Republicans operatives from out of state were bankrolling ads promoting Durham D.A. Satana Deberry ahead of North Carolina’s March 5 Democratic attorney general primary. Supporters of Rep. Jeff Jackson, her main opponent, warned that a vote for Deberry could aid the GOP-funded effort to upset TikTok maven Jackson.
Let them waste their money, I replied. If donations are a measure of support, it was no contest. Jackson had raised around $1.7 million to Deberry’s not-quite $45,000. Jackson bested Deberry by 22 points.
So for those fretting about every presidential poll this far out from November, consider the fundraising status of the two majors (CNN):
Donald Trump’s campaign saw an uptick in donations in February but failed to match the accelerating fundraising pace set by Joe Biden, whose political operation widened its already substantial financial advantage over his Republican rival as it entered March and the general election showdown, new filings show.
The new filings, which cover only a portion of the committees associated with each presidential contender, continue to show Biden’s early fundraising dominance.
The president ended February with $71 million in available cash in his principal campaign account – more than twice the $33.5 million in cash reserves held by Trump’s campaign. Biden expanded the gap seen at the end of January when his campaign had nearly $56 million in available funds to Trump’s roughly $30.5 million.
The filings also show that the Democratic National Committee ended February with more than twice the cash on hand as its Republican counterpart, buttressing Democrats’ financial edge over a political operation that Trump is working to build with the national GOP now that he is the party’s presumptive nominee.
Team Biden is kicking it. Better now?
Yes, conservative dark money groups will be a factor this election season. God knows what role Russian intelligence efforts will play. And fundraising isn’t everything. But it could be as good a measure of support as horse-race polls even as an increasingly desperate Trump begs supporters for help to pay his $464m bond in the New York fraud case ahead of a Monday deadline.
Since Digby invoked the late Texas Democrat Gov. Ann Richards, I will rip off one of her most memorable lines. Poor Donald. He can’t help it. He was born with a silver foot in his mouth. Trump can’t stop himself from making the election a referendum on Trump.
Did you know that Judge Scott McAfee delayed his written order on Willis and Wade for a week because he had been receiving threats? He needed time for proper security to be in place for him and his family. The ONLY source that I found who mentioned this was Kyle Griffin at MSNBC.
This really PISSES ME OFF. I try to be all logical about the reasons the threats keep working and point to solutions, but I’m really sick and tired of the BS excuses by law enforcement when it comes to dealing with threats from the MAGA base to the judges, prosecutors, witnesses, jurors AND THEIR FAMILIES, in Donald Trump’s legal cases.
I’m a fast talker but slow writer so I dictated my thoughts to Otter.AI (a service I use to transcribe videos). It has a feature to summarize what you said and provide action items. It worked surprisingly well!
Spocko is frustrated with the lack of action taken by law enforcement to address threats made against judges and their families. He argues that local law enforcement should have anticipated and prepared for these threats, but their failure to do so is driving him ‘nuts.’ Spocko highlights specific instances where media attention and public pressure led to action being taken, but notes that more often than not, there is a lack of response or prosecution. He questions why law enforcement is failing to take these threats seriously and why they are not doing more to address them.
It even came up with Action Items for the Georgia law enforcement based on what I said:
Anticipate and prepare for threats ahead of time to allow for quick response (Georgia law enforcement FAILED!)
Intercept, trace, find, arrest, and prosecute people making threats (Georgia law enforcement FAILED!)
I had action items for Georgia government:
Investigate reasons for failure to anticipate and respond to threats
Analyze past examples of effective law enforcement response to threats
I had action items for the people in comms in Georgia government:
Serious question: Do you want threats to stop? Because when there are no arrests for threats, the message being sent to the people making them is that they are fine.
The Failure To Protect The People from MAGA Domestic Terrorists
Every week i talk with Glenn Kirschner about what can be done about threats. He got REALLY PISSED that Trump’s BLOODBATH comments aren’t going to land him in pretrial detention. He asks,
“Will the criminal justice system writ large receive this latest deadly threat with a yawn? Or will they apply the law as it is intended to be applied? ”
Glenn Kirschner on Trump’s promise of a “bloodbath” if he loses the election?
I’m always looking for solutions, but I’m also looking at people to blame when they have refused to act over and over again when it comes to threats. Did you know Georgia law enforcement never arrested ANYONE for the threats to Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss?!
Cobb County Police said no one was arrested in response to the reported threats and declined further comment. …
On Jan. 25, Barron emailed Fulton County police chief Wade Yates and other officials. The family needed protection, he said. “Can we do anything to help her and her family with security?” he asked, referring to Moss, in the email, reviewed by Reuters. Yates suggested hiring an armed guard at a cost of $22.50 per hour, according to an email. “We can work out funding details next week,” he said.
Asked why Freeman and Moss didn’t receive a security detail, Fulton County Police said in a statement that it can’t approve budgeting in such a case and referred questions to the county government.
The county government said it did not provide security for the women because the messages they received did not rise to the level of criminal threats that could be prosecuted. The decision was not financial in nature, it added.
[The Reuters reporters talked to multiple experts who said the threats DID rise to the level of criminal threats.]
You would THINK that considering it was a Judge who is white and a Republican, Georgia law enforcement would have prepared for threats ahead of time to allow for a quick response. Georgia cops should have announced arrests IMMEDIATELY after the threats, to show they were prepared.
It’s almost as if law enforcement WANTS anyone involved in Trump cases to be AFRAID of political violence. As I said, I’ve investigated failure and successes when it comes to threats online. I could point to good communications about threats (like from New York’s Judicial Threats Assessment Unit that informed the media about the scale and scope of the threats to Judge Engoron and his clerk.)
That report got through to people in the media like Chris Hayes, who I’ve seen conflating criticism of elected officials with threats over and over again. Watch this clip of Lisa Rubin talking about the 275 pages of transcribed threats from voice mail, that finally got to him.
I know that the media have a big role to play in making sure the people understand what is happening and who is benefiting from a failure to act on threats. So I wrote to Kyle Griffin at MSNBC.
Kyle: Could you please dig into threats made to Judge McAfee? Your March 15 tweet was the ONLY place I saw anyone saying McAfee delayed the Willis/Wade order because of the threats to his family.
This sounds like a massive failure of Georgia Law enforcement.
Could you do a Weekend segment on this failure of law enforcement? I know there ARE laws that can deal with these threats, but they aren’t a priority. I don’t want to hear the lame excuses. Please get someone to expose the reasons behind the failures, and what must be done to fix it.
I wrote about Trump’s mortal fear of getting dementia because he watched his father deteriorate with Alzheimer’s disease because he watched his father mentally deteriorate with Alzheimer’s disease. In today’s Washington Post (gift link) they tackle that subject in depth:
Donald Trump invited his extended family to Mar-a-Lago in the mid-1990s. As the clan gathered at the palatial Florida estate, though, his father was badly struggling, according to Mary L. Trump, Donald’s niece.
Fred Trump Sr., the pugnacious developer then in his late 80s, didn’t recognize two of his children at the party, recalled Mary L. Trump, who attended the gathering. And when he did recognize Donald, the family patriarch approached his son with a picture of a Cadillac that he wanted to buy — as if he needed his son’s permission.
The incident, Mary L. Trump said, left Donald Trump visibly upset at his father’s descent into dementia, which medical records show had been diagnosed several years earlier.Trump reflected his anguish in an interview around that time, with Playboy in 1997 reporting that seeing his father “addled with Alzheimer’s” had left him wondering “out loud about the senselessness of life.”
“Turning 50 does make you think about mortality, or immortality, or whatever,” Trump, who had recently reached that milestone, told the magazine. “It does hit you.”
Today, as the 77-year-old Trump seeks to return to the White House, he is still focused on the ravages of dementia — but this time he is using the condition as a political weapon, alleging without medical proof that President Biden, 81, is “cognitively impaired.” Those attacks follow a long pattern for the former president, who for years has bashed enemies as mentally frail while boasting in public about “acing” the Montreal Cognitive Assessment, a basic test that flags signsof early dementia.
Trump regularly claims to have passed the test twice, but through a spokesman, his campaign declined to release his test results or to specify when he most recently took it. Rep. Ronny Jackson (R-Tex.), the former White House physician, said in an interview this monththat he administered it to Trump once, in January 2018. Trump in November released a three-paragraph letter in which Bruce Aronwald, a doctor of osteopathy, said that Trump’s health was excellent and that “cognitive exams were exceptional” but provided no details. Aronwald did not respond to a request for comment.
Ziad Nasreddine, the neurologist who created the test, said in an interviewthat if an individual in their 70s had not taken the Montreal test since 2018, the results would not be valid to cite today.
Trump’s longfixation on mental fitness followed years of watching his father’s worsening dementia — a formative period that some associates said has been a defining and little-mentioned factor in his life, and which left him with an abiding concern that he might someday inherit the condition. While much remains unknown about Alzheimer’s, experts say there is an increased risk of inheriting a gene associated with the disease from a parent.
“Donald is no doubt fearful of Alzheimer’s,” said a former senior executive at the Trump Organization, who worked for years with Trump and saw him interact with Fred Trump Sr., and who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe a confidential relationship. “He’s not going to talk about and not going to admit to it. But it’s relevant because every day he is hitting Biden with whether or not he is capable mentally of doing the job.”
Trump’s father’s condition also drove a wedge into his family, which fell into years of lawsuits that alleged in part that Donald Trump sought to take advantage of his father’s dementia to wrest control of the family estate — litigation that introduced reams of medical records detailing Fred Trump Sr.’s condition.
The full story of Trump’s father’s illness, and the family turmoil it sparked, casts new light on his views of an issue that’s become central to the presidential campaign, with pollsters finding a majority of voters have concerns about the mental fitness of both Trump and Biden. Those concerns have sharpened as both candidates have had lapses on the trail, with Biden mixing up the names of the leaders of Mexico and Egypt and Trump confusing former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley with former speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, and warning that the United States could face “World War II” under Biden.
Ok, wait a minute. Biden misspoke and said the wrong country in a passing comment which I’ve done myself while Trump very, very weirdly kept saying the name of Nikki Haley over and over again as he was campaigning against her and it was very unclear if he was literally blaming her for failing to stop the insurrection. They are not the same at all.
In the early 1970s, as Donald took a leading role in the firm, Fred Trump Sr. told the New York Times that “Donald is the smartest person I know.”
By 1990, though, the claims of Trump’s business genius were being questioned as he fell into desperate financial condition. He eventually filed six corporate bankruptcies, and he faced the prospect of personal bankruptcy as his first wife, Ivana, sought $1 billion in a divorce settlement. His high-profile casinos in Atlantic City were badly faltering.
That’s when Trump sought to change his father’s will.
Trump arranged for a lawyer to write an amendment called a codicil giving him control over the estate and to protect his inheritance from creditors.He then had two of his father’s most trusted associates deliver it to Fred Trump Sr. as if it were a formality. ButTrump’s mother, Mary MacLeod Trump, forbade Trump’s father from signing it immediately. Trump’s sister, Maryanne Trump Barry, later said in a deposition that her father didn’t like how the effort to change the will was being done “behind his back.”
Trump later admitted in a deposition that he hoped the gambit would rescue him from financial problems by giving him significant control over the estate. “It was a very bad period of time and if for any reason I was not able to come out of this well, then this would be giving me a trust to protect” his inheritance, Trump said.
That effort failed — but Trump’s actions would expose his father’s deteriorating mental state.
‘Obvious memory decline’
In October 1991, around the timeFred Trump Sr. turned 86 years old, hevisited his doctor, C. Ronald MacKenzie. In a report about that visit, the physician wrote that he had “significant memory impairment” with “early signs of dementia” and “obvious memory decline in recent years,” according to records disclosed in the court case.
Months later, a second doctor wrote in a neuropsychological evaluation that Fred Trump Sr. “did not know his birth date, was unsure of his age, and turned to his son [Robert] for help in responding to questions.” The exam by Rajendra Jutagir found that Fred Trump Sr.’s cognitive ability was below the 15th percentile for a person in his age group. He could only recall three of the previous nine U.S. presidents and could not draw the hands of a clock to show the time.
Those detailed medical reports, later entered into court filings, paint an early picture of what would be a long decline for Fred Trump Sr. — one that his son claimed not to notice for years.
“Do you recall your father suffering from any memory lapses in 1991?” an attorney asked Trump in a deposition conducted in 2000.
“No,” Trump responded.
“Do you recall him being diagnosed as having senile dementia in 1991?” the attorney said.
“No, I don’t,” Trump said in the deposition. To the contrary, Trump said that his father was “very, very sharp.”
Mary L. Trump said those claims were contradicted by other family members. Robert Trump, Donald’s younger brother, said that their father was in “notable decline” by 1990, as recounted by Mary L. Trump in a lawsuit over the will. Trump’s sister, Maryanne Barry, later was secretly recorded by Mary L. Trump as saying that “it was basically taking the whole estate and giving it to Donald” at a time when “Dad was in dementia.” (Maryanne Barry, who died last year, did not respond to a request for comment when The Post first revealed the secret tapes in 2020; Robert died in 2020.)
Regardless, by the mid-’90s even Donald Trump was publicly acknowledging the truth: that his father’s dementia was rapidly advancing.
A few years after his father’s diagnosis, Trump was driving down Fifth Avenue with his father when they passed by the Empire State Building, the iconic 102-story office tower, a landmark known well by both men. As Trump later recalled to the New York Times, his father said, “That’s a tall building, isn’t it? How many apartments are in that building?” Trump thought his father was “kidding” but eventually realized this was a sign of Alzheimer’s, he told the newspaper.
Around the same time, Trump held the family gathering at Mar-a-Lago, where Mary L. Trump says Fred Trump Sr. did not recognize her or two of his children, Robert and Maryanne. After the incident in which Fred Trump Sr. seemed to ask permission to get a new Cadillac, Robert said it would be taken care of, but “Donald just walked away, like, ‘Oh, God, get him away from me. He’s so annoying.’ He had no patience, none whatsoever,” recalled Mary L. Trump, who has more recently become an outspoken political opponent of her uncle, including writing a book that called him “the world’s most dangerous man.”
The former senior executive at the Trump Organization recalled Trump bringing his father to a party in the mid-1990s when it was clear the elder Trump was suffering from dementia. Hesaid Donald Trump had an abiding fear of germs and diseases.
“I remember distinctly he brought his father to the party and Donald was either holding his hand or close to him physically, and he introduced me to him and you could see his father wasn’t comprehending much of anything,” the former executive said. “Donald was not the type to show affection. It was just Donald being matter-of-fact that his father had Alzheimer’s.”
Trump later said in an appearance with television personality Mehmet Oz that his father in his last few years had developed what was “probably” Alzheimer’s, “which was very hard for us because he was such a smart guy, such a wonderful guy and, you know, that’s a rough thing.”
Trump’s father died at 93 years old in June 1999, eight years after the first formal diagnosis of dementia.
Mary Trump and her siblings sued Trump over the will and there was a settlement. The article goes on to recapitulate the Trump cognitive test story in which he claimed on TV that he could memorize five words, “person, woman, man, camera, TV” (all of which he was looking at in the moment) which meant that his mind was sharp as a tack.
Trump has long emphasized his belief in the importance of genetics. He has said he is a “super genius” because of his “great genes.”
Trump’s niece, Mary L. Trump, said such beliefs are noteworthy. “If intelligence is a genetically inherited state” as Trump believes, she said, “then something like dementia, Alzheimer’s, which do have very strong genetic components, is more of a concern to somebody who is directly related to Fred Trump Sr. as Donald is. I’m not saying he has dementia, but you can’t say the one thing and not also acknowledge the other.”
Experts said much remains unknown about how people get Alzheimer’s, but research has shown that genetics may play a role. […]
Forty to 65 percent of people who have the diseaseinherited a gene particularly associated with increased risk, according to Allison Reiss, who studies the gene and is a member of the Alzheimer’s Foundation of America’s Medical Scientific and Memory Screening Advisory Board. That risk can further increase depending on whether an individual has the gene from one parent or from both, she said. (There is no indication that Trump’s mother had dementia.)
Reiss, who stressed she was speaking in general and not about any individual, said that a blood test can determine the presence of the gene. Experts said it is important to note that having the gene or other potential markers does not mean that a person will get the disease; nor does the absence of them mean a person won’t get Alzheimer’s.
Trump has not said whether he has taken a number of specialized tests for Alzheimer’s, including genetic testing. Such exams can also include brain scans, cerebrospinal fluid tests and blood tests, according to the Alzheimer’s Association.
Trump has not released a full medical report during the campaign, so far providing only the brief assessment from his physician, Aronwald.
Of course he hasn’t taken any of those tests. I’m not convinced he ever took the simple one that Jackson signed off on either. He’s such a sycophant that he could easily have just told Trump what was on the test so he could brag that he aced it. Trump’s given some weird descriptions of it.
It’s natural that Trump would be worried. I think anyone would be. What’s not natural is that he’s such a narcissistic sociopath that he’s accusing Joe Biden of having the disease that he’s so terrified of having himself. Has there ever been a more obvious example of projection? The bigger question is why so many in the media are determined to let him do it.
Shortly before Joseph Ladapo was sworn in as Florida’s surgeon general in 2022, the New Yorker ran a short column welcoming the vaccine-skeptic doctor to his new role, and highlighting his advocacy for the use of leeches in public health.
It was satire of course, a teasing of the Harvard-educated physician for his unorthodox medical views, which include a steadfast belief that life-saving Covid shots are the work of the devil, and that opening a window is the preferred treatment for the inhalation of toxic fumes from gas stoves.
But now, with an entirely preventable outbreak of measles spreading across Florida, medical experts are questioning if quackery really has become official health policy in the nation’s third most-populous state.
As the highly contagious disease raged in a Broward county elementary school, Ladapo, a politically appointed acolyte of Florida’s far-right governor, Ron DeSantis, wrote to parents telling them it was perfectly fine for parents to continue to send in their unvaccinated children.
“The surgeon general is Ron DeSantis’s lapdog, and says whatever DeSantis wants him to say,” said Dr Robert Speth, a professor of pharmaceutical sciences at south Florida’s Nova Southeastern University with more than four decades of research experience.
“His statements are more political than medical and that’s a horrible disservice to the citizens of Florida. He’s somebody whose job is to protect public health, and he’s doing the exact opposite.”
Ladapo’s advice deferring to parents or guardians a decision about school attendance directly contradicts the official recommendation of the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), which calls for a 21-day period of quarantine for anybody without a history of prior infection or immunization.
It is also in keeping with Ladapo’s previous maverick proclamations about vaccines that health professionals say pose an unacceptable danger to the health of Florida residents. They include official guidance to shun mRNA Covid-19 boosters based on easily disprovable conspiracy theories that the shots alter human DNA and can potentially cause cancer – “scientific nonsense” in the view of Dr Ashish Jha, a former White House Covid response coordinator.
Meanwhile, with measles having been eradicated in the US since 2000, the disease’s resurgence, paired with Ladapo’s latest misadventure, has prompted a new round of mocking commentary. Florida: Come for the Sunshine, Leave With the Measles, opined the Orlando Sentinel; “Measles? So On-brand for Florida’s Descent Into the 1950s”, was the take of the Tampa Bay Times.
Are people ok with their kids getting measles? Maybe. I don’t know why. I had them as a kid and I still remember it. It’s awful. There’s absolutely no reason to put your child through it or anyone else for that matter, when we have a safe and effective vaccine that’s been around for 60 years!!!
The backlash prompted the Florida department of health to publish “clarifying information” this week, in which it insisted that the stay-at-home recommendation had in fact been given to parents at Manatee Bay elementary school, and attempted to blame the media for “reporting false information and politicizing this outbreak”.
Department officials repeated the claim in a subsequent statement.
“The media has continued to peddle the narrative that Dr Ladapo has defied science in his recent letter. In reality, he has used available data and immunity rates to drive policy decisions impacting Manatee Bay Elementary,” the deputy press secretary Grant Kemp said.
“97% of students at Manatee Bay Elementary have received at least one dose of the MMR immunization. Outbreaks are occurring in multiple states, and the national immunization rate for measles is less than 92%.”
Reporting false information, incidentally, is something Ladapo is familiar with himself. He was found to have personally manipulated data in a 2022 study of Covid-19 vaccines to wrongly assert they posed an elevated risk of cardiac illness or death in young men.
To Speth, and numerous other medical experts, Ladapo’s risky succession of positions denying even the most obvious benefits of immunization and vaccination is a symptom of a wider political assault by the right wing, which carries deadly potential.
Its origins, Speth believes, lie in a long-discredited study by the disgraced British former doctor Andrew Wakefield falsely tying the measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine to autism, but which was enthusiastically embraced by anti-vaxxers and other extremists in the US.
“The Wakefield study was a gross fraud, yet today up to 25% of our population believes it, and opportunistic politicians seize on the sentiment to tell people what they want to hear about the danger of vaccines,” he said.
“Republicans are at war with medical science, and that’s a horrible tragedy. But I feel like Cassandra, talking about the public health threat. We’re going to start seeing a lot more children die of infectious diseases that could be prevented if they were vaccinated.”
[…]
“What’s so sad about it is it’s completely preventable,” said state senator Tina Polsky, who has been one of Ladapo’s staunchest critics…
“To pretend that the vaccine is unnecessary to eradicate measles is completely illogical, because that’s the reason it’s been gone from our country. It will have some devastating outcomes, it’s going to scare a lot of people, and kids are going to be out of school, which has its own negative outcomes.”
Honestly, these people won’t be happy until they bring back polio so they can say the vaccine didn’t work.
My question remains: what the hell is up with DeSantis? He’s an educated man. And yes, he was running for president on the “woke” platform but come on, that’s over now and he’ll have some repair work to do if he wants to run in 2025, his biggest problem being that people think he’s a robot. Does this nonsense really help him with that?
Maybe it’s just stubbornness or … maybe he’s a true believer in which case he’s even more dangerous than Trump who is just an opportunistic ignoramus.
Meanwhile, you might want to think twice about that Florida vacation.
The testimony today of a couple of Trump toadies once again showed that they have absolutely nothing to prove that Biden did whatever it is they want people to believe he did.
But the Democrats brought this fellow to testify and it was like something out of a movie:
Parnas: "I believe Bill Barr should be investigated for the coverup and trying to silence me to get the truth out of what really happened in Ukraine." pic.twitter.com/hbhZZOnQgO
Parnas: Trump was aware of everything that was going on.. Trump approached me, shook my hand, said thank you for all that you're doing.. I was off to Ukraine.
Parnas: He basically told me not to be nice, to be very stern and relay the message that unless Zelensky announced an investigation into the Bidens by Monday, that there would be no cooperation, no aid to Ukraine from the United States pic.twitter.com/CUVJJJ1ul0
This was the worst day yet for the House Impeachment farce. I still think they’ll try to go for a vote because Dear Leader wants it and they really don’t have anything else to do but performative BS for the election. There’s talk about simply sending over criminal referral, probably under the assumption that Trump is going to win and they can prosecute Biden and his son next year. But that’s really a fallback. Trump wants an impeachment on Biden’s record. The question now is whether they can get one with the tiny majority they currently have.
That was March 20th, the day he started aggressively pimping Hydroxychloroquine. Here’s my rundown of that day’s White House press atrocity:
At the daily Trump White House rally, MSNBC’s Peter Alexander asked the president :
There are 200 dead, 14,000 who are sick, and millions who are scared right now. What do you say to Americans who are watching you right now who are scared?”
That is a totally reasonable question and an opportunity for Trump to say he understood people’s fears and that he and his team were working night and day to ensure that we get through this as best we can.
But Trump went batshit on Alexander:
CNN’s John King reacted appropriately after the rally was over:
What the president did to Peter Alexander was reprehensible. The people are looking for answers. They do want hope, they do want support, Mr. President. That was a very fair question. Kaitlan, this is a Trump trademark.”
“It was striking that this came — forgive me — this bullshit attack on fake news came just moments after the Secretary of State said the American people need to be careful about where they get their information, to go to sources they can trust.
Even Dana Bash was upset by this press conference and she has been cheerleading his press conferences.
This was a grotesque press conference, one of the worst he’s ever done.
Here are just a few of the highlights:
"I am a man that comes from a very positive school when it comes to, in particular, one of these drugs" — Trump pic.twitter.com/5i651MEXSk
In response to a question about coronavirus testing deficiencies, Trump directs Pence to talk about "the tests, and how well that's working" pic.twitter.com/vV4S23RHI4
"We haven't been given the credit we've deserved" — Trump closes Friday's coronavirus press conference by once again making a weak attempt to blame Obama for his government's mishandling of the coronavirus, including testing and resource failures pic.twitter.com/3tl4AAa8PI
Whatever goodwill the media gave him on Monday, declaring him to have pivoted to become a “wartime leader” was just smashed to bits today. Which is good on the one hand. Many people are at home and may not have been fully aware of what a deranged imbecile Trump really is. But it’s terrifying that this man is in charge of the federal response to this monumental crisis.
I hope people take heart in the Governors and Mayors who are stepping up. They are all we’ve got.
As we learned later he knew very well how bad it was. He confessed to Bob Woodward that it was a deadly threat yet he purposefully downplayed the threat. He was worried about it wrecking his re-election campaign and so he wrecked it himself by acting like a freak in front of the whole country which was locked down and glued to the television and saw this imbecile in charge of a deadly crisis.
I know it was a bad time and nobody wants to relive it but damn … why would anyone in their right minds, knowing what we know now, want to put this man back in the White House after that horrific performance? I honestly cannot wrap my mind around it.
Her comments used to be the usual way people would defend the right to abortion — straightforward, no weasel words, practical and confident. Then the anti-abortion zealots became mainstream in the Republican party and Democrats went on the defensive and they didn’t emerge from it until 30 years later when the Supremes struck down Roe v Wade. The price for that foolish capitulation is extreme.
Trump needs money so he’s putting Manafort back on active duty
🚨Flashback to 2016
Norah O'Donnell: “So to be clear, Mr. Trump has no financial relationships with any Russian oligarchs?"
Paul Manafort: “That's what he said. That's what I said. Obviously, that's . . . what our position is.” pic.twitter.com/PIx8IRYSdC
— Republicans against Trump (@RpsAgainstTrump) March 19, 2024
Donald Trump had an epic meltdown on his social media site Trump Social on Tuesday. Even for someone who is prone to ranting and raving in public, this was one for the books. Apparently on the verge of cracking under the financial pressure stemming from the civil judgments against hims for defamation and fraud, he let fly with post after post filled with whining and invective against New York Attorney General Leticia James and NY State Judge Arthur Engoran.
For instance, he wrote: “Any business thinking about moving into New York State is CRAZY! The level of anger and hostility toward businesses and business people is incredible. Numerous people have spoken to me about this since the Racist and Politically Corrupt A.G., who ran for office on a platform of “I will get Trump” without knowing anything about me or my business, and her corrupt puppet Judge, Arthur Engoron, who has already been overturned 4 times on this case, a record, started doing a number on me.”
He seems a little bit stressed, wouldn’t you say? He went on to claim that they are trying to take his fortune and force him to sell his assets in a “fire sale” which is a good indication that his boasts in his fraud trial deposition that he could find a “buyer from Saudi Arabia to pay any price he suggests,” (which Judge Engoran pointed out in his ruling “may suggest influence buying more than savvy investing”) might not be as much of a sure thing as he thought it was.
Donald Trump testified that he undervalued his properties, not overvalued them and that he was flush with hundreds of millions of dollars and no debt. Now it turns out he can’t get a bond (possibly because his properties are already leveraged and the lenders don’t want any other liens on them) and he’s crying that he doesn’t have any cash. It sure looks like that judge’s ruling was right on the money. He is an inveterate liar about his fortune. Why anyone ever loaned him money in the first place remains one of life’s biggest mysteries.
But maybe he can find a Russian oligarch to step up. Back in 2016 they even managed to make one of their assets, Paul Manafort, his campaign manager for a time. He turned out to be massively in debt to one and used inside information to pay him back. Back in those early days Trump didn’t yet know that he could get away with anything so he fired him when this information came out and Manafort ended being sentenced to 47 months in federal prison in one case and 73 months in another for a variety of crimes that were uncovered in the course of the Special Prosecutor’s investigation of Russian interference in the election.
You may recall that among other crimes like tax fraud and illegal foreign lobbying, Manafort pleaded guilty to money laundering related to his work in Ukraine with various Russian players but he subsequently lied so much to the Special Prosecutor’s office that they withdrew the plea agreement and he went to trial. And today his relationships with Ukraine and Russia should be of renewed concerns to federal authorities since according to the Washington Post, he’s now expected to join Trump’s 2024 campaign at a time when we know that Trump badly needs money.
One stated reason for the hire, which is cited in most reports, is that they need him to run the convention a job which he was well known for back in the 1980s before he decamped to Ukraine to run their campaigns and launder money. In 2016 they didn’t have a real organization and had to take what they could get so they eagerly hired anyone with a pulse and he was placed in the campaign by his former partner and Trump’s personal dirty trickster Roger Stone (who Trump also pardoned before he went into temporary exile at Mar-a-Lago.) But there is zero need to hire Manafort to “run the convention” now. There are plenty of people who could do that. It’s the other stated reason that makes more sense. The Post reported that the job would “include Manafort playing a role in fundraising for the presumptive GOP nominee’s campaign.”
Manafort hasn’t been involved in fundraising in America in many years. But he sure knows his way around Russian oligarchs and spies and he definitely knows how to broker a quid pro quo. As journalist Marcy Wheeler reminds us, Manafort’s contact during the 2016 campaign, the Russian asset Konstantin Kilimnik (who is under indictment in the United States) had once pitched him on Russian help in the election in exchange for allowing Russia to carve up Ukraine.
That deal didn’t pan out in the first term, but you can see why Trump, in his desperate financial straits, might want to re-open that line of communication. And it sure looks like Trump is ready to close the deal if he gets elected in November. It’s clear that he intends to withdraw military funding and let Russia have its way with the country (and anywhere else it chooses for that matter.)
The weird and inexplicable relationships between Trump,Ukraine and Russia have been a constant refrain for the past eight years and nothing ever shakes Trump’s bizarre willingness to court this scandal over and over again. There have been investigations and impeachments and trials and convictions and yet he just can’t leave it alone. His obsequious behavior toward Russian president Vladimir Putin, his hostility toward Ukraine, the fatuous rationale to end NATO because “it doesn’t pay its bills” and the recent comments that he would allow Russia to invade any country it wants have never made any sense, even for him. Yes, he is a shallow, puerile narcissist who loves to suck up to tyrants so they’ll let him into the strongman club but that doesn’t fully explain his apparently endless need to prove his fealty to Vladimir Putin.
And now he wants to re-hire the convicted felon he later pardoned, a man who admitted to laundering money for Russian oligarchs to do fundraising. It’s true that Trump is overwhelmingly stressed out about having his lies about his fortune exposed and possibly losing everything but it’s hard to believe that even he’d be so reckless as to go there for a bailout. But then he’s gotten away with everything so far so why not?
As he says, he likes Putin and he knows Putin likes him too. Why shouldn’t he turn to his good friend in his time of need?
Psychically, TFG “needs to make the election a referendum on himself.”
Perhaps the most delicious part of the 24/7 Trump reality show is watching the 77-year-old spoiled brat come apart at the seams, and his organization with him. It seems “panic mode is setting in.”
The former president never expected to win the presidency in 2016, botched the transition, didn’t know what the hell he was doing, hired sycophants and relations to whom he didn’t listen, and hundreds of thousands of Americans died in his tardy response to the COVID-19 outbreak. Because he’s corrupt as hell, never ran anything larger than a small family business, and because Donald Trump is about Donald Trump 24/7/365.
Trump does not keep chickens that I know of, but they are coming home to roost anyway. Psychically and financially, if not yet criminally.
A smart, ah say, a smart challenger-candidate with Trump’s pandemic record wouldn’t touch the “Are you better off?” question with a ten-foot cattle prod. The classic strategy, David Frum explains in “The Ego Has Crash-Landed,” is to assume “the voters’ verdict will be on the incumbent; the challenger’s job is simply to refrain from doing or saying anything that gets in the way.”
But Trump psychically needs to make “the election a referendum on himself,” Frum writes in The Atlantic:
In two consecutive elections, 2016 and 2020, more Americans voted against Trump than for him. The only hope he has of changing that verdict in 2024 is by directing Americans’ attention away from himself and convincing them to like Biden even less than they like Trump. But that strategy would involve Trump mainly keeping his mouth shut and his face off television—and that, Trump cannot abide.
Trump cannot control himself. He cannot accept that the more Americans hear from Trump, the more they will prefer Biden.
Almost 30 years ago, I cited in The Atlantic some advice I’d heard dispensed by an old hand to a political novice in a congressional race. “There are only two issues when running against an incumbent,” the stager said. “[The incumbent’s] record, and I’m not a kook.” Beyond that, he went on, “if a subject can’t elect you to Congress, don’t talk about it.”
Trump’s two issues, Frum observes, “are his record and Yes, I am a kook. The subjects that won’t get him elected to anything are the subjects that he is most determined to talk about.”
Ordinary people tortured and executed “heretics” in Spain by the thousands.
Ordinary people burned tens of thousands of “witches” in Europe and tried and hung them in New England.
Ordinary people slaughtered several hundred women, children, and elderly Native Americans at Sand Creek, Colo. and committed atrocities against the dead.
Ordinary people deported, executed, and starved a million or so Armenians.
Ordinary people starved millions of Ukrainians.
Ordinary people incinerated prisoners in Third Reich camps we still make movies about.
Ordinary people murdered between 1.5 and 3 million others in Cambodia.
Ordinary people killed close to one million of their neighbors in Rwanda with machetes and rifles.
Ordinary people systematically massacred about 8,000 of their neighbors and Bosnia.
Ordinary people murdered and raped Israeli villagers on Oct. 7, 2023.
Ordinary people responded by leveling cities and starving children.
Ordinary people attend rallies where their leader “confers martyrdom upon criminals who try to overthrow a democracy they associated with subhumans.”
Ordinary people live next door.
In “The Bloodbath Candidate,” Yale history professor Timothy Snyder, author of “On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century,” analyzes Donald “91 Counts” Trump promising in Ohio last Saturday there would be a “bloodbath for the country” if he’s not elected:
The Vandalia rally began with a brazen celebration of the convicted criminals who took part in Trump’s failed coup attempt. Those present were instructed to “please rise for the horribly and unfairly treated January 6th hostages.” The reference was to convicts serving time for attempting to overturn the results of the last presidential election and thereby overthrow the American form of government.
The phrase “horribly and unfairly treated January 6th hostages,” booming over the loudspeaker, was substituted here for the call to rise to the flag or the national anthem. The people who tried to overthrow the Constitution were inserted where a pledge to American values would ordinarily be. Americans were being asked to honor violence in the service of overthrowing the American system.
This Gesamtkunstwerk was designed to bring people into a sense of unity with the perpetrators of the January 6th crimes. As a chorus of convicted criminals sang over video, people rose and then joined in song. They put their hands on their hearts. Along with the coup convicts, those who attended the rally performed a perforated version of the national anthem. In so doing, they joined a virtual community of violence.
The singing was interwoven with a recording of Trump reciting the pledge of allegiance, as though he were the only American who mattered. Baseball cap still on head, Trump saluted a recording of himself. Both of these details, too, are mockeries of patriotic performance. Trump has no right to salute at that moment. Not removing the cap means that he, and he alone, is above it all — the martyr in chief, the most “horribly and unfairly treated.”
Will Bunch in his Tuesday Philadelphia Inquirer newsletter wrote, “Trump’s literal salute” in song “to those willing to commit violence on behalf of his MAGA movement — both the arrestees he now calls ‘hostages’ and the slain rioter Ashli Babbitt, hailed by the ex-president as a martyr” echoes the “Horst-Wessel-Lied,” or “The Horst Wessel Song.” The tune celebrating a fallen brownshirt became a Nazi anthem. “It was even played in churches as Goebbels forged his own version of Christian nationalism.”
Keep an eye out for that happening soon, willya?
Trump apologists explain away Trump’s bloodbath remark as a metaphor. He was talking about the auto industry and was taken out of context. But, Snyder explains, the entire rally is context. “In this sense Trump’s defenders are the one who are taking Trump’s remarks out of context.” In full context, Trump is worse.
Calling convicted, imprisoned insurrectionists “unbelievable patriots” and “hostages” he pledges to pardon is context.
“That is perhaps the most essential element of context to Trump’s later reference to a bloodbath,” Snyder explains. “He has already made clear, in a the collective performance, that violent insurrection is the best form of politics. Well before he actually used the word, he had instructed his audience that bloodbaths are the right form of politics” when done in his name.
For which (like Wessel) they would be remembered, celebrated, and forgiven.
Trump’s speeches are suffused with grievance justifying law-breaking. The Big Lie takes center stage. He invoked it nine times by Snyder’s count.
The fascist-style martyrdom cult justifies violence, in two ways. It makes a hero of criminals, thereby making criminality exemplary. And it establishes prior innocence — we suffered first, and therefore anything we do to make others suffer will always be justified. The Nazis sang their Horst Wessel Song as they conquered countries and killed millions.
In another way, Trump’s Vandalia speech also summoned up the fascist historical context. For fascists, political opponents are enemies because they are animals or are associated with animals. The border theme in Trump’s campaign is meant to link the Biden administration to violent subhumans. In the Vandalia speech, Trump called migrants animals, snakes, and monsters.
“I don’t know if you call them people,” Trump said, speaking of jailed Mexican gang members. “These are animals.”
Trump told his Jan. 6 “Stop the Steal” rally, “We fight like hell. And if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.” Just a rhetorical flourish? What happened next?
Snyder insists:
Trump is calling for a bloodbath in front of people who stood to honor bloodshed. People who have just sung with coup criminals. People whom he implicitly promises he will pardon if they carry out another insurrection. And he is doing this in the fascist style of telling a big lie that confers martyrdom upon criminals who try to overthrow a democracy they associated with subhumans.
We should see Trump for what he is: an aspiring fascist who likes, wants, and needs violence. But we need not fear him or his plans. There were not that many people assembled in Vandalia, and their reactions to Trump’s rhetoric were muted. Some left before he was done. Although Trump himself has (absurdly) escaped punishment for his attempted coup, the foot soldiers of the last insurrection are in prison. Trump won’t actually be able to pardon anyone this fall.
In coaching his followers towards a November 2024 insurrection, Trump is telling them (and us) that he doesn’t really plan to win the election. As he did in 2016, as he did in 2020, he is telling us that the vote count does not decide the issue for him. He wants to get close enough in the tally to make some kind of a play. But the vote count will matter to the rest of us. If the election is not close, it will matter even to his followers.
On that last part, I’m not so sure.
MAGAstan is a place where facts don’t matter, where the only reality is one Trump specifies, in which white, Christian males (and oligarchs like Trump) rule atop the social ladder, and all others know their place. Trump lost the popular vote in 2016, and by a wider margin in 2020. When he lost the 2020 election, his followers rioted and sacked the U.S. Capitol. The vote was rigged. The machines were rigged. Bamboo ballot paper came from China. Election officials double-counted votes and fabricated others. Ineligible “illegals” voted and handed the win to Joe Biden, etc. Trump is selling the Big Lie still. It’s part of the MAGA catechism.
Trump is hemorrhaging support and cracking under the financial and legal pressures he’s brought on himself. That’s the bloodbath he fears most and for which he swears the retribution of Real Americans™, the ordinary people in his cult. Though likely fewer by the time the election rolls around, they won’t go quietly into that good night. “He’s the bloodbath candidate,” says Snyder, and he’s advertising it.
