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Trump Talks History. Oh My God.

Published by digby on January 6, 2024

You have to watch whole thing. He is the dumbest man to ever obtain the presidency. He’s basically saying that Lincoln wanted to be famous and so he refused to negotiate and started the war. The entire comment is so incredibly ignorant, shallow and basically infantile it’s stunning:

Any “negotiation” he would have entered into would have ended up allowing slavery to expand to the entire country. That’s how good he is.

He cannot learn. This isn’t the first time he’s made an ass out of himself with this issue. Here he is from 2017:

“People don’t realize, you know, the Civil War, if you think about it, why?” Trump said in an interview with The Washington Examiner, according to a transcript released Monday. “People don’t ask that question, but why was there the Civil War? Why could that one not have been worked out?”

Trump ruminated after lauding Jackson, the populist president whom he and his staff have cited as a role model. He suggested that if Jackson had been president “you wouldn’t have had the Civil War. He was really angry that he saw what was happening with regard to the Civil War. He said, ‘There’s no reason for this.”

Jackson had been dead for 16 years when the civil war broke out.

By the way, Putin was invading Ukraine during the entire Trump presidency. If he is president again he will also “negotiate” that one by giving western Europe to Putin. Who knows? Maybe Alaska too. As long as Putin says he’s great he’ll say he got a good deal.

We Need To Start Studying Cults Instead Of Politics

Published by digby on January 6, 2024

If I adopted MSNBC’s policies against showing Trump or his followers spreading lies, I wouldn’t post that. I have more respect for my audience. I think you’re all smart enough to be able to understand why I do it. These videos are an example of how cultists think and how some of them can possibly come to understand how illogical their thought processes are:

“People do not deploy the powerful human intellect to dispassionately analyze the world,” William J. Bernstein writes, in “The Delusions of Crowds” (Atlantic Monthly). Instead, they “rationalize how the facts conform to their emotionally derived preconceptions.”

Bernstein’s book, a survey of financial and religious manias, is inspired by Charles Mackay’s 1841 work, “Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds.” Mackay saw crowd dynamics as central to phenomena as disparate as the South Sea Bubble, the Crusades, witch hunts, and alchemy. Bernstein uses the lessons of evolutionary psychology and neuroscience to elucidate some of Mackay’s observations, and argues that our propensity to go nuts en masse is determined in part by a hardwired weakness for stories. “Humans understand the world through narratives,” he writes. “However much we flatter ourselves about our individual rationality, a good story, no matter how analytically deficient, lingers in the mind, resonates emotionally, and persuades more than the most dispositive facts or data.”

It’s important to note that Bernstein is referring not just to the stories told by cults but also to ones that lure people into all manner of cons, including financial ones. Not all delusions are mystical. Bernstein’s phrase “a good story” is possibly misleading, since a lot of stories peddled by hucksters and cult leaders are, by any conventional literary standard, rather bad. What makes them work is not their plot but their promise: Here is an answer to the problem of how to live. Or: Here is a way to become rich beyond the dreams of avarice. In both cases, the promptings of common sense—Is it a bit odd that aliens have chosen just me and my friends to save from the destruction of America? Is it likely that Bernie Madoff has a foolproof system that can earn all his investors ten per cent a year?—are effectively obscured by the loveliness of the fantasy prospect. And, once you have entered into the delusion, you are among people who have all made the same commitment, who are all similarly intent on maintaining the lie.

The process by which people are eventually freed from their cult delusions rarely seems to be accelerated by the interventions of well-meaning outsiders. Those who embed themselves in a group idea learn very quickly to dismiss the skepticism of others as the foolish cant of the uninitiated. If we accept the premise that our beliefs are rooted in emotional attachments rather than in cool assessments of evidence, there is little reason to imagine that rational debate will break the spell.

The good news is that rational objections to flaws in cult doctrine or to hypocrisies on the part of a cult leader do have a powerful impact if and when they occur to the cult members themselves. The analytical mind may be quietened by cult-think, but it is rarely deadened altogether. Especially if cult life is proving unpleasant, the capacity for critical thought can reassert itself. Rothschild interviews several QAnon followers who became disillusioned after noticing “a dangling thread” that, once pulled, unravelled the whole tapestry of QAnon lore. It may seem unlikely that someone who has bought into the idea of Hillary Clinton drinking the blood of children can be bouleversé by, say, a trifling error in dates, but the human mind is a mysterious thing. Sometimes it is a fact remembered from grade school that unlocks the door to sanity. One of the former Scientologists interviewed in Alex Gibney’s documentary “Going Clear” reports that, after a few years in the organization, she experienced her first inklings of doubt when she read L. Ron Hubbard’s account of an intergalactic overlord exploding A-bombs in Vesuvius and Etna seventy-five million years ago. The detail that aroused her suspicions wasn’t especially outlandish. “Whoa!” she remembers thinking. “I studied geography in school! Those volcanoes didn’t exist seventy-five million years ago!”

I expect that most of the people Klepper interviews never give another thought to what he said. But you can tell that few of them are startled enough by what he’s led them to (without being hostile in any way) that they realize they may have gone down the wrong rabbit hole.

“Hang Mike Pence!”

Published by digby on January 6, 2024

Just a little reminder:

Most Republican officials know that he’s lying. The election was not stolen. They knew it then and they know it now. They are fine with this because they believe it benefits them.

There Has To Be A Better Way To Frame This

Published by digby on January 6, 2024

Maybe they could take a stand as to what reality really is in that headline? And maybe they could be just a little bit more assertive about it in the piece as well?

Rarely in American politics has a leading presidential candidate made such grave accusations about a rival: warning that he is willing to violate the Constitution. Claiming that he is eager to persecute political rivals. Calling him a dire threat to democracy.

Those arguments have come from President Biden’s speeches, including his forceful address on Friday, as he hammers away at his predecessor. But they are also now being brazenly wielded by Donald J. Trump, the only president to try to overthrow an American election.

Three years after the former president’s supporters stormed the Capitol, Mr. Trump and his campaign are engaged in an audacious attempt to paint Mr. Biden as the true menace to the nation’s foundational underpinnings. Mr. Trump’s strategy aims to upend a world in which he has publicly called for suspending the Constitution, vowed to turn political opponents into legal targets and suggested that the nation’s top military general should be executed.

The result has been a salvo of recriminations from the top candidates in each party, including competing events to mark Saturday’s third anniversary of the attack on the Capitol.

The eagerness from each man to paint the other as an imminent threat signals that their potential rematch this year will be framed as nothing short of a cataclysmic battle for the future of democracy — even as Mr. Trump tries to twist the very idea to suit his own ends.

“Donald Trump’s campaign is about him — not America, not you,” Mr. Biden said Friday, speaking near Valley Forge in Pennsylvania. “Donald Trump’s campaign is obsessed with the past, not the future. He’s willing to sacrifice our democracy, put himself in power.”

On Friday evening, at his own rally in Sioux Center, Iowa, Mr. Trump fired back, calling Mr. Biden’s remarks “pathetic fear-mongering” and again accusing him, without any evidence, of wielding federal law enforcement to attack his political opponents.

“They’ve weaponized government, and he’s saying I’m a threat to democracy,” Mr. Trump said incredulously.

The early maneuvering by Mr. Biden and Mr. Trump points to an election that will be fought on extraordinary ground. While the economy, abortion rights and the ages of the candidates are all expected to be central campaign issues, both men argue that what is fundamentally at stake is whether the country’s nearly 250-year-old system of government endures.

How nice of them to help Trump frame his bogus “I know you are but what am I” claims as just another interpretation of the threat to democracy. Just saying “brazenly” and issuing a passing disclaimer like “without any evidence” does not properly convey reality. And yet, they present this story as a battle for reality!

This is going to be a problem. The reflexive impulse to “be fair” leads to whitewashing what Trump is doing which is lying while Biden is accurately reflecting exactly what Trump is doing.

Yes, Trump is going to say that Biden is a threat to democracy. He’s been saying the elections are all rigged for Democrats sits he first started running for president. But that doesn’t make it true and the media is going to have to stop the “both sides” their coverage of this or many voters are going to believe that their arguments cancel each other out and get more cynical and more polarized and our country will slip further and further away from political sanity.

“The entire nation watched in horror.

Published by digby on January 6, 2024

The whole world watched in disbelief. And Trump did nothing.”

Here are the first words of Biden’s speech yesterday:

Today, the topic of my speech today is deadly serious and I think it needs to be made at the outset of this campaign.

In the winter of 1777, it was harsh and cold as the Continental Army marched to Valley Forge. General George Washington knew he faced the most daunting of tasks, to fight and win a war against the most powerful empire in existence in the world at the time. His mission was clear: liberty, not conquest. Freedom. Not domination. National independence. Not individual glory.

America made a vow: Never again would we bow down to a king.

Months ahead would be incredibly difficult. But General Washington knew something in his bones. Something about the spirit of the troops he was leading. Something, something about the soul of the nation he was struggling to be born. In his general order, he predicted, and I quote, with one heart and one mind, with fortitude and with patience, they would overcome every difficulty, the troops he was leading. And they did. They did.

This army that lacked blankets and food, clothes and shoes. This army, whose march left bloody bare footprints in the snow. This ragtag army made up of ordinary people.

Their mission, George Washington declared, was nothing less than a sacred cause. That was the phrase he used. A sacred cause. Freedom, Liberty. Democracy. American democracy.

I just visited the grounds of Valley Forge. I’ve been there a number of times since the time I was a Boy Scout years ago.

You know, it’s the very site that I think every American should visit, because it tells the story of the pain and the suffering and the true patriotism it took to make America.

Today, we gather in a new year, some 246 years later, just one day before January 6, a day forever seared in our memory because it was on that day that we nearly lost America, lost it all.

Today, we’re here to answer the most important of questions. Is democracy still America’s sacred cause? I mean it.

This is not rhetorical, academic or hypothetical. Whether democracy is still America’s sacred cause is the most urgent question of our time.

And it’s what the 2024 election is all about.

The choice is clear.

Donald Trump’s campaign is about him, not America, not you.

Donald Trump’s campaign is obsessed with the past, not the future. He’s willing to sacrifice our democracy, put himself in power.

Our campaign is different. For me and Kamala, our campaign is about America. It’s about you. It’s about every age and background that occupy this country.

It’s about the future we’re going to continue to build together. And our campaign is about preserving and strengthening our American democracy.

Three years ago tomorrow, we saw with our own eyes the violent mob stormed the United States Capitol. It was almost in disbelief as you first turned on the television.

For the first time in our history, insurrectionists had come to stop the peaceful transfer, transfer of power in America. First time.

Smashing windows, shattering doors, attacking the police.

Outside, gallows were erected as the MAGA crowd chanted, “Hang Mike Pence.”

Inside, they hunted for Speaker Pelosi. The House was chanting as they marched through and smashed windows, “Where’s Nancy?”

Over 140 police officers were injured.

Jill and I attended the funeral of police officers who died as a result of the events of that day.

Because of Donald Trump’s lies, they died because these lies brought a mob to Washington.

He promised it would be wild. And it was.

He told the crowd to “fight like hell” and all hell was unleashed.

He promised he would be side by side with them.

Then, as usual, he left the dirty work to others.

He retreated to the White House.

As America was attacked from within, Donald Trump watched on TV in a private, small dining room off my oval, off the Oval Office.

The entire nation watched in horror.

The whole world watched in disbelief.

And Trump did nothing.

Members of his staff, members of his family. Republican leaders who were under attack at that very moment pled with him.

Act. Call off the mob. Imagine had he gone out and said, “Stop.”

Still, Trump did nothing.

It was among the worst derelictions of duty by a president in American history.

An attempt to overturn a free and fair election by force and violence.

There was much more to the speech than that but this was the essence. I know we have to talk about other things in the election, kitchen table issues, gas prices, school loans, Israel, etc. etc. But this is the central issue facing Americans in 2024. None of the rest of it will matter if we don’t get this right. And many, many, many more innocent people will suffer.

Here’s the whole speech if you didn’t get a chance to see it and you’d like to.

ICYMI

Published by Tom Sullivan on January 6, 2024

Biden almost got medieval on his presumptive rival

3 Years Ago Today

Published by digby on January 6, 2024

“Coming for you Pelosi, you socialist c**t!” “We know where you live!” “Antifa’s a bunch of p*ssies!” “If we’re got to hang a bunch of crooked congressmen, we’ll do that, okay?”

That’s just a small sample of the patriotic rhetoric heard from these patriots that day. Watch the whole Youtube if you have the stomach for it. It’s about 8 minutes. It’s so easy to forget just how violent these feral criminals were that day.

And by the way, Roy Nehls, the congressman attempting to talk to the protesters, wrote this before he voted against certifying the election:

Here he is today:

Nehls announced Tuesday that he will be serving as a witness for Trump’s defense in the 14th Amendment case that argues the former president should be barred from running for office under the Constitution’s disqualification clause. Calling the civil trial a “sham” and “clear election interference,” Nehls said, “I was at the doors on January 6, face to face with protestors, and I know firsthand there was NO INSURRECTION.”

“I look forward to providing my eyewitness account of that,” Nehls wrote in a post on X.

Also, get a look at this, from yesterday:

It’s unthinkable that this monster ever comes close to power again. And even then I don’t know what we’re going to do about his cult.

Donald Trump Is A Criminal

Published by Tom Sullivan on January 6, 2024

Stop pretending he’s wearing clothes!

Friday afternoon the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to review the case from Colorado that declared Donald J. Trump, Insurrectionist, ineligible to appear on that state’s 2024 primary ballot. And oh, the humanity!

The 14th Amendment, the Civil War, Maine, Colorado, a divided nation, MAGA death threats against lawmakers and judges, etc. Plus the kettles of limp-spaghetti arguments desperate Trump’s attorneys have thrown at courtroom walls hoping something, anything, will stick and save their client’s ass.

And then there’s the tarnished Roberts court itself (Washington Post):

The public already views the Supreme Court through a partisan lens, with Democrats expressing little confidence in the court and Republicans saying the opposite — and the question of whether Trump should be kept off the ballot has the potential to further polarize those views.

“It throws them right into the political thicket,” Stanford law professor Michael W. McConnell said of the court. “There is no way they can decide the case without having about half the country think they are being partisan hacks.”

Oh, but Team Trump thinks they have this in the bag:

“I think it should be a slam dunk in the Supreme Court; I have faith in them,” [Trump attorney Alina] Habba said on Fox News.“You know, people like Kavanaugh who the president fought for, who the president went through hell to get into place, he’ll step up.”

Aaron Blake:

[D]espite Habba’s cleanup effort, she was clearly pointing in the direction of Kavanaugh (and potentially others) being beholden to Trump; there is no other reason to invoke the supposed favors Trump did for Kavanaugh. This adds to a volume of evidence that indicates that Trump does indeed expect loyalty from judges and justices — along with plenty of others in positions where that shouldn’t be a consideration.

That was before SCOTUS decided to accept the case it must take no matter how much it does not want to.

Trump sent the judges a message himself at a Friday rally in Iowa:

“All I want is fair; I fought really hard to get three very, very good people in,” he said, referring to his appointees. He added, “And I just hope that they’re going to be fair because, you know, the other side plays the ref.”

Also sprach MAGAthustra.

Translation: You owe me.

Implied threat: You’d better come through. Or else.

Oh, the democracy!

Constitutional scholars are divided on whether it would be good for democracy to bar Trump from the ballot, or whether such a move, even if legally sound, is politically too dangerous. Many of them say theyexpect the justices to try to find a way to decide the case without addressing the underlying question of whether Trump engaged in an insurrection.

Listen. Listen closely. Trump did this. That is the context no one in the press has the guts to talk about. All this hand-ringing over the Court’s dilemma, over a democracy in peril, and no mention that our democratic republic stands at this crossroads because Donald Trump is a career criminal! We’re here because of him.

Oh, but he’s not been adjudicated! they cry. Like the dozens of indicted Jan. 6 insurrectionists still awaiting trial while their accomplices sit rotting in jail? Poor babies, all!

“There’s no confusion about who Trump is,” Biden said on Friday. We know who Trump is. You don’t have to be Maya Angelou or Robert Zimmerman to know which way the wind blows.

Look, I don’t agree with everything Dan Froomkin writes here, but I share his frustration that the mainstream press refuses, refuses, to address any elephant in any room:

Our top newsrooms are too timid to go there, however. Racism, especially when it comes to calling specific people or practices racist, has long been the third rail of journalism. Newsroom leaders don’t want to be accused of stoking racial resentment, don’t want to alienate racist readers, and don’t want to have to defend their own insufficient attempts to diversify their newsrooms and sources. They just don’t want to go there.

Sadly, the fact that racism may be the key to understanding the current political climate hasn’t changed that aversion.

By the same token, Trump is a criminal. By temperament and by habit if not by judicial decree.

But God forbid anyone should speak bluntly about the personality cult that accuses Democrats of being baby-blood-drinking pedophiles.

Trump is not the the genetic progenitor of this movement. As a natural-born predator, he just exploits it more efficiently than his wannabes.

But the flood of 14th Amendment odds-making just sickens me. Because Trumpism, with its not-so-subliminal threats of violence has turned press watchdogs into lapdogs. The expert analysis we’ll be expected to swallow as SCOTUS deliberates Trump’s questionable standing as a candidate for dictator will focus on every legal and political consideration except the behaviors of the man who misled us here.

I’m reminded of the kids’ nonseense song about the hole at the botton of the sea. It all comes back to Trump. He’s the hole.

Friday Night Soother

Published by digby on January 5, 2024

This week I’ll just share some cute little videos that came across twitter this week. (These are necessary to cleanse your brain from all the Nazis.)

“…. Bastard”

Published by digby on January 5, 2024

I finished it for him.

This was the opening speech of Biden’s campaign and he is making it clear how he sees the stakes and he is 100% right.

Unfortunately, we are clearly going to have to fight much of the media at the same time we will have to fight Trump and the MAGA cult. CNN’s commentary after the speech was dismal. Gloria Borger complained that it was “very personal” ignoring the fact that it’s a presidential campaign and Biden is running against Trump! Of course it’s personal. And all he did was use Trump’s own words. (He didn’t even call him old or fat or make fun of him, which I think is the actual definition of “getting personal.”)

Then former Republican Charlie Dent said that people are sick of all the “extremistm” and are looking for something different than Trump who they think is crazy and Biden who is too old. Then he brought up No Labels at which point I changed the channel.

*sigh*

Some more highlights:

Some other highlights:

There’s a lot of work to do to get people to pay attention to what Trump has in store if he gets elected again. This was a good start.

Update –— I thought this piece in Politico Playbook framed the issue well:

BIDEN SETS THE STAKES — One way to think about the last three years of American politics is as an ongoing effort to hold DONALD TRUMP accountable for his actions on Jan. 6, 2021.

It started as a bipartisan effort that treated Trump as a pariah, but then it quickly polarized into just another red-blue issue, one that rehabilitated Trump among Republicans while generally benefitting Democrats electorally. Ever since, the accountability effort has pingponged through different branches of government, the states, and other legal and political institutions.

First up was Congress with Trump’s post-riot impeachment, which was ultimately rejected by Republican senators, including Leader MITCH McCONNELL, who argued that there were better ways in other parts of the government to seek accountability.

Next was the House Jan. 6 committee, which had no power over Trump but served as a catalyst for the next two forums of accountability: the 2022 midterms, where Republican candidates who supported election subversion were generally defeated, and the Justice Department, which indicted Trump.

Then came the GOP presidential primaries, the Republican Party’s internal system of candidate accountability. By then Jan. 6 had so fully matured into a partisan issue that trying to use it against Trump strengthened him and damaged the attacker. Trump will spend the anniversary on Saturday at two rallies in Iowa.

As the AP reminds, Trump “has called it ‘a beautiful day’ and described those imprisoned for the insurrection as ‘great, great patriots’ and ‘hostages.’ At some campaign rallies, he has played a recording of ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ sung by jailed rioters — the anthem interspersed with his recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance.”

The Jan. 6 accountability project will dominate 2024, as the issue is taken up by the states deciding whether Trump is an insurrectionist and should be allowed on the ballot, juries in Georgia and Washington, D.C., deciding two criminal cases, and the Supreme Court which seems poised to decide three major issues related to these efforts.

But all of these efforts — the GOP primaries, the 14th Amendment movement, the JACK SMITH and FANI WILLIS indictments — might sputter out, just as impeachment did three years ago.

That would leave President JOE BIDEN and his reelection campaign as the last tool of accountability.

So it is no surprise that Biden is kicking off the 2024 election today with a speech reminding voters of Jan. 6 and alerting them to the threat he believes Trump poses — one he prepped for by meeting with a group of historians at the White House.

“Using the anniversary of the Jan. 6 insurrection to frame the stakes of the 2024 campaign, the president will draw upon the history of the Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, setting Friday to argue that his likely rematch with Donald Trump will be a seismic test of the republic’s foundation,” Jonathan Lemire writes this morning, citing senior Biden advisers who offered a preview of the speech.

“‘Democracy is not a sideline issue: It is a sacred cause,’ said one of the advisers, granted anonymity as part of the ground rules during a call with reporters. ‘When major events occur, people render the judgments in national elections. Voters won’t forget Jan. 6.’”

The content of the speech will be studied carefully by Democratic strategists who are in the middle of the same electoral debate they had in 2022: Should the party emphasize Jan. 6 and the threat to democratic norms, or should it focus on traditional policy issues?

There was a cottage industry of pundits ahead of the midterms who argued Biden was making a mistake by emphasizing the former, which was allegedly not as important to voters, at the expense of the latter.

But post-election analysis suggested that Democrats prevailed in places where they convinced voters to take “the MAGA threat” seriously, and suffered in places where that message didn’t break through. It’s not a strict binary choice, of course, but a question of emphasis. Biden will use the MAGA and Jan. 6 as an umbrella threat that affects numerous policies.

As Lemire writes, “Biden will extend the concept of freedom to other issue areas during his remarks on Friday, aides said. That includes access to vote, abortion rights and economic fairness.”