These are troubled times in Arizona. Until 2020, election officials were the largely anonymous folk who did the important yet unseen work of making democracy run smoothly.
“Nobody knew who we were, what we did,” Fontes said ruefully. “It’s a little bit different now.”
All changed with Donald Trump’s unprecedented refusal to accept defeat in the 2020 election. His conspiracy to subvert the election has had an explosive impact in Arizona, a battleground state which has become arguably the ground zero of election denial in America.
In 2020, the Republican-controlled state legislature sponsored a widely discredited “audit” of votes in Maricopa county, the largest constituency containing Phoenix. Republican leaders put themselves forward as fake electors in a possibly criminal attempt to flip Joe Biden’s victory in Arizona to Trump’s.
Two years later, in the midterms, armed vigilantes dressed in tactical gear stalked drop boxes in a vain hunt for “mules” stuffing fraudulent ballots into them. Amid the furore, election officials found themselves assailed by online harassment and death threats.
No longer faceless bureaucrats, they had become public enemy No 1.
With the likely presidential rematch between Trump and Biden just eight months away, Fontes, as top elections administrator, is facing a formidable challenge. He is preparing for itlike the marine veteran that he is.
The secretary of stateis staging tabletop exercises in which officials wargame how to react to worst-case scenarios. What would they do if a fire broke out at the ballot printing warehouse, or if a cargo train spilled its toxic load on to the facility storing voting equipment?
“Tiger teams” have been assembled that can be quickly dispatched across the state to fix software or other voting problems. To anticipate bad actors using artificial intelligence to create malicious deepfakes of candidates, his office has done its own AI manipulations, making videos in which individuals speak fluently languages they do not know such as German and Mandarin. “They were very, very believable,” he noted.
Specialists from the Department of Homeland Security have been deployed to advise counties on physical and cybersecurity. Active shooter drills have been rehearsed at polling stations.
As the Washington Post reported, kits containing tourniquets to staunch bloodletting, hammers for breaking glass windows and door-blocking devices have been distributed to county election offices. “These are not things we would ever want to train anybody on,” Fontes said. “But given the environment …”
With all this under way, Fontes insists he’s ready for anything. “We will prepare as best we can for any contingencies,” he said. “And then we have no choice but to march forward, hopefully.”
The MAGA cult is out of its mind. This bureaucrat has to have a bodyguard because of all the threats. And they are totally preparing for violence in November.
Read the whole article in the Guardian. It will make your hair stand on end. I don’t know if any of this is going to come to pass — I fervently hope not. But the fact that they have to prepare for it because that orange imbecile couldn’t admit that he lost is simply stunning. My God.
Please pass this on to any jackass who claims that Trump did a good job with the pandemic. Aside from the inability to even get masks and gowns to NY City in the early days and his insistence that people take snake oil or inject disinfectant, there was his desire to stop testing people because it made him look bad that we had so many case. It is one of the most important low points no one should be allowed to forget it. Ever.
Jamelle Bouie on Kellyanne Conway’s lame attempt to paper over the GOP’s problem on reproductive rights:
Republican strategists are well aware that abortion is an albatross around the party’s neck. Their advice? Find new language.
“If it took 50 years to overturn Roe v. Wade, it’s going to take more than 50 minutes, 50 hours or 50 weeks to explain to people what that means, and more importantly, what it doesn’t mean, and to move hearts and minds,” said Kellyanne Conway, a former adviser to Donald Trump, at Politico’s Health Care Summit on Wednesday. During the conversation, she advised Republican candidates to focus on “concession” and “consensus” and to turn the conversation toward exceptions. She also urged Republicans to avoid ballot initiatives on abortion, for fear that they could mobilize voters against them.
I have no doubt that Republicans will take this advice; they are desperate to neutralize the issue. But the Republican abortion problem isn’t an issue of language, it’s an issue of material reality. The reason voters are turned off by the Republican position on abortion has less to do with language and more to do with the actual consequences of putting tight restrictions on reproductive rights. Countless Americans have direct experience with difficult and complicated pregnancies; countless Americans have direct experience with abortion care; and countless Americans are rightfully horrified by the stories of injury and cruelty coming out of anti-abortion states.
No amount of rhetorical moderation on abortion will diminish the impact of stories like that of K Monica Kelly, who had to travel from Tennessee to Florida to end a potentially life-threatening pregnancy, thanks to Tennessee’s strict post-Dobbs abortion ban. Nor will it obscure the extent to which the most conservative Republicans are gunning for other reproductive health services, from hormonal birth control to in vitro fertilization.
Good luck Kellyanne. I don’t think this one’s going to fly. What do you plan to do about zealots like Speaker Mike Johnson who wasn’t exactly helpful:
“We need to look at the ethics surrounding that issue, but it’s an important one,” Johnson told “CBS Mornings” co-host Tony Dokoupil on Thursday. “If you do believe that life begins at conception, it’s a really important question to wrestle with.”
Johnson, a Louisiana Republican, made clear his support for the “sanctity of life” as well as IVF. But he then said there’s an “ethical handling” of the issue that must be considered by states.
“In some states, like in Louisiana, there’s a limit on the number of embryos that can be created because they’re sensitive to that issue,” he said. “But it’s something that every state has to wrestle with and I think Alabama has done a good job of it.”
Michael Tomasky runs down all the roadblocks, delays, ratfucks and manipulations being used by the Trump team (which is a D-List team at best, which says something) to ensure that Trump does not go to trial on any of his criminal cases before the election. It’s depressing, but it’s true and you should read the whole thing if you haven’t seen it all put together.
When we talk about what’s wrong with our democracy, we talk about our political structures and processes. We talk about the Senate. We talk about the Electoral College. We talk about gerrymandering. And of course all these problems are real.
We don’t talk about our legal system. We should. The American legal system doesn’t uphold the values of democratic rule like equality. It far more often corrupts and perverts them. Rich people like Trump twist the system into a pretzel and win delay after delay after delay. Corporations pay fines, usually not that large when considered against their bottom line, and they admit no wrongdoing, even after their practices have killed people. Poor people, meanwhile, get pushed around by the system constantly.
There is no such thing in this country as equality before the law, and everyone knows it. And I would argue that this legal inequality does more damage to democracy than all the political inequities for the simple reason that they’re more visible. And they’ve never been more visible than they are now with Trump. If he is able to push all these cases back past November, or at least three of them (the Bragg case should proceed this summer), and then especially if he wins the White House and pardons himself, that will constitute the biggest failure of the rule of law in the history of the country.
When we talk about what’s wrong with our democracy, we talk about our political structures and processes. We talk about the Senate. We talk about the Electoral College. We talk about gerrymandering. And of course all these problems are real.
We don’t talk about our legal system. We should. The American legal system doesn’t uphold the values of democratic rule like equality. It far more often corrupts and perverts them. Rich people like Trump twist the system into a pretzel and win delay after delay after delay. Corporations pay fines, usually not that large when considered against their bottom line, and they admit no wrongdoing, even after their practices have killed people. Poor people, meanwhile, get pushed around by the system constantly.
There is no such thing in this country as equality before the law, and everyone knows it. And I would argue that this legal inequality does more damage to democracy than all the political inequities for the simple reason that they’re more visible. And they’ve never been more visible than they are now with Trump. If he is able to push all these cases back past November, or at least three of them (the Bragg case should proceed this summer), and then especially if he wins the White House and pardons himself, that will constitute the biggest failure of the rule of law in the history of the country.
None of that takes into consideration that after what we’ve seen happen with the Fanni Willis case it’s entirely possible the whole thing could blow up into a mistrial or even a dismissal or an acquittal. There are no guarantees on any of this.
As Tomasky says:
The lesson? We can’t count on the legal system to stop Trump. We have to stop him ourselves. One conviction would be nice; two would probably be quite helpful. But we can’t count on the broken legal system to do a job that we ourselves have to do at the polls.
Honestly, I don’t even think this is such a bad thing. I believe Trump should be held accountable for his crimes. It would be a travesty if they didn’t at least try. But at the end of the day this is a political problem and to the extent we still have a democracy politics is the only way to stop him. This isn’t just about Trump it’s about a political party that has become an authoritarian movement because it’s losing popular support. The only way to stop it is to defeat it, otherwise they’re just going to keep going, with Trump or without him.
Four years ago today, as Americans lost their jobs and died in hospitals, Trump went on national TV to praise himself: I’d rate my response a 10 out of 10 pic.twitter.com/M1uonozYSi
So Quinnipiac is doing swing-state polls that among other things ask people both about the state of the economy and their personal finances. Here’s Michigan, but you see the same disconnect elsewhere
I keep seeing claims that never mind the macro data, people’s lived experience is of a bad economy. But consumer sentiment isn’t a lived experience; it’s a narrative, and one that is actually at odds with people’s personal lives
In March 14, the Kentucky Senate Judiciary Committee voted to approve HB 5, the “Safer Kentucky Act.” The legislation will now head to the Senate floor for a vote, and it will almost certainly pass. The 78-page bill criminalizes homelessness—and decriminalizes the use of deadly force against individuals engaging in “unlawful camping.” Under this law, if a property owner believes an unhoused trespasser is attempting to commit a felony or attempting to “dispossess” them, they can shoot the homeless person.
Notably, The Bluegrass State found it necessary to make the language of existing related statutes more inclusive by changing his to his or her, and he to he or she. But shoot to kill. It’s fine.
The dispossess language is subsection a.
“[W]e are entering a time of vast restratification,” Chip Elliot wrote in Esquire in September 1981. “The United States is becoming more European…but it is a Europe of a different century. We are moving toward a culture in which we’ll have cooks, chauffeurs, maids, carpenters, brewmasters, vintners, industrialists, bankers, machinists, hat makers, shopkeepers, and kings and queens of a sort. And, of course, we’ll also have highwaymen, cutthroats, and thieves.” A time when people “wore swords and pistols whenever they went anywhere.”
1981. In response to a commentary on the shooting of John Lennon. What was “the social structure in America of the past three or four decades … has collapsed,” Elliot wrote over 40 years ago. It’s gotten worse since then, and since the widespread access to semiauto versions of military assault rifles. Oh, and the election of the nation’s first black president.
Ironic that these medieval “stand your ground” laws and their variants are a product of the ALEC-promoted “Castle Doctrine.”
Mike Pence has got righteous down. Just needs the anger. How many GOP allies are waiting for the signal to jump Trump’s ship? And Pence is just slipping out the door?
Pence: Donald Trump is pursuing and articulating an agenda that is at odds with the conservative agenda…. I cannot in good conscience endorse Donald Trump.
<YAWN>
This from the guy targeted for hanging by Trump’s Jan. 6 mob, egged on by Trump himself.
Pence: Donald Trump is pursuing and articulating an agenda that is at odds with the conservative agenda that we governed on during our four years. That's why I cannot in good conscious endorse Donald Trump pic.twitter.com/FW5Tcths8N
If Mike from Pennsylvania is auditioning for Pence’s anger translator, he’s got the idea. He needs to work on his delivery. But it’s a start.
Mike from Pennsylvania: Donald Trump cares the hell out of me…. He really scares me to death…. Donald Trump is mentally unfit for the office.
Mike is a former Trump voter from Pennsylvania:
“Donald Trump scares the hell out of me…Donald Trump is mentally unfit for the office. I don’t know how I voted for him the first time around. There’s no way I could possibly ever vote for him again.” pic.twitter.com/1Wx5nAoOPi
— Republican Voters Against Trump (@AccountableGOP) March 15, 2024
For your MAGA relatives:
People who are planning to vote for Trump next time I have a q. Why do you think you know him better than his – VP – Chief of Staff – Defense Secretary (x2) – Homeland Security Secretary (x2) – National Security Advisor (x2) – communications director (x3) & – lawyers
BREAKING: CNN just played a montage of all the Republican leaders from Trump’s past administration voting against him. Retweet to ensure all Americans know the individuals who worked closest to Trump know enough to vote against him. pic.twitter.com/jQRHCRbdOm
In you missed it, Mike, the boss you gave puppy-eyed looks to wanted to deploy troops to “shoot Americans in the street.”
Literally every Democratic campaign ad for the next six months should began with clips like this. Forget the other guy wanting to give tax cuts to the rich or put tariffs on trade – HE WANTS TO SHOOT AMERICANS IN THE STREETS (says his own defense secretary!) https://t.co/IlxpndC82t
Sloths—the sluggish tree-dwellers of Central and South America—spend their lives in the tropical rain forests. They move through the canopy at a rate of about 40 yards per day, munching on leaves, twigs and buds. Sloths have an exceptionally low metabolic rate and spend 15 to 20 hours per day sleeping. And surprisingly enough, the long-armed animals are excellent swimmers. They occasionally drop from their treetop perches into water for a paddle.
The New Yorker’s Susan Glasser watched Trump’s rally last weekend and her mind was blown. If only we could get everyone to do this at least once:
[L]ike so much about Trump’s 2024 campaign, this insane oration was largely overlooked and under-covered, the flood of lies and B.S. seen as old news from a candidate whose greatest political success has been to acclimate a large swath of the population to his ever more dangerous alternate reality. No wonder Biden, trapped in a real world of real problems that defy easy solutions, is struggling to defeat him.
This is partly a category error. Though we persist in treating the 2024 election as a race between an incumbent and a challenger, it is not that so much as a contest between two incumbents: Biden, the actual President, and Trump, the forever-President of Red America’s fever dreams. But Trump, while he presents himself as the country’s rightful leader, gets nothing like the intense scrutiny for his speeches that is now focussed on the current occupant of the Oval Office. The norms and traditions that Trump is intent on smashing are, once again, benefitting him.
Consider the enormous buildup before, and wall-to-wall coverage of, Biden’s annual address to Congress. It was big news when the President called out his opponent in unusually scathing terms, referring thirteen times in his prepared text to “my predecessor” in what was, understandably, seen as a break with tradition. Republican commentators grumbled about the sharply partisan tone of the President’s remarks and the loud decibel in which he delivered them; Democrats essentially celebrated those same qualities.
Imagine if, instead, the two speeches had been covered side by side. Biden’s barbed references to Trump were all about the former President’s offenses to American democracy. He called out Trump’s 2024 campaign of “resentment, revenge, and retribution” and the “chaos” unleashed by the Trump-majority Supreme Court when it threw out the decades-old precedent of Roe v. Wade. In reference to a recent quote from the former President, in which Trump suggested that Americans should just “get over it” when it comes to gun violence, Biden retorted, “I say: Stop it, stop it, stop it!” His sharpest words for Trump came in response to the ex-President’s public invitation to Russia to do “whatever the hell they want” to nato countries that don’t spend what Trump wants them to on defense—a line that Biden condemned as “outrageous,” “dangerous,” and “unacceptable.”
Trump’s speech made little effort to draw substantive contrasts with Biden. Instead, the Washington Post counted nearly five dozen references to Biden in the course of the Georgia rally, almost all of them epithets drawn from the Trump marketing playbook for how to rip down an opponent—words like “angry,” “corrupt,” “crooked,” “flailing,” “incompetent,” “stupid,” and “weak.” Trump is, always and forever, a puerile bully, stuck perpetually on the fifth-grade playground. But the politics of personal insult has worked so well for Trump that he is, naturally, doubling down on it in 2024. In fact, one of the clips from Trump’s speech on Saturday which got the most coverage was his mockery of Biden’s stutter: a churlish—and, no doubt, premeditated—slur.
He’s a pig and a lot of people have forgotten just how gross he really is. And yet, as Glasser points out, Karl Rove tok to the WSJ to complain that Biden had “lowered himself” by criticizing his predecessor. Maybe he should have insulted him personally, perhaps over his garish hair and make-up, which is now considered to be perfectly normal. As she says, the right completely ignores this (and the mainstream media does little better.)
Biden obviously met the low bar that Trump and the wingnuts had set for him and then high jumped over it. However:
Trump’s appearance in Georgia, by contrast, reflected a man not rooted in any kind of reality, one who struggled to remember his words and who was, by any definition, incoherent, disconnected, and frequently malicious. (This video compilation, circulating on social media, nails it.) In one lengthy detour, he complained about Biden once being photographed on a beach in his bathing suit. Which led him to Cary Grant, which led him to Michael Jackson, which led him back to the point that even Cary Grant wouldn’t have looked good in a bathing suit at age eighty-one. In another aside, he bragged about how much “women love me,” citing as proof the “suburban housewives from North Carolina” who travel to his rallies around the country. He concluded that portion of his speech by saying:
But it was an amazing phenomenon and I do protect women. Look, they talk about suburban housewives. I believe I’m doing well—you know, the polls are all rigged. Of course lately they haven’t been rigged because I’m winning by so much, so I don’t want to say it. Disregard that statement. I love the polls very much.
Makes perfect sense, right?
Glasser notes Trump’s infuriating “I know you are but what am I” habit of accusing the other side of what’ he’s doing. In this case it was the man whose inauguration speech was called “American Carnage” attacking Biden for giving an “angry , dark, hate-filled.” But this is where Glasser sees something that I hope everyone would see if they watched one of his rallies:
Get past the unintended irony, though, and what’s striking is how much of Trump’s 2024 campaign platform is being built on an edifice of lies, and not just the old, familiar lies about the “rigged election” which have figured prominently in every speech Trump has made since his defeat four years ago.
Trump’s over-the-top distortions of his record as President—“the greatest economy in history”; “the biggest tax cut in history”; “I did more for Black people than any President other than Abraham Lincoln”—are now joined by an equally flamboyant new set of untruths about Biden’s Presidency, which Trump portrayed in Saturday’s speech as a hellish time of almost fifty-per-cent inflation and an economy “collapsing into a cesspool of ruin,” with rampaging migrants being let loose from prisons around the world and allowed into the United States, on Biden’s orders, to murder and pillage and steal jobs from “native-born Americans.” Biden, in Trump’s current telling, is both a drooling incompetent being controlled by “fascists” and a corrupt criminal mastermind, “weaponizing” the U.S. government and its criminal-justice system to come after his opponent. His campaign slogan for 2024 might be summed up by one of the rally’s pithier lines: “Everything Joe Biden touches turns to shit. Everything.”
Indeed, Trump’s efforts this year to blame Biden for literally everything have taken on a baroque quality even by the modern-day standards of the party that introduced Willie Horton and Swift-boating into the political lexicon. Consider their latest cause célèbre, the tragic recent death of a young woman, Laken Riley, in which the accused is an undocumented migrant. Trump explicitly blamed Biden and his “crime-against-humanity” border policies for her death. “Laken Riley would be alive today,” he said, “if Joe Biden had not willfully and maliciously eviscerated the borders of the United States and set loose thousands and thousands of dangerous criminals into our country.” Against such treachery, Trump offers a simple, apocalyptic choice: doomsday if Biden is reëlected, or liberation from “these tyrants and villains once and for all.” Wars will be ended at the mere thought of Trump retaking power; crime will cease; arrests will be made; dissenters will be silenced.
I recognize that a speech such as the one that Trump delivered the other night is hard to distill into the essence required of a news story. His detours on Saturday included complaints about Jeff Zucker, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Martha Stewart, Megyn Kelly, “the big plagiarizer from Harvard,” Ron “DeSanctimonious,” the Washington Post, “Trump-deranged judge” Lewis Kaplan, “the fascist and racist attorney general of New York State,” “corrupt Fani Willis,” Merrick Garland, and the F.B.I., which, Trump claimed, “offers one million dollars to a writer of fiction about Donald Trump to lie and say it was fact where Hunter Biden’s laptop from hell was Russian disinformation.” What was he talking about? I don’t know. The man has so many grievances and so many enemies that it is, understandably, hard to keep them straight.
But whether or not it’s news in the conventional sense, it’s easiest to understand the threat that Trump poses to American democracy most clearly when you see it for yourself. Small clips of his craziness can be too easily dismissed as the background noise of our times. The condemnation of his critics, up to and including the current President, can sound shrill or simply partisan. The fact checks, while appalling, never stop the demagogue for whom the “bottomless Pinocchio” was invented.
She concludes with this piece of advice: Watch his speeches. Share them widely. Don’t look away.
She’s right. I know they’re horrible. I feel like I need to bleach my brain after watching them. But you owe it to yourself to see at least one. When I have shown them to friends(often against their will) they are once again galvanized to put a stop to this.
He claims that Trump isn’t planning to follow the “conservative agenda” he followed during their first term but that’s obviously nonsense. He’s gotten more fascist but he was fascist to begin with. But Pence not endorsing is a real rebuke to some of the other cowards like McConnell and Sununu who have decided to keep boot licking for no good reason. He was Trump’s adoring VP for four long years and he’s found the courage to just say no.
Congratulations Mike. After much soul searching and attempts to rationalize helping with the coup attempt, you finally did the right thing. And I guess you liked how that felt. Or maybe you just understand that your political life as a MAGA cultist is over so you might as well let your normal flag fly. Either way, welcome to the Resistance, You may find that it feels good to be able to look yourself in the mirror every morning.
