A random social media poster:
Also, he’s just given himself a new nickname: Honest Don.
I need a drink and it’s only 9am.
"what digby sez..."
Digby's Hullabaloo Posts
Trump starts eating his own
First they came for, etc. (Politico):
Donald Trump’s newly installed leadership team at the Republican National Committee on Monday began the process of pushing out dozens of officials, according to two people close to the Trump campaign and the RNC.
All told, the expectation is that more than 60 RNC staffers who work across the political, communications and data departments will be let go. Those being asked to resign include five members of the senior staff, though the names were not made public. Additionally, some vendor contracts are expected to be cut.
In a letter to some political and data staff, Sean Cairncross, the RNC’s new chief operating officer, said that the new committee leadership was “in the process of evaluating the organization and staff to ensure the building is aligned” with its vision. “During this process, certain staff are being asked to resign and reapply for a position on the team.”
The overhaul is aimed at cutting, what one of the people described as, “bureaucracy” at the RNC. But the move also underscores the swiftness with which Trump’s operation is moving to take over the Republican Party’s operations after the former president all but clinched the party’s presidential nomination last week.
Why it matters: Reports of plans to purge some 60 staffers come days after likely Republican 2024 presidential nominee former President Trump’s allies were installed in key committee leadership roles.
- The RNC voted for the Trump-backed Michael Whatley to become chair and the former president’s daughter-in-law Lara Trump to be co-chair on Friday, some eight months before the 2024 election.
Driving the news: “Chairman Whatley is in the process of evaluating the organization and staff to ensure the building is aligned with his vision of how to win in November,” wrote new RNC chief operating officer Sean Cairncross in an email first reported by Politico.
- “During this process, certain staff are being asked to resign and reapply for a position on the team.”
- Political, data and communications staffers were among those affected by the layoffs, according to multiple reports.
- Chris LaCivita, a Trump campaign adviser who’s the RNC’s new chief of staff, said the job cuts represented “Republicans streamlining” in order to avoid any doubling up between the committee and Trump campaign so they’re basically functioning as one, per AP.
The check is in the mail
First, the RNC. If Trump’s elected, next it will be the civil service and the diplomatic corps.
Only toadies need apply. It will be government dysfunction “like nobody’s ever seen,” to borrow a phrase. This guy’s casino went bankrupt.
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“Journalists seem bored by the biggest story of our lifetimes”
Donald “91 Counts” Trump hopes to be reelected president so he can prevent himself from facing justice. Meanwhile, he misuses the justice system’s very due-process features intended to prevent an innocent person from being wrongly convicted to stave off facing a jury of his peers, journalist Mark Jacob tells Greg Sargent.
“These are not the actions of an innocent man,” says Jacob, criticizing the press for whitewashing this as politics as usual.
Sargent writes:
Over the weekend, The New York Times published a news analysis titled, “The Biden-Trump rerun: A nation craving change gets more of the same.” This has become a constant refrain in the press: One of the candidates is running on an explicit set of promises to destroy American democracy, yet the press keeps calling this a “rematch” of 2020, almost as if it’s all a sporting event.
Trump “wants to be a fascist dictator of the United States,” and the press treats it like old news, Jacob complains. “Trump said he wanted termination of the Constitution, and NYT put it on page 13…the media has utterly underplayed the story of an attempt to kill democracy.”
“Some journalists seem bored by the biggest story of our lifetimes,” writes Jacob at his substack.
“They call it a re-run, and sigh a heavy sigh on behalf of voters who say they don’t want either candidate,” summarizes Jay Rosen.
But 2024 is not 2020. The Dobbs decision for which Trump takes credit has shifted the political landscape. Religious extremists are now targeting birth control and in vitro fertilization. Biden has overseen a historic economic recovery. Something has shifted as well in Trump himself.
“Not enough people are sounding the alarm that, based on his behavior, and in my opinion, Donald Trump is dangerously demented,” psychologist Dr. John Gartner tells Salon’s Chauncey DeVega. “In fact, we are seeing the opposite among too many in the news media, the political leaders and among the public.”
Jacob writes:
Yes, it’s a race between two old white guys we already know. But the choice is stark. When the Times argues ridiculously that neither Biden nor Trump is a “change candidate,” it’s ignoring the fact that both of them have clear visions for transforming American politics.
Biden’s agenda calls for making the super-rich pay more taxes, capping prescription drug prices, restoring abortion rights, addressing the climate crisis and creating stronger alliances to confront the growing threats facing the world’s democracies.
Trump’s agenda calls for him to become a dictator and create alliances with other dictators, as well as to harass his opponents with the Justice Department, send troops into American cities, put millions of immigrants in camps and crack down on the press.
Trump on Monday promised one of his first acts as president would be to free prisoners convicted for Jan. 6 crimes. He’ll use the fanfare to obscure quashing federal investigations into himself.
Preposterous
By the numbers: “In the 38 months since Jan. 6, 2021, more than 1,358 individuals have been charged in nearly all 50 states for crimes related to the breach of the U.S. Capitol,” per the latest Justice Department statement.
Zoom out: The description by Trump and others of those convicted over the deadly Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol as “hostages” was denounced by a Reagan-appointed federal judge in D.C. as “preposterous.”
But that’s Trump: preposterous. So is press coverage of him.
Jon Stewart Monday night said what I’ve said for years. MAGA represents the monarchist strain in American politics that never died out after the American Revolution, just uniformed in red, white and blue instead of red coats.
Trump means to abuse due process, absolve himself of his own crimes, and wield the power to have dissenters and looting suspects shot on sight, as Stewart points out at about 10:15 into this clip.
Trump has always been a lunatic. He’s just sunken deeper into lunacy since 2015. Jon Oliver invites viewers to simply read transcripts of Trump speeches.
Thankfully, Trump has begun bleeding support. Will it be enough to save the republic?
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Here’s that interview with the former Trump employee. It’s a doozy:
It’s only Monday…
Trump’s ally Orban spells out Trump’s Ukraine plan
Not that we didn’t know this was his plan to “end the war in 24 hours,” but it’s now been confirmed. He will hand Ukraine to Vladimir Putin and leave Europe to its own devices:
Donald Trump will totally stop funding Ukraine if he wins the U.S. election in November, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán said following a meeting between the right-wing figureheads.
“He will not give a penny in the Ukraine-Russia war,” Orbán told Hungarian state media Sunday. “Therefore, the war will end, because it is obvious that Ukraine can not stand on its own feet.”
The longtime allies met last Friday at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida, a summit which was lambasted by U.S. President Joe Biden.
In an interview following the meeting — during which Trump and Orbán discussed “a wide range of issues” — the Hungarian prime minister praised the Republican front-runner as a “man of peace” who would bring an end to the all-out war in Ukraine, which Russian President Vladimir Putin has been waging since February 2022.
“If the Americans don’t give money and weapons, along with the Europeans, the war is over,” he said. “And if the Americans don’t give money, the Europeans alone can’t finance this war. And then the war is over.”
He will also hand Gaza and the West Bank to the worst right wingers in Israel. And he’ll happily give Taiwan to China and probably South Korea to his good buddy Kim Jong Un, maybe even Japan.
He believes that simply allowing dictators and tyrants to take over the world makes him a “peacemaker.” He really believes that. But he’s actually just another tinpot fascist too cowardly to stand up to any one he knows has more guts than he does.
This stuff is not hyperbole and anyone who thinks “oh it won’t be that bad” if he wins because we got through the first term should remember that we lost many tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, more Americans during the pandemic than we needed to because he was the incompetent moron in the White House telling people to use snake oil and refusing to adequately inform people of the dangers because he was afraid it would cost him the election. A whole lot of Trump voters died unnecessarily because he didn’t have the guts to come out and strongly push the vaccines because he was terrified that it would make him unpopular with his base. And he lost anyway.
He is a monster and if he becomes president again every last one of us is in grave danger. The threat of nuclear war will be front and center again because his “vision” is going to escalate an arms race the likes of which we’ve never seen before. It’s terrifying.
You don’t have to imagine it:
The list goes on.
Lara is going to be a rich source of MAGA BS, isn’t she?
They held their breath until they turned blue and nothing happened
House conservatives are furious about the government funding bill negotiated by Speaker Mike Johnson that sailed through Congress last week, calling it a betrayal of Republican promises to cut spending and reshape the federal budget.
But in a twist, this time they aren’t threatening to overthrow the man in charge of cutting those funding deals with a Democratic-led Senate and White House, even as they’ve begun to paint him as a functionary for status quo policies.
House Freedom Caucus Chair Bob Good, R-Va., has blasted the first of two funding packages and said he doesn’t expect a better deal in the second one, which must pass by March 22 to avoid a partial government shutdown.
“Because the speaker doesn’t want to do that. He just wants to pass what the Senate wants so that we avoid any conflict,” Good told NBC News, saying that Johnson, R-La., wants to “join hands with the Dems” to “increase spending” and yield “no policy wins.”
“The speaker is unwilling to tell the Senate no,” he said. “It doesn’t matter what we offer.”
But Good didn’t have a solution when asked what the right flank can do about it, saying: “I’m open to ideas.”
When asked pointedly if that includes a motion to vacate the speaker’s chair, Good, one of eight Republicans who used the tool to oust former Speaker Kevin McCarthy, ended the conversation. “Thank you,” he replied.
They figured out that the only power they really have to force the entire government to capitulate to their extreme demands is to get rid of the Speaker and that didn’t really change anything. It took this for them to realize that they are just a [T]rump group with one crude tool and nobody really gives a damn about their hysterics, not even their fellow Republicans.
Now they’re just whining:
Rep. Chip Roy, R-Texas, a Freedom Caucus member and right-wing thought leader on fiscal policy, said the newly passed government funding bill was “more of the same games, a lot of smoke and mirrors.” And he predicted the next package of bills will similarly be “garbage.”
“It is business as usual,” Roy said, despite some “modest strides” toward a more normal process in developing the bills.
But when asked if he blames Johnson, Roy said, “I think the speaker reflects a conference that likes to give lip service to fiscal restraint and refuses to act on it. That’s what I think.”
As for a motion to vacate? Roy isn’t going there: “I think it’s a tool that should always be on the table, as an historical matter. I think it should be sparingly used. … I think we need to just keep working forward to try to get somewhere.”
Rep. Troy Nehls, R-Texas, an ardent Donald Trump ally who wore a T-shirt with the former president’s mug shot to the State of the Union address, was more blunt about why Johnson’s job isn’t in danger: Nobody wants it.
“Let’s just go down to Disney and see if Daffy Duck or maybe Goofy would want the job,” Nehls said. “Maybe Mickey! Maybe Mickey would want the job.”
Gee, I wonder why no one would want the job? Does anyone really want to be Marjorie Taylor Greene’s whipping boy?
The good news is that they got their scalp so they can be proud that they destroyed Kevin McCarthy, the most prodigious fundraiser in the caucus. Good work folks. Excellent.
It was the day we all were told to stay home or die
There has been a lot of talk in the last week or so about “the week before” meaning the last normal week before the country (sort of)locked down for COVID and changed everything. The trauma of that experience is still with us as it should be. We lost well over a million people from that plague and the government did not handle it well. But as Melissa Ryan explains in her great newsletter, it was way more than COVID:
… The week before is a unifying event that all Americans experienced. I’ve also learned that most folks who share their story experienced one or more seismic life changes during the pandemic. Losing loved ones, moving to a new location, and everything in between. We all seem to have a version of that story, and I always find them fascinating.
At the same time, I bristle at the idea that this was the week that changed everything. At least in America. In early 2020 we were in the 4th year of Donald Trump’s first term in the White House. Things hadn’t been normal for quite some time, and a seismic cultural and political shift had already taken place. One of my memories from that week is how quickly the American news cycle went from being dominated by all things Trump — with multiple breaking news stories a day — to being dominated by the pandemic. For me, at least, the news became easier to follow because it focused on just one thing for a couple of months.
Trump’s presidency and the MAGA movement that supports him undoubtedly made the pandemic worse for Americans. He was unable and unwilling to unify us in the way we expect the American President to do when faced with a global pandemic. He was also unable and unwilling to use the pandemic preparation plan created by the previous administration. Rather than tap into the Federal Government’s knowledge and institutional memory on public health, Trump’s son-in-law sourced research from a Facebook group of ER physicians. Trump encouraged the anti-mask protest movement, and refused to wear a mask himself most of the time. He refused to advocate all that hard for the vaccine, even though its development was one of his Administration’s few wins. Trump wouldn’t even follow the CDC’s recommendations in the White House or when he caught the virus. We’ll never know how many lives were lost as a result of the Trump Administration’s negligence and opportunism.
The pandemic didn’t create new cultural or political divides but was a handy wedge for making them worse. Exposure to and belief in conspiracy theories increased substantially, from anti-vaxxers to QAnon. Wearing masks and getting vaccinated became cultural cues, with MAGA supporters refusing to take the vaccine and those of us on the left (myself included) saw masking and getting the jab as virtues. Existing health disparities and inequities remained unaddressed, and marginalized communities were disproportionately affected. Additionally, Black Americans were “immersed in three structural and avoidable major crises: the deadly COVID-19 pandemic, a debilitating economic recession, and a fiery racial justice uprising.” And, of course, Trump and MAGA used the uprising around George Floyd and Breonna Taylor to further stoke division and incite violence.
The sudden onset of pre-pandemic nostalgia also struck me because I’ve long thought that Americans have spent the last year and some change in a weird state of denial. Instead of learning from the past and trying to build a stronger future, we’re determined to get “back to normal” by any means necessary. It’s as if we’re trying to forget the global pandemic happened at all, along with all the events that contributed to making it such a catastrophe. We don’t want to talk about how to ensure this doesn’t happen again because we’re not able to examine the collective trauma or the toll it took on all of us.
On a personal level, I get it. The early days of the pandemic were some of the most painful in my life, and that entire period isn’t something I enjoy revisiting. But as a society, we can’t continue to avoid it or pretend it never happened. We will certainly experience tragedies as a nation again. And there’s no doubt that the same movement that did everything in their power to exploit the pandemic for their own gain will attempt to exploit the next collective trauma to further their authoritarian aims as well.
I suspect part of the current ambivalence about a Trump and Biden rematch comes from this. A rematch means we’ll be forced to talk about the past as we examine both men’s records. Revisiting the pandemic, and all of the ways elected officials made a tragedy worse is inevitable. We keep trying to push the memories away only to have the same candidates from four years ago bring it all back up again.
It’s interesting that as the last normal week of our lives meme is popping online, the media post-Super Tuesday finally seems to have resigned itself to the fact that yes, this election will be Trump vs. Biden again, yes, we’re going to have to remember just how catastrophic Trump and his administration was for the world, and yes, Trump is still vulnerable in the same ways he was in 2020. The timing is coincidental but perhaps if people are ready to engage on how Covid impacted their lives, they’re also ready to acknowledge what a danger letting Donald Trump back in the White House again is for humanity. And engage in the election accordingly.
I’ll end with the last few words of the meme: of our lives. Which acknowledges that we’re forever changed and that we can’t go back to normal even if we wanted to. The pandemic took a lot from us, but I would argue that Trump and the MAGA movement’s exploitation of it took a whole lot more.
Absolutely! It’s what made it so much more painful that it already would have been. Imagine if we’d had a competent government ins charge, a leader who would be straight with the American people and engage with the world like a normal human being. Imagine if we hadn’t already been dealing with three years of non-stop chaos and utter terror that he was going to make this country spin completely out of control? Imagine if we had gone into the crisis untied as a country instead of torn apart by the ugly, divisive MAGA mentality that Trump inspired?
It would have been bad, but it wouldn’t have been as bad as it was. And now we are dealing with a mass case of PTSD that we are going to have to summon the collective courage to overcome and defeat this toxic political movement all over again. It’s exhausting, but we have no choice.
It’s not benign. It’s dangerous.
I’ve been following Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s increasing influence on the American far right for some time as he hosted the likes of former Fox News celebrity Tucker Carlson and held CPAC meeting in Budapest. (They’re doing it again in April with Orban once again doing the hosting duties.)He was the darling of a certain faction of the conservative coalition even before Trump won and whose election in 2016 super-charged the “illiberal democracy” ideology here in the US which we now know as MAGA. He likewise hopes to consolidate the European far-right into a MAGA-style movement throughout the continent.
Orban CPAC appearance got a thunderous ovation last year and just last week he came to meet with members of the Heritage Foundation which is busily putting together “Project 2025” for the second Trump term. One imagines he had quite a few tips for them. He wrote the book on how to turn a modern country into a repressive autocracy without becoming a full-fledged police state.
Trump himself doesn’t seem completely sold on that idea since he’s pushing for mass round-ups and deportations of non-citizens by national guard troops and a total lock down of the country to keep foreigners who “don’t like our religion” (or Israel) out of the country. And he’s promised to “root out the communists, Marxists, fascists, and the radical-left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country that lie and steal and cheat on elections” which leans more in the direction of Putin’s Russia or Pinochet’s Chile. But Orban’s ideas about how to make the government bureaucracy into a patronage operation, gerrymander the legislature in ways that pretty much stranglse real democracy while turning the independent media and academia into impotent irrelevancies are being observed very carefully by the Trump 2.0 planners and they will be implemented if they gain power. (It’s also the case that Orban demonized migrants as a political strategy and even built a fence to keep them out, so they do have that in common as well.)
After the Heritage meeting Orban made the pilgrimage down to Mar-a-Lago to meet with Trump. (Notably, he wasn’t invited, nor did he ask, to meet with the actual president of the United States.) Trump was very impressed with his guest. He apparently feted him at the usual party that takes place every night at this social club and introduced him to the crowd of paying guests saying, “He’s a non-controversial figure because he says this is the way it’s going to be, and that’s the end of it. Right? He’s the boss.”
I’m not sure why anyone questions Donald Trump’s intentions when he says things like that. It’s always been clear that he is an instinctive autocrat. He couldn’t understand why the Department of Justice didn’t act as his personal lawyer, for instance or why he was constrained by the constitution from exercising power over the entire government. He said repeatedly that he had “an Article II” which allowed him to “do whatever I want” and that the president has “total authority.” Even today he argues that the president has “total immunity” which is now pending before the Supreme Court. Of course he admires dictators and autocrats and believes that’s what the presidency should be.
It’s pretty clear that Orban sees Trump as an important ally. He’s even cutting campaign ads for him on that theme, calling Trump a “man of peace” which is so ludicrous it makes you dizzy:
The truth is that Orban may need Trump more than Trump needs Orban. He’s isolated in Europe and in order to fulfill his larger agenda he needs a friend in the White House and Joe Biden will not be that. Over the past month his party has been in turmoil with the resignation of the president and former justice minister over a pardon scandal involving a notorious child sex abuser. This has placed Orban in a difficult position since he has waged a Ron DeSantis style crusade again LGBTQ rights and pedophilia (which he conflates for political purposes.)
He has been the last holdout in the EU for Ukraine aid and allowing Sweden to Join NATO and both issues were finally resolved in the wake of the scandal just in the past couple of weeks. There’s no rsense that Orban is in serious trouble but cracks are beginning to show. It turns out that his Potemkin democracy still has some tiny life left in it, with some independent journalists able to use the internet to get the news out even though all the mainstream news sources have been coerced or co-opted into doing Orban’s bidding. It’s just possible that his hold is shakier than it has been in years.
If Trump wins all that changes. Orban sees his friendship with Trump and Putin that puts him right at the center of a major new alliance and it’s not at all an unreasonable assumption. He and Trump and his lackeys in the US Congress have, so far, successfully given Russia a major gift by refusing to authorize funding for the Ukraine war effort. Trump even went so far as to say that he would tell Putin to “do whatever he hell he wants” to any NATO country he deemed to be sufficiently “paid up.” We have every reason to believe that if Trump wins, Ukraine is gone and Putin will have prevailed. What happens to the Ukrainians if that happens is going to be a nightmare.
All of this is very peculiar in light of Orban’s central thesis about “national sovereignty” which he spelled out in this video (featuring such luminaries as Steve Bannon and Vivek Ramaswamy) which he made after his meeting with the Heritage Foundation. Apparently, Ukraine is not entitled to that particular privilege nor is any NATO country such as Hungary if Putin or Trump decide otherwise.
This alliance between Orban, Trump and the American right is very disturbing. It’s easy to dismiss a Hungarian Prime Minister as just some guy from a small European country who is punching way above his weight and isn’t really relevant. But this is one of those moments when you really have to wonder if you aren’t watching the beginning of a tectonic shift in the world order. The movement to appease Putin and force Ukraine to surrender has taken hold on the right and the threat to Western Europe that flows from that is very real. If Trump wins the chances of a major escalation are very high. Trump and Orban like to call that “peace” but it’s actually just a demand for capitulation. That’s what dictators do and that’s what they are.
A lot of people won’t believe this post was actually Trump, but it was.
The punchline isn’t so funny.