Former South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley speaking with attendees at the Republican Jewish Coalition’s 2023 Annual Leadership Summit at the Venetian Convention & Expo Center in Las Vegas, Nevada. Photo by Gage Skidmore via Flickr (CC BY-SA 2.0 DEED Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic)
The presidential candidacy of former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley was never exactly soaring. She nonetheless hit a downdraft when a majority of voters in Tuesday’s nonbinding Nevada Republican primary chose “none of these candidates.”
Donald “91 Counts” Trump, the indicted former president and Haley’s only serious opponent, was not even on the ballot.
“None of these candidates,” Haley, a number of long shot challengers and two former GOP candidates — Mike Pence and Tim Scott — were on Nevada’s primary ballot.
Pence and Scott received a few thousand votes combined and some of the minor candidates garnered several hundred in total.
The Haley campaign did not respond directly to a question about their loss, instead releasing a statement where they called Thursday’s competing caucuses a “game rigged for Trump,” an allegation the Nevada Republican Party has repeatedly denied.
Even so, Haley was never eligible to win convention delegates on Tuesday.
The GOP primary carried little weight, because state Republicans opted to award their delegates through party-run caucuses, which Trump is expected to win Thursday. The party barred those participating in the primary, including Haley, from being eligible for the caucuses, which means Trump will face little competition.
Haley’s campaign dismissed the loss, stating it wasted no resources in Nevada.
“We didn’t bother to play a game rigged for Trump,” Haley’s team said in a statement. “We’re full steam ahead in South Carolina and beyond.” The South Carolina primary is February 24.
Enough Republican voters have indicated they would not vote for Trump the Convict to all but sink his reelection chances. Haley would like to be the GOP’s fallback candidate in the wings.
Trump’s candidacy may not be dead yet, but that metaphor is.
Elie Mystal captured the tenor of our times in a single Formerly Twitter post Monday afternoon:
Me: We just ruled that presidents are not immune from criminal prosecution. James Madison: You just figured that out today? Me: Some people did. Madison: Dear God. Next you'll be telling me you only recently figured out that traitors can't run for office. Me: No, that's Thursday.
On the first ruling, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit on Tuesday thankfully and logically ruled unanimously that former U.S. presidents, Donald “91 Counts” Trump specifically, are not immune from criminal prosecution.
“SAVE PRESIDENTIAL IMMUNITY!” the would-be potentate declared immediately on his social network. You first have to have it to save it, Donald.
Yes, Trump will appeal to “his” justices on the U.S. Supreme Court, and must by Monday, the Appeals Court ruled.
Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern write at Slate:
The justices must now decide whether to halt the new ruling—an act that seems likely to push Trump’s criminal trial past the 2024 election—or allow proceedings at the trial court to move forward at a pace that might affect the election’s outcome. In theory, this call is purely procedural; in reality, due to the compressed timeline here, it may well determine Trump’s fate. If the former president persuades the justices to freeze the case before Judge Tanya Chutkan for months, then wins the election, he will undoubtedly exploit his office to scrap the prosecution. Once again, SCOTUS holds his fate in its hands. It does so on the very same week it will hear a different case about his removal from the ballot.
Which references the second part of Mystal’s quip. But we’ll come back to that.
While it’s impossible to predict how the justices will handle what would otherwise be a straightforward case of Presidents Not Being Kings, there is reason to think a majority of the justices might kick the can down the road far enough to help Trump evade accountability before November. Such a move would be indefensible. The former president’s arguments are not just weak but trivial, and even this hard-right court should not debase itself by pretending to take them seriously. The question is not whether a majority will ultimately agree with Trump (it won’t) but whether a majority will abet Trump’s efforts to run out the clock (it might). The bench slap he received on Tuesday, however, makes that craven move harder to pull off with a straight face.
Indefensible? Yes. Gutless? Epically. A dereliction of duty to the citizens they serve (meaning in addition to Clarence Thomas’ billionaire benefactors). The drain around which their reputations swirl beckons. A “craven move harder to pull off with a straight face”? Perhaps. But then regular readers know that shamelessness is conservatives’ superpower.
Trump’s arguments before the D.C. court were facially farcical. But since that describes Trump’s morning makeup regime, unsurprising.
Lithwick and Stern continue:
The court’s reasoning boiled down to a simple proposition: “At bottom, former President Trump’s stance would collapse our system of separated powers by placing the President beyond the reach of all three Branches.” This position was, you may recall, taken by Trump’s attorney, John Sauer, who was asked at oral argument in this appeal whether presidential immunity would prevent the prosecution of a president who ordered SEAL Team Six to assassinate a political opponent. Sauer was unable to explain why it would not.
Trump’s attorneys will offer nothing better behind which the Supreme Court’s conservative majority can hide. At best, SCOTUS might refuse the case and let the lower court ruling stand. Second. it might grant a stay. But that would imply the Supremes believe his case has merit, and/or signal the court’s sense that a lower panel should not have the last word on a ruling of such import. It would also serve Trump’s desire to put off special prosecutor Jack Smith’s prosecution in hopes that, should Trump win the presidency in the fall, he could simply abort the case from the Oval Office. Third, SCOTUS could affirm, “issuing a one-line decision that simply says the D.C. Circuit got it right, without holding oral arguments.”
What’s the betting line in London?
As for Thursday’s follies, a court will entertain whether or not the 14th Amendment disqualifies Trump of Insurrection from ever again holding elected office. Trump’s attorneys offer more ludicrous arguments proving Trump is getting what he pays(?) for. Election Law Blog’s Richard Hasen has opinions, also at Slate:
Consider first Trump’s argument in the disqualification case that the Supreme Court will hear in oral argument on Thursday. That case concerns a Colorado Supreme Court decision keeping Trump off the ballot for the Republican presidential nomination on grounds that he engaged in insurrection in violation of Section 3 of the 14th Amendment. I’ve already noted here at Slate that Trump’s arguments in his Supreme Court opening brief against the Colorado decision spent an inordinate amount of time on a hypertechnical argument about whether the president is an “officer of the United States” and the presidency is an “office” of the United States for purposes of Section 3. The argument is exceptionally weak. As Marty Lederman writes, “If the presidency isn’t an office of the United States, of what sovereignty is it an office? Ohio? France?”
As Marty helpfully explains, there are really two related hypertechnical arguments here. First, because the presidency is not an “office” of the United States, the disqualification provision of Section 3 does not disqualify anyone who engaged in insurrection from serving as president. The second argument is that disqualification does not apply to a former president who has violated his oath, because the president is not an “officer of the United States” and Section 3 applies only to someone who has “previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, to support the Constitution of the United States.” Trump has focused on this second argument.
Trumpish BS gets piled higher and deeper, of course. What the republic faces is Americans’ freedoms hanging beneath a Damoclean sword held in place by the thinnest of judicial threads. The Supreme Court has to know its already battered reputation is also on the line:
The Supreme Court now faces what are potentially two outcome-determinative questions on the presidential election, and it will likely make one or both decisions in a matter of weeks. If the court disqualifies Trump, that should be the end of his candidacy. If the court finds one way or the other not to disqualify Trump (and there are many ways the court can do so aside from embracing the hypertechnical argument), then the decision on timing on the immunity question becomes crucial.
If the court lets the election subversion case go to trial after holding there is no immunity, there’s a real chance Trump is convicted, and that conviction could be enough to swing the election away from Trump. Indeed, if it happens before the Republican National Convention, there’s a real chance the delegates could choose someone other than Trump for the general election.
Whatever the court does, it needs to be guided by the principle that like cases should be treated alike, and no person is above the law. The surest way for the court to lose more respect in the public’s eye is if it creates a rule that helps Donald Trump and only Donald Trump.
“People have got to know whether or not their president is a crook,” Richard Nixon famously said as he faced the Watergate investigation. What Trump insists is that they not know until after he’s been reelected and declares himself sovereign.
In an email on Monday sent to attorneys for Trump, Weisselberg, the Trump Organization, as well as counsel for New York Attorney General Letitia James’s office, New York Justice Arthur Engoron explained he wanted answers before issuing his verdict.
“As the presiding magistrate, the trier of fact, and the judge of credibility, I of course want to know whether Mr. Weisselberg is now changing his tune, and whether he is admitting he lied under oath in my courtroom at this trial,” Engoron wrote.
“I do not want to ignore anything in a case of this magnitude,” Engoron added.
Engoron has asked the legal teams to respond by 5 p.m. Wednesday.
Ultimately, Engoron noted, he might use the news as reason to invoke “falsus in uno”—which would discount the credibility of Weiselberg’s entire testimony.
“If you’re going to issue a ruling and if it turns out Weisselberg lied, that’s going to harm the Trump Organization when it comes time for the verdict,” former federal prosecutor Elie Honig told CNN on Thursday.
Oops.
Weisselberg isn’t going to “flip” by any meaningful definition of the term. He’s been paid millions by Trump to keep his mouth shut and he already did several months in jail for lying about his perks. But the
Remember how Republicans used to spend lavishly at the Trump Hotel when he owned it while he was in office. For some reason they aren’t doing that anymore now that the hotel isn’t owned by Trump anymore:
[S]ince becoming a Waldorf Astoria in 2022, GOP spending at the largely unchanged luxury hotel in the Old Post Office building has all but disappeared. This directly conflicts with how Republicans explained their choice of venue at the time. When questions arose about their patronage of the then-president’s business, Republicans brushed off concerns of corruption saying that Trump’s DC hotel was simply a convenient location near Capitol Hill for lawmakers and political operatives to socialize, that they would be there regardless of who owned it.
As such, it would be reasonable to expect that Republicans would continue to frequent the hotel after Trump sold it and it rebranded as a Waldorf Astoria in June 2022, leaving many of the building’s luxury public spaces largely unchanged from its time as a Trump property. Yet political spending by GOP groups at the new hotel is virtually nonexistent, clocking in at a measly $37,878, according to the FEC’s most recent data covering the 17 months from June 2022 to the end of November 2023. For comparison, GOP groups spent $1,570,239, or 40 times that, in the interval between June 2018 and November 2019—the last comparable period when the building was still under Trump ownership. In fact, the amount spent since it opened is just a quarter of the $154,500 that then-Speaker Paul Ryan’s joint fundraising committee spent there in a single day in 2018, and a fraction of the $435,034 that Republican groups have spent at Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s private club and residence, since the Waldorf Astoria opened.
DuringDonald Trump’s first campaign and his four years in the White House, his foreign business dealings drew constant scrutiny for potential conflicts of interest.
Now, as he marches toward the GOP nomination in his comeback presidential bid, the microscope is again on his overseas empire—and those holdings are growing. Trump will likely again come under pressure to distance himself from his business ventures, partly by promising that the Trump Organization won’t get involved in any new overseas deals.
Since 2021, the Trump Organization, which had paused or pulled back from ventures during his presidency, has revived its global expansion efforts. The company is building a second golf course in Scotland and has branding deals with residential projects in India and resort developments in Indonesia…
During Trump’s years in the White House, the Trump Organization decided not to move ahead with projects it was considering in places such as Israel, Saudi Arabia and the Philippines. His company continued new projects in Scotland, Indonesia and India, and continued other managing and licensing arrangements throughout the world.
After Trump left the White House, his company resumed overseas expansion with a new deal in Oman. It also continued looking for new opportunities in Asia, Europe and South America.
[…]
Critics say Trump didn’t do enough the first time around to separate his administration and his business interests, and fear the same would happen again in a second term. “To have the president of the U.S. influenced by foreign money is extremely dangerous,” said Richard Painter, who was chief White House ethics lawyer under George W. Bush.
Trump has long denied any wrongdoing. He and other family members have pointed out that the Trump Organization was involved in global real-estate projects and other overseas businesses long before he entered politics.
Once Trump left the White House and became a private citizen, he was no longer subject to the legal and ethical issues restricting the president, said Eric Trump, a Trump Organization executive vice president and a son of the former president. He said the company has been looking on four continents for new resort, golf, lodging and condominium developments.
“We have been in real estate for four generations,” Eric Trump said. “Are we supposed to sit back and do absolutely nothing?”
Eric Trump said the Trump Organization’s recent foreign expansion has been no different than deals being pursued by other major hotel, resort and real-estate companies.
“These are places in the world that it makes sense for us as a five-star brand to be,” he said.
Sure. No big deal. Trump is honest as the day is long and we can fully trust him to avoid any conflicts of interest. After all, it’s not as if his failure to divest himself of his businesses in the past, as all the other presidents have done, caused even the slightest appearance of conflict of interest.
Mr. Trump repeatedly circulated unsubstantiated claims in efforts to link his Democratic rival to his son’s business dealings, which he painted as corrupt, even before Mr. Biden became his party’s nominee.
In 2019, Mr. Trump publicly called for China to examine Hunter Biden’s financial dealings in the country. Mr. Trump claimed, without evidence, that Hunter Biden “made millions of dollars from China” and that he used his political connections to persuade China to invest $1.5 billion in a fund he was involved in.
At campaign rallies, Mr. Trump frequently levied claims that Hunter Biden was corrupt, often pointing to a New York Post report about a laptop that was seized by the F.B.I.
And during a presidential debate in October 2020, Mr. Trump repeatedly suggested, without evidence, that Mr. Biden had both served as a consultant and used his former position as vice president to help secure business deals for his son. That series of attacks drew further public scrutiny to Mr. Biden’s son’s activities, as searches for “Hunter Biden” skyrocketed following the exchanges during the debate.
Mr. Trump later called for his attorney general, William P. Barr, to take action against his Democratic challenger for his son’s work, just two weeks before the 2020 election.
What a mess. The border bill is dead, Mike Johnson’s proposal for a stand-alone Israel bill will be vetoed by the president (if it even gets out of the House), and the fate of Ukraine and potentially Europe, as well as humanitarian aid for Gaza, hangs in the balance. These people are unrepentant chaos agents.
Here’s a report from Manu Raju of CNN from the smoldering ruins of the GOP Senate caucus:
McConnell, Cornyn and other top Rs say now the Senate should move ahead with the other aspects of the emergency aid package — Israel, Ukraine, Taiwan funding — and leave border provisions behind given deep divisions in the ranks. Schumer wouldn’t say how he would proceed after tomorrow’s failed vote. McConnell on his handling of talks: “I followed the instructions of my conference who were insisting that we tackle this in October. I mean, it’s actually our side that wanted to tackle the border issue. We started it.”
Even he admits that his senate Republicans are perfidious liars.
Will they end up passing those foreign aid bills? Who knows? All this could have been avoided if they hadn’t decided to be cute to try to force the president to eat shit and agree to a border bill that his caucus hates. They got what they wanted. And then they decided not to vote for it!
This isn’t the first time they’ve played this game and it never seems to work for them. I suspect they know it in this case. But Dear Leader demanded it and Dear Leader must be obeyed.
I’m sure you recall a few years ago when the right wing had one of their perennial meltdowns over the supposed plan to put conservatives in “FEMA camps.” I case you don’t here’s a brief recap:
The FEMA camps conspiracy theory is a belief, particularly within the American Patriot movement, that the United States Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) is planning to imprison US citizens in concentration camps, following the imposition of martial law in the United States after a major disaster or crisis. In some versions of the theory, only suspected dissidents will be imprisoned. In more extreme versions, large numbers of US citizens will be imprisoned for the purposes of extermination as a New World Order is established. The theory has existed since the late 1970s, but its circulation has increased with the advent of the internet and social media platforms.
This conspiracy theory had a huge revival during the Obama years and then died off when Trump came in.
But as you may have noticed from that Wikipedia entry,the plot really took off during the Reagan years because his administration actually did develop some sort of plan for … FEMA camps.
Rex 84B, short for Readiness Exercise 1984 BRAVO, was a classified scenario and drill developed by the United States federal government to detain large numbers of United States residents deemed to be “national security threats” in the event that the president declared a National Emergency. The scenario envisioned state defense forces rounding up 500,000 undocumented Central American residents and 4000 American citizens whom the US Attorney General had designated as “national security threats” as part of the secret Continuity of Government program. These people would be detained at 22 military bases in concentration camps run by the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
It’s a Republican thing.
Trump’s top henchman Steven Miller has been floating the idea of “deportation camps” and one of Trump’s big plans is to do sweeps in American cities and put the homeless into camps as well.
Camps are on the GOP agenda.
Now we have the laboratory of MAGA atrocities proposing the same thing:
We called them workhouses in Britain in the 1800s. Dickens wrote all about them
Gov. Ron DeSantis on Monday endorsed a statewide strategy for dealing with homeless people that Republican lawmakers say is the first of its kind.
In short, put them in camps.
Legislators in the last week advanced bills that would require counties to ban homeless people from sleeping in public places and instead allow them to stay in designated camps with security, sanitation and access to behavioral health services.
Although the governor said the legislation is still a “work in progress,” he endorsed its goal of moving homeless people off the streets. He also said he was open to assigning money to help local governments treat and house them.
“We feel that if the Legislature is willing to lean in on this, that we want to be there to be able to offer support, but it’s got to be done right,” DeSantis said during a Monday news conference in Miami Beach.
“It’s got to be done in ways that is focused primarily on ensuring public order, ensuring quality of life for residents, ensuring that people’s property values are maintained,” he added.
And here I thought Florida didn’t have a homeless problem like these west coast hellholes…
Last year, Florida’s Council on Homelessness reported 30,809 people experiencing homelessness, up 9% from 2019. Of those, 15,706 were sleeping outdoors, in cars or in abandoned buildings, more than double the number from 2021. Hillsborough and Pinellas counties reported 4,144 people homeless last year, down about 300 since 2018.
According to this article there is actually some question about how this might work with some homeless advocates thinking it could be helpful if there was enough money to do it right. But most homeless advocates are rightfully concerned that there won’t be enough money to properly fund it and the idea that homeless people who don’t comply being arrested sounds like a recipe for disaster.
I don’t know about you but I wouldn’t trust Ron DeSantis to properly feed a dog much less show anything close to empathy for people who are in dire straits. You’ll notice that his priority is “ensuring public order, ensuring quality of life for residents, ensuring that people’s property values are maintained.” This is not a person who will be remotely concerned about the well-being of the people he’s incarcerating.
Finally we have some clarity on a subject that anyone with common sense could have said was obvious since the moment the constitution was ratified:
A federal appeals court on Tuesday rejected former President Donald J. Trump’s claim that he was immune to charges of plotting to subvert the results of the 2020 election, ruling that he must go to trial on a criminal indictment accusing him of seeking to overturn his loss to President Biden.
The unanimous ruling by a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit handed Mr. Trump a significant defeat, but was unlikely to be the final word on his claims of executive immunity. Mr. Trump, who is on a path to locking up the Republican presidential nomination, is expected to continue his appeal to the Supreme Court.
Still, the panel’s 57-page ruling signaled an important moment in American jurisprudence, answering a question that had never been addressed by an appeals court: Can former presidents escape being held accountable by the criminal justice system for things they did while in office?
The question is novel because no former president until Mr. Trump had been indicted, so there was never an opportunity for a defendant to make — and courts to consider — the sweeping claim of executive immunity that he put forward.
The panel, composed of two judges appointed by Democrats and one Republican appointee, said in its decision that, despite the privileges of the office he once held, Mr. Trump was subject to federal criminal law like any other American.
“For the purpose of this criminal case, former President Trump has become citizen Trump, with all of the defenses of any other criminal defendant,” the panel wrote. “But any executive immunity that may have protected him while he served as president no longer protects him against this prosecution.”
They also did an end run around his delay tactics by saying they will lift the stay and start the clock running unless Trump files an appeal with the Supremes by February 12th, effectively precluding an en banc appeal.
This is the key passage as it relates to how long a stay may now last in the DC case. https://t.co/00WA5Hee3y
— Andrew Weissmann (weissmann11 on Threads)🌻 (@AWeissmann_) February 6, 2024
Here’s Andrew Weissman on the ruling:
"All eyes should be on a filing that Donald Trump will certainly make in the next week asking for Supreme Court review. And what the Supreme Court does."
It’s rare that I bother with a Thomas Friedman column. He’s usually full of himself and his breathless “deepisms.” But the headline on his piece today grabbed me. It’s bumper-sticker messaging about Republican efforts to kill the border security deal, and it’s absent Friedman’s usual verbal filigree.
Every so often there is a piece of legislation on Capitol Hill that defines America and its values — that shows what kind of country we want to be. I would argue that when it comes to the $118.3 billion bipartisan compromise bill in the Senate to repair our broken immigration system and supply vital aid to Ukraine, Taiwan and Israel, its passage or failure won’t define just America but also the world that we’re going to inhabit.
There are hinges in history, and this is one of them. What Washington does — or does not do — this year to support its allies and secure our border will say so much about our approach to security and stability in this new post-post-Cold War era. Will America carry the red, white and blue flag into the future — or just a white flag? Given the pessimistic talk coming out of the Capitol, it is looking more and more like the white flag — autographed by Donald Trump.
Republicans have abandoned any “America First” pretense. When they say America they mean Mr. L’État, c’est moi. These are not serious people:
“The United States has for some time ceased to be a serious country. Our extreme polarization combined with institutional rules that privilege minorities makes it impossible for us to meet our international obligations,” the political theorist Francis Fukuyama remarked on the American Purpose website. “The Republican Party has grown very adept at hostage holding. … The hard-core MAGA wing represents a minority within a minority, yet our institutional rules permit them to veto decisions clearly favored by a majority of Americans.”
The WWII and Cold War generations are passing away, and the soberness they learned through hard experience with them, Friedman suggests. Joe Biden is one of the few. Although just a few years older than Trump the Unserious never held an office in public service until he was 70. And then just to boost his brand and make another buck.
Trump’s GOP is a throwback, U.S. foreign policy historian Michael Mandelbaum tells Friedman, “to the interwar period between World War I and World War II, when a whole segment of the elite felt World War I was a failure and a mistake — the equivalent today of Iraq and Afghanistan — and then approached the dawn of World War II as isolationists and protectionists, seeing our allies as either hopeless or leeches.”
If they’re not making money for Trump, that’s just what America’s allies are to him. His pre-White House dalliance with Russian President Vladimir Putin was about getting a Trump Tower-Moscow deal. Then Trump got a shot of real power up his nose and acquired a taste for something money couldn’t buy. He/they will sacrifice the world for more of it.
“Being president,” Michelle Obama said, “doesn’t change who you are, it reveals who you are.”
Who Trump is was nakedly visible for those with eyes to see well before his election. Trump is emotionally stunted, mentally unstable, amoral, deeply insecure, needy, venal, vain and vengeful, a pathological liar and con man who has lived his life on the edge of the law (and outside it) using his father’s fortune to shield himself, and now his former office. The law may or may not finally catch up to him before the fall election.
But in how willingly MAGA Republicans have been baptized into Trumpism, they have revealed who they are. These are people without honor, bad people. Not just misguided. Bad. Except Friedman will not say so in the pages of The New York Times.
Where the First Church of Trumpism will lead the U.S. and the world is predictable, Friedman will say:
As Financial Times columnist Gideon Rachman just reported, “the ammunition shortage” in Ukraine “has already led to an increase in Ukrainian casualties. … The shortage of weaponry is also having an effect on the willingness of Ukrainians to volunteer for military service. The mounting pressure on the Kyiv government is part of the explanation for the public falling-out between President Volodymyr Zelensky and his commander in chief, Valeriy Zaluzhny.”
If this is the future, and our friends from Europe to the Middle East to Asia sense that we are going into hibernation, they will all start to cut deals — European allies with Putin, Arab allies with Iran, Asian allies with China. We won’t feel the change overnight, but, unless we pass this bill or something close to it, we will feel it over time.
America’s ability to assemble alliances against the probes of Russia, China and Iran will gradually be diminished. Our ability to sustain sanctions on “pariah nations” like North Korea will erode. The rules governing trade, banking and the sanctity of borders being violated by force — rules that America set, enforced and benefited from since World War II — will increasingly be set by others, and by their interests.
Ater Trump is gone and the hangover sets in, cultists will have time to repent at their leisure. They won’t, of course.
“I want my war!” (Dustin Hoffman as Captain Hook in Hook, 1991). More fake hair.
The French famously supported Americans’ fight to win freedom from England and its king. But Republicans won’t support Ukraine’s fight to secure theirs against invading Russians. Republicans won’t take yes for an answer on a bill to enhance U.S. border security after hissing and spitting about it for years. They don’t want to govern, they want to rule, yet have no idea how to do it. But kowtowing before Donald “91 Counts” Trump? They’re hell at bowing and scraping.
Christian conservatives make up a sizable percentage of the GOP base. They are conditioned from childhood to serve a heavenly king and to long for his return. But since Jesus Christ has been delayed now for two thousand years, they’ve grown impatient. They are ready to settle. For Trump.
With President Joe Biden’s economy going gangbusters (even Fox News admits it); with the inflation Republicans expected to run on falling; with unemployment at historic lows and the stock market at historic highs; with the end of Roe following him like a dark cloud; and with the U.S. justice system breathing down his neck about insurrection and other crimes, Trump has no weapons left for waging his 2024 war on America except fearmongering about border security.
Trump wants his war. On nonwhite immigrants and, ultimately, on the freedoms the French helped us win in the eighteenth century.
His enablers in Congress will bow and oblige. They won’t take yes for an answer on the border security bill they’ve ranted about for years (Catherine Rampell, Washington Post):
A hard-won, bipartisan Senate deal dropped Sunday evening, with tons of items on conservatives’ border-policy bucket list, including many that former president Donald Trump had begged for. These include:
beefing up border security as a condition for giving any more aid to Ukraine (check!)
a tougher and faster asylum-processing system so that those who don’t meet asylum criteria cannot stay and work for years while their cases crawl through the courts (check!)
hiring more personnel for Customs and Border Protection as well as Immigration and Customs Enforcement (1,500 and 1,200, respectively — so, check, check!)
huge investments in fentanyl detection technologies and other anti-trafficking enforcement (check!)
reviving something like Title 42 restrictions, wherein the president can “shut down” most of the asylum system (though this version doesn’t require a public health pretext and has more severe consequences for border-crossers — so, check-plus, perhaps).
House Republicans should have been pinching themselves in disbelief. Yet within hours of this 370-page bill dropping, House GOP leaders ruled out letting their chamber vote on any of it.
“I’ve seen enough,” Speaker Mike Johnson (La.) said, later adding that it was “a waste of time.” He just can’t take yes for an answer, it seems.
Speaker Johnson denies he’s taking orders from the indicted former president, but that’s beyond laughable in this former political party.
“I do not think we should do a Border Deal, at all, unless we get EVERYTHING needed to shut down the INVASION of Millions & Millions of people, many from parts unknown, into our once great, but soon to be great again, Country!” Trump posted to Truth Social. Give him everything and he’ll insist it’s wrong.
Only he can fix it. His cult is willing to see Ukraine fall and the “chaos” they claim is occuring on the border (and the MAGA convoy in Texas could not find) continue until Trump is back in the White House. They will misinform the public about the proposed bill to justify killing it.
Maybe House lawmakers are genuinely confused about how immigration law works. After all, they keep insisting that President Biden take actions that courts have ruled would be illegal. They also appear to misunderstand (misrepresent?) an aspect of the bipartisan Senate deal, in suggesting that it “accepts 5,000 illegal immigrants a day.” This is not, in fact, what the bill would do; rather, it would force the United States to block anyone crossing between ports of entry from even applying for asylum when that threshold has recently been met (as is the case right now).
Maybe House Republicans have convinced themselves that any legislation that could appeal to Democrats must, ipso facto, be too reasonable for them to consider. In a twist on the Groucho Marx line, they’d never belong to a club that would have anyone else as a member.
Hard-line Republicans had already begun efforts to punish their own party members who worked on this bipartisan deal, including lead GOP negotiator Sen. James Lankford(Okla.). Poor Lankford reportedly didn’t want this job at all, but he caught the falling knife anyway — and then got stabbed in the back with it.
The bill is too conservative for many Democrats, yet Biden is willing to accept it to get more ammunition to Ukraine’s defenders as part of the package. But Trump wants his political war. The Ukrainians have a real, one on their hands.
Trump is no Marquis de Lafayette, and the Republicans no allies of freedom like the French.
