112 members of congress are objectively pro-Putin. There really is no other explanation for this other than reprehensible fealty to that Orange Monster — who is objectively pro-Putin. It’s one of the most bizarre changes of
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Digby's Hullabaloo Posts
He has to sit there and take it:
He seems “selfish and self-serving,” said one woman.
The way he carries himself in public “leaves something to be desired,” said another.
His “negative rhetoric and bias,” said another man, is what is “most harmful.”
Over the past week, Donald Trump has been forced to sit inside a frigid New York courtroom and listen to a parade of potential jurors in his criminal hush money trial share their unvarnished assessments of him.
It’s been a dramatic departure for the former president and presumptive 2024 GOP nominee, who is accustomed to spending his days in a cocoon of cheering crowds and constant adulation. Now a criminal defendant, Trump will instead spend the next several weeks subjected to strict rules that strip him of control over everything from what he is permitted to say to the temperature of the room.
“He’s the object of derision. It’s his nightmare. He can’t control the script. He can’t control the cinematography. He can’t control what’s being said about him. And the outcome could go in a direction he really doesn’t want,” said Tim O’Brien, a Trump biographer and critic.
While Trump is occasionally confronted by protesters, generally he lives a life sheltered from criticism. After leaving the White House, Trump moved to his Mar-a-Lago waterfront club in Palm Beach, Florida, where he is surrounded by doting paid staff and dues-paying members who have shelled out tens of thousands of dollars to be near him.
Many days, Trump heads to his nearby golf course, where he is “swarmed by people wanting to shake his hand, take pictures of him, and tell him how amazing he is,” said Stephanie Grisham, a longtime aide who broke with Trump after the storming of the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
When he returns to Mar-a-Lago in the afternoon, members lunching on the patio often stand and applaud. He receives the same standing ovation at dinner, which often ends with Trump playing DJ on his iPad, blasting favorites like “It’s a Man’s Man’s Man’s World” by James Brown.
Grisham, who spent long stretches traveling with Trump and at Mar-a-Lago during his 2016 campaign and as White House press secretary, described staff constantly serving as cheerleaders and telling Trump what he wanted to hear. To avoid angry outbursts, they requested motorcade routes that avoided protests and they left a stack of positive press clips every morning on the Resolute Desk in the Oval Office.
Now, Trump faces a trial that could result in felony convictions and possible prison time. And he will have to listen to more critics, without being able to punch back verbally — something he revels in doing.
Among the expected witnesses in the trial are his former lawyer and fixer, Michael Cohen, and the porn actor who alleged she had sex with him, Stormy Daniels. Both have savaged him in interviews and books as well as on social media.
It’s driving him nuts:
Apparently, he thinks once being president should be a get out of jail free card forever, even for crimes committed before they are in office? What a nice scam that would be.
I guess nobody ever pointed out to him that a president has never had immunity and yet it’s never been a problem until he started committing all his crimes.
yikes
Not actual size
C’mon, MAGAstinians. Buy another ticket for the Trump Train. Buy some more crappy merch! Sink a few more of your boats! It’ll be fun. Your enemies will tremble as Trump makes the flag you wrap yourselves in mean fascism instead of freedom. C-O-O-L, huh?
Lara Trump promises “four years of scorched earth when Donald Trump retakes the White House” (if he stays out of jail). It’s a helluva campaign pitch:
Trump has been persuaded to turn down the volume on the threats of vengeance, but his allies are continuing to advance this message. Lara Trump, the candidate’s daughter-in-law whom he installed as co-chair of the Republican National Committee because the incumbent merely cast doubt on the 2020 election without going so far as to conclusively say Trump won, unleashed this terrifying promise:
He showed us a whole lot that we didn’t know was going on — within the media, within Washington, D.C. He exposed a lot of people. So they have to do everything they can to keep him out of that White House ’cause they know Donald Trump gets in for four more years, the jig is up for them. The gloves are off. There are no holds barred here. He is going full-throttle. He’s not worried about winning another election. It’s four years of scorched earth when Donald Trump retakes the White House.
Doesn’t that sound like fun? People are tired of the toxicity of national politics, I get it. Enough to stay home and not get their shiny, white vinyl souls tainted by voting this November. Remind them what MAGA is selling.
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And a lot of Kennedys
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A heroic dog rescuer.
He saves the dogs and they save him right back.
Not only did someone self-immolate outside the court room but this happened again too:
There are some other foul rumors as well…
They have a full jury with six alternates. On Monday morning, the games will begin.
JV Last writes about one of the most profoundly depressing aspects of this election — half the country’s willingness to reward Trump with another term despite his performance as the worst leader in a national crisis in memory.
There’s a Churchill quote that goes something like this: The after effect from the extreme prostrations of war—even a successful war—is ennui.
He was explaining that in democratic societies, wars begin with drums and parades, but ends with public disaffection.3
There might be a corollary to this rule concerning pandemics because it is pretty clear that COVID broke something deep in the American psyche.
It’s why people went crazy for two years, screaming at strangers in the grocery store about masks.
It’s why we have a mass economic delusion in which people aren’t able to accurately perceive the state of the economy.
It’s why we got the meme-stock phenomenon.
It’s why our popular culture has largely chosen to ignore COVID and pretend that the pandemic never happened.4
And it’s why Americans have made themselves so willfully blind about what happened in 2020 that they are seriously considering reelecting the man who managed the greatest failure of the federal government in a century.
There’s something about a pandemic that’s different from an economic collapse. Herbert Hoover could never have gotten reelected after the economy collapsed on his watch. People fixated on the cost of his mistakes and were determined never to go back again.
But a pandemic is different. No one wants to think too deeply about 2020. They want to look away. They want to not remember it.
And this willed amnesia has made the unthinkable possible.
He’ right and it’s terrifying, especially since the world is in a major state of transition and putting someone as incompetent as Trump in charge should be unthinkable.
Last linked and excerpted a great article by Stephen Robinson who put all of Trump’s COVID atrocities in one place. It’s hard for me to understand how people can forget all this but apparently they have.
Remember that Trump dismantled most of the government’s pandemic preparedness prior to COVID:
The first recorded case of covid in the US was in January 2020. A few weeks later Judd Legum at Popular Information posted on Twitter, “I feel like more people should be talking about the fact that Trump fired the entire pandemic response team two years ago and then didn’t replace them.”
Indeed, the Trump administration gutted the infectious disease defense infrastructure through shortsighted cost-cutting measures starting in 2018 — a year after passing a trillion-dollar tax giveaway for his billionaire buddies. The administration specifically canned the executive branch team that would’ve coordinated a response.
Trump then spent most of February 2020 minimizing covid’s threat. He called the coronavirus Democrats’ “new hoax” at a campaign rally in South Carolina. By April, when everything was going to hell, he lamented that the pandemic was “something that nobody expected.” However, former President George W. Bush had warned in 2005 that “if we wait for a pandemic to appear, it will be too late to prepare.” Bush compared a pandemic to a forest fire: “If caught early it might be extinguished with limited damage. If allowed to smolder, undetected, it can grow to an inferno that can spread quickly beyond our ability to control it.”
Bush paved the way for pandemic planning, which the Obama administration continued. Only Trump was simultaneously arrogant and stupid enough to demolish what his predecessors had built.
Then-presidential candidate Joe Biden warned on October 25, 2019, that “we are not prepared for a pandemic.
Last archly observes:
Honestly, this is like a president dismantling a system that would have dealt with a sneak attack on Pearl Harbor, then having a rival say, “This is dangerous! Pearl Harbor could be attacked and it would be catastrophic!” And then Pearl Harbor gets blown to hell and . . . people think about electing the first guy again.
Trump and the masks. He gestured limply at the guidance and then did everything he could to persuade people not to wear them:
By the summer of 2020, even such Republicans as Sen. Rick Scott from Florida, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, and Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey publicly encouraged wearing masks and social distancing. Trump not only refused to promote masks but told the Wall Street Journal that they were possibly more trouble than they were worth.
“People touch them,” he said. “And they grab them and I see it all the time. They come in, they take the mask. Now they’re holding it now in their fingers. And they drop it on the desk and then they touch their eye and they touch their nose. No, I think a mask is a — it’s a double-edged sword.”
Trump consistently undermined any mask-wearing guidance from his staff.
“We have urged Americans to wear masks, and I emphasized this is a patriotic thing to do,” he said in August 2020 but added, “Maybe they’re great, and maybe they’re just good. Maybe they’re not so good.”
This was the worst:
One of the important functions of the federal government during a pandemic is to control and centralize the procurement and distribution of critical equipment so that individual states don’t end up competing against one another and creating suboptimal allocations. Trump failed in this task.
And as he was failing he tried to blame not just Democratic governors for the shortages that arose, but frontline medical personnel.
[T]here was an ongoing shortage of vital personal protection equipment in hospitals, and Trump openly accused doctors and nurses of “hoarding” masks and ventilators. He expected governors, especially Democrats, to sing his praises publicly in exchange for him doing his job, and states were pitted against each other for the equipment, which only drove up costs.
“It’s a source of frustration that there’s not more of a national strategy on procurement of these critical pieces of equipment that everyone across our country is going to need,” Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer told NBC News in April 2020. “And when we’re bidding against one another and the price keeps going up, then we can’t count on the national stockpile to meet our needs, it creates a very dangerous situation.”
Trump responded by denigrating Whitmer, and it took him a week to approve a disaster declaration for Michigan.
For Trump it was all about his re-election
By September 2020, Trump openly blamed “blue states” for the escalating covid death toll. He obviously didn’t back this up with data. He just suggested that if you excluded the dead from “blue states,” then the US numbers overall would’ve been more in line with other nations. . . .
This is especially sickening because Vanity Fair reported that the Trump administration had dismissed a national pandemic plan as bad politics. It was deemed preferable to let the virus rage through blue states — where it was disproportionately killing people of color — and blame the Democratic governors. Trump’s advisers had to tell him directly that the virus was hurting “our people” — white MAGA voters in Republican-run states.
How about trump’s first Big Lie. You know, the one that resulted in hundreds of thousands of avoidable deaths?
Bob Woodward revealed in his book “Rage” that Trump was fully aware that the coronavirus was more than just a bad flu. As early as January 28, his national security adviser Robert O’Brien warned Trump that covid would become “the biggest national security threat you face in your presidency. This is going to be the roughest thing you face.”
“This is deadly stuff,” Trump told Woodward on February 7. “You just breathe the air and that’s how it’s passed. And so that’s a very tricky one. That’s a very delicate one. It’s also more deadly than even your strenuous flus.”
Trump’s public statements often contradicted his public health advisers and created confusion. He repeatedly claimed the US had the virus “under control,” when this simply wasn’t true.
Trump administration officials insisted he was simply being “optimistic” when he’d claim the virus would “disappear” miraculously. His interview with Woodward, however, made it clear that he understood how dire the situation was. . . .
“I wanted to always play it down,” Trump told Woodward on March 19. “I still like playing it down because I don’t want to create a panic.” . . .
Yet he admitted to Woodward that the virus was a growing threat to the nation.
“Now it’s turning out it’s not just old people, Bob. But just today, and yesterday, some startling facts came out. It’s not just old, older … young people, too, plenty of young people.”
“Slow the testing down, please”:
“When you do testing to that extent, you’re gonna find more people, you’re gonna find more cases. So I said to my people slow the testing down, please,” Trump told his mostly mask-less supporters at a campaign rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma — the very same one where Herman Cain likely contracted covid and later died.
Trump’s careless disregard for public health precautions led to him contracting the virus in late September. Former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows revealed that Trump tested positive on the same day as the White House’s gloating superspreader event in honor of Supreme Court Justice nominee Amy Coney Barrett.
Trump was already experiencing symptoms and should’ve quarantined for 10 days, but visibly unwell, he still attended the first screaming match debate with Biden. At least 11 covid cases were linked to that event, including Trump’s debate prepper Chris Christie, who was hospitalized. Fortunately, Trump failed to spread the virus to his political opponent, but he kept his condition secret for days. When close aide Hope Hicks tested positive, he announced he and First Lady Melania Trump were entering quarantine, implying that Hicks had exposed them to the virus. He even attempted to scapegoat military personnel and law enforcement for infecting Hicks and other members of White House staff.
Read it all and then ask yourself how it’s even possible that we are having to fight like we’ve never fought before to ensure that this man is not ever allowed near the White House again. Nothing makes me feel as disoriented as this does.
And it’s not over yet
The Republican Party has been in such a state of pandemonium for so long that it’s hard to imagine what new turns it can take. Yet from week to week it always does. The 2020 election tantrum and insurrection was certainly the pinnacle of Trumpish anarchy but the GOP congress has been working hard to emulate their Dear Leader ever since they won the majority in 2022. It’s a bad idea to make sweeping statements about them finally jumping the shark since they always manage to outdo themselves but this week is certainly one for the books if only because the stakes are so very high and they have sunk so very low.
As I wrote a couple of days ago, House Speaker Mike Johnson was caught in a trap between his fellow right wing zealots led by Marjorie Taylor Greene who have appropriated Donald Trump’s hostility to Ukraine and the rest of his caucus which is more reluctant to see the world blow up. The events in the middle east last weekend were a sober reminder that the United States’ role in global security isn’t the best issue to use as leverage for parochial electoral advantage. It can get real very quickly.
Johnson had indicated that he was going to bring four separate votes to the floor — Ukraine, Israel, Taiwan and a bill to require Russian assets to be confiscated for Ukraine along with a ban on Tik Tok unless it is sold to a different entity, among other things. This caused a huge uproar among the MAGA fanatics who were distraught that they didn’t get their way. (They claimed they wanted funding for a massive border crackdown but everyone knows that Trump ordered that nothing should be done so he could use it as an election issue.) It was unclear if Johnson’s deals would ever make it to the floor and hovering over all of this is the fact that Greene has been holding the threat of deposing Johnson over his head for weeks.
So that’s where we stood on Wednesday morning and it didn’t look very promising. Then suddenly, out of the blue, Mike Johnson had what he would no doubt call a “come to Jesus” moment and he went before the microphones that afternoon to declare that he didn’t care if they threw him out of the Speaker’s office, he was going to do the right thing. He went on to give a stirring speech about how he believes the intelligence he’s seen and the danger of allowing Ukraine to fall.
So, I think that Vladimir Putin would continue to march through Europe if he were allowed. I think he might go to the Balkans next. I think he might have a showdown with Poland or one of our NATO allies. To put it bluntly, I would rather send bullets to Ukraine than American boys… this is not a game, this is not a joke.
It’s hard to say what happened to bring that about. He’s been stalling this necessary funding for months and could have suspended the rules and allowed the Senate package to come to the floor and it would have passed easily. Instead he allowed Trump and Greene to dictate this course and it’s been a disaster. Maybe it was that intelligence finally convincing him that this was leading to a very bad outcome or perhaps he just sees the upside to being a profile in courage instead of a MAGA toadie. Who knows? Maybe he got word from a higher power reminding him that Donald Trump isn’t really the Big Guy In Charge.
All day Thursday there were reports of intense infighting in the caucus over rumors that Johnson and members of the leadership were going to back a rules change that would require more than one member (like Greene) to call for a motion to vacate the chair, the deal with the devil that his predecessor made that ultimately took him down. Some members are clearly getting tired of these antics:
The extremists went ballistic over this, cornering Johnson on the floor and he eventually shot down the rumor, saying the rule would not be changed.
You get the feeling that Johnson has just put himself in the hands of fate at this point. And fate looks a lot like Marjorie Taylor Greene:
With Democrats staying cool (or as Minority leader Hakeem Jeffries called it “united and frosty”) there is every reason to believe she will be thwarted if she tries it so I remain skeptical that she will. She enjoys the attention she gets wielding it as a threat. But any member could do it and some sound so incensed that one might just decide to go for it.
On Thursday night Democrats on the rules committee broke with all precedent and stepped in to save the bills, voting to move them to the floor.. It’s expected that Democrats will likewise vote to proceed and the bills will pass with bipartisan support in both houses. That’s unless something happens to derail it which could easily happen because Republicans are crazy.
What does the leader of their party say about all this? Well, he’s on trial in New York and is unable to watch TV or tweet any instructions. Trump has had some luck with intimidating jurors already (with the help of Fox News) by suggesting that there are liberal plants in the jury pool lying to get chosen so they can stick it to him as usual. One juror has already asked to be excused and it’s possible others will follow once it becomes clear that Fox is intent upon identifying the ones about whom Trump has suspicions.
He’s also very upset that he has to sit in the freezing courtroom from morning until night (It’s common for the elderly to get cold easily…)
As for what’s going on in Washington, much less the rest of the world, he’s not really engaged. He doesn’t know what to say about anything to do with foreign policy anyway except “it wouldn’t have happened” if he were president and complain about how nobody else is paying their fair share. That’s pretty much all he had to say about Johnson’s plan in one perfunctory Truth Social rant on Thursday. He’s focused on the biggest issue: himself.
This may explain why Johnson is finally going to get this done — Trump is out of commission and unable to meddle in things he doesn’t understand. His being on trial may end up being the best thing that’s happened to our politics in a very long time. As long as he’s tied up in court he’s irrelevant when it comes to anything important.