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Dual threats

We raised the alarm yesterday both about Donald Trump’s Nazi-adjacent eliminationist rhetoric and his “concentration” on creating detention camps in a second term. We have also spread lots of pixels describing the New Apostolic Reformation that views Trump as an instrument of God.

Trump and Stephen Miller want to lock up and deport all immigrants not to their liking, and to eventually cut off paths to immigration for the same. That’s the political cleansing of America they seek. But the Seven Mountains people backing Trump want religious purification as well. They will dismiss any and all his personal, political, and criminal failings to advance that end.

All of them, they don’t want to govern, they want to rule.

There will be cracks on the road to Christian Dominion and local infighting, as Fred Clarkson details at Salon. Plus a healthy dose of wishcasting and Christian soldiers cosplay. But right now these people hold actual political power in the Speaker of the House.

Janine Melnitz : Yes, of course they’re serious…

Think they’re not serious? Remember Jan. 6? That was a small group of (for the most part) poorly organized political-religious zealots as well. The few who were better organized meant to overturn the presidential election and perhaps hang the vice president and House speaker.

Yes, they may be a small group of self-inflated cranks, but they are not kidding, as the video below reveals.

After that, a dose of constitutional principle.

Slightly left of centrist

U.S. Rep. Abigail Spanberger, the Virginia Democrat, will run for governor in 2025, the Associated Press reports this morning:

Spanberger, a three-term Democrat, made the announcement in a campaign video, highlighting the importance of lowering prescription drug prices, growing the middle class and easing inflation. In a video titled “What Matters Most,” Spanberger also emphasized the importance of recruiting and retaining teachers “and stopping extremists from shredding women’s reproductive rights.”

“Our country and our Commonwealth are facing fundamental threats to our rights, our freedoms, and to our democracy,” Spanberger said. “While some politicians in Richmond focus on banning abortion and books, what they’re not doing is helping people.”

Spanberger’s run for governor has been rumored since July. Let’s hope she has a Democrat lined up to run competititvely in 2024 for her 7th Congressional District House seat.

The former CIA officer and law enforcement officer for the U.S. Postal Service won her first congressional race in a district that had been held by Republicans for almost 50 years.

The Commonwealth prohibits its governors from serving consecutive terms. That’s led to intense speculation about Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s next political move, as well as early jockeying in effective shadow campaigns for the chief executive’s office.

As for other potential gubernatorial candidates, Richmond Mayor Levar Stoney, a Democrat, is expected to announce campaign plans soon.

A former Blue Dog and current member of the Problem Solvers Caucus, Spanberger has engaged in the against-the grain centrist and positioning that characterizes Democrats in swing districts. She won her seat from incumbent Dave Brat in 2018 by 2 points, held it by under 2 points in 2020, and won by 4.6 points in 2022 after redistricting.

Washington Post:

Spanberger has used her past work in federal law enforcement and the CIA to appeal to independents and moderate Republicans in her swing district while energizing the Democratic base with her background as an organizer with the gun-control group Moms Demand Action.

In the House, she has sought to strike a similar balance, aligning with liberals on abortion rights, for instance, while pushing back at times against the party’s left wing. She was a vocal critic of the “defund the police” rhetoric that some Democrats voiced in the 2020 cycle.

Spanberger never backed Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) for House speaker and went further last year by rebuking Pelosi’s handling of legislation that would ban members of Congress from trading stock, accusing her of putting forward legislation that was “designed to fail.”

Spanberger was critical of her party’s messaging and negotiating tactics related to President Biden’s original Build Back Better agenda, telling the New York Times in November 2021 that “nobody elected him to be FDR; they elected him to be normal and stop the chaos.”

The centrist Democrat has many of the right enemies.

Spanberger would be Virginia’s first woman governor.

Yesterday, Trump referred to fellow Americans as vermin , evoking the Third Reich.

Former President Donald J. Trump, on a day set aside to celebrate those who have defended the United States in uniform, promised to honor veterans in part by assailing what he portrayed as America’s greatest foe: the political left.

Using incendiary and dehumanizing language to refer to his opponents, Mr. Trump vowed to “root out” what he called “the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country.”

“The threat from outside forces is far less sinister, dangerous and grave than the threat from within,” Mr. Trump said Saturday in a nearly two-hour Veterans Day address in Claremont, N.H.

As far as I can tell, only Kristen Welker on on Meet the Press mentioned it in passing to Ronna McDaniel and the only two mainstream newspapers to headline it are the NY Times (who only discussed it in the story, not in the headline above), in a small article and Forbes.

CNN’s is here and coverage of the comment is 2/3rds of the way down the article.

I’m so old I remember when Hillary Clinton said that there was a “basket of deplorables” in the GOP and the media went into a complete frenzy of pearl clutching over her crude and dismissive treatment of members of the voting public.

Trump — crickets.

This is a huge, huge problem because even if Hillary had been crude and dismissive, she wasn’t drawing up plans to deport or put them in prison camps. Trump isn’t just talking. He’s got all kinds of people working on bringing this to fruition. If he wins, who’s going to stop him?

Update: At 5 est, the Washington Post stepped up:

But it’s way, way, way down the page online.

Trump’s defense starts its case this week

The Washington Post has an excellent write up today about where the Trump trial stands and what we can expect in the next couple of weeks:

Former Trump Organization insider Michael Cohen testified in state court that his ex-boss Donald Trump instructed him to fudge numbers on annual financial statements so that they would show his desired net worth.

Patrick Birney, a Trump Organization employee, said in court that a top executive told him Trump wanted a bigger bottom line on his annual statements, which were given to banks and insurance companies.

An insurance underwriter, Claudia Mouradian, whose deposition was played at the trial, said she relied on the Trump Organization’s claim that a statement reporting roughly $6 billion in combined golf and real estate assets had beenverified by professional appraisers.

These were among the assertionspresented during six weeks of trial and testimony in a lawsuit brought against Trump and his business by New York Attorney General Letitia James (D). Her civil case has sought to prove that the former president, his adult sons and their company deliberately inflated the values Trump included on his annual financial statements to secure better terms from bankers and insurers.

James filed her lawsuit last year, and she is asking New York Supreme Court Judge Arthur Engoron to fine the companyat least $250 million and render Trump and his family unable to operate in New York by barring them from borrowing money or owning companies. Trump’s defense has denied wrongdoing.

By the time James’s side rested Wednesday, with the defense team scheduled to begin presenting its case Monday, the attorney general’s office had sought to paint Trump as a figure whose ego relied heavily on how he compared to other billionaires and developers — and had lied in financial records to bolster his own standing.

A mountain of documents presented at the trial also demonstrated the company’s inconsistent and irregular methodologies in compiling the financial statements to his benefit. In total, 25 witnesses were called to discuss documents and share firsthand accounts.

Those included Trump, his adult sons Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump, and his daughter Ivanka Trump, who is not a defendant in the case. Each of them testified of knowing little, if anything, about the creation of financial documents at the center of the trial.

Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trumptestified this month that they trusted the company’s accountants.

“If they assured me in their expert opinion that these things were fine I would have been fine with that and signed off accordingly,”Donald Trump Jr. said.

Legal analysts and other observers say the testimony thus far haspotential shortcomings, including that no employee has testified that Trump ordered the values to be manipulated — except for Cohen, who previously admitted to lying under oath and has a well-documented, admitted grudge against Trump. And there is also no trail of records leading directly to Trump, who famously avoids communicating by email.

The case has clearly irritated Trump, though, who repeatedly attended and denounced the trial throughout the proceedings. It also carries enormous implications for him and his company.

Engoron, who is hearing the case without a jury, already ruled before the trial that thecompany’s financial statements were fraudulent and is requesting a receiver be installed to “dissolve” Trump’s entities in the state.

“If you had to win this case on the basis of people who were working with Trump you’d have a hard time,” George Washington University law professor Stephen A. Saltzburg said in an interview.

Saltzburg said James’s strongest point in public remarks to date has been about the significance of thefinancial statements.

“I think it’s going to be proven by the fact that the discrepancies are more than just honest judgment mistakes,” Saltzburg said. “I do think the judge is going to hold those who signed the documents responsible.”

This is a civil case, not a criminal trial, so none of the defendants face any time behind bars as a result. It comes as Trump is facing a looming swirl of legal troubles, including four separate criminal cases filed against him this year. Amid all of these allegations and indictments, Trump is also the leading candidate for the Republican presidential nomination next year.

When Trump took the stand to testify last week, he clashed with Engoron and belittled James and her case. Her office also succeeded in getting Trump to confirm that he played a role in preparing the statements by sometimes providing input to his staff as they prepared them.

“Is it correct you were responsible for determining the values stated in the financial statement,” Kevin Wallace, a senior attorney on James’s team, asked Trump on direct examination.

“I … have shown that I know more about real estate than other people,” Trump said. “So if somebody would ask me or if I would have an opinion I would — I would give it.”

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Trump attempted to land some surprise counterattacks against the investigators, but didn’t always succeed. He repeatedly highlighted the lengthy legal disclaimers included in his annual statements, at one point pulling a copy of one from his pocket, trying to introduce his own unofficial exhibit at trial.

The disclaimer was no smoking gun — it had been a matter of public recordfor several years since Cohen first discussed Trump’s alleged use of the statements to mislead business partners and provided copies of records to Congress. When Trump, as a witness, was told he couldn’t introduce an exhibit, he added it to his long list of complaints claiming unfair treatment at the trial.

While the trial and lawsuit have taken aim at Trump’s own self-image as a business colossus, experts and legal analysts said James’s case also had limitations.

Other than Trump’s signature on the statements themselves, James produced no company documents showing Trump had a hand in preparing the statements or inflating the values.

Only one witness pointed a finger directly at Trump — and he has publicly acknowledged that he has not always been honest, even under oath.

“I was tasked by Mr. Trump to increase the total assets based upon a number that he arbitrarily elected … [to] increase those assets in order to achieve the number that Mr. Trump had tasked us,” Cohen, Trump’s former attorney and “fixer,” testified on Oct. 24.

Throughout hours of combative cross-examination, however, Cohen conceded that in February 2019 he told Congress that Trump never actually instructed him and longtime finance chief Allen Weisselberg to doctor up his annual net worth reports. Cohen later clarifiedin the ongoing civil trial that while Trump never outright said to order the falsifications, he hinted his expectations like a “mob boss” calling shots in code.

Other witnesses called by James’s side declined to point a finger at Trump. Birney’s testimony largely relieved Trump executives of blame. Accountant Donald Bender, who did Trump’s personal and business taxes for decades, said he relied on the Trump Organization’s figures to compile reports but did not have knowledge of any intentional tampering.

Also, the Trump Organization’s biggest lender, Deutsche Bank, made millions off its relationship with the Trumps. Trump’s primary banker there previously said in a deposition that she was unaware of any bad information Trump or the other family members had given to the bank, potentially undermining the idea that the statements had unfairly benefited Trump.

Trump’s defense has argued that there were no victims in the case and nothing illegal occurred.

When the defense begins presenting its own case, Donald Trump Jr., Trump’s oldest son — who is a defendant in the case, as is his brother, Eric Trump — will return to the stand as the defense’s first witness. Trump’s attorneys are expected to arguethat his financial statements were legitimate, that valuations are subjective and that Trump properties were worth a fortune.

None of the banks were duped, because they did not rely on the statements to verify Trump’s worthiness as a business partner, the defense says.

A pretrial ruling by Engoron remains potentially momentous in the case — albeit with questions about its ultimate meaning.

In the Sept. 26 ruling, Engoron ordered all of Trump’s “business certificates” in the state be canceled. The decision arrived like an earthquake, clearly putting Trump at risk of losing control over his New York empire. But its wording left attorneys to argue what precisely it meant for his company.

New York business certificates allow limited liability corporations (LLCs) to operate under trade names. The Trump Corporation, for instance, has a certificate allowing it to operate under the name Trump International Realty, according to county records. The certificates are sometimes referred to as “DBA” certificates, for “doing business as.”

Engoron’s ruling confused some expertsin part because he canceled the certificates but not necessarily the underlying LLCs, potentially giving Trump’s attorneys a window to argue that the businesses could still be viable.

Legal experts said the effect would be the same.

“The Trump Organization is a partnership of all of these LLCs together, relying on the business certificates,” said Boston College law professor Brian Quinn. Bank loans probably require such affiliations to remain in place, he said.

Cornell University law professor Celia Bigoness said if the certificates were canceled so too would be “all other authorizations that stem from those certificates,” among them basic needs like the ability to collect sales tax.

The judge also ordered a receiver be put in place to “manage the dissolution of the canceled LLCs.”

Gregory E. Louis, associate law professor at CUNY Law School, said Engoron may not have been clear in his phrasing, but that his rulings taken together signaled that “at least Justice Engoron understands the scope of his order” as having dissolved the underlying companies as well.

Despite that setback, Trump has not backed away from the numbers on his statements, brashly explaining during his testimony on Nov. 6 that he felt most of the values were still lower than they should have been.

“The overall number of value is much higher than the number in the financial statements,” Trump testified.

Trump’s attorneys have apparently sought to create a record they could use in any appellate proceedings to help them preserve the company’s structure.

John C. Coffee Jr., a law professor at Columbia University, said Trump may be working against his team’s efforts to build the most effective appeal by focusing so much of his own energy on attacking Engoron.

“I think Trump’s rather volatile performance … [and his] occasional moments of rage does hurt him, because judges basically respect the judiciary and don’t like to be insulted by defendants,” Coffee said.

Trump and his lawyers are playing for the appeals courts. We’ll have to see if they are impressed with his case. Somehow, I doubt it.

“We just want the government to function… we’re just tired of it”

On the Sunday shows they’re still drooling over the polls showing that Biden is old and Trump is a vital young man with boundless energy sharp intelligence so they didn’t have much time to look at what happened on Tuesday. It’s too bad because there is a very interesting story that American who don’t follow the news closely but might tune in to Meet the Press would be interested to hear:

Meghan Budden’s family was considering moving if their Pennsylvania school district didn’t change course. She normally isn’t politically active, she said, but felt compelled to volunteer when a slate of Democrats launched bids to take back their school board in Central Bucks School District, just north of Philadelphia.

Central Bucks is well known both statewide and nationally for heated board meetings over masks and Pride flags, policies banning certain books and directives to not use students’ preferred names and pronouns. Accusations of discrimination against LGBTQ students have also led to an ongoing investigation by the U.S. Department of Education.

“I couldn’t have my kids in a school district where these kinds of things were happening,” Budden said.

Standing in the Bucks County Democratic headquarters on election night, Budden sobbed when the results rolled in — Democrats took all five seats up for election.

The room erupted in cheers; friends, neighbors and strangers hugged.

“It was very moving and a very joyous feeling from everyone,” Budden recalled. “And a sense of relief.”

If there was a question about whether the conservative-led school board’s policies reflected the will of the local community, Tuesday’s election may have provided an answer.

Three of the newly elected Democratic school board members will replace Republicans, including the board president, who helped set a right-wing agenda that aligned with national conservative movements around education. Voters effectively flipped the board from majority Republican to majority Democrat.

Republicans also lost majority control of school boards in Iowa, Virginia and a historically conservative district neighboring Central Bucks.

A surprising win for Democrats in a politically mixed district

Central Bucks School District is the third largest in Pennsylvania with more than 17,000 students. It’s also in a politically mixed, swing county.

“I wasn’t supposed to win,” said Democratic candidate Heather Reynolds, who beat the board’s current president and sole Republican incumbent in the race.

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Reynolds’ newly won seat represents a part of the district that’s more red than others, she said.

“I think that the community has had enough. They’ve seen what this former board majority has done and they said, ‘No more. We deserve better as a district, as a community. This isn’t who we are.'”

Reynolds said residents and parents were exhausted by the chaos that had become a normal part of monthly school board meetings.

Fiscal responsibility was also high on their list of concerns, she said: In July, the board increased Superintendent Abe Lucabaugh’s salary by almost 40%, making him the second-highest paid superintendent in the state after Philadelphia. Lucabaugh had stood by the board’s controversial policies, even as the district spent at least $1 million on a law firm following claims of discrimination and more than $140,000 on a public relations firm that managed media requests, among other things.

NPR reached out to Central Buck’s Republican board candidates for comment; some declined to be interviewed and others did not respond. Only one candidate was willing to go on the record, Glenn Schloeffel. He said the results were disappointing.

“We put a lot of work into trying to get a successful outcome, and it didn’t go our way.”

Schloeffel believes the board majority got “thrown under the bus” after the accusations of discrimination. And he doesn’t think it’s fair to characterize their decisions around books as a “book ban.” He said the books the current board removed from libraries “were highly graphic and sexual in nature. Absolutely disgusting … There’s no place for that in our schools.”

Republican candidate Steve Mass told the Delaware Valley Journal, “The only winners in Tuesday’s elections are the private schools, who will have their enrollment skyrocket in the next few years when parents see what policies are coming into our district.”

Republicans had one big donor, Democrats received more individual donations

Across the country, school board campaign funding seems to be on the rise. In 2018, a survey by the National School Boards Association reported 75% of elected officials spent less than $1,000 on their campaigns.

But this election cycle, Central Bucks candidates raised about $600,000 combined, as of Thursday, according to campaign finance records.

Local venture capitalist Paul Martino bankrolled the Republican campaigns and donated a majority of their funding — $239,000 of the $279,000-plus total. Martino – whose wife, Aarati Martino, ran for the board as a Republican this year – spent a total of $500,000 on school board races across Pennsylvania in 2021.

He also contributed $40,000 to the Stop Bucks Extremism PAC. During the campaign, the PAC mailed literature to district homes with excerpts from the often-targeted books Gender Queer and This Book Is Gay. The mailer included the message: “Extreme Central Bucks Democrats are fighting to keep these books in our middle school and high school libraries. Request an early vote ballot to protect our children!”

In total, the Democrats raised over $315,000. The Democrats’ PAC, Neighbors United, raised over $174,000. Its largest donations came from Turn Bucks Blue, a local PAC that supports Democrats throughout the county, and the Pennsylvania State Education Association. Much of the Democrats’ funding came from smaller individual donations, between $50 and $250. Each candidate also had their own PAC.

“We knew what [Martino] spent the last time, so we had to be prepared to respond to that,” said Karen Smith, a Democrat who won her race as an incumbent.

Martino declined NPR’s requests for comment.

Two Independent parents were tired of the chaos

District parent Elizabeth Derham identifies as an independent and has been disappointed with board leadership over the last two years. Derham’s husband, Jeff, is also an independent and would sometimes split his ticket. But this year was the first time he voted blue down the line, along with Elizabeth.

“No one I talk to is for any of this stuff or cares much about some of the things that they’re putting so much effort into,” Elizabeth said of the board’s conservative members.

The Derhams said their votes felt like a small-scale attempt to save their local democracy — and their public school district.

“We just want the government to function… we’re just tired of it,” Elizabeth said. “I just want people to listen to us.”

Now that the election is over, she hopes Central Bucks school board meetings become boring again.

These people are not extremists. They are normies who had the wingnut MAGAs reach right into their homes and try to indoctrinate their children. They did not like it. So they got out there and changed it.

Dan Pfeiffer talks about the public’s view of Trump’s mental acuity in his newsletter today:

The fact that Donald Trump is leading Joe Biden in news reports from The New York Times and other sources is puzzling for many of us. How could a chaotic criminal who spews conspiracy theories be on the cusp of returning to the White House? There’s not just one simple answer to how we ended up in this situation; it’s a combination of Biden’s low approval rating, divisions in the democratic coalition, dissatisfaction with the economy, a historic level of cynicism and institutional distrust, and radicalization of the Republican Party. The polarization and demographic makeup of the Electoral College mean that upcoming elections will continue to be closely contested. However, one specific finding in The New York Times/Siena College poll explains Trump’s strength and offers a particular strategy for defeating him again in 2024.

There is no sugarcoating it: Joe Biden’s age is a significant political obstacle. Many people across the country think he’s too old for the presidency, and even among Democrats, a lot of folks tell pollsters they’d rather have a younger candidate. In one sense, Biden’s age is an insoluble problem. There is no way to make him younger; he will get older as the campaign continues. Certainly, there will be high-leverage  moments such as the State of the Union, the Democratic Convention, and the debates where the President can showcase the stamina and vigor required for the job.

There has been a lot of internal debate among the Democratic Party about how to approach the age issue. Handle it with humor, lean into it by emphasizing that wisdom comes with experience, highlight the younger members of Biden’s team, or ignore it entirely. There are merits to all of those approaches. But I think the best way to defuse concerns about Biden’s age is to focus on Trump’s temperament.

Trump’s Temperament Is No Longer the Issue

One particular quote from a participant in The New York Times poll has lingered in my thoughts:

Ms. Fermin, who immigrated from the Dominican Republic as a teenager, worried that Mr. Biden’s immigration policies have put additional economic strain on the country. She voted for Mr. Biden in 2020 over concerns about Mr. Trump’s temperament, but this time around her concerns are largely focused on Mr. Biden. “Biden is too old and doesn’t have the capacity mentally,” she said. “We need somebody stronger. I think Trump can deliver this time.”

Trump’s temperament—his erratic behavior—was always his biggest weakness. I remember seeing focus group reactions in 2019 and 2020 where many voters’ biggest concerns about Trump were his tweets. I know that sounds ridiculous. I thought so at the time. But Trump spending all of his time airing petty grievances on social media was a metaphor for what concerned voters about his temperament. He was focused on the wrong things at the wrong time,and his behavior was both alarming for swing voters and embarrassing for his supporters.

But The New York Times poll makes it clear that Trump’s temperament is no longer a driving issue for voters. In 2020, Biden had a 19-point advantage on temperament. In 2023, it’s only four points.

People have forgotten because they haven’t seen him! My God, just his behavior in the courthouse steps is crazy enough but nobody’s seeing it because the media has decided to protect he public’s gently eyes and ears from his antics because well, it’s unseemly. YES IT’S UNSEEMLY! He’s a monster. But unless people can see it with their own eyes they won’t believe it.

Temperament? How about this?

How many people saw that? Only those who love Trump. Nobody even half way normal could look at that and think “well, at least he’s strong…” No he’ s fucking nuts.

Pfeiffer points out in his piece that He was banned by most social media as well but that isn’t the only problem:

In 2023, Trump resurfaced with his legal issues and presidential campaign. He has been reinstated on all major social media platforms. However, there are indications that most Americans might not be fully aware of what Trump is communicating. One reason is that many people don’t follow the news at this early campaign stage. According to Pew Research, the number of Americans who say they follow the news closely has dropped 14 percent since right before the 2018 elections.

People have tuned out because it’s just so awful. It’s also the reason they assume the country is in hell even though they think their own personal circumstances are good as is their state’s. They aren’t getting the full picture anymore.

Secondly, in previous times, individuals who were not actively seeking political news would still come across it inadvertently. Open up Facebook to check in on your nieces or pop on X (formerly Twitter) to see how people are reacting to an NBA trade, and you would almost always see some political news posts. That is no longer the case. Both platforms have tweaked their algorithms to show people less news—specifically, less political news. According to an Axios report based on data from Similarweb, referrals to news sites from Facebook and X  have plummeted since Trump left office.

How helpful.

Finally, as I detailed in this post, the news media is not adequately covering the most outrageous statements made by Trump. While political enthusiasts like us may be inundated with Trump’s unconventional remarks, it’s likely that most Americans haven’t been exposed to more than a minute of Trump’s speeches, rallies, town halls, or interviews since before January 6th.

They have self-righteously declared that “there is a cost” to them personally if they show Trump to their audience. I have never understood what that means. Unless you truly believe that everyone in this country is either a delicate flower who will run from the room if faced with reality or they are so craven and stupid that mere exposure to that cretin will convert them to his cult, it seems to me that decent people need to see what he says and what he plans to do over and over and over again.

His lies are activating the craven and stupid and only the truth will motivate the decent people to vote.

Pfeiffer says the Democrats must focus on Trump’s mental fitness and I couldn’t agree more:

While Trump has made some gains in how people view his temperament and mental fitness, the biggest shift has been growing concerns about Biden. These shifts are undoubtedly related to the dramatic increase in concern about the President’s age. In this case, it seems that the only way around is through. The President will have to use the campaign to assuage those concerns. More performances like this great economic speech in Belvedere, Illinois, will go a long way.

The focus has been on Biden for more than two years now. There has been an extensive, messy conversation about his age and fitness for office. Unfortunately, these conversations have drowned out discussion of the President’s voluminous record of achievement. It’s time for Democrats to try to shift some of that focus back to Trump. We need to remind Americans why they hated Trump in the first place. Certain voters who backed Trump in 2016 but shifted to supporting Biden in 2020 due to apprehensions about Trump’s behavior are now contemplating a return to supporting Trump. Millions of people became politically active after 2016 because they perceived Trump as a distinct threat, but some have now returned to the sidelines as their concerns have diminished. 

I understand why Democrats started their advertising campaign with positive spots about Biden and his record. Some of that should continue. All of the polling shows that voters like Biden more when they learn about what he has done. There is an information vacuum to fill. However, it’s time to start putting Trump’s erratic behavior and deranged rants back into people’s social media feeds. This can be done with campaign ads and organic content created by progressive allies and shared by all of us.

There is no need to gild the lily with ads filled with ominous music and fear-inducing voiceovers. Just show people Trump is in his own words. The Biden-Harris campaign social media accounts have begun doing exactly that, and we can help them by sharing their content within our networks.

The shared clips shouldn’t be the ones where Trump does his tinpot dictator act. They should be the moments where he acts like a clown. The best way to defeat a wannabe strongman is to make him look like a joke. Increasing concerns about Trump’s mental acuity rise will help Biden defuse the age issue with voters.

If you are reading this newsletter, you don’t need anyone to remind you that Donald Trump is an unhinged lunatic who should not come within 1,000 miles of the nuclear codes. But most Americans have barely thought about Trump in years. Haven’t seen him speak or post on social media. They haven’t heard of Truth Social. In this new media environment, the press and the social media platforms won’t do that work for us. If we want the campaign to be about Donald Trump, we must make it so. There’s no reason to wait any longer.

As you know, I share both the tin-pot dictator and the clownish clips liberally and I’ve been doing it ever since he came on the scene. People need to know what he’s saying. Hiding your head in the sand and pretending that he doesn’t exist hasn’t worked out so well.

I encourage you to send those clips to people you know or post them on your social media feeds. It’s important to remind people who he is because it’s obvious many of them have been subject to the propaganda that his first term was actually a rousing success and others have forgotten who he really is.

He’s gotten worse people and his thirst for revenge and attachment to the fascist members of his MAGA movement is stronger than ever.

He’s always been very proud of his “good German blood”

After being confronted with the party’s leading candidate for president ranting in public about “Communists, Marxists, Fascist and Radical Left Thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country” on Meet the Press, there was a time when a Chair of the Republican National Committee would be compelled to say something other than “I am not going to comment on candidates and their campaign messaging.” We are long past that time:

There was also a time when a person who would say such a thing would not be the front runner for the presidential nomination. Oh sure, there were always Republicans who said things like that. It’s right out of the McCarthy era to denounce the phantom commies who were allegedly destroying the country. But they weren’t presidential candidates with massive followings. They were cranks like Sen. Joe McCarthy who, with his close adviser Roy Cohn, who also advised Donald Trump in later year, ruined a lot of lives with his outlandish accusations but was eventually repudiated by his own party.

I hope everyone realizes that Trump’s definition of “Communists, Marxists, Fascists and Radical Left thugs” isn’t really about ideology, about which he has zero knowledge. They are old cold war epithets which he first heard as a kid and have come back into fashion on the far right. He’s applying them to his political enemies who are Democrats and certain Republicans who he believes have betrayed him. The rest of his post on Veterans Day, which Kristen Welker failed to recite went like this:

The threat from outside forces is far less sinister, dangerous, and grave, than the threat from within, Despite the hatred and anger of the Radical Left Lunatics who want to destroy our Country, we will MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!

I’m so old I remember when Hillary Clinton said at a speech that you could put half of Trump supporters into a “basket of deplorables” and the media had a full fledged meltdown with the Trump campaign getting the vapors and issuing a breathless denunciation:

Just when Hillary Clinton said she was going to start running a positive campaign, she ripped off her mask and revealed her true contempt for everyday Americans.

It was rich then and its even richer now. Today, Trump is on the stump threatening daily to exact revenge on his political enemies, which includes Democrats, the press, election officials, the Department of Justice and anyone else he believes has crossed him. It is the main theme of his campaign. But calling these enemies vermin takes it to a whole new level and one which has even more resonance than usual with the current discussion of antisemitism. He’s now blatantly using he language of Nazi Germany to degrade and dehumanize Jews in the 1930s.

If I had to guess, I would say that Trump didn’t come up with that word himself. He’s more of a “rats” guy than a “vermin” guy when it comes to rhetoric. And the fact that he repeated the exact phrase from the teleprompter at a rally later in the day on Saturday indicates that it was a speech writer’s work not his own, although it certainly reflects his feelings on the matter. I suspect it was either written or inspired by his right hand fascist, Stephen Miller, featured heavily in yet another chilling article in the NY Times about the Trump agenda for his second term.

We know he plans to purge the executive branch of civil service employees and turn the entire branch into a patronage grift for cronies and sycophants to do his bidding and nothing else. And we’ve learned that he will gut the Department of Justice and plant right wing lawyers along the lines of John Eastman, the architect of the coup attempt after the 2020 election. They will implement the Insurrection Act on the first day of the term to have in place the mechanism to deter and quell any demonstrations like the Women’s March that took place in 2017, dwarfing the inauguration crowds (which Trump has never gotten over.)

None of that is secret and it’s obviously just the tip of the iceberg. The latest Times expose relates to their plans to completely shut down all immigration and begin a draconian deportation program:

Former President Donald J. Trump is planning an extreme expansion of his first-term crackdown on immigration if he returns to power in 2025 — including preparing to round up undocumented people already in the United States on a vast scale and detain them in sprawling camps while they wait to be expelled.

It goes without saying that he plans to ban immigrants and asylum seekers entry to the country, But he’s got plans to deport millions of people based upon Eisenhower’s “Operation Wetback” which he relentlessly flogged during his 2016 campaign as well. And, yes, there will be “camps” to hold people for whatever purposes the choose, without due process. He will pay for all this with military funds if the congress refuses to allocate taxpayer money for it.

They plan to revoke visas for any foreigners they might disapprove of for any reason, they will end birthright citizenship “by proclaiming that policy to be the new position of the government and by ordering agencies to cease issuing citizenship-affirming documents like Social Security cards and passports to them. ” He has promised to deny entry to all Communists and Marxists and asked his rally goers what should be done with “all the ones that are here.” They chanted “deport them, deport them.” Whether that only applies to foreign born commies is left up to the imagination. Much of this will depend upon the Supreme Court but it’s obvious that Trump will have no problem defying their orders. Who will stop him?

Trump’s rhetoric in this regard is also right out of the Nazi playbook:

“Nobody has ever seen anything like we’re witnessing right now. It is a very sad thing for our country. It’s poisoning the blood of our country. It’s so bad, and people are coming in with disease. People are coming in with every possible thing that you could have.”

The man in charge of drawing up these plans is Stephen Miller who the Times interviewed for their story. He said:

Mass deportation will be a labor-market disruption celebrated by American workers, who will now be offered higher wages with better benefits to fill these jobs. Americans will also celebrate the fact that our nation’s laws are now being applied equally, and that one select group is no longer magically exempt.

I don’t think I need to explain the economic consequences of that.

It’s clear that Trump and his henchmen are planning a Nazi-style administration and they aren’t trying to hide it. His campaign told the Times to speak to Miller who generously shared his agenda with the paper. They want people to know what they are plotting. This time no one should assume that it’s just hyperbole. As Miller told the Times, ‘bottom line President Trump will do whatever it takes.” Don’t doubt it.

Salon

Elections are about choices

It’s said that Republicans don’t build anything. Except detention camps. They’re hell at detention camps.

Joe Biden is running for president of the United States again to invest in this country. Infrastructure week was not a joke on his watch (Mike Lux):

Joe Biden and the Democratic trifecta got more than 80% of Americans immunized from COVID despite the worst public health disinformation campaign ever. They revived our economy from the depths of the COVID recession faster than any other major country, got Americans much needed money to keep them going in the hardest times, and saved state and local governments from having to make massive cuts in police, fire, and desperately needed public services. They delivered the first gun safety bill in over 30 years. They delivered the biggest infrastructure bill since the interstate highway system was built in the 1950s. They revitalized American manufacturing with Buy in America policies, the CHIPs Act, and the Inflation Reduction Act. They passed legislation to force Big Pharma to negotiate on drug prices and bring the cost of insulin down right away. They made the biggest investment any country has ever made in clean energy.

The four trillion dollars in investments in the American economy and American people will transform the economy for generations to come.

Biden has not announced plans for a second term, but the Associated Press considers what Biden has planned:

But his ambitions are no secret, and his goals for child care, community college and prescription drugs have been laid out in detail during the Democrat’s his first term. He also has unfulfilled promises on civil rights, such as protecting access to the ballot box, preventing police misconduct and restoring the nationwide right to abortion. Banning firearms known as assault rifles remains a priority as well.

The result is a second-term agenda that could look a lot like Biden’s first-term agenda, with some of the same political challenges. Almost none of this can get done without cooperation from Congress, and many of these goals already have been blocked or pared down because of opposition on Capitol Hill.

Biden has achieved bipartisan victories on infrastructure projects and public funding for the domestic computer chip industry. But Democrats would need to win wide majorities in both the House and the Senate to clear a path for the rest of his plans.

“We’re going to finish as much of the job as we can in the next year,” said Bruce Reed, Biden’s deputy chief of staff. “And finish the rest after that.”

Biden’s campaign expressed confidence that the president’s agenda would stack up well against Republicans in next year’s election. Kevin Munoz, a spokesman, described the election as “a choice between fighting for the middle class or shilling for rich special interests” and he said ”it’s a contrast we are more than happy to make.”

Progress or purges, America? What’s a greater source of American pride?

All they lacks are railcars

The headline on Masha Gessen’s New Yorker conversation with psychoanalyst, psychiatrist and author Robert Jay Lifton promises to reveal how one maintains hope in an age of catastrophe. It is a fascinating conversation with a man who has studied human depravity, literal fallout from it, and what differentiates “the helpless victim and the survivor as agent of change.” As for how one maintains hope today, the headline is a tease.

“Lifton is fascinated by the range and plasticity of the human mind, its ability to contort to the demands of totalitarian control, to find justification for the unimaginable—the Holocaust, war crimes, the atomic bomb—and yet recover, and reconjure hope,” Gessen writes.

Amidst the bickering over the war in Gaza, less tease and more how-to would have been nice. Given the obvious trajectory of the Trump cult, what’s needed is a way both to avoid being a victim and needing to be change agents after the fact of a period of “psychic numbing” and “malignant normality” that leads to unspeakable evil by banal men and women.

Areeba Shah warns at Salon that networks seem desensitized to Donald Trump’s eliminationist rhetoric. After covering years of it, the malignant normality of it is no longer shocking even if it is news:

“If we don’t call out the rhetoric as extreme, we risk making it normal and acceptable,” Libby Hemphill, a professor at the University of Michigan’s School of Information and the Institute for Social Research, told Salon.

Too late.

Trump’s recent comments about vowing to implement rigorous ideological screening of immigrants to the U.S., particularly suggesting he would turn away anyone who doesn’t like “our religion,” received little coverage. Broadcast news “totally ignored the comments,” Media Matters pointed out. Meanwhile, cable news devoted just under seven minutes of coverage and CNN and MSNBC each devoted about three minutes, with Fox News devoting less than one minute.

Even so, the Washington Post last week alerted readers to Trump’s (and his enablers’) plans to turn a second term into a festival of revenge and retribution that could make Stalin smile. For all its sins, the New York Times has not totally forsaken raising the alarm about mass deportations and more detention camps. The strategist behind Trump’s second-term war on immigrants is a man who’d look at home in a gray uniform: Stephen Miller.

Mr. Trump’s campaign referred questions for this article to Stephen Miller, an architect of Mr. Trump’s first-term immigration policies who remains close to him and is expected to serve in a senior role in a second administration.

All of the steps Trump advisers are preparing, Mr. Miller contended in a wide-ranging interview, rely on existing statutes; while the Trump team would likely seek a revamp of immigration laws, the plan was crafted to need no new substantive legislation. And while acknowledging that lawsuits would arise to challenge nearly every one of them, he portrayed the Trump team’s daunting array of tactics as a “blitz” designed to overwhelm immigrant-rights lawyers.

“Any activists who doubt President Trump’s resolve in the slightest are making a drastic error: Trump will unleash the vast arsenal of federal powers to implement the most spectacular migration crackdown,” Mr. Miller said, adding, “The immigration legal activists won’t know what’s happening.”

Blitz, indeed. Spectacular crackdown. Like no one’s ever seen. And Trump’s spirit infuses the effort. But, oh, we’ve seen it before.

His stoking of fear and anger toward immigrants — pushing for a border wall and calling Mexicans rapists — fueled his 2016 takeover of the Republican Party. As president, he privately mused about developing a militarized border like Israel’s, asked whether migrants crossing the border could be shot in the legs and wanted a proposed border wall topped with flesh-piercing spikes and painted black to burn migrants’ skin.

As he has campaigned for the party’s third straight presidential nomination, his anti-immigrant tone has only grown harsher. In a recent interview with a right-wing website, Mr. Trump claimed without evidence that foreign leaders were deliberately emptying their “insane asylums” to send the patients across America’s southern border as migrants. He said migrants were “poisoning the blood of our country.” And at a rally on Wednesday in Florida, he compared them to the fictional serial killer and cannibal Hannibal Lecter, saying, “That’s what’s coming into our country right now.”

Trump and Miller would ship immigrants they round up in railcars without a second thought about the optics. And perhaps to gleefully drive home the point that they mean business.

I was really looking forward to how to maintain hope in an age of catastrophe.

Lucky for me, I’m not a psychiatrist. I can declare this man, his henchmen, and his NAR true believers fucking lunatics and it’s no violation of professional standards.