Not a member of the “David French liberal fan club” but I’ll give him credit for addressing an incredibly undercovered – and certainly ignored by political reporters – story.
Amid the constant drumbeat of sensational news stories — the scandals, the legal rulings, the wild political gambits — it’s sometimes easy to overlook the deeper trends that are shaping American life. For example, are you aware how much the constant threat of violence, principally from MAGA sources, is now warping American politics? If you wonder why so few people in red America seem to stand up directly against the MAGA movement, are you aware of the price they might pay if they did?
Of course, he has the obligatory THE LEFT IS VIOLENT TOO paragraph, so fuck that guy, forever and always, but still.
Yep. I don’t think anyone should underestimate the power of the threat that Trump’s army of violent, brainwashed followers bring to the political system. Look what’s happened to James Lankford in the Senate for having the nerve to negotiate a hard right, draconian border bill that until five minutes ago would have been a Republican wet dream. Death threats, sanctions and probably a primary opponent.
House Republicans were shocked by some of the recent high-profile retirements announced by their colleagues, which have included powerful committee chairs and rising stars inside the GOP.
But given the miserable state of affairs inside the House right now, they also weren’t exactly surprised.
“They’ve signed up to do serious things. And we’re not doing serious things,” said Rep. Ken Buck of Colorado, a conservative who is retiring after bucking his party on several key issues.
Rep. Don Bacon of Nebraska, a moderate who represents a key swing seat, pointed to his party’s struggle to govern as driving the departures.
“When you’re divided in your own conference, the joy of the job is harder,” Bacon told CNN. “When you have folks on your own team with their knives out, it makes it less enjoyable.”
And Rep. Carlos Gimenez of Florida, an ally of deposed former Speaker Kevin McCarthy, said this is not how he or many of his colleagues imagined life in the majority, saying, “I thought that some of our members would be smarter.”
“A lot of us are frustrated with what’s going on, and that’s just being flat-out honest,” he told CNN. “It’s foolish. And it’s been proven to be foolish. The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.”
As the 118th Congress has been dominated by deep dysfunction and bitter divisions inside the GOP, a number of Republicans – particularly from the so-called governing wing – are heading for the exits. So far, 23 GOP lawmakers have decided to not seek reelection or resigned early, including five committee chairs, though some have cited personal reasons or are seeking higher office.
Still, the caliber and timing of some of the retirements has raised alarm bells, particularly those who are giving up coveted committee gavels that some work their whole career to achieve.
And on the Energy and Commerce Committee alone – a highly sought-after assignment – there are eight Republicans who are retiring.
“Those are big losses for us,” said Rep. Greg Pence of Indiana, who is among the members on the panel hanging up his voting card. “It is alarming. Especially for the institutional knowledge … So, that’s a big deal.”
The wave of retirements is rattling some of the Republicans who are choosing to stick around and fueling concern about a potential brain drain as more senior members decide to leave and take their wealth of institutional knowledge with them.
“You get this panic and anxiety like, ‘OK, who’s going to step up? Is this a normal thing that happens every few years, or is it actually abnormal?’” said Rep. August Pfluger of Texas. “So, yeah, I’m very worried about it.”
They should be. And they should realize that their party has devolved into a full blown cult which is the reason for this.
The electoral side of the Resistance (Indivisible, Run for Something, Moms Demand Action) keeps grinding and winning, too. The performative stuff faded but these voters cram into any available polling booth.
So much of the media seems determined to portray the Democrats as big huge losers with a constituency full of apathetic losers and it just ain’t true. Just because they aren’t staging freak show rallies with a bunch of nuts dressed like weirdos doesn’t mean people aren’t voting and voting in droves.
The problem with this stuff is that they are setting up Trump to say the election was stolen next November. After all, the media has been saying that Biden is universally loathed because he’s old, that the polls have Trump winning in a landslide and that nobody in the country knows anything about what Biden has done as president because he’s … old. How can trump possibly lose? It’s impossible! This stuff might as well be an in-kind donation to fund his legal challenges in the next election.
That ad should appeal to the remaining normie swing voters but you never know. Still, this Pew Survey from a couple of weeks ago seems relevant:
That’s a lot of Republicans who say that the war in Ukraine is important to them. It’s true they don’t care as much about it as Democrats but when 75% of the entire country believes something is in the national interest you would think the Republicans would at least be a teensy bit worried that they’re on the wrong side of this one.
There is no sign of that as yet. The younger members of the Senate all walked away from the national security bill and are strutting around like they’re Matt Gaetz, proud as peacocks. And I don’t think I have to say anything about the House. They’re on vacation.
I always hesitate to post things by Bill Kristol, particularly on foreign policy, but I’ll do it today because this is a case in which I think there’s common ground between people like me and people like him. Putin (and Trump) are on the wrong side of both of us:
A broad coalition of political forces in the United States, ranging from Mike Pence on the right to Bernie Sanders on the left, is anti-Putin. Against them stand Donald Trump and some of his acolytes, who are pro-Putin.The likely nominee of one of our two major political parties is pro-Vladimir Putin. This is an astonishing fact. It is an appalling fact. It has to be a central fact of the 2024 campaign.
But the political professionals say foreign policy doesn’t matter in elections. Americans vote on the economy. Or immigration. Or abortion rights.
That’s true to some degree. But not as much as we might think—particularly now that the post-Cold War era has ended in the wake of Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. The world we now live in seems more like that of 1972, or 1980, or 1988. In such a world, issues of foreign policy and national security matter in selecting a president. Putin matters.
And American voters know who Putin is. In an August Gallup poll, 95 percent of all Americans had an opinion of the Russian dictator, making him better known than any American politicians other than Biden and Trump. In that poll, Trump was seen favorably by 41 percent of Americans and unfavorably by 55 percent, while Biden’s favorable/unfavorable split was 41 percent to 57 percent.
Putin’s numbers in that poll? 5 percent favorable, 90 percent unfavorable. A YouGov poll last week was a bit rosier: 13 percent in favor of the Russian dictator, 81 percent unfavorable.
It’s actually striking that all the work of the pro-Putin right—from Trump himself to Tucker Carlson—has had so little effect in improving Putin’s image. Putin turns out to be a very hard sell. Which is all the more reason to hang Putin around Trump’s neck. It could well make Trump a harder sell to some number of swing voters.
Those who seek to save the country from a Trump second term can and should hammer home Trump’s fondness for Putin.
A Bush 1988 campaign operative was quoted as saying that they were going to make the American public believe that Willie Horton, the murderer paroled under a law signed by Massachusetts governor Michael Dukakis, was Dukakis’s running mate. They did a pretty good job of that. There is far better justification for making Vladimir Putin into Donald Trump’s figurative running mate. Because it’s true: A vote for Trump is a vote for Putin.
It actually is. And when you look the American public’s attitude toward Putin I don’t think it’s a net plus.
Trump has said only one thing about Navalny since the word came down that he was dead. And it’s all about him, of course:
Notice he uses the Kremlin’s language in which they described Navalny’s cause of death as “sudden death syndrome.” I’m sure the next time he meets with Vlad he be reassured that Vlad had nothing to do with his death, just as he was reassured that he had nothing to do with the election interference in 2016 and that his other pal MBS had nothing to do with the murder of Jamal Khashoggi. He always defends his friends.
And when is someone going to ask him why he hates America so much? I’ve never heard anyone, right or left, degrade the country so often.
Marcy Wheeler takes a look at Robert Hur today and it’s very good. She is generally less critical of Merrick Garland than some but in this case she is unsparing. She points out that Garland tends to have a naive belief that all career DOJ employees are apolitical even as in the case of Hur who was appointed by Trump as a US Attorney and was involved in some of the most partisan actions of the Trump Justice Department. He clerked for Rehnquist, fergawdsakes!
The details of Hur’s tenure are not well known and they are damning:
The problem is, with Hur, Garland should have known better, and not just because Hur was obviously a senior member of Trump’s DOJ.
At the end of last week’s Jack podcast (YouTube; Simplecast), Allison Gill and Andrew McCabe discussed the role Hur played in Trump’s DOJ. Gill replayed McCabe’s warnings, a year ago when Hur was appointed, about the former PADAG’s willingness to engage in politics. McCabe pointed to Hur’s role in imposing limits on the Mueller investigation (to which, I’ve noted, Hur didn’t adhere in this review) and participation in a gang arrest press conference staged at the White House, breaching the separation between the White House and DOJ.
But Hur had a more specific role in carrying out a partisan hit job for Trump.
Just after 1:02 on the podcast, in the stuff recorded last week, McCabe described that Hur played a key role in, “overriding the process that I was entitled to and basically accelerating the decision to fire me in an effort to get it done before I could retire.” McCabe claimed that Hur violated his due process to fulfill Trump’s demands to fire the former FBI Deputy Director rather than let him retire on schedule.
As laid out in McCabe’s 2019 lawsuit against DOJ, for months leading up to McCabe’s firing, Trump had been complaining that DOJ hadn’t fired him yet. Against that background, on March 5, 2018, FBI and DOJ started the process of using DOJ IG’s problematic report finding that McCabe lacked candor about serving as a source for one of Devlin Barrett’s biennial right wing hit jobs as an excuse to fire him. Time was short. They had less than two weeks to do that before McCabe’s designated retirement date (depending on how you calculate it, any of the days from March 16 and 19, inclusive).
The process started with Candice Will, the head of FBI’s Office of Professional Responsibility, preparing a recommendation to fire him.
After some discussion on March 5 about whether, in response to McCabe attorney Michael Bromwich’s request, McCabe’s team should get a copy of the IG Report in advance so as to have more time to respond, Will laid out, in a handwritten note sent March 7, that she would send just the letter reporting DOJ IG’s referral, but not the report, to Bromwich. Without saying it directly, Will was signaling she was not going to give Bromwich any extra time to respond.
That same note made it clear that without intervention from DAG — Rod Rosenstein’s office — “it seems unlikely that this will reach final resolution before Mr. McCabe’s March 18 retirement date.” Those rushing to fire McCabe before his retirement recognized on March 7 that the only way they could fire McCabe before he retired was via Rosenstein’s involvement.
The same morning Will explained that they couldn’t manage to fire McCabe before he retired without intervention from Rosenstein’s office, she sent Hur an email asking to speak to him on the phone, “about a matter being forwarded to the DAG?” Remember: at this point, Hur was Rosenstein’s top deputy.
Will’s notes from that conversation were, when released via FOIA, almost entirely redacted under a deliberative privilege. They appear to memorialize what happened at a meeting between Hur, Rosenstein, and Scott Schools that day. Schools, the senior career Associate Deputy Attorney General at the time, played a role in DOJ that was always supposed to ensure ethics; in that role, he oversaw the review process leading up to McCabe’s termination.
An email thread documenting how OLC head Steven Engel interpreted the SES guidelines on firing, which Hur then forwarded to Schools, who forwarded it to Will, likewise remains heavily redacted under b5 deliberative exemptions.
Those documents — what Robert Hur told Will on March 7, 2018 and how Steven Engel spun guidelines mapping out what kind of due process senior employees get before you can fire them — are among the records that McCabe would have gotten in discovery if DOJ hadn’t settled the lawsuit.
DOJ redacted less of the emails showing that Will kept Schools and, at times, Hur, informed of how Michael Bromwich frantically tried to review the entire case file in time to mount a legal challenge, but even there, there are deliberative discussions withheld from release.
One thing is clear: with each request Bromwich made, DOJ took days to respond.
In the lawsuit, McCabe’s lawyers noted that Bromwich wasn’t given emails and statements involving FBI’s press person, Michael Korten, that the DOJ IG had ignored — emails that were exculpatory — until the day before Bromwich had to present McCabe’s case to Schools.
Certainly, Andrew McCabe has reason to be biased against Robert Hur, because Hur was part of a team that forced McCabe to fight for years just to get a pension earned over decades.
But you don’t have to take McCabe’s word that Hur played a part in, “overriding the process that I was entitled to and basically accelerating the decision to fire me in an effort to get it done before I could retire.”
Take Merrick Garland’s word on what happened. In response to a question from Chuck Grassley shortly after the settlement, Garland explained why career lawyers at DOJ said they should settle: because they were going to lose the case.
The case … involved a claim that he was not given amount of time necessary to respond to allegations and the litigators concluded that they needed to settle the case because of the likelihood of loss on the merits of that claim.
Garland delivered this heavily rehearsed (and inaccurate — that’s not the only thing included in the suit) statement, explaining that the team that rushed to fire McCabe so they could take his pension had not given McCabe the amount of time required to respond to the allegations against him, on October 27, 2021, over a year before he named one member of that team that deprived McCabe of his due process to lead an investigation into Joe Biden.
Garland was clearly just repeating a well-rehearsed answer in this response to Grassley. It’s unlikely he reviewed the matter closely enough to know that Hur was one of the people, according to the career attorneys who said DOJ would lose the suit, who deprived Andrew McCabe of due process. Though Garland knows how DOJ works. He should have known the universe of people who might be involved.
Given how politically contentious the decision to settle was, however, it is also virtually certain that people in Lisa Monaco’s office did review the details closely. In fact, traditionally, the person who would review matters that — like this one — involve weighing ethical considerations and the potential of a big black eye for DOJ is the career Associate Deputy Attorney General, the successor to Scott Schools, who was involved in the firing.
In July 2018, Jeff Sessions appointed Bradley Weinsheimer as Schools’ successor.
It would be shocking if Weinsheimer didn’t review the decision to settle the McCabe lawsuit.
But if he did, that would be cause for further concern. That’s because Weinsheimer is the guy who rejected complaints from Biden’s attorneys about Hur’s politicized attacks on Biden.
By settling Andrew McCabe’s lawsuit, DOJ conceded that Robert Hur and others had deprived the former FBI Deputy Director of due process. They violated DOJ’s rules to do Trump’s bidding. Then, DOJ put Hur in charge of an investigation of Joe Biden.
Come on. Nobody’s asking Garland to break the law or do anything to protect Joe Biden. But it would be nice if he and his underlings would at least be attentive enough to not sabotage him by failing to recognize a partisan when they see one!
The McCabe episode was one of the clearest examples of Trump vengeance. There could be no mistaking what they were doing and putting someone involved in that grotesque display of partisan payback should have been fired. Putting him in charge of an investigation into the Democratic president who defeated his benefactor is simple malpractice.
At least the presidential experts haven’t lost their minds, even if most of the rest of us have.
Biden makes his debut in our rankings at No. 14, putting him in the top third of American presidents. Trump, meanwhile, maintains the position he held six years ago: dead last, trailing such historically calamitous chief executives as James Buchanan and Andrew Johnson. In that and other respects, Trump’s radical departure from political, institutional and legal norms has affected knowledgeable assessments not just of him but also of Biden and several other presidents.
[…]
Biden’s most important achievements may be that he rescued the presidency from Trump, resumed a more traditional style of presidential leadership and is gearing up to keep the office out of his predecessor’s hands this fall.
Trump’s position at the bottom of our rankings, meanwhile, puts him behind not only Buchanan and Johnson but also such lowlights as Franklin Pierce, Warren Harding and William Henry Harrison, who died a mere 31 days after taking office.
Trump’s impact goes well beyond his own ranking and Biden’s. Every contemporary Democratic president has moved up in the ranks — Barack Obama (No. 7), Bill Clinton (No. 12) and even Jimmy Carter (No. 22).
Yes, these presidents had great accomplishments such as expanding healthcare access and working to end conflict in the Middle East, and they have two Nobel Prizes among them. But given their shortcomings and failures, their rise seems to be less about reassessments of their administrations than it is a bonus for being neither Trump nor a member of his party.
Indeed, every modern Republican president has dropped in the survey, including the transformational Ronald Reagan (No. 16) and George H.W. Bush (No. 19), who led the nation’s last decisive military victory.
Academics do lean left, but that hasn’t changed since our previous surveys. What these results suggest is not just an added emphasis on a president’s political affiliation, but also the emergence of a president’s fealty to political and institutional norms as a criterion for what makes a president “great” to the scholars who study them.
This is all correct. The Republican party went rogue a long time ago. Trump is just the natural consequence of all that. History is taking note.
It’s not just swing voters who will decide our fate. It’s nonvoters.
Those of us who simply couldn’t believe Americans were crazy enough to elect Donald Trump in 2016 got a rude awakening. The MAGA types are loud, but not that numerous. Michael Tomasky this Presidents’ Day considers the other voters we didn’t see coming then who will again decide this year’s presidential election. He invites the Biden campaign and us to step outside our political bubble and get inside their heads:
Last week, NBC produced a poll showing that respondents were remembering the Trump years comparatively fondly. No, don’t roll your eyes and tongue-cluck these people. It’s vital that we ponder this.
Respondents were asked of Biden and Trump whether each man had done about the kind of job they expected, a better job, or a worse job. For Biden, the numbers were 14 percent better, 44 percent as expected, and 42 percent worse.
For Trump? Prepare yourself. It was 40 percent better, 31 percent as expected, and 29 percent worse.
We can rationalize that away or deal with it.
But the numbers are the numbers, Tomasky advises. Yes, the pre-pandemic economy under Trump was not bad, but it’s been better under Biden. Median household income went up, as it did under Obama, but most of the Trump increase went to the top quintile. “This is what Bidenomics is changing—a transfer of some of that wealth back to the middle. Which is why rich people hate it so much.”
Trump’s overall job numbers sucked. The stock market tanked and the deficit soared.
But voters don’t seem to blame Trump for the pandemic. No matter how poorly he handled it. No matter that he lied about its severity. No matter that a 2021 study found that Trump’s mismanagement accounted for 40 percent of pandemic deaths.
That’s the kind of stuff highly informed voters may know. But those aren’t the voters I’m talking about it. Your average swing voters, if they ever knew this stuff, have long since forgotten it and have probably settled on the view that Trump was doing pretty well and the pandemic wasn’t his fault and he did what he could. Many, in fact, may credit him for presiding over the creation of life-saving vaccines, and that’s fair enough: Operation Warp Speed kicked off under his watch.
There’s one final uncomfortable reality that we have to come to terms with, which is that for these voters, Donald Trump is not a moral monster. He’s just not. He’s embarrassing. He’s a little wild with his rhetoric at times. They wouldn’t necessarily want their sons to be like him. But they think he ran the country pretty well. It may be hard to believe but this opinion is widely shared. Go read the story describing the results of that NBC poll I linked to above.
What to do about it since the various prosecutions of Donald “91 Counts” Trump don’t seem to be eroding his popularity?
It is simultaneously true that those voters don’t like Trump. But they forget the specific things they don’t like. Here it is important to remind them. Remind them of everything. Not the things that offend liberals, like his racism and sexism. It’s fine to sprinkle some of that in there, but don’t assume these people share our values and will be as offended by all that as we are. They won’t be. Remind them instead of Trump’s idiocy. Buying Greenland. Sharpie-ing up that hurricane map. Getting the Boy Scouts—the Boy Scouts!—to boo Obama and talking to them about rich people having sex on yachts. Advising that people inject Clorox. Tossing paper towels to hurricane victims. And so on and so on.
Remind them of just how relentlessly he was in our faces, every hour of every day. It was exhausting. Your average person surely doesn’t want that. And remind them of his betrayals of normal American values. His love of Vladimir Putin. His disparaging of the military. Even more, his disparaging of service members and veterans. That John Kelly story. Kelly has confirmed all that now, on the record. MAGA people may not care that Trump thinks people who gave their lives for their country in battle are losers. But surely independent voters in the Milwaukee suburbs do—or will, if someone reminds them, and reminds them, and reminds them.
By the way: I think also that these voters can be made to care about democracy being at risk. Fascism may be an abstraction to them. But January 6 was no abstraction. They saw it. They understood what it was. They don’t approve. Democracy can and must be part of the argument to swing voters.
These voters, Tomasky concludes, “don’t remotely see Trump in the wholly negative terms that we do.” They need reminding.
I’m going to sound like a broken record before this election is over. While it’s necessary to persuade existing voters to swing left in November, it’s as important to get nonvoters to go to the polls. Such as left-leaning unaffiliateds who don’t even get asked to vote because they have poor voting records and are harder to identify with Democrats’ Death Star database. (“Don’t be too proud of this technological terror you’ve constructed,” keeps replaying in my head. ) I’m talking about voters under 45 who lean left but sit out elections. These are registrants, particularly the young ones, who don’t need persuading of anything more than to vote at all.
Are there issues about which they care strongly? Do they know they’ll need a photo ID in 2024 because THOSE GUYS don’t want them voting? Offer nonpartisan information on the where, when, and how of casting their fall ballot. Will you exercise your freedom this fall? Save democracy? Make history?
But convincing sometimes voters that their futures depend on what they do this fall requires campaigners in North Carolina, in Arizona, and maybe Pennsylvania to change the way they are accustomed to doing business.
A friend reminded me yesterday of the recent Cosmopolitan article about what it could take to get disillusioned Gen Z voters off their couches.
Even if all your choices suck, you still have a choice. Choosing to do nothing is a choice. This is what it means to be an adult: Adulthood, like citizenship, is not guaranteed to be fun and exciting. It hasn’t been for me. Maybe we talk about which choices on the table are most empowering for young people. A sense of control is what people most desire amidst threat and chaos. Right now their control is being stripped from them.
Doing nothing means those who mean to deprive us of any choice win because we let them without putting up a fight.
An analogy I use is finding yourself in a kayak in a chaotic, rushing river and being battered against the rocks. You can sit there and get beat up and risk drowning, or you can paddle. Your choice. You might even find learning to read and navigate the rapids much more fun and less bruising than doing nothing but complain you’d rather be somewhere else. Or have different choices.
Born to run for dictator. Found instantly on Ebay.
Donald “91 Counts” Trump has always been high-wealth and low-rent. He has spent his entire life complaining that the world (“they”) are laughing at us (“him”). Go figure.
Ron Filipkowski reminds Americans that if you pick your president late at night while watching the Home Shopping Network (HSN), you get what you pay for.
Montage of clips of Trump selling his various products and scams over the years: Trump University, Trump Steaks, Vodka, Board Game, Mattresses, Water, Airline, Vitamins, Ties and more. pic.twitter.com/aBiLMrxQEg
From deodorant to bottled water and, at one point, a personalized vitamin kit that was determined by urine test, Trump has put his name on almost anything shoppers would buy. He also had a menswear line from Phillips-Van Heusen that was sold at Macy’s, as well as a collection of Trump-branded home decor.
The Washington Post found in 2016 Trump-branded manufactured in 12 countries. In 2018, Quartz estimated only 15 percent of Mr. America First’s items for sale were made in the U.S.
It’s not clear where his $399 Trump “Never Surrender” high-tops are made, but those are the odds. SneakerCon in Philadelphia on Saturday loudly booed when Trump introduced them.
Oh my, a large crowd of thousands just booed the shit out of Trump, wouldn’t let him get a word in, and started chanting “lets go Biden.” #NoTrumpAbortionBanhttps://t.co/B00YXC4kcN
“A vote for Biden is a vote to send tens of thousands of Michigan jobs to China and other places that we don’t want them to go,” the Michigan Advance quotes Trump as saying at a Saturday rally in a Waterford Township hangar. “A vote for Trump is a vote to keep those manufacturing jobs in America and add a lot of jobs,”
He’s offered Trump Steaks, Trump Airlines, Trump Vodka, Trump Water, Trump Wine, Trump Mortgage, and Trump Magazine. Not to mention his scam Trump University that closed after a string of lawsuits won by victims who received $25 million in compensation.
Trump doesn’t know much, but he knows there’s a sucker born every minute.
Trump has spent the weekend blabbing about his hideous gold tennis shoes and the New York Fraud ruling. He did find time to post one thing about Navalny. Naturally it was an “analysis” from some obscure web site asserting that Donald Trump is the Navalny of the United States, with all the usual lies.
But this is the important part. He smeared Navalny:
And then he killed him.
These wingnuts are very confused. They don’t know if Trump is just like Navalny, being falsely accused of corruption and fraud or if Navalny is actually a criminal who deserved to be treated the way he was treated. Because if they’re saying Navalny was a corrupt fraudster, he’s exactly like Trump. Which is it?
I’m surprised Trump hasn’t flogged this right wing meme more than this. It’s all over social media. Maybe his feral instincts tell him that it’s probably not a good place for him to go. Instead he’s just not mentioning it. I certainly hope that the next time a real journalist sits down with him that he’s grilled on this.
Charlie Kirk is a major influencer on the right and his Turning Point organization is the MAGA CPAC. I doubt very seriously that Trump will dump him because he’s a racist. That’s a feature not a bug.
For more than a year, Charlie Kirk, the conservative activist and MAGA influencer, was aimed like a heat-seeking missile toward one goal — ousting Republican National Committee Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel.
It’s a battle he won. Just this week, former President Donald Trump endorsed a new slate of leaders to head the party apparatus and signaled that McDaniel’s four terms would soon come to an end.
Few Republican groups have had as meteoric a rise as Kirk’s Turning Point USA, which launched in 2012. It sought to activate young conservatives and saw its fortunes grow as it attached itself to the Trump movement in 2016. The organization has raised roughly a quarter-billion dollars since, as The Associated Press reported last fall, with its fundraising exploding during the Covid pandemic.
But the RNC effort has Kirk increasingly under the microscope in Trump world. In recent weeks, at least three people, including McDaniel herself, have privately warned Trump about Kirk’s conduct, seven sources familiar with the discussions told NBC News.
Kirk came up during her conversation with the former president at his Mar-a-Lago resort this month in which her future at the helm of the RNC was discussed. It’s disputed who first brought up Kirk, but McDaniel blamed him for some of the RNC’s fundraising woes, saying his organization is collecting from donors who would otherwise fund a more robust party effort.
The discussion of Kirk was first reported by RealClearPolitics. NBC News spoke with more than two dozen Republicans for this report. Both the RNC and Trump campaign did not respond to requests for comment.
McDaniel also asked Trump if he was aware of comments Kirk made on his popular podcast questioning whether Martin Luther King Jr. deserved a federal holiday and remarking that diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives in the airline industry made him skeptical that Black pilots were qualified. He was not, so she relayed them to him.
Those comments sparked a second person, Darrell Scott, a pastor from Ohio who was one of Trump’s first vocal Black allies and has been an adviser to him, to express concerns directly to the former president, four people familiar told NBC News. Scott had already shared his complaints publicly, on a podcast hosted by conservative commentator Tudor Dixon, a Trump-endorsed candidate for governor of Michigan in 2022.
Scott said he could “neither confirm nor deny” that the conversation with Trump took place. But he acknowledged that he has heard from people close to Trump who share his view that Kirk’s commentary may harm the former president’s prospects with Black voters.
“I’ve got to say, racism is like the word ‘ugly.’ I can’t always describe it, but I know it when I see it,” Scott said in an interview with NBC News. “That boy’s a racist right there.”
It’s unclear how Trump has taken to the warnings. Trump allies offered conflicting accounts of whether he was bothered by any of the issues raised to him, with one ally who has warned him about Kirk saying Trump believes Kirk is a “juggernaut.”
“Trump is f—ing pissed that Charlie is out causing problems for him in the Black community,” said another person close to Trump who claimed direct knowledge of his thinking.
Donald Trump Jr., the former president’s eldest son and a close Kirk ally, said the idea that Kirk is in anything less than “great standing with both my father and the entire Trump campaign” is “nothing more than fiction coming from people jealous of the close relationship Charlie has built with our family.”
“Frankly, it’s sad that there are some people attempting to increase their own relevancy by manufacturing lies that Charlie is on the outs,” he said in a statement. “Nothing could be further from the truth.”
It’s a fascinating story of a greedy grifter vs other greedy grifters and they’re all at each others’ throats. Delicious. Read the whole thing.
