The excellent Bolts Magazine is doing something called “Ask Bolts” allowing readers to ask questions of experts on various issues facing the electorate:
Elections law expert Josh Douglas is the author of The Court v. the Voters: The Troubling Story of How the Supreme Court Has Undermined Voting Rights, a new book that is set for release next week. The book dives deeply into high-profile cases that have undercut U.S. democracy in recent decades, from Citizens United to Shelby County.
Now he has agreed to answer questions from Bolts readers.
What do you want to know about how the Supreme Court has affected voting rights in recent decades? Ask him anything about how the court has upended the way states run their elections, how the damage can be repaired, and how the justices may end up further shaping democracy in 2024. And remember: No question is too in the weeds for Bolts!
We’ll pitch them to him by May 10 and write up his responses
Click over to fill out the form if you have questions and hopefully we’ll see the answers!
Trump: Declares nine different "Infrastructure Weeks," derails them all with various antics and scandals, fails to sign any major legislation because everyone in Congress hates him.
Biden: Negotiates with Congress to pass a bipartisan $1 trillion infrastructure bill.
Today Biden will be in Wisconsin announcing a major new Microsoft data center on the spot where Trump promised to bring a new Foxconn plant that never opened.
Trump will probably take credit for the Microsoft plant and people will probably believe him even though he’s been out of office for 3 and a half years.
One of the most inane of all MAGA Republican claims is the insistence by militant right wingers and insurrectionists that they are pacifists. Take, for instance, Marjorie Taylor Greene:
MAGA rapper DVS 7.0 / Shawn Olivo, a speaker at Marjorie Taylor Greene’s indictment protest rally, attacked a mobile COVID testing station in 2021.
During the rally, Marjorie Taylor Greene claimed, “Democrats are the party of violence” and Republicans “are the party of peace.” pic.twitter.com/DETE68di8u
Or Trump who often brags that he had no wars while he was president (unless you count Afghanistan and Syria and large numbers of drone strikes in various places.)
TRUMP: “We were respected all over the world. The best economy we’ve ever had. Everything was good. No wars, defeated ISIS, no wars, we had no nothing, but we were respected all over the world. Now it is a disgrace.” pic.twitter.com/4CdZhZuVto
They aren’t the only ones. And I think we can all agree that these are not people anyone would normally describe as flower children regardless of the fact that NY Times columnist once fatuously described the bellicose Trump as “Donald the Dove.” These are the most contentious people in politics and they only get away with proclaiming such nonsense because they have mastered the tactic of getting people to believe up is down and black is white.
In recent days we’ve seen this ridiculous argument deployed by members of congress to justify their refusal to provide military aid to Ukraine as if fights off the Russian invasion of their country. Some, like Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance have asserted that Ukraine can’t possibly win so it’s a waste of time anyway. Others said it’s all Joe Biden’s fault because it wouldn’t have happened if he hadn’t stolen the election. (Trump is the one who trots that out most often.) And then there’s just the general Russophilia in the MAGA crowd. But the most common argument usually goes that it’s none of our business if Russia and Ukraine are fighting over their borders especially since we have our own border problems to deal with.
In other words they equate the movement of migrant refugees to the US southern border with the Russian military moving into Ukraine and killing vast numbers of people with the aim of taking over the country. You see, asylum seekers, many of them women and children arriving with nothing more than the clothes on their backs, are little different than soldiers armed with tanks and bombs. As much as the Republicans want nothing more than peace in our time, they reluctantly admit that America has to defend itself against this marauding horde.
One of the main “weapons” these invaders are allegedly using is their cultures. This would be the Great Replacement Theory, originally promulgated by a French intellectual to gin up European resistance to middle eastern refugees. Here in America, the story goes that they are coming to ruin our great culture (taco trucks on every corner!) and vote for Democrats (even though they can’t and don’t even try.)
According to many of those same hysterical Republicans many of these migrants are actually terrorists. Trump himself has said that he is “100% certain” that we will have a terrorist attack because “you cannot forget that the same people that attacked Israel are right now pouring at levels that nobody can believe into our beautiful U.S.A. through our totally open border.”
But that’s not all. The MAGA right believes that the fentanyl crisis is actually a war being waged by the cartels and fought by migrants bringing it over the border. Despite the arguments by the experts at the Department of Homeland Security that 95% of the drugs smuggled in from Mexico are in vehicles at legitimate border crossings, these armchair generals are sure that many more drugs are brought into the country between the ports of entry by shadowy armed figures dressed in camouflage who are evading the border patrol. (As you know, the Senate passed a bill to hire more people to work the border but Donald Trump ordered the House not to vote for it because it would give Joe Biden a “win” so that was that.)
The fentanyl crisis is real, no one denies that. But the US has been waging a “war on drugs” for decades. (Talk about a “forever war”) Some of it was just political sloganeering, along the lines of “Just Say No,” Nancy Reagan’s 1980s anti-drug bumper sticker. But there has been a lot of money spent over the years and some very dubious policies that often did more harm than good. One such policy was Plan Colombia a military initiative adopted in the last years of the Clinton administration to combat cocaine trafficking and the Colombian cartels. It didn’t work but then using the American military or the CIA to fight a “war on drugs” never does.
But that won’t stop the hawks like “Donald the dove” from doing it anyway. They may be peaceniks but they are champing at the bit for a war of their own and it looks like Mexico will be their enemy of choice. Naturally they won’t actually declare war. America doesn’t really do that anymore. No, the plan is to send in Special Forces to “take out” the cartels.
This has been on the back burner for a while but as Rolling Stone reported this week, Donald Trump is talking about it quite seriously as something he plans to do very early in his administration should he win in November:
The former president has not presented specific details in public about these plans — for example, how many U.S. troops he’d be willing to send into sovereign Mexican territory. But, the three sources tell Rolling Stone, in conversations with close MAGA allies, including at least one Republican lawmaker, Trump has privately endorsed the idea of covertly deploying — with or without the Mexican government’s consent — special-ops units that would be tasked with, among other missions, assassinating the leaders and top enforcers of Mexico’s powerful and most notorious drug cartels.
You may recall that former Secretary of Defense Mark Esper wrote that he thought Trump was joking when he told him that he wanted to use patriot missiles to destroy the fentanyl labs his first administration. (This was in 2020 and he still didn’t know that patriot missiles are surface to air missiles but whatever.) So I suppose we should be glad that he’s dropped that idea as far as we know. But this idea of sending in the special forces has since then caught on like wildfire in the GOP.
There are several bills to declare the cartels terrorists, which Trump wanted to do during his first term, and authorize the use of force to take military action. Former DHS official Ken Cuccinelli wrote a policy paper that calls for a “defensive war”against Mexico justified on the grounds of drug trafficking and, significantly, migration which is cited often. It says that if these special forces deployments aren’t entirely successful the president should send in “elements of the Marines, Army, Navy, Air Force and Coast Guard.”
All the Senators and congressmen who are agitating for these actions insist that this isn’t an invasion but their proposed legislation sure sounds like it’s authorizing one. It says the president can use “all necessary and appropriate force” against “foreign nations” if they’ve “trafficked fentanyl” into the US. What could go wrong?
Needless to say, the Mexican leadership doesn’t see it that way and one must assume the Mexican people wouldn’t either. The MAGA leaders, on the other hand, see it as an American prerogative, similar to Russia invading Ukraine for its own purposes. Mexico is the weaker country and so must capitulate and do whatever the stronger US demands or suffer the consequences. The fact that Mexico is our biggest and most important trading partner is irrelevant since the movement doesn’t believe in foreign trade anyway. The fact that they are an ally and neighbor just makes it all the more enticing.
This is what the MAGA “peace movement” is really all about: might makes right. And they are itching to put it into action.
By 11 my time (plus-5 from ET), it had gone viral, with 200k views, 47 QTs, 4.4k likes, 1.6k RTs, and 300 responses.
The post is a good way to start thinking about the information economy that led us to a place where a Republican judge helps delay accountability for stealing nuclear documents and storing them in a closet normally storing campaign swag. This information economy creates an environment in which a former prosecutor like Aileen Cannon either believes, or claims to believe, outlandish claims of bias and ill-treatment solely because career national security officials — rebranded by Trump as the Deep State — did their job.
The RWers were pissed, as she notes.
This kind of viral response on Xitter is the point — right wingers have deliberately stoked such toxic viral responses for years. This is the kind of “engagement” Xitter’s billionaire owner has chosen to foster.
The point is not rational discussion, but instead the replacement of it with brainless mob-think, a mob-think designed to reinforce unquestioning partisan identity, a mob-think designed to drown out rational consideration of what it means that Judge Cannon has intervened in this way.
The RW propaganda network, she notes, has plowed the earth for growing conspiracies for decades now, conspiracies that provide cover for Cannon to entertain:
That Walt Nauta, who doesn’t claim to have sorted through any documents, must have the ability to sort through classified documents
That because the document investigation, which included crimes in DC, started in DC, and used DC SCIFs for the investigation, it’s proof that Jack Smith was deliberately attempting to bypass SDFL
That because Mark Meadows and Pat Philbin got the White House involved in document response, it’s proof that Biden improperly intervened
That even though multiple Trump-friendly witnesses testified that Trump didn’t even know Tom Fitton’s Clinton socks theory until 2022, he should be able to argue to jurors he applied it in 2021
That because NARA informed DOJ about classified documents, the same way they did with Joe Biden, it’s proof that NARA are part of the prosecution team as opposed to the victim
That because Trump’s surveillance system uses difficult software and one of the defense lawyers only uses an iPad, prosecutors have failed to meet discovery obligations
That Trump has immunity to steal nuclear documents that he couldn’t even declassify on his own
These are all, individually and collectively, crazy. It’s unclear whether Cannon truly believes them or simply doesn’t care. She has chosen to treat Trump’s claims according to the reality his propaganda bubble has created rather than the actual facts before her.
A lot of the responses to my Tweet were lefties imagining that Jack Smith has some kind of button he can press to get Aileen Cannon replaced; he doesn’t.
But even if he did, it wouldn’t solve the problem. Because the problem before us is that Trump’s mob and his judges have been trained to believe that applying any law to him amounts to a two-tiered system of justice by a very comprehensive propaganda machine.
Trump’s propaganda machine has drowned out facts and replaced it with grievance.
And until something starts cutting through that grievance, mere trials aren’t going to fix this.
The MAGA king can do no wrong. No guardrails can stop him. No laws can bind him. No walls can hold him.
Tuesday was another bad one for Donald Trump, Boy King of the Red Hats. It ended in Indiana with Trump’s victory in the Republican primary. The former insurrectionist-in-chief won handily against South Carolina’s Nikki Haley who, Politico reports, “cleaned up in the suburbs.”
A zombie Haley candidacy continued to punch above its weight in the Trumpiest of states: The former South Carolina governor is on track to break 20 percent for the first time since she dropped out of the race two months ago.
Trump may have won Indiana’s 58 delegates, but Haley “posted above-30-point performances in places like Marion County, home to Indianapolis, and affluent Hamilton County, its suburb to the north.”
Indiana is sure to go into the Trump column in November. But in a tight presidential contest, Trump cannot afford to lose even a fraction of Republican base voters who turn out for primaries. As one Twitter user observed, if President Joe Biden had lost 22 percent to a candidate no longer in the race in a deep blue state, it would be front page news.
Indeed, there would calls for Biden to drop out of the presidential contest, renewed speculation about a brokered convention, commentary about Democrats in disarray, etc.
Wow. This is terrible for Trump.
He lost more than 21% of the Indiana Republican primary vote to a candidate who dropped out months ago. pic.twitter.com/g66k7361Dc
That’s how Tuesday ended for Trump. Earlier, he faced testimony from adult film actress Stormy Daniels in his Manhattan criminal trial for falsifying business records and election interference. Digby covered that here and here. Coverage of the trial was, well, everywhere.
For his part, Trump was lucky not to have been thrown in jail for contempt exhibited inside the courtroom:
In a private conversation on Tuesday with prosecutors and Donald Trump’s lawyers, the judge overseeing the former president’s hush-money trial rebuked him for “cursing audibly” during Stormy Daniels’s testimony.
New York Supreme Court Justice Juan Merchan said Trump’s behavior might have the effect of intimidating Daniels — who was testifying as a key witness in the case — and threatened to hold him in contempt of court once again.
“I understand that your client is upset at this point, but he is cursing audibly, and he is shaking his head visually, and that’s contemptuous,” Merchan told Trump’s lawyer Todd Blanche. “It has the potential to intimidate the witness, and the jury can see that.”
Trump’s one other lucky break Tuesday was a decision in Florida by U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon to delay indefinitely Trump’s trail on dozens of felony charges for willful retention of national defense information.
“Honey bunch”
The MAGA cult was unusually restless over at Elon Musk’s Cyber-Twitter on Tuesday. One gusss as to what had them stirred up more than usual. A 60-year-old, married, “weird” “orange turd” being spanked on his big bottom by a 27-year-old woman he called “honey bunch” (what century is he living in?) and reminded him of his daughter. Multiple court reporters commented on the “ick” factor in Daniels’ testimony about her one sexual encounter with Donald Trump in 2006. He didn’t use a condom, she said, after she’d explained that she worked expressly for her production firm because they required condom use.
Cultists may believe whatever lie Trump tells them, and that his criminal trial is a setup by the Biden administration, but they listened nevertheless. And they vented.
“Joe Biden is a worldwide fucking cartoon,” tweeted one.
“The only man who can make America great again,” posted another above a photo of Trump.
“Typical NAZI Democrat lies and propaganda,” read a third.
“Biden and democrats are always lying,” read another.
We all know that Trump is nothing more than projection. He says that everything, from his legal problems to the 2020 election is rigged. Guess what? He rigged The Apprentice:
The conversation turned to “The Apprentice,” Daniels remembered. Trump told her that she should be a contestant, to which she replied: “There’s no way that NBC would allow an adult actress on television.”
“He said, ‘You remind me of my daughter, she’s smart and beautiful and people underestimate her as well,'” Daniels said. She added that Trump offered to tell her what the show’s challenges were ahead of time: “I can’t have you win … but you can at least make a good showing.”
It was reality TV, which means it was scripted. He’s always lied and said it wasn’t.
Stormy Daniels just testified that Trump showed her a photo of Melania, and when Stormy said she's beautiful, Trump responded: "We don’t even sleep in the same room." pic.twitter.com/QOyCEzFe2K
— Republicans against Trump (@RpsAgainstTrump) May 7, 2024
The trial was pretty banal this morning, even though important:
How do you prove a defendant caused others to make false business records where those with direct knowledge of his intent and involvement are limited to the defendant, a man now in jail for perjury, and Michael Cohen?
You surround Michael Cohen’s expected testimony with a mountain of circumstantial evidence, an already substantial pile to which prosecutors just added excerpts from Trump’s books How to Get Rich and Think Like a Billionaire.
Those excerpts reveal Trump as a micromanager who advised never taking one’s eyes off his checkbook, advertised he negotiated the price of everything “down to the paper clips,” trusted Weisselberg wholly, and boasted that he even loved signing checks.
And best of all for the prosecutors? They are Trump’s own easy-to-digest, New York Times-bestselling words, perhaps amplified or made snappier by his ghostwriter, Meredith McIver, but nonetheless his.
He has said many times that he liked to sign checks because that was how he kept tabs on what was being spent. Apparently, he kept doing it while he was in the White House.
Within 15 minutes of her testimony beginning, Daniels had guided the jury to the hotel suite in Lake Tahoe where she has said she and Trump had sex. “Does Mr. Hefner know you stole his pajamas?” she recalled asking Trump after seeing his silk sleepwear. He peppered her with questions, she said, about her job—about unions, residuals, and STD testing—which she thought was “very cool.” But he kept cutting her off, and she asked him, “Are you always this rude?”
Daniels said she had come to the suite for dinner and didn’t realize that Trump intended to sleep with her. It concerned her that he didn’t wear a condom, she testified, but she didn’t mention it, because “I didn’t say anything at all.” She testified that it was dark out by the time she left the suite, and her hands were shaking as she tried to put her gold, strappy heels on. Daniels has always said the sex was consensual but awkward and, for her part, reluctant. When she was asked on the stand why she didn’t say no to Trump, she repeated, “I didn’t say anything at all.”
At the defense table, Trump stared straight ahead.
The trial, in these first few weeks, has flitted between the dry details of financial records and the intrigue surrounding a historic sex scandal. Before Daniels testified, with the pendulum set to swing back toward her side of the matter, Trump’s attorney Susan Necheles argued to the judge that “this case is a case about books and records” and sought to limit the details of the alleged tryst that would be admissible.
Merchan seemed to understand. “We don’t need to know the details of the intercourse,” he said. After Daniels began testifying, he seemed frustrated when she went beyond the confines of the questions asked of her, reminding her a few times not to elaborate unprompted. The condom detail, for instance, was one that led Trump’s lawyers to call for a mistrial, a request that Merchan did not grant.
They were also upset that Daniels had told the story that she was threatened in a parking lot saying that it was prejudicial. The judge said he was surprised they didn’t object at the time and that he would have the jury disregard it. Hookay.
Necheles was tough on Daniels, painting her as a liar and extortionist. Having been warned by the prosecution to keep her answers short, she denied it all. A taste:
During a fiery cross-examination in the New York hush-money trial, porn star Stormy Daniels fought back against a defense lawyer’s accusations that she has a vendetta against Donald Trump.
“Am I correct that you hate President Trump?” defense lawyer Susan Necheles demanded early in Tuesday afternoon’s questioning.
Daniels looked directly at Necheles, her voice crisp as she answered.
“Correct,” Daniels said.
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“And you want him to go to jail?” Necheles pursued.
“If he’s found guilty, yes,” Daniels snapped back.
The tense exchange came after nearly four hours of direct testimony, in which Daniels described the one-night-stand she says she had with the then-Apprentice star in 2006.
Necheles raised her voice as she confronted Daniels with a tweet in which Daniels called Trump an “orange turd”— and about a nearly half-billion dollars in legal fees she owes after unsuccessfully suing Trump for defamation.
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“You didn’t take any money out of your pocket to pay President Trump did you?” the lawyer asked, referring to more than $500,000 in legal fees Daniels owes Trump after losing the federal court case.
“You’re choosing not to pay President Trump?” the lawyer demanded. “You have said publicly you’re not going to pay President Trump?”
Daniels was asked about her tweets from 2022, in which the porn star said she’d go to jail before paying Trump. In one tweet, Daniels had vowed, “I’ll never give that orange turd a dime.”
“You call him names all the time!” Necheles shouted, in what was more an accusation than a question.
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“Yes,” Daniels answered quickly. “Because he made fun of me first.”
“So one of you started it, but you continue it?” Necheles asked, her voice still loud.
“Correct,” Daniels answered defiantly.
At another point, Necheles accused Daniels of cashing in on a false “claim” of sex.
“You’ve been making money by claiming you had sex with Mr. Trump for more than a decade, right?” the lawyer asked.
“I’ve been making money by telling my story about what happened to me,” Daniels answered.
“And that story has made you a lot of money, right?” Necheles demanded.
“It has also cost me a lot of money,” Daniels answered.
There was more of this and it will continue on Thursday. What a day.
I think the prosecution elicited all this detail about the sexual encounter as a way to build Daniels’ credibility when the defense tries to say that she made the whole thing up to extort poor innocent Donald Trump who would never have done such a thing. (That seems to be his position anyway.) But there’s been so much testimony about how concerned they were about the women coming forward during the campaign (and McDougal may yet take the stand as well) that his protestations aren’t going to hold much water on that. And Stormy had a lot of details, even saying that she kept her bra on and they were in “missionary” and she was staring at the ceiling asking herself how she had so misread the situation. Those details are important.
This is how Stormy Daniels recalled her sexual encounter with Donald Trump in 2023, speaking to me for @NYMag: pic.twitter.com/HjZe9UNFkP
Several members of the general public who on Tuesday attended one of the most intense days of testimony in Donald J. Trump’s trial described the proceedings as riveting, and said they found the star witness, Stormy Daniels, to be credible.
“Just an authentic individual,” Hamilton Clancy, 61, an actor who lives on the Upper West Side, said on Tuesday about Ms. Daniels. He was among the people who lined up early for a coveted seat in the courtroom, which was otherwise packed with journalists.
Mr. Clancy said that in addition to Ms. Daniels’s believability, he was surprised and impressed with Justice Juan M. Merchan’s calm demeanor.
“He was so low-key, so even-keeled,” Mr. Clancy said. “You see how fair the guy is.”
Mr. Clancy and his spouse, Karen Kitz-Clancy, arrived in line at 5:20 a.m. for their seats in the overflow courtroom. It is Ms. Kitz-Clancy‘s 63rd birthday, and this is how she wanted to spend it.
“It was absolutely thrilling,” she said. “We were in the room where it happens.”
Also in the overflow room was Seth Slade, 59, a paralegal who lives in Woodside, Queens.
“I thought she’s a compelling witness,” he said of Ms. Daniels. “It seemed like the judge wanted to move it along.”
Johnson: President Trump has done nothing wrong… it has to stop and you’re going to see the Congress address this in every possible way because we need accountability. All these cases need to be dropped because they are a threat to our entire system pic.twitter.com/Vvg6pQRU52
Ruth Ben-Ghiat, expert on authoritarianism, succinctly analyses what statement and I think it’s right on:
This as yet another loyalty performance for an audience of One, who is addressed as though he is still the head of state. We are also dwelling in the “upside-down world” of authoritarianism, as I call it. “Accountability” means stopping investigations into abuse of power, and “a threat to our entire system” = a threat to Republican plans to convert America to an autocracy under Trump’s lead. That’s the most telling phrase.
This is what it’s all about. The “you can believe me or you can believe your eyes” and “I know you are but what am I” and the rest of these crude descriptions of the intensely frustrating inversion of reality in which these people live is all in service of authoritarianism. Trump isn’t an intellectual or an academic and neither are most of his followers. They are authoritarians who are simply following their own instincts.
It’s not uncommon among our species. It’s just that the American system of government was supposed to be a structural impediment to permitting it as a form of government, which is not to say that it has succeeded in the past. (Uhm… slavery, Jim Crow, internment etc.) But this is different because they are using these openly dictatorial tactics to shut down dissent and brainwash half the country into believing that up is down and black is white.
I would guess that nobody is more surprised than Donald Trump that his lies were so easily believed by massive numbers of Americans. But he knows it now and he will use it. He is a sociopathic narcissist and nothing will stop him once he obtains presidential power again. I just hope some of these sycophants like Mike Johnson, who isn’t as stupid as Trump, understand that in order to demonstrate power, dictators often sacrifice loyalists just to show they can. Some of the biggest MAGA bootlickers are going to find themselves thrown to the wolves, just wait and see.
As you hear all about Trump’s encounter with Stormy Daniels, get a load of this:
Former Trump aide John McEntee promised a ban on pornography was coming in the United States in a recent interview with Daily Wire host Michael Knowles. McEntee had a senior position in the Trump White House and is a key contributor to the infamous Project 2025, a collection of policy proposals to transition the United States to Christian nationalist authoritarianism in the first 180 days of Trump’s second term.
“You bring up the elephant in the room,” McEntee told Knowles, “which is a stain on not only society but the entire dating culture as well, which is pornography. Whenever America bans that, which will be happening at some point, everyone will be much better off.”
The Project 2025 plan specifically lists a ban on pornography stating, “[Pornography] is as addictive as any illicit drug and as psychologically destructive as any crime. Pornography should be outlawed. The people who produce and distribute it should be imprisoned.”
“The minute that goes away, this country will flourish,” McEntee told Knowles.
McEntee was Trump’s body man who was fired because he couldn’t get a security clearance and rehire in 2020 to be the director of the personnel office. He was a very powerful staffer in that role and remains a favorite Trump confidante.
After leaving the White House, McEntee received seed money from billionaire tech investor, and Trump supporter, Peter Thiel to create a dating app for conservatives called “The Right Stuff.” McEntee subsequently gained a large following on social media promoting the dating app with short videos reciting pithy MAGA talking points while out at restaurants.
In the interview with Knowles, McEntee, now the CEO of a dating app, also said he was “rethinking the 19th Amendment,” which gave women the right to vote, after being shown a TikTok video about feminism.
This person will be a powerful member of the new administration. He won’t be able to do anything about the 19th Amendment but the fact that he thinks this is important is relevant. As for the desire to outlaw porn — good luck. I don’t think even Donald Trump is shameless enough to push that one.
