You think the skies will go dark for four minutes today? How about for four years or permanently?
For your Robert F. KennedyJr.-leaning friends. RFK Jr.’s New York director hates Democrats and Joe Biden so much that she dreams of seeing the 2024 presidential election decided for Trump in a GOP-led House.
#Spoiler4Trump Rita Palma, NYS director for RFK Jr’s campaign, gives away the playbook for the campaign’s mission — it’s shady AF‼️@ritamollerpalma openly admits the plan is take electoral votes from Biden in blue states, in order to force a contingent election so that the… pic.twitter.com/EqBwQPvJVh
Whether or not this plan is far-fetched, it reflects nihilism masquerading as progress. Not unlike making America great again by demolishing the republic and replacing it with a Gileadish autocracy. How d’ya like that, libs?
Somewhere in my dusty memory is a plot line in which someone plans their own suicide to look like a murder and configures the evidence to implicate a former lover(?). To hate someone that much….
* What happens when you’re running out of the hotel to chase an eclipse.
4 years ago today — April 7, 2020 — Trump held one of his covid trainwreck pressers and rolled out the talking point that coronavirus testing was causing causes and not, you know, the virus, which at that time was spreading out of control (🧵) https://t.co/DhcSelmRzi
Trump says he made over $50 million and maybe he did. But I think I’d wait for the fundraising reports to come in before treating that as a confirmed number. I don’t know if you’ve noticed but he tends to exaggerate a little bit.
On the other hand, those crooked gazzilionaires really might have added a zero to their checks when they heard this:
Donald Trump promised to keep billionaires’ taxes low at a fundraising dinner Saturday night in Palm Beach, Fla., held at the home of billionaire John Paulson.
A Trump campaign official told NBC News that the former president “spoke on the need to win back the White House so we can turn our country around, focusing on key issues including unleashing energy production, securing our southern border, reducing inflation, extending the Trump Tax Cuts, eliminating Joe Biden’s insane [electric vehicle] mandate, protecting Israel, and avoiding global war.” NBC News requested to have a reporter present at the fundraiser, but the campaign refused.
[…]
Some billionaires who abandoned Trump in the wake of Jan. 6 and who supported his opponents in the primary have come crawling back to the former president in hopes of keeping their tax burden low.
Billionaire investor Nelson Peltz — who apologized after Jan. 6 for supporting Trump, telling CNBC, “I’m sorry I did that” — recently hosted a breakfast at his Palm Beach mansion attended by Trump and several other billionaires, including Steve Wynn and Elon Musk, according to The Washington Post. Oracle’s Larry Ellison is also considering cutting Trump’s campaign a check, while billionaire heirs Richard and Elizabeth Uihlein told the Financial Times that they intend to donate to the former president’s campaign.
“While Donald Trump has been busy awarding himself golf trophies at Mar-a-Lago and palling around with billionaires, Joe Biden has been crisscrossing the nation connecting with voters and outlining his vision to grow our economy from the bottom up and the middle out,” Democratic National Committee Chair Jaime
He means it. He said this earlier:
Trump in leaked footage at wealthy fundraiser: You’re all wealthy people. You have so much money… We gave you the largest tax cuts in history pic.twitter.com/vDFuQM7nUx
Here’s what Donald Trump says when he thinks you’re not watching: He says he’s going to cut taxes for his rich friends, all while cutting Social Security for everyone else. @BernieSanders and I are mad as hell about it, and together, we’re going to stop him. pic.twitter.com/QYcBILQkzY
Trump told a rally audience last week that he would be coming up with a policy on abortion in the next week. (And yes, everyone made the same joke about “infrastructure week and health care reform in two weeks” joke when he did it.) But he does have to come up with something because his own people are waiting for the magic words he’s been promising that will put this whole thing to rest. Unfortunately for him, it’s not possible:
Former President Donald Trump is vowing to solve the abortion dilemma that has dogged Republican candidates since the fall of Roe v. Wade with his singular dealmaking acumen.
The presumptive Republican nominee, who has pledged to make a statement on abortion this week, has said for months that if elected he would “come together with all groups” and “negotiate something” that would “make both sides happy,” suggesting that “15 weeks seems to be a number that people are agreeing at.”
“We’ll end up with peace on that issue for the first time in 52 years,” he said.
The tactic has drawn praise from conservatives including Kellyanne Conway, Trump’s former counselor, who called it “a reasonable conversation starter.”
“It reflects consensus,” she said of a 15- or 16-week ban, citing her own firm’s polling. “People recognize that the lack of compromise, moderation and reasonableness is on the side of the professional, political left, and the Democrats.”
But Trump, who has blasted other Republicans for speaking “inarticulately” on abortion, is running headlong into the same problem the rest of the party has encountered: There is almost certainly no deal the opposing sides of the abortion wars would accept.
“You’re getting the worst of both worlds” by pitching a 15-week ban, said a GOP political strategist who has worked on several presidential campaigns, including Trump’s failed 2020 bid. “Pro-life groups still aren’t going to be happy, and you’re still supporting a nationwide limit that Democrats will attack,” said the strategist, granted anonymity to speak critically about the former president’s rhetoric.
I’m not sure where Kellyanne gets the idea that there’s consensus on the 15 week ban but …. there isn’t. Good luck with trying to sell a national ban in the swing states that still have abortion rights.
Good luck with this. Trump instinctively understands that this is a dangerous issue for him but there’s no way out.
It’s even more ghastly when you read the whole thing.
I just thought I’d put this up as we go into the final week before the 2016 Stormy Daniels election fraud case begins on the 15th.
Think about what he said and the fact that dozens of other women have accused him of the same thing and that he’s even been held liable for defamation and sexual assault for over 90 million dollars. The man is a reprehensible reprobate on a level we’ve never encountered in presidential politics — and we’ve had some real beauts when it comes to womanizing. This man is truly disgusting.
RNC Chair Michael Whatley says the quiet part loud on Maria Bartiromo's show and portrays Ukraine as an "aggressive" adversary of the US pic.twitter.com/CS6B5tiK4h
He’s a tried and true Trumper and I’m sure he believes that Ukraine is responsible for election interference rather than Russia. That’s what Putin told Trump and now half the GOP (at least) believes it. I seriously doubt he meant to say Russia, considering Trump’s fealty to Vladimir Putin. He didn’t misspeak.
Some Republicans know otherwise. But will they have the nerve to defy Dear Leader? I’m not so sure:
.@RepMikeTurner tells @jaketapper it's "absolutely true" that Russian propaganda has "infected" a portion of the GOP base, calling out "anti-Ukraine and pro-Russia messages, some of which we even hear being uttered on the House floor." pic.twitter.com/Jv4fAiCNf4
Historian Thomas Zimmer, who puts out the Democracy Americana newsletter and co-hosts the “Is This Democracy” podcast, has been writing and talking extensively about the significance of Project 2025. This week on my earlyworm podcast “How are you feeling about democracy?” he told me the two main goals of Project 2025:
That diagnosis is we were not ready in 2016/17. We didn’t have the plans. We didn’t have the expertise and we didn’t have the personnel. And this must not happen again, right?
The two big lessons they have drawn from this experience is a) we need to have more of this planning operation beforehand. We need to have our plans ready. We need to have the personnel ready. But also b) we need to purge everyone who put the brakes on what we wanted to do the last time around
Thomas and I had a great conversation about how much of this is coming from Trump and how much of this is the GOP establishment trying to define MAGA to make sure they get what they want out of Trump, whose first presidency failed to transform anything but the federal judiciary. That’s a lot! But not enough for the primal forces of nature behind America’s right wing.
The U.S. is still processing the Civil War and its aftermath over 150 years later. When I arrived from the Midwest as a kid, southerners still tossed around yankee as a slur. Israel hasn’t had even a century to process the Holocaust and isn’t done. Now Israelis have to process Oct. 7. I’m not optimistic where this will go near term:
Six months after Oct. 7, Israelis are struggling to recover their bearings, their core, their belief that Jews are safe in Israel.
In Israel’s south and north, more than 120,000 people have been evacuated, their neighborhoods transformed into front lines. The homes sit empty, toys still scattered in front yards.
In the southern kibbutzim, where 3,000 Hamas-led fighters launched a surprise assault on that indelible Saturday morning, the residents return not to live but to serve as guides for visitors from abroad. They give heart-rending tours, recounting how 1,200 people were slaughtered and 253 hostages were dragged into Gaza, according to Israeli government figures.
Evacuees fear that their communities are becoming places frozen in time and loss. They worry that if no solution is found for them — if security is not restored along the borders they share with their enemies — the rest of the country will remain exposed, in a permanent state of existential danger.
Existential danger is going around, real and imagined. Donald Trump is hyping “stranger danger” at every rally and speech. Scary, scary brown people are coming! Diseased animals! They kill the women and rape the men!
The song is as familiar as the intractable animosities:
There is nationwide support for the military’s punishing war against Hamas, which has killed more than 33,000 Palestinians, according to the Gaza Health Ministry. The ministry does not distinguish between civilians and combatants but says most of the dead are women and children.
The images from Gaza — of shattered cities, families killed together in their homes, malnourished children — do not often appear on the nightly news here. Most of the world thinks Israel has gone too far. Most Israelis don’t think they’ve gone far enough.
Here in the U.S., we worry that Trump is the real danger, and gun culture has gone too far. His cult wants to go further and, like him, rejoices “in the suffering of those they hate and fear.” They are at war too.
Trump, by the way, shared an article that dismisses concerns about his lack of character and values (via Meidas Touch):
“We shouldn’t much care whether our commander-in-chief is a real conservative, whether he is a role model for children or says lots of silly things, or whether he is modest or dignified. What we should care about is whether he knows we are in a war, knows who the enemy is, and knows how to win. Trump does.
Hint: You are the enemy.
Trump’s shared article also turns the fear that voters have of Trump becoming “another Hitler” or a “dictator” into a positive “reason for hope.” The writer says Trump’s enemies “rightly fear” what he and his party will accomplish, calling it a “counterrevolution.” Kind of sounds like an insurrection:
“His enemies hate him with an indescribable fierceness. “Another Hitler,” they say, “elect him and he will be a dictator.” We should take this hysteria as reason for hope. The America-haters rightly fear that he and his party are on the threshold of a successful counterrevolution.”
I’m confused by this America-hater thing. The American Revolution birthed a democratic republic on this continent. And a Trump counterrevolution would do … what exactly? Or have they even thought that far ahead?
Depending on your worldview, this coming Monday’s super-hyped solar eclipse may be interpreted as: a). A sign of the impending apocalypse, b). A sign that once in a blue moon, the moon blows in and obscures the sun, giving humanity the impression (for a few heart stopping moments) that the apocalypse has, in fact, arrived, or c). A dollar sign for event promoters, hoteliers, tow truck drivers, and people who sell cheap cardboard sunglasses.
I know. I’m a cynical bastard.
If the “Great North American Eclipse” forces people to tear themselves away from their 5 inch iPhone screen to gaze up at The Big Sky, and ponder the awesomeness and vastness of the cosmos (and most importantly, humankind’s relative insignificance in the grand scheme of things)…then I’m for it (I Googled “can you view the eclipse with a…” and right after “mirror”, “sunglasses” and “welding mask”, there it was- friggin’ “iPhone”).
Do me a favor. If you’re lucky enough to make it through the horrendous traffic and wriggle through the madding crowd to snag a perfect observation point in one of the areas that will experience totality…don’t view it through a 5-inch screen…LOOK at it! Utilize some form of eye protection, of course, but experience the ACTUAL PHENOMENON! Thanks.
After all, as Carl Sagan observed:
“We live in a society exquisitely dependent on science and technology, in which hardly anyone knows anything about science and technology.”
BTW, here’s evolutionary perspective on why we sophisticated, technically-advanced humanoids still get the tiniest little lizard brain-fueled twitch when Big Light Go Away:
With that in mind, please enjoy this special mixtape that I have assembled to accompany the solar system’s ultimate Laserium show (don’t worry-I didn’t forget the Floyd, man!).
The 2024 election has become a kind of waking nightmare in which many of us stare at Donald Trump as he unleashes some new attack on any number of targets: a judge’s daughter, immigrants, the rule of law, American national security, the Constitution. And we blink and shake our heads, stunned to think that many of our fellow citizens are eager to put this autocratic ignoramus back in the White House.
In a more normal time in American life, people had to leave politics for having a nanogram of Trump’s baggage. Think of the late Senator Thomas Eagleton, the 1972 Democratic vice-presidential pick who had to drop out of the race because he’d been treated for depression. The idea—how old-fashioned it seems now—was that America could not risk any possible mental-health issues not only in the president, but even in the person next in the line of succession. Today, however, we have a former president who exhibits all kinds of signs of a disordered personality—and yet the big worry among many voters (and too much of the media) is whether his opponent is missing a step because he’s roughly 42 months older than Trump.
All of this is enervating and exhausting. But that’s the point: Trump is succeeding because he is, to use Steve Bannon’s infamous expression, seeking to “flood the zone with shit.” Trump’s opponents are flummoxed by how he provokes one new outrage on top of another, and each time they believe he’s finally—finally—gone too far. Bombarding the public space with deranged statements and dangerous threats, however, is not a mistake; it’s a strategy.
By overwhelming people with the sheer volume and vulgarity of his antics, Trump and his team are trying to burn out the part of our brains that can discern truth from fiction, right from wrong, good from evil. His campaign’s goal is to turn voters into moral zombies who can no longer tell the difference between Stormy and Hunter or classified documents and personal laptops, who cannot parse what a “bloodbath” means, who no longer have the ability to be shocked when a political leader calls other human beings “animals” and “vermin.”
Trump isn’t worried that all of this will cause voters to have a kind of mental meltdown: He’s counting on it. He needs ordinary citizens to become so mired in moral chaos and so cognitively paralyzed that they are unable to comprehend the disasters that would ensue if he returns to the White House.
He points out that the polls show that it’s working, that millions are in a “fugue state called ‘undecided'” as if the past eight years never happened.
He acknowledges how hard it is to stay engaged. I feel that. Sometimes it makes me physically ill to watch him and seeing his cult followers and listening to what they say makes me profoundly depressed. I’m stunned that he’s still a threat after all we’ve seen. But Nichols is right:
But to ignore Trump is a mistake. To dismiss him as an incompetent clown is dangerous. Voters who care about democracy, who care about the future of freedom in America and around the world, must steel themselves to stay in the political process. We do not need to explode over every attempt to bait and troll us. Instead, we can let every one of his manic outbursts increase our resolve to speak clearly and plainly in defense of our system of government and our democratic culture—especially to family and friends who might be treading water in the ever-filling Trump septic pool.
…Think of how previous generations engaged with politics: by reading a newspaper, watching an hour of news, and talking with friends and neighbors and other citizens in their community. When I was a boy, Americans managed to confront immense questions of national importance without withdrawing into comfort zones and information silos.
Now we face an existential threat to our democracy. Perhaps we might think about how to revive the civic practices and sensibilities—especially staying informed without becoming overwhelmed or falling into despair—that got us through those earlier crises.
He adds this advice, which I think is good:
Many people assume that folks like me who write about politics are news junkies. They think we dive into the cable shows in the morning and lull ourselves to sleep at night with the latest podcasts. Yes, I pay more attention to the news (and to books about politics, and other sources) than do most people, and sometimes—during a crisis or a big event when I know I’ll have to write—I do, in fact, just stay glued to my TV and my laptop. But otherwise, that level of news consumption is not healthy. I don’t do it, and neither should you.
You might think that, come 5 p.m., I am immersed in cable news. (Hey, sometimes I’m on those shows, and sure, there are days when I watch for hours.) But let me put in a word here for indulging in regular mental breaks. In my case, as many of you know, that means vintage television: Although I enjoy catching up on the news over dinner, more often you’ll find me chuckling with my wife over the clipped, staccato dialogue of Adam-12 or having a laugh with a rerun of Cheers. (“Hey, what’s happening, Norm?” “Well, it’s a dog-eat-dog world, Sammy, and I’m wearing Milk-Bone underwear.”)
If you’re going to make it to November, stay up to date, but don’t forget to unplug now and then. (Reading The Atlantic regularly, of course, is a great way to stay informed.) Few of us are required to have instantaneous knowledge of the day’s events; we can catch up on the news in various ways once or twice a day. Give yourself a break. You’re going to need it.
I too am a news junkie but I do what he does. I’d lose my mind if I stayed glued to developments 24/7. I do write late at night three times a week but I always turn it off in the evening. I find that nordic noirs never fail to cheer me up. And I do this even though it’s my job to follow this stuff closely. Checking in once or twice a day is enough for any normal person. But everyone needs to stay engaged. We can’t let this monster win by turning us into moral zombies. We just can’t.
