… because he’s an idiot:
"what digby sez..."
Digby's Hullabaloo Posts
Just for fun… it’s still early
There are a lot of people who will walk over hot coals to vote for Trump. But there are just as many, if not more, who will do the same thing to vote against him.
David Pecker to take the stand
Opening arguments in Donald Trump’s criminal trial are scheduled to begin today and Trump isn’t taking it well. He was posting late into the night on Sunday railing against well, everything, clearly feeling the stress of what he’s about to face. And he may know more about what he could be facing than we do at this point. The NY Times reports that the prosecution’s first witness is going to be David Pecker, the former publisher of the National Enquirer and owner of its parent company AMI — and former close confidante of Donald Trump.
Evidently, the two men, who’ve known each other since the 1980s, have not spoken since Pecker was given immunity by federal prosecutors in the Michael Cohen case back in 2018 and testified that Trump was involved up to his neck. And yet, while Trump has crudely insulted everyone involved in that case, and his current one, he’s never said a word against Pecker. That’s curious, don’t you think?
Up until the moment the FBI searched Michael Cohen’s home and office looking for evidence of this payoff scheme to silence various people during the 2016 campaign, there had been no greater cheerleader for Donald Trump than David Pecker. The National Enquirer had run hit piece after hit piece on his political rivals, first in the primary when they accused Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Tx., of having an affair and Dr Ben Carson of medical malpractice and basically devoted every other front page to slamming Hillary Clinton as a raging succubus from hell. Once Trump got into the White House, Pecker used his paper to extol Trump’s leadership as a combination of Mahatma Gandhi and Alexander the Great but after one last cover calling Michael Cohen a traitor and a liar, the Trump stories stopped cold and the paper went back to its celebrity gossip roots.
Nobody knows for sure what precipitated the change but the timeline certainly suggests that Pecker fairly quickly decided that he didn’t want to go to jail for Donald Trump when the FBI came calling. He stuck an immunity deal with the federal prosecutors and told them what he knew. And what he knew was that back in 2015 when Trump had decided to run for president, he called Pecker up to his office in Trump Tower and asked him what he could do to help his campaign. Pecker told him that he could keep an eye out for negative stories and they could coordinate together to shut them down. Cohen would be the liaison.
Pecker used the “catch and kill” method (pay for the story and then never run it) with former Playboy playmate Karen McDougal who said she’d had a months long affair with Trump and paid off a doorman who claimed he had evidence that Trump had fathered a child with an employee. But according to the Wall St. Journal when adult film star Stormy Daniels turned up (for a second time) Pecker refused to have the Enquirer pay her off because he had consulted with an election lawyer who informed him that it could be considered an illegal in-kind contribution. Cohen made the deal with Daniels anyway and ended up having to front the money himself with the understanding that Trump would reimburse him.
Predictably, Trump took his sweet time in paying back Cohen who even had Pecker ask for it on his behalf. Trump told Pecker that Cohen had plenty of money. In the end, he reimbursed him, plus a bonus, but he lied about it repeatedly until shortly after the FBI raid on Cohen’s office. Trump’s involvement in the payments was first revealed by his newly hired attorney, Rudy Giuliani, on Fox News one night when he blurted out that Cohen had “funneled it through the law firm, and the president repaid him.” The next day Trump tweeted a long explanation obviously written by someone else explaining that he’d paid off an extortionist and “money from the campaign played no roll [sic] in it. The move, which was the first of many hare-brained strategies cooked up by Giuliani and Trump without input from people who know better, came as a complete surprise to his staff one source telling the WSJ, “people in the White House are a little concerned about what looks like the roller coaster ride ahead.” As the Journal reported, they were right to be:
Election-law experts said Mr. Giuliani’s revelation places the president at the center of questions about possible campaign-finance violations. Mr. Trump’s reimbursement of his lawyer for the payment could violate election law, since Mr. Cohen likely would have been required to report the funds he spent upfront as an in-kind donation, if investigators determine the payment was made to help Mr. Trump win the election. Mr. Giuliani on Wednesday suggested it was.
Michael Cohen pleaded guilty to those campaign finance violations saying in court that he did so at Trump’s direction. Pecker was given immunity and he corroborated Cohen’s account that Trump was in on the scheme. Trump, identified as “Individual 1” in prosecution documents was let off he hook even though it was clear that he was guilty of the same crimes Cohen for which Cohen was going to prison and Pecker was given immunity.
Even Fox News analyst Judge Andrew Napolitano thought this was a clear cut case of criminal liability
According to then-US Attorney in charge of the case, Geoffrey Berman, who was later forced to resign, that happened because of interference from Attorney General Bill Barr who instructed them to “cease all investigations” into the matter. Berman wondered if Barr was trying to shield Trump from possible legal liabilities after he was out of office. It’s certainly not a stretch to think so.
In 2021, the FEC fined AMI $187,500 for unlawfully aiding Donald Trump’s presidential campaign in 2016 by making a $150,000 illegal campaign contribution in the Karen McDougal matter. Pecker (who no longer owns the company) was personally protected by his immunity agreement. They let Trump off the hook too despite the investigators’ finding that he was liable as well.
There is no doubt that the scheme was illegal. It’s just a matter of the Manhattan prosecutors proving that Trump’s actions to hide the payments show that he was doing it to commit another crime. If the other crime is violating campaign finance laws, Pecker will be able to shed light on that issue.
After all, Pecker had already made the mistake of paying off McDougal on Trump’s behalf but refused to pay Stormy Daniels because he’d been informed by an attorney that he was crossing legal lines. What are the odds that he didn’t call up his good pal Trump and say, “hey, Don, my lawyer tells me this plan we’ve got going might be illegal?” Maybe he was too scared to say anything but he sure wasn’t scared to tell Cohen that he wouldn’t play ball so I think that’s unlikely.
We know Pecker is going to testify that Trump asked him to help with the campaign and that he was in on the scheme to “catch and kill” any negative stories. Michael Cohen got Trump on tape talking about payments. Will Pecker testify that Trump knew that what they were doing was illegal? Will they be able to show that his fraudulent bookkeeping was in service of covering up his crime? Stay tuned. We’re finally going to find out.
Republican Voters Against Trump (RVAT) has posted a new ad pointedly suggesting that with Donald Trump’s history he could not even get hired at your local mall.
“Would you buy a used car from this man” entered popular culture in the 1960 election. This RVAT ad is another version of that famous attack. It may work against Donald Trump. And it may not. The popular vote spread in 1960 was less than one percentage point (just over 100k votes), even though Sen. John F. Kennedy won in the Electoral College by 303-219 votes. (Sen. Harry Byrd of Virginia won 15.) So, how effective was it even in the pre-internet stone age?
Donald Trump lost the popular vote in both 2016 and 2020, but the electoral vote spread was nearly the same as 1960 in each. It’s just that the count fell Trump’s way in 2016 (and against the country’s international standing).
Who knows? Maybe the the approach will work this time. Trump’s support has nowhere to go but down. It’s just that as the late Paul Weyrich observed, Republican chances in elections go up as the voting population goes down. There’s no rooom for Democrats slacking off. Too much is on the line.
● ● ● ● ● ● ● ●
For The Win, 5th Edition is ready for download. Request a copy of my free countywide GOTV planning guide at ForTheWin.us.
Uncommitteds will find this must-see TV
Americans love a good courtroom drama as much a police procedural. That fascination may finally get uncommitted voters who have tapped out and tuned out of politics to pay attention to what’s at stake in the November presidential election, Anat Shenker-Osorio tells Greg Sargent in today’s Daily Blast podcast.
Donald Trump’s Manhattan trial begins today. The political press will drive a battle-of-the century narrative to draw eyeballs and clicks. Are these charges serious? Can District Attorney Alvin Bragg prove Trump paying off a porn star was election interference? Who will triumph? But the hubbub around the trial may communicate to non-political junkies the message that where there is smoke there is fire. Trump won’t come out of this unscathed even if acquitted.
The right forever has thrown smoke bombs at opponents to convince the less-tuned-in that there must be something suspicious afoot. Al Gore and the internet. Hillary’s emails. Obama’s birth certificate. Voter fraud. There’s a Deep State out to get you. That there is no there there is beside the point. Create doubt in people’s minds. It’s a death by a thousand cuts strategy for sabotaging an opponent. Or a country. Russians are professionals at it.
The irony as the trial begins today is that the black smoke swirling around Trump will be his emails. That’s not how Shenker-Osorio puts it. She uses the concept of social proof, “where people think the thing they think people like them think.” A lot of people are going to see smoke billowing from Trump and think there must be something to it.
The problem for Democrats, says Shenker-Osorio, is that they “cannot say on Monday that these people are an authoritarian faction” coming for your freedom — an existential threat to America — and on Tuesday promise to work with them. That’s not an effective, consistent or sticky message. “Either the theater is on fire or it’s not on fire,” she tells Sargent. (Democrats seem to have a biological aversion to consistent messaging.)
Polls show that only a fraction of voters “would be less likely to support Trump upon a conviction in this criminal trial.” But that’s enough in a contest with razor-thin margins. To this day, I celebrate one of our 2006 field organizers for losing the most Republican county in the district. Losing there by only 3,000 votes meant flipping the district from red to blue.
Dahlia Lithwick and Shenker-Osorio said the same at Slate on Friday:
Thus, while it is absolutely the case that 36 percent of independents saying that a guilty verdict would move them away from Trump is less than the 44 percent saying it wouldn’t, when your vote total is presently neck and neck and electoral precedent says it will come down to the wire, you cannot afford to lose anyone, let alone over a third of the gettable voters. That 36 percent matters greatly.
And so, those who are dismissing the electoral consequences of this criminal trial by declaring that events in Manhattan over the next few weeks will merely animate Trump’s base—a base that will see this trial as yet more proof of the Deep State’s (™) persecution of their Lord—are also demonstrating a fundamental misunderstanding of electoral math. You cannot mobilize the voters who are already absolutely voting for Trump to any greater heights. No matter how rabid their fury, and how bottomless their sense of shared grievance, they still get only one vote each—at least until they figure out how to commit the voter fraud they love to decry on a broader scale. The rank and file in the tank for MAGA cannot become more impactful.
Opening arguments today are not like Trump’s civil trials. This is a criminal case. Law & Order stuff. Must-see TV, even if it’s not on TV.
This means that voters who only barely register the drumbeat of political news will still see a man they are supposed to consider the potential leader of the free world falling asleep, muttering threats at jurors, and generally looking sad and trapped and small. And if he is declared guilty, this process will render him, in many voters’ understanding, a criminal.
Presidential elections are won and lost on broad narratives like “Morning in America” and “Yes We Can,” not on narrow policy disagreements.
What Trump on trial—and the constant barrage of chatter about it—ultimately does is clue these weary citizens into the actual consequences of this election. It changes the narrative from a tale of two old men, neither of whom they find appealing, into the possibility that a convicted criminal will be deciding which laws, if any, apply to him and also to everyone else. This, for everyday voters residing outside the commentariat, is what can become core to politics: a story of morality and possibly even some game-changing theater.
Stay tuned. We know you will.
● ● ● ● ● ● ● ●
For The Win, 5th Edition is ready for download. Request a copy of my free countywide GOTV planning guide at ForTheWin.us.
I’m not sure why this would be but it’s interesting:
The latest national NBC News poll shows the third-party vote — and especially independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. — cutting deeper into former President Donald Trump’s support than President Joe Biden’s, though the movement the other candidates create is within the poll’s margin of error.
Trump leads Biden by 2 percentage points in a head-to-head matchup, 46% to 44%, in the new NBC News poll
Yet when the ballot is expanded to five named candidates, Biden is the one with a 2-point advantage: Biden 39%, Trump 37%, Kennedy 13%, Jill Stein 3% and Cornel West 2%.
I’ve wondered how many former Trumpers are anti-vaxers who think he betrayed them with the COVID vaccine and maybe there are more than we think? It seems hard to believe. I’d think more of the Kennedy voters would be lefty anti-vaxers, and there are quite a few. But who knows? The polling right now generally is imprecise. It’s possible that Kennedy’s sabotage campaign could end up being the greater threat to Trump or maybe just a wash like Ross Perot’s was. Nonetheless, it’s still the case that he’s being bankrolled by Trump and pushed hard by ratfuckers like Steve Bannon so the Biden camp is right to be concerned and take this seriously.
Our politics has always been full of eccentrics and weirdos. And maybe they’ve had more influence than I realized. But this remarkable confluence of batshit lunatics all at once has to be a first.
But he isn’t entirely stupid either
This lede from The New York Times could be defined as an understatement but I’m not inclined to slam it. At least they aren’t sayihng Mike Johnson is the new Winston Churchill like some people are fatuously contending:
The accolades directed at Speaker Mike Johnson in recent days for finally defying the right wing of his party and allowing an aid bill for Ukraine to move through the House might have seemed a tad excessive.
After all, a speaker’s entire job is to move legislation through the House, and as Saturday’s vote to pass the bill demonstrated, the Ukraine measure had overwhelming support. But Mr. Johnson’s feat was not so different from that of another embattled Republican who faced a difficult choice under immense pressure from hard-right Republicans and was saluted as a hero for simply doing his job: former Vice President Mike Pence.
When Mr. Pence refused former President Donald J. Trump’s demands that he overturn the 2020 election results as he presided over the electoral vote count by Congress on Jan. 6, 2021 — even as an angry mob with baseball bats and pepper spray invaded the Capitol and chanted “hang Mike Pence” — the normally unremarkable act of performing the duties in a vice president’s job description was hailed as courageous.
Mr. Pence and now Mr. Johnson represent the most high-profile examples of a stark political reality: In today’s Republican Party, subsumed by Mr. Trump, taking the norm-preserving, consensus-driven path can spell the end of your political career.
Mr. Johnson and Mr. Pence, both mild-mannered, extremely conservative evangelical Christians who have put their faith at the center of their politics, occupy a similar space in their party. They have both gone through contortions to accommodate Mr. Trump and the forces he unleashed in their party, which in turn have ultimately come after them. Mr. Pence spent four years dutifully serving the former president and defending all of his words and actions. Mr. Johnson, a Louisiana Republican, played a lead role in trying to overturn the election results on Mr. Trump’s behalf.
But in two critical moments, when facing intense, sometimes violent, pressure from within their party, they both chose a more difficult path.
I guess it depends on what you think is more difficult: selling out your country or losing your political career which, if there is any justice in this world, you are likely to lose anyway — because you sold out your country. They could very well be defeated in November and beyond, as they have been in every election since 2018, and all this brown-nosing and genuflecting to these far right wingnuts will have been for naught. And anyway there are always purges of loyalists in authoritarian regimes, if only to keep all the sycophants on their toes, and religious goodie two-shoes types like Pence and Johnson usually top the list of potential human sacrifices. There’s no guarantee of survival under Trump whether you back him or not.
Sometimes doing the right thing is also the smart thing.
Kevin Drum noted something very interesting in a recent Economist article about Americans’ lack of trust in institutions. As he says, we are all aware of this but draws our attention to this:
Kevin draws the correct inference in my opinion:
Collapse of trust in government is a purely American phenomenon. Why? Because we have Fox News and the others don’t. Oh, they have tabloids and conservative newspapers and so forth, but nothing like Fox News, which makes its living by spreading outrage over the way the country is run.
The power of Fox News is truly spectacular. Outrage sells, and the fact that one of the two major parties amplifies Fox uncritically means it has a surprisingly large influence in setting the agenda for the mainstream media too.
The truth is that US institutions mostly operate about as well as they ever have. But Fox pushes outrage over Dr. Fauci and trust in the CDC plummets. They push outrage over Donald Trump’s loss in 2020 and trust in elections plummets. They go all in on CRT and DEI and trust in schools plummets. They push climate denialism and trust in science plummets. They insist that the rest of the news media are liberal pawns and trust in the very institution that explains reality plummets.
Has there ever been an institution like Fox News that works so relentlessly from within to destroy faith in a country by its citizens? It’s a real-life version of what conservatives thought the Communist Party was in the ’50s. And we all just let it happen.
That timeline says it all. Yes, the left has had mistrust in certain government institutions since the 1960s but it didn’t completely decimate the public faith in all of them across the board. Some of us, including Kevin, tried to warn the country that something toxic was happening in our culture thanks to the right wing media ecosystem for a quarter century. But the political leaders it benefits and the mainstream media didn’t want to admit so Americans didn’t adequately see the threat.
It looks like Rupert and company have had it with her.
Au contraire Marjorie:
Of course it’s partisan.
Propaganda is a hell of a drug.
And I mean that
Those of you who read this blog regularly know that I have been very critical of MSNBC and CNN for making what seemed to me to be a rather self-righteous decision not to show Donald Trump to their audience. They talked about him incessantly but they refused to show him and that was a mistake. Yes, he lies but people needed to be reminded that he’s a disgusting narcissistic sociopath. Many of them seem to have forgotten.
Anyway, Nate Cohn of the NY Times has observed the phenomenon:
Donald J. Trump appears to be a stronger candidate than he was four years ago, polling suggests, and not just because a notable number of voters look back on his presidency as a time of relative peace and prosperity.
It’s also because his political liabilities, like his penchant to offend and his legal woes, don’t dominate the news the way they once did.
In the last New York Times/Siena College poll, only 38 percent of voters said they’d been offended by Mr. Trump “recently,” even as more than 70 percent said they had been offended by him at some point.
We didn’t ask a question like this back in 2016 or 2020 for comparison (unfortunately), but my subjective thumb-in-the-wind gauge says that, if we had, more voters would have said yes to the “recently offended” question. Mr. Trump’s most outrageous comments just don’t dominate the news cycle the way they did four to eight years ago.
Similarly, many voters seem to be tuning out his myriad legal challenges. A majority of voters said they thought he had committed federal crimes, but only 27 percent of registered voters in the last Times/Siena poll said they were paying “a lot of attention” to the news about the legal cases against him. That’s much lower than the 39 percent back in October 2019 who said they were paying a lot of attention to the Trump-Ukraine controversy (the “perfect” phone call).
It seems plausible that the lack of attention paid to Mr. Trump contributed to his early strength in the polling. Voters generally still don’t like him — in fact, his favorability rating is unchanged from our 2020 polling. But his liabilities just aren’t in the forefront of people’s minds, making it easier for the “double haters” — those who tell pollsters they dislike both candidates — to back him over President Biden.
Cable news has changed in recent days and it’s long overdue. Hopefully it’s making a difference.