DAYS AFTER DOZENS of Palestinians were killed by Israeli airstrikes against displacement camps in Southern Gaza, former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley wrote “Finish them!” on Israeli artillery shells.
Haley, who recently sputtered in her bid to defeat former President Donald Trump for the 2024 Republican nomination, toured a kibbutz ravaged by Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack against Israel in the company of current Knesset member and former U.N. envoy Danny Danon.
“If you think this will only be in Israel, if we are arrogant enough, this could absolutely happen in America too and this is the moral of this story,” Haley said at one point during the visit.
Danon posted a collage of photos on Tuesday showing Haley writing on an artillery shell. “Finish them! This is what my friend, the former ambassador, Nikki Haley wrote today on a shell during a visit to an artillery post on the northern border,” Danon wrote.
Alongside her chilling note, Haley wrote “America loves Israel!” and autographed the bomb.
“Finish them”
That certainly has the echo of certain “final” kinds of “solutions” doesn’t it?
This is the person we are supposed to see as the “good Republican.” And she is a monster.
Woman in town from England goes down to the courthouse in lower Manhattan today to see the MAGA animals down there with her own eyes and is absolutely disgusted….no wonder America is a laughing stock because of these brain dead morons pic.twitter.com/5U0geFUfGw
— Wu Tang is for the Children (@WUTangKids) May 30, 2024
They call her the c-word, not realizing that in England it’s the equivalent of calling someone a “dick” not the grotesque epithet it is here in the US. Nonetheless, those people are truly vile. Creepy.
And then there was this from earlier in the week:
This is an actual video that Trump posted to his Truth Social. It’s a vulgar attack on Joe Scarborough that proclaims Trump “will get rid of all the fucking liberals” if he wins.
Why is a presidential candidate posting that he will get rid of everyone who opposes him? pic.twitter.com/hHsGHvoxEB
He’ll get rid of all you fucking liberals. You liberals are gone when he fucking wins. You fucking blowjob liberals are done. Uncle Donnie’s gonna take this election—landslide. Landslide, you fucking half a blowjob. Landslide. Get the fuck out of here, you scumbag.
Trump posted something that says “you liberals are gone when he fucking wins.” I don’t know specifically what he means by that but it isn’t good. And anyway, it’s not like Trump hasn’t said the same thing in public:
We pledge to you that we will root out the communists, Marxists, fascists, and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country.
Recall that his spokesperson then responded to the ensuing criticism by saying:
Those who try to make that ridiculous assertion are clearly snowflakes grasping for anything because they are suffering from Trump derangement syndrome, and their entire existence will be crushed when President Trump returns to the White House.
The news here isn’t this one man’s anger at Scarborough, it’s that Trump elevated it. And moments like these require context: This one should be placed alongside Trump’s other recent threats, such as his vow that news organizations will be “thoroughly scrutinized” if he wins, his promise to persecute his “vermin”-like political foes, and his threat to prosecute a range of enemies without cause. Looked at this way, is it really a leap to suggest that Trump is broadcasting the idea that liberals should feel threatened en masse by a second Trump term?
There is a mini cottage industry of punditry that is forever on the lookout for the merest hint of disrespect toward conservative voters, particularly rural and working-class white ones. But the fact that the GOP nominee for president approvingly posted a video that declares a large ideological subgroup of Americans “done” and “gone” if he is elected—never mind the vile epithets directed at them—appears to have garnered almost no headlines. Few if any top-shelf pundits have scowled with disapproval.
This has long been the case, even before Trump came along. It’s fine for salt-of-the-earth to grossly denigrate liberals but make a passing comment about some conservatives being in a “basket of deplorables” and it’s off with your head. It’s griped me for my entire adult life but I’ve just come to accept that this will never change. It seems that our idea of “Real America” is so tied to the image common-sense, white yeoman farmers that right wingers are granted special dispensation to be assholes for some reason. The rest of us have to mind our manners.
But as Greg points out, this is now a serious problem:
This is not intended as whataboutism. Rather, the point is that allowing such moments to remain decontextualized makes it easier to evade grappling with their true underlying intent. After all, it is undeniable that a central rationale of Trump’s presidential run is the threat to use state power to persecute and target—in a newly aggressive way—a large, albeit ill-defined, class of Americans who are designated as enemies of Trump and his MAGA movement.
It’s not just talk anymore. If we didn’t know that before January 6th we certainly should now.
People get very upset when you suggest that maybe this immense amount of whining about other people’s economic problems (most people say their own finances are fine) might be a bit self-indulgent. Mea culpa.
I was wondering the other day about our more recent experience: the Great Recession. That was just 15 years ago and it was extremely painful and the recovery was much slower than this one has been. Looking at the index of consumer sentiment over the period of 2009-2012 when Obama was handily re-elected (if not in a landslide) the trajectory is about the same. It was in the doldrums until 2012, at which point it ticked up to exactly the level it is today.
Yet some people were so convinced that Obama was in deep trouble throughout that year that when it was clear he won on election night, Karl Rove even had a fit on the air, convinced that it was impossible that Obama had won:
Shortly after Fox News became one of the first to call Ohio for the president, Rove chastised its “decision desk.”
“This is premature,” Rove said, adding later that he’d be “very cautious about intruding in this process.”
As NPR’s David Folkenflik wrote earlier today, Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly tried hard to convince Rove that the network’s analysts had found no plausible way for Romney to overcome his deficit.
David reports:
“Even as more results continued streaming in, Rove did it again. At 11:40 p.m., he was still at it — reciting county after county, “and then there are cats and dogs elsewhere that add up to another 120,000 votes.” Kelly and Baier sought to provide a check but listened sagely to Rove, who is not just a chief political analyst for Fox and a columnist for its sibling newspaper, the Wall Street Journal, but also a leader of one of the major outside political committees spending tens of millions to defeat Obama and other Democrats.
“Having lost the argument — not to mention his call that predicted for Romney an edge over Obama in the electoral college of about 30 electoral college votes — Rove made clear that the president’s victory carried little weight.
“‘He has blown the last two years — he’s played small ball,’ Rove said around 12:40 a.m. Wednesday. ‘This does not bode well for the future. … He may have won the battle but lost the war.'”
I’m not saying it’s the same situation. There’s so much about this election that’s unique. But it’s not unprecedented for a president to be re-elected with consumer sentiment just coming out of the doldrums as this one is. Let’s all take a deep breath.
One of the most popular and entertaining feeds on twitter is one called “NY Times Pitchbot” which has even been name checked by President Biden. It mocks the NY Times, obviously, usually for its “both sides” tendencies. But it’s getting harder and harder to mock them. Here’s Kevin Drum on one recent egregiously misleading headline:
Emerging Portrait of Judge in Trump Documents Case: Prepared, Prickly and Slow
If you read the actual piece, it contains one (1) example of judge Aileen Cannon being prepared—set against half a dozen where she was confused or mistaken. But the main thing the story makes clear is that practically everything Cannon does is to Donald Trump’s benefit. The headline says nothing about this.
A more accurate hed would have been, “Inexperienced, Slow, and Always On Trump’s Side.” Why run the article at all if you’re going to bury it under an innocuous and misleading headline?
That’s just one example. I’ve highlighted quite a few in the last few weeks as well.
Most of the actual journalism at the Times remains as good as always. But something is very wrong in the headline department. And it’s not just there. The mainstream press in general seems to be hedging its bets in this way, probably to appeal to certain algorithms for clicks and eyeballs. Unfortunately, many people only read the headlines and they set a narrative that does not reflect the truth. It’s a problem.
I’ve been belatedly listening to the Rachel Maddow podcast “Ultra” which is about a far right, Nazi-sympathizing, authoritarian plot to overthrow the FDR administration during the late 30s and early 40s. I knew about the German Bund, of course, and I’ve written about the big Nazi rally at Madison Square Garden. But I confess I was not aware of the massive investigation and trial to put Nazi spies and collaborators on trial. The echoes of today are overwhelming which is why Maddow dug into the story, I assume. (She never mentions it in the podcast, though, which is very effective.)
Being in that mindset, I guess it’s not surprising that I love the lede of this piece in The New Republic:
In his book In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler’s Berlin, Erik Larson cites a cable sent to the State Department in June 1933 by a U.S. diplomat posted in Germany that provided a far more candid assessment of the Nazi leadership than the one that President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s administration was then conveying to the public. “With few exceptions, the men who are running this Government are of a mentality that you and I cannot understand,” read the cable, which was written five months after Adolf Hitler was appointed chancellor. “Some of them are psychopathic cases and would ordinarily be receiving treatment somewhere.”
The article isn’t about that, however. It’s about a secret communications back channel among current American right wing players. There is documentary evidence and it’s chilling:
I’ve thought about that passage from the cable many times over the past several weeks as I’ve been reading excerpts from a private WhatsApp group chat established last December by Erik Prince, the founder of the military contractor Blackwater and younger brother of Betsy DeVos, the secretary of education during President Donald Trump’s administration, who invited around 650 of his contacts in the United States and around the world to join. Prince, who has a long track record of financing conservative candidates and causes and extensive ties to right-wing regimes around the world, named the group—which currently has around 400 members—“Off Leash,” the same name as the new podcast that he’d launched the month before.
Among the topics are the “Biden Regime” which they think is in an alliance with Islamic terrorists, hostility to democracy, hatred for Palestinians, Iran among other things, all of which are expressed in especially violent, nihilistic terms.
The author points out that while there are many conspiracy nuts (such as Lara Logan) there are also a lot of people who you might ordinarily consider to be establishment players:
All of which makes Off Leash arguably more concerning, because the group can’t be dismissed as merely a collection of harmless cranks. Many of the participants, though not all household names, are wealthy and politically wired—which makes their incessant whining in the group chat about being crushed under the bootheel of the deep state particularly grating—and they will collectively become wealthier and more influential if Trump wins the November election. That’s especially true of the Americans in the group, but the same holds for the international figures because the global right will become immensely more powerful and emboldened if the former president returns to the White House. That prospect is a source of great hope to Off Leash participants. “Trump, Orban, Milei, it’s happening,” former Blackwater executive John LaDelfa posted to the group during a trip to Argentina on December 4, two days after Prince created it. “Around the Globe, we are the sensible, the rational, the majority. Don’t give in to fear. We will defeat the Marxists.”
Collectively, Off Leash provides an informal virtual gathering place for current and former political officials, national security operatives, activists, journalists, soldiers of fortune, weapons brokers, black bag operators, grifters, convicted criminals, and other elements in the U.S. and global far right. The roster of invitees includes:
-Icons of the MAGA ecosphere such as Tucker Carlson, the most revered figure among group chat participants, with the exception of the Supreme Leader himself; Kimberly Guilfoyle, the longtime fiancée of Donald Trump Jr.; and retired Lieutenant General Michael Flynn, Trump’s convicted-then-pardoned first national security adviser. Flynn has participated, Carlson only minimally, and Guilfoyle not at all.
-Current and former lawmakers and aides, such as Tennessee Congressman Mark Green of the House Freedom Caucus; Vish Burra, who was director of operations for Congressman George Santos; and Stuart Seldowitz, a national security adviser to Barack Obama from 2009 to 2011 who was arrested last November after harassing an Egyptian halal street cart vendor in New York City for two weeks, during which time he called him a “terrorist” and said, “If we killed 4,000 Palestinian kids, it wasn’t enough.”
These are not harmless cranks. They are “of a mentality that you and I cannot understand. Some of them are psychopathic cases and would ordinarily be receiving treatment somewhere.” Many of them will be influential in a new Trump administration.
Donald Trump’s pollsters have been tracking the impact of his indictments throughout his first trial and, moving to get ahead of events, are arguing that regardless of the verdict in the New York hush-money case, they can spin it in his favor.
In the campaign’s internal polling, two-thirds of respondents say politics played a role in his criminal indictments.That is at odds with public polling, which has found that somewhere between a plurality and a majority of Americans believe the case has been handled fairly, with a sharp partisan split. Some 60 percent of voters have said they think the charges are very or somewhat serious. Even 6 percent of Trump voters say they would be less likely to back him if convicted.
But the Trump campaign’s interpretation of its own polling suggests what its strategy might be for dealing with a guilty verdict. Trump’s advisers and allies say the public, which has largely tuned out the trial, may have already factored the possibility of a conviction into how it sees Trump. And as Trump has before, he’ll use the case to bolster the grievance narrative he’s been cultivating for years.
“We’ve got 66 percent telling us that politics have played a role in it. Only 28 say ‘no role,’” said Jim McLaughlin, a Trump pollster whose firm conducted the survey. “The interesting part about that is, even 27 percent of Democrats are saying ‘politics played a role in the indictments.’”
No politician wants to be convicted of a crime, and if he is convicted, it is not out of the question that Trump could face prison time. But if the jury cannot reach a verdict or finds Trump not guilty? “The media loves asking the question, ‘OK, what happens if Donald Trump is found guilty of a felony?’” McLaughlin said. “They don’t ask the question, ‘What happens if he’s found not guilty?’ If he’s found not guilty, I think he gets a bump out of it.”
I suspect he will get a bump if he’s acquitted too. It validates the idea that he’s teflon, an invincible superhero. I could see it convincing some people that he is unbeatable so might as well get onboard.
I wouldn’t take what Trump’s pollsters say about those numbers as gospel though. They have to lie or their patron will be very angry. I doubt any polling can capture how people will react to either verdict to be honest. If I had to guess, if he is convicted the reaction will fall along the predictable party lines with a few people at the margins saying they’ve have enough. And the opposite if he’s acquitted. But who knows?
On Wednesday, I pointed to a posting at The Ink calling for Democrats to tell a better story. Facts without context aren’t as “sticky” as a good story. Facts matter. College graduates, children of the Enlightenment, built their educations and their livelihoods around them. But like your SAT or GRE scores, nobody gives a damn about them later in life. What does your job experience say about you? What story does it tell?
The play’s the thing that will catch the conscience of disaffected voters, writes Michael Podhorzer at Weekend Reading. A key point in Part I of his analysis:
Disaffected voters cast ballots when they believe that if the other party wins, they will lose the freedoms they now take for granted – whether it’s the freedom to own an AR-15 or to have access to reproductive health services.
Podhorzer addresses presidential polling showing “young voters and voters of color” moving away from Biden:
Before we can address the question of whether Biden needs a “low turnout election,” or assess the danger posed by “disengaged voters [driving] the overall polling results,” we need a better way of thinking about votersin the age of MAGA.
Like what I call “mad poll disease,” turnout terror is caused by not recognizing that the factor most certain to determine the election outcome is one we can’t know ahead of time. That factor is: What will the election seem to be “about” to most voters by October? Will it be a referendum on the Biden administration – or will it be a referendum on whether America should be ruled by MAGA? (For stylistic ease, I’ll refer to the alternatives as either the “MAGA election” or the “Biden election” even though, of course, the reality will be something along a continuum, closer to one or the other.)
If we imagine a single undecided voter picking between Biden and Trump in a voting booth, it might seem painfully obvious why this frame would matter. But it is less obvious that what the election is “about” also affects who turns out to vote.
Since 2016, whenever an election has been “about” MAGA, turnout rates have been much higher than normal, and Democrats have won much more often in those contests. If the Trump and MAGA agenda is salient in October, I am confident turnout will again be at historic highs and that Biden will do as well or better than he did in 2020. But if the economy, immigration, or a similar issue is center stage, turnout levels will be lower, as will Biden’s prospects for an Electoral College victory.
This gets back to facts, facts in which Democrats put undue confidence. Podhorzer argues that the broader story Democrats tell will have more of an impact on supporter turnout than trying to persuade voters who believe the economy sucks to believe it doesn’t by hammering away at their disbelief with fact sheets. As in, “Since 2016, whenever an election has been “about” MAGA, turnout rates have been much higher than normal, and Democrats have won much more often in those contests.”
As you can see from the chart below, there was very little change in the number of “most likely” voters going into the 2016 and 2020 elections. But going into this election, there are nearly a third more of the “most likely” voters than there were before the last two elections! That 18 million voter gain reflects the conversion of previously “very likely” voters into “most likely” voters across all demographics.
Podhorzer provides more analysis of how these shifts shake out in Biden’s favor. I won’t reproduce those here. But his conclusions about “double haters” may be useful:
In our current political era, knowing and believing what Trump and MAGA plans to do makes people more likely to vote.
The dramatic change in partisan preferences for somewhat likely voters and those who haven’t voted is the crux of the uncertainty about the outcome of the 2024 election. But it would be a mistake to think that the portion of these less likely voters was dependent only on how large the turnout ladle that scoops them up in November will be. Rather, turnout rates will depend on what motivates those less likely voters to vote, given they have been all but sitting out the last three elections. In our current political era, knowing and believing what Trump andMAGA plans to do makes people more likely to vote: for better or worse.
[…]
Recent history suggests that contingent voters can and will become more engaged in the coming months. But it’s far from assured that they will become engaged enough to understand why they personally need to come out and vote. This is not a reason to panic and make predictions of doom; it’s a reason to get to work at keeping those predictions from becoming self-fulfilling prophecies. This isn’t just a job for political campaigns; it’s the job of all of civil society, including the media, who care about American democracy.
Tell better stories. Start with shared values, name the villains, share a vision (say what you’re for).
I’ll have to study this more for what it means for the unaffiliated voters I’m pursuing as critical to wins this fall. But I’ll take the upbeat advice.
Update: What have I been saying?
.@AnandWrites: "American democracy is at risk because of the Democratic Party's risk aversion: not wanting to get messy, to do things that alienate a third of people… but if you're running against fascism in 2024, maybe a little less caution, a little more boldness, try stuff." pic.twitter.com/m8ezgfyZBj
Seeing Trump cultists break down in tears over their authoritarian master facing justice was as disconcerting as it was disheartening. While some may feel the need to mock them for their Trumpish idolatry, I feel sorry for them. Pity may indeed smite them worse than mockery. Mockery feels like oppression, and oppression reinforces faith.
#NOW Trump Supporters BREAK DOWN IN TEARS as they pray for former president Trump outside of NYC Court, as jury deliberations continue inside. pic.twitter.com/chocOaF6oW
— Oliya Scootercaster 🛴 (@ScooterCasterNY) May 29, 2024
It is best to remember, as Jenny Cohn and even Tony Perkins pointed out, that the Trump cult attracts the fringiest of the fringe, the sort of people who in another decade might relocate to Jonestown or opt for phenobarbital mixed with apple sauce or pudding. They are loud. They get press. But they are not many. Until America’s Most Corrupted, those MAGA Republicans who’ve latched onto Trump in pursuit of personal power, succeed in burying our democracy to replace it with Gilead, we will still count votes on Election Day.
Remember that. While reminding Black voters in Philadelphia what he’s done for them, President Biden reminded them what Trump would have done to them had Black Americans stormed the U.S. Capitol.
Your vote still counts. Use it.
Biden: What do you think Trump would have done on January 6 if Black Americans had stormed the Capitol? I don't think he would be talking about pardons. This is the same guy who wanted to tear gas you as you peacefully protested George Floyd's murder. pic.twitter.com/cCqa4BcYb0
Newsmax host Todd Starnes wants Trump to make a run for the border:
#NOW Trump Supporters BREAK DOWN IN TEARS as they pray for former president Trump outside of NYC Court, as jury deliberations continue inside. pic.twitter.com/chocOaF6oW
— Oliya Scootercaster 🛴 (@ScooterCasterNY) May 29, 2024
Here’s Trump sputtering today:
Trump: "Mother Theresa could not beat these charges. These charges are rigged. The whole thing is rigged. The whole country's a mess." pic.twitter.com/v7PDMhYpy7
Trump: There are a lot of witnesses they could’ve called.. Take a look at the list. You have a lot of big players, very big players that would solved their problem, or actually would have given us the win. We already have the win. pic.twitter.com/NjT1FmNCrd
The jury asked for Pecker testimony to be read back to them today. The consensus among the legal beagles is that the prosecution is likely happy about that since it means they are looking at corroboration of Cohen’s testimony. We don’t know but it’s likely that Trump isn’t going to sleep well tonight.
