I’ve received a remarkable number of gracious compliments on @jaredkushner's recent in-depth discussion with @lexfridman.
I personally love this clip as it reveals the determined optimist who firmly believes that there's always a solution if you're willing to try enough paths.… pic.twitter.com/ge8xt6edqR
“I just think it’s just something where, if you want to accomplish something, you know, a lot of people, I hear, complain about what other people do or why it’s hard, or why it’s impossible,” Kushner said in the video. “And again, I say this as somebody who has been so blessed with so many things in life, but when I’ve had challenges or things I’ve wanted to achieve, I just focus and say, ‘What can I do?’” he added. “I’ll read everything I can get my hands on. If I fail at one thing, if the door closes, I’ll try the window. If the window closes, I’ll try the chimney. If the chimney closes, I’ll try to dig a tunnel. It’s just, if you want to accomplish something, you just have to go at it.”
In sharing the post online, Ivanka gushed over her husband, observing that she had received “a remarkable number of gracious compliments” regarding Kushner’s comments. “I personally love this clip as it reveals the determined optimist who firmly believes that there’s always a solution if you’re willing to try enough paths. I love this about Jared … and it’s a good reminder as we start the new year!” she continued.
Two Nepo Babies patting themselves on the back for their very stable genius in choosing their parents.
Lawyers are right this minute arguing that Donald “91 felony indictments” Trump should be immune from criminal prosecution for acts he took during his White House tenure.
“Circuit judge Florence Pan is putting Trump lawyer John Sauer in a tough spot,” writes The Guardian’s Hugo Lowell.
Sauer is still arguing that Trump is not an “officer” of the U.S.
On the SEAL Team Six scenario above, Brian Beutler takes on the argument that Trump should be held to a special standard. We all know how special he is, don’t we?
Beutler’s “We Can’t Afford Weak-Kneed Liberalism In The Trump Era” refers specifically to objections to disqualifying Trump from the ballot based on the 14th Amendment. Just to get you started:
Boiled down, the argument is this: Donald Trump should be held to a special standard, not written into the Constitution, because applying the law to him faithfully is unfair to Republicans, and may allow them to engage in tit-for-tat retribution.
Both of these objections are easily refuted.
Consider Jonathan Chait’s most recent piece, restating his opposition to the disqualification effort, which he describes as a “gambit.”
Chait maintains his objection is political, not legal, but it is actually both—he’s making a case for the Supreme Court to invent new law to reach what he believes would be a politically expedient outcome.
The legal aspect of his reasoning centers on standards of evidence: The allegation that Trump “engaged in insurrection” is contestable, and since Trump contests it, the public will never fully accept his disqualification. The Supreme Court should thus reverse state-level decisions disqualifying him on what are ultimately due-process grounds.
Politics may be animating this argument, but it is an argument about the law and how it should be applied. The legal question of whether Trump’s conduct matches the meaning of “engaged in insurrection” is at the heart of all academic and judicial opinions supporting his removal from the ballot. Chait appears driven by fear of the consequences of applying the law to Trump, so he’s adopted the legal view that the 14th amendment shouldn’t be applied to Trump without the strictest possible scrutiny. That’s a legal mechanism—it just happens to be an atextual one.
THE FAFO DOCTRINE
The unfairness point is easiest to rebut. Chait argues Trump should be held to this invented standard under the law because, “the timing and political stakes of this case require incontestable certainty.” It’d be wrong to apply the law as written (no criminal conviction required!) because it’d be unfair to Republicans. “If the Court were contemplating a Trump disqualification a year or two ago, when the Republicans had more time to organize their alternatives, it might have allowed a more forgiving threshold of truth,” he argues.
The glaring weakness here is that Republicans are real adults, making decisions for themselves, with a mix of real and fake information, and the fact that their leader engaged in insurrection and might thus be disqualified from office was not hidden from them at any point. They called it an insurrection. They acknowledged Trump’s culpability. Then they decided to reanoint him as their leader. This strikes me as Their Problem, not Our Problem.
And, oh-my-god, there is the risk of tit-for-tat by Republicans!
When playing procedural or constitutional hardball, be sure not to create new norms that sunder the whole constitutional order. Fortunately that is not a major concern here. It’s more an indication that Republican mind games are having their intended effect of making liberals doubt themselves.
I’ve watched Democrats cringe like abused spouses since at least the GOP sweep of 1994. “But what will Republicans do?” (To us.) They pull their punches. They often don’t throw any. What if they call us bullies?
The Bears, one of Adrian Belew’s bands, play a joyous set of guitar-driven songs that stick with you. Reading Jedediah Britton-Purdy’s offering in The Atlantic immediately evoked one of their most memorable: “Trust.”
The Duke Law School professor considers the breakdown in mutual trust fueling what feels like a breakdown in the democratic spirit that birthed this country, powered its resolve to form a more perfect union, and held it together, more or less, since its founding:
In 2019, 73 percent of those under 30 agreed that “most of the time, people just look out for themselves,” and almost as many said, “Most people would take advantage of you if they got the chance.”
Trust in government has taken an even greater hit. In 1964, 77 percent of Americans trusted the federal government to do the right thing most or all of the time. In 2022, that number was 22 percent, and it has been languishing in that neighborhood since 2010. In 1973, amid riots, domestic terrorism, the Watergate scandal, and clashes over the Vietnam War, majorities trusted Congress, the presidency, and the Supreme Court. Majorities (in many cases substantial ones) mistrust all of those institutions now. Trust in newspapers and public schools has traveled the same trajectory.
Why is that? Britton-Purdy suggests:
Some—probably a lot—of the fracture comes from social media and, before it, the rise of partisan cable and talk radio. (There is inevitably a lot of conjecture in saying what causes what in huge, interwoven changes. Let me know if you find a large and fiercely divided democracy without social media to serve as a control in this experiment.) Some of the fracture comes from social segregation: Liberals live in liberal neighborhoods, conservatives among conservatives, and education, which sorts people into workplaces, now closely tracks politics.
With the rise of AI, we see again another world-changing technology barreling down the tracks with little concern for its downstream cultural effects. It doesn’t help that somewhere over the past 50 years we stopped asking high school basketball coaches to teach classes in civics. But I digress.
Whatever forces ate away at the social contract undergirding our democracy, they acted while we slept, not completely unnoticed but not unchecked either, until one day we had a reality-show president, QAnon, horse dewormer, and the sacking of the U.S. Capitol. It was as if one day Americans asked, “Hey, where’d this grand canyon come from?”
Britton-Purdy injects a modicum of academic both-sidesing in analyzing the breakdown in our ability to tolerate democratic disagreement. “Trust and skepticism, if not cynicism, are two sides of a delicate balance. The goal is not some kind of harmonious community, but for citizens of an intensely diverse country to be able to coexist in a time when our problems need political solutions; not to love one another, but to get along enough to wrestle with climate change, immigration, public safety, child care, budget deficits, war—together.”
We took for granted “an invisible consensus” of trust, there until it wasn’t. But what Britton-Purdy is really talking about behind the breakdown of trust is the rise of MAGA epistemology:
Only through trust can anyone ever know much of anything. Almost all of what anyone treats as knowledge is not part of their own experience, but the upshot of a social process—reporting, teaching, research, gossip—that they have decided to trust. I don’t personally know that Antarctica exists, that my vaccine works, or how many votes were cast for each candidate in 2020, and except for Antarctica, which requires only a long journey at great expense to verify, those facts are basically impossible for me to observe. When I say I know them, I mean I trust the way they came to me. I trust those who told me, and I trust how they learned what they say they know.
This point, that most knowledge is indirect and social, might have seemed a philosopher’s conceit just a few decades ago. Yes, René Descartes pointed out that our lives might be illusions woven by an evil demon, and David Hume observed that just because bread tastes good today, that’s no guarantee it won’t poison you tomorrow. (Both examples have pretty clear applications to vaccine conspiracy theories.) But so what? The sun rose every day, the trains ran on time, and Walter Cronkite came on at 6:30.
That complacency was the privilege of an invisible consensus, in which most people’s trust was, so to speak, facing in the same direction. Those who believe Trump’s stolen-election fables or anti-vax theories are not refusing to trust: They are trusting some other mix of reporting, research, teaching, and gossip. The polls showing collapsing trust in “newspapers” or “television news” don’t really show a decline in trust; they show a fragmentation, trust displaced. But from the perspective of a democracy that relies on a common set of facts, acute fragmentation might as well be a collapse.
As perceptive observers have always understood, democracy is extremely demanding. It requires the qualities of mind and character that sustain a healthy and balanced political trust, such as the willingness to listen to others and to doubt one’s own side. It also requires the commitment to build a world of citizens, not just consumers or spectators or even protesters, but people who expect to exercise power and responsibility together.
Stealing history
I’ve been less generous. As white supremacy has eroded, those who assumed it as their American birthright have become people of the lie. Supporters of The Lost Cause lie of the Confederacy have all but died off. Monuments erected to redefine treason as heroism are being dismantled. So with Trump’s 2020 election loss, a new Lost Cause has arisen to replace it. David Blight, the Yale historian of the Civil War and Reconstruction Era recognized it before Joe Biden’s inauguration.
At Mother Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina on Monday, Biden remarked:
We saw something on January 6th we’d never seen before, even during the Civil War. Insurrectionists waving Confederate flags inside the halls of Congress built by enslaved Americans. A mob attacked and called Black officers, Black veterans defending the nation those vile of racist names.
And yet, an extreme movement of America, the MAGA Republicans, led by a defeated President, is trying to steal history now. They tried to steal an election. Now they’re trying to steal history …
“Economic stress is an important reason that Trump might win reelection,” Britton-Purdy writes. But we survived the economic stress of the Great Depression and World War II with a sense of common purpose missing now. The world’s largest middle class has fallen behind the investor class, and those under 30 see no reason to trust the decay will reverse in time to benefit them.
Beyond 2024, it’s also a lesson that the country is set up to benefit other people who don’t care about you. Countries with lower levels of economic inequality tend to have higher levels of social trust, and individuals with less money tend to be less trusting. Rebuilding a middle-class economy is a way to buttress democratic trust.
[…]
And that old idealistic favorite, universal national service, is still worth trying to achieve. Nothing builds trust more successfully than doing important work with people who might otherwise be worrisome strangers.
And one man pulls the string Bring down the whole damn thing
But not with a pampered, amoral narcissist — 91 felony indictments to his name, so far — injecting xenophobia directly into the MAGA bloodstream at every opportunity.
There’s quite a bit of good writing about Christian Nationalism these days largely because we’re spending a tiresome amount of time in Iowa which is the heartbeat of white conservative evangelicalism. This one (gift link) from the NY Times is quite good. And this one from Benjamin Wallace Wells in the New Yorker is really excellent. They both report that today’s evangelical GOP evangelicals are different than they used to be.
Wells interviews a number of Iowa pastors and politicians and they’re all interesting. But this one really struck me:
One evening, I drove from Des Moines to Council Bluffs, on Iowa’s far-western edge and just a few miles from Omaha, to meet Joseph Hall, another pastor who had delivered the opening prayer at a recent Trump rally. Hall is forty-six years old, a military veteran who grew up in South Carolina and still has a strong Southern accent. His church looked like it was prospering. It got several hundred parishioners on Sundays, he said, and many of his sermons were online. When I asked Hall to recommend one that captured his point of view, he suggested the one he’d given in 2021, on “boldness.”
The next day, Mike Huckabee was scheduled to appear at the church. The following Tuesday, it would be Ben Carson. I had assumed that their host would be, like them, a long-standing member of the religious right, but when I met Hall he told me that he had never been very politically involved before Trump’s loss in 2020. But he was certain that Joe Biden had stolen that election, and for him that conviction tended to color everything: “If an election can be stolen, so can anything—our rights, our freedoms, our property, guns, anything.”
Hall spoke slowly and genially (at the end of our conversation, he asked me to take a selfie with him), and I realized that he was exactly who Dunwell had meant in referring to a “rising strain of Christian nationalism.” The nation, Hall explained, “was founded by men of the cloth.” He said, “The whole point of separation of church and state was never to remove the church from government; the whole purpose was to keep the government out of the church.” The DeSantis campaign was arguing to religious voters in Iowa that Trump’s opposition to fetal-heartbeat bills showed that he wasn’t really on their side. Hall told me that abortion wasn’t everything to him. “There is a bigger picture,” he said. You could tell what a threat Trump was to the secularists because of how desperate they were to beat him. “The enemy only attacks those who have potential.”
For some of Trump’s opponents—Liz Cheney, for instance—January 6th was so transformative that they obliterated previous political affiliations. Trump was at war with democracy; where did you stand? But, for some of his supporters, like Hall, those events had a similar effect in the opposite direction: January 6th had stopped political time, so everything that mattered came in its wake, and was defined by persecution. “I believe with all my heart that through the stolen election there’s been devastation, destruction—there’s been nothing good the last four years,” he said. “Everything seems to be deliberate destruction. Why open the borders? Why close the pipelines? It’s ultimately to destroy our nation and our way of life.”
It was Christmastime. There were wreaths up in Hall’s sanctuary, the caucuses just a few weeks away. Hall’s candidate, and Hall’s perspective, were on the verge of a resounding victory. “This is more than a fight between left and right, Democrats and Republicans,” Hall said. “This is good and evil. Biblically.”
Think about that. Donald Trump inspired someone to become a pastor in order to fulfill his vision. That gives me a headache.
The upshot in both articles is that we are no longer dealing with Republican evangelical Christianity as we’ve known it. There are plenty of the old guard left who eye the new guard with suspicion. But they’re following along with the new guard which is Christian Nationalist. Religion is now a means to power nothing more. The theology is incidental.
A friend pointed out to me the other day that Charlie Kirk, the young wingnut leader who runs Turning Point USA, one of the biggest far right organizations, has suddenly and quite abruptly started using Christian Right rhetoric. It’s no longer a Church thing. It’s a Trump cult thing.
Italian opposition leaders have called on Giorgia Meloni’s rightwing government to ban neofascist groups after a chilling video emerged of hundreds of men making fascist salutes during an event in Rome.
The crowd was gathered outside the former headquarters of the Italian Social Movement (MSI), a neofascist party founded after the second world war which eventually morphed into Meloni’s Brothers of Italy party.
The annual gathering, on Via Acca Larentia in the east of the city on Sunday, commemorates the 46th anniversary of the killing of three militants from the now defunct party’s youth wing.
In the video, which was widely shared online, the men are standing in rows making the stiff-armed salute and shouting “present” three times. A militant then shouts “For all fallen comrades!” – a typical rallying cry of neofascists.
This sort of thing is ostensibly illegal in Italy. But it’s apparently hard to prove.
Here’s a story about the journalist who posted that video:
Paolo Berizzi of La Repubblica newspaper has been under round-the-clock police protection for three years after receiving death threats from neo-fascist groups that he reported on. This is the latest episode of our series “Global Voices of Freedom”.
When it comes to freedom of the press, Italy is certainly not a front-runner. According to Reporters Without Borders, it ranks 41st in the world. Last year 25 journalists had to be protected by the police 24 hours a day due to credible threats and attacks. New cases of intimidation are reported almost every day, according to the Italian interior ministry.
Berizzi, a journalist from Bergamo in northern Italy, is one of those 25. He specialises in reporting on the activities of neo-fascist groups in Italy, and consequently has been under police protection since 2019. He is a special case because he is the only journalist who requires an escort for political reasons: all the others are threatened by mafia and organised crime groups.
Berizzi has been writing about the return of neo-fascism and neo-Nazis for the past 20 years in investigations, articles and books.
“In Italy there is a problem of fascism, or rather various forms of fascism, because there are different types,” he explains. “In recent years these have emerged because we have underestimated them and made them normal. Thanks to ideal conditions for their return, racist, discriminatory and nostalgic impulses have re-surfaced among elected lawmakers who have sworn an oath to the Italian Constitution, among European parliamentarians and representatives of institutions who want to convince us that fascism is not just negative but also responsible for good things.”
Looking back, Berizzi says he wouldn’t change anything, even if he could. “I would do all the things I did again. For me, journalism is either a civic action or it is not. Either it serves to denounce phenomena that undermine our peaceful coexistence and daily life, or it abdicates its main function.”
He adds: “We are one of the few countries that have so many journalists under police protection, and that’s not normal. On the contrary, it is a sign that journalists struggle to do their jobs. In a free country no journalists should receive police escorts and protection. The fact that there are so many journalists forced to live under armed protection is a sign of defeat for the state, which has to protect those who are threatened.”
This is why I call the American verson of these people Red Hats. I’m sure you can see the parallels.
Back in 2015, I covered the Trump escalator moment with a mix of horror and amusement. But unlike the smug press corps I took Trump seriously anyway. I quoted Bloomberg’s Mark Halperin, (lately #MeToo accused whose career is pretty much defunct) saying it too:
Substance: Made a concerted and admirable effort to laundry-list his presidential plans before the speech was finished, calling for the replacement of Obamacare, cautioning foreign adversaries about messing with the U.S., expressing opposition to the current trade bill, promising to build a southern border wall and sticking Mexico with the bill, terminating Obama’s executive order on immigration, supporting the Second Amendment, ending Common Core, rebuilding infrastructure, resisting cuts in entitlement programs. Still, left open too many questions about the hows and wherefores, given that he has never run for nor held office.
Best moment: Protracted run-up to formal declaration of candidacy was spirited and engaging.
Worst moment: Lost his rhythm a bit whenever cheerful supporters in the crowd tossed out helpful prompts or encouraging chants.
Overall: A madcap production–garrulous, grandiose, and intense—that displayed his abundant strengths and acute weaknesses. For the first time in decades, Trump is a true underdog, but his ability to shape the contours of the nomination fight should not be ignored. On the debate stage, through TV advertising (positive and negative), in earned media, and by drawing crowds, Trump has the potential to be a big 2016 player. He staged an announcement event like no other, and now he will deliver a candidacy the likes of which the country has never seen.
I wrote at the time:
What is it they say about a stopped clock? Well, even Mark Halperin is right twice a day. The Villagers in general may not be able to see it — but for reasons about which we can’t even speculate, Mark Halperin is on to something when it comes to Donald Trump.
I could never stand Halperin and I probably still can’t. But since he was right about that I figure I might as well pay attention to what he’s saying about Trump now. He’s always seemed to have some insight into the weird phenomenon.
JV Last at the Bulwark links to Halperin discussing Trump and Biden in the wake of this last weekend of campaign rhetoric from both candidates:
It is a crude way to measure both perception and reality, but perhaps the most telling way to view the time between now Election Day is this: Can Biden win enough news cycles to overcome Trump’s current lead?
The answer is that he definitely can, as Friday’s events, and the coverage of them, built around the 1/6 anniversary, demonstrate.
I heard from three readers that Mr. Biden’s remarks represented one of the best speeches in substance and performance of his presidency, maybe even of his career. . . .
The subject of his address definitely reflects three positive advantages for the incumbent, as compared to say, his talking about the economy or immigration.
First, this topic of Trump and democracy and norms is clearly where Biden’s passion is, and candidates almost always are better when they are talking about something that animates them.
Second, the Dominant Media (definitely and decisively) and the general election electorate (unambiguously if not necessarily dispositively) are more with Joe Biden on this matter over Donald Trump than most anything else (besides abortion).
Third, because of the first two reasons, talking about 1/6 and democracy gives Biden a chance to win a news cycle even when he is behind in the polls.
And that, for now and maybe a long time, is one of Biden’s biggest challenges. It is VERY hard to win a news cycle when trailing (as Ron DeSantis and, more than most realize, also Nikki Haley, can tell you).
Until and unless the incumbent goes ahead, even the Dominant Media, which will root hard for him to win until the very end, slants its coverage away from him. . . .
Last agrees with Halperin that Biden will be at a disadvantage as long as he’s trailing in the polls. I would just add that he isn’t actually trailing in the polls right now. In some he’s ahead a few points at others he’s behind a few points. All within the margin of error. Furthermore, many of the headline making polls that show him behind are reporting numbers from registered voters not likely voters which show him leading.
We’ll have to see how the polling goes over the next few months but I think this will probably be another close election in those swing states where our ridiculous electoral college is definitive. Hopefully it won’t be super close but it’s possible. There are no landslides in polarized America.
As for #2 and #3, those are vectors along which Biden can reasonably hope to improve and Trump probably cannot.
For instance: I would posit to you that, over the next month, we will be approaching the high-water mark for Trump’s poll numbers.
Trump is finishing a primary campaign that was mostly a coronation. His rivals barely criticized him and when they did, they made sure to stay away from his actual electoral vulnerabilities. This period will culminate with a series of blowout victories for Trump: He will win Iowa by the largest margin of any Republican, ever. He will win New Hampshire. He will beat Nikki Haley in her home state by more than 20 points.1
He will win every single primary and caucus.
And this juggernaut of winning will make Trump seem like a colossus.
But that view is likely to be misleading, because unlike every other contested primary in the modern era, Trump will arrive at the nomination in a pre-campaign state where he has yet to take a punch.
And the reality is this: Do you think Republican voters are likely to become more comfortable with Trump the more they see of him over the next 10 months? I do not. Historically, Trump’s approval numbers have moved inversely to the magnitude of his public presence.
I believe this is true. He’s the Big Winner right now because he managed to vanquish a bunch of duds, at least one of whom many Republicans were hoping would be good enough to knock Trump out. Some of them actually aren’t looking forward to more Trump chaos but they are resigned to the fact that he’s going to win. You see this all over the polling, focus groups and anecdotal reporting from the field. I’m not saying they’re going to convert and vote for Biden. But with a rather substantial faction of the GOP coalition wishing there was someone else, you cannot expect his following to grow and there may even be some slight erosion. This is his high point.
Over the weekend, the Senate and House agreed on the top line budget number which is required before they can make any kind of deal to keep the government open. The Crazy caucus isn’t happy:
Members are pissed about this top line deal. Some are mad they found out about it from Twitter, others are mad that it’s the same deal MCCARTHY put together that caused HFC to revolt.
One member told me that those who ousted McCarthy “failed to get a more conservative speaker.”
Marge already says she won’t vote for this top-line budget (even though she voted for McCarthy’s) and Johnson only has a one vote majority right now. So don’t get your hopes up that we’ll avoid a shutdown. But who knows? Maybe his direct line to God will provide an intervention.
Following up on my post below I wanted to highlight Brian Beutler’s newsletter today about Biden’s speech, with which I agree wholeheartedly:
The remarks don’t just live on the page and in the moment they’re spoken. They have the potential to be recirculated endlessly, on television and social media, and now these clips will communicate Biden’s meaning explicitly, without requiring any sort of decoding.
President Biden: Trump calls those who oppose him ‘vermin.’ He talks about the blood of America as being ‘poisoned,’ echoing the same exact language used in Nazi Germany. There's no confusion about who Trump is, what he intends to do pic.twitter.com/YS2C6z4ipN
And as they circulate, they may also serve as an antidote to the huge glut of viral video content on social media that’s selectively edited to make Biden seem doddering and confused.
Making things like January 6—Trump’s totalitarian ambitions, his crimes and corruption, his general untrustworthiness—the central themes of the campaign has these ancillary benefits, because they are visceral. They unite Democrats, and enliven Biden himself. Policy and economics aren’t similarly unifying or morally black and white, and stripped of the emotional valence of insurrection and dictatorship, they evoke a softer register. They make Biden seem quiet and tired.
I want Democrats to consider the speech in this light because they have a fatalist tendency to throw a single haymaker, find it did not level their opponent for all time, and thus retreat to safe ground. In this period of after-action assessment, influential party figures will cite the worst news coverage and bad advice from inside the Beltway bubble as evidence that principled anti-Trump politics are a bust. That shouldn’t be the only view Biden hears.
Groundhog Day isn’t for another month but if you were watching cable news over the past few days you certainly had a feeling of deja vu watching all the footage of the January 6th insurrection again and being reminded of the violence and horror of that day. It is still as shocking as it was three years ago. And yet we are about to embark on a replay of the election that brought is to that awful moment and it feels as if nothing has changed in our politics at all.
Three years ago at this time we were still reeling from the global pandemic that was still taking lives by the tens of thousands and stunned by what had transpired after the election. There was talk of invoking the 25th Amendment against Trump to get him out of office before the inauguration and the congress was considering impeaching him for the second time, mostly in order to prevent him from ever running again. Staunch Trump supporters like then House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy and S. Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham stood up to denounce Trump and there was a very strong sense that the camels back had finally, finally been broken.
But everyone should have known better because even after the events of that momentous day, 147 House Republicans came back into the chamber that night and voted to overturn the election results. And as for the impeachment, despite Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell reportedly telling his aides, “The Democrats are going to take care of the son of a b—- for us. If this isn’t impeachable, I don’t know what is,” the Senate Republicans couldn’t muster the 10 more votes they needed to get the two thirds needed to convict.
So here we are. Unless something highly unexpected happens we are facing a rematch between Donald Trump and Joe Biden next November. And the current polling shows that it is very close so unless Donald Trump wins it, I think we can probably expect more disruption and violence just as we did three years ago. It’s as if the whole political system has been frozen in that moment and we’re right back where we started.
Last time we had one of the weirdest presidential campaigns ever with the pandemic causing massive disruptions, with social distancing on the rational Democratic side and super spreader events from the Trump campaign. And we saw the most bizarre political conventions ever mounted with Republicans flouting all norms, as usual, from public health advisories to the use of the White House and major government monuments to stage it as if it were a royal jubilee while the Democrats held theirs outdoors in a parking lot.
And we’re not going back to normal this time. Trump’s assault on democracy has never been resolved so we shall have the bizarre spectacle of a presumptive nominee of the Republican Party under 91 criminal indictments and massive legal problems stemming from his post-election behavior in 2020. Half the campaign may take place inside and outside courthouses. And once again, as it was 24 years ago, a conservative Supreme Court may end up being the deciding factor.
This weekend we had a chance to see the outlines of how the campaign will likely unfold and the contrast has never been clearer. On Friday President Biden gave what many observers called one of the best speeches of his career, appearing at Valley Forge, Pennsylvania to mark January 6th and lay out the stakes in the election. He said, “Today we’re here to answer the most important of questions: Is democracy still America’s sacred cause? It’s what the 2024 election is all about.”
He made clear that he was at Valley Forge to evoke George Washington’s decision to only serve two terms and peacefully hand over the reins of power, establishing one of the bedrocks of American democracy, which Donald Trump upended when he couldn’t bear to admit he lost. And he contrasted his statesmanship with Donald Trump of whom he said, “he still doesn’t understand a basic truth, and that is you can’t love your country only when you win.” And he exhorted the voters to cling to reality and ensure that he doesn’t have a chance to do it again:
“When the attack on January 6th happened, there was no doubt about the truth. As time has gone on, politics, fear, money — all have intervened. And now these MAGA voices who know the truth about Trump on January 6th have abandoned the truth and abandoned democracy. They made their choice. Now the rest of us — Democrats, independents, mainstream Republicans — we have to make our choice.”
Donald Trump stumped in Iowa all weekend, counting down to the primary there in less than two weeks. He made many many, many incoherent and daft statements and lied flagrantly about Biden stuttering through his Valley Forge speech. (He also took a shot at the late Senator John McCain’s disability, suffered when he was tortured as a prisoner of war.) In other words he was his usual childish, bullying self which is what his followers love about him.
But he also talked about January 6th and the 2020 election at each stop.
Trump: You have the J6 hostages. Nobody has been treated ever in history so badly pic.twitter.com/hkBvFc0UAT
He also claimed that the FBI “led the charge” that day and repeatedly asserted that those who staged the insurrection did so “peacefully and patriotically” virtually demanding that people believe him rather than their own eyes. And, as it happens, many people do. The latest Washington Post poll found that only 18% of respondents said they were “mostly violent” and 72% of Republicans think “too much is being made of the storming” of the Capitol.
So, the battle lines have been drawn. On the anniversary of January 6th, the two presumptive nominees for president gave speeches. President Biden told the truth, reminding the country of what really happened. He asked that Americans recognize the threat that another Donald Trump presidency presents to all of us. And Donald Trump continued to lie, even more brazenly than he did then, once again insisting that he actually won the 2020 election and exhorting his followers to “finish the job.”
Those words hold true for the rest of us as well. It’s time to end this stand-off once and for all.
“Sir? How do you do it?” Trump fabulizes. His “sir” stories are legion, as Daniel Dale recounted in 2019:
Lots of people do call Trump “sir,” of course. But the word seems to pop into his head more frequently when he is inventing or exaggerating a conversation than when he is faithfully relaying one. A “sir” is a flashing red light that he is speaking from his imagination rather than his memory.
In poker parlance, it’s a tell.
The supercut assembled for “Morning Joe,” contrasts President Biden’s recent speech with another by Donald “91 felony indictments” Trump.
“Sir? How do you do it? How do you wake up in the morning and put on your pants?”
First off, he doesn’t start with pants.
“We’re a failing nation,” says Trump, who actually does know something about failing.
President Biden, meanwhile, visits Mother Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, S.C. today. In 2015, a white supremacist murdered nine Black churchmembers there during a Bible study:
According to his campaign, Biden will warn that MAGA Republicans, led by Donald Trump, are running on a dangerous agenda that is the polar opposite of American principles and will reiterate the stakes of the 2024 election when it comes to democracy and personal freedoms.
“He’s willing to sacrifice our democracy, put himself in power,” Biden said.
The speech in Charleston will continue to drive that argument, an adviser said, drawing a line between the past and the present with Biden’s choice of the historic venue and linking the church’s history to what he sees as a struggle for the soul of the nation.
