Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

Not bloody likely

This piece by Punchbowl is yet another “red tsunami” horse race piece designed to give Democrats heartburn. (Fun for MAGA and Villagers alike!)

We’ve talked a lot during the past two years about the group of a dozen-plus vulnerable House Republicans who hold districts President Joe Biden won in 2020. But what if these Republicans aren’t as endangered as we thought?

We’re in southern California all week talking to candidates running in competitive races that may decide control of the House. In conversation after conversation, we found rank-and-file Republicans increasingly ready to embrace former President Donald Trump in toss-up seats. Trump lost California by roughly 30 points in both 2016 and 2020, so this is a significant development.

There are five Republican incumbents in the Golden State who represent seats that Biden won. Given the razor-thin GOP House majority, if Democrats flip all these seats they could win the chamber back this fall. But it’s not so simple.

Much has changed since 2020 when Biden beat Trump in a popular vote and Electoral College landslide. Biden is currently trailing Trump in the polls nationally. He’s stuck with a 38% average approval rating. So in the mind of these at-risk Republicans, tying yourself to a well-known challenger when Biden is broadly unpopular isn’t the worst idea, despite Trump’s obvious downsides.

“I think the base is more excited than ever. The more they try to lock up President Trump, I think it does the opposite of whatever they’re trying to do,” Rep. Young Kim (R-Calif.) told us. “So there is more enthusiasm, there is more energy that’s going to help the base to come out.” Biden won Kim’s district in 2020 by just under two points. She faces Democrat Joe Kerr in November.

Farther south, Republican Matt Gunderson is challenging Rep. Mike Levin (D-Calif.) in a San Diego-area seat Biden won by double digits four years ago. But Gunderson insisted the math is different this time around. “Right now in our polling, Biden’s lead has diminished to 5.7%. So it’s almost half his tally last cycle,” Gunderson said. “That Trump drag impact’s not going to be the same as it has been in the past.”

Democrats are also targeting longtime incumbent GOP Rep. Ken Calvert (R-Calif.) to the east of Los Angeles. Trump won by the district around a point in 2020, and Calvert is eagerly endorsing the former president in 2024.“My opponent’s going to be supporting Joe Biden, and I’m comfortable with that. He can support Joe Biden. I’ll support Trump, and I think the district will vote accordingly,” Calvert said. Calvert narrowly defeated Democrat Will Rollins in 2022, and two are locked in a highly-anticipated rematch this cycle.

The acknowledgment that Biden’s political standing is eroding in swing seats isn’t a radical assessment. Even in deep-blue California, there are still pockets of opposition to Biden as residents unhappy with rising crime, illegal border crossings and sky-high costs make their displeasure known.For example, Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom recently faced a recall effort and there’s fury at progressive district attorneys like George Gascón in Los Angeles County.

FFS. A bunch of republicans running for re-election are saying they have a good chance to win? Stop the presses!

Yes, there are red districts in California. They may win re-election and they may not. But there is nothing in this article to suggest that this is a given or that anything in California’s current political environment indicates this. Certainly, the fact that Gavin Newsom was subject to a recall three years ago, in which he prevailed by well over 60 % and then went on to win re-election the next year with similar numbers, says nothing!

This is exactly the kind of reporting you get when the “Republicans are winning!” narrative takes hold. And yet the national polls actually have the presidency essentially tied and the swing state polls are all over the place. Sheesh.

Ric Grenell: from internet troll to Trump’s twisted foreign policy guru

If you have the time to read just one long piece today, read this one about Grenell, on tap to be Trump’s Secretary of State or something equally horrifying. He will serve as one of Trump’s top deputies in any case:

Richard Grenell’s quest to be secretary of state in a second Trump administration began late on Election Day in 2020, when the defeated president dispatched loyalists to run shambolic “stop the steal” operations in battleground states.

President Donald J. Trump tapped Mr. Grenell — his combative former ambassador to Germany, acting national intelligence chief and special envoy to the Balkans — to fly by private plane to Nevada, where Mr. Grenell ensconced himself, his dog Lola, lawyers and a crew of activists in a suite at the Venetian Resort, which served as the group’s war room in Las Vegas. In a days-long spectacle, the Trump team filed a lawsuit and aired false accusations of fraud, including one wrongly implicating hundreds of members of the military.

It was all a sham. Mr. Grenell told the team in the war room, two G.O.P. operatives recalled, that the Nevada vote was not, in fact, stolen. The operatives, who asked not to be named for fear of reprisal from Mr. Grenell, said he told the team that the goal was simply to “throw spaghetti at the wall” — the operatives described Mr. Grenell making a theatrical tossing gesture as he spoke — to distract the media from calling Nevada while the election battle in neighboring Arizona played out.

In retrospect, one of the operatives said, the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol should have subpoenaed everyone in the room, including the operative himself.

Somebody could have stepped forward at the time but then Grenell is a particularly nasty piece of work:

This article is based on interviews with 40 people, including nearly three dozen Republicans. Most asked for anonymity because they did not want to harm their chances of roles in a future Trump administration or to unleash the wrath of Mr. Grenell, who frequently savages those he disagrees with on social media. One Republican former operative said that after a recent disagreement, Mr. Grenell combed five years’ worth of the operative’s tweets to fuel an online attack that lasted for weeks

He first came to GOP prominence as an internet troll so that makes some sense. But he’s been a full-blown Trump troll since trump came on the scene:

To his detractors, Mr. Grenell is a caustic opportunist of modest achievement who scaled the heights of an administration in which pit bull partisanship was prized. Susan E. Rice, President Biden’s former domestic policy adviser and a former national security adviser to President Barack Obama, has called him “one of the most nasty, dishonest people I’ve ever encountered.” Brad Chase, Mr. Grenell’s former business partner, who fell out with him over his conversion to Trumpism, said he was a “soulless, shameless sellout.”

To his supporters, Mr. Grenell is a loyal, tireless messenger for Mr. Trump who transmits the former president’s demands with an efficient bellicosity that stifles naysayers.

“President Trump trusts him as a pair of safe hands in deconstructing the administrative state and confronting the deep state,” Stephen K. Bannon, the former Trump strategist and host of the “War Room” podcast, said in a brief interview. “There’s so much that’s got to be taken apart and jettisoned.”

Here’s his foreign policy vision:

Mr. Grenell has spent the past three and a half years leveraging his Balkan contacts in business ventures, including with an important partner — Jared Kushner, Mr. Trump’s son-in-law — and that he brings a bombastic bravado to American diplomacy held in high regard by the former president.

“If you want to avoid war, you better have a son of a bitch as the secretary of state,” Mr. Grenell said in a March episode of “Self Centered,” a current events podcast. America needs a “tough” chief diplomat, he said, “who goes in to these tables and says: ‘Guys, if we don’t solve this here, if we don’t represent peace and figure out a tough way, I’ve got to take this file, go back to the United States and transfer it to the secretary of defense, who doesn’t negotiate. He’s going to bomb you.’”

Here’s a NY Times gift link to read the rest of this, which includes his massive conflicts of interests, particularly in the Balkans and other places in the Russian sphere of interest. It’s worth your time. He’s a monster and he’s going to be in charge of Trump’s foreign policy and any other dirty work Trump wants done if he wins.

… when they want to

Trump only got 6 write-in votes at the convention. He put this out yesterday:

The crowd “enthusiastically” booed him which anyone who saw the footage can see. But this is for the cult which won’t see it because they live in a hermetically sealed bubble. If they come across it they’ll say it’s all fake. He has fully indoctrinated his followers. But it’s still shocking that he doesn’t care that the rest of us can see the truth with our own eyes. Utterly shameless.

Memorial Day Executive Mansion,
Washington,
Nov. 21, 1864.

Dear Madam,

I have been shown in the files of the War Department a statement of the Adjutant General of Massachusetts that you are the mother of five sons who have died gloriously on the field of battle.

I feel how weak and fruitless must be any words of mine which should attempt to beguile you from the grief of a loss so overwhelming. But I cannot refrain from tendering to you the consolation that may be found in the thanks of the Republic they died to save.

I pray that our Heavenly Father may assuage the anguish of your bereavement, and leave you only the cherished memory of the loved and lost, and the solemn pride that must be yours to have laid so costly a sacrifice upon the altar of Freedom.

Yours, very sincerely and respectfully,

A. Lincoln.

A reminder of how Trump communicated with the widows of fallen soldiers when he was president:

That’s the man who constantly claims he did more for Black people than Abraham Lincoln.

For every holiday he has a similar message

As usual, there is nothing on earth that isn’t all about him:

He thinks it’s cute.

He’s so brain damaged.

By the way, here’s the boring old guy:

“you’ll forever prefer the music of your late teens”

The Washington Post (gift link):

The plucky poll slingers at YouGov, who are consistently willing to use their elite-tier survey skills in service of measuring the unmeasurable, asked 2,000 adults which decade had the best and worst music, movies, economy and so forth, across 20 measures. But when we charted them, no consistent pattern emerged.

Until they charted them by generation. “Age, more than anything, determines when you think America peaked.”

The good old days when America was “great” aren’t the 1950s. They’re whatever decade you were 11, your parents knew the correct answer to any question, and you’d never heard of war crimes tribunals, microplastics or improvised explosive devices. Or when you were 15 and athletes and musicians still played hard and hadn’t sold out.

[…]

The closest-knit communities were those in our childhood, ages 4 to 7. The happiest families, most moral society and most reliable news reporting came in our early formative years — ages 8 through 11. The best economy, as well as the best radio, television and movies, happened in our early teens — ages 12 through 15.

There are certainly marketing implications behind the research, especially for streaming music services. There is too much more to go into in detail here. See the link and enjoy your holiday.

---

My online friend, musician and Navy veteran Stephen Bensen, is sharing his hummingbirds with passersby this weekend. “people just walking by, see the hummingbirds and want to be a part of it. i love being able to do this.”

● ● ● ● ● ● ● ●

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

Service and self-sacrifice

I’ve shared before a tale about the first Memorial Day in 1865 in Charleston, South Carolina, a remembrance of “slavery’s terrible legacy.” The focus of that ceremony and of most on Memorial Days since is on the fallen. Less featured are the stories of those left behind.

The Fayetteville Observer ran an op-ed a few days ago by Rebekah Sanderlin. She calls out Donald Trump for his dismissal of soldiers who fell in battle in Europe as “suckers and losers.” She spotlights the burdens borne by the wives of U.S. soldiers lost in Afghanistan thirteen years before Trump’s snubbing:

I started leading Care Teams in 2005, only we didn’t call them that then. We didn’t call them anything back then. We just helped. We, military spouses, showed up after the soldiers in dress uniforms notified someone just like us that the person she loved most in this world was never coming home. As the wife of an enlisted U.S. Army Special Forces soldier who spent more time deployed than home, my husband’s friends were the ones dying, and my friends were their widows.

Sometimes we were there to simply be a friend to a woman who didn’t have any friends nearby, but mostly we quietly did all the little things life requires of people, things people can’t do when they’re in shock and grieving. Because most military families live far from their hometowns, they rarely have a local network to lean on during a tragedy. We became their local network. 

We vacuumed, we washed dishes, we walked their dogs. We prepared their houses for the stream of people who were about to appear. We bought groceries, arranged meal trains, picked up their family members from the airport and met their kids at the bus stop, fully aware — though those children weren’t yet — that they were having the last normal moments of their entire lives. 

Early in 2005 I learned to always bring toilet paper with me. When the widow wasn’t looking, I would sneak a few rolls into her bathroom. It seems like a tiny, insignificant thing, and it was, but I quickly saw that the last thing anyone needs when their world has collapsed is to also be out of toilet paper. Some of those years, the casualties came often enough that I just kept a giant pack in my car.

Service is what Trump expects wherever he goes. It’s not a thing he does, nor is self-sacrifice in his limited vocabulary. Trump’s comments left Sanderlin and others “furious and disgusted”:

I was still leading Care Teams and still carting around toilet paper in November 2018 when then-President Trump called the U.S. Marines who died at Belleau Wood “suckers” and the American soldiers buried at Aisne-Marne American Cemetery “losers.” I was furious and disgusted even though, like everyone else, I had become conditioned to our President saying horrible things. But there were some lines that even the most ardently anti-war protestors were too decent to cross, and this man — the President of the United States — had just spit on those lines. But I didn’t have time to stay mad then. We were at war, and we were still getting new widows. 

In the months following President Trump’s callous insult, my husband’s unit would lose six more soldiers in Afghanistan. I had the privilege of knowing most of them before the deployment and there was not a sucker or a loser among them. They were committed, proud, well-trained and highly competent patriots, and they were some of the greatest people I’ve ever known. 

Sanderlin’s story evokes We Were Soldiers, the 2002 Mel Gibson film, sure to be streaming this Memorial Day weekend. Based on the Battle of la Drang on November 14, 1965, first major battle of the Vietnam War, the film’s depictions of battle are brutal. So brutal that unlike most war films this one is thought with caveats to “get it right.” Although it lays on the patriotic symbolism pretty thick, scenes that flash back to the wives comforting each other as news of their husbands’ deaths arrives as the battle rages are a gut-punch. Sanderlin’s Care Teams have lived it.

Unlike in the film, the practice today is for uniformed soldiers to deliver death notices.

In military communities, and in most civilian communities, we revere the people who gave their lives for our country. We honor them and we take care of their families. Not because there’s something in it for us, but because it’s the right thing to do. We do it because when they saw a need, they stepped up, and we owe them at least that much. We do it because we know our large, diverse country is held together only by an understanding of shared sacrifice. 

Trump’s “what’s in it for me” nation

Sanderlin concludes:

How did we get to a place where mocking our nation’s war dead is not an immediate disqualifier for a Commander in Chief? Why would any young person agree to wear a military uniform knowing that even their President does not honor their service? And why would anyone who has served in our military ever forgive Donald Trump for denigrating their brothers who were killed in action? 

The irony in Trump’s Make America Great Again slogan is that, in the years since Trump entered politics, he has remade our country in his own image, a what’s in it for me nation where mocking the very concept of sacrifice carries no political repercussions. 

If we elect him again, we are the suckers and losers.

● ● ● ● ● ● ● ●

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

Rolling Stone reports on Trump’s plans for those state charges should he become president:

Donald Trump likes to tell anyone who will listen that he’s absolutely convinced he will win his 2024 rematch against President Joe Biden. And, according to people who’ve spoken to the ex-president about this, Trump also seems convinced that if he wins another four years in the White House, state prosecutors will still be waiting for him on the other side of his term — ready to put him on trial, or even in prison, just as they are now.

To avoid such risks, the former and perhaps future president of the United States wants Congress to create a very specific insurance policy that would help keep him out of prison forever, two sources familiar with the matter tell Rolling Stone. Trump vaguely alluded to this idea last week outside his New York criminal hush money trial, when he said he has urged Republican lawmakers to pass “laws to stop things like this.”

In recent months, the sources say, Trump has spoken to several GOP lawmakers on Capitol Hill, attorneys, and other associates about the possibility of Republicans passing legislation in a second Trump term that would shield former presidents (i.e. Trump) from non-federal prosecutions. In recent conversations with closely-aligned lawmakers, Trump has pressured them to do so, describing it as imperative that he signs such a bill into law, if he again ascends to the Oval Office. 

[…]

The former president himself has hinted at a legislative push to limit his exposure to such criminal charges. In an improvised press conference outside the Manhattan courthouse on Tuesday, Trump said he’s been telling the Republican lawmakers who want to attend his trial and show solidarity to focus on legislation instead.

“We have a lot of ’em. They want to come. I say, ‘Just stay back and pass lots of laws to stop things like this,’” Trump told reporters. 

Right. He also seems to think that a law to allow former presidents to remove any state trials to federal court. I guess he thinks his Supreme Court majority will always save him. (He may be right about that.)

I assume if he wins and has a congressional majority that he will have no problems getting this through almost immediately. It will be at the very top of his list. The Senate will end the filibuster for this. Whatever it takes.

He is terrified of going to jail and that is now the top motivation for his candidacy. Sure, he wants revenge and needs to prove that he’s not the loser he so obviously is. But staying out of jails is job one and he will do anything to avoid accountability for his crimes wherever they are.

This is a good idea, especially if you live in a swing state. From Simon Rosenberg:

The Importance of Voting on Day 1 – Our elections have changed a lot in recent years. Most voters can now vote early in person or with no-excuse mail ballots. This has made it far easier for people to vote which is one reason we’ve seen such a big increase in turnout in recent years. It also has forced our campaigns to move away from Election Day focused get out the vote programs, and begin our work to get our folks to vote much earlier. The recognition that our Election Day is now as Tom Bonier calls it “just the last day of voting” is central to why Team Biden asked to move the debates up this year. People start voting on September 20th, and it was smart to move the debates to before people started voting.

This new early vote electoral system is important for Democrats, who traditionally have more episodic and new voters in our coalition. This extra time to do GOTV allows us, if we have the money and the volunteers, to reach down and touch more less likely voters than we could in the past, and this increases our turnout and helps us win.

Practically, the faster our voters vote the quicker our campaigns can reach and turnout these less likely voters. Every night campaigns get the list of people who voted that day, so when you vote early you come off the campaign GOTV rolls (and you stop getting canvassed and called!!!!) allowing the campaign to move on to other people who have not voted yet. So having Democrats vote as early as possible, on Day 1 as a I call it, is something that increases turnout for us and helps us win.

All of this is why I want to encourage everyone in the Hopium community to become an advocate for Voting on Day 1. Make sure you do it yourself. Educate your networks about why it matters:

Voting on Day 1 increases Democratic turnout and helps us win

Voting on Day 1 has other benefits. A heavy early turnout leads to stories about “hey everyone is voting” putting social pressure on people to go vote, which also increases turnout. Voting early in big numbers also becomes a very public affirmation that our democracy and election system is working as intended, which creates a greater incentive for people to vote and makes it far harder for the Republicans to cheat, disrupt or contest the election.

We have four months to develop an understanding among Democrats that Voting on Day 1 is a vital new tool we have to help us win and make it far more likely the 2024 election comes off without interference. There is a reason Trump hates non-Election Day in person voting so much – it makes our democracy work better and far harder for him to cheat or challenge the election results.

I had not realized how useful it would be to vote the minute you get the chance. This is worth spreading around. I doubt most people understand this.

"They've got all these blockbusters still to hand down and I think Justice Sotomayor is telling the public 'you better brace yourself because this is going to be a disaster of epic proportions'" @mjs_dc reacts to Justice Sotomayor's frustration with the court #SaturdayShow pic.twitter.com/C0Di0UnCaO

— The Saturday/Sunday Show with Jonathan Capehart (@weekendcapehart) May 25, 2024