The defense will try to say that Trump was just trying to keep these allegedly false accusations about his womanizing from Melania. Please. She knew who she was married to. He’s on record saying he’d be dating Ivanka if she wasn’t his daughter. He once said when asked if he would stay with Melania if she was disfigured in a car crash: “How do the breasts look?”
He very famously once said:
“You know, it doesn’t really matter what [the media] writes as long as you’ve got a young and beautiful piece of ass.”
She herself went on Howard Stern and said that she and Donald “have incredible sex once a day, sometimes even more.”
She had no trouble defending his grotesque Access Hollywood comments:
So no, Trump wasn’t worried about Melania. She had a pre-nup.
Robert Kutner thinks JD Vance is the only guy who can keep the MAGA/corporate coalition going after Trump. He writes:
WITH THE PUBLICATION IN 2016 of his best-selling book Hillbilly Elegy, Vance marketed himself as a self-made man who had risen above his troubled origins. For Vance, poverty was all about self-defeating values. In my review of his book in the Prospect, I described Vance as Charles Murray with a shit-eating grin. As I wrote:
Hillbilly Elegy turns out to be a very sly piece of work that professes to express great nostalgia and compassion for the hillbilly way of life. (“Americans call them hillbillies, rednecks, or white trash. I call them neighbors, friends, and family.”) But Vance is on the trail of a bait and switch. Despite the down-home charm, he ends up sounding condescending to his neighbors and kin. Vance not only excelled at Yale Law; he is now at a Silicon Valley hedge fund. And, according to Vance, you could be, too—if you weren’t so gol-durned lazy. If you weren’t selling your food stamps, blowing off jobs, deserting your kids, and getting stoned on Oxycontin.
By then, hillbilly Vance had already become a protégé of Peter Thiel, the ultra-right tech billionaire. Thiel poured $15 million into Vance’s 2022 campaign for the Republican Senate primary in Ohio.
Vance reminded me of Harold Ickes’s withering description of the 1940 Republican nominee for president, Wendell Willkie. An Indianan who also served as a lawyer for wealthy corporations but tried in the campaign to stress his rural roots, Ickes called him the barefoot boy from Wall Street.
But when I subsequently appeared with Vance at a public event at Oberlin, I realized that I had underestimated him. In contrast to the bombast of Trump, Vance is a man of intellect and charm. He can be effective at a rally, but also impressive in a discussion.
I wonder. I don’t think MAGA is MAGA without Trump. Like any cult, once the leader is gone, so is the cult. That’s not to say that Vance couldn’t ascend to the top of the GOP but it won’t be because he keeps Trump’s coalition together. He will have to somehow put together his own and I’m not sure he has the juice to get a majority. He’s an odious person completely lacking in charm of any kind. Say what you will about Trump but he’s got some kind of charisma and always has, and it makes people pay attention to him. Vance is just another right wing jerk and there are a lot of them out there. I’m not sure Vance demonstrably better than any of them.
Kuttner thinks Vance will have a substantial leg up if Trump picks him as VP and thinks there’s a good chance he will. Maybe. But I don’t think that helps him much if Trump loses. If Trump wins, well… we have bigger problems.
It’s going to be something to watch them all try to be the new Trump though (and that assumes we aren’t stuck with the old one, god forbid.)
During a sidebar about the relevance of Steve Bannon’s requests of Pecker, Steinglass admitted that New York Election Law 17-152, which prohibits conspiracies to promote a candidate’s election through unlawful means, is their “primary” predicate.
It appears that this is the theory the Manhattan DA has settled on.
Of course it was a conspiracy. It was composed of three people and two of the members of the conspiracy have either pleaded guilty or have immunity and are testifying against the third: Donald Trump. The question all comes down to whether or not the jury believes them — and the mountain of paperwork that backs them up.
If Trump wasn’t acting like an asshole every single day, it might not be this way. Maintaining some dignity in this situation would go a long way. Instead, look at what he did today after the gag order hearing — right in the courthouse:
That was after this happened:
He’s making a fool out of his lawyer and degrading the justice system like a juvenile delinquent. And it’s a wonder that people who are watching all this think it might not be a good idea to put him back in the White House?
Today is the 4 year anniversary of the most DISASTROUS press bleaching, I mean briefing of all time, masterfully weaved into hilarious comedy gold by the amazing @SarahCpr.
Donald Trump, “extraordinarily resilient” Man of Action, is unable to celebrate today. He is stuck in a courtroom having his brain and his body drained. Of bleach?
Watters claims ‘they’ are draining Trump’s brain by having him sit all day: You’re going to take a man who’s usually golfing and you’re going to sit him in a chair in freezing temperatures pic.twitter.com/gcDkTlahqO
Who? This reincarnation of rough-riding Teddy Roosevelt? This manly man with the constitution of a rhinoceros? This Adonis, this Übermensch with a Rocky Balboa physique of who can’t stand the sight of blood or walk 18 holes?
Tennessee public education advocates chalk up a win
Efforts to defund Tennessee’s public schools crashed and burned on Monday after weekend negotiations failed to advance Gov. Bill Lee’s universal voucher bill. The bill will be dead (for now) once the legislature adjourns for the year. Lee plans to bring it back next session.
“I am extremely disappointed for the families who will have to wait yet another year for the freedom to choose the right education for their child, especially when there is broad agreement that now is the time to bring universal school choice to Tennessee,” Lee said in an early Monday statement. “While we made tremendous progress, unfortunately it has become clear that there is not a pathway for the bill during this legislative session.”
“Freedom to choose”? Remember when conservatives pitched vouchers as a way to help poor, minority kids escape “decaying” inner-city public schools, lives of poverty, drugs, etc. ? Nowadays they’ve dropped the facade. The “funding should follow the child” rubric hides the real goal of having the general public subsidized rich parent’s choice to send their kids to private schools. Vouchers and supposed “opportunity scholarship” programs are aimed at diverting public funds away from not-for-profit public education to selective private academies, many of them religious schools. Many charter schools operate the same way with public funds.
Charter schools, which were originally proposed to be district-run, innovative public schools, have since morphed into national charter school chains, Christian nationalist schools, and facades for for-profit corporations. More here: https://t.co/ManKFPEI1p#CharterSchoolFailhttps://t.co/xafa5jsOdT
A look behind the curtain reveals where the tax dollars get diverted, to nominally nonprofit private schools often operated by for-profit LLCs that take a markup on dollars spent for services, supplies, teachers, and facilities.
Resegregation of schooling is a bonus for supporters, as is ensuring fundamentalists’ kids are not exposed to ideas like CRT, DEI, multiculturalism, “woke,” evolution, or any other Fox News bogeymen-of-the-month. These programs are designed to subsidize rich families who already “choose” to sent their kinds to private schools. What they want is a tax break for doing so.
“Vouchers are welfare for the well-to-do,” Missouri activist Jess Piper tweeted in Feburary. Annual public schools spending is still “the big enchilada” for many investors.
The Tennessee For All Coalition celebrated its successful efforts to kill the voucher proposal.
“The governor’s voucher scam would have diverted money from our already underfunded public schools, doing immeasurable harm to every community in our state,” the coalition said in a statement. “Every child in Tennessee deserves to have a chance to succeed through strong public schools. We are one step closer to this vision with the defeat of this voucher scam. We will continue to fight to increase funding to every public school so communities can have more resources, restorative accountability measures, less reliance on high-stakes testing, and better paid educators and school support staff.”
We won!! This was only possible because of parents, students, educators and community members organizing together across the state.
Congratulations to everyone who gave their time to this effort, here’s some of what we did together:https://t.co/8MmWxkoXIj
Tennessee Education Association President Tanya T. Coats said in a statement:
“90% of Tennessee’s students are educated in public schools, and today is a great day for them and their parents,” part of the statement read. “On behalf of our students, I want to thank the legislators who stood strong for our state’s children. I also want to thank the thousands of Tennesseans, including their local elected officials, who were moved to speak out against the governor’s proposal, and who I’m sure would do it all again in a heartbeat. We’ve seen a lot of bad voucher policies passed around the country, and none of them have lived up to the promise of benefitting parents and students.”
Despite my Republican colleagues best effort, the power of the people cannot and will not be stopped.
Proud of the people of Tennessee for standing up for labor, racial justice, and public schools.
In the face of unrelenting pressure, the people are winning— resistance matters. pic.twitter.com/zEDJCCHjoZ
Walter Shapiro in TNR runs down all the consequences we’ve seen so far from the Supreme Court decision to reverse Roe vs Wade and the political problem it’s caused for Republicans:
Even a huckster with Trump’s disdain for the truth cannot spin away the fact that Republicans are on the unpopular side of the abortion debate. Fifty-nine percent of voters in a Fox News poll in late March said that abortion should be legal in all or most cases. And a Wall Street Journal poll in mid-March found that a stunning 39 percent of suburban women in swing states consider abortion to be their most important voting issue in 2024.
It wasn’t supposed to be like this for Republicans. In the spring and early summer of 2022, as the Alito draft became the official opinion of the Supreme Court in the Dobbs case, the prevailing GOP view of the political aftereffects of the decision was, in effect, “It will all blow over.” No Republican predicted that abortion would still be a powerful weapon for the Democrats in 2024 and beyond.
Writing in Politico, Rich Lowry, the editor of the conservative National Review, declared that the Dobbs decision was “a fizzle” as “a quick-acting elixir for Democratic political woes.” His logic in the July 2022 piece was that the Alito leak gave everyone a chance to brace for a reversal of Roe, “limiting the shock value and making the decision a dominant story for days rather than weeks.”
In an interview with NPR, Mitch McConnell—who, via efforts to block Merrick Garland and rush through Amy Coney Barrett, played arguably as big a role in Roe’s reversal as Trump did—seemed unfazed by the political implications of his anti-abortion handiwork. “I think it will be certainly heavily debated in state legislative and governor’s races because the court will have, in effect, returned this issue to the political process,” McConnell said after the Alito draft leaked. “My guess is in terms of the impact on federal races, I think it’s probably going to be a wash.”
Since everything for McConnell is political, it is tempting to wonder if he would have pursued the abortion issue with break-the-rules zealotry if he knew that it would turn out to be anything but a wash for the Republicans. There are hints from McConnell’s early days as, yes, a liberal Republican that he once supported Roe. If there was no conviction behind McConnell’s rush to approve anti-abortion judges, it suggests that this was a major miscalculation by a man who was always prized for his political sagacity.
GOP Senate flamethrower Josh Hawley, whose raised fist of support shortly before the January 6 insurrection lingers in memory, offered a novel why-Republicans-will-gain theory in an interview with the Kansas City Star after the Dobbs decision. According to Hawley, millions of Americans will relocate based on the availability of abortions in their states. “The effect is going to be that more and more red states are going to become more red,” the Missouri senator said, “purple states are going to become red and the blue states are going to get a lot bluer. And I would look for Republicans as a result of this to extend their strength in the Electoral College.”
Other right-wing senators, who had been leading the anti-abortion bandwagon for years, adopted the implausible argument that the uproar over the leaked Alito memo was all sound and fury, signifying nothing. Texas Senator Ted Cruz argued in a TV interview, “Angry leftists, many of whom are pretty ignorant and don’t even know what overturning Roe means, I think a month afterwards are gonna be surprised—‘Wait, nothing about my life changed.’” (Something tells me that voters in Arizona and Florida might not agree.)
Concerned about the political blowback from the decision, Senate Republicans circulated a memo (scooped by Axios) that was little more than a big smiley button on how to handle abortion. Written immediately after the Alito leak, the memo recommends, “Be the compassionate, consensus-builder on abortion policy.… While people have many different views on abortion policy, Americans are compassionate people who want to welcome every new baby into the world.” An ad script for a mythical female Republican suggests this deliberately bland wording: “Here’s my view—I am pro-life, but in reality, forget about the political labels, all of us are in favor of life.”
When anyone in politics says, “Forget about the political labels,” realize that they are trying to squirm out of the losing side of an argument.
Conservative Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan, who is sincerely anti-abortion, offered some wise recommendations for Republican men in May 2022: “Don’t fail to embrace compromise because you can make money on keeping the abortion issue alive.… Use the moment to come forward as human beings who care about women and want to give families the help they need. Align with national legislation that helps single mothers to survive.”
You may have noticed that none of this has happened over the last two years. Instead, the abortion issue has been defined for the nation by reactionary state judges and insensitive, good-old-boy GOP state legislators. The result is that the Dobbs decision was not a single event, but a torrent of regressive policies. It is telling that, despite Trump’s urging, the GOP-controlled Arizona state House failed again Tuesday to soften the state’s abortion laws.
Many Republicans in Washington embraced the anti-abortion movement out of political convenience. With the issue gathering momentum nearly two years after Dobbs, this Faustian bargain doesn’t seem very convenient after all.
The anti-abortion zealots are pushing for a national ban, saying they will “compromise” by just banning it after 15 weeks with some vague, ill defined exceptions. That just isn’t going to fly. It’s all extremely inconvenient and they simply don’t know what to do about it.
A growing number of House Republicans are accusing their conservative colleagues of enabling Democratic wins, especially after this weekend’s foreign aid votes. Multiple members believe they could have gotten concessions from Democrats on border policy in exchange for Ukraine funding, only to be blown up by backlash from conservatives.GOP leadership brought up border security provisions alongside their foreign aid package — but the package was blocked by Republicans from reaching the House floor under normal rules.
It ultimately failed to get the two-thirds majority needed to pass the House under suspension of the rules. “If you were a true conservative, you would actually advance border security, but what they want to do is they want to blow up border security,” Rep. Andy Barr (R-Ky.) told Axios.
“[T]he members who scream the loudest about border security were actively and knowingly preventing us from getting it done,” another member said.
“They’re making us the most bipartisan Congress ever,” a third member told Axios. “Because they are unwilling to compromise just a little bit in a divided government, they force us to make bigger concessions and deals with the Dems.”
Conservatives who advocate for blocking procedural motions argue it’s necessary to light a fire under GOP leadership to demand more.
Multiple conservatives said they expected more out of Speaker Mike Johnson than former Speaker Kevin McCarthy due to his record as a rank-and-file member. “Republicans have control of the House and we should be leveraging it to secure our border, unfortunately the Uniparty is working to secure the borders of Ukraine instead of our own border,” Rep. Eric Burlison (R-Mo.) tweeted.
“[T]he problem is [Johnson’s] gotten nothing on anything. Right? They roll him every time,” Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) — who is pushing the motion to vacate — told reporters on Saturday.
Republicans left town yesterday without Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) pulling the trigger on her motion to vacate.
Johnson “needs to do the right thing, to resign and allow us to move forward in a controlled process. If he doesn’t do so, he will be vacated,” Greene said on Fox News.
Johnson has faced some of the most tumultuous weeks of his speakership, with his longevity in the role remaining in question.
But the Louisiana Republican has asserted that he won’t cave to threats to his speakership and feels rules changes should be made in the next Congress to tamp down on the unprecedented level of chaos.
This is the problem when you put purists and low information conspiracy theorists into elective politics. They should have stayed Facebook activists not become legislators. They’re clueless about how this works and are obviously incapable of learning.
Marge says she wants Johnson to resign and is all over the internet saying that Republicans are so angry about all this that they will hold their breath until they turn blue and refuse to vote in November. Actually, these antics may very well be turning off normie Republicans who want the chaos to stop. Either way, I’m sure Marge will be there blaming her leadership because that’s what the right has been doing for the last 15 years. It’s their brand. And even if they lose everything this fall I doubt they’ve learned their lesson.
On Sunday, the network published the results of a national poll that asked respondents, among other things, to evaluate how interested they were in the election on a scale from 1 to 10. Fewer than 2 in 3 selected 9 or 10 — lower than any similar measurement by NBC’s pollsters this late in a presidential election year since at least 2008.
Among Republicans, 70 percent indicated they were very interested in the election. Among Democrats, only 65 percent. Among independents? Fewer than half.
This isn’t terribly surprising. It is consistently the case that independents — generally meaning independents who tend to vote for one party or the other and independents who don’t — are less politically engaged and less likely to vote. Comparisons of national polling conducted by the Pew Research Center with Census Bureau estimates of the electorate show how much of the nonvoter pool in each recent election has been made up of independents.
In 2016 and 2020, at least two-thirds of partisans voted, according to this analysis. About 6 in 10 independents who lean toward a party did, while about half of non-leaning independents cast ballots.
But there’s an important asterisk this year: Those less likely to vote are also much more likely to support Trump.
You can see it in the NBC News data. Biden leads by nine points with those who voted in 2020 and 2022. Among those who voted in neither of those elections? Trump leads by 22 points.
He points out that the Harvard Youth Poll released last week suggests the same thing.
That amounts to an almost 20 point lead among likelies.
Research by University of Pennsylvania political scientist Dan Hopkins published by 538 earlier this month used an Associated Press poll conducted by NORC, previously the National Opinion Research Center, to compare support in the general election with voting frequency. The same pattern prevailed: Those who vote less often are more likely to back Trump — including among the Black and Hispanic voter pools that have been a focus of attention since 2020.
This suggests that Gallup’s finding that young and non-White voters were shifting right over the past few years might be a function of less politically engaged people.
Viewing the same point through a different lens: Pew’s analysis of recent voting habits shows that Black and Hispanic voters are also more likely to have not voted in recent elections.
Bump suggests this might indicate that all the handwringing about a supposedly big shift right among those voters is a bit of a mirage.
Obviously, Democrats still need to do everything they can to get out the vote. Apathy isn’t ever something to count on especially since Trump has a unique ability to motivate his cult. (Also, they’re going to try to throw out as many votes as possible.) But this does at least show that the majority of the most engaged people are appalled by Donald Trump and will do whatever they can to assure that he doesn’t get back into the White House. It’s something.
There’s a ton of legal analysis coming about today’s opening arguments in Trump hush money trial and I’ll try to recap some of it for you later. But in the meantime I found that I enjoyed Olivia Nuzzi’s colorful twitter observations about the atmosphere in the courtroom and I suspect you will too:
Hello from Manhattan criminal court where Donald Trump’s hush money trial officially starts this morning
It is another freezing day inside this courthouse
Donald Trump just arrived, railed against Letitia James, and then walked into the courtroom. He’s now hunched over in his seat whispering to his attorneys.
Donald Trump is glowering in the direction of Judge Merchan as the trial officially begins.
Trump is tilting his head dramatically and making trout-like movements with his mouth as he listens to judge Merchan. Like a version of this iconic sequence but much more subtle
As Trump sits in the courtroom listening to Judge Merchan explain how his criminal trial is going to work, Truth Social sends out push notifications for the spate of posts sent from his account this morning, including one that refers to him as “Daddy Trump.”
Donald Trump is staring straight ahead with a dull expression as the prosecution begins opening remarks, referring to a “criminal conspiracy,” “a coverup,” and “a scheme to corrupt the 2016 election.”
Donald Trump is shifting uncomfortably in his seat as the prosecution references David Pecker and Michael Cohen.
Trump busies himself by fiddling with papers on the table in front of him while prosecutor Matthew Colangelo talks about his alleged affair with Karen McDougal.
It’s hard to tell what exactly Trump is looking at in the courtroom at any given time. But he is certainly not looking at the prosecutors.
Colangelo is standing to Trump’s right presenting the prosecution’s opening statement. Trump’s lawyer, Todd Blanche, sitting near the aisle to Trump’s right, has angled his body to face Colangelo. Trump, meanwhile, has not looked over at the prosecution once. He is alternately staring down at papers, staring off ahead, or appearing to look at the screen in front of him (the content of the screen is not clear).
Donald Trump raised his eyebrows in a dismissive gesture after the prosecution read his comments from the Access Hollywood tape.
As the prosecution moves onto the subject of Stormy Daniels, Trump scribbles notes to his lawyer and slides the paper over so he can read it.
With every new allegation and detail from prosecutors, Trump inches closer to fully making this expression.
Prosecutors are telling this story about Trump’s 2016 campaign: the operation was in a tailspin after the Access Hollywood tape, scrambling to avoid further disclosures that would hurt the candidate even more with women voters. They argue that the hush money payment was not about communications or “spin” (spin being PR-speak for lying) but about “election fraud.”
Donald Trump’s lawyer begins opening remarks for the defense. Todd Blanche tells the coirt: “President Trump did not commit any crimes.”
Blanche tells the court, as Trump looks on, that he and others will refer to Trump as “President Trump” because “he has earned” the title. “We will call him President Trump out of respect for the office that he held,” Blache says. Adding, “But he is also a man… and a husband.”
Blanche needs to humanize for the jury of Trump’s peers the nonhuman, peerless man. But it also felt, like it always feels, that this was yet another Trump employee performing for an audience of one.
Blanche has an unfortunate habit of backing up away from the microphone while he gesticulates and paces about as he speaks, making it hard to hear him completely
As Trump looks on with an even, satisfied expression, Blanche tells the court: “There’s nothing wrong with trying to influence an election. It’s called democracy.”
Blanche tells the court: “There is nothing illegal about entering into a nondisclosure agreement. Period.”
The defense is now introducing doubt about Michael Cohen’s character, calling him “a convicted felon… a convicted perjurer… a convicted liar.”
Trump’s legal team introduces the Regina George defense. Blanche tells the jury: “You will learn that Michael Cohen was obsessed with President Trump. He’s obsessed with President Trump to this day.”
Blanche encourages the jury to be skeptical of words like “scheme” and “conspiracy.” He rolls his eyes as he refers to the “‘Catch and Kill scheme.’” Blanche says that Trump’s behavior, described by prosecutors, is “not a scheme” and “not against the law.”
David Pecker has taken the stand. Bespectacled, puffy silver hair and a puffy silver mustache, wearing an ill-fitting gray suit and pale tie. Under the bright white courtroom lighting, he looks almost translucent.
Trump busies himself scrawling on paper as Pecker describes his work at AMI. In my experience, Trump has basically zero tolerance for conversation that does not immediately and directly relate to him. He has very little curiosity about others. And he looks pretty bored right now.
Pecker has twice laughed out loud in the few minutes he’s been on the stand — emphasis on the loud. Like Chris Matthews style. It’s a little weird but overall somewhat endearing. (Trump did not seem to react to Pecker’s laughter.)
Pecker’s testimony has concluded for today. Court is ending early due to the holiday. Day two of the trial begins at 9:30 am tomorrow.
It’s very interesting watching Trump process his own boredom. There’s a lot of procedural bullshit the judge and the lawyers have been working out since Pecker’s testimony concluded. Left alone while his lawyers approached the bench, Trump was just sitting there with a blank expression, twirling a pen around in his hand and staring at it.
He left the courtroom and violated the gag order:
Trump again going after witness Michael Cohen: When are they going to look at all the lies that Cohen did in the last trial… He got caught lying. Pure lying. When are they going to look at that? pic.twitter.com/1hYa8YpjCV
Desperation➡️call for "disruptions" so he can be saved and public will think it is too dangerous & inflamnatory to prosecute him. https://t.co/lhcEN4HXZ9
He was angrily posting all morning about how the Columbia protesters are allowed to continue while his followers aren’t. So, yeah, I think she’s right. But the truth is that very few people have shown up to support him.
