Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

Just thought you should know. And plan accordingly.

The work is never finished

I am reminded.

Full quotation:

It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us — that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion — that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain — that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom — and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

Michael Beschloss will be along presently.

The anniversary brings to mind something related to Gettysburg that I wrote for Dirty Hippies in 2011, “The Future They Feared”:

We were sitting in a Waffle House in Staunton, Virginia discussing the state of the nation over breakfast. I had just read an Ed Kilgore column in Salon  about the nationwide Republican war on voting rights, and the conservative debate over whether voting is even a right or not.

As I am standing in line to pay my tab, a African-American man in his forties slides into an occupied booth next to the register and sits opposite an older white man. They share a brief exchange about how his shift went. Two smiling, white waitresses come over to take his order and start a friendly argument over how he likes his toast. He is a regular.

“Toast, not grits?” remarks the older white man.

“It’s Filmore,” smiles one of the waitresses to the cook. “Burn it. He likes it burnt.”

“Dark, not burnt,” Filmore insists.

This is Virginia — the capitol of the Old South. Black man. Restaurant. Sharing a table with a white man. White women competing over who will wait on him.

It occurs to me that the prospect of the very everydayness of such a scene horrified many Virginians and others across America 50 years ago.

Some people need an “other” to fear or they don’t know who they they are themselves. It’s not just generational. It is a personality type. Many of the same types today fear poor people, gays, Muslims and Mexicans.

We are on our way to see the Gettysburg battlefield where two American armies slaughtered each other, where the Army of Northern Virginia lost its war over the right to deny rights to an entire class of “others,” and to hang onto a people’s irrational fear of the future I saw at a northern Virginia Waffle House.

Today add to the list of irrational fears transgender people, grooming, drag shows, and black history. In 50 years, should we survive the next few, no one will bat an eye.

“It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”

Working on it. Hope you are. The work is never finished.

Late Update: Heather Cox Richardson has more on the events of the day.

“Parkinson’s disease sucks”

It’s heartening to see people who still believe in public service as a vocation. A neighbor spent his career in international development. My state representative served first in the Peace Corps. I recently met a couple who retired here after careers as Foreign Service officers.

Donald Trump calls Washington, D.C. a swamp and people eat it up in part because guys like George Santos and Bob Menendez give public service a bad name. (Even though there’s some “both sides” to that, political corruption and faithlessness does seem to have a right-wing bias.)

Yet some people still believe. They’re not the ones who become notorious in the press.

CBS this morning profiles Virginia congresswoman Jennifer Wexton (D). Wexton comes from a family of public servants. She’s afflicted with a rare disease, yet forgoes some speech and physical therapy to keep serving her consituents:

Progressive Supra-nuclear Palsy, as Wexton said, has no cure. At this time, there is no treatment that will slow its progression, and it tends not to respond to medication, according to the National Institutes of Health. It often worsens rapidly, and most patients “develop severe disability within three to five years of symptom onset.” It affects movement — loss of balance is a common symptom — and causes slurred speech. Vision problems often develop as the disease progresses, too. 

Wexton described exhaustion, missed therapy appointments and lost sleep as the effects of the recent relentless House schedule. The narrowest of margins between the parties meant she needed to be present on Capitol Hill for the dozens of votes and debates.   

Her fatigue was so severe that she suspects it contributed to a painful fall at her home in Virginia four weeks ago. It was the fall that injured her neck and continues to cause her pain.

“It’s just so hard for me now,” Wexton told CBS News. Her voice and her ability to speak have been impaired by her medical condition, and her fatigue has grown.   

“Fatigue absolutely does have an impact,” she said during an extended interview. “The most important thing you can do is get sleep.”

She teared up several times as she echoed the message she sent to constituents in a written statement earlier this year: “I’m heartbroken to have to give up something I have loved after so many years of serving my community.”

“I’ve been worse since September. It’s been tiring. It’s been really hard being here for the ten weeks,” she said. “It’s awful.”

Wexton will leave the office she’s held since 2019 after sge defeated incumbent Republican Barbara Comstock.

“There is no ‘getting better’ with PSP,” Wexton told the press in September. She was dignosed in April. “People with progressive supranuclear palsy typically die six to nine years after their diagnosis,” reports the Cleveland Clinic. Plus, “People with PSP also have a higher risk of falls, which can result in bone fractures and head traumas. Falls that cause serious injuries are a common cause of death among people with PSP.”

We wish her well.

This man is demented — and the audience cheers

Back when he was running against Clinton he used to say she belonged in jail and she was crook and that she didn’t “have the strength and stamina” to be president. It wasn’tsubtle by any means. But this … this is beyond grotesque. And his audience loves it.

Meanwhile, speaking of stupid:

Fine. Everything is fine.

Don’t let them forget Trump or shirk who they’ve become

Following up on the post below, here’s a great piece by Brian Beutler from his excellent newsletter Off Message. He recaps the infuriatingly terrible media response to Trump’s “vermin” comments, proving just how inured they’ve become to his escalating extremism. He notes that the outcry from regular people finally jolted them out of their reflexive “that old Trumps says the darndest things” reaction. But what do we do?

But the question now—as days turn into weeks, and fresh stories vie for our attention—is whether this will be a passing kerfuffle, or one Republicans, as long as they support Trump, can never live down. 

Reporters have no shortage of Trump outrage porn to cover, and if Democrats can’t differentiate the vermin libel as something that transcends his more typical offenses, it will fade like most of the others. That’s the main source of my small misgivings over the couch-fainting, pearl-clutching way liberals have responded to it. “Ack, Hitler said that!” True enough, he did. But every reference to Hitler comes fraught not just with the repugnance of his words and deeds, but with danger and fear—of invasion, and war, and death camps. It grants Trump the air of menace he wants to cultivate. He and everyone in his orbit derive juvenile pleasure when good people flinch at their provocations. They are much less happy when they get caught taking things too far. That’s when the artifice falls away, and they clam up like bullies who realize they’ve antagonized someone who can kick their asses. That’s when they start turning on each other. 

So what could Democrats say or do to transform the vermin libel into a red line? Why is it that, seven years later, the word “deplorables” remains a galvanizing term for Republicans and an embarrassment for Democrats? Was it that Republicans recoiled in fear that Hillary Clinton might tie up the deplorables and send them down a river in a basket? Or was it that they used it to undermine her claim to want to be president for all Americans—and then kept saying that?

Clinton fairly but unwisely described Trump’s most bigoted supporters as “deplorables” on a Friday evening. That Monday, Trump responded, “She revealed herself to be a person who looks down on the proud citizens of our country as subjects for her rule,” and insisted, in deep projection, that anyone with “contempt in your heart for the American voter” should not run for president. 

I think Democrats can exploit the vermin libel in much the same way. So that there’s no forgetting, even after Trump’s gone. But they have to want to.  

[…]

“Too many voters have forgotten that Trump is a deranged clown who isn’t up to the job,” wrote Pod Save America’s  Dan Pfeiffer. 

True, but: Why did that happen? Was it inevitable? If it wasn’t inevitable, shouldn’t Democrats have labored harder to keep memories fresh, since, unattended, they are short? And now that the forgetting is underway, how much damage has been done? Is it reversible? Can a professional campaign and a few well-produced ads jog memories that have faded over three years?

I’m actually staking a lot of hope on the answer to that last question being “yes.” The trauma and scars of the Trump presidency are real, which means mass forgetting should be slower, harder. When he’s tormenting us nonstop again, people will remember. Or at least I hope they will.

[…]

“Trump is more mentally fit for the presidency than Biden” is a false contagion of an idea, and it can only spread through a combination of lost knowledge (about Trump) and new impressions (about Biden).

Biden’s enemies have gone to great lengths to foster those impressions, and spread them. Democrats have done much less work to preserve our collective memory of the Trump years.

If the net effect of those decisions is to turn the question of fitness for the presidency on its head, why couldn’t it also upend our perception of other things? Those same Trump loyalists have gone to similarly great lengths to spread the idea that the Biden economy is tattered and miserable; most Democrats have shied away from directly refuting that assertion for fear of seeming insensitive to a struggling minority. Coincidentally, a strong public consensus has emerged in favor of the idea that the economy is bad when (broadly speaking, for most people) it is very strong. 

Coincidentally, or perhaps not. 

The consensus could just as easily reflect the effectiveness of propaganda—mostly on the right, but some on the left—over material reality, and the Democrats’ acquiescence to it.  

So what is to be done? If the tools required to make the vermin libel a lasting liability for Republicans include repetition, and the tools required to remind people that Trump is a crook and a lunatic include repetition, what’s the best way to introduce people to the idea that the economy is much stronger than public opinion suggests?

If Democrats interpret public opinion to mean they should be delicate about their economic messaging, that they should reinforce the primacy of people’s struggles, they will in essence feed the false perception, and compound the problem. Why do that work for the people who want to beat you?

But if the right move is to contest public opinion in the realm of ideas, it means politics is more about information warfare and less about governing excellence than we might like. I believe this because I’ve spent half of a life-long journalism career watching elections turn on bullshit. But I think even skeptics recognize it when it takes a toll, as it often does, in other countries. 

The notion that political popularity is a variable that’s highly dependent on the trajectory of material conditions is very reductive. Obviously it’s better to succeed than to fail, and it’s easier to husband public approval in prosperity than in recession. But what people expect of their political leaders is constructed socially, not an inherent property of the human mind. Russian public opinion does not appear to be tightly linked to material conditions. Public opinion in Mexico doesn’t seem to turn on conditions there either, and it makes sense as a theoretical matter that people in societies with incompetent governments will lose faith in the idea that politics is about improving material conditions, and start making their assessments of leaders based on other things. 

In the Republican nation of America, where government is and should be incompetent, perceptions of the economy have become a pure proxy for partisanship, good when the president is on team red; bad when on team blue.

We’re evolving into the propaganda society we imagined we were too advanced to become.

This may be an insoluble problem (though if any progressive billionaires want me to take a stab at solving it, my Venmo is easy to find). But even if it can be solved, Democrats will for now have to shape opinion through the system as it exists. They could attempt this by scampering to address every last economic indicator that isn’t pointed the right direction, and maybe they should. I’d never fault an officeholder for trying to make people’s lives better. But they’ll have more success moving the arrows of public opinion by transmitting opinion than they will by transmitting money. 

 

Here’s the advice:

I’d suggest: Say what you mean bluntly on the topics you want people to care about. Don’t outsmart yourself. Don’t let your paranoid suspicions about how your opponents will react or your fears about playing into their traps overcomplicate the task of conveying simple ideas.

If you think the vermin libel disqualifies Trump, say so. It’s a much simpler way to introduce the idea than comparing Trump to Hitler and hoping the masses a) agree with the comparison and b) decide it is disqualifying on their own. The economic message should be similarly blunt. “We’ve built the best American economy in 70 years, after Trump destroyed the last one.”

More than any particular poll or paper liability, I worry about the way the party strains to explain Donald Trump’s enduring strength as a candidate against Joe Biden. The kids call it cope, but whatever it tells us about the state of the Democratic psyche, it also suggests something much worse—that strategic weaknesses keep going unaddressed.   

For the weeks and months following Donald Trump’s campaign announcement, the whipping boy was inflation. When the government tamed inflation, it became an under-theorized “lag” in public sentiment about the economy. When polls suggest Biden’s age explains his poor polling, we’re told the point is moot because Donald Trump is also old. When Biden trailed Trump in the late summer, we were reminded that Barack Obama also trailed in head-to-head polling at the same point in 2011. Now that it’s November, we’re due for a new hypothesis.

Those who insist good policy is destiny will try to find it in economic data. For most of my career, they embraced the view that job and GDP growth were skeleton keys to political success. They continued making that argument under Biden until it ceased to be true, at which point they insisted it was inflation, then specifically gas prices, then a hangover effect from inflation, then housing prices. You can call it a curve fitting exercise, I think of it as Dems trying to tug carpeting into every corner of a room that’s too big. The missing piece is storytelling.

I can’t argue with any of this. Relentless repetition is key. Trump knows that and he’s right. It works/. Even when you think you’ll scream if you have to say it again, do it anyway. There is a cacophony of news and information in our culture and it’s the only way to break through. And he’s right: Keep It Simple Stupid.

I don’t know if Dems will get the message. They are still caught in the argument between “popularism” kitchen table issues and bold confrontational politics, using the wedge issues like abortion and democracy. I think it’s more than fine to tout accomplishments but in a country where people think the economy is in a great depression despite all evidence to the contrary, the latter is the better choice.

Not that some of us didn’t see it coming…

Over the past few years people have argued over whether or not Trump and his movement were fascist. (I came down on the side of yes, quite some time ago..) But others made the point that the word has a specific meaning and Trump didn’t necessarily fit it perfectly. Tom Nichols, Never Trump conservative, was one of those people.

He warned that the indiscriminate use of the word word could blind us to the time when it might actually become accurate. He says that time has come:

For weeks, Trump has been ramping up his rhetoric. Early last month, he echoed the vile and obsessively germophobic language of Adolf Hitler by describing immigrants as disease-ridden terrorists and psychiatric patients who are “poisoning the blood of our country.” His address in Claremont, New Hampshire, on Saturday was the usual hot mess of random thoughts, but near the end, it took a more sinister turn. (It’s almost impossible to follow, but you can try to read the full text here.) In one passage in particular, Trump melded religious and political rhetoric to aim not at foreign nations or immigrants, but at his fellow citizens. This is when he crossed one of the last remaining lines that separated his usual authoritarian bluster from recognizable fascism:

We will drive out the globalists, we will cast out the communists, Marxists, fascists. We will throw off the sick political class that hates our country … On Veterans Day, we pledge to you that we will root out the communists, Marxists, fascists and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country, that lie and steal and cheat on elections and will do anything possible … legally or illegally to destroy America and to destroy the American dream

It’s not just the vermin thing. It’s the threat to “drive out” the people he calls communists, Marxists, fascists and radical left thugs, all of which he has used to describe the people who oppose him. That’s us, folks.

As the New York University professor Ruth Ben-Ghiat later pointed out to The Washington Post, Trump is populating this list of imaginary villains (which she sees as a form of projection) in order “to set himself up as the deliverer of freedom. Mussolini promised freedom to his people too and then declared dictatorship.”

Add the language in these speeches to all of the programmatic changes Trump and his allies have threatened to enact once he’s back in office—establishing massive detention camps for undocumented people, using the Justice Department against anyone who dares to run against him, purging government institutions, singling out Christianity as the state’s preferred religion, and many other actions—and it’s hard to describe it all as generic “authoritarianism.” Trump no longer aims to be some garden-variety supremo; he is now promising to be a threat to every American he identifies as an enemy—and that’s a lot of Americans.

[…]

It is possible, I suppose, that Trump really has little idea of what he’s saying. (We’re under threat from “communists” and “Marxists” and “fascists?” Uh, okay.) But he has reportedly expressed admiration of Hitler (and envy of Hitler’s grip on the Nazi military), so when the Republican front-runner uses terms like vermin and expressions like poisoning the blood of our country, we are not required to spend a lot of time generously parsing what he may have meant.

More to the point, the people around Trump certainly know what he’s saying. Indeed, Trump’s limited vocabulary might not have allowed him to cough up a word like vermin. We do not know if it was in his prepared text, but when asked to clarify Trump’s remarks, his campaign spokesman, Steven Cheung, told The Washington Postthat “those who try to make that ridiculous assertion are clearly snowflakes grasping for anything because they are suffering from Trump Derangement Syndrome and their entire existence will be crushed when President Trump returns to the White House.”

What?

Cheung later clarified his clarification: He meant to say their “sad, miserable existence” instead of their “entire existence,” as if that was somehow better. If that’s not a fascist faux pas, nothing is.

But here I want to caution my fellow citizens. Trump, whether from intention or stupidity or fear, has identified himself as a fascist under almost any reasonable definition of the word. But although he leads the angry and resentful GOP, he has not created a coherent, disciplined, and effective movement. (Consider his party’s entropic behavior in Congress.) He is also constrained by circumstance: The country is not in disarray, or at war, or in an economic collapse. Although some of Trump’s most ardent voters support his blood-and-soil rhetoric, millions of others have no connection to that agenda. Some are unaware; others are in denial. And many of those voters are receptive to his message only because they have been bludgeoned by right-wing propaganda into irrationality and panic. Even many officials in the current GOP, that supine and useless husk of an institution, do not share Trump’s ambitions.

I have long argued for confronting Trump’s voters with his offenses against our government and our Constitution. The contest between an aspiring fascist and a coalition of prodemocracy forces is even clearer now. But deploy the word fascist with care; many of our fellow Americans, despite their morally abysmal choice to support Trump, are not fascists.

As for Trump, he has abandoned any democratic pretenses, and lost any benefit of the doubt about who and what he is.

Nichols thinks that people who were premature anti-fascist (where have we heard that before?) in response to Trump have caused a problem because now nobody will believe it since he’s now actually a fascist. I don’t think I agree with that. He was always a fascist, he’s just too ignorant to know what he is. Before he didn’t have enough people around him to bring a full program into fruition and the Republican Party was too confused to help him. (They still are to some degree, fortunately.)

He is naturally gifted at propaganda since he’s a pathological liar and he’s demonstrated amazing power with his Big Lie. Others have noticed and see the potential of using him for fascistic purposes. It’s here whether we call it by its name or not.

If she can do it there, she can do it anywhere

Greg Sargent on the latest accomplishments of Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer:

Few Democrats would deny that the party must win back working people. Yet one of the party’s long-term conundrums is whether they can pursue ambitious efforts to combat climate change without threatening those very workers’ wages or jobs.

In coming days, Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer is set to sign a package of bills that would transition the state to 100 percent clean electricity by 2040. The bills — which also include robust provisions for workers — are among the most ambitious efforts undertaken by any state to move toward a carbon-free future in a manner that is actively good for working people. Significantly, Democrats are testing this approach in a swing state in the heart of the industrial Midwest.

[…]

Climate action tends to expose cracks in the Democratic coalition precisely because it aggravates existing tensions between the goals and interests of environmentalists and workers. But in a surprise, after long negotiations between the governor, labor advocates and Democrats in the state legislature, the end product pleased most climate activists and labor officials.

“Michigan is leading the way in creating high-road labor standards that protect good-paying jobs while providing a pathway to a clean energy future,” Ryan Sebolt, director of government affairs for the state’s AFL-CIO, told me. As energy work evolves, Sebolt said, the bills will ensure that these remain quality jobs “long into the future.”

That’s strikingly positive talk given that organized labor has long been skeptical that such a balance can be achieved. And it comes with good news on another front: United Auto Workers members are close to ratifying their new contracts with General Motors, Ford and Stellantis. These contracts will cover a large number of workers at electric-vehicle battery plants, another sign that the transition could translate into quality green-energy manufacturing jobs in the future.

All of this is very heartening stuff. If working people come to see that they have a stake in the green transition, it could help build durable political support for it over time.

“This is a multi-decade-long transition to remake the energy system,” said Jesse Jenkins, a climate expert at Princeton University. “The only way we’re going to accomplish that is if we sustain a political coalition to see that process through.”

Opponents of the green transition understand the fault lines in that coalition perfectly well. When former president Donald Trump traveled to Detroit to speak about the UAW strike, he railed that the transition to electric vehicles will ultimately destroy autoworkers’ livelihoods. Michigan, one of the three “blue wall” states that Trump won in 2016, is trending Democratic but will be heavily contested in 2024 with Trump making exactly that sort of appeal to the state’s industrial workers.

At the same time, Whitmer and Democrats are using the majorities they won in 2022 to pass a range of socially liberal measures — from new LGBTQ+ protections to repeal of an antiabortion statute — that are often said to be driving working-class voters from the party. But they are doing this while also appealing to workers’ material interests: Earlier this year, they repealed Michigan’s anti-union “right to work” bill, and now, they’re passing a climate bill that working people can learn to love.

If Michigan Democrats can win back working people by passing solid pro-labor legislation without abandoning the party’s deepest priorities on cultural issues — and defeat Trump in the industrial heartland — that would be a big step forward. But if they can also pull this off on climate, it could provide a model for more efforts to sell the green transition as a boon to workers in difficult political territory going forward.

And the stakes riding on getting that one right are impossible to overstate.

Fight the wind or ride the balloon

Thomas P.M. Barnett’s “The Pentagon’s New Map” (2004) outlined how the sources of conflict in the world are concentrated in the non-integrating “gap” areas under cultural stress and disconnected from the broader economy.

As in Barnett’s past work, “America’s New Map: Restoring Our Global Leadership in an Era of Climate Change and Demographic Collapse” (2023) looks to a future worth creating.

The cultural stress in the U.S. these days, Barnett tells James Fallows on his podcast this week, is connected to America “losing its whiteness.” But that’s more connected to climate change than Americans of the Baby Boom generation care to admit.

Fallows writes:

Barnett is crystal-clear about climate change as a central driver of world politics, economics, and strategic tensions. And he emphasizes two related aspects of particular importance to the United States.

—One is climate’s role as driver of migrations—mainly south-to-north around the world, since that’s more feasible than east-west migration across the broad oceans. Millions of people are going to have to move, and sooner or later someone will have to accept them.

—The other is climate’s potential to be the next great motivating theme in American life, a rough counterpart to frontier-expansion in the late 1800s, and industrialization in the early 1900s, and military challenges in the mid-1900s.

You can read more about this as the central argument in his new book, and a recurring theme in the second half of our conversation. For instance: Barnett argues in his book that the US will naturally become more open to Latin American migrants, both because more of them will be coming, and because the US will have greater needs.

But how does America move past its impulse to shoot migrants at the border?

Barnett: It’s going to be accomplished by generational turnover. 

The Boomers and the Gen Xers, both Cold War babies, what do they know? They know the sanctity of borders. It’s a very Cold War mentality. That’s what they know. That’s what they’re comfortable with. OK?

When you start talking millennials, Gen Zs—I got six of them as kids—they don’t have those instincts. They’re not gonna sign up for a 50 year Cold War with the Chinese to prevent them from doing—what? Building bridges around the world or something like that? They’re very skeptical about our military interventions. You’re seeing the resistance on our support to Israel right now. You’re seeing the wavering of our support to Ukraine. They’re very much focused on climate change.

They are very much convinced that they’re going to live in this (ethnically changing) world. I think they’re right. And they’re eager to address it. So think about who’s going to be running the system in 2050. The peaking and the points in history where we’re going to have the most adaptation are going to be probably in the 2030s, 40s, 50s. And that’s when Gen Z and the millennials are going to come online.

The mean age for a white person in America, Barnett says, is about 58, which turns out to be the mean age of people arrested or charged for the January 6th protest (as of April 2021 study; 94% white, average age 40). The nonwhite mean age in America is about 27. The Ancien Régime is fighting to hold on and hold out against change but will ultimately fail.

California over our lifetimes became a “majority minority” state. Guess what? The sky did not fall. It won’t in the rest of the country. The question is how much political violence has to occur before the Boomers let go of (or die out trying) the world they grew up as comfortably in as they don’t in this changing one.

Gen Z, Barnett tells Fallows, does not feel those winds of change. Like flying in a hot air balloon, they don’t feel the wind. Gen Zers are in it and part of it. The cultural changes that make Boomers tear their thinning hair out are natural for Gen Z.

It’s a fascinating 55 minutes of conversation. Especially the part about what a positive American “brand” could look like in a climate-changed future. Now, I have to get the (audio) book.

To my Gen Z friends: Hurry up every chance you get.

Kicking the 14th Amendment down the road

Whistling past a graveyard. Tiptoeing through a minefield. Neither the courts nor election officials nor Congress want to touch ruling Donald Trump ineligible to serve as president.

Colorado Politics:

A Denver judge on Friday found Donald Trump remains eligible for the state’s 2024 presidential ballot even though he engaged in an insurrection, joining courts elsewhere that have rejected attempts to disqualify the leading Republican candidate.

District Court Judge Sarah B. Wallace determined the provision of the 14th Amendment barring insurrectionists from holding office does not apply to presidents and, therefore, does not disqualify Trump.

“While the Court agrees that there are persuasive arguments on both sides, the Court holds that the absence of the President from the list of positions to which the Amendment applies combined with the fact that Section Three specifies that the disqualifying oath is one to ‘support’ the Constitution whereas the Presidential oath is to ‘preserve, protect and defend’ the Constitution,” Wallace wrote.

‘Tis the season for reluctance

“To be clear, part of the Court’s decision is its reluctance to embrace an interpretation which would disqualify a presidential candidate without a clear, unmistakable indication that such is the intent,” she wrote in a Nov. 17 order.

Nonetheless, the 102-page order offered a damning critique of Trump’s conduct leading up to the Jan. 6, 2021 assault on the U.S. Capitol, and Wallace concluded Trump did, in fact, incite an insurrection to halt the certification of President Joe Biden’s victory.

Associated Press:

The decision by District Judge Sarah B. Wallace is the third ruling in a little over a week against lawsuits seeking to knock Trump off the ballot by citing Section 3 of the amendment. The Minnesota Supreme Court last week said Trump could remain on the primary ballot because political parties have sole choice over who appears, while a Michigan judge ruled that Congress is the proper forum for deciding whether Section 3 applies to Trump.

Three judges. Three different explanations for why they could not rule Donald Trump disqualified under the 14th Amendment from serving again in elected office.

Ruby Freeman knows well what it’s like to draw the wrath of the Trump cult. As do other election workers. Members of Congress and Secret Service members who sheltered in place during the January 6th attack on the Capitol by Trump supporters do too. Prosecutors involved in Trump cases in New York, Atlanta, and Washington, D.C. face a flood of threats and require beefed-up security details. Sen. Mitt Romney has spent $5,000/day on personal and family security since the Jan. 6 insurrection.

As we head into holiday season, we’ll repeatedly see Hans Gruber fall from the 30th floor of the Nakatomi Tower. But not before he ruins Joe Takagi’s London-made suit by splattering it with Takagi’s brains and blood. The priciest judge’s robes I found online are not nearly that expensive. Still, if I were wearing one I’d rather not see it ruined that way either.

How much of a factor in a judge’s decision-making in a Trump case is the deepening fog of threats, menace, and intimidation from Trump and his followers over Trump’s prosecutions and his attempts to return to the White House he called “a real dump“?

I don’t know. But I do know we put up with this shit. And I’m sick of it.