Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

Will it work?

An interesting thought experiment from Brian Beutler in his newsletter today:

President Biden has been buffeted by attacks on his Middle East policy for the past two weeks, but enjoyed a brief reprieve on Thursday in the form of welcome criticism from Ari Fleischer, an immense cynic and warmonger who gained infamy as chief spokesman for the U.S. invasion of Iraq. 

“When [President Biden] said that Israelis should not be consumed by rage? Who the hell does he think he is?” Fleischer cried bitterly on Fox News. “I sat in on every summit meeting with foreign leaders when they came to the U.S. after 9/11 and met with President [George W.] Bush—not one said to Bush the Americans shouldn’t be consumed with rage. Instead they just came to support us.”

It’s worth stipulating a few things before we consider why Fleischer’s input was valuable (though he surely did not intend it to be): 

-First, Biden’s plea to the Israeli people wasn’t to let go of their rage, but to not let rage shape their response to the Hamas pogrom of October 7. 

-Second, by attacking Biden in this way, Fleischer adopted an implicit position either that Israel should let rage be its guide, or that ministering to a grieving people not to lash out vengefully and ineffectively is wrong in principle. In other words, his view is self-discrediting no matter its intended meaning. 

-Third, the idea here isn’t just to devise Middle East policy through negative domestic polarization. “If Ari Fleischer is owned we must be doing things right,” is a logically and morally infirm way to think about policy, and in any case, right-wing goons like Fleischer will attack U.S. Middle East policy, whatever it is, when the president is a Democrat. 

But we don’t need to assume Biden’s on the right track just because Fleischer played mad at him. Fleischer helped us (or at least he helped me) see past a barrage of good- and bad-faith Biden criticism with an unwitting thought experiment: What if one or more of those heads-of-state had tried to make American citizens and our leaders respond to the 9/11 terrorist attacks shrewdly instead of ruthlessly?

A pincer movement of left-wing critics and right-wing hawks and opportunists has encircled Biden at a precarious moment, but I think, given real political constraints (not polling data but, e.g., Israeli politics, and the U.S. Congress, and its veto powers) he has so far done quite well. 

Still he and and all of his critics and everyone else would benefit from thinking through what we’d say today in hindsight if some respected U.S. ally had appealed to us the way Biden appealed to Israelis and Benjamin Netanyahu—supportive publicly, but with caveats, hinting at a more aggressive diplomatic effort behind the scenes to nudge us off the path to flailing wars of retribution. 

The unsatisfying answer, as with most alternate history, is that it depends. If it had worked, events would’ve played out much differently, and the person who beat back the neoconservatives would be a hero, underappreciated only because our catastrophic response to 9/11 would never have happened. 

If it had not worked, on the other hand, I think people looking back would still appreciate their prescience. (We can see now in our public reassessments of Iraq and Afghanistan war skeptics that the leaders of the post-9/11 period who didn’t fall in line behind Bush have fared the best historically.) But their legacy would turn just at least in part whether they changed their relationship with the United States when it became clear Bush had decided on a course of indiscriminate violence. Did they pay lip service to justice, or did they seek it in earnest?

That hypothetical should (among so many other things) be on Biden’s mind today.

The critique at the heart of Biden’s diplomatic efforts is that invading Gaza without a next-stage plan for withdrawal, and for its humane future, would resemble the mistakes the U.S. made after September 11.

But I think a similar insight applies to Israel supporters in American politics, particularly in the Democratic Party, which will drive U.S. policy in the coming weeks and months, and whose supporters don’t carry a desire for unconstrained violence in their bloodstream. Much has already been made (more than is strictly wise) of the fact that surveys find public opinion in the U.S. on the side of support for Israel. As much support as Biden has provided or more. I think a more nuanced reading of the data is that the public wants the U.S. to support an Israeli counteroffensive but can be easily nudged into revealing that their views will likely change if the current approach leads to quagmire and mass death in Gaza. 

This hints at the ultimate danger of poll-driven politics—that leaders will chase volatile public opinion into the moral abyss. It was nothing if not public opinion that spooked early aughts Democrats into supporting the invasion of Iraq, when with a little imagination they (like Barack Obama and Barbara Lee) could’ve seen disaster coming and staked out war opposition early, when doing so was hard. 

What will Biden and his political allies do if and when Israel invades Gaza without an achievable objective and it becomes an endless disaster? What happens when the polling turns? If they don’t know how to answer the question, it’s an argument for following their consciences now. (Of course, for many Democrats, that would change nothing. They’re following their consciences already.)

But it’s something I hope Biden has pondered deeply. 

The best journalism I’ve read on this basic conundrum—a very difficult subject to report out, to be sure—suggests both that Israel is on the precipice of disaster 1, and that a better, more defensible alternative is available. What does he do if Israel doesn’t embrace it?

What is his plan if Netanyahu, who brought what’s left of Israel’s democracy to its knees to keep himself out of prison, rolls the dice with wrecking the whole global order to keep his prime ministership? Will he change U.S. policy in any way? Is America obligated to blindly support a foreign government, even one with Israel’s unique and tragic history, if its people choose as their leader a person who is as corrupt as Donald Trump and bloodthirsty as Dick Cheney? I would not want to gamble my presidency, my party, my country’s standing in the world on the impulse and selfishness of a person like him.

1 –Prior to this month I had not read a Thomas Friedman column in many years; his work was honestly laughing stock in my peer group, in part because of his views on globalization and the Iraq war (remember “suck on this”?), and because of his tendency to write in cliche and mixed metaphor. But circumstance has made his realm of genuine reportorial expertise more salient, and that’s reflected in his recent output.

I don’t have the answer to that either and basically I’m just hoping that the Israeli people decide to get rid of Netanyahu and try to turn the page. The polling suggests that they see him for the self-absorbed failure he is right now. 80% want him to take responsibility for what happened and he is refusing to do so.

Asked who they would vote for had elections been held today, the poll again gave abysmal grades to the current coalition — 43 seats compared to their current 64 — with Gantz’s party alone soaring to 40 seats from its current 12..

They may be rallying around the flag but they are not rallying around Netanyahu and his party.

I’m not sure that it was rage that drove the American response after 9/11. The neocons who used the rage and pain of Americans to fulfill their long-held ambitions to institute a “Pax Americana” could have been marginalized if the president had been a stronger, smarter man with a mind of his own. Instead, not unlike Trump, he clung to shallow tropes like “I got capital and I’m gonna use it” to initiate a war that lasted 20 years and from which we are still feeling the ramifications. He didn’t have the tools to fight them off and he loved dressing up in soldier costumes and calling himself a “wartime president.” (He did make it a policy not to grotesquely degrade Muslims and Islam, which is more than anyone can say for Donald Trump.)

In Israel, Netanyahu is driving this himself for his own political survival and I get the sense that the Israeli people see through this. Maybe that means they will have cooler heads than we had. Let’s hope so.

Don’t kid yourself

At least they aren’t blaming the Democrats anymore. (For now anyway.)

Kevin McCarthy, the ousted speaker, was making his way through the Capitol when reporters asked what he thought of the chaos consuming House Republicans, who for nearly three weeks have been trying and failing to replace him.

His answer veered into the existential. “We are,” he said on Friday, “in a very bad place right now.”

That might be an understatement.

In the House, Republicans are casting about for a new leader, mired in an internecine battle marked by screaming, cursing and a fresh flood of candidates. In the Senate, their party is led by Senator Mitch McConnell, who spent weeks arguing that he remained physically and mentally fit enough for the position after freezing midsentence in two public appearances. And on the 2024 campaign trail, the dominant front-runner, Donald J. Trump, faces 91 felony charges across four cases, creating a drumbeat of legal news that often overwhelms any of his party’s political messages.

As national Democrats largely stand behind President Biden and his agenda — more united than in years — Republicans are divided, directionless and effectively leaderless.

For years, Mr. Trump has domineered Republican politics, with a reach that could end careers, create new political stars and upend the party’s long-held ideology on issues like trade, China and federal spending. He remains the party’s nominal leader, capturing a majority of G.O.P. voters in national polling and holding a double-digit lead in early voting states.

And yet his commanding position has turned Republicans into a party of one, demanding absolute loyalty to Mr. Trump and his personal feuds and pet causes, such as his false claims that the 2020 election was stolen. The result is an endless loop of chaos that even some Republicans say once again threatens to define the party’s brand heading into an election in which Republicans — after struggling to meet the basic responsibilities of governing the House of Representatives — will ask voters to also put them in charge of the Senate and the White House.

“This looks like a group of 11th graders trying to pick the junior class president, and it will hurt our party long term,” said former Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey, who is challenging Mr. Trump for the party nomination. “It’s going to be very hard to make the case that the American people should turn over control of the government to Republicans when you can’t even elect a speaker.”

In recent months, the former president has focused more on his own legal peril than on his party. Flouting pressure from the Republican National Committee, Mr. Trump has largely opted out of some of the party’s biggest moments. He skipped the first two Republican primary debates for his own events and plans to skip the third, forgoing a chance to present his party’s message to an audience of millions.

And he has largely taken a hands-off approach to the fight over the House speakership. Nine months ago, he helped install Mr. McCarthy as speaker. But he did not come to Mr. McCarthy’s rescue this fall when Representative Matt Gaetz led the charge to oust him. He then endorsed Representative Jim Jordan, who has failed to win enough support.

Political parties out of power typically lack a strong leader. In 2016, Mr. Trump’s election plunged Democrats into years of ideological battles between a restive liberal wing and a more moderate establishment. But what’s less typical — and perhaps more politically damaging, some Republicans said — is the drawn-out, televised turmoil putting the internal dysfunction on public display.

“It’s kind of a captainless pirate ship right now — a Black Pearl with no Jack Sparrow,” said Ralph Reed, a prominent social conservative leader, who argued that the issues would eventually be resolved. “But on the bright side, we will have a speaker at some point.”

“These Republicans are complete idiots,” Ann Coulter, the conservative commentator, said on a radio program last week.

Mr. McConnell all but threw up his hands in interviews on the Sunday talk shows. “It’s a problem,” he said on “Face the Nation” on CBS. “We’re going to do our job and hope the House can get functional here sometime soon.”

And The Wall Street Journal editorial board, long a bastion of establishment Republican thought, wrote more than a week into the drama: “As the current mess in choosing another House Speaker shows, never underestimate the ability of Republicans to commit electoral suicide.”

Most frustrating to some Republicans is the fact that the messy battle is largely symbolic. Democrats control the Senate and the White House, meaning that whoever becomes speaker has little chance of making their agenda into law.

Still, there could be real-world political implications. As Republicans battled one another, Mr. Biden focused on an actual war. He spent much of last week building support for Israel, with a wartime visit and an Oval Office prime-time appeal for $105 billion in aid to help Israel and Ukraine — funds that face an uncertain future in a House frozen by infighting.

It’s a split screen Democrats are more than happy to highlight.

“The president of the United States, a Democrat, gave the strongest pro-Israel speech, at least since Harry Truman, maybe in American history,” said Representative Jake Auchincloss, a moderate Democrat from Massachusetts. “The division is on the Republican side of the aisle, where they are so fractured they can’t even elect a leader of their conference.”

Mike DuHaime, a veteran Republican strategist who is advising Mr. Christie, said the inability to pick a speaker was a “new low” for Republican governance. “If you don’t have the presidency there is no clear leader of the party,” he said. “That’s natural. What’s unnatural here is that we can’t run our own caucus.”

But others say that Mr. Trump, along with social media and conservative media, has turned the very incentive structure of the party upside down. With a broad swath of the conservative base firmly behind the former president, there may be little political cost in causing chaos. The eight Republicans who voted to oust Mr. McCarthy, for example, are likely to face no backlash for plunging the party into disarray. As their message is amplified across conservative media, they’re more likely to see their political stars rise, with a boost in fund-raising and attention.

“What’s happening is you have people who don’t want to be led, but also want to engineer a situation where they can be betrayed and use that to rail against leadership,” said Liam Donovan, a Republican strategist and former National Republican Senatorial Committee aide.

Trump is their leader. It’s just that a few of them don’t like it and have to be coerced into supporting him. And if they can get away with flouting his orders, they do it. His endorsements have often gone unheeded. But if he really puts his clout behind stopping someone it’s likely he will succeed.

Trump is whipping against Tom Emmer because he didn’t vote to overturn the election on January 6th. That’s a bridge no GOP speaker is allowed to cross, apparently. So, I would guess the Republicans will capitulate to that. They have plenty of others to choose from who have not offended Dear Leader in this way.

And then this. Sigh:

Nicole McCleskey, a Republican pollster, said the messy dust-up in the House would be forgotten by next November’s elections, washed away as just another moment of broken government amid near-record lows for voters’ trust in Congress.

“People are used to Washington dysfunction, and this is just another episode,” she said. “It’s Republicans and Democrats, and they’re all dysfunctional. For voters, it’s just further evidence that Washington can’t address their problems.”

As long as the media keeps both-sidesing this that’s probably true.

For the first two years of Biden’s presidency, the government functioned as it’s supposed to. The filibuster required some egregious sausage-making but at the end of the day they got legislation passed, the government stayed open and a lot of business was done on a bipartisan basis in spite of this clown show that calls itself the GOP. But once the voters handed power to the Republicans, even in one house of congress, all hell broke loose.

They are not “all dysfunctional.” The Republicans are dysfunctional. But I’d imagine that a lot of people don’t see it that way because the press insists on implying that both sides are equally screwed up. They need to remember that making people hate government is the Republican agenda. This is how they get people to believe in a strongman, even an impecilic pretender like Trump.

Look for him to start blowing everything up

They’re serious this time:

Donald Trump wanted to pull the United States out of NATO during his first term, but was repeatedly talked out of it by senior administration officials. For a possible second term in the White House, the 2024 Republican presidential frontrunner is already discussing how he could actually get it done, if his demands aren’t met by NATO. He and his policy-wonk allies are also gaming out how he could dramatically wind down American involvement to merely a “standby” position in NATO, in Trump’s own words.

When the former president has privately discussed the United States’ role in the transatlantic military alliance this year, Trump has made clear that he doesn’t want the upper ranks of a second administration to be staffed by “NATO lovers,” according to two sources who’ve heard him make such comments. The ex-president has made these kinds of jabs at the longstanding alliance during conversations related to the ongoing Russian war in Ukraine. 

Trump, the sources say, has continued to express an openness to pulling the U.S. out of NATO altogether. However, Trump has suggested that this could be averted if the alliance — which Trump once famously called “obsolete” — gives in to his newest demands. This would include his desires for non-American members to further and steeply increase their defense spending, and for a reevaluation of the bedrock principle that an attack on one member is tantamount to an attack on all. 

When he was in office, Trump would repeatedly scoff at this collective-defense clause of the North Atlantic Treaty, known as Article 5. One former senior administration official recalls to Rolling Stone a moment in the Oval Office in mid-2018 when the then-president started reading from a written list of smaller NATO countries, some of which he argued most Americans had never even heard of before. 

Trump then vented that “starting World War III” over some of these countries’ sovereignty made absolutely no sense, and that he shouldn’t be forced to automatically commit American troops to any such crisis. 

Any threats or action on Trump’s part in recasting the U.S.’s role in NATO would all, of course, be contingent on Trump winning reelection next year. When he was leader of the free world for four years, he dangled anti-NATO sentiments on multiple occasions, only to yield to intra-administration pushback.

“It would be a tremendously stupid endeavor, especially at a time when war in Europe rages, and much of Europe is looking to the United States to deter further conflict,” Dr. Aaron Stein, a Black Sea Fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, says, reacting to Trump’s NATO-skeptic policy goals. “Trading away allies based on ignorance, and Trump is ignorant about this issue, is just silly for broader U.S. national security.”

But this time around, an array of nationalist allies and pro-Trump policy wonks have been eager to offer the ex-president frameworks for how to MAGA-fy the U.S. approach to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. One possibility that has piqued Trump’s interest in recent months is what the former president has privately branded, “NATO on standby,” according to sources familiar with his private musings. One source close to Trump describes the idea as having the potential to “blast a hole straight through NATO.”

Trump’s idea reflects some of the arguments laid out in a policy brief, published in February by researcher and conservative writer Dr. Sumantra Maitra, titled: “Pivoting the US Away from Europe to a Dormant NATO.” The paper was posted by the Center for Renewing America, a think tank stacked with Trump administration veterans and MAGA Republicans that is laying groundwork to be a premier policy driver if Trump retakes the presidency. “The NATO bureaucracy is a barrier in the path of reduced American commitment,” the brief reads. “It is self-sustaining and prone to push missions that are beyond NATO’s core role and, at times, opposed to the domestic interests of the United States. Radically reducing the NATO bureaucracy should be a chief aim.”

Sources familiar with the matter say that this paper indeed circulated within Trump’s immediate circle earlier this year. “There were some ideas in it that the [former] president liked,” says a former Trump administration official who remains in close contact with the 2024 campaign. 

During his time in office, Trump repeatedly misunderstood the meaning and purpose of NATO’s collective spending agreements, which required each member to spend at least two percent of their gross domestic product on defense. By contrast, the former president mistakenly spoke of the alliance as a kind of protection racket, in which members’ spending obligations were paid to the U.S. as dues rather than a general requirement for countries to spend set amounts on defense as they saw fit.

In a memoir of his stint as Trump’s national security adviser, John Bolton wrote that he “could never tell” if Trump genuinely understood NATO’s defense spending requirements. Bolton recounted a number of attempts in which Trump, frustrated by an impression that NATO members were stiffing the U.S. on an imagined tab, alternately threatened to leave or reduce America’s commitment to the Atlantic alliance, only to have the threats walked back by staff. (These days, the ex-president has reserved especially harsh words for “NATO lovers” in general and Bolton in particular.) 

“In a second Trump term, we’d almost certainly withdraw from NATO,” Bolton predicted to The Hill in August.

The issue has taken on new urgency as Trump has ratched up his antagonism both towards European allies and the Ukrainian government in the wake of Russia’s invasion of the country in February 2022. 

“The good old USA ‘suckers’ are paying a VAST majority of the NATO bill, & outside money, going to Ukraine. VERY UNFAIR!” Trump bellowed on his Truth Social platform in January. 

During an August town hall interview with Fox News, Trump bragged that he had told NATO members “I will not protect you from Russia,” if they were “delinquent” in defense spending. 

The former president’s continued irritation at NATO allies and his growing agitation against U.S. military aid to Ukraine, which has sought to join the alliance, has ratched up fears that Trump would make good on his threats to leave the alliance if he wins the 2024 U.S. presidential election.

That prospect prompted the Senate to pass an amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act over the summer. The legislation, introduced by Senators Time Kaine and Marco Rubio, would prohibit any future president from withdrawing from NATO without the approval of two thirds of the Senate.

The measure would tie up any attempt at a formal withdrawal in Congress but would not prevent a future Trump administration from undermining confidence in the U.S. security guarantees implicit in the alliance. Under NATO’s Article 5 collective defense agreement, states are obliged to assist member states under attack, but the treaty leaves it to member states to define the scope and type of assistance they would offer once invoked. 

Even his expression of intent would upend all of our alliances and throw everything into chaos.

Trump has no idea what he’s doing — he’s posting memes about his omnipotence and whining about his legal problems all day. He’s too dumb to understand anything complicated and his only agenda is revenge against his enemies so blowing up agreements and institutions is all he can do. Getting rid of NATO is one of them because he has a grudge against Europe for some reason. But there are other people on the far right who are ready to do it for other more substantive reasons and they aren’t good.

“Well right now, [the House] can’t govern, and I think that the eight people who betrayed the conference and joined the Democrats to defeat the 96 percent of the conference unleashed furies that I don’t think they’d even dreamed of, because it gave every person the right to be equally destructive and equally angry.

Hahahaha. No, Newt, those furies were unleashed decades ago by you. Recall Newt’s first big power play against his own party:

On the evening of Oct. 4, 1990, Newt Gingrich and his then-wife, Marianne, were enjoying a VIP reception at a Republican fundraiser when they were suddenly hustled over to have their picture taken with President George H.W. Bush.

“I thought it was a bad idea,” Gingrich said in a series of interviews in 1992 that have not been previously published.

Days earlier, Gingrich had dramatically walked out of the White House and was leading a very public rebellion against a deficit reduction and tax increase deal that Bush and top congressional leaders of both parties — including, they thought, Gingrich — had signed off on after months of tedious negotiations. The House was to vote on the deal the very next day.

“We went over and I said [to Bush], ‘I’m really sorry that this is happening,’ and he said with as much pain as I’ve heard from a politician, ‘You’re killing us, you are just killing us.’ ”

Gingrich’s actions both before and after his encounter with Bush showed a man willing, if not eager, to weaken the president and, as he put it, “to dismantle the old order.”

Gingrich, then the party whip and No. 2 Republican in the House, and his followers took down the deal the next day, severely undercutting Bush and highlighting the betrayal of his famous “Read my lips: no new taxes” pledge. In some key respects, Gingrich’s revolt set the stage for Bush’s demise and eventual defeat — as well as the Republican takeover of the House in 1994 that catapulted Gingrich to the speakership.

Gingrich’s defiance and high-visibility debut as provocateur in 1990 was a decisive moment for him. It was the first chance he had to exercise real political power, providing an early glimpse of the complexity and the contradictions that he has displayed since.

Recall that Newt succeeded in helping to defeat Bush in 1992 and was rewarded for it by making him Speaker of the House in 1994.

This is your monster, Newt. You paved the way for bomb-throwing narcissists to blow everything up. They learned from the best.

While the House clown show fulminates over Joe Biden’s brother, get a load of what Trump was raking in from just one guy while he was president

The media has been so overwhelmed with news of the war in Israel and the trainwreck happening in slow motion in the House of Representatives that a lot of stories that would have normally received front page treatment have been relegated to the back burner. When the news is emanating from the right wing media, that’s actually a good thing since it’s almost never truly newsworthy and almost always a form of MAGA propaganda. A case in point is a breathless report released last Friday from the Chairman of the House Oversight Committee announcing that they’ve found evidence that President Joe Biden’s brother paid him $200,000 in 2017, which is supposed to prove that Joe Biden was part of some kind of criminal scheme.

Upon examination, one can see that the check was marked as a repayment of a loan Joe Biden made to his brother a couple of months before, not a payoff of some sort. And furthermore, it was during the time that Joe Biden was completely out of office and hadn’t even decided if he was going to run three years later. But they found this check and immediately started running around in circles shrieking “smoking gun! smoking gun!”

Their reasoning is this: the repayment was sent on the day James Biden received a check for the same amount from a healthcare company (which later went bankrupt) that he had allegedly promised to get some investment from the Middle East due to his political connections. If that’s true, then Biden’s brother was influence peddling, just as Hunter Biden did in his various schemes. But there’s nothing illegal in these people trading on their names no matter how slimy the practice. And it’s certainly not confined to Biden’s relatives or Democrats. Recall the activities of former President George H.W. Bush and his son Neil who parlayed their political contacts into big bucks from all over the world. Or Jared Kushner. 

Going back to the beginning of the republic, relatives of powerful politicians in America have made a bundle promising that they have special access and special interests giving them money based upon that promise. It’s a shady business but unless there is some reason to believe that there is some reciprocation by a politician or some other benefit is exchanged it’s usually just a lucrative game of perceptions, not unlike lobbying which, I would argue, is actually much more corrupt since the money is most often given right out in the open to the campaigns of the people they are trying to influence. Half of Washington, in both parties,is involved in that unseemly business. (And, once again, there is no evidence Joe Biden was personally involved in any of his son or brothers’ businesses.)

On Friday, Chairman Comer excitedly tweeted, “A document that we’re releasing today raises new questions about how President Biden personally benefited from his family’s shady influence peddling of his name and their access to him.” The whole right wing mediaverse went crazy with the usual suspects like Lauren Bobert tweeting, “Yesterday, the Oversight Committee unveiled a $200,000 check James Biden wrote to his brother on the same day he received a loan from a failing company. And it was even more than 10% for the Big Guy this time.”

After Democrats pushed back, Comer tweeted a video hedging his accusations just a little bit, saying “even if this was a personal loan repayment, it’s still troubling that Joe Biden’s ability to be paid back by his brother depended on the success of his family’s shady financial dealings.” Think about that. There’s no evidence that Joe Biden knew anything about his brother’s deal. All we know is that he loaned him some money and was paid back. There’s nothing “troubling” about any of that. Not to mention the fact that Joe Biden was a private citizen who didn’t hold any office at the time.

If you want “troubling,” how about the latest revelations about the man James Comer and virtually the entire US Congress is supporting for president, Donald Trump? You’ll recall a couple of weeks ago that it was reported  Trump had shot his mouth off to a foreign businessman about the United States’ nuclear submarine capabilities. Considering his sloppiness with all the classified documents he stole from the White House, this was hardly surprising. As president he’d been known to share classified information with people who had no business getting it, putting allies and sources in danger in the process. He never cared. He never stopped.

This man, an Australian billionaire by the name of Anthony Pratt, had Trump’s number from the moment he became president and while he was unable to donate money to his campaign because he was a foreign national he saw a much more direct way to influence Trump. He put money directly into Trump’s pocket by joining Mar-a-Lago and spending time with Trump whenever he could. Trump liked him very much, especially when he did things like spend a million dollars for New Year’s Eve party tickets that were sold to everyone else for $50,000.

And Trump just loved to dish about national security with this fellow, telling him that he bombed an Iraqi city before it had been reported and sharing that when the president of Iraq called to complain he said, “What are you going to do about it?” He claimed that his dealings with the Ukrainian president in the “perfect phone call” were nothing compared to what he usually did with foreign leaders. One shudders to think what he meant by that.

All of this was reported in a big story in the NY Times on Sunday which was followed up by an Australian 60 Minutes report that has Pratt on tape discussing all of this. He considered Trump a sharp operator who “ran his business like the Mafia.” 

 As the Times reported:

Mr. Pratt was hardly the only favor seeker circling Mar-a-Lago, which became the fulcrum of the president’s two overlapping worlds, and a marketplace of sorts where favors, secrets and opportunities to lobby the president over clubhouse burgers were treated as currency. But Mr. Pratt, who rode in Mr. Trump’s motorcade and attended a White House state dinner, played the game better than most.

According to the Times, Pratt also made out like a bandit saving over $2 billion in taxes due to the 2017 tax cuts and dined out on America’s national security secrets for years. This is just one of dozens of examples of Donald Trump getting paid directlyby people seeking access and influence by spending vast sums of money at his properties and getting exactly what they paid for — while Trump was the president of the United States. He is the most corrupt president in American history, blatantly selling access to rich people, foreign and domestic and these “drain the swamp” Republicans, howling about Joe Biden’s brother paying back a loan, can’t wait to put him back in the White House. 

Salon

America under siege

The last few weeks have been more stressful than the some during the Trump administration, even during the height of the pandemic. It is easy to grow weary and lose faith that after nearly a quarter of a millennium, this country will self-correct once again. That sense is spreading (Associated Press):

For many Americans, the Republican dysfunction that has ground business in the U.S. House to a halt as two wars rage abroad and a budget crisis looms at home is feeding into a longer-term pessimism about the country’s core institutions.

The lack of faith extends beyond Congress, with recent polling conducted both before and after the leadership meltdown finding a mistrust in everything from the courts to organized religion. The GOP internal bickering that for nearly three weeks has left open the speaker’s position — second in line to the presidency — is widely seen as the latest indication of deep problems with the nation’s bedrock institutions.

[…]

About half of adults (53%) say they have “hardly any confidence at all” in the people running Congress, according to a poll from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research that was conducted in October. That’s in line with 49% who said that in March. Just 3% have a great deal of confidence in Congress, virtually unchanged from March.

About 4 in 10 adults (39%) have hardly any confidence in the executive branch of the federal government, compared with 44% in March. Most Republicans (56%) have low levels of confidence in the executive branch — which is overseen by a member of the opposing party, Democrat Joe Biden — compared with just 20% of Democrats.

About a third of adults (36%) say they have hardly any confidence in the conservative-majority Supreme Court, a figure that has remained steady in recent months. The polling reinforces that Democrats are more likely than Republicans to say their confidence in the Supreme Court is low. Black Americans are more likely than Americans overall, as well as more likely than white or Hispanic adults, to have hardly any confidence in the nation’s highest court.

One-third of U.S. adults (33%) continue to have low levels of confidence in the Justice Department, with Republicans having less confidence than Democrats. This comes as former President Donald Trump rails against the department after being charged with mishandling classified documents and attempts to overturn the 2020 election results.

Efforts to undermine our system and to build public support for autocracy are decades old.

Historian Heather Cox Richardson charts them in her recent book. As her publisher sells it:

In Democracy Awakening, Richardson crafts a compelling and original narrative, explaining how, over the decades, a small group of wealthy people have made war on American ideals. By weaponizing language and promoting false history they have led us into authoritarianism — creating a disaffected population and then promising to recreate an imagined past where those people could feel important again. She argues that taking our country back starts by remembering the elements of the nation’s true history that marginalized Americans have always upheld. Their dedication to the principles on which this nation was founded has enabled us to renew and expand our commitment to democracy in the past. Richardson sees this history as a roadmap for the nation’s future.

Since I’m only partway through, I’ll have to take Penguin’s word that. Richardson’s description of the modern downward trend begins, familiarly, in the 1970s with the beginning of the conservative backlash to the Civil Rights movement. But its roots lie in the white backlash to Reconstruction.

The Associated Press reflection on where we are concedes the same post-1970s history. The decline in trust accelerated with the T-party movement that arose in reaction to Barack Obama’s presidency and deeppened with Donald Trump’s rejection of the 2020 election results.

“That validated the idea that the whole institutional system is rigged, which it isn’t,” said David Bateman, an associate professor of government at Cornell University.

Democracy once was rigged only when Republicans lost. By further stoking public distrust even when they win, they hope to build support for replacing it with autocratic rule. People are fickle. Republicans have a better shot at retaining power when the consent of the governed is not a factor.

Yes, that’s discouraging. More than that, argues Bishop William J. Barber II, it is “mean, unjust and evil.” America is under siege.

Anyone who has heard a sermon from Bishop William J. Barber II knows he knows the history as well as Richardson.

LIVE: Wake the Sleeping Giant | Bishop Barber Speaks in Gulfport, Mississippi https://t.co/E5J4CYs6fj

— Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II (@RevDrBarber) October 22, 2023

Barber insists. “Society can’t die here. Democracy can’t die here. Justice cannot die here.” But that requires a plan. It requires we be as steadfast as our relentless, long-scheming opponents. We have power we are not using, the power of the vote. Especially poor and low-wealth Americans. There are 15 states, he insists, in which if only 20 percent of non-voters turned out, they could change the results.

Do not let the stress get to you. Keep on keeping on.

And no rules

A law professor sent Slate’s Dahlia Lithwick a chilling note suggesting, she said, “if Jim Jordan won the speakership, he would simply never certify a Biden election win.”

Erica Newland, formerly with the Office of Legal Counsel in the Department of Justice, did research on the matter for Protect Democracy. She concurs. If the current iteration of the GOP controls the House in January of 2025, there is no way they will certify a Democratic victory.

Ian Bassin, Protect Democracy’s co-founder and executive director, tells Lithwick that on the bright side a handful of Republicans thwarted Rep. Jim Jordan’s (R-Ohio) bid for House speaker:

And I think if that holds, and that’s a big if, this is one of the most important developments in this country over the last seven-plus years. And here’s why. I’m going to invoke another recent story in the news that I think is really important to pay attention to, which is the elections this past week in Poland. So, in Poland this past week, a coalition that ran from the center right to the left, united and pulled off a stunning upset of the illiberal nationalist and ever more authoritarian leaning Law and Justice party, which has governed Poland for the better part of the last decade or so.

Why is that important? Because history teaches that the way to defeat authoritarian movements is to form a very broad pro-democracy coalition of people who typically disagree about policy and politics. This is why I talked about how our strategy at Protect Democracy is build a broad coalition of pro-democracy progressives, moderates, and conservatives.

Bassin says that while for “most of the last six years, the American Republican Party, by and large, has chosen the German and Italian path” toward authoritarianism, he is “cautiously optimistic” that we may survive its attempt to undo the republic.

Meanwhile out here in the provinces, the news is mixed.

Jennifer Rubin celebrates Wisconsin Democrats’ state chair Ben Wikler for year-round organizing that has held the line against an authoritarian Republican majority in the Madison state house. Prepared and positioned, Democrats have fended off multiple GOP efforts to undermine the will of Wisconsin voters. Thus, a lesson for us all:

The Wisconsin lesson: Even in less than ideal conditions, defenders of the rule of law and democracy can organize, instill hope, drive public opinion and defeat authoritarian efforts to protect incumbents.

North Carolina Democrats will need some of that organzing given the latest set of aggressively gerrymandered district maps unveiled last week by Republicans in Raleigh. They have a supermajority and mean to keep it (Carolina Forward):

This is so plain and demonstrable a fact that even Republican leaders have not really bothered denying it since the maps dropped last week. Republicans are gerrymandering North Carolina’s election maps for partisan advantage simply because we can, says the Art Pope-John Locke Foundation. “Political considerations are now allowed to be used as one of the criteria,” said Republican State Senator Warren Daniel, a lead map-drawer. They are, of course, technically correct about this. Yet admitting so openly to rigging North Carolina’s democratic process is quite a departure from the elaborate pantomime staged last year, when Republican leaders pretended to take into account factors like compactness and communities of interest. It speaks volumes that virtually no Republican spokespeople have even bothered defending the fundamental fairness of these maps in public. Everyone concerned, it seems, knows the score.

A reworking of the court-drawn, one-election, 7-7 congressional map used in 2022 was expected.

But not so for the state legislative maps. North Carolina’s State Senate and State House maps were wholly and duly drawn and passed by Republican legislative leaders alone in February of last year. As such, the plainest reading of Article II, Sections 3 and 5 of the North Carolina State Constitution explicitly prohibits altering them now – most especially the House map, which was not even challenged in court. Yet that is precisely what Republican leaders of the legislature have done, with the full acquiescence of the new Republican majority of the state supreme court. This marks a major breach of constitutional order in our state.

If not hard rules, Dr. Peter Venkman at least had guidelines. As we’ve seen inside the Beltway, violating constitutional boundaries is no longer out of bounds for Antide. The law is what they say it is, to be followed when it works in their favor (and provides political cover), and to be ignored when it does not.

Democratic House Whip Katherine Clark (D-Mass.) contrasted Democrats’ positions with Jordan’s in nominating Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries of New York during Jordan’s third failed attempt at winning the speakership:

In her speech, Clark chided Jordan for voting against health care for children, veterans, and 9/11 survivors, opposing lowering the cost of insulin, wanting to cut Social Security and Medicare, and never supporting a farm bill.

Also, Clark said, “The Republican nominee wants a national abortion ban with no exceptions for rape, incest, or the health of the mother. We want to make our own health care decisions in consultation with our families, our doctors, our faith, not with Jim Jordan!”

Antide is bereft of ideas. It has settled on one principle, one rule to follow: power. For its own sake. Not to improve voters’ lives. Not to perfect the union. And certainly not to embrace multiracial democracy (or any other kind). The only thing American about them is their birth certificates.

Update: Corrected the name of Carolina Forward.

We’ll give you crazy

Rudy says Biden is an Iranian spy: “He’s on Iran’s side and he’s on Hamas’s side. He is not on our side. He’s got a bunch of spies in his Admin. This guy is working for Iran. Why? Maybe because they’ve infiltrated his Admin the way the communists infiltrated FDR’s Admin.” pic.twitter.com/pBudDVycaM

— Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) October 22, 2023

This is the man the putative GOP nominee for president hired to represent him.

Meanwhile, in MAGA:

THIS WEEK IN THE REPUBLICAN PARTY

Oct 14 – Oct 21, 2023 pic.twitter.com/9kR7YkCZmL

— Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) October 22, 2023

And they aren’t positive

I never much cared for Mitt Romney over the years but I did admire his willingness to vote to impeach Trump and sign on to bipartisan legislation from time to time. That’s a pretty low bar but in GOP politics these days it makes him a unicorn. But in his new book he doesn’t hold back about his impressions of his fellow Republicans and I am here for it:

Christie, Chris

Mr. Romney’s advisers in 2012 suggested that he consider Chris Christie, then the governor of New Jersey, as a running mate, according to the book.

But Mr. Romney had reservations about Mr. Christie’s “prima donna tendencies,” and worried that the governor was not “up to the physical demands” of being on the ticket and was plagued by “barely buried” scandals, Mr. Coppins writes.

The two also came into conflict in 2016 after Mr. Christie became one of the first establishment Republicans to back Mr. Trump.

“I believe your endorsement of him severely diminishes you morally,” Mr. Romney wrote in an email. He added: “You must withdraw that support to preserve your integrity and character.”

Evaluating Mr. Christie’s 2024 campaign, Mr. Romney labels him “another bridge-and-tunnel loudmouth” like Mr. Trump, saying it would be “a hoot” to watch the two of them spar on the debate stage.

Cruz, Ted

Mr. Romney called Senator Ted Cruz of Texas “scary” and “a demagogue” in his journal, and in an email assessing political candidates in 2016, he said Mr. Cruz was “frightening.”

He was also bluntly critical of Mr. Cruz’s role in Mr. Trump’s efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election, including his perpetuating Mr. Trump’s baseless claims of voter fraud.

Mr. Romney said that he believed Mr. Cruz and Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri, another objector, were too smart to believe what they were saying.

“They were making a calculation that put politics above the interests of liberal democracy and the Constitution,” Mr. Romney said.

DeSantis, Ron

Of all of the would-be challengers to Mr. Trump, Mr. Romney seemed to have the most to say about Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, who was viewed early on as having the best shot at challenging Mr. Trump for the nomination.

Mr. Romney’s views on the governor were decidedly mixed, according to the book.

“Mr. Romney wanted to like the governor,” Mr. Coppins writes. The senator said that it was a “no-brainer” to support Mr. DeSantis if it meant keeping Mr. Trump out of the White House.

Yet Mr. Romney appeared to have reservations. He worried that Mr. DeSantis shared “odious qualities” with Mr. Trump, pointing to his penchant for stoking the culture wars and his fight with the Walt Disney Company.

And Mr. Romney appeared to have objections to the Florida governor on a more personal level.

“There’s just no warmth at all,” Mr. Romney said. He added that when Mr. DeSantis posed for photos with Iowa voters, “he looks like he’s got a toothache.”

Even his appraisal of Mr. DeSantis’s positive qualities came with a backhanded sting.

“He’s much smarter than Trump,” Mr. Romney said. But, he added, “there’s a peril to having someone who’s smart and pulling in a direction that’s dangerous.”

Gingrich, Newt

While Mr. Romney was running unsuccessfully for Senate in Massachusetts in 1994, Mr. Gingrich, a hard-line conservative who would become House speaker, was rising to prominence.

Mr. Romney recalls thinking, according to the book, that Mr. Gingrich “came across as a smug know-it-all; smarmy and too pleased with himself and not a great face for our party.”

Two decades later, when the two were competing against each other in the Republican presidential primary, Mr. Romney was no more impressed.

Mr. Coppins writes that Mr. Romney saw Mr. Gingrich as “a ridiculous blowhard who babbled about America building colonies on the moon.” He also had moral objections to Mr. Gingrich’s admitted adultery.

In his journal, Mr. Romney wrote that his wife, Ann, thought that Mr. Gingrich was “a megalomaniac, seriously needing psychiatric attention.”

McConnell, Mitch

As he does with many other Republicans in the book, Mr. Romney hammers Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader, over what he sees as a gap between his public and private statements relating to Mr. Trump.

Mr. Coppins writes that Mr. Romney questioned “which version of McConnell was more authentic: the one who did Trump’s bidding in public, or the one who excoriated him in their private conversations.”

Still, Mr. Romney seems to have respect for Mr. McConnell. In January 2021, he said, he believed Mr. McConnell had been “indulgent of Trump’s deranged behavior over the last four years, but he’s not crazy.”

Pence, Mike

Mr. Romney makes his disdain for the former vice president abundantly clear, calling him “a lap dog to Trump for four years.”

He seems particularly appalled by what he viewed as Mr. Pence’s willingness to compromise his own moral views, or contort them, to be a loyal foot soldier to Mr. Trump.

“No one had been more loyal, more willing to smile when he saw absurdities, more willing to ascribe God’s will to things that were ungodly, than Mike Pence,” Mr. Romney told Mr. Coppins.

Perry, Rick

Mr. Romney described Mr. Perry, the former Texas governor who was a rival for the 2012 Republican nomination, as a “dimwit,” Mr. Coppins writes.

In his journal, Mr. Romney wrote of Mr. Perry that “Republicans must realize that we must have someone who can complete a sentence.”

In 2016, when Mr. Perry ran a short-lived campaign for president, Mr. Romney said that the Texan’s “prima donna, low-IQ personality” was a non-starter.

Santorum, Rick

The former senator from Pennsylvania, who also ran against Mr. Romney in 2012, was “sanctimonious, severe and strange,” in Mr. Romney’s assessment.

At one point during the 2012 campaign, Mr. Romney finds himself irked by his rival’s “apparently bottomless self-interest,” Mr. Coppin writes.

In his journal, Mr. Romney said Mr. Santorum was “driven by ego, not principle.”

Trump, Donald J.

Perhaps the freshest revelation in Mr. Romney’s book is his acknowledgment that many of his colleagues in the Senate, including Mr. McConnell, privately shared his poor view of Mr. Trump.

But that harsh assessment — which would set up Mr. Romney’s conflict with Mr. Trump throughout his presidency — was made most clear in the email Mr. Romney sent to Mr. Christie in 2016.

“He is unquestionably mentally unstable, and he is racist, bigoted, misogynistic, xenophobic, vulgar and prone to violence,” Mr. Romney wrote. “There is simply no rational argument that could lead me to vote for someone with those characteristics.”

You have to admit, this takes some balls considering that he is still in the US Senate for another year. Good on him.

Utah Senator and one-time GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney says he is no longer at home within a party dominated by Trump. He also talks about examining his legacy, as the subject of a new biography, "Romney: A Reckoning." https://t.co/3dRov5edUu pic.twitter.com/np30GCcnyW

— CBS Sunday Morning 🌞 (@CBSSunday) October 22, 2023

A very thought-provoking piece from Zack Beauchamp at Vox about the next steps for the Israel war. It’s complicated and well worth reading in its entirety, going into all the global, military and political implications, but this is a taste of the kind of thinking that’s gone into it and I think it’s impressive:

The moral case for counterterrorism

Bradley Strawser, a former US Air Force captain, has an unusual job: he is a moral philosopher working for the US Navy. His title is professor of philosophy in the defense analysis department at the Naval Postgraduate School; his actual job description is teaching America’s special operators how to fight wars as ethically as possible.

When I asked Strawser how he would approach the current conflict between Israel and Hamas, he said that it was essential to hold two ideas in one’s head at the same time.

First, that Israel had not only a right but a moral obligation to respond to Hamas’ vicious attack on its civilian population.

This may not seem obvious, as a ceasefire would certainly lead to some immediate reduction in civilian suffering. Indeed, a temporary ceasefire to provide humanitarian relief before further Israeli escalation might well be a good idea.

But an indefinite ceasefire is politically impossible in Israel — no major faction could countenance it — for reasons that speak to the very purpose of having a state. Governments owe their citizens a duty of protection, to keep them safe from external threats. If Hamas is not militarily degraded and deterred by the end of this operation, the Israeli state will have failed in this basic task.

“Even with all the history, and even with their culpability and failures and how they’ve [wronged Palestinians] for decades, this is self-defense against horrific aggression. You have to respond,” Strawser says.

Second, that no matter how barbarous Hamas’ conduct, Israel cannot itself ignore the laws and moral codes governing warfare in response. While civilian casualties are a terrible inevitability in warfare, there are clear moral rules that any state must follow — even when facing a brutal enemy who disregards all of them like Hamas. Unfettered, a modern military like the IDF could cause carnage on an even more horrific scale than it already does.

“If you’re going to become the monster you fight, what’s the point of fighting the monster?” Strawser asks.

The dilemma he poses — Israel must act, but it must do so within moral limits — is the heart of the moral case for replacing a regime change strategy with counterterrorism. It is a way, perhaps the only way, to satisfy Israel’s legitimate security needs without crossing the line into brutality.

A regime change operation, one that sends IDF tanks into the urban core of places like Gaza City in the north, would inherently threaten civilians in the densest parts of the Strip, far more than the current bombing offensive. Though Israel has warned residents of the northern Gaza Strip to leave, this is exceptionally difficult to accomplish in practice.

They cannot get out entirely: neither Israel nor Egypt will accept mass numbers of Gazans into their borders. Within Gaza, they have trouble getting south: armed Hamas fighters have warned them not to leave, and the roads themselves are difficult and dangerous thanks to Israeli airstrikes. Nor is it obvious they’re willing to flee: given the history of Palestinian dispossession at Israeli hands, they have legitimate reason to worry that they will never be able to return if they leave.

So long as there are large numbers of Palestinians where Israel wants to invade, there is virtually no way for it to fight without massive civilian casualties.

Moreover, it matters morally that Israel has no clear endgame. If the post-invasion situation is almost certainly going to be a bloody insurgency, one that could strengthen Hamas in the long term, Israel would need — morally speaking — to make the case that it has a credible plan for achieving civilian security in the postwar environment. It would be profoundly unjust, and cruel, to either leave Palestinian civilians in anarchy or subject them to an painful occupation and years of bloody counterinsurgency.

Some of the tactics Israel has resorted to in preparation for such an expansive war — most notably the cutoff of electricity, water, and humanitarian supplies — are themselves obviously indefensible.

It is widely accepted that it’s immoral to intentionally starve civilians as part of a tactic to weaken your opponents: this kind of siege has, in recent history, been used only by the world’s most vile regimes (like Bashar al-Assad in Syria). If you think about the war against Hamas as a total existential war, it opens the moral door to a much more expansive set of potential tactics designed to facilitate this much more expansive objective — some of which amount to atrocities.

In moral terms, then, the case for limiting Israel’s ambitions is fairly straightforward: nothing it can hope to accomplish with a regime change operation can outweigh the harm it will do to civilians in the process.

In fact, there’s a very good case that there’s less tension between morality and military necessity in Gaza than it seems. A counterterrorism campaign would likely produce better strategic outcomes than a larger invasion in part because it kills fewer civilians, denying Hamas horrific imagery it could use to recruit more fighters or galvanize external forces like Hezbollah to come to its aid.

“The most important thing [strategically] is to separate Hamas, as a military organization, from the Palestinian population,” says Kurth Cronin, the Carnegie Mellon professor.

What force Israel may use, permissibly, needs to be tightly limited and designed to accomplish feasible ends. Regime change is not one of them — however understandable it may be for Israelis to want Hamas annihilated.

There’s a lot more at the link and I think it’s important. This is not a “black and white, good ‘n evil” issue even though a whole lot of people want to think it is. Whether or not anyone in power on either side is thinking it through this comprehensively is unknown. We’ll just have to see how it unfolds.