Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

You’ve read about how the Trump White House was basically a pill mill, dispensing uppers and downers like candy and even handing out fentanyl for reasons no one has been able to explain. Right. Perfectly normal.

Look what’s been happening at Tesla, the company owned by the other Very Stable Genius, Elon Musk. The Wall Street Journal reports:

Several current or former directors at Tesla and SpaceX attend parties with him, go on exotic vacations and hang out at Burning Man, the Nevada arts and music festival.

Musk and these directors, including venture capitalists Gracias and Ira Ehrenpreis, tech mogul Larry Ellison, former media executive James Murdoch, as well as Musk’s brother, Kimbal Musk, have invested tens of millions of dollars in each other’s companies—Ellison held billions of dollars in Tesla shares with about a 1.5% holding in 2022. Some also received career support and help from Elon Musk.

Most members of Tesla’s current eight-person board have amassed shares worth hundreds of millions of dollars from their seats over the years, significantly more than what board members at other companies make for their service. 

Tesla pays its directors mostly in stock options, and the current board, not including Musk himself, collectively has made more than $650 million selling shares from those options. They hold additional options valued at nearly $1 billion. Some directors agreed to return a portion of that compensation to Tesla to resolve a shareholder lawsuit about their compensation while denying any wrongdoing. A judge has yet to approve the settlement. 

Some current and former Tesla and SpaceX directors have knowledge of Musk’s illegal drug use but haven’t taken public action, according to people who have witnessed the drug use or were briefed on it.

The Wall Street Journal reported in January that Musk has used drugs including cocaine, ecstasy, LSD and magic mushrooms, and that leaders at Tesla and SpaceX were concerned about it, particularly his recreational use of ketamine, for which Musk has said he has a prescription. The illegal drugs violate strict antidrug policies at Musk’s companies and could put SpaceX’s federal contracts and Musk’s security clearance at risk. 

At the upscale Austin Proper Hotel, Musk has attended social gatherings in recent years with Tesla board member Joe Gebbia, the 

Airbnb co-founder and a friend of his, where Musk took ketamine recreationally through a nasal spray bottle multiple times, according to people familiar with the drug use and the parties. 

Other directors, Gracias, Jurvetson and Kimbal Musk, have consumed drugs with him, according to people who have witnessed the drug use and others with knowledge of it.

Musk and some people close to him, including Kimbal Musk, attend parties at Hotel El Ganzo, a boutique hotel in San José del Cabo, Mexico, known for its art and music scene as well as drug-fueled events, according to people familiar with the parties.

The volume of drug use by Musk and with board members has become concerning, some of these people said.

In the culture Musk has created around him, some friends, including directors, feel there is an expectation to consume drugs with him because they think refraining could upset the billionaire, who has made them a lot of money, some of the people said. More so, they don’t want to risk losing the social capital that comes from being close to Musk, which for ome feels akin to having proximity to a king.

Totally fine. Nothing to worry about.

Elon Musk already holds the world record for losing the most money, and the Tesla CEO has lost another $30.5 billion in the first month of 2024. At the same time, his rival in wealth, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, has gained $7.3 billion.

Now the gap between the tech moguls is just $15 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. That might sound like a lot (a lot, a lot) to normal people, but it’s not much in the race to the top for the world’s richest, especially considering that Musk has already lost twice that sum in just a few weeks.

You’d think that Musk would be attending to business in light of that. Well, not so much. Get a load of what he spent the weekend doing around the clock:

It was a full blown bender, I’m afraid.

The man has issues. Big ones.

Another right wing outrage-fad runs its course

What if they held a book banning and nobody showed up?

In Florida, where the right-wing Moms for Liberty group was born in response to Covid-19 school closures and mask mandates, the first Brevard County School Board meeting of the new year considered whether two bestselling novels – “The Kite Runner” and “Slaughterhouse-Five” – should be banned from schools.

A lone Moms for Liberty supporter sat by herself at the January 23 meeting, where opponents of the book ban outnumbered her.

Nearly 20 speakers voiced opposition to removing the novels from school libraries. One compared the book-banning effort to Nazi Germany. Another accused Moms for Liberty of waging war on teachers. No one spoke in favor of the ban. About three hours into the meeting, the board voted quickly to keep the two books on the shelves of high schools.

“Why are we banning books?” asked Mindy McKenzie, a mom and nurse who is a member of Stop Moms for Liberty, which was formed to counter what it calls a far-right extremist group “pushing for book banning and destroying public education.”

“Why are we letting Moms for Liberty infiltrate our school system?”

Moms for Liberty, founded in 2021, expanded its mission to include efforts to ban certain books from schools, outlaw the teaching and discussion of gender and sexuality by teachers and halt the teaching of critical race theory.

Now the group is at a crossroads.

“One of their major challenges is the fact that most Americans are actually pretty positive about their own children’s schools,” Jack Schneider, a professor of education at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, said via email. “Although their message may have appeal in the abstract, at least to conservative voters, families aren’t clamoring for disruption in their own children’s schools.”

After effectively channeling conservative anger over cultural issues into action on the ground, from supporting candidates in school board races to spearheading campaigns against teachers, administrators and other political foes, Moms for Liberty’s burgeoning influence in Republican national politics may be faltering, observers say.

A sex scandal involving the husband of Moms for Liberty co-founder Bridget Ziegler, a Sarasota County school board member, has not helped the group’s cause.

Ziegler has been on the forefront of the cultural battles GOP Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has waged in the public schools. DeSantis named her to the board now overseeing the Walt Disney Company’s special tax district in central Florida amid his clash with the entertainment giant over a state law that restricted how sexual orientation and gender identity could be taught in the classroom. Ziegler remains on the school board despite calls for her to step down.

(The latest on the sex-scandal has Ziegler deploying his wife to “hunt” for threesome candidates…and it just gets uglier.)

The right always has some kind of culture war “uprising” going and this one was a doozy. All those “hot moms” charging the citadel of public education to save the children from the gays and the pedos got everyone very excited. But, like all of these battles, it fizzled as the wingnuts moved on to the next outrage. We’re on the border now. Book banning is so 2023.

The big problem with these events is that the media takes them so very seriously while they are raging. This one really took off during the 2021 Virginia off year election when everyone in the beltway proclaimed Glenn Youngkin the Great Whitebread Hope because he supposedly rode the Moms for Liberty train to victory. (It wasn’t true, not that it mattered.) But if the media had shown a little more restraint this ridiculous culture war battle might have been avoided. They just can’t help themselves.

Speaking of crazy right wing fads going kerflooey:

Here’s some footage of the “invasion.” Very scary:

In case you needed more evidence that Netanyahu and his boys are holding out for a Trump restoration, here it is:

Criticism of President Joe Biden by a far-right minister in Israel’s government who said Donald Trump would allow more freedom to fight Hamas sparked outrage there on Sunday, highlighting the sensitivity of relations as Washington provides key support for the offensive against the militants in Gaza.

The Biden administration has skirted Congress to rush weapons to Israel and shielded its ally from international calls for a cease-fire in the four months since Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack that triggered the war. But the White House has also urged Israel to take greater measures to avoid harming civilians and to facilitate the delivery of more aid to besieged Gaza.

Itamar Ben-Gvir, Israel’s national security minister, in an interview with The Wall Street Journal said Biden was hindering Israel’s war effort.

“Instead of giving us his full backing, Biden is busy with giving humanitarian aid and fuel (to Gaza), which goes to Hamas,” Ben-Gvir said. “If Trump was in power, the U.S. conduct would be completely different.”

He’s not wrong.

Netanyahu didn’t exactly disagree although he didn’t overtly suck up to Donald Trump like Ben-Gvir. Other members of the “war cabinet” did speak out. They’re going to need to so more than this, however.

His remarks drew fire from Benny Gantz, a retired general and member of Netanyahu’s three-man War Cabinet, who said Ben-Gvir was “causing tremendous damage” to American-Israeli relations. Opposition leader Yair Lapid, also posting on X, said Ben-Gvir’s remarks prove that he “does not understand foreign relations.”

He understands the American right wing very well, though. There is no doubt that Trump will be a nightmare for Muslims in America and around the world. And the Palestinians will be especially targeted because the American left is their ally in this war. Does anyone really think that isn’t the way Trump makes his “policies?”

A typical Republican:

You betcha

That is a real post from Donald Trump. last night.

From Meidas who watches Trump’s rallies. All of them. So we don’t have to:

So it appears that Trump confusing Nikki Haley with his deranged conspiracy about Nancy Pelosi and Trump randomly posting that he looks like Elvis (he does not) has people finally seeing just how delusional, cognitively impaired, and utterly weird Trump’s campaign is. Well, I have been covering all of Donald Trump’s speeches for my reporting with the MeidasTouch Network and it’s just been mind boggling how the media has sought to normalize what can only be described as the strangest and weirdest thing ever. Here is what goes down at a typical Trump speech:

1. He comes out to the playing of the “January 6 Anthem” song which he recorded with some of the most dangerous J6 rioters in jail.

2. He brags how his song with the J6 rioters gets more downloads than Taylor Swift (it does not)

3. He spends a few minutes talking about passing cognitive exams, and how the audience would not pass the exam, but because he is really smart (he is not) he is able to ace the exam.

4. He praises Viktor Orban, the leader of Hungary, who Trump says is the most respected leader in Europe (he is not).

5. He praises President Xi and says he is very strong and rules over 1 billion people with an iron fist and Hollywood couldn’t find an actor as tough as President Xi.

6. He praises Putin and says people say it’s a bad thing he gets along with Putin but he thinks it’s a good thing.

7. He makes weird noises reenacting lifting weights with a trans woman and he says “mommy I can’t do it. Mommy. Ughhh, uhh, mommy help me.”

8. He says he doesn’t like seeing President Biden at the beach and says he has a better body than Biden (he does not)

9. He talks about his hatred of windmills and his hatred of electric cars. He says he would rather be electrocuted than eaten by sharks however.

10. He praises the J6 insurrectionists and calls them hostages.

11. He whines about his court cases, attacks prosecutors, judges, and witnesses, and then praises “the great Alphonse Capone” and brags he was indicted more than Capone.

12. He quotes Hitler and says immigrants are poisoning the blood of our country.

13. He says he wants to be a dictator on day 1.

14. He plays QAnon music, audience members often make QAnon sign with their hands, and he talks about how America is a failing nation.

15. He does a weird dance and leaves.

It’s like watching an SNL sketch. The rallies have become parodies of themselves.

When Real Americans cut off their noses to spite their faces:

Donna Knoche made her way up to the podium at the Johnson County Commission hearing on June 6, 2022, her new yellow shirt crisp and her voice steady. It wasn’t something she’d ever thought she’d have to do in her 93 years in the place her grandfather first homesteaded in the 1860s.

Calmly setting aside her walker, she looked at the county commissioners arrayed to her left and began to speak.

“I never in all my life thought I would stand up here to protect our property rights by being able to use our land legally for the best benefit of our family,” she said.

To her right, scores of people were in line behind her. Many of them had other ideas. 

Some implored the commissioners to vote to allow the so-called West Gardner plan, a utility-size array of solar panels, saying the county needed to commit to clean energy for their children’s future.

But others were just as passionately opposed. Many wore matching T-shirts that implored the council to “Stop INDUSTRIAL SOLAR,” testifying for more than three hours against the plan for Knoche’s farm and others across the county. 

To them, the solar plant  would “threaten health and well-being” and did not fit “the character of the land.” It would create “a landscape of black glass and towering windmills,” that would put lives at risk and cause “a mass exodus out of the area.”

The fight played out in front of one small county commission in one 613,000-person county. But at its heart, this fight – and hundreds of others like it across the country – was over the future of the whole nation’s energy supply and, perhaps, the future of the planet. 

As the country races to shift to carbon-free energy to forestall climate change, opposition movements have popped up nationwide to fight new solar and wind farms, hampering America’s chances of meeting its climate pledges.

A USA TODAY analysis of local rules and policies nationwide found that, as of December, 15% of counties in the United States had banned or otherwise blocked new utility-scale wind farms, solar installations or both.

In the past decade, 183 U.S. counties had their first wind projects start producing power, while nearly 375 blocked new wind turbines. In 2023, almost as many counties blocked new solar projects as added them.

The reasons for local opposition are varied and the motives behind them can be murky but often boil down to one essential idea: Renewables are fine, but we don’t want them here.

That’s a problem, said Grace Wu, a professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara, who studies energy systems and land use change. “If nowhere seems to be the right place, increasingly we’ll have a harder and harder time to site them.”

The land owned by the Knoche family is just one spot in a statewide fight in Kansas, which has both the nation’s fourth best wind resources and, as solar power technology has become more efficient, strong solar as well: the same sunlight that drives photosynthesis in large-scale crops like corn can generate energy in solar panels. 

Today, the state gets 47.13% of its electricity from wind and 0.33% from solar.

Yet now, 14 of the 105 counties in Kansas block wind turbines and 12 block solar farms. These include outright bans, height restrictions, unworkable setbacks for turbines, size limitations for solar farms, caps on the amount of agricultural land that can be used and, in McPherson County, an “indefinite moratorium” on solar applications.

These efforts mirror those in hundreds of counties and townships across the nation, where the merest hint of a potential project quickly brings forth a Facebook group, yard signs, organized protests and – increasingly – zoning rules and laws that make new renewable energy impossible to build.

Seen as just one flare-up in a nationwide trend to oppose local green-energy projects, the fight in Johnson County shouldn’t be surprising. 

But to Donna Knoche, 93, and her husband Robert “Doc” Knoche, 95, it’s bewildering – and annoying.

For them, leasing acres to a solar farm would simplify their land’s care, keep it available for farming when the lease runs out and allow it to continue to be passed on through the generations.

“We figured it was just one of those sorts of things that you could do – like buying a house or leasing a car. You could just do it on your own and not have to deal with all this complexity,” Donna said.

You would have thought so. But that’s always been entirely self-serving. They are all about freedom — for themselves. When someone else does something they don’t like they are always ready to step in and tell them they can’t. What else is the so-called Religious Right all about if not that?

In a way, this is wingnut NIMBYism. Some of the locals are right wingers who don’t believe in climate change and think it’s all a big lib hoax. But they also don’t like the “look” of solar panels on the land. They’re not pretty like the amber waves of grain. So they are fighting something that could help save the planet, make use of fallow land and provide income for themselves and their neighbors.

Hopefully the younger generation will be smarter but I’m not holding out any hope. The people profiled in that piece are in their 90s so it’s not necessarily a generational thing. It’s a brainwashing thing.

JD Vance on This Week, calmly demonstrating his revolutionary MAGA zeal:

As you can see, this man is unhinged. But the confident glibness of the slick liar is always unnerving. He’s dangerous.

Tell ya what I’m gonna do

School voucher salesmen. This is getting to be like an old “I Love Lucy” episode. The facts don’t matter. Taxpayers are lining up to be sheared.

Friends like Jeff Byant (N.C.) and acquaintances like Jess Piper (Mo.) have hammered on efforts to privatize public schools for years. No matter what they’re called — school vouchers, charter schools, opportunity scholarships — they are schemes for separating public funding from public education and resegregating schools under the rubric of “choice.” For investors and wealthy parents, it’s about the money, either in profits or in tax breaks.

Piper is right, BTW:

So is Bryant. Charters that were once local and parent-organized are being squeezed out by the big-money boyz:

The aim is to bust school budgets and, in the words of Grover Norquist, drown public education in the bathtub so the mandated not-for-profit spending can wind up in the for-profit world.

This from Arizona in 2023:

Arizona’s universal school voucher program that was estimated to cost only $65 million is now poised to cost the state $900 million over the next year, exceeding its available funding by hundreds of millions of dollars. 

John Ward, chief auditor for the Arizona Department of Education, said Wednesday the skyrocketing price tag is due to a projected spike in applicants to the voucher program. Ward estimates that the Empowerment Scholarship Account program, as it’s officially known, will reach 100,000 applicants by July 2024, far outstripping initial estimates and surpassing the $500 million dollar cushion provided in the budget passed last month. 

Don’t believe this is not by design. The scheme is a scam, writes Thomas Mills at PoliticsNC:

When Moore says “ALL families,” he’s referring to wealthy families since the legislature eliminated the income cap for the vouchers. The site crashed because North Carolina has so many people already in private schools who now are eligible for state subsidized education. Rich folks who send their children to private schools are about to get a windfall while poor schools are going to lose funding. It’s Robin Hood in reverse.

The whole program is a scam, the epitome of a bait-and-switch. Republicans pushed through their voucher program as a way to level the playing field, offering poor families a way to send their children to private schools when public schools weren’t working for them. Now, they’re saying that families that don’t send their children to public schools shouldn’t have to pay for them. They have dropped any pretense of helping struggling families and moved straight to subsidizing rich people. According to Republicans, rich people have no community obligations.

Let’s be clear. The name “Opportunity Scholarship” is pure propaganda. There are two types of scholarships, need-based and merit-based. Giving vouchers to rich people just because they decide not to send their kids to public schools is a tax break, not a scholarship. And it’s a tax break designed for wealthy people at the expense of poor people.

Republicans are working hard to damage public schools. They fundamentally don’t believe in the responsibility of the state to provide a sound, basic education. They have cut per pupil spending, let teacher pay lag, and reduced support staff in schools. They’ve tried to dictate curriculum to indoctrinate students in a conservative philosophy, all while claiming public schools are brainwashing our kids with left wing ideas. They’ve left us with demoralized teachers and overworked staff and our children are paying the price.

And the GOP will subvert state constitutions to do it. You may have noticed that sort of thing is in fashion among MAGA Republicans.

If the Republicans win, they will have essentially reinterpreted the constitution. Article 9, Section 2 of the constitution reads, “The General Assembly shall provide by taxation and otherwise for a general and uniform system of free public schools, which shall be maintained at least nine months in every year, and wherein equal opportunities shall be provided for all students.” Traditionally, the court has interpreted the “uniform system” of “equal opportunities” to mean the quality of education should be as good in poor counties as it is in rich ones. The GOP would render the clause either aspirational or maybe just a suggestion, despite the word “shall.”

“Are you tired of paying high taxes, or any taxes? Tell ya what I’m gonna do.”

Joe Biden dominates South Carolina Democratic primary

With over 95 percent of the vote counted in Saturday’s Democratic primary in South Carolina, President Joe Biden swept every county, garnering 96 percent of the vote overall and 95 percent or better in every county.

As The New York Times put it, “There was not much drama Saturday night.” Biden himself was in Southern California, reports Politico. At the watch party at the state fairgounds in Columbia, people were headed for the doors less than an hour after poll closing.

Self-help author Marianne Williamson edged out Rep. Dean Phillips (Minn.), with the pair earning a combined 2 percent of the vote.

With the Biden vote so dominant, the race so uncompetitive, and the vote count so low (a mere 131 thousand), the Times attempts to draw comparisons to past primaries, but comparables are slim:

The last time an incumbent Democratic president sought re-election, in 2012, President Barack Obama went unchallenged in South Carolina — and the state did not hold a primary.

Four years later, when former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton defeated Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont in the state’s primary, 370,864 people voted. In 2020, with no competitive Republican primary and 12 Democrats on the ballot, 536,949 people voted.

The South Carolina Democratic Party said early vote data showed that the share of Black voters in the electorate was 13 percent higher than in 2020, when people of color made up about half of the voters in the Democratic primary and there was no Republican primary to siphon off voters.

In 2016, the last year in which both parties held presidential primaries in South Carolina, voters of color made up two-thirds of Democratic primary voters.

Biden and his allies moved South Carolina’s primary this year ahead of two states with less diverse population (Iowa and New Hampshire). Biden’s 2020 win there revived what appeared a flagging campaign. The campaign hoped “to counter a decline in approval for the president among some Black voters” and to underscore “actions the administration has taken to help benefit Black communities,” The Washington Post reports:

The incumbent’s team hoped a big win would springboard his campaign in the states ahead with a show of strength and quash intraparty doubts about some polling that has shown him trailing former president Donald Trump in a potential rematch. Saturday’s vote was also expected to provide a measure of Biden’s standing among Black voters, who helped propel Biden to victory and made up 56 percent of Democratic primary participants in the state four years ago, according to exit polls.

About polling. Use caution:

As far as what will motivates 2024 voters, I’m struggling to balance the need to defend our freedoms from (let’s face it) creeping fascism and Democrats’ conviction that what motivates voters more are kitchen table issues. I grew up in the Cold War when Birchers were screaming about the threat of creeping communism. Their red, white, and blue heirs today hunger for a fascist strong man. Do average voters see that threat or are they too busy fretting over paying for rent and groceries to notice?

Democratic politicians and MSNBC pundits keep hammering away at the threat to democracy. But democracy and fascism are too abstract for most voters. Freedom is not. But they can’t seem to get on board with that framing. Freedom is stability. Can Democrats walk the freedom walk and chew groceries at the same time?

Ezra Klein opined on people’s need to vote for stability in troubled times:

Biden and his allies are framing this election as order against chaos. The party that gets things done against the party that will make America come undone. Kristen Soltis Anderson, a co-founder of the Republican polling firm Echelon Insights, believes that the Democrats are right that voters are craving stability. But she thinks they refuse to see that Trump is leading in many polls because voters believe that he is the one who might offer it. What Trump is pitching, she said, is a “push for order — ‘I am going to be the one who secures the border. I’m going to be the one that cracks down on crime. I’m going to be the one that tries to stabilize your prices.’” To that list one might add Trump’s skepticism of America’s support for Ukraine and many voters’ dislike of Biden’s handling of the war in Gaza.

I’ve struggled with this portrayal of Trump as the candidate of stability. I doubt it can survive the gale-force winds of the actual campaign he will run, of the things people will hear and see from him when they tune in to the election. But I think Soltis Anderson is right when she says that Democrats are having trouble persuading voters of their central pitch: that they are the party of stability. It does not feel like a stable time. It is not Biden’s fault that the world is tumultuous. But that does not mean he will not be blamed for it.

There are months to go before fall voting begins. That the broader economy is going gangbusters may finally reach people’s kitchen tables beforehand. But Biden and Democrats still have to sell the Biden recovery and not flinch from fears that voters won’t buy it because they don’t feel it. Don’t take the country’s temperature, people. Change it. Biden has to lead the way, and he’s doing too few interviews, Klein suggests, at a time when his age is an issue, like it or not.

Meantime, I’m still obsessed with turning out independents, unaffiliateds, NPAs, etc. whose votes will ultimately determine the fall elections in multiple states. They are overwhelmingly under 45 around here and turn out at ~12 percent below Democrats in North Carolina’s bluest, densest precincts. Out in red, rural Trump country, older independents turn out far more. For Republicans. State average indendent turnout is 6.5 precent below Democrats.

What are Democrats doing wrong where their support among independents is strongest? There’s some drama there, I’m sure of it.

But what if it doesn’t happen?

The Daily Beast reports:

IN THE MIDDLE of last year, several of Donald Trump’s closest advisers, including some of his 2024 campaign’s senior staff, started noticing an ominous trend in independent polling and in internal Republican survey data: A significant share of swing voters in key states — even some Republicans — say they would not want to vote for a freshly-convicted criminal. 

The trend spooked them enough that, in recent months, some of these officials and political allies have directly warned Trump of possible looming catastrophe ahead for his 2024 presidential bid, two people with direct knowledge of the matter tell Rolling Stone.

For the most part, Trump has shrugged off such warnings, as he and his campaign brass publicly lean on bravado and their messaging that President Joe Biden’s reelection prospects are unequivocally doomed in November. Still, Trump and his legal team are working diligently to delay his criminal trials, in hopes that he can secure the presidency once again — and the power to quash the cases — before any potential convictions come down.

They’ve had at least some success: On Friday, the judge in Trump’s Washington, D.C. election subversion case declared that the trial will not take place on March 4, as it was originally scheduled, and will be rescheduled at a later date.

Republicans close to the former president and current 2024 GOP frontrunner have been carefully tracking poll results — especially in a handful of battleground states that will decide the expected Biden-Trump rematch — of likely swing voters who say they are open to pulling the lever for Trump, with a major caveat. Many of these survey respondents, including in the crucial bloc of self-identifying independents, keep saying that they would not vote for Trump, if prior to the election, a jury handed down a guilty verdict in one of the criminal cases against him. 

In a number of national and state polls, this variable — whether Trump is criminally convicted — puts what has been a moderate Trump lead in peril. For several months, this trend has continued to appear in a variety of high-quality polls, both public and private, including as recently as this week.

But even as the MAGA elite publicly insist that Biden is historically vulnerable as an incumbent, the polling trend has grown increasingly difficult for Trump’s lieutenants to just brush off, according to interviews with seven knowledgeable sources such as conservative activists close to Trump 2024, officials working on the ex-president’s campaign, longtime GOP operatives, and Trump allies in right-wing media.

“[Late last year], I mentioned to him how the polls were saying a conviction would hammer him with some of the voters he needs to keep in his column to win,” says a source who has spoken to Trump about 2024 many times. “I said it was something to take very seriously, but not necessarily a death blow … But in my own thoughts, I kept thinking, ‘It’d be a fucking disaster.’ But we’ll find out, I guess. Hopefully, people are lying to the pollsters.”

[…]

Within the upper echelons of Team Trump, there is a range of opinion on what these numbers mean exactly. Some say it’s too early and that it’s all theoretical, and therefore possibly a polling mirage. Others are concerned, but they’re not setting their hair on fire. Some are privately saying that a criminal conviction could be fatal to Trump’s chances at reconquering the White House.

Another close Trump ally tells Rolling Stone that, though there are many variables and Biden’s own polling is uniquely terrible, they can’t shake the feeling that one day they’ll look back on this polling trend as a bright-red warning sign — one that is comparable to the foreboding signs that Trump’s 2016 opponent saw for months before her defeat. 

As this Trump ally points out, 2016 Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton’s campaign was derailed in part by an investigation by former FBI Director James Comey. The ally notes that Clinton “had [FBI director James] Comey hanging over her for the 2016 campaign. It was not the only thing that brought her down, but it was a significant thing… hacking at her campaign for months. Is a criminal conviction going to be our Hillary-Comey moment, if there ends up being [a guilty verdict] before the election? It’s a question that sort of haunts me, and I’ve discussed it with some of President Trump’s campaign people and people who the [former] president listens to.”

His cult doesn’t care, of course. They think he’s Jesus. And Trump himself doesn’t really worry about this having a negative effect on his electoral chances, I suspect because he plans on trying to unleash massive civic unrest if it happens. Whether that would do him any good remains to be seen but we saw on January 6th that he’s convinced violence is not only acceptable, it’s preferable to accepting defeat.

They go on to quote one of his big Evangelical backers who says that he will only get more popular if he’s convicted. They really do see him as the second coming.

The big question here is whether or not he will have a conviction under his belt before the election. The way it’s going , it doesn’t look all that promising. Jude Tanya Chutkan just postponed the January 6th case beyond March because the District Court is dragging its feet on the immunity case. (Needless to say, if they and the Supremes find that presidents have immunity for anything they do while president, even after they are out of office, we will have bigger problems — we will have a democracy in name only.) These delays could very well put them out of reach before the election and we know what he’ll do if he wins. And if the media would pound this the way they did Hillary Clinton’s penny ante email scandal, it would help.

And I have to wonder what will happen even if one or more of these important cases goes to tria and he’s found not guilty or there’s a mistrial? It’s certainly not beyond the realm of possibility. Look at Kyle Rittenhouse, who went to a protest, loaded for bear, and then killed two unarmed protesters and got away with it. It could happen. And then all bets are off.