Unfortunately, sometimes people have to see the consequences of their actions before it can.
If there’s one issue I’ve sadly become so pessimistic about that I can hardly write about it anymore, it’s guns. The ongoing tragedy of our fetish for the grotesque weapons of war with which so many Americans believe they have a right to play makes me feel like pulling the covers over my head and never coming up for air. I’ve noted the failure of NRA in the last couple of years and they did manage to pass a very tepid gun safety bill in the last congress. But even with that it just seems so hopeless that I’ve lost heart.
But I read a story this morning in the Washington Post that makes me wonder if maybe something might be changing and I’m sharing it with you with a gift link so you can read it too. It’s about four current and three former Senators who have changed their minds. That’s not something I expected to see.
They interviewed these senators who all voted against the bills that were proposed in the wake of the horrific Sandy Hook massacre in 2013. It’s emotionally wrenching to be reminded of that horror and witnessing these Senators confront what they did is quite moving. An excerpt:
It is rare for politicians to shift their viewson policy issues as culturally divisive as gun rights. But the expressions of remorse underscore how the failure to change laws in response to Sandy Hook continues to haunt many who held power at the time — prompting some of them to openly wonder if they allowed short-term political considerations to cloud their judgment on votes that might have saved lives. Obama, addressing Sandy Hook families last year at an event commemorating the 10th anniversary of the shooting, called Congress’s inaction that spring despite his personal lobbying “perhaps the most bitter disappointment of my time in office, the closest I came to being cynical.”
The Democrats have changed, not the Republicans which means that any real change will require the Democrats either winning the White House and the congress with either a filibuster-proof majority or the will to eliminate the filibuster. We’re a long way from that. But this article made me think for the first time in a long time that it might be possible.
Read the whole thing if you have the time. Maybe there is a tiny bit of light at the end of the tunnel?
“It’s my fucking money!” the 2024 Republican presidential frontrunner privately vented in October, referring to an alleged sum in the tens of millions of dollars, a source with direct knowledge of the matter tells Rolling Stone.
Trump wasn’t talking about a business deal. Rather, he’s been grumbling about money donated to a think tank his former staffers and allies founded in 2021 to “advance the America First agenda.”
For several months now, according to three people with knowledge of the situation, the former president has complained to an array of confidants and Republicans about the millions raised by the America First Policy Institute, a MAGAfied think tank launched near the start of his post-presidency. The nonprofit is populated by several former high-ranking Trump administration officials, including Larry Kudlow, Rick Perry, and Linda McMahon, and it’s led by Brooke Rollins, who served as a top White House domestic policy aide to Trump. AFPI is one of several Trump-aligned organizations and think tanks working to craft an intellectual framework for hardline policies, ranging from voter crackdowns to potentially invading Mexico.
In the ex-president’s mind, Rollins was making a “killing” off of his name, sources recount, and was stiffing Trump. “It’s not right,” the former president has groused in recent months.
Letting Trump wet his beak with this money would likely be illegal but needless to say, he doesn’t care about that:
AFPI is a tax-exempt, educational nonprofit and is expressly barred under IRS rules from spending money on elections or donating to a political candidate like Trump. Given that Trump is a candidate for office, paying him personally could be seen as attempting to aid a political campaign. One of the experts pointed out that tax-exempt nonprofitsmust also operate for public benefit, and they cannot disproportionately benefit private individuals or pay them more than fair market value for their services.
The way campaign finance laws work these days for Republicans, I doubt it would be a problem. They could just write a check for the whole thing and the FEC would shrug.
He wants a check:
Trump has stated his belief that this money is held in an account by “Brooke,” and that she can easily transfer it to him, personally, if she wanted to do so. In some of his discussions on the topic, Trump has said that he’s willing to settle for “just half” of the haul, two of the people with knowledge of the matter say. He’s suggested he’ll let Rollins off easy, and “she can keep” the rest of the cash.
The reason they will probably succumb to his demand is that all these people are angling for a job in a prospective Trump administration. So they’ll pay him whatever he wants.
Apparently, he won’t shut up about it. He just keeps demanding it, asking lawyers to get involved and refusing to hear their explanations as to why he shouldn’t do it.
No matter how many times this has been explained to the former (and possibly future) leader of the free world, he apparently refuses to accept the logic. He fires back that the only reason the think tank and other MAGA-friendly groups get so many donations is because of Trump’s name and “my brand,” and therefore, he’s entitled to a substantial cut.
I long since stopped believing this is all just a grift. His severe personality disorders (malignant narcissism, pathological lying etc.,) drive him as much as anything, But greed is certainly a motivator and he will take whatever he can get. It’s in his nature.
What’s even weirder, in my opinion, is the apparent eagerness among regular people to give this self-professed billionaire their hard earned money. But that’s one of the most important pieces of evidence supporting the idea that this is a cult not a political movement. One of any cult leader’s greatest skills is parting his followers from their money. Trump requires it as a personal offering to him as a living god. When they don’t do it, it makes him very angry.
Several years ago, when many Democratic strategists were demanding that the party embrace the tenets of the Christian Right in order to win over the salt of the earth, white, Real Americans (whom they insisted were essential to a legitimate governing majority) the media briefly reported on some of their more extreme rituals. They looked at “purity culture” practices such as gay conversion “therapy”, masturbation abstinence and “purity balls” which feature a pseudo wedding ceremony between a father and daughter.
All these practices were disturbing enough that they pretty much went underground after being publicly exposed and the culture wars turned to their next battlefield, the latest being the cruel bullying of transgender teens and banning of gay literature in schools.
There was something particularly creepy about the purity balls. TIME Magazine reported on one of the balls back in 2012, where girls as young as eight or nine don long white dresses and listen to their fathers “promise ‘before God to cover my daughter as her authority and protection in the areas of purity,’ and to practice fidelity, shun pornography and walk with honor through a culture of chaos and by so doing guide their daughters as well.” He promises to protect her “purity of mind, body, and soul”and the girls are given lockets with a key, which the father keeps until the girl gets married at which point they turn it over to her husband. (I guess chastity belts are hard to find these days.)
After dinner comes the ballet performance, when seven tiny ballerinas in white tulle float in; then seven older dancers carry in a large, heavy wooden cross, which they drape in white, with a crown of thorns. Four of the five Wilson daughters are among the dancers, and they offer a special dance to their father, to the music of Natalie Grant: Your faith, your love And all that you believe Have come to be the strongest part of me And I will always be your baby …
Then Randy and his friend Kevin Moore stand in front of the cross, holding up two large swords, points crossed. Fathers and daughters process beneath the swords to kneel; the girls place a white rose, symbolizing abstinence, at the base of the cross while the fathers offer a quiet blessing.
I don’t know if these purity balls have completely gone out of fashion but you don’t hear about them much anymore. At least not until last week, when this story from ABC showed up in our news feeds:
Years before Mike Johnson would ascend to No. 2 in the presidential line of succession, a German TV news outlet profiled the future speaker of the House and his then-teenage daughter.
“This looks like a wedding,” a news reporter says in German in a 2015 n-tv news segment that was unearthed by ABC News. “But they are not bride and groom — but rather father and … daughter,” the reporter adds, referring to Johnson and his then-13-year-old daughter, Hannah.
According to ABC, the segment shows him nodding along as his daughter Hannah vows “to make a commitment to God, myself, my family, my friends, my future husband, and my future children … to a lifetime of purity, including sexual purity.” That’s quite a pledge to require a 13 year old to take. (Mrs Johnson is shown in the film saying that they don’t even discuss contraception because premarital sex is completely out of the question.)
Is it at all a surprise that Speaker Mike Johnson engaged in this bizarre practice? Of course not. It’s a wonder nobody thought to ask him about it before. After all, he was already on record as a staunch believer in purity culture when he said that he installed so-called accountability software called “Covenant Eyes” on his and his teenage son’s devices so they can catch each other is they ever view pornography. He and his wife have a “covenant marriage” which makes divorce very difficult (and which Johnson tried to make into law when he was in the Louisiana legislature.) He even says God told him he’s Moses chosen to pull Republicans together.
Speaker of the House Mike Johnson is a fundamentalist with a theocratic agenda that he’s been pursuing for many years. And like so many other Christian nationalist leaders, he’s made common cause with a man one would think a true believer like himself would think was the antichrist. Has the man who forced his little girl to take that purity pledge ever seen this?
Johnson obviously doesn’t care about any of that. He worked with other leaders of the Christian Right to help Trump’s coup attempt in 2020 and raced down to Mar-a-lago the minute he got the speakership to immediately endorse Donald Trump immediately.
As the New Republic pointed out, Johnson has been groomed for power for years by some of the most influential right wing organizations in America, including the secretive Council for National Policy which “journalist Anne Nelson, author of the book on the Council for National Policy, Shadow Network, has described … as ‘the secret hub of the radical right.’ She has also described Johnson as their ‘creation.'” They all, including Mike Johnson, clearly see Donald Trump as a useful tool and nothing more.
Johnson said during a Fox interview, “I am a Bible-believing Christian. Someone asked me today in the media, they said, ‘It’s curious, people are curious: What does Mike Johnson think about any issue under the sun?’ I said, ‘Well, go pick up a Bible off your shelf and read it. That’s my worldview.’” He certainly checks all the boxes, even going so far as the strange rituals of fundamentalist purity culture.
But you know what they say about power corrupting even the most pious of believers. Mike Johnson aligned himself with the most morally corrupt politician to ever run for the presidency and he doesn’t seem in the least bit conflicted by it. Clearly he didn’t take any of his purity pledges seriously at all.
This is a viral pic of DeSantis being interviewed for a podcast. It says it all, doesn’t it? His campaign is falling apart. Any competent advance person should have seen to it that this wouldn’t happen.
And then they went ahead and posted it.
DESANTIS: “I’m going to be a change agent in Washington. I don’t want to be liked in Washington. I don’t care about the media, the bureaucrats, any of that. I want to return this government to We the People.” pic.twitter.com/Jd8gJJvHEX
Cutman Jacob “Stitch” Duran administers treatment to fighter Vladimir Klitschko. Photo via Wkimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0).
Polls we reported on Tuesday suggest that a large swath of maybe-Trump supporters are looking for an excuse to abandon him in 2024. A criminal conviction is what they’re waiting for:
An October Times/Siena poll indicates the conviction gut-punch for Trump would be stronger in swing states, leading to Biden victories in Georgia, Michigan, Nevada and Pennsylvania as well as Wisconsin where Biden is already favored. The shift would be “seismic,” with Biden winning by 10 rather than losing by four percentage points.
Democrats are their own worst enemies in this situation. Three years ago on the date the Electoral College met to officially elect Joe Biden president, I posted:
It is never a good bet to think Donald J. Trump won’t stoop that low or lower. But the question Democrats have to answer now both for others and for themselves is what they will do to defeat the New Confederacy that announced itself last week.
To refresh memories, mutliple post-election protests by thousands of Trump supporters resulted in violence. “The events went by several names, including the Million MAGA March, the March for Trump and Stop the Steal DC,” NPR reported in mid-November. More protests erupted weeks later:
By Saturday night, clashes between rallygoers and counterprotesters escalated into violence, with four people stabbed and 33 people arrested into Sunday morning. Nine people were transported to hospitals, according to Washington, D.C.’s Fire and EMS Department. Two of the nine were police officers with injuries that were not life-threatening.
That was just the warmup for Jan. 6.
President Joe Biden’s institutionalist instincts will tell him to let the state and federal court cases involving Trump play out. Hands off. Innocent until proven guilty, etc. Let the juries decide Trump’s fate and those of his accomplices. That’s fine for the incumbent. But Democratic Party operatives should not let it lie. Not now. But fair play is the party’s natural instinct.
Trump’s support is weakening. Now is no time to back off. Waiting for the courts to convict Trump months from now (if ever), or hoping states will ban him from their ballots is political malpractice. Democrats must press their advantage. Right now.
Remind voters at every turn that Trump faces 91 felony counts. His closest associates face charges. Let Republicans complain that, no, Joe Biden is the real fascist. Let Trump whine about how UNFAIR it all is. Donald Trump’s Christmas “MAY THEY ROT IN HELL” messages are insane. Voters — Trump voters — are seeing through him. They just don’t want to admit they’ve been had. Democrats must leverage their unease. Once you’ve cut your oponent over the eye, work the eye. Holding back and waiting for the referee to stop the match is a fool’s game.
How many Rocky movies did Stallone make? And they’re all the same movie. So why do people keep going? Because so many Americans themselves feel like underdogs. We want to root for the little guy with heart. Facing insurmountable odds. Risking it all. We want to feel the thrill up our spines and in the tops of our heads when Bill Conti’s trumpet fanfare introduces the training sequence. We want to hear that. Wait for it. Cheer for it. Pay for it. Over and over and over.
Readers may enjoy an older video making the rounds again from the show “Letters Live.” Contrary to JoJoFromJerz’s description (social media sometimes strips context), the words are not actress Edie Falco’s. She came to read them in 2018.
In the wake of violence in Charlottesville in 2017, a Salt Lake City resident named Jonna Ramey wrote an open letter to white nationalists that was titled, “What Is Wrong With You?” Her letter was published in The Salt Lake Tribune and was soon read by millions. At Letters Live at New York City’s The Town Hall back in 2018, acting legend Edie Falco joined us to read it.
Letter of the week: What is wrong with you, white supremacists?
I am a 67-year-old American white woman. My parents enlisted in World War II to fight fascism. They both served; my mother was a nurse, my father navigated bombers. They lost friends in that bloody war so that all the world could be free of fascism. They did not fight so that some white people could claim supremacy or that Nazis could openly walk the streets of America.
White person to white supremacist person: What is wrong with you?
People of European heritage are doing just fine in the world. They run most of the world’s institutions, hold much of the world’s wealth, replicate as frequently as other humans. You’re not in any danger here. The world is changing, that’s true. Others want a piece of the pie. They work for it, strive for it and earn it. Technology (robotics) is having a greater effect on your job prospects than immigrants. Going forward, tackling corporate control and climate change will need all of our attention, ideas and energy. Put down your Tiki torches and trite flags and get involved in some real work.
By the way, the world won the war against Nazi fascism in the 1940s, just as America won the war against the Confederacy in the 1860s. Aligning with two lost causes just labels you as profound losers.
And finally, white person to white person: Like my parents before me, I will not stand idly by nor give up my rights or the rights of other Americans because you think you are better than some of us. It doesn’t work that way. All Americans stand shoulder to shoulder against your hatred and bigotry.
Jonna Ramey Salt Lake City
So much of the discontent in this country is an expression of inchoate feelings. People lack words to express their profound unease. Or the words they might use open them to ridicule or condemnation, like Charlottesville’s “very fine” Nazis. Donald Trump’s MAGA cult wants America to be “Great Again.” What that means they will not or cannot say. What they don’t say speaks volumes.
People who view society as a zero-sum game find it more socially acceptable to accuse immigrants, for example, of “taking our jobs” or bringing in disease and drugs than to admit out loud what’s really eating at them. Newcomers sharing in America’s freedoms, they believe, means less for them.
It is the prospect of white people sharing political and cultural space in this teetering democracy with people they consider inferiors. Since white people first invaded this continent, they have dominated it and the Black people they imported. That’s the way it was. That’s the way it’s always been. That’s as America’s founders and the bearded white man in the sky intended.
It is Christians seeing their First Amendment religious protections extended to people who believe in a deity other than Jesus or none at all. Religious freedom is all well and good so long as other faiths are not too numerous and noisy about their beliefs. So long as “lesser” faiths agree whose god is The Big G.
It is the icky feeling they experience at seeing LGBTQ+ people emerge from the closets where they belong. Freedom was never meant for them.
It is the gnawing discomfort of Americans who love them some Declaration and Constitution but know deep down they never believed any of that “created equal” stuff; it was always just marketing. As the expression goes, “When you’re accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression.”
It is knowing despite all the time spent in Sunday school that they never learned to share.
The Daily Mail released a poll showing that Trump is up 4 points from Biden (with a margin of error at 3.5, which is undoubtedly very generous.) They also did one of those questions asking “what word do you associate with Trump and Biden.” He’s apparently very proud of the word cloud they made of it:
He likes it! I assume he thinks all this is a huge compliment. And I think we can be sure that he’s going to give them more of what they want.
Here’s the Biden word cloud which he didn’t post:
When I went looking for this I fully expected that the biggest word in that cloud was going to be “old.” “Nothing” is actually a happy surprise. It’s not even particularly negative, it’s just … neutral. People aren’t thinking much about him one way or the other. We can work with that. The rest of the words are largely positive.
Trump’s fascism, on the other hand is making a huge impact. And it appears that a whole lot of people think his fascism is just great. They want this orange make-up wearing, yellow cotton-candy haired, imbecilic monster to be their dictator. I can hardly believe there are so many of them.
We’ve got a major sickness in our political culture and I’m not sure if it’s curable.
Here’s a Christmas present for all of you who don’t have subscriptions to the NY Times: a free link to this delightful bit of holiday schadenfreude: the story of Ron DeSantis’ precipitous fall. Grab an egg nog and add a double shot. It’s just so much fun:
Boxed in by a base enamored with Mr. Trump that has instinctively rallied to the former president’s defense, Mr. DeSantis has struggled for months to match the hype that followed his landslide 2022 re-election. Now, with the first votes in the Iowa caucuses only weeks away on Jan. 15, Mr. DeSantis has slipped in some polls into third place, behind Nikki Haley, and has had to downsize his once-grand national ambitions to the simple hopes that a strong showing in a single state — Iowa — could vault him back into contention.
For a candidate who talks at length about his own disinterest in “managing America’s decline,” people around Mr. DeSantis are increasingly talking about managing his.
Ryan Tyson, Mr. DeSantis’s longtime pollster and one of his closest advisers, has privately said to multiple people that they are now at the point in the campaign where they need to “make the patient comfortable,” a phrase evoking hospice care. Others have spoken of a coming period of reputation management, both for the governor and themselves, after a slow-motion implosion of the relationship between the campaign and an allied super PAC left even his most ardent supporters drained and demoralized.
It only gets better. I urge you to read it.
DeSantis is as bad as Trump in most ways and worse in others in terms of his philosophy and intentions. But he doesn’t have that celebrity glamour that really gets Trump over. He and his wife thought they could create it by flaunting their youth and pretending to be some kind of Florida version of JFK and Jackie. But their personalities are so weird (in his case) and grating (in hers) that none of that played with the crowd. Also, they don’t have the trappings of wealth that really make that work for certain people.
DeSantis’ campaign is turning out to be an epic flame out on the level of Scott Walker, Jeb Bush or Rick Perry. In fact, it’s exceeding all of them. What he did in Florida to get this nomination is a tragedy.
Ron DeSantis is one of the worst presidential candidates in history and if we’re lucky, we won’t be hearing from him again.
All the most hopeful political strategists I read have one big caveat as they contemplate the upcoming election: the third party threat. That could throw a monkey wrench into everything and usher in another Trump flukey win. I’ve written before about No Labels, which is nothing more than a grift of dumb big donors. But this one is something else and it’s kind of terrifying:
The super PAC supporting Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s presidential bid is narrowing its ballot access campaign focus to seven states — including crucial battlegrounds that will determine the outcome of the presidential election.
American Values 2024 will now prioritize helping to get Kennedy on the ballot in Arizona, California, Georgia, Illinois, Michigan, New York and Texas, according to plans first shared with POLITICO.
Half of these target states were decisive in the 2020 race, and won by now-President Joe Biden by narrow margins. The promotion of a third-party candidate in these battlegrounds could change the pathways for victory for the major parties’ nominees — even if Kennedy only garners single-digit support next November.
“The seven states we will initially focus on have a total of 183 electoral college votes and some of the highest populations in the country,” PAC Founder Tony Lyons said in a statement.
The super PAC originally planned to also work on gaining ballot access in Indiana, Colorado and Nevada but have dropped them from the list after advice from their counsel. But American Values 2024 will still dedicate between $10 and $15 million to the smaller list of states.
A statement outlining the new plan also said it’s confident that Kennedy could win a contingent election, a possible scenario where no presidential candidate gets 270 electoral college votes. Under such a scenario, congressional delegations from each state cast votes to choose the next president.
“Kennedy has two clear pathways to the White House,” Lyons said. “We will do everything we can, while working closely with our attorneys and without coordinating with the campaign, to make sure that the uniparty fails in any efforts to derail the peaceful, populist revolution that he represents.”
There hasn’t been a contingent election since 1836. It is also widely believed that a contingent election would result in the Republican nominee winning the presidency because there are more state delegations with a majority of Republican members than Democratic ones.
It is nothing but sabotage, a sick con to help elect Donald Trump. And Kennedy and his people are so deluded that if they were to succeed they would feel zero remorse, and insist that it’s not their fault because Biden just wasn’t good enough. (Democrats are required to win huge to overcome certain narcissistic egos in its broad coalition.) That’s how these people think.
There is something wrong with him. He’s not normal. And the people working for him are craven opportunists. I wish I knew what could be done but I’m not sure there’s anything except working overtime to educate the people who might vote for him about the stakes. He’s polling at 13 percent or so and that probably won’t hold up. But if he’s on the ballot in those battleground states he doesn’t have to have more than a fraction of that to sabotage the election.
I won’t even talk about Jill Stein, who will definitely be on the Green Party ballot. She was pivotal in 2016 and I’d imagine between her and RFK Jr, they could siphon off enough votes in those battlegrounds to really cause some chaos. And chaos benefits MAGA. It’s what they plan for. It’s what they live for.
