This is what his people are hearing from him:
In case you were wondering, it’s all lies.
I post this stuff here because I know most people don’t look at what he’s saying because they have lives and they already know that Trump is a narcissistic monster. But it’s easy to forget just how deranged he really is and I think it’s important to have this stuff out there from time to time to remind ourselves of it.
Brett Meiselas at Meidas Touch:
As Republicans try to cope with their crushing losses suffered during Tuesday’s elections, multiple MAGA firebrands have taken aim at one particular target – Taylor Swift. But Swift’s fervent fanbase, known as Swifties, are ready to fight back.
On Tuesday, the iconic superstar encouraged her fans to vote, writing on Instagram, “Voters gonna vote!” and sharing a link to Vote.org.
Last month, following a similar call to action, Swift was reportedly responsible for registering more than 35,000 people to vote.
That kind of muscular power-flexing by women seriously gets under the skin of pasty male misogynists (and worse).
Right-wing extremist and conspiracy theorist Jack Posobiec seethed in an unhinged post on X about “THE CHILDLESS, UNMARRIED ABORTION ARMY MOBILIZED BY BARBIE, TAYLOR SWIFT, AND TIKTOK THAT IS CRUSHING REPUBLICANS AT THE BALLOT BOX.”
In the words of Taylor Swift, you need to calm down.
Charlie Kirk, who runs the extremist organization Turning Point USA, a radical group attempting to pull young voters into the MAGA movement, could not contain his rage during his podcast.
“Taylor Swift is going to come out in the presidential election and she is going to mobilize her fans, I’ll be nice…and we’re going to be like ‘Oh why, where did all of these young female voters come from’… We better have a plan for that… Taylor Swift, I think she put up one voter registration link and she registered millions and millions. And let’s be honest, all the Swifties want, is swift abortion.”
Political activist Olivia Julianna responded by posting the Kirk rant on TikTok, told Swifties “you know what to do,” and posted her own link to Vote.org. The clip garnered 1.6 million views in 24 hours.
@0liviajulianna #taylorswift #swiftie #oliviajulianna ♬ original sound – Olivia Julianna
“It remains unclear why MAGA Republicans think it is smart to pick a fight with the Swifties,” Meiselas adds.
Um, ’cause the haters gonna, etc.?
Ed Walker blogs at emptywheel. His message this Veterans Day: “Is it too much to ask Republicans to accept majority rule?”
Apparently, yes.
Ohio Republicans wasted no time in announcing their defiance of the constitutional amendment passed Tuesday that secured reproductive freedoms. The amendment passed 57-43:
COLUMBUS, Ohio (AP) — Four Ohio Republican state lawmakers are seeking to strip judges of their power to interpret an abortion rights amendment after voters opted to enshrine those rights in the state’s constitution this week.
Republican state Reps. Jennifer Gross, Bill Dean, Melanie Miller and Beth Lear said in a news release Thursday that they’ll push to have the Legislature, not the courts, make any decisions about the amendment passed Tuesday.
“To prevent mischief by pro-abortion courts with Issue 1, Ohio legislators will consider removing jurisdiction from the judiciary over this ambiguous ballot initiative,” said the mix of fairly new and veteran lawmakers who are all vice-chairs of various House committees. “The Ohio legislature alone will consider what, if any, modifications to make to existing laws based on public hearings and input from legal experts on both sides.”
The wording of that “ambiguous ballot initiative”? It was the Ohio GOP’s wording. And still they lost.
Democrats’ former Ohio state chair David Pepper posted a letter signed by 27 GOP legislators from the Ohio House Pro-Life Caucus pledging to defy the amended constitution:
Pepper writes:
Specifically, they pledge: “We will do everything in our power to prevent our laws from being removed based on perception of intent. [ie. the new Constitution] We were elected to protect the most vulnerable in this state, and we will continue that work.”
There are so many ways to respond to the specifics of their statement. Here are a few:
1) “perception of intent”? — it’s the law. The Constitution! Not some ephemeral “intent.” And while they now claim confusion, THEY were the ones who claimed that the words of the Amendment were both clear and sweeping, trying to scare voters to vote No. They spent millions running ads on all of this. They put out government propaganda on it, using your tax dollars. Yet now they say the language is confusing and cloudy, so they don’t plan to respect it.
2) “everything in our power”? Your power is bound by the Constitution you are now pledging to defy. You have NO power to defy the Constitution you swear an oath to.
3) “We were elected”? Almost all of you are in districts that were rigged (by you) to guarantee victory. The people didn’t have a choice. And your districts are in open violation of the same Constitution you now pledge to violate. This week’s Issue 1 vote is far more legitimate than your exercise of power in districts that violate Ohio law (due to your leadership’s intentional violation of that law)
There are more retorts, but I’ll stop there. Because they don’t get us very far, even if they need to be said.
What this is, again, is a declaration that they plan to violate both the new law and the clear will of the people of Ohio as best they can.
The kicking and gouging for every last sliver of power is further proof that the GOP is no longer a political party but an extremist authoritarian faction that refuses to accept democratic outcomes. Republican pedants insist the nation is a republic, not a democracy (meaning a pure democracy), despite the word vote appearing in the U.S. Constitution dozens of times and majority over a dozen
Their intense efforts at rigging elections, twisting the law, and mining it for loopholes for defying the will of the people is exhausting. Politicians have always done so in vying for advantage. But the effort today reinforces just how strong the temptation is to seek power for its own sake. The Trump cult’s plan for wringing service from the meaning of public servant can be no clearer.
Now Democrats in New York state are taking up the game with fresh intensity. God help us.
Update: Pepper later this morning reinforces why the extreme gerrymandering since the 2010 election is so toxic to democracy and feeds both radicalism and cynicism.
… there’s now an entire generation of officeholders in the majority who’ve come to power, remained in power, and in some cases, risen to higher levels of power, without ever winning a contested election. A contested, general election.
Some were appointed to their initial office and never faced one real election. Others…had a single moment where a narrow group of voters mattered, and that was that. The rest of their careers career, the voters have never been given another choice. They’ve never had to campaign again. And for most, that’s the only politics they know.
On the flip side, there’s a generation of folks who’ve aspired to be public servants but are locked out. Completely shut out, no matter their skills or the quality of their campaigns.
He’s not talking about a fraction or even half in places like Ohio.
“I’m talking about almost every member of the current majorities. An entire generation of them.”
You wonder why democracy scares the bejesus out of them. It’s almost as scary as nonwhite, non-Christians and women taking control in their lives.
Japan is filled with cute critters, but these pint-sized squirrels are at the top of the list. The Japanese dwarf flying squirrel and Siberian flying squirrel are known for their big eyes, small stature, and overall adorable appearance. In fact, they’re so popular in Japan that they’re even used as the design on Sapporo’s metro card.
The Japanese dwarf flying squirrel (Pteromys momonga) is only found on Japan’s Honshu and Kyushu islands. Living in sub-alpine forests and boreal evergreen forests, these nocturnal animals blend into the trees with their coloring. With their body measuring up to 20 centimeters and their tail growing up to 14 centimeters, their small size can make them hard to spot.
A family of Japanese dwarf flying squirrels
pic.twitter.com/eh0hIhGd7S— Science girl (@gunsnrosesgirl3) November 7, 2023
Though the name might confuse you, these squirrels don’t fly. Instead, they use a membrane called the patagium to glide from tree to tree. Feasting on seeds, fruit, tree leaves, buds, and bark, these squirrels forage at night and spend their days tucked into the holes of trees. These rodents only mate once or twice a year, but their population is abundant and the IUCN has it listed as an animal of “Least Concern.”
I knew girls like her in high school. They all became criminals:
After Rep. Lauren Boebert helped get Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene kicked out of the House Freedom Caucus over the summer, Greene has been on a payback mission against her former friend-turned-nemesis. And after a date at Beetlejuice The Musical turned into a national conversation about groping, Greene has resorted to a playbook familiar to any woman who survived high school: She’s telling GOP colleagues, according to lawmakers, that Boebert is a “whore.”
One Republican lawmaker, who has heard Greene use that word multiple times to describe Boebert, told The Daily Beast that Greene has been at this campaign for some time.
“Calling her a whore, that’s not new,” this GOP lawmaker said. “She’s been doing that for a while.”
Another GOP lawmaker also witnessed Greene refer to Boebert as a “whore.”
This second lawmaker additionally claimed Greene had trashed Boebert in a conversation with Donald Trump, though this member had no knowledge of the specific language Greene used in that conversation—just that the two had discussed Boebert. Yet another GOP member who speaks to Trump told The Daily Beast that Greene had, in fact, made “disparaging” remarks about Boebert to the former president, though again, this person didn’t have specifics about what Greene had said to Trump.
Trump didn’t return a request for comment via a spokesperson.
When The Daily Beast asked Greene about these accusations this week, the Georgia Republican didn’t deny them. Instead, she went on a tirade against this reporter.
“Why are you working on a story?” she asked. “Because you like to write trash, you just can’t help yourself.”
Greene continued that this reporter was “drawn to the gossip and the drama.”
“You just love it so much, you got to create it, and make it more, and bigger, and nastier,” she said.
Greene’s office didn’t respond to a request for comment. Boebert declined to comment.
From Jonathan Karl’s new book:
In his final days in the White House, President Donald Trump tried to launch a U.S. military withdrawal from Afghanistan — only he wasn’t exactly the person giving the orders, according to a new book by ABC News Chief Washington Correspondent Jonathan Karl.
In “Tired of Winning: Donald Trump and the End of the Grand Old Party,” excerpts of which were released in Vanity Fair on Friday, Karl reports that aide Johnny McEntee, known as Trump’s “body guy,” led a chaotic attempt to reshape the U.S. military posture abroad.
The incident was first reported on by Jonathan Swan of Axios, but Karl provides significant new details.
McEntee, after serving as Trump’s “body guy” (or “body man” as some say) — the staffer responsible for traveling with the president and carrying his bags — became, at age 30, the director of the Presidential Personnel Office, primarily responsible for overseeing the hiring and firing of executive branch employees, including ensuring staffers were loyal to Trump’s political vision.
But after the 2020 election, Karl writes, McEntee took on a greater role — one that saw him involved in Trump’s ousting of Defense Secretary Mark Esper — replacing him with Christopher Miller — and the recruiting of Miller’s senior adviser Douglas Macgregor.
From there, Karl reports, McEntee wrote a list for what Trump should do in the final days of his presidency — a list that included withdrawing U.S. forces from Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and Africa.
“Three days after Macgregor arrived at the Pentagon, he called McEntee and told him he couldn’t accomplish any of the items on their handwritten to-do list without a signed order from the president,” Karl writes in the excerpts released by Vanity Fair.
The House Jan. 6 committee’s investigation unearthed the extraordinary story of what happened next, Karl writes, but it wasn’t included in the committee’s final report. The panel had taken the sworn testimony of the key players, including McEntee and Macgregor, as well as national security adviser Robert O’Brien and Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Mark Milley.
Macgregor advised McEntee the priority should be the Afghanistan withdrawal and that it should be put in a presidential directive. But when McEntee couldn’t figure out how to draft such a document, Macgregor told him and his assistant “to open a cabinet, find an old presidential decision memorandum, and copy it,” Karl writes.
“Easy enough,” Karl reports. McEntee and his assistant “wrote up the order, had the president sign it, and sent it over to Kash Patel, the new acting defense secretary’s chief of staff.”
But the document caused widespread confusion among top officials.
Miller met with Milley and others to discuss next steps, but Milley quickly questioned who had given Trump such military advice. When no one could say where it came from, he and Miller went to the White House for answers, Karl writes.
When Milley asked O’Brien, Trump’s national security adviser, where the document came from, O’Brien said he’d never seen it before. Also at that meeting was Vice President Mike Pence’s national security adviser Keith Kellogg, who looked at the order and told the room: “This doesn’t look right,” according to the excerpts.
“‘You’re telling me that thing is forged?’ Milley responded in disbelief, Karl writes. ‘That’s a forged piece of paper directing a military operation by the president of the United States? That’s forged, Keith?'” Milley said, according to the excerpts.
The group eventually asked Trump directly, who confirmed he’d signed it. O’Brien then told Trump it “would be very bad,” Karl writes, and advised him not to follow through with the directive.
“As soon as he realized an Afghanistan withdrawal would require more work than having McEntee scribble up a note, he dropped it entirely,” Karl reports.
This is what we can expect in 2026 if he wins again. Johnny McEntee , along with Stephen Miller, is the one in charge of putting together the agenda for the second term.
I suppose that most people don’t know this stuff and some that do dismiss it as palace intrigue or fake news. But this is how Trump rolls and he hasn’t changed one bit. Look at how he’s handling his own legal affairs.
And yet half the country thinks this imbecile should be president again and it’s going to be political trench warfare to ensure that he isn’t. I’ll never stop being stunned by that. It’s shaken my belief in the basic common sense of Americans more than anything in my lifetime.
Sean Casten, D-Il., lays it all out in this twitter thread:
It’s hard to explain how dysfunctional the @HouseGOP is, and the degree to which their own internal divisions are superseding every normal function of government. But I’m going to try with a short story about this week in the house. Thread:
1. First: We operate on a 9/30 fiscal year but the (McCarthy) led house couldn’t agree on how to fund prior to. They tried to just say “cut everything by 30%”. That didn’t pass. So they said “let’s just fund at current levels for 45 days”. That cost McCarthy his job.
2. For context, when Dems had the majority we got all our appropriations done by August 1 so the Senate could finalize and POTUS could sign. @HouseGOP still hasn’t done that.
@HouseGOP 3. Also, you may recall this summer the @HouseGOP threatened to default on US debt unless we agreed to future spending rules. A deal was struck that passed the House and was signed into law to do so. The 30% cut was not consistent with that law. (AKA, it was illegal)
@HouseGOP 4. By contrast, the straight 45 day continuing resolution that cost McCarthy his job was legal (in the sense that it did not violate the June agreement and bought us time to do so). OBEYING THE LAW WAS A RED-LINE FOR THE @HOUSEGOP. So they fired McCarthy.
@HouseGOP 5. They then used the first 20 days of that 45 day period to fight over a new speaker. Should we pick someone who hates gay people, fought to overturn the election or creeps on his son’s porn? It took a while, but the @HouseGOP finally said YES to all three.
@HouseGOP 6. That leaves a lot of work to do by a party that doesn’t like laws, is at war with itself and an inexperienced leadership team. But off we went. Last week, we were supposed to vote on transportation funding. Rs couldn’t agree so Johnson never brought a bill to the floor.
@HouseGOP 7. (This isn’t just a Johnson problem. McCarthy previously chose not to bring an agriculture funding package to the floor because Rs couldn’t agree. Still don’t have a path on that one.)
@HouseGOP 8. This week, we were supposed to vote on a funding package for our financial services & general government. Minutes before we were supposed to vote on that yesterday they pulled it on account of internal squabbles too.
@HouseGOP 9. Note: ALL of these bills violate the law we passed last June. But having discovered that Ds won’t vote to break the law, they are trying to pass these with all R votes. But they’re big mad at each other so even that’s not possible.
@HouseGOP 10. Now to the question on the mind of every libertarian troll who’s read this far. “If government is going to run out of money and you aren’t even voting on bills to fund it why are you wasting my tax dollars in DC?” Well, here’s what they did bring up for votes this week:
@HouseGOP 11. A bill to prevent the government from using the word “latin-x” – a bill to cut WH press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre’s salary to $1 – a bill to defund the office of gun violence prevention – a bill to eliminate the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau –
@HouseGOP 12. A bill to cut SEC Chair Gary Gensler’s salary to $1 – a bill to defund the office of gun violence prevention – a bill to prevent the government from developing greenhouse gas disclosure rules – a bill to eliminate 50% of the budget for the consumer product safety commission.
@HouseGOP 13. These things aren’t urgent. They aren’t helpful. And they aren’t going to become law (See: laws require Senate + POTUS approval). But they keep the idiot wing of the @HouseGOP from turning on their rookie manager. And waste 435 people’s time on the House floor.
@HouseGOP 14. And so now we are 7 days from a shutdown. Still no path to fund. Still no sign of anyone in the @HouseGOP willing to stand up to their extreme fringe. Still no discernible leadership talents from their new Speaker. Right now it’s annoying. But in 8 days, its disastrous.
@HouseGOP 15. Because if they can’t get their s**t together, 8 days from now soldiers, air traffic controllers, food safety inspectors, IRS agents, border patrol… all go without pay. Some will be furloughed. Food, heating, housing assistance. Every government function.
@HouseGOP 16. PLEASE @HouseGOP. Grow up. Stop fighting with your brother and sister in the backseat. Either act like the adults you claim to be or at least have the dignity to go to your room so the adults can babysit your sorry selves. Too much is at stake.
They can’t. They are all suffering from a mass case of arrested development and cult worship. They are going to shut down the government because they think it will be good for them politically. They watch Fox and read Breitbart and follow the word of Dear Leader. They want a shutdown and they’re going to get it. Call it the Tuberville gambit: just say no and nothing else.
He will do it regardless. There is no doubt.
Maybe Americans are getting a clue. Maybe they are waking up, if not in the way wingnuts and QAnons think they should. The results of the last few elections suggest that, as Jamelle Bouie writes, the right’s culture war shtick — from “parental rights” to book bans to “critical race theory” to transgender kids and ad nauseum freakouts over drag shows — has finally worn thin (New York Times):
If the results of Tuesday’s elections in Virginia, Kentucky and Ohio tell us anything, however, it’s that this post-Roe form of culture warring is an abject failure, an approach that repels and alienates voters far more than it appeals to or persuades them.
It certainly turned off voters to Moms for Liberty. They got their asses handed to them in school board races in Iowa on Tuesday.
Amanda Marcotte writes that the Moms for Liberty brand is now toxic as well in Bucks County, Pennsylvania (Salon):
As I reported, parents in the Pennridge district eager to fight back against right-wing radicals formed the Ridge Network and got the word out, arguing to voters that the group was degrading the quality of the public schools. This week, those efforts paid off: Democrats won all five of the open school board seats in the district, wresting control away from Moms for Liberty.
[…]
By the time this election rolled around, Moms for Liberty seemed to have already realized their brand had become poisonous. As the Daily Beast reported, “In 2021, Moms for Liberty claimed credit for 33 seats in Bucks County,” but in this election cycle, the group “endorsed only a single candidate in the county.” The Philadelphia Inquirer reports that some Republican candidates wanted the group to keep its distance, fearful of the taint. And that was my sense of things in the Pennridge district this fall. School board members who had links to Moms for Liberty tried to downplay it and ended up getting outed by investigators from the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC).
Just an other well-funded astrourf group in retreat. Sunlight is not their friend.
“I am so tired of these psychos,” tweeted one fed-up parent involved in pushing back.
Moms for Liberty was started, in a fairly obvious manner, to help boost the national prospects of Republicans. So it’s a delicious irony that, in two short years, the organization is mostly known as a symbol of the MAGA extremism that is driving down the overall popularity of the GOP, leading to yet another election cycle where Democrats overperformed expectations. The group was meant to put a family-friendly gloss on right-wing extremism. Instead, they got parents and teachers, many who barely have time to work and care for their families, to become political organizers. Messing with people’s schools was not, it turned out, a genius political strategy.
They’ll be back with whatever moral panic they cook up next.
Joe Biden is running for president of the United States. Donald Trump is running for dictator of the former United States. That is the 2024 presidential contest in a nutshell (until someone comes up with something blunter). There is not enough bronzer in the world to conceal the pasty, combed-over remnant of a democratic republic this country will be in 2025 should enough Americans not come to their senses and dump Trump and his Christian-nationalist authoritarian cult.
One thing Trump and his imitators know: repetition works. Say anything enough times and people will begin to believe it. Social proof. The left thinks facts speak for themselves and need no marketing. They’re wrong. Ask the people peddling Medicare advantage plans or Skyrizi.
The press sells more soap (drugs that may be “right for you,” these days) promoting a close horse race than on covering a democracy’s slow, public descent into authoritarianism. It’s a ratings downer. Martin Niemöller is a downer. Until Trump’s goons come for your favorite news anchor.
There are a few voices shouting warnings on the fringes. Margaret Sullivan warned on Thursday (The Guardian):
It’s now clearer than ever that Trump, if elected, will use the federal government to go after his political rivals and critics, even deploying the military toward that end. His allies are hatching plans to invoke the Insurrection Act on day one.
But the press is too timid to say so loud enough and often enough and soon enough.
Instead, journalists have emphasized Joe Biden’s age and Trump’s “freewheeling” style. They blame the public’s attitudes on “polarization”, as if they themselves have no role. And, of course, they make the election about the horse race – rather than what would happen a few lengths after the finish line.
Here’s what must be hammered home: Trump cannot be re-elected if you want the United States to be a place where elections decide outcomes, where voting rights matter, and where politicians don’t baselessly prosecute their adversaries.
This is not alarmism. It is literally what Trump says he will do if elected again.
Susan Glasser (The New Yorker) is baffled that Trump is still viable after inciting an insurrection, 91 felony charges, and being out of office for nearly three years:
On Thursday, in an interview with Univision, Trump again made explicit what is often implicit in his vengeance-fuelled campaign: his willingness to use the justice system to go after his opponents if he is returned to the White House. Any other prospective President would have denied with all possible force a recent Washington Post report that Trump has already demanded that his aides make plans to target some former advisers who have become public critics, including his former chief of staff John Kelly, former Attorney General Bill Barr, and former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley. Instead, Trump all but confirmed the story when he told the Spanish-language network that he would use the courts against his political rivals. “If I happen to be President and I see somebody who’s doing well and beating me very badly, I say, ‘Go down and indict them,’ ” Trump told Univision. “They’d be out of business. They’d be out of the election.”
The Washington Post reported the story this morning, but you won’t find it on page 1. (I couldn’t find where it appears in the print edition.) The New York Times hasn’t found space yet.
The woman Trump’s rally mobs chanted he should lock up was right about him all along. Hillary Clinton still is, writes Glasser:
In an appearance this week on “The View,” Clinton compared Trump to Adolf Hitler, who was, she noted, “duly elected” before he dismantled Germany’s democracy and turned himself into a dictator. Her main point—and it bears endless repetition between now and whatever awaits us next November—is that Trump has clearly spelled out exactly how he plans to go after core tenets of American democracy. There is no mystery here. “Trump is telling us what he intends to do,” Clinton said. “Take him at his word. The man means to throw people in jail who disagree with him, shut down legitimate press outlets, do what he can to literally undermine the rule of law and our country’s values.”
It’s worth noting that Clinton made those comments before Trump’s incendiary interview. He’s said it all before; he’ll say it all again. The question, with one year left on the clock, is: Who’s listening? ♦
Too few. They’re too busy staring at the polls to see who’s ahead this week by a nose. (I accidentally typed noise. That works too.)