Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

Imagine what would happen if Trump testified in a criminal case. pic.twitter.com/nDhZM6O98N

— Bill Grueskin (@BGrueskin) November 6, 2023

Cue the reporting about how Trump, a 77 year old conspiracist who is delusional about basic aspects of reality, is too cognitively impaired to be president. Right? Right? pic.twitter.com/3Gdp2tgOBc

— Brian Klaas (@brianklaas) November 6, 2023

Here’s a minute by minute of the morning session. Jesus H. Christ.  Tens of millions of people want to put this psycho back in the White House:

The judge’s pre-trial ruling on the “worthless” clause.

“Thus, the ‘worthless clause’ does not say what defendants say it says, does not rise to the level of an enforceable disclaimer, and cannot be used to insulate fraud as to facts peculiarly within defendants’ knowledge, even vis-à-vis sophisticated recipients.”

Some additional context on the Trump Tower triplex here by @ChaseWithorn at Forbes, which spent years pressing Trump Org officials about property valuations.

This is in response to Trump Org’s engagement letter with Mazars, which held management responsible for “preventing and detecting fraud.”

Referring to the document, Trump says: “I’d love to read this your honor. Can I do that?”

Engoron: “No, not at this point.”

Trump: “Shock”

These two dots show the NYAG’s office in relation to 40 Wall Street.

(They’re right next to each other.)

Trump’s minions are busily drawing up plans to prosecute enemies and deploy the military into the streets of America

Over the weekend, Democrats celebrated their biennial tradition of hand-wringing and panic about the election a year hence. Every cycle about this time, polls showing that their voters are unhappy with their candidates and wish they had someone better are floated by all the major polling outfits and everyone starts hyperventilating. It seems like only yesterday that the polling showed Democrats being swept away by a “red tsunami” in the midterms and it was inevitable that they would lose both chambers of Congress for the foreseeable future. Oops!

One of the more extreme examples of this came back in 2011 when President Barack Obama was running for re-election. With a 61% disapproval rating on the economy and 73% saying the country was heading in the wrong direction in some polls, there was growing talk of running a primary opponent or replacing Joe Biden as vice president on the ticket. Data maven Nate Silver wrote an epic analysis for the New York Times on November 3, 2011, almost exactly 12 years ago, that was headlined, “Is Obama Toast? Handicapping the 2012 Election.” His conclusion? Probably. At best, Silver concluded, Obama only had a 50-50 chance of winning.

Yes, Americans are upset about the economy and the world feels unstable but I don’t believe that it’s so bad that a majority will put an actual criminal, vengeful, would-be dictator back in the White House.

We all know what happened. Obama went on to win 332 electoral votes to Romney’s 206, and 51.1% to 47.2% in the popular vote. In today’s politics that’s what a landslide looks like.

The point of rehashing this ancient history is just to remind everyone that polling is not invincible by a long shot. A lot can happen in the next year. More importantly, when it comes down to voting, people have to actually make a choice. And next year they are going to choose between a man they consider to be too old to be president and a man (just three years younger) who is also under 91 felony indictments for attempting to impede the peaceful transfer of power and stealing classified documents. He has also been held liable for sexual assault and massive business fraud in New York Civil courts just in the past year. He could easily be a convicted felon by the time voters go to the polls next year.

This is, of course, on top of the terrible performance he gave during his four years as president, a performance which was rewarded with a decisive loss by seven million votes, 51.3% to 46.8%. As it was the most litigated presidential election in history because Donald Trump is the greatest sore loser the world has ever known, the only people who doubt the result are members of the cult who believe whatever their Dear Leader tells them.

But perhaps Americans are in a forgiving mood and figure it’s best to let bygones be bygones and welcome Trump back to the White House because he can’t possibly be any worse than the president who has brought the country out of the mess created by the pandemic with one of the strongest jobs booms in half a century, passed massive bipartisan legislation under the most difficult circumstances and is handling foreign policy challenges few have had to confront since the cold war. (And yes, he is old. He just doesn’t trowel on piles of bronze make-up and dye his hair neon yellow to hide it as Trump does. )

So if voters think it can’t get worse, they need to think again.

As I wrote last week, there are dozens of MAGA Republicans working on the agenda for the next term getting ready to implement what amounts to an authoritarian takeover of the U.S. government. They aren’t trying to hide it. In fact, they are explicitly running on it as a platform. I mentioned the reinstatement of Schedule F, Agenda 47, Project 2025 and their plans to install MAGA legal advisers throughout the administration to ensure that there are no Federalist Society RINOs like former Attorney General Bill Barr or White House counsel Don McGahn, who didn’t robotically snap to and fulfill all of the president’s wishes without question.

But that’s really window dressing. Sure they want to “deconstruct the administrative state,” as former adviser and podcaster Steve Bannon has been pushing for years. A patronage system makes it so much easier to profit on the backs of the taxpayers and deliver goodies to their wealthy benefactors. But it’s important to remember that Donald Trump doesn’t understand or care about any of that. It’s all about him. And right now he has only one real agenda: revenge.

As Democrats throughout the land spent the weekend in agonized tribulation over the polls that say some Biden voters want to vote for Trump, the Washington Post published a big story about what Trump and his henchmen have planned for their next term should this come about:

Donald Trump and his allies have begun mapping out specific plans for using the federal government to punish critics and opponents should he win a second term, with the former president naming individuals he wants to investigate or prosecute and his associates drafting plans to potentially invoke the Insurrection Act on his first day in office to allow him to deploy the military against civil demonstrations.

Needless to say, he wants to prosecute Joe Biden and his family and has explicitly framed it as payback. (Last month in New Hampshire, he said, “This is third-world-country stuff, ‘arrest your opponent. And that means I can do that, too.” ) But it’s not just Democrats he plans to go after. Repblicans like former White House chief of staff Gen. John Kelly, his former attorney Ty Cobb (who appears frequently on CNN) and former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley, as well as members of the FBI and Justice Department, are all on the list.

This is part of “Project 2025,” which the Post reporters describe as a “partnership of right wing think tanks” rather than just the Heritage Foundation which has previously been reported as leading the planned purge of civil service personnel. According to documents acquired by the Post, they are drafting executive orders to invoke the Insurrection Act to deploy the military for domestic law enforcement. The main purpose of this would be to quell demonstrations and protests. Jeffrey Clark, Trump’s co-defendant in the Fulton Country Georgia felony trial and an unnamed co-conspirator in the Federal Jan. 6 case, is spearheading this initiative.

Anyone who enables Donald Trump to become president again is essentially enabling a military crackdown on peaceful protest. I’m sure the insurrectionists of Jan. 6 (who Trump now calls “hostages”) will be free to assemble wherever they want. But those who disagree with Trump about the economy, abortion, Israel and Ukraine or any other issue about which his positions are magnitudes more odious than Joe Biden’s will have to learn to keep their mouths shut. We won’t be having anything other than MAGA demonstrations in the future.

Unless the country has completely lost its moorings on a level that can only be explained by LSD in the water supply, the fact that people are saying Donald Trump would be a better president is nothing more than a political primal scream. Yes, Americans are upset about the economy and the world feels unstable but I don’t believe that it’s so bad that a majority will put an actual criminal, vengeful, would-be dictator back in the White House. Call me an optimist. We can’t be that far gone.

Salon

He and his teenage son check each other’s porn habits

Not a joke:

SPEAKER OF THE House Mike Johnson admitted that he and his son monitored each other’s porn intake in a resurfaced clip from 2022.

During a conversation on the “War on Technology” at Benton, Louisiana’s Cypress Baptist Church — unearthed by X user Receipt Maven last week — the Louisiana representative talked about how he installed “accountability software” called Covenant Eyes on his devices in order to abstain from internet porn and other unsavory websites.

“It scans all the activity on your phone, or your devices, your laptop, what have you; we do all of it,” Johnson told the panel about the app.

“It sends a report to your accountability partner. My accountability partner right now is Jack, my son. He’s 17. So he and I get a report about all the things that are on our phones, all of our devices, once a week. If anything objectionable comes up, your accountability partner gets an immediate notice. I’m proud to tell ya, my son has got a clean slate.” 

COMPROMISE ALERT: Speaker Mike Johnson uses software Covenant Eyes (learned about at a Promise Keepers retreat) that scans all his electronic devices & gives a weekly report an "accountability partner" his 17 yr old son (so basically don't watch porn or your son/dad will know😬) pic.twitter.com/SSWpB9IIDB

— Receipt Maven (@receiptmaven) October 31, 2023

Outside of the creepy Big Brother-ness of it all, Receipt Maven also aired concerns about whether Covenant Eyes — which is still a working subscription-based service — might “compromise” Johnson’s devices, if he’s still actively seeking accountability. 

“A US Congressman is allowing a 3rd Party tech company to scan ALL of his electronic devices daily and then uploading reports to his son about what he’s watching or not watching….,” Receipt Maven wrote. “I mean, who else is accessing that data?”

Since he was elected Speaker of the House in October, Johnson’s history as a faith-obsessed, election-denying, far-right Christian nationalist has come under the microscope, from his time with the anti-LBGTQ organization Alliance Defending Freedom to his claim that school shootings could be blamed on abortion and teaching evolution.

He’s not a fan of contraception either. He was unable to say whether he would continue to vote against birth control as he has in the past:

Wow. Mike Johnson on Fox News Sunday doesn’t rule out voting against access to contraception but then says “I really don’t remember any of those measures” when asked about his past votes against reproductive health care pic.twitter.com/4pDl3BGGD3

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) November 5, 2023

Let’s just say, I won’t be surprised if we find out that this fellow has some very weird habits.

Speaking of which:

@PeterVroom1

Nov 4 

Although no one has asked, I’d like to explain why I’m so personally concerned about background and repeated mistruth’s coming from our Speaker, Mike Johnson. I was Congressman J. Dennis (Denny) Hastert’s Chief of Staff from 1986-1991 — before he became Speaker. Like Mike Johnson, Hastert had religious roots as a graduate of Wheaton College and Wheaton honored him after he became Speaker by naming a program and building The J. Dennis Hastert Center for Economics, Government, and Public Policy. 2/10 

Also like Mike Johnson, Denny had been in leadership as Deputy Whip when he was nominated as a “safe choice,” ironically because other Speaker nominees had some uncomfortable “skeletons in their closets.” Further like Mike Johnson, Hastert was very affable and well-liked personally and considered to be a “safe choice.”

When the news broke in 2015 about Hastert’s involvement in pay-offs to a young student that he had sexually abused during his earlier career as a high school teacher and coach, I was floored and couldn’t believe the accusations were true.

Over the years, my wife and I had become close to Denny and his family and I was proud of the time I had served with Denny in Congress and our own children had fondness for the entire family. Before the full nature of the charges against Denny became known (those involving child abuse), he asked if I would provide a letter of support to the judge hearing his case. I gave no commitment but upon learning weeks later the full details, determined that I could not possibly speak to his character – a character that I previously thought I knew so well.

After the news broke about Hastert, the leadership at Wheaton College closed ranks around Denny. Initially by ignoring the charges until protests by Wheaton student groups, particularly LGBTQ students, demanded that they denounce Hastert and rename the Hastert Center. Wheaton College eventually did, and issued a public apology for the delay.

The information now coming out about Mike Johnson certainly raises serious concerns but I make no formal accusations. What I do know is the best thing Johnson can do for the country is to immediately present himself to the media – the entire media, not pre-arranged reputation rehabilitation efforts with right wing media only, and answer for the numerous inconsistencies in his telling of his family history and background. Until that happens, I will continue to do my part by unearthing the facts.

The leadership of the Republican Party includes some very odd characters. I don’t know that Mike Johnson has any skeletons in chis closet like Hastert and Jim Jordan. But his story about his finances if very hinky and his scrubbing of his social media is suspicious. As I said, he’s a weirdo.

If only there were cameras

The head of the Trump Organization takes the stand this morning in its Manhattan civil fraud trial. You can say a lot that will roll of this odd duck’s back, but questioning Trump’s net worth cuts to the core of his pathologically insecure self-image. He’s prone to lash out at those who do.

We know that here from experience. The 2019 post that drew a threat letter from one of Trump’s lawyers commented on MSNBC reporting that Trump’s real estate empire was in such shaky financial shape that he had hostile foreign powers backstopping his loans. Hullabaloo got caught in the backlash.

Former Trump personal attorney, Michael Cohen, thinks Trump will respond just as poorly to having his financial condition questioned to his face on the witness stand. He won’t be able to keep his cool, Cohen told CNN anchor Phil Mattingly (Raw Story):

“At the beginning, he’s going to try. He’s going to try very hard to stay within the lane, because he already knows that he’s — he and the judge don’t clearly see eye-to-eye, so he’ll try to stay in the lane, but as the prosecutors continue to drill down on him with information and with allegations that he overinflated his net worth by billions, that’s going to irritate him. Because his net worth, his statement of financial condition, it’s really a combination of his id, his ego, his superego, all mashed into one narcissistic sociopath.”

Cohen said he has testified that Trump “would make that mob-style statement, I’m not worth 4.5, I’m worth 5 or 7 or 8,” and expect his employees to generate a financial statement that reflected the number he’d pulled from his ass. Those financial statements, already determined by the New York court to be fraudulent, are why “John Barron” is in court today as the judge decides what the Trump Organization’s financial penalties will be. It’s no longer a matter of what he claimed but how much he’ll pay in fines.

This is a reality show I’d pay to watch.

and the royalist style in American politics

The reason people chose an authoritarian for president in 2016 was not economic anxiety, although that was there. And it was not racism, although that was there too.

Robert P. Jones, founder and president of the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) spoke with Chauncey DeVega about the apocalypticism behind White Christian nationalism and the desire to restore “traditional American values.” With violence, if need be. Jones discusses his findings in “The Hidden Roots of White Supremacy and the Path to a Shared American Future.” 

Results of a recent American Values Survey reveal, says Jones (Salon):

Three-quarters of Americans believe that the future of democracy is at stake in the 2024 presidential election. It’s one of the few things that Republicans and Democrats agree on, 84% of Democrats and 77% of Republicans. Now, of course, they mean very different things in terms of their concerns about “democracy.” There is also great pessimism about the country. More Americans than not say that America’s best days are now behind us, which is overwhelmingly coming from Republicans. There is widespread economic anxiety. But the deeper disagreement, coupled with deep divides about the country’s identity. Who are we? Who is the country for? Who counts as a “real American”? These deeper disagreements, rather than policy differences, are driving our partisan divisions.

The new survey’s findings about the rise in support for political violence are particularly troubling. We found that the numbers of Americans who say that “Things have gotten so far off track that true American patriots may have to resort to violence in order to save the country” has gone up over the last few years, from 15% to 23%. Those feelings are disproportionately on the right. One in three Republicans believe that as compared to only 13% of Democrats. We also found troubling links between white Christian nationalism and political violence. Among those who believe that America was intended by God to be a promised land for European Christians, nearly four in ten believe they may have to resort to violence to save the country. 

Who’s really entitled here?

Although evangelicals, people inclined to believe the world is 6,000 years old and Jesus dictated the Declaration of Independence, may not in fact believe Donald John Trump is God’s man, that’s irrelevant. They are, by and large, all in on Trump because they believe things are so bad that Dallas megachurch pastor Robert Jeffries told a 2015 interviewer he wanted the meanest “son of a you know what” for president: Donald Trump.

Yes, says Jones, when “Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council, or Mike Johnson, when they use the word ‘Christian’, it is racially coded” narrowly to mean white evangelical Protestant Christians. But there’s more.

There is a real belief in Apocalypticism among conservative white Christians, specifically, and white conservatives and the right, more broadly. That is very much tied to changing demographics: we are no longer a majority white Christian country, and we were just 20 years ago. That has set off a visceral reaction, and a kind of panic among conservative White Christians in particular. As I document in The Hidden Roots of White Supremacy, most white evangelicals sincerely believe that God designated America to be a promised land for white European Christians. That is not a joke to them. If a person sincerely believes such a thing and the country is changing and is not in agreement with that vision, it opens the door to political extremism and violence to secure that outcome. Many conservative White Christians truly believe that they have a divine mandate and entitlement to the country.

The historical record clearly shows that white evangelicals have long had an instrumental, rather than principled, relationship to democracy. As long as there were super majorities of White Christian people in the country, they could pay lip service to the principles of democracy knowing that they had sheer numbers that would guarantee an outcome in their favor. But when democratic processes were unlikely to uphold white Christian power, they historically supported all manner of anti-democratic practices, including white racial terrorism, slavery, segregation, severe voter suppression, and gerrymandering. With the continuing decline of white Christians as a demographic group, these attempts by White conservatives and their allies to undermine democracy are just more obvious and unrestrained, as seen on Jan. 6 for example. 

Which is a longwinded way of saying they are hypocrites and phony American patriots. As I’ve argued at length, they are at heart royalists, not patriots. Evangelicals are raised from childhood to bow to a king, Jesus, and to yearn for his return to Earth. Attempting to install an interim surrogate follows from the programming now that their cultural and religious supremacy is threatened.

Consider the decades of political fights leading up to the Civil War as southern states jockeyed for control of the U.S. Senate and the presidency. Loss of control there meant a threat to the South’s slave economy. A mortal threat, in southern planters’ eyes. Mortal enough that when they lost the White House to Abraham Lincoln, they went to guns. On Jan. 6, 2021, Trump’s minions rioted and sacked the U.S. Capitol. Guns are not off the table next time they lose.

House Speaker Mike Johnson embodies evangelicals’ ahistorical view, Jones argues:

What they’re actually committed to is a particular outcome where America’s laws and government and society correspond to God’s laws as they see it. That’s the only legitimate outcome for Johnson and other white Christian nationalists. Everything else is illegitimate. They will use the language of democracy and voting if it achieves their ends and goals, but Johnson and the other white Christian nationalists and many other conservatives at present are not committed to those principles and values if they come out on the losing side of a democratic election.

Jones argues that we are focusing too much on evangelicals, the loudest and proudest of Trump’s followers. But the royalist strain is broader:

It’s also worth remembering that it wasn’t just white evangelicals who strongly supported Trump in the last two elections. Trump was supported by mainline white Protestants, the non-evangelicals. They voted six in 10 for Trump in both elections. White Catholics did too by the same percentage. While these white Christian nationalist tendencies are more pronounced among white evangelicals, this is more broadly a white Christian problem.

Well, just as this isn’t your father’s Republican Party, that isn’t the Catholic tradition I learned from Jesuits either, but a tradition dating from feudalism and before. If I may crib from Jesus and Richard Hofstadter, the royalist style in American politics always ye have with you.

What would a second Trump term mean for the climate?

Ok, kids, pay attention. This is for real.

Back in the home stretch of the 2020 presidential election, I stated that a second Trump term would be “game over for the climate.” That hasn’t changed in the years since. In fact, it’s become even more true.

We are three years further down the carbon emissions highway, and the devastating consequences of the 1C (1.8F) warming we have already caused are now apparent in the form of unprecedented dangerous, damaging and deadly extreme weather events. As yet, we have not taken the exit ramp needed to avoid a far worse planetary warming of 1.5C (3F).

Yes, real progress has been made during the Biden era, with “staggering” green energy growth nearly on track to reach the needed reductions in carbon emissions in the power generation sector. But power generation is only a slice of the carbon emissions pie, responsible for about one-fifth of total carbon emissions. The rest comes from transportation, industry, agriculture and buildings. And collectively, we are not meeting the targets, including a 50 percent reduction in worldwide carbon emissions by 2030 and zero emissions by 2050, required to limit warming to 1.5C/3F.

There is, once again, some good news. The COP26 international climate summit of 2021 in Glasgow yielded enough progress to limit warming below 2C (3.6F) if all pledges are met and met on time. 

The bad news? That’s still too much warming. And the continued expansion of fossil fuel infrastructure by the nations of the world is incompatible with the 1.5C (3F) goal. 

Promises are nice. But they must be kept. And they have not been as yet.

What is needed for further progress? For one, developing countries must also agree to ramp down emissions — a last-minute holdout by India was an obstacle to a more aggressive agreement at COP26. But diplomacy and leadership by the U.S. is required to make that happen.

Consider what happened during the Obama era. Stymied by Republicans in Congress, President Obama nonetheless used his executive authority to promote incentives for renewable energy and tighter emissions restrictions on polluters, bringing China to the table and achieving a bilateral agreement that set the stage for the successful Paris summit. China ended up exceeding its commitments and began decommissioning coal-fired power plants.

But that all came to an abrupt halt with Trump. When he was elected, he turned over the reins of our government to fossil fuel interests and promised — and eventually made good on — a unilateral pullout from the Paris climate agreement. That signaled to other countries, like China and India, that the U.S. was no longer willing to keep up its end of the bargain, and in turn, they slacked off in their own efforts. 

It is clear that the U.S. must lead — and that when we do, other nations join us.

What does leadership mean here? As the world’s largest cumulative carbon polluter, an average effort won’t cut it. We have an obligation to achieve something closer to 60 percent reductions in emissions by 2030. The climate provisions of the Inflation Reduction Act, if fully implemented — and not blocked by GOP-stacked courts — get us only partly there (around 40 percent). We will need further climate legislation — and a president and Congress willing to pass it.

Leadership also means helping out other nations that have had a far lesser role in creating the climate crisis and are already suffering the consequences. While the 2022 COP27 summit in Sharm El-Sheikh was disappointing from the standpoint of decarbonization, it did pave the way for progress at COP28 next month in Dubai by establishing a historic loss and damage fund.

Critical to getting countries like India to do more is getting industrial nations, like the U.S., to provide funding and assistance to poorer nations to help them both deal with the devastating consequences they are already experiencing and to encourage them to leapfrog past fossil fuels to clean energy as they seek economic development. That’s what the “loss and damage” agreement does, and it could lead to a greater willingness by India and other developing countries to ramp up their own commitments to decarbonization.

All of this progress is in jeopardy, however, if Trump wins the presidency again, particularly if Republicans hold or, worse, expand their control of Congress. Congressional Republicans have already indicated their intent to eliminate loss and damage funds. And this speaks to an even larger problem. While we have seen renewed leadership on climate by the Biden administration, other nations are wary of what a second Trump presidency could portend, particularly on climate where they fear he will refuse to honor our commitments to the rest of the world and derail four years of progress on climate.

The GOP has threatened to weaponize a potential second Trump term against domestic climate action. In the event they also keep the House of Representatives and retake the U.S. Senate, they will fast-track the most climate-averse policy agenda in the history of our nation to be signed into law by Trump.

Republicans have already written a climate plan for a prospective second Trump term with the innocuous title “Project 2025.” This radical plan would block efforts underway to scale up renewable energy and create a clean energy grid. It would defund climate programs at the Environmental Protection Agency and clean energy efforts at the Department of Energy. It would also bar other states from adopting California’s clean energy policies and put the fossil fuel industry fox in the environmental henhouse by turning over regulation of polluters to Republican state legislatures.  

So, we are truly at a “fragile moment.” Global climate action lies on a knife edge, hinging upon American leadership that is threatened by a prospective Trump second term and a radicalized GOP intent on undermining climate progress both here and abroad. 

It is not an overstatement to say, one year out, that we face an American election unlike any other. It will determine not only the course of the American experiment but the path that civilization collectively follows. On the left is democracy and environmental stewardship. On the right is fascism and planetary devastation. Choose wisely.

Michael E. Mann is presidential distinguished professor and director of the Center for Science, Sustainability and the Media at The University of Pennsylvania. He is author of the new book “Our Fragile Moment: How Lessons from Earth’s Past Can Help Us Survive the Climate Crisis.

I know everyone is in a bad mood and they want to punish the people who have failed to make everything wonderful in the last three years. But this isn’t really about feelings, it’s about survival.

Donald Trump thinks we should rake the fucking forests.

I’m not going to be around much longer so I don’t have as much of a personal stake in what’s going to happen if this country doesn’t sober up and fast. But I really hope for all the kids sake that they take this seriously.

.@GovChristie after being booed at Florida GOP summit: "Your anger against the truth is reprehensible … The problem is you fear the truth. The problem is you want to shout down any voice that says anything different than what you want to hear." pic.twitter.com/70y3y90ZLE

— CSPAN (@cspan) November 5, 2023

Politico:

A combative Chris Christie was loudly booed as soon as he took the stage and throughout his remarks at the Florida Freedom Summit in Kissimmee, as Trump maintains his dominance in the state amid a string of fresh endorsements. Before the former New Jersey governor had his time at the podium, Asa Hutchinson, the former governor of Arkansas, faced similar jeering when he evoked Trump’s legal troubles.

Even Vivek Ramaswamy was heckled — the crowd chanting “Trump” — when he said the GOP needs a younger, non-traditional nominee.

The response is nothing new for the 2024 contenders when it comes to throwing jabs at Trump. It speaks to how challenging the landscape remains for candidates vying for the 2024 GOP nomination as Trump maintains a strong hold on the Republican Party.

Christie fed off the animated crowd, fueling more boos as he challenged audience members’ reactions to his remarks.

“The problem is, you want to shout down any voice that says anything different than what you want to hear. You can continue to do it, and believe me — believe me, it doesn’t bother me one bit,” Christie said before pivoting to Israel.

He also talked about the country’s more than $33 trillion debt, noting that $13 trillion has been added in the last 6.5 years. Christie said the country needs a leader that will stand against more spending, while chatter in the audience began again.

With each disruption, the New Jersey Republican fired back until he left the stage at the conclusion of his remarks.

“You can yell and boo about it as much as you like, but it doesn’t change the truth. And the truth is coming. The truth is coming, and all of you need to understand: America needs better than what we’ve had. And it never makes America a better place, whether it’s on a college campus in an Ivy League or whether it’s in an auditorium in Orlando, for us to be booing and shouting down opinions we don’t agree with,” Christie said.

Hutchinson didn’t face immediate blowback from the crowd, but once he broached Trump’s legal challenges, the audience erupted into intense booing for over a minute. He pointed to his experience as a federal prosecutor, and even as the crowd roared, Hutchinson attempted to speak over them until he finished his point.

“I can say that there is a significant likelihood that Donald Trump will be found guilty by a jury on a felony offense next year. That may or may not happen before you vote in March. And it might not make any difference to you,” he said. “But it will make a difference for our chances to attract independent voters in November. It will make a difference for those down-ticket races for Congress and Senate. And it will weaken the GOP for decades to come.”

They don’t need no stinkin’ independent voters! They believe everyone but three hippies in San Francisco love Donald Trump more than life itself.

It’s a cult. But sure, let’s put their Dear Leader in charge because Biden is old. Great idea.

I can’t say this holds any answers but it is reassuring that someone is willing to discuss the intensely frustrating complexities of what’s going on in Israel:

Barack Obama offered a complex analysis of the conflict between Israel and Gaza, telling thousands of former aides that they were all “complicit to some degree” in the current bloodshed.

“I look at this, and I think back, ‘What could I have done during my presidency to move this forward, as hard as I tried?’” he said in an interview conducted by his former staffers for their podcast, Pod Save America. “But there’s a part of me that’s still saying, ‘Well, was there something else I could have done?’”

Mr. Obama entered the White House convinced he could be the president who would resolve the decades-old conflict between Israelis and Palestinians. He left office after years of friction and mistrust with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, who was frustrated by the president’s masterminding of the Iran nuclear deal and by his demands that Israel suspend new settlements.

In his comments on Friday, delivered at a gathering of his former staff in Chicago, Mr. Obama acknowledged the strong emotions the war had raised, saying that “this is century-old stuff that’s coming to the fore.” He blamed social media for amplifying the divisions and reducing a thorny international dispute to what he viewed as sloganeering.

Yet he urged his former aides to “take in the whole truth,” seemingly attempting to strike a balance between the killings on both sides.

“What Hamas did was horrific, and there’s no justification for it,” Mr. Obama said. “And what is also true is that the occupation and what’s happening to Palestinians is unbearable.”

He continued: “And what is also true is that there is a history of the Jewish people that may be dismissed unless your grandparents or your great-grandparents, or your uncle or your aunt tell you stories about the madness of antisemitism. And what is true is that there are people right now who are dying, who have nothing to do with what Hamas did.”

Still, Mr. Obama appeared to acknowledge the limits of his musings about bridging divides and embracing complexity.

“Even what I just said, which sounds very persuasive, still doesn’t answer the fact of, all right, how do we prevent kids from being killed today?” he said. “But the problem is that if you are dug in on that, well, the other side is dug in remembering the videos that Hamas took or what they did on the 7th, and they’re dug in, too, which means we will not stop those kids from dying.”

I don’t have the answers. Neither does he. Neither does anyone who can see the fear, the threats, the injustice of everything that’s gone before and is happening now. It’s just … sigh.

The faux populist tries another one

Don’t buy the hype. He’s a phony from the word go:

Josh Hawley is at it again. Over a brief career in Washington, the elfin senator from Missouri—when he’s not egging on and then fleeing from insurrectionists—has attempted one pseudo-populist or culture-war gimmick after another to propel him to a higher level of celebrity than he currently enjoys. Alas, while his ideas have gained some prominence on the right, Hawley’s own star isn’t ascending at nearly the same rate. But he is nothing if not undaunted, and this week he unveiled a plan to “overturn Citizens United.” I’m putting that in scare quotes for a reason. Hawley’s latest legislative burlesque is wholly fake—and threadbare even by his gutter standards.

There are many—mainly on the left—who’d like to somehow overturn Citizens United v. FEC, the execrable 2010 decision that unleashed a tidal wave of funny money into our politics and demonstrated that the Supreme Court didn’t need to have a 6–3 conservative tilt to cock up the entire country. It would be great if we could pass a law and set things right, but here’s the rub: Congress can’t fix it, sorry! As MSNBC’s Jordan Rubin explained, overturning the decision would require one of two unlikely events: the Supreme Court choosing to reverse itself or the successful enactment of a constitutional amendment. “That’s because the 2010 case was decided on constitutional grounds—under the First Amendment—as opposed to statutory grounds,” writes Rubin.

The fact that Hawley, even with the assent of Congress and the president, literally cannot “overturn” Citizens United makes this matter done and dusted. But it’s still worth prodding his proposal to assess the full measure of his ambitions—which turn out to be appropriately deceptive. You see, for all of Hawley’s bluster, he’s only targeting one sliver of the boodle that the Supreme Court’s allowed to come sluicing through the gates: corporate money. For all this posturing, Hawley would leave unchecked the flood of dark money.

If you’re authentically aggrieved by the Citizens United decision, this is where the profound misrule lies: Political nonprofits—mainly 501(c)(4)s—can accept unlimited donations and don’t have to disclose their donors, even when the nonprofit then sends the money to super PACs, which do have to disclose donors. As Open Secrets has documented, contributions from shell companies and dark money sources have ballooned in the last two election cycles, with more than $612 million flowing into federal political committees in 2022. Rubin reports that “the nonprofit One Nation donated $53.5 million to the GOP-aligned Senate Leadership Fund, the largest political contribution of any organization that election cycle.”

“Safe to say,” Rubin concludes, “leaving nonprofits out of the equation wouldn’t solve the dark money problem.” But this is what Hawley’s proposal pointedly does.

It really doesn’t take a ton of spelunking to get to the bottom of what Hawley’s trying to do with this sudden stance against Citizens United: This is just a new layer of the senator’s song and dance against what he terms “woke” corporations, and of the broader project of conservative nationalism that TNR contributing editor Osita Nwanevu characterized as “Trumpism for intellectuals,” in The New Yorker back in July 2019.

TNR’s Matt Ford saw a similar level of playacting in a previous Hawley proposal to belatedly jump into the right’s war against Disney with a stunt bill purportedly aimed at reducing the value of the entertainment conglomerate’s valuable copyrights. As Ford pointed out, however, not only was that proposal extremely unlikely to pass constitutional muster, it would very likely “lead to taxpayers giving a multibillion-dollar payout to Disney for its property losses” if it was successfully enacted.

It’s extremely unlikely that Hawley doesn’t understand the fatal flaws in the ideas he’s going to such flamboyant lengths to promote. The senator, after all, has degrees from the two schools that are locked in tight competition to be America’s Slytherin—Stanford University and Yale Law. As Rubin notes, Hawley also used to clerk for Chief Justice John Roberts, so surely he understands the difference between constitutional and statutory grounds.

But even if Hawley’s anti–Citizens United measure is a complete joke, he’s probably getting exactly what he wants out of the effort: favorable headlines from credulous media outlets such as Real Clear Politics, which announced “Sen. Josh Hawley To Introduce Bill Reversing Citizens United,” or Above the Law, which took the cake with “Unlikeliest Of Heroes Josh Hawley Takes On Mitch McConnell To Get Big Corporate Money Out Of Politics.” Even some liberals fell for it: a DailyKos poster titled their blog post, “I agree with … Josh Hawley?” (Don’t worry, “Greg from Vermont,” you really don’t!)

The political press has been on a recent tear of ignominy lately. Media Matters’ Matt Gertz caught multiple outlets selling the GOP’s recent proposal to pay for the proposed Israeli aid package with deficit-ballooning cuts to the IRS as an “offset” this week, in another example of a framing that could have been avoided if anyone bothered to acquire some basic literacy about the legislative process and operating budgets. That Hawley’s sham of a bill has no chance to “overturn Citizens United” doesn’t take a deep dive into the particulars to figure out. To be honest, many of the ruses perpetrated by George Santos, who survived an expulsion vote on Wednesday, were a lot harder to penetrate than Hawley’s latest caper, if only anyone would bother to try.

Count him among the whole group of right wing populist pretenders who see the political utility to pretending to oppose “woke” big money while enabling fascist big money at every turn. (See: DeSantis, Ron.) You can’t ever take this guy at his word. There’s always an agenda.

While we all wring our hands over the NY Times Poll, I think it’s important for people to see this. Just to keep some perspective:

Ladies & gentlemen, the leading Republican candidate for president. pic.twitter.com/QOiDnWa3jv

— Republicans against Trump (@RpsAgainstTrump) November 5, 2023

We’ve become so used to these confessions. https://t.co/bsJPWE98Rp

— Sherrilyn Ifill (@SIfill_) November 4, 2023

The entire GDP of Hungary is $189 billion. Annual inflation in Hungary is around 20 percent. Orban is an authoritarian. Hungary does not border Russia no matter how many times Trump keeps saying it does in every speech he gives where he praises Orban. https://t.co/IHbZw0Uu9A

— Ben Meiselas (@meiselasb) November 4, 2023

Trump: And we will together restore law and order in our country. We will completely overhaul the doj to investigate every marxist prosecutor in America for their illegal racist in the reverse enforcement.. pic.twitter.com/eftLSe9vX5

— Acyn (@Acyn) November 4, 2023

Trump: And when you think of it how important elections are, you have millions of people alive right now if the election was not rigged. They would be alive. Ukraine, Israel. pic.twitter.com/0h2spbhJzA

— Acyn (@Acyn) November 4, 2023

Ah yes, 2017-2021, when famously there were no problems at all. https://t.co/E1enzaHbMk

— Brian Tyler Cohen (@briantylercohen) November 4, 2023

According to this timeline from Wikipedia, there were 19 terrorist attacks during his term. of course many of them were perpetrated by white supremacist supporters so I suppose he doesn’t consider that a problem. And that’s not counting the hundreds of mass shootings. Or the pandemic that killed over a million people. But yeah, it was “perfect.”

Trump: Everything is a lie. The whole thing is a lie. The whole election was a lie pic.twitter.com/73NQT6z5gX

— Acyn (@Acyn) November 4, 2023

All those college educated men who voted for Biden in 2020 and now want to put this monster back in office need to take a serious gut check.