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DeSantis tried to pass Trump in his own lane and lost control

The cult wasn’t buying it. And neither was anyone else:

Some moderate Republican voters here recoiled at ads that Ron DeSantis’s allies started running last month broadcastingthe Florida governor’s vows to use deadly force at the southern border.

“I don’t like the fact that we’re going to start murdering people,” said Becki Kuhns, 71, who is eager for an alternative to Donald Trump and brought up the commercials unprompted.

Down the road at a cigar bar in Nashua, where regulars talk politics and watch debates together, a different DeSantis problem came into focus: Trumpsupporters were unmoved by DeSantis’s pitch that he’d deliver the former president’s agenda more effectively.

The people he’s targeting “belong to Trump,” said Howard Ray, 43, who went to a DeSantis event but wasn’t persuaded. “He comes across kind of hard right.”

He added:“Those types of people are in Trump’s camp, and they’re not moving.”

DeSantis began the year widely viewed as theRepublican with the best chance to build awinning coalition against theformer president — the Trump alternative who could entice Trump critics yet was alsoin many ways a continuation of Trump’s “America First” platform. But DeSantis’s support has shrunk dramatically since then, erodingon both ends of the party spectrum, interviews with dozensof early state voters, as well as pollsters and strategists, show.

The GOP minority that disapproves of Trump — and thatfavored DeSantis before he and most other candidates announced — has splintered to other hopefuls. Boosted by them and by independents, former U.N. ambassador Nikki Haley has surpassed DeSantis in New Hampshire and, in one poll released Monday, pulled even with the Florida governor in Iowa — where DeSantis has poured his resources.

At the same time, DeSantis has struggled amongTrump supporters, losing ground with those who approve of the former president, who has used his four criminal indictments to re-energize a base that once looked readier to move on from him. And DeSantis has struggled on both ends to make personal appeals that resonate, with a stiffer presentation than freewheeling Trump.

Now, DeSantis is left in a perilous position with just over two months until the first nominating contest, mired in a second tier of candidates well behind Trump.

Despite his appeals to the Trump base, DeSantis has at times tried to offer something for everyone, eliciting sometimes discordant descriptions of his candidacy from voters.

Tosome in Iowa and New Hampshire he was a “fresh voice” and a “true conservative” unlike Trump. To others he was “America First” or, to those who disdained him, a “Trump wannabe.” They said he stood for “freedom” and “families” and fighting wokeness in schools, with his record in Florida sometimes defining him despite his months-long efforts to talk in national terms.

DeSantis’s average support in national polls of the GOP primary dropped from more than 30 percent in March to 24 percent in May, when he officially joined the race, to 14 percent today.

Faced with that slide, DeSantis’s team has focused most of its attentionon Iowa, where it hopesintensive campaigning and a sophisticated ground operation will turn the tide against Trump. They note that a pro-Trump super PAC is resuming ad spending there against DeSantis — after earlier signaling that it was focused on the general election — and that polls show a growing share of voters considering candidates besides Trump, who holds a large polling lead.

But Haley, rather than DeSantis, has been gaining there, with a highly-anticipated Des Moines Register/NBC News/Mediacom poll on Monday showing both Haley and DeSantis at 16 percent and Trump in the lead at 43. In a sign of Haley’s rise, a pro-DeSantis super PAC has started to air ads against her.

Advisers and allies argue that Haley appeals to the anti-Trump wing for stances that alienate the rest of the GOP and that DeSantis is still the only candidate who can bridge those camps — with most of his voters migrating to Trump if he drops out. Anti-Trump voters will eventually coalesce behind whoever can beat the former president, they say.

“The reality is this party is going to nominate somebody … that has a record of delivering on America First principles,” DeSantis said last week in New Hampshire, embracing that core identity even as he underlined moderate-friendly themes like “economic vitality.”

Speaking to voters at a bar in Creston, Iowa, this month, DeSantis said he would enact Trump’s ideas and take them further. He said he would “clean house” at the Justice Department, push to end the war in Ukraine and finish the wall at the southern border. He said that he would “make Mexico pay for it” by charging fees on remittances and that if drug traffickers tried to break through, they would wind up “stone cold dead.”

Trump backers ‘just not voting for him’

As DeSantis launched his campaign in May, adviser Ryan Tyson laid out the strategy to wealthy fundraisers who gathered at the Four Seasons Hotel in Miami. “Trump without the crazy,” was how supporters saw him, Tyson said.

The “Never Trump” voters in the party were saying DeSantis was too much like Trump, he added, but they made up about 20 percent of the GOP. Tyson was more focused on what he called “soft” Trump voters. “These voters here in this segment are gonna collapse to the governor,” he predicted.

Trump has instead consolidated support, surging back from a low point after last year’s midterm elections, when many Republicans blamed him for their losses and took note of DeSantis’s landslide reelection victory. Indictments on a slew of criminal charges, starting in March, galvanized the base and rallied the party back to Trump’s side, all as the former president attacked DeSantis. “I am your retribution,” Trump has told voters.

Some DeSantis allies debate whether he should have announced earlier, to capitalize on his post-midterms momentum. Maybe, they say, he should have hit Trump hard from the start. They lament certain comments — like DeSantis’s dismissive statement about a “territorial dispute” in Ukraine — as unforced errors. But mostly they view Trump’s resurgence as a force beyond DeSantis’s control.

“To this day he has a very high favorable rating among those favorable to Trump,” said Charles Franklin, who directs the Marquette Law School Poll. “They’re just not voting for him.”

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Dennis Martin, for instance, worries that Trump’s indictments will be a distraction and even says, “I don’t like Trump as a person.” The 57-year-old from a suburb of Des Moines is considering Trump, DeSantis and Vivek Ramaswamy, a first-time candidate who has also embraced the Trump agenda.

But Martin is also outraged at the charges against Trump, thinks he did “a hell of a job as president” and says he’s leaning slightly toward supporting Trump again.

Heading to breakfast in nearby Ankeny, David Melssen said he’d been following DeSantis’s response to the war between Hamas and Israel. “Great man. He sent an airplane to bring back Americans,” he said immediately when a reporter mentioned DeSantis’s name.

Asked if he could vote for DeSantis, he said: “Yeah, if Trump decides that Ron DeSantis is the guy to back.”

The Trumpers are in cult and they aren’t abandoning their Dear Leader for a usurper. And the few Republicans who don’t like Trump aren’t going to vote for an extremist jerk like DeSantis because that’s exactly what they don’t like about Trump. What lane did he think he was running in anyway? His strategy was always flawed.

If he thought he was just doing it to be the fallback in case Trump falls over on the golf course and breaks a hip, he’s now revealed himself to be a creepy weirdo so I don’t think that would work either. And anyone who thinks Trump is going to endorse DeSantis is smoking something very, very potent.

He’s also unstable

The NY Times:

One of Donald J. Trump’s new comedic bits at his rallies features him impersonating the current commander in chief with an over-the-top caricature mocking President Biden’s age.

With droopy eyelids and mouth agape, Mr. Trump stammers and mumbles. He squints. His arms flap. He shuffles his feet and wanders laggardly across the stage. A burst of laughter and applause erupts from the crowd as he feigns confusion by turning and pointing to invisible supporters, as if he does not realize his back is to them.

But his recent campaign events have also featured less deliberate stumbles. Mr. Trump has had a string of unforced gaffes, garble and general disjointedness that go beyond his usual discursive nature, and that his Republican rivals are pointing to as signs of his declining performance.

On Sunday in Sioux City, Iowa, Mr. Trump wrongly thanked supporters of Sioux Falls, a South Dakota town about 75 miles away, correcting himself only after being pulled aside onstage and informed of the error.

It was strikingly similar to a fictional scene that Mr. Trump acted out earlier this month, pretending to be Mr. Biden mistaking Iowa for Idaho and needing an aide to straighten him out.

In recent weeks, Mr. Trump has also told supporters not to vote, and claimed to have defeated President Barack Obama in an election. He has praised the collective intellect of an Iranian-backed militant group that has long been an enemy of both Israel and the United States, and repeatedly mispronounced the name of the armed group that rules Gaza.

“This is a different Donald Trump than 2015 and ’16 — lost the zip on his fastball,” Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida told reporters last week while campaigning in New Hampshire.

“In 2016, he was freewheeling, he’s out there barnstorming the country,” Mr. DeSantis added. “Now, it’s just a different guy. And it’s sad to see.”

It is unclear if Mr. Trump’s recent slips are connected to his age. He has long relied on an unorthodox speaking style that has served as one of his chief political assets, establishing him, improbably, among the most effective communicators in American politics.

But as the 2024 race for the White House heats up, Mr. Trump’s increased verbal blunders threaten to undermine one of Republicans’ most potent avenues of attack, and the entire point of his onstage pantomime: the argument that Mr. Biden is too old to be president.

Mr. Biden, a grandfather of seven, is 80. Mr. Trump, who has 10 grandchildren, is 77.

Even though only a few years separate the two men in their golden years, voters view their vigor differently. Recent polls have found that roughly two out of three voters say Mr. Biden is too old to serve another four-year term, while only about half say the same about Mr. Trump.

If that gap starts to narrow, it’s Mr. Trump who has far more to lose in a general-election matchup.

According to a previously unreported finding in an August survey from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research, 43 percent of U.S. voters said both men were “too old to effectively serve another four-year term as president.” Among those voters, 61 percent said they planned to vote for Mr. Biden, compared with 13 percent who said the same about Mr. Trump.

Last week, similar findings emerged in a Franklin & Marshall College poll of registered voters in Pennsylvania, one of the most closely watched 2024 battlegrounds.

According to the poll, 43 percent of Pennsylvanians said both men were “too old to serve another term.” An analysis of that data for The New York Times showed that Mr. Biden led Mr. Trump among those voters by 66 percent to 11 percent. Among all voters in the state, the two men were in a statistical tie.

Berwood Yost, the director of the Franklin & Marshall poll, said that Mr. Biden’s wide lead among voters who were worried about both candidates’ ages could be explained partly by the fact that Democrats are much more likely than Republicans to identify age as a problem for their party’s leader.

“The age issue is one that if Trump gets tarred with the same brush as Biden, it really hurts him,” Mr. Yost said.

Steven Cheung, a spokesman for the Trump campaign, noted that the former president maintained a commanding lead in Republican primary polls and that in the general election, several recent polls had shown Mr. Trump with slight leads over Mr. Biden.

“None of these false narratives has changed the dynamics of the race at all — President Trump still dominates, because people know he’s the strongest candidate,” Mr. Cheung said. “The contrast is that Biden is falling onstage, mumbling his way through a speech, being confused on where to walk, and tripping on the steps of Air Force One. There’s no correcting that, and that will be seared into voter’s minds.”

Mr. Trump’s rhetorical skills have long relied on a mix of brute force and a seemingly preternatural instinct for the imprecise. That beguiling combination — honed from a lifetime of real estate negotiations, New York tabloid backbiting and prime-time reality TV stardom — often means that voters hear what they want to hear from him.

Trump supporters leave his speeches energized. Undecided voters who are open to his message can find what they’re looking for in his pitch. Opponents are riled, and when they furiously accuse him of something they heard but that he didn’t quite precisely say, Mr. Trump turns the criticism into a data point that he’s unfairly persecuted — and the entire cycle begins anew.

But Mr. Trump’s latest missteps aren’t easily classified as calculated vagueness.

During a Sept. 15 speech in Washington, a moment after declaring Mr. Biden “cognitively impaired, in no condition to lead,” the former president warned that America was on the verge of World War II, which ended in 1945.

In the same speech, he boasted about presidential polls showing him leading Mr. Obama, who is not, in fact, running for an illegal third term in office. He erroneously referred to Mr. Obama again during an anecdote about winning the 2016 presidential race.

“We did it with Obama,” Mr. Trump said. “We won an election that everybody said couldn’t be won, we beat …” He paused for a beat as he seemed to realize his mistake. “Hillary Clinton.”

At a Florida rally on Oct. 11, days after a brutal terrorist attack that killed hundreds of Israelis, Mr. Trump criticized the country for being unprepared, lashing out at its prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu. Mr. Trump appears to have soured on Mr. Netanyahu, once a close ally, after the Israeli leader congratulated Mr. Biden for winning the 2020 election.

In the same speech, Mr. Trump relied on an inaccurate timeline of events in the Middle East to criticize Mr. Biden’s handling of foreign affairs and, in the process, drew headlines for praising Hezbollah, the Iranian-backed militant group.

Last week, while speaking to supporters at a rally in New Hampshire, Mr. Trump praised Viktor Orban, the strongman prime minister of Hungary, but referred to him as “the leader of Turkey,” a country hundreds of miles away. He quickly corrected himself.

At another point in the same speech, Mr. Trump jumped into a confusing riff that ended with him telling supporters, “You don’t have to vote — don’t worry about voting,” adding, “We’ve got plenty of votes.”

Mr. Cheung, the Trump campaign spokesman, said the former president was “clearly talking about election integrity and making sure only legal votes are counted.”

In a speech on Saturday, Mr. Trump sounded as if he were talking about hummus when he mispronounced Hamas (huh-maas), the Islamist group that governs the Gaza Strip and carried out one of the largest attacks on Israel in decades on Oct. 7.

The former president’s pronunciation drew the attention of the Biden campaign, which posted the video clip on social media, noting that Mr. Trump sounded “confused.”

But even Republican rivals have sensed an opening on the age issue against Mr. Trump, who has maintained an unshakable hold on the party despite a political record that would in years past have compelled conservatives to consider another standard-bearer. Mr. Trump lost control of Congress as president; was voted out of the White House; failed to help deliver a “red wave” of victories in the midterm elections last year; and, this year, drew 91 felony charges over four criminal cases.

That was refreshing. Now let’s see the media spend some time challenging the belief that Trump had an unprecedented number of accomplishments making him the greatest leader the world has ever known. His followers seem to believe that he single-handedly changed the world and the country was basically utopia when he was president. They believe this because he told them so 1,450,000 times. Needless to say, it is not true. Everything they believe about his is not true. It’s a case of mass delusion.

He’ll be lucky if it lasts until Christmas

Now that the curtain has finally come down on the sideshow of the House of Representatives Speaker’s race it’s tempting to think that we can leave behind that political show for a while and focus on something else. Unfortunately, nothing could be further from the truth. If anything, the next few weeks and possibly months are going to be just as dramatic and much more relevant to the everyday lives of the American people. The MAGA movement is now 100% in charge of one house of congress and they show no signs that they have accepted the fact that their tiny majority entitles them to get their way 100% of the time. The new speaker is a far-right Christian Nationalist and Trump cultist and he appears to be ready to push the envelope farther than it’s ever been pushed before.

Speaker Mike Johnson, second in line for the presidency, is the most extreme leader this country has ever had. When asked about his governing philosophy he said, “go pick up a Bible off your shelf and read it. … That’s my world view. That’s what I believe. And so I make no apologies.” That appears to be literally correct. As my colleague Amanda Marcotte points out in this piece [insert link] Johnson is an antediluvian, patriarchal ,misogynist with all that that that implies and he has devoted his life to re-making America into an explicitly Christian fundamentalist state.

Despite his belief that the 1960s ushered in a decadent culture that is destroying the moral fabric of the nation, like most conservative Evangelicals, Johnson is also a fervent follower of the thrice married, sexual abuser Donald Trump. He was deeply involved in the GOP House caucuses attempt to help Trump overturn the 2020 election which he no doubt believes was justified since the United States is a “biblical Republic” rather than a constitutional one in his view. It would seem that his stern morality does not preclude him being practical enough to make allowances when political power is at stake.

So, what can we expect going forward? He is evidently a very affable fellow, not as grim or hostile as some of his colleagues on the MAGA right. That will probably buy him a bit of a honeymoon. After all, he was voted in unanimously by the full caucus which nobody thought was possible. And his extremist credentials help him with the bomb throwing back benchers who ousted his predecessor, Kevin McCarthy. The main instigator of that coup, Matt Gaetz, R-Fl., appeared on former Trump adviser and podcaster, Steve Bannon and crowed:

The swamp is on the run, Maga is ascendant and if you don’t think that moving from Kevin McCarthy to Maga Mike Johnson shows the ascendance of this movement, and where the power of the Republican party truly lies, then you’re not paying attention.

There couldn’t be a more enthusiastic endorsement for an extremely pious Christian from a man who was credibly accused of partying and drug use with very young women for years. Who says the Republican Party is in disarray?

“Maga Mike” is going to have to hope that his party is in full cooperation mode because he has no leadership experience of any kind. He was a staff lawyer for an ultra with wing Christian advocacy organization for years before he ran for office. But perhaps he’s a natural and will be able to bring this fractious caucus together in ways that former speakers John Boehner, Paul Ryan and Kevin McCarthy were unable to do. His poise and demeanor in presenting himself to the media as a very measured, dare I say, moderate fellow shows a certain amount of public relations savvy that will certainly be useful, at least in the beginning.

He appeared with Sean Hannity for the ceremonial softball Fox interview and sounded very much like his predecessors. He heavily criticized the Biden administration of course, made a passing insult implying that the president has diminished capacity and indicated his support for impeaching him. I assume a majority of his colleagues feel the same way since their 2024 strategy is to create a counter-narrative of Biden’s alleged corruption to offset the fact that Trump is under 91 felony indictments.

But everything else he said was anything but fire breathing wingnut rhetoric. The man whose entire career has been based on the idea that gay sex and abortion should be criminalized told Hannity that gay marriage has been decided and that there’s no national consensus on abortion, suggesting that they will not take up the issue in the House. His pro-Israel comments weren’t particularly bellicose. He indicated that he was ready to engage in talks over the budget with the White House and said he didn’t want a government shutdown.

I wonder if the audience was impressed with his newfound pragmatism? Or is it just that he’s in over his head?

He railed against Vladimir Putin saying that Ukraine defeating him was essential in order to dissuade China from moving on Taiwan. But this is a person who Republicans for Ukraine gave an “F” rating for voting over and over again to deny funding to help repel Putin’s invasion of the country. What gives? Well, if one were to guess, it would be that Mike Johnson is pulling a fast one:

https://x.com/atrupar/status/1718630670409347291?s=20

For all his alleged concern about Putin’s aggression it appears that he hasn’t changed his spots. Johnson is slickly using Israel to advance his agenda to stop funding for Ukraine. And keep in mind that one of the Gaetz faction’s obsessions is to have each bill decided separately —- for everything, not just Ukraine and Israel — so this is yet another feint to the MAGA caucus of which he is a card-carrying member.

We’ll have to see how this all shakes out over the next few weeks. The continuing budget resolution expires on November 18th and Johnson has said that he would like to extend it to January 31st — with conditions. What those are going to be is anyone’s guess. But it does appear that at least in the beginning he’ll have the support of the hardliners. But he should keep in mind that Kevin McCarthy’s ouster was precipitated by his debt ceiling negotiations and with the White House that contained numerous concessions to the GOP and Johnson’s MAGA friends who refused to take yes for an answer. Unless any deals he makes with the White House and the Senate are tantamount to complete capitulation by the Democrats, they’re not going to be happy. There’s a very good chance his honeymoon will be over before Christmas.

Salon

Muddying the waters

When Republican Rep. Madison Cawthorn lost his North Carolina District 11 seat in Congress in the 2022 primary, he had help from Democrats. Republican voters may have found Cawthorn embarassing in the extreme, but many Democrats loathed the young extremist. Enough loathed him that they switched their registrations to unaffiliated so they could choose a Republican ballot and vote against him in the primary. Plenty of real unaffiliated voters who lean left chose to vote in the GOP primary as well.

Both could prove a problem for Democratic campaigns in 2024.

“I’m not a Republican,” wrote Theodore R. Johnson last week in the Washington Post, “but I’ll play one on Super Tuesday, March 5.” Johnson live in Virginia where an open primary allows voters registered nonpartisan to participate.

“I always cast my ballot in whichever primary is more competitive,” he explains. “In 2016, it was the Republicans’; in 2020, the Democrats’. The one constant is that deciding whose box to check is hard.”

That choice will be harder for him in 2024. The GOP presidential field is a basket of undesirables, “a master class in making a comically complex decision tragically complicated.”

Johnson elaborates:

With politics like these, it’s little surprise that most of the country avoids primary elections altogether by simply choosing not to vote. Those who do vote in general elections often stick to partisan lines that track through a tangle of cultural, ideological and social markers. Parties make the choosing easier.

But there is such a thing as too easy. The current state of our two-party system increasingly causes voters to view one of the two as tolerable and the other as a threat. It reduces complicated issues to simplistic battles of good vs. evil, us vs. them. That makes the choice quite straightforward: Vote for your side (the good guys) and against the side filled with bad people and their bad ideas. Even independents have picked a team, effectively partisans without the membership card. The simplicity of it all is a feature, not a bug. And it’s terrible for democracy. Some things, including political decisions, are supposed to be a little bit hard.

Johnson explains his thinking process without explicitly suggesting he’ll vote in the GOP primary to promote the Republican most likely to lose in November 2024.

For those unversed in how Democrats target voters for persuasion and turnout efforts, unaffiliated voters who “date around” and Democrats like those who switched to vote against Madison Cawthorn muddy the targeting waters.

In states where unaffiliated voters may vote in party primaries, choosing a Democratic ballot in a primary suggests to campaigns that an unaffiliated voter leans left and goes on the list for persuasion and turnout contacts. So left-leaning independents who vote in the GOP primary look like right-leaning independents. It lowers their Democratic support scores. That’s a problem for Democrats needing unaffiliated voters to reach a 50%+1 win margin:

Independents (UNAffiliated voters in NC) are the largest bloc of registered voters in NC: 36% (2.6 million voters). But statewide they voted against Democrats here 58% of the time in the last two elections. Democrats cannot win without them, but their traditional tactics, as [David] Pepper recognizes, focuses only on “the most frequent voters.” This tactic leaves many “removed from the political conversation” in what I’ve dubbed “No Voter’s Land.” These are voters campaigns are reluctant to contact (using the tactics of the last war, you might say) because computer scoring deems them not good bets.

In a sense, Democrats believes low-scoring UNAs are (in Seinfeld terms) not sponge-worthy. It’s not that they won’t vote with Democrats, it’s that Democrats lack the data to give them confidence that they might, so they cautiously avoid them.

Oh yes, in 2020 only roughly 17% of NC’s registered unaffiliated voters bothered to vote in the Democratic primary. In 2022, it was only 5.4%. If Democratic campaigns are relying on primary voting to steer them toward friendly independents in 2024, they’ve got a problem.

There’s not enough antacid for this

Seeing so many anti-Trump conservatives and libertarians dig in their heels in opposition to the rise of Donald Trump was at least somewhat encouraging. Yes, their efforts to secure political power had helped create the monster. But looking it in the eye was entirely different from war-gaming for a billionaire-funded think tank. The experience may not have scared them “left,” but we got to watch more than a few revaluate their trajectories in life, at least temporarily. (America loves a redemption story.) Should MAGA wither and blow away, some will backslide. Count on it.

All of which is prelude to citing David French for the second time in a month. Strange bedfellows.

President Joe Biden’s long political experience, warts and all, have prepared him for what might be the most perilous set of foreign policy crises of the 21st century. With the Israel-Hamas war dialing up, it is unclear how Biden threads the needle between supporting America’s longtime ally presently led by a lunatic and expressing compassion for innocent Gazans presently dominated by lunatics. I’m not even sure there is a needle.

The war has driven a wedge between Biden and younger and left-leaning voters. French believes Biden has the right stuff even while a recent poll shows Biden’s support slipping 11 points with Democrats (New York Times):

Consider what he confronts: a brutal Russian assault on a liberal democracy in Europe, the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust and an aggressive China that is gaining military strength and threatens Taiwan. That’s two hot wars and a new cold war, each against a nation or entity that forsakes any meaningful moral norms, violates international law and commits crimes against humanity.

In each conflict abroad — hot or cold — America is indispensable to the defense of democracy and basic humanity. Ukraine cannot withstand a yearslong Russian onslaught unless the United States acts as the arsenal of democracy, keeping the Ukrainian military supplied with the weapons and munitions it needs. America is Israel’s indispensable ally and close military partner. It depends on our aid and — just as important — our good will for much of its strength and security. And Taiwan is a target of opportunity for China absent the might of the United States Pacific Fleet.

The Washington Post Editorial Board devoted its Sunday editorial to China’s stepped-up provocations in the South China Sea. The U.S. is the indispensible nation to allies Australia, the Philippines and Taiwan on that side of the globe as well. Thus, the Post writes, “it’s imperative that the administration send constant reminders to Beijing and to America’s allies in the region that the United States is a Pacific power and can deal with multiple crises at once.” So far, the Editorial Board suggests, Biden is striking the right pose in the Pacific.

French continues:

And keep in mind, Biden is managing these conflicts all while trying to make sure that the nation emerges from a pandemic with inflation in retreat and its economy intact. In spite of economic growth and low unemployment numbers that make the American economy the envy of the world, Americans are still dealing with the consequences of inflation and certainly don’t feel optimistic about our economic future.

Biden is now under fire from two sides, making these challenges even more difficult. The populist, Trumpist right threatens his ability to fund Ukraine, hoping to engineer a cutoff in aid that could well lead to the greatest victory for European autocrats since Hitler and then Stalin swallowed European democracies whole in their quest for power and control.

You thought the first Trump presidency was a disaster and deadly? A second could be the apocalypse for which his evangelical cult thirsts.

French, the former National Review writer, sees in Biden a steady hand in a political climate that insists a leader overreact to every poll and public demonstration. Biden’s policies seem “fundamentally sound.”

History will have the last word on that. For now, the domestic threat from a Congress and Supreme Court dominated by MAGA lunatics and funded by self-interested billionaires is enough to recommend investing in manufacturers of antacid.

French, himself a non-MAGA evangelical, sees Biden as an American leader in the right place at the right time:

If Biden can persevere in the face of the chaos and confusion of war abroad and polarization at home, all while preserving a level of economic growth that is astonishing in contrast with the rest of the world, he’ll have his own story to tell in Chicago, one that should trump the adversity of any given moment or the concern generated by any given poll. If Biden can do his job, then he can take the stage in Chicago with his own simple pitch for re-election: In the face of disease, war, inflation and division, the economy thrives — and democracy is alive.

May we all survive the next fifteen months. Especially Joe Biden.

Pandas!

This video of pandas just being pandas while a zookeeper desperately tries to rake leaves is the best video on the internet pic.twitter.com/6kspStJ6O5

— Nature is Amazing ☘️ (@AMAZlNGNATURE) October 29, 2023

My friend the high school teacher told me this reminded her of her freshman class. Lol.

I think we need some more cute panda action, don’t you? (Along with a nice tall adult beverage):

I think we know the next week is going to be awful. They all are right now. But here’s a little piece from Jill Lawrence at the Bulwark about something nice and it may make you feel good for a minute or two. It’s about the Taylor Swift phenomenon and it channels my personal experience with her. I understand you mileage may vary but I have thought throughout this year as I saw all these people get caught up in the Swift tour that it was so refreshing to just see something wholesome and positive happen for a change.

Swift is an icon, a big sister, a mentor. She’s also an emphatic win for second-wave feminism and its legacy of smashed stereotypes, economic empowerment, and anti-discrimination laws. You have to be a woman of a certain age to think to yourself “sisterhood is powerful” as Swift and her female dancers line up onstage, arms across each other’s shoulders, a wall of solidarity; to think “our bodies, ourselves” while watching women of every shape, size and color own that stage.

Beyond all that, as meaningful as it is to second-wavers like me, Swift is a sorely needed role model for our times. Her triumph is not just her well documented business savvy, musical gifts, or the way she has worked for years with the nonpartisan voter-registration group Vote.org, urging her fans to participate in U.S. democracy. It’s even bigger than that, though it sounds so simple: Swift is a nice girl, not a mean girl. A sweet, considerate person who picks up the trash at a family gathering. “I don’t think she got the diva memo,” Ed Kelce, father of current boyfriend Travis Kelce, said this week in an interview with People magazine. She is the girlfriend who meets the parents, whether their famous son is an actor or a football player.

Swift is nothing but nice throughout Eras, from her special moment mid-concert with the late Kobe Bryant’s young daughter to the many times she thanks her fans for buying tickets to a three-hour-plus live concert (twice as long as A Hard Day’s Night!) that spans all of her musical “eras,” proving that it wasn’t a harebrained obsession. “It’s only because of you that I get to do that,” she tells them. By the end, she’s asked them for just one more song’s worth of their time, as if she’s imposing on them for yet another favor. As TMZ reported, Swift is also kind to those working for her. She gave $100,000 bonuses to the fifty or so Eras Tour truckers who drove her equipment around the country, and unspecified but “very generous” bonuses to others on the tour, including band members, dancers, lighting and sound technicians.

I remember mean girls from junior high school, and I’m sure they’re still around. Swift is the antidote we need, especially now. She shows young girls, women, and her many male fans that you can be a rich celebrity while also treating others with kindness and respect. You can give away extra money to people who work for you, instead of stiffing them for what they’re owed. You can be strong without threats and intimidation. You can show that kindness is not weakness. In the age of Donald Trump, these are all lessons that bear repeating.

Read the whole thing. It’s fantastic.

This embrace of Taylor and her resilience, talent, positivity and integrity reminds me that there’s a whole side of life that has nothing to do with all the ugliness I read about and see everyday and it gives me hope.

More Federal Prosecutors testify that the GOP is full of it

Oh:

The top federal prosecutor in Los Angeles confirmed to congressional investigators that he declined to bring tax charges against Hunter Biden last year, but insisted his decision did not hamper the probe into the president’s son.

Martin Estrada, the U.S. attorney for central California who made those remarks in closed-door testimony, told the investigators that the Delaware prosecutors running the Hunter Biden probe have long been able to file charges in California. In fact, Estrada said, at least two Delaware prosecutors were given special authority to operate in California long before their boss, David Weiss, was appointed a special counsel earlier this year.

The question of why Weiss’ office has not charged Hunter Biden with tax crimes has been a topic of considerable Republican scrutiny. An IRS whistleblower has testified that Weiss, the Trump-appointed U.S. attorney for Delaware, faced roadblocks in charging the president’s son when Biden-appointed U.S. attorneys for central California and Washington, D.C., declined to formally partner with him.

The U.S. attorney for D.C. has pushed back against that claim. And on Tuesday, in a closed-door interview with the House Judiciary Committee, Estrada pushed back as well. POLITICO obtained a copy of the interview transcript, which is not public.

Estrada acknowledged in the interview that, in the fall of 2022, he declined to “co-counsel” with Weiss on filing potential tax charges in California. Estrada cited the “practical impact of limited resources” for making that decision. But he said he didn’t stiff-arm Weiss; instead, according to Estrada, he offered to help in other ways.

“I discussed our analysis of facts and law to explain to him why we would not be co-counseling on the case, but then I told him that we were happy to provide office space, administrative support for his attorneys,” Estrada told investigators, recounting a five-minute phone call with Weiss on Oct. 19, 2022. “He thanked me for that and the call ended.”

Estrada also revealed that, prior to his appointment as U.S. attorney in September 2022, his office authorized at least two prosecutors from Weiss’ Delaware office to work as “special U.S. attorneys” in the central California district. Estrada said he believed that authorization meant that Weiss could charge Hunter Biden in California without his permission.

The Hunter Biden probe spans multiple jurisdictions because the president’s son was living in California and Washington, D.C., during years when he allegedly failed to pay federal income taxes.

Weiss and Hunter Biden’s lawyers came close to reaching a plea deal this summer that would have resolved the tax issues. But after the deal collapsed, Attorney General Merrick Garland made Weiss a special counsel, formalizing his ability to bring criminal charges anywhere in the country.

Weiss charged Biden with gun crimes last month in Delaware, and he has indicated in court documents that he may soon file tax charges in California. But so far, no tax charges have been brought.

Lawyers for the president’s son have said he belatedly paid taxes he owed, along with penalties and interest, in October 2021.

And then there’s this which should be in the first paragraph:

Without naming Hunter Biden, Estrada discussed how his office decides when to charge people with tax crimes.

“My understanding is where an individual has not paid taxes in the first instance but later paid those taxes with penalties and interest before a prosecution is initiated or an investigation is initiated, we have never brought criminal charges,” he said in the House Judiciary interview.

None of this matters unfortunately. It’s quite clear that the facts mean absolutely nothing in this case. The Republicans are lying about everything and it doesn’t make much difference to the press that they’re doing that. But the truth, to the extent anyone cares about it, is that the so-called “tax case” against Hunter Biden doesn’t exist. He paid those taxes late and paid the penalties and interest. Tens of millions of people do that every year and they don’t have federal prosecutors breathing down their necks.

Trump’s vocabulary, according to Bill Barr

Captain Obvious:

During an event at Harvard’s Institute of Politics on Thursday night, Barr spoke about his former boss in largely unfavorable terms. At one point, CBS Chief Correspondent Jan Crawford asked him if he thinks Trump is losing his mind. She cited the former president’s comments calling Hezbollah “very smart.”

“That was appalling,” Crawford said. “I mean, do you think he’s– is he losing it?”

“His verbal skills are limited,” Barr replied, prompting chuckles from the audience. “And so he, you know, if you get him away from ‘very, very, very,’ the adjectives sort of– they’re unfamiliar to him and they sort of spill out and he goes too far. You know, he’s not very disciplined when it comes to what he says.”

Speaking in Florida earlier this month, Trump said Hezbollah – the Iran-linked militant group – is “very smart,” which prompted ridicule across the spectrum. His comments echoed past praise of other notorious figures around the world, including Russian President Vladimir Putin, North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un, and Chinese President Xi Jinping.

Elsewhere during the program, Barr called Trump “a very petty man” and said he is running for president again for “retribution.”

“Things would start moving toward chaos,” the former attorney general said.

Moving toward chaos??? Was he sleeping the last three weeks? The last six years???

Barr has not said he wouldn’t vote for Trump, by the way. He’s not a fan of that hippie Joe Biden so…

They’re all like him now

CNN’s Harry Enten examines where Johnson is positioned within the GOP:

[There’s been] a bit of a debate about Johnson’s ideological record. Just how conservative is he? A look at the data reveals that Johnson is most certainly well to the right of the median American voter. But he is actually fairly close to the center of a Republican Party that has shifted further right in recent years.

Consider what most people have learned about Johnson: He is an ardent defender of former President Donald Trump and was a key figure in the efforts to overturn the 2020 election.

Joe Biden, of course, was the legitimate winner of that election, and there is no real proof that he wasn’t. Most general election voters agree that Biden won the election legitimately. A recent ABC News/Washington Post poll found that just 29% of registered voters feel he didn’t.

Among Republicans, however, 60% of them said Biden’s win wasn’t legitimate, according to that same poll. Only 23% disagreed.

Meanwhile, the overwhelming majority of Republicans (70%) in a recent CNN/SSRS survey indicated that the criminal charges Trump faces over his failed attempts to overturn the 2020 election are not relevant to his fitness to serve another term. Even among the general electorate, just 49% said it should be disqualifying.

Indeed, we can’t forget that a clear majority of House Republicans (139 of them, including Johnson) voted against certifying 2020 election results from at least one state. Their votes were outside the mainstream among all House members but not within the House Republican Conference.

The same is true for an amicus brief that Johnson led supporting an effort to get the Supreme Court to overturn the 2020 election results in four Biden-won states. Most House members didn’t sign. A majority of House Republican members (126) did.

The fact is, whether you like it or not, arguing that Biden was the rightful winner of the 2020 election is the minority point of view among Republicans today.

Johnson has also faced criticism for his position on abortion. He co-sponsored a bill to prohibit abortions once a fetal heartbeat is detected, usually around six weeks.

A May Gallup poll found that 59% of Americans were opposed to such legislation, with 37% in favor. This lines up with the pro-abortion rights side winning every abortion-related ballot measure since Roe v. Wade was overturned last year, including in several red states.

But take a look at what that same poll found among Republicans: A majority (61%) wanted abortion banned after six weeks. Johnson, again, is within the mainstream of his party.

Legislatively, most Southern states have enacted bans on abortion at six weeks or even earlier.

I could go on and on about Johnson’s record on different issues that many object to, and we’ll find fairly consistently that while he may not be with the median general election voter, he is with the median Republican voter.

This is best seen through aggregate statistics compiled by the academics at Voteview. Since entering the House in 2017, Johnson has built a voting record that is more conservative than 81% of all members currently serving. He is, however, only more conservative than 63% of his GOP colleagues. In other words, 37% of House Republicans are more conservative than the new speaker. That puts Johnson right in the middle third of today’s House Republican Conference.

In fact, Johnson has voted with the Republican majority 94% of the time this Congress. That almost matches the median House Republican member (93%).

To put that in perspective, take a look at failed speaker hopeful Jim Jordan. The Ohio congressman’s voting record is more conservative than 91% of other House Republicans. Unlike Johnson, Jordan really is out of the mainstream not just within Congress overall but the House Republican Conference, as well.

This isn’t to say that Johnson isn’t more conservative than the Republicans of yesteryear. It’s just that Republicans, as a whole, have become more conservative.

For example, Kentucky Rep. Hal Rogers, who was first elected in 1980 and is the longest-serving House Republican incumbent, was more conservative than 59% of GOP members during his first term. He’s more moderate than over 80% of House Republicans today.

And Republican members of Congress remain representative of their voters. According to a 1982 CBS News poll, less than 50% of adults who self-identified as Republican called themselves conservative. This past year, Gallup has found that over 70% of Republicans say they are conservative.

Of course, polls also show that Democrats have become considerably more liberal over the same stretch. As a result, independents, who are about as likely to identify as moderate as they were 40 years ago, probably feel like neither party represents them.

But there are no independents in the House. There are Democrats and Republicans. And it’s in this political universe where someone like Johnson could have attained the House speakership. He’s simply emblematic of today’s GOP.

Enten isn’t being entirely honest with that last “both sides” comment.

Here’s the comparison:

Here it is from a global perspective:

Don’t blame the Democrats for the sharp rise in polarization. The wingnuts have gone full fascist. And a whole lot of Americans think it’s just great.