I’m not going to recap that runner-up debate last night because it’s completely irrelevant and you missed nothing. (I did watch it and that’s two hours I’ll never get back.) The only thing of note that happened in this primary yesterday was Chris Christie’s speech dropping out of the race which is only worth mentioning because he said a lot of things that Republicans need to hear (not that Fox carried them, needless to say.)
But it is important to hear what Trump is saying because he is going to be the GOP nominee and he is a danger to all of us. He had a competing town hall last night. A few highlights:
Well, actually, he’s answered it many times:
Trump has said the town hall was wonderful and congratulated the Fox moderators for being very professional. In other words it was a love fest where he felt very safe and cozy. Nonetheless, he did say the quiet part out loud a number of times.
Something Anand Giridharadas shares at The Ink is worth noting. He spoke with Daniel Ziblatt, the Eaton Professor of Government at Harvard University and director of the Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies about how world democracies respond to antidemocratic movements.
Giridharadas writes, “People speak of this as an existential moment for democracy, but it also feels like a business-as-usual moment in terms of how many citizens invest their time and energy.”
That’s the way it feels to me too, more like a Sears crisis. People want a movement. Few want to start one.
To preseve this republic, Democrats need to step it up a notch. Except here on the ground their idea of stepping it up a notch is typically doing the same thing, the same way, just more of it. Telling ourselves every freakin’ election is the most important of our lifetimes is counter-productive. Because what do we do in the face of an existential crisis? We play it safe. We stick with what we know. We don’t experiment. That’s a mistake.
Giridharadas interviews Ziblatt:
I see an imbalance between the professed level of outrage by very large numbers of people about Trump, about Trumpism, about democratic decay, about lies, and the lack of an actual movement. Can you talk about that imbalance?
There’s a book by Eitan Hersh called Politics is for Power. He makes this case about how to move beyond what he calls political hobbyism: people watching MSNBC and feeling like they’re engaged in politics. This is like the community I live in, a place where when you go take your dog for a walk at night, you see everybody’s TVs are on and they’re watching MSNBC, but voter turnout for local elections is 15 percent. And so that’s really a problem that afflicts both red states and blue states.
Institutional change is something that not everybody cares about. Or it’s like a bank shot to get to what you want; it’s an indirect route. If you’re not happy with your life, the idea that we need to introduce, say, proportional representation is an abstraction. So how do you get people to think in institutional terms?
The way to do that is to link institutional reform to the issues that people really care about in their daily lives. Whether that’s abortion rights or gun control; it could be economic policy.
I also think there’s something to be drawn from looking at America’s own great tradition of institutional reform. Up until about 1970, there was a tradition of reforming the Constitution and making our system more democratic. We’ve stopped doing that, and reimagining what’s possible is really important.
The mistake the left makes, Democrats make, and a Biden administration still working from a 20th-century political paradigm makes is to think what people care about most is kitchen table issues. It’s how they express their everyday anxieties, yes, but that’s because what’s eating them goes much deeper than economics. They don’t know how to put into words what they’re really anxious about, or else they have enough residual shame not to talk about it in public.
It seems like authoritarians perfectly understand the actual emotional landscape of the country and of people. And generally pro-democratic leaders don’t. Can you talk about that?
We say emotion, but what’s that mean? It means fear, it means hope, it means aspiration, anxiety. It’s this fear, fear of loss. This idea that if you have been at the top of the hierarchy, equalization feels like you’re now at the bottom of the hierarchy — that, I think, is a lot of what’s driving our politics, particularly on the Republican side of things.
I would say the hypothesis of the Biden presidency was that if you address people’s material concerns, this will take some of the steam and anger out of the populist movement — this rage that fuels Trump and continues to fuel MAGA. And I think there’s a lot to that. It’s a pretty good bet to make.
But if you look at the persistent low poll numbers and the perception of the economy — I think this is something that people haven’t really dealt with: why are people still not happy? — maybe there’s something else that’s going on. And I think it does have to do with these broader demographic and cultural changes that people are responding to, and not really understanding.
And so I don’t quite know what political leader out there is doing this. I think Biden tries to speak to it to some degree. I think he thinks of himself as being able to do that. He does it better than lots of politicians, but it’s still probably not sufficient.
I think that’s right. The truth lies just below the surface, underneath a scab perhaps, and many are not ready to dig deeper. Meantime, MAGA Republicans are fine with manipulating people’s anxieties about being left out to their advantage. Democrats keep playing to people’s pocketbook “best interests.” Their pitch is, “Democracy is under a threat, imperiled, this could be the last election ever…but I know you’re really concerned about the price of bananas,” as Giridharadas puts it.
Tapping people’s “guts,” as Stephen Colbert famously put it, feels beneath them. We’re forever trying to prove we’re the smartest kids in the room. We rely on political abstractions. Republicans play to raw emotions.
“What we need is to present a vision of what kind of democracy, what kind of society we want — something that can tap into people’s hopes and aspirations,” Ziblatt says.
Paint the beautiful tomorrow. Sell the brownie, not the recipe. Barack Obama did that and went from obscure freshman senator to president.
Ziblatt thinks Biden is on the right track, but to be most effective needs to present a more unifying tableau.
Instead of the campaign speech Biden just gave on Friday [President Biden’s speech in Blue Bell, Pennsylvania on January 5, 2024, which focused on Donald Trump’s threat to democracy], I’d like to have seen a speech given to commemorate January 6th, with Liz Cheney sitting right next to A.O.C., with Dick Cheney in the audience. This shouldn’t be a partisan event. This needs to be a moment of national recognition and consensus, like Spain in 1981.
Giridharadas laments the lack of visibility on TV of any pro-democracy movement. “Where is this movement? I want to be in it. Can you connect me to something?” people write him in emails.
I’m forwarding the emails to you.
First of all, you have to get involved with real organizations, where people are coming together face to face. This can mean volunteering at your local precinct office of the Democratic Party. It turns out it’s a really low bar to get involved. You could very quickly become the leader of the local precinct office. And then you notice that nobody can meet regularly because they all have kids. So you work to set up a thing where people are sharing childcare duties, and next everyone is thinking about who should be the candidate in the next election.
Yeah, it’s actually work. But it’s work that makes a difference and grows the Democratic bench. People like Trump and George W. Bush were born on third base and think they hit a triple. Many progressives want to start on third base or it’s not worth their time. Get over yourselves.
Last question. Is there a case you’d make for hope? Is there anything in the United States that gives you hope that the authoritarian threat will be overcome?
There are overwhelming majorities of Americans who do value these institutions and value liberal principles, and value principles of racial equality. I was looking at some survey data on whether or not you think there should be rules, restrictions on where people can live on the basis of race. In the mid-1970s, very high percentages of Americans agreed that there should be. Today, overwhelming percentages of Americans think the opposite, conservative and liberal alike.
On a whole series of questions like this, there’s been a major transformation in people’s views about race and racial equality. And as much as we have this moment of Nazis in the streets and racists feeling like it’s possible to talk more vocally, if you look at the numbers, most Americans reject this stuff. If you think of Richard Nixon’s effort to inflame the silent majority in the late 60s and early 70s, it was incredibly successful. Donald Trump’s attempt to do that in 2020 just foundered. And I think it’s because there have been profound changes in most Americans’ basic attitudes.
There are serious ailments — guns, violence, etc. — but our society at some level has this vibrancy, this health, and our economy is pretty strong as well, though our institutions just don’t reflect that. And so that’s why I’m obsessed with the institutions. I feel like, if we could get our politics right, then it could reflect that more. That’s where I find hope and optimism.
Wednesday’s Hunter Biden contempt hearing clown show in the House Oversight Committee made my head hurt. So I checked in now and then but could not stay in. But for those who missed it to preserve their mental health, I wanted to share a couple of clips that popped up later:
An ‘X’ user named Modern Man praised the “black girl magic” that Rep. Jasmine Crocket’s (D-Texas) brought to her takedown of Republicans on the committee. Oh, and did she. Right out of the gate.
“Let me tell you why no one wants to talk to y’all behind closed doors, because y’all lie.”
Enjoy.
Democrat’s ranking member, Rep. Jamie Raskin of Maryland brought more than his share.
While Raskin is from just south of the Mason-Dixon Line, he uses “you guys,” not “y’all.” Either one works. But in the clip above he was just getting warmed up.
Yes, it was a sideshow. But the Democrats came ready to perform, and with better material.
Chris Christie dropped out of the race today and gave quite a speech. He didn’t endorse anyone and I think we know why:
Christie’s speech was the best one I’ve ever seen him give. He didn’t mince words about Trump and chastised those who are giving him a pass. He talked honestly about the stakes for the country in this election.
A couple of highlights:
National Review says that Nikki Haley or Ron DeSantis “are far and away better on the merits, more likely to win in November, and, if elected, more likely to deliver — free from the wild drama of a second Trump term — conservative results.” I don’t know about Haley and DeSantis but we can certainly agree on the horror of another Trump term. But maybe they could have been consistently critical of the MAGA cult over the past 7 years? I dunno. But they were “Never Trump” in 2016 and they are again, so I guess that’s something.
Mediaite reports:
The editorial minced no words in prosecuting its case against Trump, bluntly stating that Trump “lost to Joe Biden in 2020″ and “did everything he could to overturn the result, including trying to bully his vice president into violating his oath and preventing and delaying the counting of the electoral vote.”
“When a mob, fervently believing Trump’s lies, fought its way into the U.S. Capitol to try to end the count, Trump did little or nothing to try to stop it,” it added.
The editors continued, assailing both Trump’s fitness for office and his effectiveness in it during his first term:
These were infamous presidential acts and represented serious offenses against our constitutional order. Nothing can justify them, and it’s wrong to simply pretend that they didn’t happen. It’s impossible to imagine Ron DeSantis or Nikki Haley, whatever their other flaws, engaging in such grotesquely selfish behavior injurious to our republic. On this basis alone, both are vastly preferable to Trump.
***
In his first term, Trump notched some important conservative wins and even forged some creative victories (think the Abraham Accords). He’d be an enormous improvement over Joe Biden on many policy questions. [Bullshit…]
But much energy would be wasted on his personal vendettas and fighting back against the Left’s sure-to-be-unhinged reaction to his return to the White House. He’d have trouble attracting talent to serve him. His bad instincts on trade and NATO, tendency to personalize everything including foreign relations, contempt for rules that get in his way, and erratic nature would risk real harm to the country. He’d be an easily distracted 78-year-old one-termer sure to get wiped out in the midterms, once again…
[…]
“It’s not too late to choose one of them, and forge a better path for the party and for the country,” concluded the editorial.
They obviously prefer DeSantis which means they are MAGA 2.0. Still, since DeSantis is a dud and has no chance of winning, this is better than nothing. All the Never Trump Republicans, even those who can’t bring themselves to endorse Joe Biden, are important for the popular front that’s necessary to save the country from another Trump term. So… welcome to the resistance once again, NR.
Joe Lieberman and company really are determined to screw up this election:
A political group intending to support a presidential candidate run by the group No Labels plans to file paperwork with the Federal Election Commission on Wednesday, with a handful of Republican and Democratic strategists as advisers.
The group, New Leaders ’24 political action committee, expects a No Labels ticket to materialize this year. No Labels has said it would mount a campaign if President Biden and former President Donald J. Trump are their parties’ nominees, in a rematch of the 2020 campaign that is increasingly likely.
The group will be advised by Rob Stutzman, a Republican and former deputy chief of staff to Arnold Schwarzenegger during his governorship as well as an adviser for Mitt Romney’s 2008 presidential campaign. Kathleen Shanahan, a Republican and former chief of staff to Jeb Bush during his governorship, will be the chief executive, and Andrew Fishman, whom the group identified as a Democrat and who has a business background, will serve as treasurer, Mr. Stutzman said.
Officials said they had $2 million in initial commitments, but they expect up to $300 million if there’s a “viable” ticket.
It remains to be seen whether No Labels, which counts former Senator Joe Lieberman of Connecticut and Larry Hogan, the former Republican governor of Maryland, among its leadership, will find what it calls a unity ticket to run in 2024. Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia, who recently said he would not seek re-election, has suggested he is considering a presidential campaign, and he is seen as a top potential candidate by some in the group.
A super PAC is necessary, officials say, because No Labels, which doesn’t have to disclose its donors, can’t operate as a campaign committee and is focused only on trying to ensure ballot access in various states.
Independent and third-party candidacies, which have been tried repeatedly, have served as spoilers in previous presidential races. And Democrats have been vocal about concern that a ticket like the one No Labels is looking to run could tilt the election in Mr. Trump’s favor.
You have to love the fact that Lieberman, of all people, is behind this. He is the guy who lost the Vice Presidency by 537 votes in Florida because Ralph Nader got 97,000 votes. But then he’s also the guy who lost a primary and ran third party and won. He’s fine with it. He still lives to punish hippies. Like Joe Biden… ?
What in the world, you wonder? Well…
There was a Biden impeachment hearing today at which Hunter himself turned up making himself available to testify publicly again. The Republicans were … upset.
Here are the highlights:
Then Marge took the mic and Hunter got up and walked out.
The hearing is being run by circus clowns so why would anyone expect something other than a circus?
I keep hearing anecdotal reports of Republicans who are saying they will not vote for Trump this time. I don’t know if they aren’t being represented in the polls or what, but there’s a lot of it and since it’s coming from the GOP primary reporting it’s worth mentioning. This one from Jonathan Martin at Politico who followed the Haley campaign for a while and had this impression:
The most memorable feature of Haley’s otherwise forgettable gathering was not what she said but the nature of her audience — and how it explains why Trump is poised to win overwhelmingly in Iowa on Monday but will face the same general election challenges in 2024 he did in 2020.
I would have liked to see more discussion of that but this piece was about the GOP voters who are rejecting Trump. But it’s important that someone mention this general election dynamic, even in passing. Maybe he’ll develop that in a later piece.
I struggled to find a single attendee in the suburban strip mall tavern who was not a college graduate. Similarly, the day before, I couldn’t find a Haley admirer who showed up to see her in Sioux City who was not also a college graduate.
“She’s reasonable,” Jim Maine, a Waukee resident, said of Haley. “Originally I was favoring DeSantis, but he just hasn’t connected.”
Maine had no use for Trump, calling the former president “a jilted junior high boyfriend” who “makes up names for people.”
A retiree, Maine was an accountant for an insurance company — “pretty standard around here,” as he put it of Dallas County. Now, none of his neighbors “who voted for [Trump] the last couple of times are going to vote for him again.”
If it all sounds like a windup to a sort of cul-de-sac Pauline Kaelism — I don’t know anyone in our homeowners association voting for Trump! — well, that’s the defining story of today’s Republican Party. The GOP’s traditional, professional class base is eager to move on from somebody they find between embarrassing and appalling, but the party’s beating heart is now Trump-loving working class voters.
The old Republican construct of establishment-vs-conservative — one that DeSantis, in particular, is operating under as he runs to the right — is about as relevant to the Trump era as the Blackberry. The most consequential fault line in this race and in GOP politics broadly is based on class.
That’s how Democratic primaries have been covered, and rightfully so, for the last 40 years. The candidate able to emerge as the beer-track hopeful almost always emerges as the nominee while the wine-track hopeful is limited to pinot-sipping precincts (hat tip to Ron Brownstein for the terminology).
This race is scarcely different.
Haley and DeSantis are largely competing for the votes of Iowa’s upscale voters — DeSantis was in Waukee last week — while Trump is on course to roll with the overwhelming support of blue-collar Iowans.
It is, of course, a delicate topic anywhere, but even more so with voters who pride themselves on being Iowa Nice.
One couple at Haley’s event in Waukee was happy to discuss their support for her but asked I not use their names for what they had to say about the former president.
“All our friends who voted for Trump have moved onto other candidates,” said the husband, a retired banker from nearby Polk County, the largest jurisdiction in the state. “But they’re all Polk County people. You get out to rural Iowa, and you start talking to them …”
His voice trailed off as he talked in disbelief about how Trump’s felony counts only reinforce his support with such voters.
In separate polls conducted by the Des Moines Register and Fox Business last month, Trump had the support of 61 percent of Iowans without college degrees while his two main opponents were only in the teens or below.
And the reason why Haley has such high hopes in New Hampshire, particularly if Chris Christie drops out, is because the state is an outlier in the modern party: less religious, more educated and wealthier. She and Christie are sitting on the votes of a heavily upscale demographic, which if combined could make for a competitive race.
Consider the new CNN-University of New Hampshire poll there: Haley is now only down to Trump by single digits because she is soundly defeating him among voters there with a college degree and even more heavily among those with an advanced degree.
Haley’s challenge is that New Hampshire may only represent a false dawn, a blip before the primary returns to states with a downscale demographic more like Iowa.She may find hope in New Hampshire, but that would only tempt her to return home to South Carolina and discover that she’s Hootie and the Blowfish to Trump’s Taylor Swift.
Ouch.
I think he’s right about all this. New Hampshire is an outlier in the primaries and there’s little chance that Haley’s going to be able to gather enough delegates even if she does well in big states like California which is voting early this year.
But what’s important about this is the fact that these people are saying they won’t vote for Trump again in the general election. It would be preferable if they would hold their Republican noses and vote for Biden but if they want to stay home that’s certainly ok too.
Trump is not going to wear any better on this faction of the GOP. He’s going to alienate them even more because he is under 91 indictments and acts downright demented on the trail spewing Nazi rhetoric. I don’t know how many of these disaffected Republicans are out there but it only takes a few to make a huge difference in the swing states.
The idea that former President Donald Trump was performing his official duties when he told his supporters to march to the Capitol and “fight like hell” and then sat in his dining room watching them storm the building and refusing to do anything to quell the riot has always seemed to be a stretch. After he lost 60 of 61 court cases in which he tried to overturn the results of the election that he continued to exhort the top officials in the Justice Department to lie and say they had evidence of fraud hardly seems like a presidential duty either. And all the calls to local officials asking them “find” enough votes to change the outcome of their election wouldn’t normally be considered the job of a president. American elections, for better or worse, are processed by state and local authorities.
Nonetheless, Donald Trump’s lawyers had filed an appeal in the US District court arguing that everything he did in the post election period were part of Donald Trump’s official duties as President and therefore he should be given immunity for all of it which is ridiculous. But even more ridiculous, his lawyers didn’t really end up addressing that claim that in oral arguments before the court on Tuesday, instead focusing on a truly fatuous assertion that unless a president has been impeached and convicted by the US Congress he cannot be prosecuted for anything that happened during his term in office. This naturally led to some very unusual questioning by the judges:
I think even smart elementary school kids could see the holes in that argument. What if a president just resigned before the impeachment so that he would be immune from prosecution for his heinous acts? What if he decided to have enough members of the Senate killed as well so they couldn’t get to the two thirds majority required for conviction? Once you start handing out immunity from crimes unless they follow the very weak political process of impeachment you’ve pretty much said all bets are off and the president of the United States has a license to kill.
Basically Trump’s lawyer seemed to get backed into this ridiculous argument and couldn’t figure out how to get out of it. All he had to do was say that ordering a hit on a political opponent could never be part of a president’s official duties so such an act would not qualify for immunity. But then that would have brought the argument back to the also terrible but not completely embarrassing grounds on which they had originally wanted to make it — the absurd notion that Trump’s attempts to overturn the election were part of his official duties.
That original argument didn’t hold much water anyway. Judge Karen L. Henderson, appointed by George H.W. Bush, wasn’t impressed with the argument that Trump attempted to overturn the fully adjudicated, legal election because it is his constitutional duty to ensure that election laws are upheld. As she said, “I think it’s paradoxical to say that his constitutional duty to take care that the laws be faithfully executed allows him to violate the criminal law.”
The original standard they are sort of basing this on was developed by the DOJ’s Office of Legal counsel to ensure that a president could not be criminally prosecuted while he was in office and over and over again as this has come up in various investigations and earlier impeachments, parties on all sides made it clear that any president who breaks the law could be prosecuted after his term was over. Why else would Gerald Ford have pardoned Richard Nixon or would Bill Clinton have entered into a plea agreement with the Office of Special Counsel when he left office? Did none of the lawyers involved have the Trump team’s sophisticated understanding of the US Constitution? Unlikely in the extreme.
Trump attended the arguments in person even though he didn’t need to. I suspect it’s partly because he thinks that glowering at the judges in his cases intimidates them. According to news reports he sat emotionless most of the time but scribbled what were likely instructions when the prosecution was speaking. He seemed very pleased when his lawyer made the irrelevant, political arguments that Trump is winning in all the polls, which is also a lie.
Trump also just likes to be a part of the story so he can pound home to his followers that he is being persecuted for their crimes. But it didn’t work out so well for his this time. The court house required him to enter in the back and there were no cameras in the hallways or out front so he had to retreat to the Waldorf Astoria Hotel to hold his little post-hearing press briefing. He expressed his firm conviction that “as president you have to have immunity, very simple” and said that there would be “bedlam” if the courts didn’t buy his argument, obviously signaling his flock to stand back and stand by. He concluded with this:
We’ll probably get the District Court opinion quite soon and then it will be on to the Supremes for Trump’s appeal, should they decide to accept it. In the meantime, there will be plenty of Trump Trial action in the next few days. The second E. Jean Carroll defamation case begins next week (in which, incidentally, the US Appeals Court from the 2nd circuit refused to rehear Trump’s earlier “immunity” argument on Monday.) And closing arguments in his fraud trial are scheduled for Thursday. Trump announced that he will be giving the closing arguments himself in that case, ostensibly because he knows the case better than anyone. I assume he got his law degree from Trump University.
As we watch these legal cases really start to take off it’s both reassuring that it seems as though rational people are in charge of the proceedings and nerve wracking considering that Trump’s main strategy — to delay the process as long as possible — may end up working simply because the judicial system is not built for speed. He’ll try to wrap up the primaries as early as possible and officially become the presumptive nominee and then claim that the political process must supersede the legal process until the election is over.
He doesn’t care if his lawyers make fools of themselves in court just as long he can push off the trial date as long as possible. In that sense reason may be winning the battles at every turn, just as they did with the election cases in 2020. But Trump could end up winning the war.