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“Choking On My Own Blood”

Published by Tom Sullivan on March 5, 2024

In other Super Tuesday news….

“The lieutenant governor of North Carolina and the first Black person to hold the office, [Mark] Robinson is heavily favored to clinch the GOP nomination for governor in next Tuesday’s primary and, at a Saturday rally with Trump, got the former president’s formal endorsement,” The Washington Post reported Saturday. Should he win today’s primary, Robinson is expected in the fall to face Josh Stein, the state’s sitting Democratic attorney general.

Robinson is something to behold. “Mark Robinson is not running to be governor to be a bully over anybody,” Robinson told the MAGA rally crowd. Why did he feel the need?

Left unmentioned: the deluge of offensive comments that made such a declaration necessary. There was the time he called school shooting survivors “media prosti-tots” for advocating for gun-control policies. The meme mocking a Harvey Weinstein accuser, and the other meme mocking actresses for wearing “whore dresses to protest sexual harassment.” The prediction that rising acceptance of homosexuality would lead to pedophilia and “the END of civilization as we know it”; the talk of arresting transgender people for their bathroom choice; the use of antisemitic tropes; the Facebook posts calling Hillary Clinton a “heifer” and Michelle Obama a man.

Even in a Republican Party that, under former president Donald Trump’s leadership, has often rewarded crude insults, baseless claims and incendiary language, Robinson stands out among candidates this year for the volume of his bigoted attacks and vicious diatribes. The lieutenant governor of North Carolina and the first Black person to hold the office, Robinson is heavily favored to clinch the GOP nomination for governor in next Tuesday’s primary and, at a Saturday rally with Trump, got the former president’s formal endorsement.

But, of course, he did.

MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow Monday evening took note of Robinson’s flair for the conspiratorial.

Maddow ran with mild stuff from Robinson suitable (barely) for prime time. Here is Robinson from 2021 heralding the coming Christian caliphate that will rule America. That’s all y’all.

NC Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson Declares That ‘Christian Patriots’ Will ‘Own This Nation and Rule This Nation’ from Right Wing Watch on Vimeo.

“Tell our enemies on the other side of the aisle that will drag this nation down into a socialist hellhole that you will only do it as you run past me laying on the ground, choking on my own blood because I will not give up this nation to you!” Robinson bellowed. “It is not yours. You did not build it, you did not defend it, and you will not own it. We will. The Christian patriots of this nation will own this nation and rule this nation and help freedom survive for future generations.”

It’s an amazingly warped definition of freedom.

Time for the left to champion the real deal, Anand Giridharadas wrote almost a year ago:

The right’s desertion of freedom creates a historic opportunity for the left to reclaim what should never have been conceded. In reporting my book “The Persuaders,” I saw research showing that freedom is the most highly ranked value by people on the far right, far left, center right, and center left. There aren’t a lot of values like that left.

[…]

As Anat Shenker-Osorio, the progressive messaging guru whom I write about in “The Persuaders” says, the thing about freedom is that you can feel it. It’s corporeal. It’s not abstract. People know what it feels like to be free. And not to be free. This is a theme, a concept, a frame, a word that the left can no longer afford to hand to the right, and the good news is it seems like it no longer is.

Thanks, Mark Robinson, for making the contrast stark by campaigning on the opposite of freedom.

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Voter Fraud Scoobies Are Back

Published by Tom Sullivan on March 5, 2024

Freedom for vs. freedom from

It’s Super Tuesday. Do you know where your polling place is?

MSNBC last night pointed to a New York Times story I’d missed, perhaps because it’s old news to me. The voter fraud fraudsters are — say it with me — doubling down:

A network of right-wing activists and allies of Donald J. Trump is quietly challenging thousands of voter registrations in critical presidential battleground states, an all-but-unnoticed effort that could have an impact in a close or contentious election.

Calling themselves election investigators, the activists have pressed local officials in Michigan, Nevada and Georgia to drop voters from the rolls en masse. They have at times targeted Democratic areas, relying on new data programs and novel legal theories to justify their push.

What began with True the Vote in Texas has spread into a nationwide network of voter fraud sleuths in places such as Michigan.

The Michigan activists are part of an expansive web of grass-roots groups that formed after Mr. Trump’s attempt to overturn his defeat in 2020. The groups have made mass voter challenges a top priority this election year, spurred on by a former Trump lawyer, Cleta Mitchell, and True the Vote, a vote-monitoring group with a long history of spreading misinformation.

Their mission, they say, is to maintain accurate voting records and remove voters who have moved to another jurisdiction. Democrats, they claim, use these “excess registrations” to stuff ballot boxes and steal elections.

The theory has no grounding in fact. Investigations into voter fraud have found that it is exceedingly rare and that when it occurs, it is typically isolated or even accidental. Election officials say that there is no reason to think that the systems in place for keeping voter lists up-to-date are failing.

Same as it ever was. Michigan pays data experts from the Electronic Registration Information Center (ERIC) to keep its voter rolls as up to date as the law allows. (“Federal law requires clerks to keep voters who may have moved on the rolls for two election cycles, unless they receive notice from the voter,” the Times reminds.) But ERIC, you may recall, is part of a vast, left-wing voter fraud conspiracy. It’s given side-eye by the right’s “election intergrity” shock troops since being “exposed” by Gateway Pundit in January 2022 as a “left-wing plot to add more racial minorities to the voter rolls.”

Never fear. The voter fraud Scoobies are here.

The Scoobies’ goal in 2024 is not just flagging “questionable” registrations, but intimidating local election clerks, bogging down elections staff chasing their “leads,” and laying the groundwork for a replay of 2020 election challenges when Donald “91 Counts” Trump loses in November.

In Nevada, the Pigpen Project has set out to clean the voter rolls. Two longtime conservative activists, Chuck Muth and Dan Burdish, have organized door-to-door canvassing and enlisted landlords to compare voter rolls with their leasing records. More than once, they have escorted landlords to the Clark County registrar’s office so that they can flag registrations of former tenants.

Stephanie Wheatley, a spokeswoman for Clark County, said that the evidence was not enough to remove a voter but that it was “enough for the election department to do research and investigate.”

Nevada is also an ERIC state. And like Michigan, a blue state in 2020.

For readers new to my work, I attended a 2013 “election integrity” boot camp hosted by the Voter Integrity Project of NC (VIP-NC) a True the Vote spinoff led by one Jay DeLancy. The workshop taught aspiring voter fraud Scoobies how to sniff out bad registrations, including by “driving by abandoned homes and vacant lots, taking photos to prove to the local Board of Elections that people registered there no longer live there” (Crooks & Liars, 2013):

Arguing by anecdote, DeLancy related a story about people showing up to vote with clean, never-folded power bills for ID. He flashed on the screen a copy of former Gov. Bev Perdue’s power bill and asked, how do you think I got that? He made it on his computer. Those people with the power bills? It might be voter fraud. See, because it’s possible to mass-produce fake utility bills, someone, somewhere might be forging them to commit widespread voter fraud, undetected.

“How is fraud widespread if it’s undetected?” Colin Powell asked caustically while visiting Raleigh in August.

(This Super Tuesday, North Carolina voters must for the first time produce acceptable photo IDs to vote.)

What’s both sad and pathetic about our democracy-averse neighbors is not how they’re wasting their time, but what the Scoobies are not doing with it (added emphasis):

America is headed for greater plurality that will shift the political power balance. The sad part is, such legislation and citizen “boot camps” feel like white-knuckled exercises in protecting a demographic patch of electoral turf that’s shrinking beneath supporters’ feet. State after state erects barricades to voting and retreats behind them as for a siege. Not once did any speaker this weekend suggest opening up the franchise to greater participation, registering new voters and encouraging them to go the polls to exercise their right to vote.

This is what these Real American™ paranoiacs believe about their neighbors:

Nice, decent white people wake up on Election Day, shower, dress, eat breakfast, then go the polls to do their patriotic duty by casting their votes. OTHERS — Poors numbering in the invisible millions — are not like US. They go instead to commit felonies punishable by five years in prison and a $10,000 fine for each offense just to add a single extra vote to their team’s total.

The voter fraud Scoobies’ concept of freedom is negative, freedom from not freedom for. They are maximizing their freedom by keeping feared others from enjoying any.

From 2019:

A priest friend jokes, in America you are expected to have faith. Not faith in anything in particular, just faith. In a similar vein, politicians peddle abstractions like freedom. Not freedom for anything in particular. Just freedom.

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Super Tuesday Cheat Sheet

Published by digby on March 4, 2024

For all you political junkies out there, here’s Bolts Magazine’s fantastic Super Tuesday breakdown of important races:

2024 is starting off fast: Tuesday, March 5 is one of the busiest election days on the calendar this entire year. It’s just the first with non-presidential primaries on the ballot, but it’ll take care of roughly 25 percent of all House districts, in one fell swoop!

That’s because California and Texas, the two most populous states, are holding all their primaries, as are Alabama, Arkansas and North Carolina. Across these five states, millions of voters will decide critical state and local offices, referendums and bond measures. Plus, Vermont municipalities are holding their town hall days. (And that’s not all: Ten other states hold their presidential primaries, but voters will have to head back to the polls later this year for down ballot offices.)

So buckle up for a crowded election day. 

To help you, Bolts has identified more than 50 items to watch on Super Tuesday, and why they matter, including key races for supreme courts, governors, DAs, mayors, and lawmakers, plus referendums.

On the menu? Hotly contested judicial openings; prosecutor races in two of the nation’s three largest counties, Los Angeles County and Harris County; school boards that are deciding the rights of LGBTQ+ students; and partisan control of the nation’s fifth most populous county, San Diego County.

Voters will also take the first step in choosing the successor of California Senator Diane Feinstein. They’ll decide on the comeback bid of Alex Villanueva, LA’s scandal-plagued former sheriff. They’ll settle the latest conflict between a reform DA and police unions in Austin. They’ll arbitrate the Texas governor and attorney general’s revenge tours against GOP officials who defied them. And in Vermont, noncitizen residents of Burlington will get to weigh in on local elections for the first time after a 2023 reform.

Be sure to return to this page on election night, and on subsequent days, to check the results. Note that this guide is not exhaustive; it is Bolts’ selection of important races to monitor.

I know the presidential race is pre-ordained but there are other races that are not and we should pay attention. Bolts is the best resource for the state and local races we need to be aware of.

Republican Tax Cut Giveaway FTW

Published by digby on March 4, 2024

Their corporate benefactors made out like bandits. Everyone else? Not so much.

Gird yourself. Shocking News. The GOP tax cuts didn’t pay for themselves:

The corporate tax cuts that President Donald J. Trump signed into law in 2017 have boosted investment in the U.S. economy and delivered a modest pay bump for workers, according to the most rigorous and detailed study yet of the law’s effects.

Those benefits are less than Republicans promised, though, and they have come at a high cost to the federal budget. The corporate tax cuts came nowhere close to paying for themselves, as conservatives insisted they would. Instead, they are adding more than $100 billion a year to America’s $34 trillion-and-growing national debt, according to the quartet of researchers from Princeton University, the University of Chicago, Harvard University and the Treasury Department.

The researchers found the cuts delivered wage gains that were “an order of magnitude below” what Trump officials predicted: about $750 per worker per year on average over the long run, compared to promises of $4,000 to $9,000 per worker.

If the Democrats could win the trifecta in November, they should be able to let these ridiculous tax cuts expire. (Maybe … there’s always the filibuster.) With the economy roaring and plentiful jobs with people already getting large wage increases it should be a slam dunk but probably won’t be. The stock market is exploding Those people are awash in a tsunami of money. The idea that they aren’t paying their fair share is outrageous.

And the idea that a majority of Americans are so brainwashed that they want to give them even more is profoundly disturbing.

Trump Celebrates His Victory

Published by digby on March 4, 2024

After the Supremes released their decision overturning the Colorado Ballot Case ruling, Trump gave a speech and the cable nets were beside themselves in anticipation. If you have a spare 15 minutes to watch it all, I urge you to do it. I wish everyone would see it because they need to be reminded of what he is.

This wasn’t a rally where you can possibly chalk up his lunacy to the fever of the crowd. This was him speaking extemporaneously before a camera, just riffing on what he cares about.

If you don’t have time (or can’t bring yourself to watch him) here are just a few of the highlights.

He says this will bring out country together. Because the country will only come together if Trump wins everything, That’s how this works.

Aaaaand….

I think that gives you the gist. And I would hope it will be on the evening news and in prime time so that people who are working can see it too. Maybe some will think he’s making a good point and that presidents should be given blanket immunity and its perfectly fine for a presidential candidate to trash judges and prosecutors and call them names in a formal setting like this (or at least not a political rally.) Maybe it’s a mistake to remind people that Donald Trump whines like a 5 year old even when he’s being given a gift by the Supreme Court. It’s possible that most voters really love that in a leader, I don’t know. But they should see it and make up their own minds if they want to sign on for four more years of that insufferable pity-party.

By the way, here’s a quick fact check:

DANA BASH: We have been hearing him first and foremost, talk about the fact that he is obviously very pleased about the Supreme Court decision to keep him on the ballot, or prevent Colorado from taking him off the ballot, and therefore other states as well, because of the actions that he was involved with in and around January 6th.

Then he veered into lots of other areas where we definitely have to fact check.

Daniel, I want to first just say the last thing he was talking about immigration, which of course has nothing to do with the Supreme Court decision today. He said a number of things that I hope that you get into. One of which was 20 million people he believes are in this country.

We don’t have any evidence to back that up.

And going on about the need for the president to use his executive, authorities to, quote unquote, “close the border.”.

There is an antiquated immigration system. Congress, in a bipartisan way in the U.S. Senate, tried to update it at least a little bit, and it was killed because, the president did not want to give Joe Biden that political win.

But let’s start by talking, if you will, Daniel, about, the allegations, with absolutely no evidence that he was making against President Biden, that he is behind all of the prosecutions that we are seeing both on a federal and state level.

There is absolutely no evidence to back that up. In fact, there are, there is a special counsel to to provide not one but two layers of distance between the president and these investigations. And that’s just on a federal level.

DANIEL DALE: That’s correct. So the claim is false even in terms of those federal cases. There’s no evidence that President Biden, you know, ordered or was behind these prosecutions.

But the claim is is is especially nonsensical when it comes to, you know, state and local cases. A civil lawsuit from the New York attorney general, a case is brought in Georgia and New York by local district attorneys.

There is zero evidence whatsoever that President Biden has somehow orchestrated these. So it’s just conjured out of thin air.

I think this, as many Trump speeches are, was kind of a where do you start kind of speech from a fact check perspective. You talked about immigration. He said, you know, I didn’t need to go to Congress. I just, he suggested that he just shut the border with his own executive authority.

In fact, he tried in 2019 to impose essentially an asylum ban on people crossing between ports of entry, from Mexico. And it was blocked by the courts. It was blocked by the Ninth Circuit. The Supreme Court declined to lift that block.

So the idea that he just did it so Biden can do it is not true.

He talked about a new, supposedly new category of crime called migrant crime. That, this is basically propaganda. There has always been some crime by immigrants. All of the data suggests that immigrants tend to commit crimes at lower rates than native born Americans. And I think, Dana, it’s worth noting that in 2023, preliminary data published by the FBI shows that the US is either at or around the lowest violent crime rate nationally since 1970. So this idea of a crime wave is nonsense.

And then I’ll just add quickly, he went through a bunch of his his old favorites. So I defeated ISIS in four months. In fact, the caliphate, so-called caliphate was liberated about two years into his tenure. He said he passed the largest tax cut in history. In fact, on a percentage basis, it’s nowhere close to the Ronald Reagan tax cut. He said there are people from insane asylums, all over the world coming across the border. He’s provided zero evidence for this, even when I’ve directly asked his campaign.

So false claim after false claim, as per usual.

DANA BASH: Daniel, thank you so much for being here. To to provide that kind of fact checking that only you can appreciate it.

Trump’s Purging The Few Remaining GOP Moderates

Published by digby on March 4, 2024

One of the moldiest political tropes around is the one that says a presidential candidate needs to run to the base during the primaries and then pivot to the center once he or she locks down the nomination. It makes some strategic sense, for sure, and we’ve seen it in action many times although it doesn’t always work. But Donald Trump is not one for standard campaign strategy so despite the fact that he’s the defacto nominee of the Republican Party for president, he’s not making any kind of pivot to the center. If anything he’s embracing the MAGA base ever more tightly, despite the fact that there is a substantial minority of his party that’s rejecting him in these primaries.

Over the weekend Trump bagged some more wins in caucuses in Michigan, Idaho and Missouri, all three of which were the result of amateur hour mistakes by local and party officials that messed up the usual primary system. Even so, from what we can gather there still exists an anti-Trump vote among Republicans and GOP leaning Independents. We’ll see on Super Tuesday if that phenomenon (which I wrote about last week) continues, even as it’s obvious that Trump is the nominee.

Nikki Haley won her first primary on Sunday in the District of Columbia, which Trump claimed he lost on purpose and immediately disparaged as nothing more than a win for “the swamp”, calling her “Birdbrain” and the “Bird” in a series of furious posts on his Truth Social platform. He can’t bear to lose anything, even when it doesn’t matter.

The AP reported on the anti-Trump vote in GOP primaries from their APVotecast surveys over the weekend, noting that while many of those who voted for Haley are Democrats or Independents who didn’t vote for Trump in 2020 “about 1 in 10 early contest voters who said they supported Trump in the 2020 general election said they wouldn’t be doing so this year.” So this group exists and it’s a problem for the Republicans.

As a result, according to a different AP report, many in the Trump camp would like him to make that pivot to the center, the sooner the better. Campaign professionals understand that this Never Trump faction is his Achilles’ heel but his people are committed to “let Trump be Trump” — mostly because they have no choice. People have tried to get Trump to soften his edges in his previous campaigns and he’s simply incapable of doing it.

They’re still trying:

Former Speaker Newt Gingrich, a Trump ally who sometimes speaks to the former president, compared 2024 to 1980, when Republican Ronald Reagan won a landslide over Democratic incumbent Jimmy Carter, who was saddled with inflation, high unemployment and international conflict. Reagan, dubbed “the happy warrior,” won 44 states and a new Republican Senate with “a positive vision,” Gingrich said, that was about more than Carter’s record.“When you have the kind of numbers Biden has, what people need is about 70% positive, 30% anti-Biden,” Gingrich said,

That’s downright hilarious. A “happy warrior” is the last thing anyone would ever call Donald Trump. A whining warrior, maybe. A vengeful warrior definitely. But he is the unhappiest presidential candidate in history and he never shuts up about it.

Campaign adviser Chris LaCivita told the AP, “their role is to provide the organization ‘to amplify and to force project’ Trump’s message.” And they insist that he is already running his general election campaign against President Joe Biden which means that what he’s saying in his rallies right now is the general election message.

That message is so extreme it’s very hard to believe that the 10 percent of Republicans who say they’re not going to vote for Trump again will come around in the fall. He’s going further than he’s ever gone before and people are going to see all this eventually.

He rambles on for hours at a time, often speaking off the cuff about strange notions like magnets don’t work in water and suggesting that Abraham Lincoln could have negotiated the country out of the civil war if he hadn’t wanted to be famous. He calls the insurrectionists “hostages” and opens his rallies to the recording of the so-called January 6th prison choir. Even weirder, the finales of his prepared speeches are now accompanied by spooky Q-Anon inspired music, which seems to send the crowd into paroxysms of ecstasy.

He vows to enact the greatest deportation program the world has ever known, describing immigrants in the most demeaning terms imaginable saying they are “poisoning the blood of our country.” He calls his political enemies communist, Marxist, vermin who must be “purged” and promises not to allow anyone into the country who doesn’t believe in “our religion.” They are divisive, hateful diatribes that should make any decent person recoil in horror.

But that’s just Trump, right? It’s just a schtick and nobody should take it literally. He’s just playing to the crowd because they love that stuff. But the truth is that his speeches seem to be written by Stephen Miller or are, at least, very Miller-esque in that they are full of plans and policies. It’s not just Trump riffing away to please the crowd.

For instance, this past weekend, he threw a new idea into the mix. He said that he will withdraw all funding from any schools that require vaccines, which would be virtually all of them:

That was on the teleprompter and considering what we know about the planning for a second Trump term with Project 2025 and Agenda 47, I think it would be very foolish not to take such promises seriously. The Republicans have become so nihilistic that they would easily allow polio to once again ravage the children of this country if it would get big cheers at a Trump rally.

Republicans and Independents who’ve been voting for Nikki Haley in these primaries should know that Trump doesn’t want their vote. He made it clear this weekend when he said that MAGA now represents 96 percent of the party and they are getting rid of “the Romneys”

If that’s what the campaign plans to “amplify and project” to their potential voters, good luck to them. He’s openly purging his coalition of anyone who isn’t MAGA and if these surveys are correct, that means he has no intention of doing or saying anything to appeal that 10 percent (or more) who say they won’t vote for him in the fall. Let Trump be Trump, I say. It can only help the Democrats.

Salon

Update–

Fergawdsakes:

Joe Lieberman’s Baby

Published by digby on March 4, 2024

No Labels is going to go after Biden hard, using Trump talking points

Lieberman will never stop trying to destroy the Democratic party out of pique that they rejected him that one time. Here’s the latest on No Labels’ attempt to help Donald Trump win the election:

With days to go before its previously announced mid-March deadline of finalizing plans for a third party presidential ticket, No Labels still doesn’t have a candidate or a clear plan — even as it looks to take swings at President Joe Biden that its own officials acknowledge are more potent than accurate.

And major potential recruits are still holding out: a person familiar with the conversations told CNN that No Labels officials have talked with advisers to Chris Christie, but that the former New Jersey governor has declined to meet with them himself.

The group’s officials now say that they have no set date and still deliberately have provided no explanation for how they will make a decision. And several prospective candidates and members who have heard the group’s pitch told CNN they have been left skeptical about the mechanics actually translating to a workable campaign.

No Labels officials – who have repeatedly said they don’t want to become a spoiler that would result in Donald Trump going back to the White House – have urged prospective candidates and others to prioritize accusing Biden of having politically toxic positions he does not actually hold. They are hoping to spread those accusations more widely next week, ahead of Biden’s annual State of the Union to Congress.

In a private presentation the group has circulated among members and prospective candidates are two claims that No Labels officials say would be damaging to Biden, even as they acknowledge the claims aren’t true: that he is for “open borders” and that he is captive to a “far left” that “wants to abandon Israel” and is “sympathetic to Hamas.”

Those claims, alongside accusing Biden of overseeing a ballooning national debt, are the best way to appeal to voters, No Labels suggests in slides from their presentation obtained by CNN.

One official who verified that the slides were accurate — after audibly sighing in frustration as each was described — said these claims were meant as “some themes that Biden should be considering before the State of the Union.”

“These are ideas that I would imagine any No Labels unity ticket would be embracing,” the No Labels official added. “We’re putting that out there.”

Another official agreed that these are exactly the issues a unity ticket should run on, arguing that the cumulative effect of Biden’s policies has been effectively open borders, and that even though Biden is adamant about not abandoning Israel, the voters they have polled believe that a large part of a dominant faction of the Democratic base now does support pulling away from Israel.

The point, the second official explained to CNN, is to capitalize on how they believe voters view Biden and Trump, which is drawn in part on polling No Labels has conducted periodically since last year by presenting these false positions as options.

The plan was for former Dallas Mayor Mike Rawlings, a Democrat, to write a more polished version of these arguments in an op-ed to publish before Biden’s speech.

Earlier this week, No Labels announced a $750,000 ad campaign urging Congress to back the bipartisan immigration and border bill. Biden went to the border on Thursday to reiterate his support for the bill — and again called on Trump to join him in backing the legislation, instead of convincing Republicans to scuttle for his own political gain.

The funny thing about all this is that No Labels strategy ends up being very much like the ultra-lefties. They are attempting to enable Donald Trump to win because they have a beef with the Democratic Party.

A Peek Behind The Closed Doors

Published by Tom Sullivan on March 4, 2024

The New Yorker interviews Biden

“Saturday Night Live” made mad fun over the weekend of comments that President Joe Biden is sharp as a tack “behind closed doors.”

The New Yorker this morning offers a peek behind those closed doors. John Harwood tweets that the interview, like his own last fall, “shows talk of his alleged mental decline as utter bullshit.”

Evan Osnos writes:

If you spend time with Biden these days, the biggest surprise is that he betrays no doubts. The world is riven by the question of whether he is up to a second term, but he projects a defiant belief in himself and his ability to persuade Americans to join him. For as long as Biden has been in politics, he has thrived on a mercurial mix of confidence and insecurity. Now, having reached the apex of power, he gives off a conviction that borders on serenity—a bit too much serenity for Democrats who wonder if he can still beat the man with whom his legacy will be forever entwined. Given the doubts, I asked, wasn’t it a risk to say, “I’m the one to do it”? He shook his head and said, “No. I’m the only one who has ever beat him. And I’ll beat him again.” For Biden, the offense of the contested election was clearly personal. Trump had not just tried to steal the Presidency—he had tried to steal it from him. “I’d ask a rhetorical question,” Biden said. “If you thought you were best positioned to beat someone who, if they won, would change the nature of America, what would you do?”

Trump tried to steal the presidency “from him.” That sense, that feeling, is how Republicans have sold imaginary voter fraud over decades to undermine the democratic process. They encourage conservatives to imagine how it would feel to have their vote stolen from them, to imagine it as a grotesque, personal violation like rape or assault. Perhaps Democrats should encourage their Bidenly serene base to conjure the same feelings. What the Trump GOP means to do this fall is exactly the personal violation of which they’ve accused the left for decades. If it motivates the right, could it motivate the left?

The rest of the piece is about Biden’s view of the upcoming election, about Trump’s weaknesses, and about polling on various policy stances and economic measures. And Biden’s age. Give it a rest. And stop giving column inches to David Axelrod.

Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, of Rhode Island, voiced a position that I encountered among many high-ranking Democrats. “He’s not the only option that we had,” he told me. “But, once he’d made the decision to go, he became the only option that we have.” In the months that remain, Whitehouse said, the best way to beat Trump is a strategy that he called “Biden plus offense.” When people are “frightened or angry, you need to convince them that you, too, are equally concerned and you’re willing to throw punches and pick fights,” he said. “If you’ve got your sleeves rolled up and you’re waist-deep fighting alligators in the swamp, then nobody’s really thinking about your age.”

A Biden campaign staffer, Mike Donilon, opines on Biden’s “freedom agenda”:

It’s easy to miss how unusual a “freedom agenda” is for a Democratic Presidential campaign. Since the nineteen-sixties, Republicans have held fast to the language of freedom—from the backlash against civil rights to the Tea Party to the Freedom Caucus. But Democrats have been trying to convince the public that the Republican Party under Trump has transformed into the “MAGA movement,” an authoritarian crusade bent on dominion. Donilon said, “At its heart, it doesn’t believe in the Constitution, doesn’t believe in law, embraces violence.” He sees an opportunity for Democrats to be “in a place where they usually aren’t.” They can lay claim to the freedom to “choose your own health-care decisions, the freedom to vote, the freedom for your kids to be free of gun violence in school, the freedom for seniors to live in dignity.”

Bruce Reed, a close Biden aides, tells Osnos, “We live in abnormal political times, but the American people are still normal people. Given a choice between normal and crazy, they’re going to choose normal.”

Remind normies just how crazy is crazy. Cut to the chase. Trump and his anti-Constitution, anti-rule-of-law, anti-democracy, royalist cult will sure as hell try to steal your vote this fall to install Trump as a monarch. Let the policy wonks quibble about polls and policies. Remind voters that it’s not just abstract democracy on the line this fall.

Republicans mean to fuck you over and gut your freedoms. What are you prepared to do about it? At a minimum, get off your ass.

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For The Win, 5th Edition is ready for download. Request a copy of my free countywide GOTV planning guide at ForTheWin.us.