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Are You Better Off Now?

Published by Tom Sullivan on March 19, 2024

Biden allies pledge over $1 billion

https://bsky.app/profile/kilgoretrout.bsky.social/post/3knymlyryi32x

Lefty social media is having a field day.

Once upon a time, Republicans and their Mighty Wurlitzer ran messaging circles around Democrats. They own the media outlets. Republicans have revanchist billionaire oligarchs funding them. Hand it to the GOP, they are better than Democrats at finding a message and staying on it, repeating it, drilling it into people’s head until it sticks. Donald “91 Counts” Trump is still doing that with his stolen election fiction. His Freak chorus sings it for him from coast to coast. Except off-key.

Lately, Republicans can’t seem to turn around without stepping on a rake. When Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.) rhetorically asked a press conference, “Are you better off today than you were four years ago?” she stepped on a big one. Sen. Katie Britt (R-Ala.) echoed it in her Stepfordesque response to Joe Biden’s the State of the Union address 10 days ago.

The Bulwark reacted to Stefanik with “AFKM?” and statistics. “At this point in 2020, a few hundred Americans were dying every day from COVID. By April 2020 that number would be over 2,000 dead per day.“

Jedis these guys are not.

Even more stunning is the fact that Republicans, including the Insurrectionist-in-Chief, haven’t stopped using the line and pretending COVID-19 never happened. Social media is not letting them forget it.

Better off? “Our president is no longer telling us to ingest bleach,” replies Keith Roysdon from Knoxville.

Trump’s support may not be be crumbling, but the cracks are widening.

Weirdly, the Biden reelection campaign seems to be finding its groove in hitting the GOP square in the jaw and not letting Americans forget the Trump years.

The Biden social media team is on top of rapid response even if his team’s TikToks need work.

And that’s just COVID. The Dobbs decision is an albatross around the GOP’s neck that the left, women and men, won’t let voters forget. While Biden-Harris hits Trump hard on social media, on my streaming news the Biden-Harris campaigns ads are already regular and more upbeat.

Democrats do not have the billionaire oligarchs Republican do. But the GOP struggles to raise funds while Trump cannot secure the half-billion bond for his New York civil fraud case, Biden has more cash on hand than any Democratic presidential candidate at this point in the race and his allies are rallying to supply over a billion dollars more (New York Times):

A new $120 million pledge to lift President Biden and his allies will push the total expected spending from outside groups working to re-elect Mr. Biden to $1 billion this year.

The League of Conservation Voters, a leading climate organization that is among the biggest spenders on progressive causes, announced its plans for backing Mr. Biden on Tuesday, at a moment when his Republican challenger, former President Donald J. Trump, is struggling to raise funds. Mr. Biden’s campaign, independent of the outside groups, expects to raise and spend $2 billion as part of his re-election bid.

[…]

The pro-Biden outside money originates from nearly a dozen organizations that include climate groups, labor unions and traditional super PACs. There are left-wing groups like MoveOn and moderate Republicans like Republican Voters Against Trump.

The largest spenders so far are Future Forward, the super PAC blessed by the Biden campaign, which has reserved more than $250 million in television advertising; the Service Employees International Union, which said last week that it would spend $200 million to back Mr. Biden and fellow Democrats; and American Bridge, the Democratic research organization that said in January that it planned to spend $140 million on an anti-Trump advertising campaign in battleground states.

“The sheer scale of what we’re talking about has never been seen before in our country’s history,” said Tiffany Muller, the president of End Citizens United, the government reform advocacy group working to limit the ability of these types of outside groups to spend unlimited sums on elections.

More of that, please.

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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.

Let’s Set The Record Straight

Published by digby on March 18, 2024

Trump is lying more than ever

This Washington Post fact check is worth reading if you aren’t following all the latest Trump lies:

Trump frequently recycles false claims of achievement from when he was president that we have repeatedly fact-checked, including:

-He created the greatest U.S. economy in U.S. history (not by any metric).
-He passed the biggest tax cut in history (it ranks 8th).
-He did more for Black people than any president but Abraham Lincoln (not by any metric).
-He defeated ISIS in four weeks (it took the United States and coalition partners more than two years after he took office).
-He was the first president to impose tariffs on China (China has faced U.S. tariffs since George Washington first enacted them in 1789).He increased government revenue even though he cut taxes (False).

But there are always new lies. Here are a few:

Biden was declared ‘incompetent’ to stand trial in documents case

“He’s [Biden] at great jeopardy, really, but they said: ‘Look, he’s incompetent to go to court but he can be president.’ Figure that one. In other words, he can’t represent himself at court because he’s incompetent.” (Fox News town hall, Feb. 20)

“Well, Joe Biden had more boxes than any human being ever, and they let him off. Of course, I wouldn’t want to be let off that way. They say: ‘He’s incompetent, we’ll let him off.’” (rally in Richmond, March 2)

“He has no clue, like with the documents hoax. How about that? He’s not competent to stand trial, but he’s allowed to be the president.” (rally in Rome, Ga., March 9)

Trump faces a criminal trial for hoarding classified documents after he left office and refusing to return them. But Biden also discovered that he had retained classified documents at his home and office. He returned them, but a special counsel was appointed to see if he, too, should face criminal charges. The special counsel, Robert K. Hur, concluded that it would be tough to win a case — because Biden had reasonable defenses, the facts were occasionally murky and Biden (unlike Trump) had cooperated fully with the investigation. In a controversial passage, he wrote that jurors probably would view Biden as “a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.”

Trump has now absurdly twisted this sentence to falsely claim that Biden was not competent to stand trial — which under the law means a person is incapable of understanding or assisting in their defense. In reality, Hur was making the point that, if a case were brought to trial, Biden could make a credible case he did not willfully retain the documents, especially because he cooperated. In many cases, the special counsel decided that the documents were mishandled by mistake — or were not especially important anymore, despite the classification level.

During a congressional hearing on his report Tuesday, Hur was asked if he found that the president was senile and exhibited a decline of cognitive ability. “I did not,” Hur said. “That conclusion does not appear in my report.”

In his report, Hur addressed the difference between the Trump and Biden document cases. “Several material distinctions between Mr. Trump’s case and Mr. Biden’s are clear,” Hur wrote. “After being given multiple chances to return classified documents and avoid prosecution, Mr. Trump allegedly did the opposite. According to the indictment, he not only refused to return the documents for many months, but he also obstructed justice by enlisting others to destroy evidence and then to lie about it. In contrast, Mr. Biden turned in classified documents to the National Archives and the Department of Justice, consented to the search of multiple locations including his homes, sat for a voluntary interview and in other ways cooperated with the investigation.”

Prisons are being emptied around the world to flood U.S. borders

“The prison population all over the world is at the lowest point it’s been in many decades because they’re dumping their prisoners into our country.” (Richmond)

“When you look at the people that are being allowed to come all over the world, they’re emptying their prisons. They’re emptying their mental institutions into the United States of America.” (Rome, Ga.)

This claim is an echo of Trump’s notorious comment in his 2015 speech announcing he would run for president — that Mexico was “sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists.” Illegal immigration by Mexicans has fallen sharply, so now Trump claims the entire world is sending criminals to the southern border. Sometimes he even riffs that it’s a cost-saving maneuver by world leaders — “nothing more expensive than storing a prisoner in a jail for 60 years.”

This is poppycock. Immigration experts know of no effort by other countries. As someone who came to prominence in the late ’70s and early ’80s, Trump appears to be channeling Cuban leader Fidel Castro’s 1980 Mariel boatlift. About 125,000 Cubans were allowed to flee to the United States in 1,700 boats — but there was a backlash when it was discovered hundreds of refugees had been released from jails and mental health facilities.

Helen Fair, research associate at the Institute for Crime & Justice Policy Research in Britain, which tracks the world prison population (except for a handful of countries), says the numbers keep growing. In 2013, 10.2 million people were in prison — and that had grown to 10.77 million in 2021. A preliminary estimate for February 2024, not ready to be published, indicates the population has grown even more. “In short, I would disagree with Donald Trump’s assertion,” she said.

Congo has released murderers into the United States

“Last night they had four from the Congo. Where in the Congo do you live? I wonder what beautiful place do you live in the Congo? ‘We are from prison.’ What did you do? ‘Murder.’ They’re in the United States right now, right? This is what they’re allowing.” (Richmond)

“The Congo — very big population coming in from the jails of the Congo.” (speech at Eagle Pass, Tex., Feb. 29)

“The other day from Africa, the Congo, they had numerous prisoners caught from the Congo.” (Rome, Ga.)

As part of his falsehood on prisons being emptied, Trump often conjures up another bit of fiction — that a conflict-riven country in Africa, the Democratic Republic of Congo, is shipping murderers to the United States. Fair says no such decline in Congo’s prison population is shown in the data. Instead, the DRC’s prison population keeps growing.

When Trump was president, he greatly restricted refugee admissions, stranding Congolese who had been waiting in camps seeking to reunite with relatives already in the United States. Still, Customs and Border Protection data show that during his presidency there was a surge in undocumented arrivals from the Democratic Republic of Congo. In 2017 and 2018, no one from Congo sought to cross either the southern or northern border, but in 2019 and 2020, that changed, with 614 and 267 encounters, respectively.

That one is particularly odious. He just had to make sure he scratched that racist itch by claiming that crazy, criminal Black Africans were coming to kill all the white women in their beds.

15 million migrants have entered the United States under Biden

“They’ve let in 15 million people … and I think it’s going to be 18 million by the time we get the worst president in our history out of office.” (Richmond)

“I think the number is 15 million people already, I think it’ll be 18 to 20 million people by the time we get rid of this guy. Think of it, that’s bigger than New York state. I think it’s going to be close to 20 million people.” (Rome, Ga.)

“This is the worst invasion probably. We’ve never had anything like it. No country has ever had anything like it. The number today could be 15 million people, and they’re coming from rough places and dangerous places.” (Super Tuesday remarks.)

Trump never met a number that he could not double, triple or quadruple. Here, he manages to take a real number — 4 million to 5 million migrants arriving during Biden’s presidency — and increase it threefold. Then he offers a prediction to make it sound even larger.

Here’s the reality: Customs and Border Protection recorded about 8.5 million “encounters” between February 2021, after Biden took office, through December of last year. But that does not mean all those people entered the country illegally. Some people were “encountered” numerous times as they tried to enter the country — and others (about 4 million of the total) were expelled, mostly because of covid-related rules that have since ended.

The inflation rate under Biden is 50 percent

“But the fact is, under Biden, we have a three-year inflation rate of almost 50 percent. Under me, you had no inflation. You had no inflation.” (Rome, Ga.)

“We have cumulative inflation of over 50 percent. That means people are, you know, they have to make more than 50 percent more over a fairly short period of time to stay up.” (interview on CNBC, March 11)

The monthly inflation headlines are often about the year-over-year inflation rate, as measured by changes in the consumer price index. It reached a high of 9 percent during Biden’s presidency, largely because of supply chain issues after the pandemic. Annualized inflation has dropped since then. The year-over-year figure in February was 3.2 percent.

Wages have also gone up under Biden, helping to mitigate the impact, though many workers have not seen their paychecks keep up with inflation. Average hourly earnings are up 15.5 percent during Biden’s presidency and the Employment Cost Index is up 14 percent. Since early 2023, wage growth began to outpace inflation, with the gap expected to fully close sometime this year.

Native-born Americans have lost 1 million jobs to immigrants

“In February alone, nearly 1 million jobs held by native-born Americans disappeared. Think of that. You lost a million jobs. Black people, that’s who lost the jobs. Hispanic people, that’s who lost the jobs.” (Rome, Ga.)

Here, Trump seizes on a confusing (and exaggerated) number to make a misleading claim. The latest Bureau of Labor Statistics employment report shows that the number of native-born workers with jobs fell from 129.8 million in January to 129.3 million in February 2024, for a decline of about 500,000. So Trump doubled the actual figure. Meanwhile, the number of foreign-born workers, meaning people who were not citizens at birth, grew from nearly 30 million to 31 million — an increase of more than 1 million.

But that does not mean that U.S. citizens have “lost” those jobs to immigrants. Monthly changes in employment don’t tell you much — and this report is not seasonally adjusted, meaning temporary holiday hiring and a winter slowdown in construction can affect the numbers at the start of the year. The BLS report shows the unemployment rate is lower for native-born Americans — 4.0 vs. 4.7 percent. That’s the more important figure. Moreover, according to the Economic Policy Institute, the share of prime-age (ages 25-54) employment-to-population ratio (EPOP) for U.S.-born individuals was 81.4 percent in 2023, up from 80.7 percent in 2019 — for its highest rate since 2001. Indeed, native-born workers have gained more than 6 million jobs during Biden’s presidency — as have foreign-born workers.

If you want to see some inflation, just wait until Trump takes office, deports all the immigrants and slaps 100% tariffs on foreign made cars and other goods. Should be fun. But by then he’ll have successfully destroyed democratic institutions so there’s not much any of us will be able to about it.

Click over to see the rest of the fact check.

Published by digby on March 18, 2024

Ankush Khardori at Politico takes a look at some polling on Trump’s legal problems:

Eight months out, we had questions. Among them: If Trump is convicted of a crime, how will it affect his chances of returning to the White House? What do Americans make of his claim that he should be immune from prosecution even if he actually perpetrated a criminal scheme to steal the last election? Does the public trust the Supreme Court to decide that issue fairly?

To find out, we worked with Ipsos to poll the American people — and we discovered some surprising answers to all of these questions, and several more.

The bottom line is that a conviction in Manhattan may not doom Trump, but it would do real damage.

More than a third of independents said a guilty verdict would make them less likely to support Trump’s candidacy. In a close race, that might matter.

It also cuts against the conventional wisdom, as analysts have sometimes doubted the political impact of the prosecution in Manhattan, which concerns Trump’s alleged falsification of his company’s business records in connection with a hush-money payment to the adult film star Stormy Daniels. The trial, which was set to start March 25, was delayed on Friday by at least three weeks to allow more time to review records from federal prosecutors.

As for Trump and the Supreme Court, the results are legitimately remarkable in a time of intense political polarization and distrust of the justices. A whopping 70 percent of the country rejects Trump’s claim that presidents should be immune from prosecution for alleged crimes they committed while in office. Less than a quarter of the respondents, meanwhile, said that they trust the Supreme Court to issue a fair and nonpartisan ruling on the matter.

Key findings.

Half of the country believes Trump is guilty in the Manhattan prosecution

Fifty percent of respondents said that they believe Trump is guilty of the alleged crimes charged in Manhattan.

There was a predictable and sizable partisan split, with only 14 percent of Republicans reporting that they believe Trump is guilty, while 86 percent of Democrats held that view. Among independents, 54 percent said that Trump is guilty.

What arguably stands out most is the fact that the number of people who said that they believe Trump is guilty here was nearly identical to the results when we asked respondents to consider Trump’s guilt in his other three criminal cases — the Justice Department’s prosecution in Washington over the 2020 election (49 percent said he is guilty), the department’s charges against Trump in Florida over his retention of classified documents (52 percent: guilty), and the Fulton County District Attorney’s case against Trump in Georgia over the 2020 election (49 percent: guilty). These numbers also roughly track Trump’s unfavorability ratings among the American population.

All of this suggests at least two possibilities worth bearing in mind, and they are not mutually exclusive.

First, it is possible that at least some Americans — perhaps very large numbers of them — are not clearly distinguishing the cases against Trump from one another or do not care about the sorts of distinctions that have occupied some legal commentators, including yours truly. Second, their opinions on Trump’s guilt may be a proxy for their views on Trump more generally and more evidence that we live in a 50-50 politically polarized country.

44% said that a conviction wouldn’t affect their support. But among those who said it would. Trump has a problem:

By a more than 2-1 margin, respondents said that a conviction would make them less likely to support Trump (32 percent) as opposed to more likely (13 percent). Notably, more than a third of independents said it would reduce their likelihood to support Trump. Not surprisingly, the vast majority of respondents who said that a conviction would bolster their support were Republicans. (The numbers were similar when we asked about a potential conviction in the federal prosecution for undermining the 2020 election.)

The one problem is that much of the case hinges on Michael Cohen which actually helps Trump since 38% said it would make the case weaker while the rest either said it would make the case stronger or have no effect. We’ll have to see if that skepticism applies to a jury.

The good news is that the American people haven’t completely lost their bearings: the overwhelming majority does no believe that a president should have total immunity as Trump is insisting:

Seventy percent of respondents rejected this position, including a large plurality (48 percent) of Republicans. Only 11 percent of all respondents endorsed Trump’s position that presidents should have criminal immunity for conduct while in office, and they were largely Republicans.

Unfortunately, half the country doesn’t trust the Supreme Court to issue the correct ruling:

A sizable plurality (46 percent) expressed that view, while about a quarter of the respondents (24 percent) took the other side. About a third (29 percent) said that they do not know whether they trust the court on this issue.

It doesn’t give us which people believe that but I would guess it’s a little of both. MAGA is high on its persecution complex and Democrats can already see that the high court is delaying the trial to help Trump so…

But the public isn’t swayed by that:

The odds of a Trump trial in Washington this year may have gone down, but that has not deterred the public.

Fifty-nine percent of respondents said that Trump should stand trial in the Justice Department’s 2020 election subversion case before Election Day. Ninety percent of Democrats expressed that view, as did 65 percent of independents and even 26 percent of Republicans. These figures have largely held steady since we asked the question last August and are in line with the results from at least one other recent poll.

As I said earlier, perhaps the majority of Americans haven’t abandoned all common sense after all. Will it make any difference? I doubt it. But they are the ultimate jury so let’s hope all those people come out and vote in November whether or not Trump has to face a courtroom jury before then.

A Final Solution?

Published by digby on March 18, 2024

Trump says Israel should “finish the problem”

Because he’s a big peacenik, dontcha know:

Former President Donald Trump called on Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to end the war in Gaza quickly during an interview with Fox News Channel’s “MediaBuzz.”

 This is the first time Trump has called to end the war in Gaza since the Hamas attack in Israel on October 7.

Trump’s comments in Sunday’s aired interview follow calls he made on Friday with FNC’s “Fox and Friends” host Brian Kilmeade that Israel should “finish the problem.”

“You had a horrible invasion. It took place. It would have never happened if I was president, by the way,” he added Friday.

On Sunday, the former president didn’t mention hostages or any other conditions that he would back to broker a ceasefire.

 “You have to finish it up and do it quickly and get back to the world of peace. We need peace in the world…we need peace in the Middle East,” Trump said when asked by “MediaBuzz” host Howard Kurtz what he would tell Netanyahu about the war in Gaza.

No word on what he thinks Netanyahu could do to “finish the problem” quickly. Perhaps someone could have asked him what he would do to “finish the problem.” It might be interesting to know that. Of course, he would default to “it never would have happened if I had been president” because nothing bad can possibly happen when he’s our Dear Leader. (Well, except for a deadly pandemic that killed over a million Americans.) Does he think he could make a “deal” with Hamas like he plans to force Ukraine to do with Russia — unconditional surrender? Sure, that’ll work.

But thinking that October 7th and the responding invasion never would have happened if he were president is just daft. Does he think Hamas is so afraid of him that they wouldn’t have attacked Israel? His narcissism knows no bounds.

This line of his: “we need peace” translates into “do what the tyrants tell you and you won’t have a problem. Otherwise, they’ll have to finish it — finally — if you know what I mean.”

4 Years Ago Today

Published by digby on March 18, 2024

The stock market stopped trading during that press conference.

Here’s what I wrote that day:

President Trump’s Oval Office speech last week was a massive dud and the stock market took a huge dive last Thursday. So Trump decided to take the bull by the horns and held a press conference in the Rose Garden with a group of CEOs just before closing time the next day. The market made a sharp upward turn as he spoke and the president was extremely pleased with himself. Numerous reports about the deliberations within the dysfunctional White House over the past week, however, have made it clear that was the only thing that pleased him.

According to the New York Times, it’s been an extremely chaotic time with infighting among the various task force members, Jared Kushner stepping all over everyone’s toes and incompetent leadership from the top. In other words, it’s been business as usual in the Trump administration. Unfortunately, this time this bumbling White House is confronting its first real crisis and one of the most serious global challenges in decades.

On Sunday, Trump appeared in the White House briefing room to announce that the Federal Reserve had cut interest rates virtually to zero, but on Monday the market dropped precipitously again. Although Trump obviously thought that he could turn it around with another end-of-day press conference, it didn’t work. The market closed down nearly 3,000 points, and every bit of news about the coronavirus was so bad that even Trump dialed down his bragging a notch and avoided the incessant happy talk that had pervaded all his other appearances.

One thing the president had noticed, apparently, was that Vice President Mike Pence was getting good reviews in the media for his daily briefings, with newspapers and cable news pronouncing that his serious tone was welcome and necessary in the crisis. It is, therefore, no surprise that Trump led the briefing again on Tuesday, shoving Pence to the background. Why let the veep hog all that good press?

As Dan Froomkin noted this week in Salon’s Press Watch column, many members of the media remarked on the change in Trump’s “tone” on Monday, although by the end of the briefing the president had reverted to form:

But Trump being Trump, he couldn’t bring himself to apologize for the many lost weeks of insufficient federal response, nor admit even the tiniest flaw: He rated his performance a 10 out of 10. And soon enough, he was back to sending out vile tweets about the “Chinese Virus” and attacking “failing” governors who had the audacity to critique the federal response.

Froomkin pointed out that the press, for the most part, has looked for leadership among other players in this crisis, particularly health experts, governors and mayors who have stepped into the breach both in terms of actual response and delivering the clear public information required in an emergency such as this. After Tuesday’s briefing, a reporter asked the president why he’d changed his tone on Monday. Trump said that he hadn’t changed it at all, adding, “I have seen that people actually liked it.”

The truth is that he’s not the only one who has changed his tone. Fox News and other right-wing media have made an abrupt pivot as well, and as has been the case throughout the Trump presidency, it’s a chicken-and-egg question as to who went first.

This compilation by the Washington Post illustrates the change:

Some right-wing commentators are now saying that Trump has made “a sharp pivot to a “wartime” footing,” taking command of the crisis. Former Trump communications director Jason Miller said, “This is a war unlike anything we’ve faced in American history and it’s going to take an unconventional president who isn’t trapped by preconceived notions of doing things the way they’ve always been done to lead us through this.”

His leadership has certainly been “unconventional” up until now:

Trump likes the war metaphor.

I felt a little sense of déjà vu as I read those pieces and watched the media response to Trump’s appearance on Tuesday. It recalled an earlier episode in which a president looked like a deer in the headlights during a crisis and was then elevated to heroic status by the press when he appeared at Ground Zero with a bullhorn and spoke to the assembled rescue workers:

I can hear you! I can hear you! The rest of the world hears you! And the people — and the people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon!

The ecstatic reaction from the media fully activated the impulse to rally around the president, and that was the end of virtually all skepticism about the American response to the 9/11 attacks for the next year. The media made George W. Bush into a “wartime” leader that day, and granted him all the power that came with it.

We are once again facing a national crisis. This time it’s not just hitting a couple of cities, as devastating as that was. This is affecting everyone in the country. The economic fallout stands to be even worse than the 2008 financial crisis. And once again, you can sense that the media is longing to anoint a leader to perform some ostensibly heroic ritual to make us all feel better.

That’s why my antennae went up when I heard all the TV commentators making so much of Trump’s new “tone” and how he seemed to be a different, more serious president. This comment by Dana Bash at CNN was so effusive that the Trump team sent it out to their followers:

The AP headlined an article, “Trump changes his tone, gets real on the coronavirus threat.” CNN published one called “What drove Trump’s newfound somber tone on coronavirus.” In fairness, both articles feature plenty of skepticism and don’t soft-soap Trump’s failures so far. But as this crisis deepens there is a danger that mainstream media commentators and pundits will fall into the same trap they fell into after 9/11.

Trump won’t be able to hold his big rallies for the foreseeable future. They were key to his success in 2016, but it wasn’t the rallies themselves as much as all the free TV exposure they gave him. I think he has figured out that he will be able to hold these televised press conferences, surrounded by experts, and appear to be in command and look presidential instead.

Recall that he reportedly told a group of GOP donors at Mar-a-Lago just a week or so ago:

They’re trying to scare everybody, from meetings, cancel the meetings, close the schools — you know, destroy the country. And that’s ok, as long as we can win the election. But I really believe that if they see that the Trump administration is handling this virus in a professional, competent way, I don’t believe that’s going to hurt us.

Trump’s feral survival instincts have kicked in, and they’ve saved him many times before. If he can manage to control himself even a little bit, his supposed nemesis, the media, may give him the boost he needs to win again.

He didn’t win, thank God. But we wonder why people don’t blame Trump for the monumental failure of his COVID response today?

Sometimes Money Speaks Louder Than Words

Published by digby on March 18, 2024

Back in 2000 when Donald Trump first tested the waters of a presidential campaign , giving a series of speeches as a possible Reform Party candidate, he famously told Forbes Magazine, “It’s very possible that I could be the first presidential candidate to run and make money on it.” He was speaking at the time about a weird deal he had going with motivational speaker Anthony Robbins in which he timed his political appearances around paid seminars that Robbins paid him a million bucks to give. By the time he decided to run for real in 2015 he didn’t publicly suggest that he could make money campaigning but he did make the case that he was incorruptible saying, “I don’t need anybody’s money.” (He’d obviously figured out that that real graft was to made once he was in the White House.)

He pledged to spend a hundred million of his own money on his run but ended up only giving about $66 million out of $398 million so Trump didn’t “self-fund” by a long shot. In 2020 he didn’t use any of his own money at all instead raising $774 million for the campaign with the RNC and his Super PACs raising much more. (The 2020 election was by far the most expensive in history, doubling the record breaking 2016 campaign.) His spending in that campaign was so profligate that it ended up having a cash crunch in the months before the election.

Still, the myth persists among the MAGA faithful that Trump is incorruptible because he’s allegedly a self-made billionaire and doesn’t need anyone’s money. (And even though they believe this, they’ve been sending him their own hard earned cash just because they love him so much.) Back in 2019, Politico reported on research showing that this myth has had some pretty serious political consequences:

Using a 2017 University of Maryland Critical Issues Poll, we found that believing Trump was not born “very wealthy” leads to at least a 5-percentage-point boost in the president’s job approval, even after considering the many factors that can influence public approval ratings. This shift is rooted in the belief that his humble roots make Trump both more empathetic (he “feels my pain”), and more skilled at business (he is self-made and couldn’t have climbed to such heights without real business know-how).

When voters were informed of the truth, that Trump was born with a silver spoon in his mouth and had to be bailed out repeatedly by his father, there were “noticeable and statistically significant effects on evaluations of Trump’s character” losing 10 percentage point from Republicans on empathy and 10 points on business acumen. The researchers said, “our research shows that the basic information plugged-in elites take for granted is not known by many Americans, and can be consequential in political evaluations.” Imagine that.

The following video has gone viral on social media the last couple of days and it shows what might have been if all journalists had been as aggressive as Barbara Walters was in 1990 when she confronted him with his recent business failure (just one of many more to come) and the lies he was telling the public:

You’ll notice that his persecution complex was in full effect even then, as he whines to Walters that nobody’s ever been treated as unfairly as he has been.

Trump has been dancing as fast as he can for decades, trying to stay one step ahead of bankruptcy and the law and he has been successful at doing it, apparently leading him to truly believe that he could always prevail by sheer force of will. When the 2020 election didn’t go his way, his fragile psyche couldn’t take it and he simply created an alternate reality in order to cope.

Now he’s faced with the greatest challenge of his life, and he has to make one great hail mary pass in order to keep himself from going broke and out of prison. He has to win the presidency and he desperately needs money to pay his own legal expenses and finance his campaign. It’s not going all that well.

The wheels of justice are grinding infuriatingly slowly, largely due to some judges (and Justices) who seem to be happy to help Trump out of his immediate criminal jam. But the civil judgments against him add up to more than half a billion dollars and nobody knows exactly what kind of collateral he’s having to put up to post the required bonds or who might be acting as his benefactor. The potential for corruption is so immense it’s stunning that anyone could have the chutzpah to run for president under these circumstances. But then again, this is Trump we’re talking about and the White House is his guaranteed get-out-of-jail free card.

But what about his campaign? Considering his precarious personal financial situation there’s no way that Trump will be self-funding any part of it and he’s commandeered the RNC for his personal use, most likely to help him pay for any lawyers who won’t allow him to stiff them. So, according to the New York Times, he’s having to hustle like crazy for campaign donations:

One of the most pressing issues facing Mr. Trump is the financial disparity he and allied groups now face with Mr. Biden and the Democratic Party. Mr. Biden’s campaign announced on Sunday that it entered March with $155 million cash on hand with the party, after raising $53 million in February. The Trump operation has not released a more recent total, but his campaign account and the Republican National Committee had around $40 million at the end of January.

He’s having to hit up billionaires and Wall St more than ever before and it sure looks like he’s making some deals, such as his abrupt turnaround on TikTok last week after meeting with one of their major investors. This is because so far, his small donor base appears to finally be a little bit tapped out. The campaign claims that February will be their strongest month for small dollar fund-raising which would beat the $22.3 million in August. But as the Times pointed out, the Biden campaign is seeing a massive rush of small donor money, raising more than $10 million online after the State of the Union, more than doubling Trump’s much ballyhooed haul of $4.2 million from his ignominious mug shot.

How can it be that Biden is raising so much more money when we are told daily that Trump voters are overwhelmingly excited while Biden’s are disconsolate and depressed? Well, money isn’t everything and incumbency always has an edge in the money game but it does seem odd that with Trump holding a slight lead in many of the polls that he would be having trouble raising money while the Democrats are awash in cash.

Perhaps Biden voters are more enthused than is commonly recognized or, just as likely, are more terrified of another Trump term. But maybe it’s also the case that Trump’s rapturous followers aren’t as representative of Republican voters as they would have us believe. And just maybe people have heard a few things about Trump being indicted on 91 felony counts in several different criminal cases and being hit with over half a billion dollars in fines. Is it possible that people are still telling pollsters that they plan to vote for Trump but they aren’t putting their cash where their mouths are? I wouldn’t be surprised. Sometimes money speaks louder than words.

Salon

Update:

Tasteless Prankster

Published by Tom Sullivan on March 18, 2024

What’s so witty about Trump, mockery, and “Birdbrain”?

 Photo (2016) by Gage Skidmore via Flickr (CC BY-SA 2.0 DEED).

Michael Kruse examines how Donald “91 Counts” Trump uses humor “to maintain the useful reputation as a politically incorrect outsider despite his obvious insider status as the leader of the GOP.”

“Hilarious, “super funny,” some say. Kruse isn’t joking. He has quotes. Italian fascist Benito Mussolini, “had the same twisted sense of humor,” says Ruth Ben-Ghiat, author of “Strongmen.” It’s a part of Trump’s bonding with his audience.

“It’s such a huge part of his movement,” Alexander Reid Ross, the author of Against the Fascist Creep and a member of the executive committee of the Far Right Analysis Network, told me. “It is a way of inverting and reversing assumptions in a carnivalesque kind of way. It’s a way of upending morality,” he said. “It’s a thing that gives him permission to go on the attack in really hostile ways while saving face as just sort of an old satirist or something.”

Fintan O’Toole posted a New York Review of Books essay Kruse cites:

“This comic-authoritarian politics has some advantages over the older dictatorial style. It allows a threat to democracy to appear as at worst a tasteless prank,” O’Toole wrote. “Trump’s audiences, in other words, are not passive. This comedy is a joint enterprise of performer and listener. It gives those listeners the opportunity for consent and collusion.”

Trump’s lame jokes allow him to “normalize the abnormal, lessen the monstrous and offer audiences a sinister kind of license.”

There’s more praise for Trump “comedy.”

I get what Kruse and others are trying to convey. Trump is setting up an “in-group” and “out-group” dynamic, making it clear who to laugh at. I’m no expert on stand-up. But tasteless, as O’Toole put it, is what best describes Trump’s act, with “no line between entertainment and violence.” What passes for Trump rally humor is juvenile name-calling, fourth-rate pantomime, tall tales, outrageous boasts, and exhortations to mayhem frosted with a kind of Coulteresque “just joking” (for plausible deniability). I guess it’s not for everyone.

Once, after some pizza and beer, a friend and I attended the local Monday night “wrasslin'” just for the hell of it. This was long before the business became a pyrotechnic-fueled, chest-thumping spectacle under Vince McMahon. Remember, Trump was once part of that world too. It’s theater, of a sort, if you like that kind of theater. It’s “The Drunkard” with tights and piledrivers. The only reason Trump doesn’t appear with monster trucks is they require too much arena space that could be filled with adoring supplicants. Trump loves to brag about his crowd size.

“Bloodbath.” Just a metaphor! Ann Coulter would roll her eyes, toss her hair, and sigh, “It was only a joke.” (Trump doesn’t dare toss his hair.)

Right. And if you don’t fight like hell, you won’t have a country anymore? Also a metaphor. Like the insurrection that followed. Hilarious!

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Is A ‘Wabulance’ In Order?

Published by Tom Sullivan on March 18, 2024

MAGA Republicans can dish it out but they can’t take it

President Biden’s fiery SOTU hurt MAGA feelings. Axios has it:

WHITE SULPHUR SPRINGS, W.Va. — House Majority Whip Tom Emmer (R-Minn.) said GOP leadership should reconsider how they invite presidents to give the State of the Union address, citing President Biden‘s “divisive” speech.

Why it matters: Emmer argued Biden’s remarks were a “hyper-partisan” campaign speech, telling Axios the president should not be invited to address Congress next year if he’s elected to a second term.

What they’re saying: The Minnesota Republican said he’s bullish on former President Trump‘s odds of defeating Biden in November, but felt Biden’s speech should have had a more unifying tone.

  • “That was about the most divisive State of the Union — I wouldn’t extend him an invitation next year, if that’s what we’re going to get,” Emmer said during an interview at the House GOP retreat.
  • “He’s not going to be there next year — it’ll be a different president. But I think you’ve got to rethink issuing invitations for a State of the Union if it’s not going to be a State of the Union, and that was not. That was a campaign speech,” he added.

They’re aborting the State of the Union?

Emmer’s demand came after Biden’s March 7 speech. Others in his caucus wanted to abort it.

Axios reminds readers. Sen. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa) introduced a bill in late February to keep Biden from being invited to address the Congress if his budget and national security strategy is late to arrive.

On Super Tuesday, MSNBC reported:

Rep. Scott Perry raised the specter of rescinding Biden’s invitation. “He comes at the invitation of Congress, and Republicans are in control of the House,” the Pennsylvania Republican told Fox Business’ Maria Bartiromo. “There’s no reason that we need to invite him to get more propaganda.”

Glass jaws on that side of the aisle. Decorum for thee but not for me. Democrats laughed at the Georgia Peach Queen of decorum last May when she called for it after her past heckling of Biden’s SOTU.

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Trump’s Fed Chair Will Be A Crank

Published by digby on March 17, 2024

The WSJ:

Influential economic advisers to Donald Trump presented the former president with a shortlist of potential candidates to lead the Federal Reserve during a meeting at his Mar-a-Lago club in Florida last week, according to people familiar with the matter.

In the Thursday meeting, Steve Moore and Arthur Laffer, who have long advised Trump on economic issues, recommended three candidates: Kevin Warsh, an economic-policy adviser to President George W. Bush who later served on the Fed’s board of governors; Kevin Hassett, a former chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers during the Trump administration, and Laffer himself. Laffer, an economic adviser to former President Ronald Reagan, is one of the founding theorists of supply-side economics and a champion of the 2017 tax cuts Trump signed into law.

I’m not familiar with Warsh but he sounds like the most normal of the three. Hasset is a Trump loyalist and Laffer is a full-blown crank.

I wrote about his so-called economic success for Salon a bit ago. Laffer and Moore are heavily involved in the conomic side of Project 2025. It’s not good:

Trump’s determination to lower taxes for the rich is a given. Everything he does is first and foremost for himself and he won’t even try to rationalize it. It’s unlikely that the rest of the party can get away with that, so they’ll no doubt return to their perennial excuse — the federal budget deficit as a reason to lower taxes, even though that makes no sense. 

That tired old saw goes back to the Reagan administration which popularized a quack theory called “supply side economics” championed by economist Arthur Laffer. He claimed that the more you cut taxes the greater the revenue to the government. Even then everyone knew it was ridiculous. Reagan’s budget director, David Stockman, actually spilled the beans to journalist William Greider, telling him, “It’s kind of hard to sell ‘trickle down, so the supply-side formula was the only way to get a tax policy that was really ‘trickle down.’ Supply-side is ‘trickle-down’ theory.” Trump gave Arthur Laffer the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2019.

Today another supply side guru, Stephen Moore, formerly of the Club for Growth, has co-authored the Project 2025 economic plan to completely “reform” the U.S. Treasury. He’s pushing to privatize Social Security which Trump has never explicitly ruled out and told The Guardian, “Yes, I am strongly in favor of cutting tax rates to make [the] American economy No 1.” And this would presumably be in addition to extending the Trump tax cuts from 2017 which are up for renewal next year. 

Just this week, we’ve received some important data on the effect of those tax cuts and I’m sure you won’t be surprised to learn that they did not pay for themselves or deliver the thousands of dollars in increased wages to workers as promised. The New York Times reports:

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.

The new paper, by David Hope of the London School of Economics and Julian Limberg of King’s College London, examines 18 developed countries — from Australia to the United States — over a 50-year period from 1965 to 2015. The study compared countries that passed tax cuts in a specific year, such as the U.S. in 1982 when President Ronald Reagan slashed taxes on the wealthy, with those that didn’t, and then examined their economic outcomes. 

Per capita gross domestic product and unemployment rates were nearly identical after five years in countries that slashed taxes on the rich and in those that didn’t, the study found. 

But the analysis discovered one major change: The incomes of the rich grew much faster in countries where tax rates were lowered. Instead of trickling down to the middle class, tax cuts for the rich may not accomplish much more than help the rich keep more of their riches and exacerbate income inequality, the research indicates.

This is nothing but a giveaway to their rich benefactors. It’s a con that’s been working beautifully for 50 years. 

Don the Con will surely keep that going. It’s what he does.

Cancel Culture GOP Style

Published by digby on March 17, 2024

The GOPers want to cancel Joe Biden’s Stare of the Union speeches because he’s so divisive. You really can’t make this stuff up:

House Majority Whip Tom Emmer (R-Minn.) said GOP leadership should reconsider how they invite presidents to give the State of the Union address, citing President Biden‘s “divisive” speech.

 Emmer argued Biden’s remarks were a “hyper-partisan” campaign speech, telling Axios the president should not be invited to address Congress next year if he’s elected to a second term.

The Minnesota Republican said he’s bullish on former President Trump‘s odds of defeating Biden in November, but felt Biden’s speech should have had a more unifying tone.

“That was about the most divisive State of the Union — I wouldn’t extend him an invitation next year, if that’s what we’re going to get,” Emmer said during an interview at the House GOP retreat.

“He’s not going to be there next year — it’ll be a different president. But I think you’ve got to rethink issuing invitations for a State of the Union if it’s not going to be a State of the Union, and that was not. That was a campaign speech,” he added.

Emmer is not the first Republican to float blocking Biden from giving the annual speech, with multiple members having sought to prevent the president from speaking this year.

Sen. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa) introduced a bill aimed at barring Biden from delivering the speech unless he submitted his budget and national security proposal on time.

Former House Freedom Caucus Chairman Scott Perry (R-Pa.) called for Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) to rescind his invitation unless Biden took stronger action to address securing the border.

As political polarization has grown, the State of the Union has become an increasingly tense and partisan affair — with Republicans heckling Biden each of the last two years.

This silly “I know you are but what am I” trolling is so, so tiresome. These people are juvenile hooligans but it’s Biden’s fault because he made them do it. And this includes leaders like Tom Emmer who was reputed to be a mature adult in the room.

Many of the remaining semi-normal Republicans have had enough. Colorado right winger ken Buck announced last year that he wouldn’t run for re-election and just last week announced that he wasn’t even going to stay for the rest of the term. Kevin McCarthy checked out early too:

In the House, several Republicans who’ve announced retirements or resignations are longtime lawmakers like Buck known for adhering to congressional norms and traditions rather than the more disruptive tactics of the far right. Some of the GOP retirees in both chambers have expressed concerns about the increasingly Trump-centric and partisan direction their party is taking. And multiple lawmakers who are retiring have cited general congressional dysfunction, from difficulty passing major legislation to petty infighting, as a central reason for their departure.

“I’m sure the leadership chaos on the Republican side is not helping keep members in Congress,” Kyle Kondik, a political analyst and managing editor at Sabato’s Crystal Ball at the University of Virginia, told Vox in December. “Overall, though, the House just does not seem like a very pleasant place to be.”

No it certainly doesn’t seem like a pleasant place to be.