case by David Corn reminds us that the adult film actress known as Stormy Daniels had approached various media back in 2011 with the story that she’s slept with Trump at a golf event four months after his son Baron was born. Cohen had managed to scare her off then but in the wake of the release of the Access Hollywood tape just before the election, in which Trump bragged about assaulting women, she resurfaced with her story and Cohen sprang into action.
He negotiated with Daniels’ lawyer and the National Inquirer to pay her $130,000 and sign a non-disclosure agreement at which point he took the deal to Trump. Trump expressed his concerns about how this would affect his campaign if it got out and agreed to the payment telling Cohen to arrange for it to be made with Allen Weisselberg, the Trump Organization CFO.
Finding a way to get the money was complicated. Cohen and Weisselberg bounced around a number of different ideas without coming up with any way to front the payment so Cohen put the money up himself with the understanding that he’d be paid back. Text messages and emails show that many people in the campaign were aware this was happening including campaign manager Kellyanne Conway and Trump’s personal assistant Hope Hicks, both of whom are on the witness list for the trial.
When the Daniels story hit in January of 2018 Cohen claimed that he had done the payoff completely on his own and Trump famously said he didn’t know anything about it.
Subsequent documents found by the FBI and Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani put the lie to that, revealing that Trump had reimbursed Cohen and the reimbursement appeared in the Trump Organizations financial records as a legitimate legal expense.
Cohen went to federal prison for campaign finance violations, tax evasion, making false statements to a bank, and lying to Congress on behalf of Trump in this case. Trump is referred to in his indictment as “Individual number 1” and it’s clear that he’s the beneficiary of all of Cohen’s actions to cover up the hush money scheme. Why the feds put Cohen behind bars but never pressed the case against Trump is one of those questions to which we’ve never gotten a satisfactory answer.
Everyone assumes that Cohen is going to be shredded on the stand because he’s a convicted liar but he’s also the only one who’s paid the price for Trump’s crimes, so it’s always possible the jury will see the unfairness of that. But as Corn points out, the case doesn’t rely on Cohen’s word alone. There is a long list of people who were involved in this scheme and there is a mountain of paper evidence to back up the charges.
The Manhattan DA, Alvin Bragg, does not characterize the case as a “hush money” case but rather a financial fraud crime undertaken to interfere in the 2016 election, a campaign finance violation, which raises the charges to felonies. When he announced the indictment he said:
This is the business capital of the world. We regularly do cases involving false business statements. The bedrock — in fact, the basis for business integrity and a well-functioning business marketplace — is true and accurate record-keeping. That’s the charge that’s brought here, falsifying New York State business records.”
We already have a judgement in civil court to the tune of 450 million or so that says Trump routinely falsifies his business records. This time he did it to hide a personal indiscretion and violated campaign finance laws on top of it and that’s a criminal offense. As the NY Times reported in this lengthy recent profile of Bragg, although legal experts pooh-poohed this case when it was first brought, there has subsequently been a change in that opinion since a federal judge refused to allow the case to move to federal court and the presiding judge is convinced that the case should go to trial.
I have no idea if a jury will find Trump guilty. But I do know that unless the full NY Appeals Court issues a last minute stay of the case to consider his latest bogus delaying tactic, the first criminal trial of a former president will begin next Monday and the defendant, Donald Trump, will be required to attend every day it is in session. It’s going to seriously interfere with his heavy golfing schedule but he has no choice.
He says he believes this will help him gain sympathy with the voters and will no doubt appear on the courthouse steps each day to whine and carp about the case. And every day people will be reminded of Donald Trump’s sordid past and his ongoing, overwhelming corruption and criminality. He certainly knows that which is why he’s worked so hard to delay the trial rather than take advantage of what he claims to be a great political advantage and fulfill his destiny as the Nelson Mandela of Mar-a-Lago. He’s worried and he should be.
Fool me twice, etc.
“No one in law enforcement should be caught off guard if trouble breaks out before, during, or after the November presidential election,” Juliette Kayyem begins in The Atlantic.
It is not too soon for the Biden administration and the Department of Justice to start what-iffing a response, and to take seriously recommendations made by the January 6th Committee . It appears the administration means to get ahead of the next insurrection. “A show of readiness,” Kayyem writes, “can also deter people who might have learned the wrong lesson from the Capitol riot: that just a bit more violence might have changed the outcome of the 2020 election.” Because the most hardcore MAGA soldiers not already in jail (especially those with military training) will have learned from Jan. 6 how to do a coup and how not to.
Kayyem adds:
Any attempts to shore up the nation’s defenses against political violence might be misinterpreted—or intentionally misconstrued—by some of Trump’s supporters as an attempt by a Democratic administration to use federal power to interfere in the 2024 election. But the fact that everything Biden does at this stage will be seen through a politicized lens shouldn’t scare him into inaction.
If Trump and his supporters want to quibble with plans to protect election officials from external pressure during vote counts in Georgia and Wisconsin, or to protect members of Congress from rioters during the certification process, then they should do so out loud, before the election. But preparing for election turmoil shouldn’t be a partisan issue. The right keeps warning us of the potential for left-wing antifa violence; surely conservatives would want the executive branch to prevent it from affecting the vote certification if Trump wins. The best course is to lay out transparent plans to safeguard the electoral process no matter who is ultimately sworn in.
On one level, we all want to forget about the death and disruptions of COVID-19 pandemic that dominated 2020. It was a worldwide trauma. But people as committed as the Proud Boys and the Roger Stones and Christian nationalists will not go away. The figureheads will keep more distance from overt planning. But they may not need to do more than feed the desire of the fringe right for direct action. Trump, as Michael Cohen testified, knows well how to make his desires plain without stating them plainiy. His followers will take it upon themselves to give the Boss the violence he craves. Even MAGA judges know what the Boss wants:
In his sentencing memo Thursday, U.S. District Judge Cormac J. Carney made it clear why he was letting Tyler Laube off lightly.
It wasn’t just because of what Laube did or didn’t do – the defendant had already confessed to beating a journalist at a 2017 Southern California rally and pleaded guilty to violating riot laws as part of a white supremacist gang.
Laube deserved a light sentence, Carney said, because prosecutors should have focused on leftist groups.
In a 22-page memo, Carney repeatedly said prosecutors have “ignored” violence committed by Antifa and instead focused on targeting people like Laube – Trump supporters and members of the far right.
Ninety miles away on the same day, USA Today reminds readers, ANTIFA members were on trial:
In San Diego, the last two defendants in the “San Diego 11” – members of Antifa charged with committing violence against Trump supporters in January 2021 – were sitting before a jury. Their nine co-defendants have already been sentenced, some of them to years in prison, for their crimes.
Strongmen rise out of chaos, a friend noted yesterday. Provide enough chaos and people will demand one. It need not be as localized as the Jan. 6 insurrection.
Yes, some of these clowns are itching to “go to guns” with the left and the gummint. But direct confrontation and frontal assault may not be the only way to introduce chaos. For those unwilling to martyr themselves in a glorious shootout, attacks on utilities have already been field-tested and not all the terrorists prosecuted.
Some of the perps in the N.C. substation attacks may have been trained at Fort Bragg,
North Carolina and elsewhere.
We’ve looked at such attacks here, here, and here.
The FBI is still looking for the perps behind the Aug, 2023 Torrance, California substation attack. To my knowledge, the 2013 Metcalf, Calif. sniper attack on a substation remains unsolved. This is chaos on the cheap for armed RW reactionaries. The “how to” is in circulation. You know it is.
Lucklily for us, Trump will not be in control of the executive branch on Jan. 6 next year, or on Inauguration Day, win or lose. Better that the Biden adminstration is braced for whatever comes.
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Republicans in disarray
Republicans want desperately to control the national narrative around the presidential election. They need voters and the press focused on any number of subjects not-Donald Trump and his visible mental decay: an immigration “crisis,” inflation, the economy, Joe Biden’s age, sexual identity politics, election “fraud,” etc. It’s just that their MAGA base keeps spitting out the bit and Donald Trump cannot stay on his own message.
Trump’s campaign finance criminal trial in Manhattan begins on Monday despite his every effort to derail it. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-MAGA) threatens to oust yet another Republican speaker of the ungovernable House. GOP-controlled states keep tripling down on abortion restrictions. Arizona’s state Supreme Court just reactivated a Civil War abortion law.
The ruling, Washington Post reports, is “expected to have a seismic impact on the politics of the battleground state, testing the limits of Republican support for abortion restrictions and putting the issue front and center in November’s election.”
Arizona’s conservative Supreme Court on Tuesday revived a near-total ban on abortion, invoking an 1864 law that forbids the procedure except to save a mother’s life and punishes providers with prison time. The decision supersedes Arizona’s previous rule, which permitted abortions up to 15 weeks.
Arizonans are poised to consider the issue in November, now that the groups working to amend the state’s constitution to enshrine abortion rights — which include the ACLU of Arizona and Planned Parenthood Advocates of Arizona — say that they have acquired enough signatures to establish a ballot measure, according to the Arizona Republic. Meanwhile, Republicans in the state are asking Arizona Gov. Katie Hobbs (D) and the Republican-led state legislature to come up with a solution.
The developments in Arizona are part of a wave of state actions to reckon with the future of access to reproductive care after the U.S. Supreme Court, with a conservative majority installed during Donald Trump’s presidency, overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022. While several states enacted abortion restrictions as a result of overturning Roe, protecting access to reproductive care has broadly been a winning issue for Democratic candidates and for ballot measures that protect abortion access in the elections since the 2022 ruling.
Reproductive freedoms will be front and center in the national psyche, especially among women, between now and November. After Republican election losses and wins for reproductive freedoms in state after state post-Roe, this unpopular ruling is just what Republicans and Trump don’t need. Reproductive freedom guarantees are on the fall ballot or proposed in multiple states.
Trump’s bragging about ending Roe will be a centerpiece of Democrats’ campaigns across the country. It could even put Florida in play for Democrats. Trump’s attempt to leave abortion to the states and to back away from enacting a national abortion ban adds to the message confusion on the right. Republicans are trying to disclaim from their own positions. Women and men know that the fringe right won’t stop with abortion. Contraception access and IVF treatments will be next. Trump’s campaign is all over the place on these issues, Politico reports.
It is not helping that Trump is so discombobulated over the start of a criminal trial for the first time in his life. He’ll have to attend court each day where his criminality will be in the spotlight. He’ll try to play the victim, naturally. But it’s not exactly the campaign ad his party wants playing on repeat even if this jury fails to convict when another sent Trump fixer Michael Cohen to prison.
The propaganda arm of the GOP is no help either. Fox Business guest Mark Simone tells Larry Kudlow, “This issue does not hurt Donald Trump, he’s not against abortion. He’s actually okay with abortion, he wants that 15 week limit. Perfectly reasonable.” This Arizona decision will soon blow over. Letting states decide makes Trump the pro-choice candidate!
SIMONE: Yeah, it is to be pro-choice, states can decide. If you had to travel to another state to get an abortion, it’s not the worst thing in the world. Hopefully this is a very rare occurrence in your life, once in your life, maybe you would do it. Buying a bus ticket to go somewhere to get it is not worst thing in the world.
That will play well with the majority of voters, won’t it?
If there’s an upside for the GOP, the fight to restore women’s freedoms takes the focus away from GOP efforts to rig the election for themselves in state after state.
Passing out in an hours-long line outside a polling station undersupplied with machines to vote on a single day in a Black precinct because the GOP outlawed anyone giving you water “is not the worst thing in the world” either, amirite? Hopefully your voting is very rare occurrence too.
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He’s right. It’s outright corruption.
This long expose of Jared Kushner’s corrupt foreign business dealings (NY Times gift link) will make you reach for the tequila. How are these people getting away with this stuff?
Jared Kushner’s investment fund is not especially large by global finance standards. But as he gets it fully up and running, each step is bringing with it ethical issues that would only grow if his father-in-law, Donald J. Trump, should win another term as president.
His $3 billion fund is financed almost entirely from overseas investors with whom he worked when he served as a senior adviser in the Trump White House. He has taken money from government wealth funds in Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, as well as from Terry Gou, a founder of Foxconn, the Taiwan-based electronics manufacturer, whose role in Mr. Kushner’s firm has not been previously disclosed.
In total, 99 percent of the money placed with him by investors has come from foreign sources, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission in late March.
Mr. Kushner’s firm, Affinity Partners, is collecting approximately $40 million a year in management fees from those investors even before any share of profits earned on investments. He has made 10 investments to date, totaling $1.2 billion, many of them in companies based abroad.
The investments include stakes in the Shlomo Group, an Israeli car-leasing and financing company; Dubizzle Group, a Dubai-based online real estate site; EGYM, a Munich-based electronic fitness company; Mosaic, a California-based solar lending site; and Zamp, an Abu Dhabi-backed fast food company that operates more than 1,000 restaurants in Brazil.
Other investments include two insurance businesses and a software company.
The foreign transactions — previously unseen in scale and speed for a former White House adviser — are bringing fresh scrutiny as Mr. Kushner’s father-in-law again seeks the White House and control over American foreign policy.
[…]
In a series of interviews, Mr. Kushner, 43, laid out new details of his effort to ramp up his firm. He also defended himself against the conflict-of-interest questions that have swirled around him since he left the White House and began soliciting investors.
“Following the laws and the rules is something we always do,” he said. “Perception, I’ve learned that from my time in politics, is important. But I can’t control what everyone is going to write or say about me.”
Mr. Kushner, the sole owner of the company, said he hoped to generate billions of dollars in additional returns for his investors and himself after helping to expand the companies he is investing in.
He has set up shop on the ninth floor of an office tower north of Miami. Its walls are filled with mementos from his time at the White House, including at least a dozen items signed by Mr. Trump, often with the words “Jared, Great Job. Thanks.”
Mr. Kushner has said he does not intend to return to the White House. But pressed on whether he would definitively rule out going back to government, he spoke instead about how happy he was in his life right now. He continues to offer advice to America First Policy Institute, a nonprofit set up by former Trump White House officials who are already preparing for a possible return to power.
Please click on that gift link up at the top to read the whole thing. It. Is. Stunning. And perhaps the most stunning thing about it is the crusade the Republicans launched against that piker Hunter Biden for his ancient and penny ante foreign dealings. I can’t for the life of me understand why the Democratic Senate hasn’t launched full bore investigations into what’s going on here. Even Republicans in the article acknowledge that nobody’s seen the scale and speed with which anyone has cashed in as Jared has done.
For some reason Trump and his family’s flagrant corruption has never interested people much which is astonishing. It’s unprecedented and happened right out in the open and it’s hardy even a scandal. And I’m sure that when he is finally defeated the Democrats will simply say that they want to turn the page and that will be that. It’s outrageous.
You’re not going to like it
Trump only has one economic idea: tariffs. Oh, he’ll give tax cuts for himself and for other rich people in return for donations and favors, of course. But his only “economic” idea is that tariffs force other countries to stop laughing at us and bring in money for the government which is 100% nonsense. His tariffs cost the government when it is forced to compensate American producers for their losses when countries retaliate and the cost of the tariffs are born by consumers who pay higher prices for goods. Duh.
Former President Donald J. Trump is planning an aggressive expansion of his first-term efforts to upend America’s trade policies if he returns to power in 2025 — including imposing a new tax on “most imported goods” that would risk alienating allies and igniting a global trade war.
[…]
Essentially, Mr. Trump’s trade agenda aims at backing the United States away from integration with the global economy and steering the country toward becoming more self-contained: producing a larger share of what it consumes and wielding its might through one-on-one dealings with other countries.
Mr. Trump, who calls himself a “tariff man,” took steps in that direction as president, including placing tariffs on various imports, hamstringing the World Trade Organization and starting a trade war with China. If he is elected, he plans a more audacious intervention in hopes of eliminating the trade deficit and bolstering manufacturing — with potentially seismic consequences for jobs, prices, diplomatic relations and the global trading system.
His plans — which he has described as “a sweeping pro-American overhaul of our tax and trade policy” — would amount to a high-stakes gamble with the economy’s health, given that unemployment has dropped to 3.7 percent, inflation has substantially cooled from its post-pandemic spike, about 200,000 jobs are being created each month and the stock market is near a record high.
Mr. Trump’s plans have drawn warnings from trade experts with more traditional economic views. Daniel M. Price, a top international economics adviser in the George W. Bush White House, called the plans “erratic and irrational.” He said that the costs would be borne by U.S. consumers and producers, and that the plans would risk alienating allies.
Anyway, if you want a glimpse of what his big economic plan looks like for average Americans:
I hope people don’t like salad and fish because it’s not going to be affordable for most of us if Trump gets his way. Say goodbye to your morning coffee.
Reality:
This doesn’t take into account the overwhelming horror of living in a woke country where transgender people exist and racial minorities are forcing the rightful white owners of the country to share power. The nightmare is real.
The Big Liars are organizing
Wired has a report on what they have planned:
As the most consequential presidential election in a generation looms in the United States, get-out-the-vote efforts across the country are more important than ever. But multiple far-right activist groups with ties to former president Donald Trump and the Republican National Committee are mobilizing their supporters in earnest, drawing on one baseline belief: Elections in the US are rigged, and citizens need to do something about it.
All the evidence states otherwise. But in recent weeks, these groups have held training sessions about how to organize on a hyperlocal level to monitor polling places and drop boxes, challenge voter registrations en masse, and intimidate and harass voters and election officials. And some are preparing to roll out new technology to fast-track all of these efforts: One of the groups claims they’re launching a new platform for checking voter rolls that contains billions of “data elements” on every single US citizen.
These groups could have a major impact on the 2024 election. In addition to disenfranchising voters and putting additional pressure on already overstretched election offices, they could convince more and more people that US elections are fraudulent.
Catherine Engelbrecht and her organization True the Vote have effectively tried to disenfranchise voters for more than a decade by claiming that voter rolls are filled with phony voter registrations. Engelbrecht’s rhetoric was given an unprecedented boost in the wake of 2020, when Trump and other elected officials mainstreamed conspiracies that the elections had been rigged in favor of Democrats. Hundreds of national and local election denial groups were formed, and many of them amassed huge followings on social media platforms like Telegram. As the 2024 presidential election looms, they are ramping up efforts to do it again.
“It could be exponentially worse than what we saw in 2020, but we’re going to be awake, we’re going to be engaged, we are going to understand the process, and we’re going to have options to continue to hold to those truths,” Engelbrecht said during a March webinar titled “Election Integrity Team Building 101.” “We’re not going to back down. There’s too much to lose.”
The hour-long presentation was delivered from a hotel room in Denver, with Engelbrecht laying out what could sound like a relatively benign plan to monitor elections and check voter rolls. “Keep a soft heart, keep a kind word in your mouth, approach people irrespective of party with love. You will find that things will be much better if that is the approach that is taken,” Engelbrecht said. The session, she said, was overbooked.
Engelbrecht then began speaking about elections being “perilously close to cracking in half,” and her presentation became a highlight reel of election conspiracies, references to crystals, Christian nationalist rhetoric, and militaristic jargon. “If this republic’s to be saved, it’s because [of] people like all of you that are on this webinar right now. There are some bad actors out there and we live in particularly chaotic and caustic times,” said Engelbrecht. “If we wait on somebody to do something, we will watch freedom slip away on our watch. That’s how close we are.”
This person is a proven wingnut liar:
Engelbrecht founded True the Vote in 2010, when she was an activist for the right-wing populist Tea Party movement. After the 2020 election, Engelbrecht and her collaborator Gregg Phillips became central figures in the Stop the Steal movement, and starred in the widely-debunked election conspiracy film 2000 Mules. They were also arrested for contempt of court after refusing to identify their source behind allegations that the Chinese government had accessed US election data. True the Vote also made wild allegations of widespread ballot stuffing in Georgia during the 2020 vote and a subsequent runoff in 2021. Earlier this year, True the Vote was forced to admit in court that the group had no evidence to back up its claims.
Apparently, nothing will stop them however. They have been developing lots of tools to help them steal it in 24:
In 2022, the group rolled out a slick new software tool known as IV3, based on technology developed by Phillips, that compared names on voter rolls to a database maintained by the US Postal Service, allowing anyone to challenge voter registrations across the country if they spotted a discrepancy. A WIRED investigation, however, revealed that the information used to challenge the registration of hundreds of thousands of people was based on unreliable data.
Undeterred, True the Vote announced last week that it was relaunching IV3. Phillips claims that the software’s database now has close to “100 billion data elements about every single voter in the United States.” WIRED has not seen proof of this claim. The new IV3 system will soon be available in all 50 states, the organization said. On Thursday, the group held a webinar to train local activists on how to use it. The new system also relies on data from the US Postal Service, but Engelbrecht claimed during the presentation that Phillips and his team had “normalized” the data from all 50 states to ensure the system would not produce inaccurate results. She also said that thousands of people across the country were already registered, and that they had a long waiting list.
Additionally, she said that another software tool developed by Phillips’ team, called Ground Fusion, would be released soon; it is aimed at organizations and PACs looking to identify voting irregularities across larger geographic regions.
True The Vote isn’t the only group doing this:
A secretive Georgia-based firm called EagleAI NETwork has developed a voter information database to fast-track the deletion of ineligible voters from the system. Voter rights groups have advised against its use, as insignificant errors—such as a missing comma before the suffix “Jr.”—have led to eligible names being removed. Still, at least one county in Georgia has agreed to use EagleAI to review voter challenges and conduct list maintenance activities.
One of EagleAI’s key backers is former Trump adviser Cleta Mitchell, who in the past two years has become central to the push to spread election conspiracies on a national level through her well-funded Election Integrity Network.
The group has held in-person training seminars in recent years, with session topics including how to protect “Vulnerable Voters from Leftist Activists” and “Monitoring Voting Equipment and Systems.” More recently, the group has made its training sessions available online, and is now once again ramping up its efforts ahead of the 2024 election with an initiative called Soles to the Rolls, aimed at boosting challenges to voter registration.
Read the whole thing. There are more groups organizing around a variety of different approaches, many of which are aimed at challenging the vote after the fact. I think we know that Trump will not accept a loss and he has a whole army of people ready to defend the sore loser in highly organized ways. Yes, they are mostly crackpots but you never know which ones might break through.
I think we all know by now that the only way the election will be over on November 5th is if Donald Trump wins and they will do everything in their power to make sure he does, by any means necessary. What happens if he loses is unknown but you can bet they aren’t going to go quietly.
Don’t let him forget it
What he said yesterday was that because he needs to get elected and he thinks this issue is hurting him so he’s just saying that he isn’t for a federal ban to get it off the table. But what Healey says above shows why he can’t take it off the table. He’s the reason all those states now have abortion bans and he’s proud of it. Normal people don’t care for the idea of women in neighboring states dying or young incest victims being forced into childbirth because Donald Trump is trying to split the difference. He created this problem when he and Mitch McConnell packed the court with wingnuts and now they have to live with it.
I noted yesterday that Lindsey Graham had come out with a big statement against Trump’s decision, pushing for a 15 week national ban, and Trump went on a tirade against him on Truth Social. By the end of the evening I became convinced this was a kabuki dance, at least on Graham’s part, to portray Trump as a “moderate.” “See, he’s not so bad!” I’m not entirely convinced Trump is in on that, however. His tirade went way farther than necessary to push that strategy. It sure sounded sincere to me…
As for the Republicans? Here’s a sample of the fatuous BS they’re trying to pull:
Come on. A 15 week abortion ban is an abortion ban. Words mean something. Or, at least, they used to.
Saying the quiet part outloud:
UPDATE:
Oh my. Here’s one that Trump thinks is just fine and is the reason he proudly takes credit for overturning Roe:
Trump gave all of us more reason to vote this fall
If it was not clear before that reproductive freedoms will be the central issue of this presidential campaign, Donald Trump made that clear on Monday, as Digby noted. Every time he does, he’ll drown out his own party’s messaging about border security, age, inflation or any other bit of spaghetti they hope sticks to the wall. But then keeeping his mouth shut about “our Great Roe v. Wade Victory” is not one of Trump’s strong suits.
This is one Trump message the left should amplify, and Biden-Harris is on it.
The GOP wants to leave all our freedoms up to individual states. Where once we were North and South, segregated and less-so, MAGA Republicans want to make what freedoms we Americans enjoy contingent not on the Constitution but on where we live. They want to leave our freedoms up to the states.
Not if we leave it up to our votes.
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For The Win, 5th Edition is ready for download. Request a copy of my free countywide GOTV planning guide at ForTheWin.us.