Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

Hope Hicks testifies

It seems the news has already moved on from Hope Hicks, judging by the headlines. But there were gasps in the overflow room when she enterered the Manhattan courtoom Friday to testify under subpoena in Donald Trump’s criminal trial. When she briefly broke down on the stand and the judge called a pause, newsies scrambled to report the drama.

But ahead of that, Olivia Nuzzi of New York Magazine posted a thread with observations on Hicks worth noting:

Some things to know about the prosecution’s next witness, Hope Hicks: her relationship with the Trump family began in 2012 when she began doing PR for Ivanka from an outside firm. She joined the Trump Org. By the winter of 2014, when Donald Trump was preparing to run for the GOP nom, she was part of a tiny circle of his trusted advisers.

For most of the 2016 campaign, the staff was the Island of Misfit Toys. Hardly anyone had traditional political experience. At least half the staffers were possibly literally, clinically insane. Her general competence and normal-ness and likability made her an outlier.

She was good at managing the principal. She was good under pressure. And she maintained good relationships with the mainstream press. She entered the WH as a senior adviser and kept a small office within earshot of the Oval. Close enough that Trump would just yell out for her.

Unlike most who stayed in the Trump orbit through the administration, she never really succumbed to a bunker mentality. She never got stuck in their information bubble. She maintained connections to and perspective from the world outside MAGA. She was not an ideologue.

But for a long time she was inclined to make excuses for her boss. How else do you wake up and go to work each day and spend your working hours putting out the fires he seemed to have a pathological impulse to spark? For anyone who stayed, there was a lot of self deception.

Hope Hicks is not Fawn Hall. She was genuinely powerful and central to the Trump operation. But she’s also not John Dean. She was compelled to testify, just as she was compelled to take part in various hearings and investigations over the years.

She is a powerful witness for the prosecution because the public is so familiar with her image and the perception of her closeness to the former president, though they have not been close in years and have only spoken a few times in passing since 2021.

She has a long and near-photographic memory and she witnessed more than most, but anyone expecting her to offer some sort of operatic betrayal of her former boss will probably be disappointed. That’s not her style.

Aside from hearings or investigations, she has never spoken on the record. She will do what the prosecution requires & then she will return to private life. She does not want a book or cable contract. She does not seek forgiveness or understanding from the Trump-critical public.

Nuzzi profiled Hicks for GQ in 2016 and later for New York Magazine and provides links.

WATCH– Hope Hicks ‘drops a bomb’ during Trump trial: "Nail in the coffin moment." https://t.co/Mi0f1KpUtX

— All In with Chris Hayes (@allinwithchris) May 4, 2024

The Trump campaign grew frantic at the release of the “Access Hollywood” tape in October 2016 and went immediately into damage-control mode that might have been pointless. “The tape was damaging. This was a crisis,” Hicks said. “I think [Trump] felt like it was pretty standard stuff for two guys chatting with each other,” she added.

Jurors received only a transcript.

Hicks had one response: “Deny, deny, deny.”

Hicks claimed not to have been privy to any of Trump’s hush-money efforts involving Trump affairs with former Playboy model Karen McDougal and porn star Stormy Daniels.

In testimony on Trump’s state of mind in 2018 when the Daniels payments became public, Hicks told the court, “I think Mr. Trump’s opinion was it was better to be dealing with it now, and it would’ve been bad to have that story come out before the election,” Hicks said.

It was a “mic-drop moment,” Greenberg told MSNBC’s Chris Hayes, a “nail in the coffin moment” for Trump.

Regarding Cohen telling the New York Times he’d paid hush money to Stormy Daniels on his own, Hicks testified:

“I’d say that would be out of character for Michael,” Hicks responded. “I didn’t know Michael to be an especially charitable person or selfless person.”

Of Cohen, Hicks said on cross-examination:

“He liked to call himself a fixer, or ‘Mr. Fix it’ – and it was only because he first broke it that he was able to then fix it,” Hicks said, laughing.

Now we wait for Michael Cohen to testify. Mic-drop or not, Trump’s defense only needs one juror to vote to acquit. To be continued.

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Baby tiger time:

Sandstone, Minnesota – The Wildcat Sanctuary was called upon in late November 2020 to help two adult tigers and two elderly lions in Indiana after one of their caretakers passed away. Staff and volunteers made the 14-hour journey from Minnesota with vehicles, trailers and transport crates to rehome the cats and bring them back to the sanctuary. As they were loading the big cats from the hillside private breeding facility in a rugged, remote area of rural Indiana, they were stunned to find that tigress Winona, approximately 3-5 years old and missing her tail, had given birth to a cub just hours earlier. Sanctuary staff named the 4-pound male newborn Dash.

The Wildcat Sanctuary’s Founder Tammy Thies explained, “The facility had bred tiger cubs for years to be sold on the Internet or used for cub petting profit. We had been told tiger Winona had given birth only 5 months ago, so we were shocked to find a cub born just four hours earlier lying next to Winona, the umbilical cord still attached. Marcus, the male tiger housed with Winona and father of the cub, noticed the cub at the same time our staff did. For little Dash’s safety and wellbeing, we had to remove him from his mother.

“We were devastated to make that decision, but comforted to know Dash would never be sold into the cub petting trade or used to breed more captive tigers. Dash is the youngest big cat I have ever rehomed to our sanctuary.

He will live his entire life ‘wild at heart’ in a large, natural habitat at The Wildcat Sanctuary, where he will be loved and receive proper vet care, nutrition and enrichment.

He lives at the Wildcat Sanctuary today

President Joe Biden on Friday announced a final rule that will open up Obamacare plans to tens of thousands of immigrants who came to the United States as children but do not qualify for government health insurance because they lack legal status.

Federal health officials estimate that roughly 100,000 people enrolled in the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program will sign up for subsidized plans through the health insurance marketplace over the next year under the rule, which the Biden administration proposed last year.

The announcement comes as Biden continues to make health care and his defense of the Affordable Care Act a centerpiece of his reelection campaign.

Yesterday Trump’s attorney introduced a tweet by Michael Cohen in which he called Trump Von ShitzenPants into the record in an argument about the gag order. This is related to certain internet memes about Trump allegedly wearing adult diapers. I think it’s a mean joke but if there’s anyone who deserves it, it’s him.

Now I’m seeing this stuff crop up on social media and I don’t know if it’s a lefty joke or some kind of MAGA attempt at a gag or what. But damn. This is where we are these days:

These pics apparently come from a Pennsylvania blog called Dispatches from Trumpland:

After noticing a trend of pro Donald diaper merch at rallies throughout this year, I hit up President Trump’s latest event in rural Pennsylvania last weekend with the express purpose of seeing if his faithful were still flying their diaper flag. And let me tell you, it did not disappoint.

Not only were there tons of diaper hats, shirts, stickers and actual diapers themselves, but one group had a massive probably six foot “Diaper Don” Flag that they were waving in line.

WTAF?????

That’s Trump during the lunch break in his criminal trial today. His beautiful gal friday, Hope “Hopey” Hicks is testifying today and it’s very uncomfortable for him. Apparently, he can’t look at her and they didn’t make eye contact.

Of course you’ve heard about Noem’s disgusting tale about gleefully shooting her puppy. And it’s possible that you’ve heard that she claims in her book to have “stared down” Kim Jong Un, which is a blatant lie. And now here’s another one.

She says that Nikki Haley threatened her. Playbook reports:

The way Noem tells the story, in the summer of 2021 she “was hauling a trailer full of horses” when she got word that Haley wanted to talk.

Here’s how Noem recounts the conversation:

“‘Hi, Governor, this is Ambassador Nikki Haley, and I just wanted to introduce myself and have a conversation. I just wanted to let you know that I follow you quite a bit. I have heard quite a bit about you, and you are doing a good job there in South Dakota. I was thinking that maybe you might like a mentor, and maybe I could be someone who could do that for you. Because you’re a governor, you’ve gone through some challenging things that I did as well. I would be more than willing to be a mentor, because you’ve never been in this type of role before.’

“She went on to tell me about her life story, her résumé, and some of the challenges she faced in her legislature as governor and as ambassador to the United Nations reading daily talking points from the State Department. Once again, I recall, she offered to mentor me, as she was sure I was facing some decisions and situations I’d never seen before. …

“After what seemed to me a bit of an awkward pause, she added, ‘I … just … also want you to know one more thing … I’ve heard a lot of really good things about you. But I also want you to know that if I hear something bad … I will be sure to let you know.’

“There was a long pause.

“‘Um, well, thanks for that, Ambassador.’

“‘Let me be clear,’ she added. ‘I’ve heard many good things about you. But when I do hear bad things, I will make sure that you know. I’ve enjoyed talking to you. We will visit soon. Goodbye.’ Click.”

She says she took a few minutes and then called her assistant:

“‘I think I was just threatened by Nikki Haley?’

“‘What?!’

“‘Yeah, I’m pretty sure I was just threatened by Nikki Haley. It was clear that she wanted me to know that there was only room for one Republican woman in the spotlight. It was weird.’

“Unsurprisingly, I never received any calls or ‘mentoring’ from her, but the message was clear. I’m the alpha female here, and you should know your place. I actually felt a little sad for her.”

Playbook reports:

Contacted for comment, Haley spokesperson Chaney Denton was befuddled. She said the two women did talk, but — looking back at Haley’s calendar — found that it was in 2020, not 2021.

I had thought she had the best chance for the VP nod because she checked all the boxes. Then we found out that she had an affair with that miscreant Corey Lewandowski and she did that weird infomercial for her Texas dentist. Now this book. I don’t know that Trump absolutely won’t pick her anyway because he does what he wants but the consensus is that she’s toast. I hope so. This is a very weird person.

I have recently begun to think that Trump is leaning heavily toward her North Dakota neighboring Governor Doug Burgham because he’s made a very impressive show of Penceian sycophancy on television. We know how much Trump loves that. And it would actually be a smart move because they could bill themselves as the “billionaire businessmen” ticket coming to save America. That might appeal to those deluded cultists who still think Trump is a genius businessman.

I think Trump truly wanted to choose a woman but there just aren’t any good ones. Isn’t that always the problem?

His Big Lie is the gift to the Democrats

Donald Trump was all over the place in his big TIME Magazine interview this week but there is one issue on which he’s never wavered. When asked if he thought there would be violence around the election this fall he said, “if we don’t win, you know, it depends. It always depends on the fairness of an election.” On Wednesday he went even further, telling the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, “if everything’s honest, I’ll gladly accept the results. I don’t change on that. If it’s not, you have to fight for the right of the country.” It’s pretty clear that in his mind and the minds of his followers there is no such thing as an honest and fair election that doesn’t result in a Donald Trump victory so there’s little doubt about what to expect if they don’t get their way in November.

Over the past three years Trump’s Big Lie has become the main organizing principle of the Republican Party. There had been a festering sense of grievance and resentment among the GOP base for decades which Trump skillfully tapped into. But ever since his flukey win in 2016, his insistence that the succession of losses the party has suffered under his leadership were all the result of rigged elections, has taken a toll. Among the Republican faithful these days are quite a few who question whether it’s even worth it to participate.

A local Pennsylvania GOP organizer named Milo Morris told Antonia Hitchens of the New Yorker that he was confronted with a lot of suspicion and distrust from his own voters who say to him “this whole game is just ridiculous and I’m not going to participate anymore.” He said, “the skepticism is hurting us. A lot of people are disenfranchised by the fraud allegations.” Gosh, I wonder where they are getting those crazy ideas?

Trump’s campaign and his supporters in the media begged him to stop talking about the Big Lie and insisting that it was going to happen again. They knew that this relentless drumbeat going into another election was counter productive. But he won’t stop and they’ve apparently accepted that fact and are now trying desperately to compensate for it. Unfortunately, he’s sabotaging those efforts as well.

Trump has been disparaging early voting and mail in voting since before the 2020 election when he correctly surmised that he was going to have trouble getting re-elected. States were changing some of their election procedures to deal with difficulties getting to the polls due to the pandemic and if he lost he saw that he could use that as an excuse to challenge the election. He and his henchmen (such as Attorney General Bill Barr) spend months suggesting that the mail-in votes were rife with fraud and told his voters not to use that method or trust the results where it was was used. This formed the basis for his claims that the election was stolen despite no evidence that anything untoward had happened.

But that has presented a big problem for the party in subsequent elections. Early voting and vote by mail boost turnout. They are convenient methods for people to participate and they like using them but by insisting that Republicans should only vote on election day, some voters just don’t make it to the polls. Moreover, it makes it much more difficult for the people running the ground game to focus their get out the vote efforts. State and local Republicans are desperate to get their people to use these methods and are working to persuade voters to forget what they’ve been told in the last two election cycles and vote early. Unfortunately, they keep running into one big orange roadblock.

Trump is hooked on the idea that elections should only be held on one day and that they should be done with paper ballots and hand counted. He reiterated that this week in Wisconsin. He told Fox News’ Laura Ingraham in February, “If you have mail-in voting, you automatically have fraud.” (He has also stated in the past that he thinks the counting should be stopped at midnight, which is certifiably insane.)

Trump has also posted on Truth Social that people should vote absentee or early, but it’s obviously something he did under duress. After all, it’s almost as if he’s admitting he was wrong about something and that simply cannot happen.

There are various groups working to persuade voters to essentially forget that Trump has been instructing them for years to only vote on election day because it’s the only way they can be sure their vote will count. Last month the NY Times published a big, sexy profile of Turning Point Action’s get-out-the-vote program called “chase the ballot” which they characterize as attempting to fix this problem. But Axios recently quoted the COO of the organization, Tyler Bowyer, saying “we’re not trying to encourage more people to get on the early voting list. If you vote too early, you’re basically telling Democrats how many votes they need to win” which is simply bizarre since it would do no such thing. (Bowyer, by the way, is also one of the fake electors who was indicted in Arizona last week so he is something of an expert on voter fraud.)

Donald Trump has no one to blame but himself for this problem. But it’s unclear whether the Republican party is really putting its efforts into getting out the vote anyway. From what we hear from the new Chair of the RNC, Trump’s daughter in law Lara Trump, the real efforts are going toward something else entirely: vote suppression and intimidation.

Lara Trump: We now have the ability at the RNC not just to have poll watchers… but people who can physically handle the ballots… pic.twitter.com/xd06medJal

— Acyn (@Acyn) April 24, 2024

This comes from the top. Trump has said for years now that “sometimes the vote counter is more important than the candidate.”

Openly, as usual, suborning election theft. https://t.co/XWfpma4AnM

— Barton Gellman (@bartongellman) January 15, 2022

His daughter in law didn’t mince words when she said that they will have people in the polling places “handling the ballots” and issuing threats of prosecution. Why bother with trying to maximize turnout when you can intimidate the election workers and manipulate the vote count?

This is really their last resort. Their leader has spent the last several years basically telling their voters that their votes are irrelevant because the system is rigged and now they’re having to scramble to try and convince them they should vote anyway, even as he’s still saying it’s probably pointless. Their only option is to turn election day into a chaotic circus and hope that somehow they can find a way to disqualify enough votes to eke out a win in the electoral college. That’s what they like to call “election integrity.”

Maybe we need a movie?

We suffer from a failure of imagination, Tom Nichols argues, about what a second Trump administration would actually look and feel like. It’s not that the clues aren’t there. They are. Trump told us again in his Time interview this week:

In the interview, Trump once again promised to pardon the January 6 insurrectionists; once again, he vowed to use the Justice Department as his personal legal hit squad. He said he will prosecute Joe Biden, deport millions of people, and allow states with newly strict abortion regulations to monitor pregnant women. He will kneecap NATO and throw Ukraine to the Russians.

[…]

Nostalgia and presentism are part of politics. But a second problem is even more worrisome: Americans simply cannot imagine how badly Trump’s first term might have turned out, and how ghastly his second term is likely to be. Our minds are not equipped to embrace how fast democracy could disintegrate. We can better imagine alien invasions than we can an authoritarian America. The Atlantic tried to lay out what this future would look like, but perhaps even words can’t capture the magnitude of the threat.

Or perhaps non-political junkies don’t read The Atlantic? Dan Pfeiffer remarked again on Thursday that “the vast majority of Americans … do not actively engage with politics and the news.” Or what they do hear is not news, but infotainment.

Eugene Robinson shouts into the hurricane of Fox News disinformation and reality TV:

Imagine the National Guard, perhaps aided by active-duty military units, fanning out across the country to round up and deport all undocumented migrants, believed to number roughly 11 million. Imagine these men, women and children being held pending deportation in vast detention camps.

[…]

Imagine the National Guard also being sent into cities to fight crime, whether or not governors request such assistance. When Time correspondent Eric Cortellessa noted that violent crime is declining across the country — homicides fell by 13 percent last year, according to the FBI — Trump insisted, without evidence, that the data is rigged. “It’s a lie,” he claimed.

Think about what our lives would be like if Trump even tries to do those two things. This is not the kind of country where troops in military gear set up highway checkpoints and raid residential neighborhoods, demanding to see everyone’s papers. This is not a country where camo-clad soldiers patrol shopping malls and nightlife districts. Not yet, that is.

I recall times traveling outside the country and seeing police and soldiers with automatic weapons patrolling airports and beaches, and two dudes with a pistol and a shotgun standing guard outside a Mexican bank, and thinking, “Toto, I’ve a feeling we’re not in Kansas anymore.”

Nichols suggests maybe a movie could help Americans grasp that reality:

… Americans had a hard time conceiving of a nuclear war until 1983, when ABC showed the made-for-television movie The Day After. The movie (as I wrote here) made an impact not because anyone thought a nuclear exchange would be a walk in the park but because no one could really get their head around what would happen if one took place. (That’s despite how thoroughly fears of nuclear war had otherwise permeated the culture.) The movie includes a stomach-churning scene of people watching a football game at a stadium, looking up to see the contrails of American missiles in the sky, and realizing that the world as they’ve known it would last for another 30 minutes at most. This was not Dr. Strangelove; it was a moment people could see happening to themselves.

BTW, The Day After is set in Kansas, Toto.

Filmmakers might want to throw in scenes of entire coastal communities disappearing under swiftly rising seas. Don’t expect MAGA Republicans to do anything to stop that.

It’s clear Trump won’t do anything to restore women’s reproductive rights, either. (That’s Joe Biden.) Trump is still taking credit for women’s rights being revoked. How about imagining Dr. Bleach-and-Light Enemas in charge of another pandemic should one occur? Surely the mass graves from the last one haven’t entirely disappeared down the memory hole.

Maybe the cost of living could rouse non-political junkies? It’s technical, but Catherine Rampell warns of inflation spikes under a second Trump administration:

Donald Trump, the presumed Republican presidential nominee, wants to kneecap the Federal Reserve. This should be a five-alarm fire for anyone who claims to care about inflation.

The former president and his advisers keep finding new ways to outdo themselves on bad economic ideas. Should Trump be granted a second term, he plans to slash the labor supply by ratcheting down immigration (including legal, work-authorized immigration). He wants to devalue the dollar. He’d levy worldwide tariffs of 10 percent or higher, plus perhaps a 100 percent tariff on some Chinese goods, apparently failing to notice that the costs of his previous tariffs fell almost entirely on American consumers.

Now, according to a Wall Street Journal scoop, Trump also wants to strip the Fed of its political independence. Proposed changes include enabling the president to fire the Fed chair at will, or even play a role in setting interest rates himself.

Uh-huh. The guy who bankrupted his Atlantic City casinos and was just fined $355 million for defrauding lenders to get favorable interest rates for himself wants to set interest rates for the country. Brilliant idea for making America great again.

Imagine this. Nobody knows more about setting interest rates than Donald Trump, many people are saying.

With tears in their eyes.

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“Monarchy shit”

A Jon Stewart clip from March resurfaced that echoes what I’ve been arguing for years. The underlying ethos of conservatism in this country is not patriotism but “monarchy shit.” Neofeudalism, to use a pointy-headed term. It’s not freedom or liberty, but a desire to bow and scrape before people believed to be your superiors by birth. Among people who fancy themselves superior by birth and their willingly willing supplicants.

Ask Donald Trump about his genes and step back. Quickly. And don’t scratch a MAGA Supreme Court justice too deeply either. Or one of the Masters of the Universe on Wall Street. They aspire to being “a nation unto themselves” under a system of government by hereditary royalty and landed gentry where the hired help doesn’t get uppity. (I’m “reading” Ari Berman’s “Minority Rule,” what can I say?)

Stewart’s monologue was a response to Sen. Katie Britt’s (R-Ala.) “widely mocked rebuttal” to President Biden’s State of the Union address:

Stewart suggested it was “just one more entry in the Republican mythology that they are the inheritors of the American revolutionary tradition, that they somehow are more American-y than non-Republican Americans.”

For those Republicans claiming to be the true "patriots," Jon Stewart suggests a tiny wardrobe adjustment pic.twitter.com/5TpCzgYUxd

— The Daily Show (@TheDailyShow) May 2, 2024

Turn in your flags.

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Not that there was any question

Pathetic: Coward Trump backs out of his earlier claims that he'd testify, makes up an excuse. https://t.co/PKLyTQGiga

— MeidasTouch (@MeidasTouch) May 2, 2024

He still has a constitutional right to testify in his own defense. Obviously. I have no idea why his lawyer is bobbing his head up and down in agreement.