In virtually every way, this economy is better than it was under Trump before the pandemic. You know, the best economy the world has every seen? Yeah, that one.
In case you were wondering how they are dealing with this?
Of course.
I wrote recently about Kevin McCarthy’s crusade to take down Nancy Mace and the others who engineered his ouster. Mace is a specific target and for good reason. She is a real piece of work.
Just this week this was revealed:
According to two reports, as pro-Trump rioters stormed the US Capitol in an attempt to stop Congress from certifying the presidential election on January 6, freshman GOP Rep. Nancy Mace tried to convince her staff to let her get attacked.
The Washington Post reports Mace was so incensed at then-President Donald Trump that she brought up the idea of approaching rioters head-on in the hopes she would get punched in the face and become the “face of anti-Trump Republicans.”
She’s since endorsed Trump to become the GOP’s next presidential nominee.
Hours after the Post published its piece, The Daily Beast seconded the reporting, noting that three sources who personally witnessed the conversations confirmed they happened. Those sources told the Beast that Mace explicitly said she wanted to “get punched in the face” for “media attention.”
This report by Abby Phillips says it all. The question is, will Trump go to bat for her? Will MyKevin cross him? Stay tuned.
Some of you may not be fully aware of who Charlie Kirk is and how influential he has become in the Republican Party. He originally started as a right wing youth organizer but in recent years has evolved into a major organizer of right wing activism across the board. Hit Turning Point USA conferences, which are held throughout the year, are major events that attract all the big names in the MAGA word as well as many “establishment” types. His organization is the heir to CPAC which has been losing steam for some time.
Here’s a recent dispatch from Dave Weigel at Kirk’s latest gathering:
LAS VEGAS – In a Planet Hollywood hotel ballroom, a few steps away from the Criss Angel Theater, around 200 Republican Party activists worked on their battle plans. The Republican National Committee would not save them. They would save themselves.
“No more culture of losing,” Turning Point USA CEO and co-founder Charlie Kirk told an audience of RNC members, GOP county chairs, and plugged-in activists. “Embrace Donald Trump. Don’t fight Donald Trump. Embrace what he’s brought to the party. It’s a populist, people-centered movement, and this is what the oligarchs fear the most.”
The two-day Restoring National Confidence summit was built to tweak Ronna McDaniel’s party committee, whose 168 members were about to meet in another hotel on the strip. Both meetings unfolded as the RNC released its weakest yearly fundraising numbers of McDaniel’s tenure.
TPUSA, with annual revenue not far off the RNC’s, had been building an alternative power base for years. It advocated non-stop “relational” organizing, developing an app that its allies could use to find votes. It had identified low-propensity voters — “disengaged voters,” as Arizona RNC member Tyler Bowyer called them — and put their information in binders for conference attendees. And it had built an influential media network, including Kirk’s show, which revels in the weekly churn of cultural battles that obsess the young, online right.
One host last week had expounded at length on the potential “psyop” of the Kansas City Chiefs making it to the Super Bowl and Taylor Swift endorsing Joe Biden — a topic that came up several times on stage in Las Vegas. Democrats, explained Bowyer and pundit Jack Posobiec, would use Swift’s fame to engage those lower-propensity, low-information voters.
The same week, Kirk had caused his own uproar by lashing out about diversity efforts at airlines — “I’m sorry, if I see a Black pilot, I’m going to be like boy I hope he’s qualified,” he said on his show — and posting at length about the criminal records of the Central Park Five, after one of them, the recently elected New York City Council Member Youssef Salem, was pulled over by police. Earlier in the month, he’d commemorated Martin Luther King Jr. Day by remarking upon the civil rights leader’s “awful” personal life. The comments drove shocked media coverage — and, according to Kirk, getting no blowback “outside of one donor.”
Kirk then made this pivot …
That last is fellow fascist agitator Candace Owens getting on the bandwagon.
I wish this was fringe stuff but it isn’t. As you can see these people have a ton of money and they are very influential. They travel under the radar of the mainstream media so you may not be aware of just how dangerous they are. The fascist tone of their rhetoric has become very explicit. And millions of people absorb what they’re saying every single day.
Update —
Lol. There’s a little trouble in paradise:
There was a time when the right wing railed against Michelle Obama for encouraging kids to eat their vegetables and go outside to play and had a complete meltdown over governments trying to stop kids from drinking so much sugary soda that there is now an epidemic of obesity among children. How dare the government deign to advise Americans about healthy eating.
Just a couple of months ago there was a story that health experts were considering telling people that they should cut down on beer consumption and it resulted in this lovely retort:
Needless to say, nobody is talking about shutting down the beer or soda pop industry or limiting Ted Cruz from drinking as much as he wants to.
Get a load of what the freedom loving right is up to now. Yes, Florida is leading the way, once again:
Gov. Ron DeSantis said at a press conference Friday that he opposes the promulgation of lab-grown meat in Florida.
Discussing his opposition to implanting an environmental agenda on farmers, the governor noted that lawmakers are working through legislation to ban lab-grown meat production.
“You need meat. OK?” the governor said. “We’re gonna have meat in Florida.”
“We’re gonna have fake meat? That doesn’t work,” he said. “We’re gonna make sure to do it right.”
Rep. Tyler Sirois, R-Merritt Island, is the sponsor for HB 435. The legislation has so far passed one subcommittee in the House and has two more to go.
Sen. Clay Yarborough, R-Jacksonville, is the sponsor for SB 586. That bill has not been taken up by any of its committee assignments yet.
A bill by Sen. Jay Collins, R-Tampa, SB 1084, also would crack down on lab-grown meat, with other provisions included. It has passed one of its three committee assignments so far.
Florida Agriculture Commissioner Wilton Simpson has been working with lawmakers to push that provision, along with farmer tax breaks and other measures.
This is obviously a sop to the meat industry which doesn’t want the competition. In the world as we previously knew it the market decides if people want the alternative product or not and I would guess that most people are still going to choose the real thing when it comes to meat. Nobody is proposing to force people to eat Impossible or Beyond Beef but now DeSantis is proposing to ensure that those who want it can’t have it. Because, as he says, “you need meat!”
It’s not just about helping out his rich buddies, though. It’s also another salvo in the right’s culture jihad where he remains its Osama bin Laden. He’s been pushed back to Tallahassee but he hasn’t given up.
Donald “91 Counts” Trump famously learned to attack, attack, attack from skeevy attorney Roy Cohn, and to worship himself from Norman Vincent Peale, the positive-thinking guru. Trump has navigated 77 years of his life and scammed his way to celebrity by demanding, whatever the truth of the fine mess he’s created, whatever the dirty deals he was involved in (look, here’s another), that reality bend to his will. He’s always the innocent, always the victim, always the victor.
It’s not as if the Republican Party with the aid of its right-wing media allies wasn’t already far along the path to up-is-downism. It’s just that Trump’s natural flair for the scam fit so well with the party’s proclivities that he was able to wholly coopt the conservative movement.
Now, with the U.S. economy firing on nearly all cylinders under Joe Biden in 2024, Trump will have to find another gear to sell his marks that it’s all going to shit. Have no doubt. He will.
The U.S. economy just keeps getting better. And it’s forcing Donald Trump and his allies to contort the talking points they thought would guide them back to the White House.
A remarkable run of good economic news has tripped up the Trump campaign’s initial plans to paint President Joe Biden as a disaster on the economy. Now, the GOP frontrunner is grasping for new ways to attack the administration’s increasingly robust record.
You can read about that here and here. Even Fox Business is buckling to to reality. Even hacks and shills like Stephen Moore recognize it (emphasis mine).
“I think that is the question of the day,” said Stephen Moore, a senior fellow at The Heritage Foundation and an economist with FreedomWorks who is close to the Trump campaign. “You can’t blame the president when policies go wrong, and then say he’s not responsible if things are going right.”
Moore, who said he met with Trump in December and discussed the economic outlook, added: “If this continues, where you see strong job growth and also if you see wages outpacing inflation, as has been for the last nine months or so, that certainly makes the argument less persuasive.”
But Trump’s skill is not in crafting persuasive arguments. It’s in relentless repetition. He’ll “power of positive thinking” his way to convincing followers his fabulous new clothes fit his naked, rock-hard body like his head fits Sylvester Stallone’s torso.
See?
Trump has responded by throwing out a series of counterarguments downplaying Biden’s role in the economic upswing, including suggesting that the stock markets’ gains are actually his doing.
On Monday, he claimed on Truth Social that voters were already enjoying a “TRUMP STOCK MARKET” because the economy was anticipating his eventual victory. For now, Trump said, “EVERYTHING ELSE IS TERRIBLE (WATCH THE MIDDLE EAST!)”
Such claims have proved too much for economists and “for many Republicans as well.” But those are people who live in the real world and only vacation in Trump’s, not residents of MAGAstan.
“Biden officials say they recognize that the president faces an uphill battle selling his own agenda, even with the recent economic tailwinds,” Politico continues. So long as grocery prices remain 25 percent higher than where they were before the Covid pandemic, Trump will have an easier time selling “EVERYTHING ELSE IS TERRIBLE.”
Democrats need not to sit back and let him. People can’t eat statistics.
Truth:
“Trump won’t be honest about the economy for the same reason he’s been rooting for the market to crash before the next election,” Democratic National Committee rapid response director Andrew Floyd said in a Friday statement. “He only cares about himself, and he’ll leave working families out to dry if he thinks it’ll help him and his ultra-rich friends.”
Somewhere on Friday a TikTok video went by (if I find it again, I’ll post it) with a woman complaining that football intruding on her Taylor Swift concert ruined the experience for her. Why, why, she was all about Taylor and yet the camera kept cutting away to shots of Travis Kelce the football player. That’s just wrong!
FOUND IT (3 P.M. EDT):
She was lampooning the “keep Taylor out of my football game” crowd, obviously.
Fox News is having a time of it as well, in a different way. The conspiracy theories Fox is spinning about the power couple are truly something to behold (New York Times):
Of course, people are entitled to their opinions on celebrity political speech or the possible existence of a secret Pentagon diva lab. But if Fox News’s hosts truly believe that it’s irresponsible and dangerous to invite celebrities to weigh in on politics, they might want to turn their attention to … Fox News.
Over the years, Fox has invited Gene Simmons, the bassist of Kiss, to talk about the handling of an Ebola outbreak. It had the fashion model Fabio on to blame crime in California on liberalism. It gave us Kid Rock on cancel culture. Last year, the actor Jim Caviezel declared Donald J. Trump “the new Moses” on “Fox & Friends.”
And let’s not forget that Fox was instrumental in the entry into politics of a certain TV celebrity, whom you might know better as the candidate Mr. Biden will likely be running against.
Fox is, after all, infotainment.
Except heavy on the ‘tainment, light on the info.
More broadly, Fox has long embraced a kind of pop-politics cultural warfare that made a martyr of Roseanne Barr and a demon of Kathy Griffin, and that encouraged its viewers to question whether their beer was too liberal. Like the right-wing publisher Andrew Breitbart (adapting an idea from the Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci), it believed that politics is downstream from culture.
But it has been selective about which celebrities should stay in their lane, and which get to merge. After LeBron James criticized then-President Trump in a 2018 interview, Fox’s Laura Ingraham told him to “shut up and dribble.” The endorsements of Mr. Trump by the former quarterback Brett Favre and the golf champion Jack Nicklaus, for some reason, were unobjectionable.
Much of the criticism of Ms. Swift, meanwhile, seems tinged with condescension, suggesting that a 33-year-old female pop star is a gullible naïf, ripe for bamboozling by political operators. “Does Taylor realize the guy that they want her to endorse is a kind of stumbling, bumbling mess?” asked Mr. Hannity, raising a concern he has not voiced when interviewing, say, the right-wing rocker Ted Nugent (“never shy about sharing his opinions!”).
James Poniewozik concludes, “bashing celebrities, warring over culture and playing into the fear of cultural marginalization may be too deeply wired into Fox’s sensibility for the network to do otherwise.”
FOMO, Foxies, FOMO?
The cutest animal? Could be…
A small mammal, native to the Eastern Himalayas and Southwestern China, has been born at Altina Wildlife Park in New South Wales Australia.
Rani, Altina’s beautiful female red panda, at 9yrs of age, has proven to be an amazing and loving mother of her new little baby boy, born on the 17th December 2023!
It’s unusual for an older inexperienced Red Panda to naturally be a good mother, so staff are excited and pleased with the progress.
After three months gestation, cubs are born into a nest made of twigs and grass in the late spring and early summer. Newborn cubs are covered in thick grey fur and their eyes and ears are closed. Cubs will emerge from the nest at about three months of age but stay with their mother until the next breeding season starts.
They are considered full-grown between 18 and 24 months and live on average, 8 to 10 years in the wild; up to 15 years in zoos. Red Pandas may live as long as 23 years. They show symptoms of age at around 12 to 14 years old and while females do not usually breed after age 12, males continue to be reproductively capable well into their later years.
The newest little adorable ball of baby fluff spends most of his days sleeping and eating.
Rani’s appetite has changed to include more protein like insects and eggs and twice the amount of golden bamboo is being consumed to keep up with her milk production for her little man!
Altina grows all the golden bamboo the red pandas could eat on site which makes feeding the growing family of red panda so much easier!
Here’s some more adorable red panda footage:
He’s such a Godly man. Biden, on the other hand, is a blood drinking satanist.
By the way…
We know about Trump’s psychotic behavior. He is a malignant, narcissistic, pathological liar. But he employs a specific manipulative strategy that actually has a name. But I didn’t know that there is a very specific diagnosis. Sidney Blumenthal in the Guardian explains:
Time after time, with predictable regularity, never missing a beat, Donald Trump proclaims his innocence. He always denies that he has done anything wrong. The charge does not matter. He is blameless. But this is only the beginning of the pattern. Then, he attacks his accusers, or anyone involved in bringing him to account, usually of committing the identical offense of which he stands accused.
But it is not enough for him to lash out. Then, he declares himself to be the victim. Whatever it is, he is falsely accused. But his self-dramatization as the wounded sufferer is only half his story: he insists that whoever has accused him is in fact the offender. He emerges triumphant, the martyr, the truth-teller, courageously unmasking the real villain. J’accuse!
Trump’s pattern is textbook manipulation – literally. It has a precise name given to it after decades of academic research. Jennifer Freyd, now professor emerita of psychology at the University of Oregon, developed the theory over her career studying sexual assault, trauma and institutional betrayal. She named the process by which the perpetrator seeks to avoid accountability Darvo – a strategy with the elements of denial, attack, and reversal of victim and offender.
“I named the idea in the 1990s,” Freyd told me. “People can deny an accusation without resorting to Darvo. Why not just say, ‘I’m disturbed by what you’re saying, it doesn’t comport with what I remember, these are important issues, I want to understand.’ You can stick to a firm denial without being a victim. But the viciousness of the attack is intended to be silencing.”
Freyd observes: “The people who use Darvo are different from the people who don’t … It’s a red flag.”
Trump’s behavior in the E Jean Carroll case has been a classic exhibit. The defamation case was brought after Trump said she was “totally lying”, explaining that “she’s not my type”, about her description of his sexual assault of her in a book and a New York magazine article. He issued a formal statement from the White House on 19 July 2019: “If anyone has information that the Democratic Party is working with Ms Carroll or New York magazine, please notify us as soon as possible. The world should know what’s really going on. It is a disgrace, and people should pay dearly for such false accusations.”
All the elements of Darvo, his familiar pattern, were present in his deflection. He denied the incident occurred: “I’ve never met this person in my life.” He attacked her: “Shame on those who make up false stories of assault to try to get publicity for themselves or sell a book or carry out a political agenda.” And he turned the tables to make himself the victim and her the aggressor deserving of punishment: “People should pay dearly for such false accusations.”
In the first defamation trial in 2023, Judge Lewis Kaplan declared that based on the jury’s deliberations Trump had defamed her and committed rape. “… Mr Trump ‘raped’ her as many people commonly understand the word ‘rape’,” he stated. “Indeed, as the evidence at trial recounted below makes clear, the jury found that Mr Trump in fact did exactly that.”
The jury awarded Carroll $5m. Trump appeared on CNN the day after the judgment to call the decision “fake news” and her a “whack job”. She amended her defamation lawsuit.
During the second trial, Trump inevitably repeated this pattern. First, he denied the accusation. “She said that I did something to her that never took place,” he testified in a deposition. “There was no anything.” Then, he attacked her: “I know nothing about this nutjob.” Then, he made himself her victim: “She’s accusing me of rape, a woman that I have no idea who she is.” Then, he called her “sick, mentally sick” and labeled her attorney Roberta Kaplan “a political operative”. They had connived for ulterior motives to hurt him.
Then, he lied about an interview she had given, to claim that – even if he never knew her and the event never took place – she said she enjoyed being sexually assaulted by him. “She actually indicated that she loved it. Okay? She loved it until commercial break,” Trump said. “In fact, I think she said it was sexy, didn’t she? She said it was very sexy to be raped. Didn’t she say that?”
In the second defamation trial, the jury delivered a judgment of $83.3m in damages against Trump.
There’s a method to Trump’s madness. The madness is the method – and the method is the madness. It’s more than his malignant narcissism. It’s more than his relentless lying. Conscious or unconscious, it is his invariable reflexive response to the danger of being held responsible for his misdeeds and crimes. Its roots lie in the model of his brutish father. Upon that foundation he added the vicious counsel of Roy Cohn to attack anyone suing him in order to raise the personal cost for his victims, drain them of resources and delay the courts.
Though Trump ranks among the greatest living specimens of misogyny, his blame-casting extends to foes of any gender in every one of his conflicts
And this has now become the defining feature of GOP politics.
…Though Trump ranks among the greatest living specimens of misogyny, his Darvo blame-casting extends to foes of any gender in every one of his conflicts. Trump’s syndrome has become the core of his politics. Just as he is the Maga icon, even exalted as a god, his derangement is the golden calf for his followers. They worship by imitation. His gaslighting about his sexual violence has morphed into the essence of his pseudo-ideology of a debauched party.
The Trump Republicans, apologizing for him, twist their arguments into the Darvo template. In the Republican-dominated House of Representatives, the weaponization committee has institutionalized a warped Darvo construct in its projections on the cave wall of conspiracies and enemies. One day, the FBI is the culprit victimizing Trump; the next, Taylor Swift.
In case after case, Trump applies the blueprint. His closing statement at his New York fraud trial on 12 January was definitive in his application of the complete features of Darvo. He raced back and forth from denial, to attack, to reversal of victim and offender. “This is a political witch-hunt that was set aside by – should be set aside. We should receive damages for what we’ve gone through, for what they’ve taken this company through.” He was the victim.
It is now everything in Trump world:
Trump’s campaign themes largely consist of his defenses, which are adaptations of Darvo. He denies all the accusations. A majority of Republicans believe he is falsely charged. He attacks a host of enemies from E Jean Carroll to Jack Smith, from the judges to their clerks. He is the victim. They are the offenders. Darvo is his shield of innocence.
“Are you thinking of trying to use campaign funds to pay some of the penalties?” a reporter asked Trump after it was disclosed that he had spent $50m in donor money on lawyers’ fees in 2023.
“What penalties?” Trump answered.
“In the New York fraud case and the defamation case.”
“I didn’t do anything wrong,” Trump said. “I mean, that’s been proven as far as I’m concerned.”
Read the whole thing. There’s much more to it. This tactic has to be the single most frustrating thing about Donald Trump and the Republicans right now. They deploy this tactic to great effect and it ends up manipulating not only their own followers but the rest of the culture as well by making it seems as though Trump can get away with anything. And with the exception of the two lawsuits in NY, so far he has.
By the way, there’s some news today about how he acts behind the scenes in his legal cases. E. Jean Carroll’s lawyer Roberta Kaplan appeared on a podcast and talked about the Trump depositions:
The ex-president reportedly freaked out when his legal team provided lunch at his resort for opposing counsel. Like throwing papers, storming out of the room and yelling at his attorney Alina Habba. All because his lawyers extended a basic courtesy. Real stable genius stuff.
But there’s more! Trump apparently referred to Kaplan as a “see you next Tuesday,” which, as many are aware, is a euphemism for calling someone a cunt.
As Kaplan describes:
“We come in the room and I say, ‘I’m done asking questions’ and immediately I hear from the other side, ‘Off the record. Off the record. Off the record.’ So they must have planned it. And he looks at me from across the table and he says, ‘See you next Tuesday.’”
But Kaplan was unaware of the hidden insult:
Kaplan said that she was initially confused, as their next meeting was set for a Wednesday. “You could tell it was like, it was like a kind of a joke again, like teenage boys would come up with. But again, I wasn’t in on the joke,” she said.
“I wasn’t in on the joke, so I had no idea. Then we get into the car and my colleagues are like, ‘Robbie, do you know what that means?’ And I’m like, ‘No, what are you talking about?’ They tell me and I’m like, oh my God, thank God I didn’t know because had I known, I for sure would have gotten angry. There’s no question I would have gotten angry,” Kaplan said.
No kidding. Trump is not only a malignant narcissist, he’s got the mind of a 13 year old boy. He’s pathetic.
This isn’t the first time we’ve seen this insanity. Remember “frazzledrip”?
On Tuesday, it was revealed that Marjorie Taylor Greene had shown support for executing Democrats including liking a comment in January 2019 that said it would be “quicker” to remove Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi with “a bullet to the head.”
At the same time, it was revealed that the Republican lawmaker had signaled her endorsement of the unhinged “frazzledrip” conspiracy.
Here’s what that theory, which originated on conspiracy site YourNewsWire (now known as News Punch) in April 2018, claims:
A video that was found on the laptop of Anthony Weiner, the former Democratic congressman who was jailed in 2017 for sexting with a minor, began circulating on the “dark web.” The video was found in a folder on the laptop’s hard drive called “life insurance” and was named “frazzledrip.”
The bogus report says the video — which, to be clear, does not exist on the dark web or anywhere else — shows Hillary Clinton and Huma Abedin, Weiner’s former wife and longtime Clinton aide, raping and mutilating a young girl. Specifically, the video is supposed to show Clinton filleting the young girl’s face, and then taking turns with Abedin to wear the girl’s face as a mask in order to purposefully terrify the child so that her blood would be flooded with adrenochrome. The girl then bleeds out before Clinton and Abedin drink the blood during a Satanic ritual sacrifice.
But the horrific conspiracy theory didn’t end there. QAnon supporters also spread the rumor that multiple officers from the New York Police Department who saw the video had been killed by Clinton, who then covered up the murders by making them look like suicides.
In May 2018, just a month after YourNewsWire first spread the frazzledrip conspiracy, Greene posted a picture of the mother of slain New York Police Department Detective Miosotis Familia with former President Donald Trump, a post first flagged by Media Matters for America, a progressive media watchdog.
Under the post, a commenter wrote: “This is the mother of a NYPD officer who watched a horrific video seized on anthony weiners laptop of huma and hillary filleting a childs face. This was another hillary hit.”
Greene liked that comment and replied: “Yes Familia.”
In another comment, Greene appeared to lean further into the conspiracy: “I post things sometimes to see who knows things. Most the time people don’t. I’m glad to see your comment. I’ve decided it’s time to start doing a lot more videos and engage further in the fight. Most people honestly don’t know so much. The [mainstream media] disinformation warfare has won for too long!”
Most of the millions of Americans who have been brainwashed by the QAnon cult over the last 12 months have been exposed not to the extreme dark side of the conspiracy, but to a lighter version, pushed by hijacking the Save the Children message and eschewing any overt link to QAnon and its origins.
Greene has repeatedly tried to distance herself from links to QAnon, which recently played a central part in the Capitol riots, but she has never disowned the conspiracy movement. And this latest revelation shows that Greene is not just flirting with the fringes of this conspiracy theory, but embracing its darkest corners.
On Tuesday, CNN reported that Greene had endorsed calls, made on
Marjorie Taylor Greene is one of the leaders of the MAGA party. This stuff is not fringe.