Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

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.

According to his lawyer, Trump has nothing to worry about:

Prosecutors claimed the former lawyer wrote legal memos on behalf of the Trump campaign creating a false legal backing for the fake elector scheme.

As part of the plea, the former lawyer agreed to testify in future cases if called upon. That would include the trial of former President Trump, scheduled for early next year.

Grubman said Chesebro’s guilty plea doesn’t implicate any other defendants, and that Trump should “not be worried.”

“He did not implicate anyone else. He implicated himself in that particular charge,” he said. “He is required to testify truthfully if he is called by the state, and Mr. Chesebro is a man of his word.”

“At the same time I will say, if he is called by a defendant he will testify and testify truthfully,” Grubman added.

This isn’t going to go over well, however:

“First of all, Mr. Chesebro never believed in ‘the Big Lie,’” attorney Scott Grubman said Saturday in an interview on MSNBC. “If you ask Mr. Chesebro today who won the 2020 presidential election, he would say Joe Biden.”

I’m sure Trump will claim he doesn’t know this person. But he’s never happy to hear that someone doesn’t believe the Big Lie. He hasn’t said anything yet about Chesebro as far as I know but here’s his post about Sidney Powell:

“Stollen” election. He spells it that way every time. It’s not a typo.

BTW:

 

McCarthy: This is embarrassing for the Republican Party. It’s embarrassing for the nation pic.twitter.com/Mv8fc4PvoR

— Acyn (@Acyn) October 22, 2023

EJ Dionne:

The chaotic Republican-led House of Representatives has a rather poor sense of timing. The United States is in the midst of two international emergencies and faces the threat of a government shutdown next month. President Biden’s prime-time speech on Thursday pressing for aid to Ukraine and Israel underscored the exorbitant costs of the GOP meltdown.

But the embarrassing exercise could prove to be a blessing because it’s exposing a crisis in our politics that must be confronted. The endless battle for the speakership is already encouraging new thinking and might yet lead to institutional arrangements to allow bipartisan majorities to work their will.

The House impasse was precipitated by both radicalization and division within the Republican Party. Narrow majorities in the House have enabled right-wing radicals to disable the governing system. Normal progressives and normal conservatives, in alliance with politicians closer to the center, are discovering a shared interest in keeping the nihilist right far from the levers of power.

The current crisis, after all, was initiated by a small far-right contingent, empowered by the broad popularity of Donald Trump in the party. They brought down former House speaker Kevin McCarthy despite his willingness to make one concession after another to the crazies, the impeachers and the Trumpists.

Republicans blame Democrats for assisting in McCarthy’s defenestration. The GOP doesn’t want to recognize that McCarthy gave Democrats no reason to save him — he flatly refused to negotiate with them at his hour of need — and many reasons to believe he’d continue to kowtow to party extremists.

The last straw came after Democrats gave more votes than Republicans did to pass McCarthy’s September bill to avoid a government shutdown. The next day, McCarthy turned around and bizarrely claimed that Democrats “did not want the bill” and “were willing to let government shut down.” That dishonest nonsense sealed his fate.

Republicans have yet to learn the lesson of McCarthy’s fall: Because of the GOP’s splits, only an agreement with Democrats can create a majority in the House capable of governing. On the compromise measure to avert a debt ceiling crisis, House Republicans divided 149-71. On the bill to avoid a shutdown, the vote was even closer, 126-90. In their divided party, Republicans who want to avoid defaults or shutdowns or selling out Ukraine cannot do so on their own. They should formally recognize this.

Democrats are going out of their way to say they are ready to deal. “We are willing to find a bipartisan path forward so we can reopen the House,” Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) said at a news conference on Friday, after Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) went down in his third and decisive defeat in the speakership vote. Republicans, Jeffries said, had a choice: to “embrace bipartisanship and abandon extremism.”

The Democratic rank-and-file has quietly been working in this direction. Rep. Annie Kuster (D-N.H.), chair of the New Democrat Coalition, told me that moderate Democrats “were talking to any reasonable Republican we had a relationship with” in an effort to empower Speaker Pro Tempore Patrick T. McHenry (R-N.C.) to bring up bills that have broad support in both parties.

She noted that the Democrats’ conditions were minimal and hardly left-wing: to agree to avoid a government shutdown; to pass spending bills along the lines of the fiscal accord McCarthy and McHenry themselves made with Biden in May to avert a debt default; and to provide military aid to Ukraine and Israel and humanitarian aid for Palestinians.

Some middle-of-the-road Republicans were genuinely interested, Kuster said, but the plan blew up in the Republican conference on Thursday “because word got out that we [Democrats] might support the McHenry solution, and that made it unacceptable to the right.” More moderate Republicans also worried that Jordan would use a McHenry interlude to keep his own candidacy alive.

Democrats have reacted with understandable horror at the willingness of 200 Republicans to make the election-denying, insurrection-sympathizing, Trump-backed Jordan second in the line of succession for the presidency. But it’s important to recognize an additional blessing: For some two dozen Republicans — whose ranks grew through the three ballots — a Jordan speakership was too much to accept.

The iron rule of Republican politics has been that the right wing of the party plays hardball, and more moderate Republicans inevitably fold. Not this time. Because of the brave souls who went public, the party caucus voted 112-86 by secret ballot on Friday afternoon to force Jordan to step aside. All friends of democratic rule should be grateful. With a regiment of perhaps a dozen lesser-known Republicans pondering a now wide-open speaker’s race, a new version of the McHenry option might gain appeal.

One more lesson emerged from scare tactics and threats to anti-Jordan Republicans. They matched those “unleashed against anybody who stands in the way of Donald Trump,” Rep. Jamie B. Raskin (D-Md.) told MSNBC’s Joy Reid, adding: “If you fail to renounce and denounce political violence in very clear and specific terms, it’s going to come back to haunt you.”

Bipartisanship is no magic elixir, but bipartisanship in pursuit of majority rule is a worthy cause. Pushing Republicans to confront extremism in their ranks is both good politics and essential for governing. The Democrats’ offer to help Republicans through their intraparty struggle will either hasten the day of reckoning or expose the GOP’s refusal to stand up to its nihilists.

It’s a nice idea but Republicans refuse to take yes for an answer. They actually whined when Democrats didn’t vote for Jim Jordan, the insurrectionist.

I don’t know what it will take for any House Republicans to get to the point at which they understand that saving the country is more important than saving themselves from the wrath of Trump’s brainwashed cult but they aren’t there yet. Not by a long shot.

Maybe they mean to repeat history

When was America great the first time? Someone go ask Donald Trump. Maybe Jordan Klepper should query Trump rally attendees what “great again” means again.

I’m guessing they really mean 1859.

“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” – George Santayana, The Life of Reason, 1905. From the series Great Ideas of Western Man.

Historian Seth Cotlar (Rightlandia) will be in Seattle on Tuesday interviewing Rachel Maddow about her new book Prequel: An American Fight Against Fascism. Those who listened to her latest podcast, Ultra, know the basics. She traces the America fascist movement of the 1930s and 40s in more detail. What Cotlar finds interesting is how this history disappeared down the collective memory hole for most Americans in subsequent generations:

One thing we learn from Maddow’s book is that almost all of the seditious American fascists from the 1930s and 40s—people who literally wanted to work together with the Nazis to eliminate or deport the nation’s Jews and turn the country into an authoritarian homeland for white Christians—got off scot free after WWII and went on to live fairly normal lives as people who their neighbors generally thought of as “Commie-hating Christian Patriots,” if perhaps slightly eccentric or kooky ones.

Likely, history will once again consign people like Rudy Giuliani, Sidney Powell, John Eastman, Steve Bannon, convicted insurrectionists from the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers, et al. to the slightly eccentric or kooky category. Those who don’t go to jail will return to their normal lives, their yards, and their pet goldfish.

Cotlar continues:

Let’s take Charles Lindbergh as our first case study. I vividly remember, as a teenager visiting DC for the first time in 1983, staring up in awe at The Spirit of St. Louis hanging from the rafters of the Air and Space Museum. As far as I can remember, Lindbergh’s pro-Nazi sensibilities were not part of what I learned about him on that day. Had that come up, I suspect I would have dismissed it as a fairly unimportant aspect of who that brave aviator was.

It appears that Lindbergh had kind of a cultural moment in the mid-1980s, because in 1985, Minneapolis made the decision to name one of its airport terminals after Mr. “Let’s Put America First Because the Jews are Trying to Drag us into a War” and Mr. “aviation technology was a gift to the white people of the world so we can maintain our dominance over the world’s savage hordes of non-whites.” I blithely flew in and out of Minneapolis’s Lindbergh terminal many times in the 1990s and 2000s, DURING and AFTER my PhD work in US History, and I swear it was not until the mid-2010s that I first thought to myself “hey, wait a minute, why the hell is that Hitler-lover Lindbergh’s name on this terminal?”

I was just as ignorant of the fascist proclivities of Henry Ford, who had a framed picture of Hitler on his desk in the 1930s which was reciprocated by Hitler who had a framed picture of Henry Ford on his desk. I vaguely remember hearing some relatives talk about how Ford was an antisemite, but I imagined that meant he was personally rude to individual Jewish people. I did not know that aside from innovating the Model T and the assembly line (factoids I dutifully learned in history class), he also was responsible for producing and disseminating an enormous barrage of lying, antisemitic propaganda that fueled a violently fascist movement in the pre-WWII era. Many Ford dealerships in the 1920s and 30s placed copies of Ford’s publication (a representative sample below) on the seat of every new Ford they sold. So it’s not that Ford’s antisemitism simply made him guilty of private “wrongthink.” He’s not just “a man of his time” who’s been subjected to unfair cancellation these days by the woke mob and “revisionist historians.” He poured a large chunk of his wealth into building a robust fascist movement that talked openly about eliminating Jewish people from America and the earth. The pro-democracy Americans who fought against fascism in Ford’s time understood that quite well.

The problem is that by not teaching that inconvenient history, the “buffoonishly illiberal bigotry” of the past has a way of slip-sliding its way largely unnoticed into the present. Cotlar presents a list of forgotten minor figures from the fascist movement now resurrecting nearly a hundred years later.

Normalizing such people as mere “anti-communists” or “fundamentalist Christians” or “ultraconservative patriots” or “principled isolationists” was a mistake. So was minimizing them as irrelevant “kooks” or “crackpots.” Both impulses did a real disservice to the nation’s political memory by weakening our antifascist defenses and atrophying our pro-democratic muscles. Gerald LK Smith, for example, had a mailing list of over 3 million names in the 1960s. The Liberty Lobby’s neo-Nazi radio show could be heard on over 470 AM radio stations in that decade. Calling these folks “crackpots” did nothing to stem the torrent of fascist bile they poured into the reservoir of our political culture on a daily basis, bile that was generally ignored as irrelevant by the vast majority of Americans and interpreted as perfectly normal, “patriotic, pro-Christian, anti-Communist Americanism” by the millions of people to whom it appealed.

One of my takeaways (IIRC) from Allan Bloom’s “The Closing of the American Mind,” is how Americans with no knowledge of the history of ideas naively believe the ones in their heads are original, theirs. Those who don’t know the difference are doomed to repeat the same historical mistakes of their forebears. Unless our resurrected fascist movement footsoldiers see them not as mistakes but missed opportunities.

America has a rich history of racism, and it also has a rich democratic history of people and movements that pushed against that racism. America has a rich history of fascism, and it also has a rich democratic history of people and movements that sought to blunt the power and influence of those fascists. In passing down such histories to the rising generations, there’s no need for us to bothsides them as if we should honor them as equally valued and respected parts of our national tapestry. To a great extent, nations are the stories they tell themselves about themselves. One way we can hopefully move toward a more democratic future is by more fully and truthfully telling the history of fascism and those who resisted it in the American past.

Threatening the nation that protects them

Sometimes in grazing the net, a theme appears in otherwise disconnected bits of internet flotsam. The current of electrons this morning delivered several random entries pointing toward the cultural degradation of the very people in this country who decry cultural degradation the loudest. This is the real American carnage, to borrow a phrase.

The meme at the top is one example.

The man who entered American carnage into the lexicon spoke of “Mothers and children trapped in poverty in our inner cities, rusted out factories, scattered like tombstones across the across the landscape of our nation, an education system flush with cash, but which leaves our young and beautiful students deprived of all knowledge.” His most ardent followers are working at this very moment to decimate public education, to proscribe what children can learn, and to ensure children remain in poverty. Violent crime is rampant, he suggested, and does to this day. People believe him.

In fact, violent crime is down. Yes, property crimes are up, but along with hate crimes targeting Blacks, Latinos, and LGBTQ+ Americans. Antisemitic crimes are up as well.

Another bit of flotsam this TikTok video by comedian John Fugelsang, riffing on a theme familar to fans of this son of a former nun and former Fransiscan brother. His targets are the very “people of faith” most devoted to the former president.

Post by @johnfugelsang

View on Threads

The Liberty Way

Perhaps the most damning bit this morning comes from conservative columnist David French. The “most consequential education scandal in the United States,” he writes is not what’s taught at Ivy league schools or your neighborhood schools, but “the moral collapse at Liberty University in Virginia.” You know the one, the religious school founded by Rev. Jerry Falwell.

“Liberty’s misconduct both symbolizes and contributes to the crisis engulfing Christian America. It embodies a cultural and political approach that turns Christian theology on its head,” French writes, unintentionally echoing Fugelsang (New York Times):

Last week, Fox News reported that Liberty is facing the possibility of an “unprecedented” $37.5 million fine from the U.S. Department of Education. The education department has been investigating violations of the Clery Act, a federal statute that requires federally funded colleges and universities to publicly report data about campus crime. To put that number into perspective, consider that Michigan State University paid $4.5 million for its own “systemic failure” to respond to the infamous Larry Nassar sexual abuse scandal, in which Nassar was convicted of sexually abusing dozens of women in his care. While Liberty’s fine is not yet set, the contents of a leaked education department report — first reported by Susan Svrluga in The Washington Post — leave little doubt as to why it may be this large.

The report, as Svrluga writes, “paints a picture of a university that discouraged people from reporting crimes, underreported the claims it received and, meanwhile, marketed its Virginia campus as one of the safest in the country.” The details are grim. According to the report, “Liberty failed to warn the campus community about gas leaks, bomb threats and people credibly accused of repeated acts of sexual violence — including a senior administrator and an athlete.”

A campus safety consultant told Svrluga, “This is the single most blistering Clery report I have ever read. Ever.”

If this was the only scandal at Liberty, it would and should be a national story. But it’s not the only scandal. Far from it. I’ve been following (and covering) Liberty’s moral collapse for years, and the list of scandals and lawsuits plaguing the school is extraordinarily long. The best known of these is the saga of Jerry Falwell Jr. Falwell, the former president and son of the school’s founder, resigned amid allegations of sexual misconduct involving himself, his wife and a pool boy turned business associate named Giancarlo Granda.

Falwell is nationally prominent in part because he was one of Donald Trump’s earliest and most enthusiastic evangelical supporters. Falwell sued the school, the school sued Falwell, and in September Falwell filed a scorching amended complaint, claiming that other high-ranking Liberty officers and board members had committed acts of sexual and financial misconduct yet were permitted to retain their positions

But that’s not all. In 2021, ProPublica published a comprehensive, gut-wrenching report describing how Liberty mishandled claims of sex abuse and sex harassment on campus and used its strict code of conduct, the Liberty Way, against victims of sex abuse. If, for example, a victim had been drinking or engaged in any other conduct prohibited by Liberty policies, those details in their sex abuse complaint could be used against them in school disciplinary proceedings.

Too many Christians, too many Christian institutions, French believes, have gotten Christianity “exactly backwards.” The biggest threat to Christianity is not secular America. Christianity is, as Fugelsang suggests, under attack by fake Christians.

“For a lot of right-wing America, the Bible consists of the Book of Leviticus and the Book of Revelation duct-taped to the entire Left Behind series.” Sad, but true.

French concludes, “Liberty University is consequential not just because it’s an academic superpower in Christian America, but also because it’s a symbol of a key reality of evangelical life — we have met the enemy of American Christianity, and it is us.”

The overlap between French’s targets and MAGA Republicans is substantial. The sadder irony is that the people I now think of as Antide are not only a threat to their own ostensible faith, but to the democratic republic that protects their right to practice it so badly.

This is the test

Ron Brownstein with a typically astute analysis of Biden’s current challenges and whether his long experience will now be seen as an asset:

The escalating confrontation between Israel and Hamas is offering President Joe Biden a crucial opportunity to begin flipping the script on one of his most glaring vulnerabilities in the 2024 presidential race.

For months, polls have consistently shown that most Americans believe Biden’s advanced age has diminished his capacity to handle the responsibilities of the presidency. But many Democrats believe that Biden’s widely praised response to the Mideast crisis could provide him a pivot point to argue that his age is an asset because it has equipped him with the experience to navigate such a complex challenge.

“As you project forward, we are going to be able to argue that Joe Biden’s age has been central to his success because in a time of Covid, insurrection, Russian invasion of Ukraine, now challenges in the Middle East, we have the most experienced man ever as president,” said Democratic strategist Simon Rosenberg. “Perhaps having the most experienced person ever to go into the Oval Office was a blessing for the country. I think we are going to be able to make that argument forcefully.”

Biden unquestionably faces a steep climb to ameliorate the concern that he’s too old for the job. Political strategists in both parties agree that those public perceptions are largely rooted in reactions to his physical appearance – particularly the stiffness of his walk and softness of his voice – and thus may be difficult to reverse with arguments about his performance. In a CNN poll released last month, about three-fourths of adults said Biden did not have “the stamina and sharpness to serve effectively as president” and nearly as many said he does not inspire confidence. Even about half of Democrats said Biden lacked enough stamina and sharpness and did not inspire confidence, with a preponderant majority of Democrats younger than 45 expressing those critical views.

But the crisis in Israel shows the path Biden will probably need to follow if there’s any chance for him to transmute doubts about his age into confidence in his experience. Though critics on the left and right in American politics have raised objections, Biden’s response to the Hamas attack has drawn praise as both resolute and measured from a broad range of leaders across the ideological spectrum in both the US and Israel.

“Biden is in his element here where relationships matter and his team is experienced (meaning operationally effective) and thoughtful (meaning can see forests as well as trees),” James Steinberg, dean of the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, and deputy secretary of state under former President Barack Obama, wrote in an email.

Similarly, David Friedman, who served as ambassador to Israel for then-President Donald Trump, declared late last week, on Fox News Channel no less, that “The Biden administration over the past 12-13 days has been great.”

These responses underscore the fundamental political paradox about Biden’s age, and the experience that derives from it. On the one hand, there’s no doubt that his age is increasing anxiety among Democrats about his capacity to serve as an effective candidate for the presidency in 2024; on the other, his experience is increasing Democratic faith in his capacity to serve as an effective president now.

While more Democrats have been openly pining for another, younger alternative to replace Biden as the party’s nominee next year, many party leaders argued that there was no one from the Democrats’ large 2020 field of presidential candidates, or even among the rising crop of governors and senators discussed as potential successors, that they would trust more at this moment than Biden.

“No one – not a one,” said Matt Bennett, executive vice president for public affairs at Third Way, an organization of centrist Democrats. “That is genuinely the case. And I get people’s uneasiness about him both because he’s old and he has low poll numbers. But that doesn’t mean he isn’t the best person for the job.”

Familiarity with an issue is no guarantee of success: Biden took office with a long-standing determination to end the American deployment in Afghanistan but still executed a chaotic withdrawal. But in responding to global challenges, Biden, who was first elected to the Senate in 1972, is drawing on half a century of dealing with issues and players around the world; even George H.W. Bush, the last president who arrived in office with an extensive foreign policy pedigree, had only about two decades of previous high-level exposure to world events.

This latest crisis has offered more evidence that Biden is more proficient at the aspects of the presidency that unfold offstage than those that occur in public. It’s probably not a coincidence that the private aspects of the presidency are the ones where experience is the greatest asset, while the public elements of the job are those where age may be the greatest burden.

Biden’s speeches about Ukraine, and especially his impassioned denunciations of the Hamas attack over the past two weeks, have drawn much stronger reviews than most of his addresses on domestic issues. (Bret Stephens, a conservative New York Times columnist often critical of Biden, wrote that his first speech after the attack “deserves a place in any anthology of great American rhetoric.”) In Biden’s nationally televised address about Israel and Ukraine on Thursday, he drew on a long tradition of presidents from both parties who presented American international engagement as the key to world stability, even quoting Franklin D. Roosevelt’s call during World War II for the US to serve as the “arsenal of democracy.”

But even when Biden was younger, delivering galvanizing speeches was never his greatest strength. No one ever confused him with Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton or Barack Obama as a communicator and his performance as president hasn’t changed that verdict. Instead, Biden has been at his best when working with other leaders, at home and abroad, out of the public eye.

Biden, for instance, passed more consequential legislation than almost anyone expected during his first two years, but he did not do so by rallying public sentiment or barnstorming the country. Rather, in quiet meetings, he helped to orchestrate a surprisingly effective legislative minuet that produced bipartisan agreements on infrastructure and promoting semiconductor manufacturing before culminating in a stunning agreement with holdout Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia to pass an expansive package of clean energy and health care initiatives with Democrat votes alone.

“He’s showed a degree of political dexterity in managing the coalition that would have been very challenging for anyone else,” said Rosenberg. “His years of actually legislating, where he learned how to bring people together and hash stuff out, was really important in keeping the Democratic family together.”

To the degree Biden has succeeded in international affairs, it has largely been with the same formula of working offstage with other leaders, many of whom he’s known for years, around issues that he has also worked on for years. In the most dramatic example, that sort of private negotiation and collaboration has produced a surprisingly broad and durable international coalition of nations supporting Ukraine against Russia.

Biden’s effort to manage this latest Mideast crisis is centered on his attempts through private diplomacy to support Israel in its determination to disable Hamas, while minimizing the risk of a wider war and maintaining the possibility of diplomatic agreements after the fighting (including, most importantly, a rapprochement between Israel and Saudi Arabia meant to counter Iranian influence). Administration officials believe that the strong support that Biden has expressed for Israel, not only after the latest attack, but through his long career, has provided him with a credibility among the Israeli public that will increase his leverage to influence, and perhaps restrain, the decisions of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

The president “wisely from the very moment of this horror show expressed unfettered solidarity with Israel and that allowed him to then go to Israel and behind closed doors continue the conversation, which I’m sure Secretary [Antony] Blinken started,” said one former senior national security official in the Biden administration, who asked to be anonymous while discussing the situation. That credibility, the former official said, allowed Biden to ask hard questions of the Israelis such as “‘Ok, you are going to send in ground troops and then what? We did shock and awe [in the second Iraq war] and then we found ourselves trapped without a plan. What are you doing? What’s the outcome? Who is going to control Gaza when you’re done whatever you are doing? At least stop and think about this.’”

In all these ways, the Israel confrontation offers Biden an opportunity to highlight the aspects of the presidency for which he is arguably best suited. In the crisis’ first days, former President Trump also provided Biden exactly the sort of personal contrast Democrats want to create when Trump initially responded to the tragic Hamas attack by airing personal grievances against Netanyahu and criticizing the Israeli response to the attack. For some Democrats, Trump’s off-key response crystallized the contrast they want to present next year to voters: “Biden is quiet competence and Trump is chaos and it’s a real choice,” said Jenifer Fernandez Ancona, vice president and chief strategy officer at Way to Win, a liberal group that funds organizations and campaigns focusing on voters of color.

Ancona said Biden’s performance since the Hamas attack points to the case Democrats should be preparing to make to voters in 2024. “He’s been a workhorse not a show pony, but that’s something we can talk about,” she said. “You can show a picture of a president working quietly behind the scenes, you can tell a story of how he has your best interests at heart. It is what it is: he’s, what, 80? You can’t get around that. But I do think he has shown he has the capacity and strength and tenacity to do this job. He’s been doing it. So why shouldn’t he get a chance to keep doing it?”

Likewise, Rosenberg argues, “In my view you can’t separate his age from his successes as president. He’s been successful because of his age and experience not in spite of it, and we have to rethink that completely.”

Other Democrats, though, aren’t sure that Biden can neutralize concerns about his age by making a case for the benefits of his experience. One Democratic pollster familiar with thinking in the Biden campaign, who asked for anonymity while discussing the 2024 landscape, said that highlighting Biden’s experience would only produce limited value for him so long as most voters are dissatisfied with conditions in the country. “The problem with the experience side is that people feel bad,” the pollster said. “If people felt like his accomplishments improved things for them, they wouldn’t care about his age. … The problem with the age vs. experience [argument] is that experience has to produce results for them, but experience isn’t producing results.”

William Galston, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and long-time Democratic strategist, sees another limit to the experience argument. Like most Democrats, Galston believes that Biden’s response to the crisis has, in fact, demonstrated the value of his long track record on international issues. “This is where all of his instincts, honed by decades of experience, come into play,” Galston said. “He knows which people to call when; he knows whom to send where. As was the case in [Ukraine], this is the sort of episode where Biden is at his best.”

The problem, Galston argues, is that voters can see the value of Biden’s experience in dealing with world events today and still worry he could not effectively handle the presidency for another term. “It’s not a logical contradiction,” Galston said, for voters to believe that “‘Yes, over the first four years of his presidency, his experience proved its value, and he had enough energy and focus to be able to draw on it when he needed it’ and at the same time say, ‘I am very worried that over the next four years, in the tension between the advantages of experience and disadvantages of age, that balance is going to shift against him.’”

To assuage concerns about his capacity, Biden will need not only to “tell” voters about the value of his experience but to “show” them his vigor through a rigorous campaign schedule, Galston said. “The experience argument is necessary, but not sufficient,” Galston maintains. “In addition to that argument, assuming it can be made well and convincingly, I think he is going to have to show through his conduct of the campaign that he’s up for another four years.”

Biden’s trips into active war zones in Ukraine and Israel have provided dramatic images that his campaign is already using to make that case. As Galston suggests, the president will surely need to prove the point again repeatedly in 2024.

But most analysts agree that what the president most needs to demonstrate in the months ahead is not energy, but results. His supporters have reason for optimism that Biden’s carefully calibrated response to the Israel-Hamas hostilities will allow them to present him as a reassuring source of stability in an unstable world – in stark contrast to the unpredictability and chaos that Trump, his most likely 2024 opponent, perpetually generates. But Biden’s management of this volatile conflict will help him make that argument only if its outcome, in fact, promotes greater stability in the Middle East. If nothing else, Biden’s long experience has surely taught him how difficult stability will be to achieve in a region once again teetering on the edge of explosion.

I can tell you one thing unequivocally. Whatever Biden’s management of this crisis may end up being judged, it’s bound to be a million times better than if his opponent Orange Julius Caesar was in charge. As far as the next election is concerned, that’s all you need to know.

This latest moral panic is even dumber than usual

Greg Sargent on the latest:

Kim Reynolds, Iowa’s Republican governor, signed a law in May that, among other provisions,requires schools to remove books that depict a “sex act.” That statutory phrase has now helped unleash a frenzy of book-banning across the state, one that illustrates a core truth about these types of censorship directives.

Their vagueness is the point.

When GOP-controlled state legislatures escalated the passage of laws in 2022 and 2023 restricting school materials addressing sex, gender and race, critics warned that their hazy drafting would prod educators to err on the side of censorship. Uncertain whether books or classroom discussions might run afoul of their state’s law, education officials might decide nixing them would be the “safer” option.

What’s happening in Iowa right now thoroughly vindicates those fears. This week, the Iowa City Community School District released a list of 68 books that it removed from schools to comply with the law. Among the titles: “Ulysses” by James Joyce, “Nineteen Minutes” by Jodi Picoult, “The Handmaid’s Tale” by Margaret Atwood and “The Bluest Eye” by Toni Morrison.

The Iowa law requires K-12 schools to remove materials that depict any one of a series of sex acts that include intercourse and other types of genital contact. The law also bans instruction on gender identity or sexual orientation before seventh grade.

Beyond Iowa City, the Des Moines Register reports that school districts across the state have removed hundreds of books from their school libraries, also in response to that law. Among these titles: “1984” by George Orwell, “Brave New World” by Aldous Huxley, “Slaughterhouse-Five” by Kurt Vonnegut and “Forrest Gump” by Winston Groom.

To be clear, what’s happening here is not necessarily the fault of the districts themselves. Their administrators have worked for months to determine which books must be removed to comply with the law. They’ve asked the state for guidance, but it has mostly not been forthcoming — leaving them in the tough position of navigating the law on their own.

That has led districts to flag books with depictions of “sex acts” that aren’t lascivious or lewd and often aren’t important parts of their content, said Margaret Buckton, a lobbyist for the Rural School Advocates of Iowa. As Buckton told me, “fear” is “motivating districts to interpret even vague descriptions of a ‘sex act’ that aren’t pornographic as meeting this definition.”

No one disputes that in plenty of cases materials depicting such acts should be removed. Nonetheless, the law and the subsequent lack of state guidance are plainly causing officials to cast a wide net. “Many literary classics have sex in them,” said Jonathan Friedman, director of free expression and education programs at PEN America. “But now the term ‘sex act’ is turning into a blunt instrument to remove scores of books that have all kinds of literary merit and cultural significance.”

Variations of this are proliferating across the country. In Spotsylvania County, Va., school officials removed14books because of a state law concerning “sexually explicit” material, and it included two by Toni Morrison. In Missouri, a similar law prompted school librarians to pull dozens and dozens of titles, including “1984” and “The Handmaid’s Tale.”

And just this past week, children’s publisher Scholastic declared that it has created for its book fairs a separate category for some titles about sexuality, gender and race. That is meant to alert organizers of fairs in states with onerous laws such as Iowa’s to books that might constitute violations without forcing them to sift through the entire Scholastic collection to determine which could be unlawful.

But that separate batch also includes uncontroversial books that merely display tolerance for LGBTQ+ people or tell the life story of Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, as Judd Legum reports on his Substack. Putting such books in that cordoned-off category could risk making them more likely to be excluded from fairs.

Scholastic spokeswoman Anne Sparkman told me that thousands of bookfairs have opted not to include that separate category of titles, which is highly unfortunate, but she also noted that thousands have included them. As Sparkman rightly pointed out, the haziness of many laws already has many local educators guessing at which books to exclude to avoid self-incrimination, and Scholastic — which opposes such laws on principle — understandably feels obliged to help them navigate this “ambiguity,” even if there’s no easy way to do so.

Just as critics predicted, all this vagueness and uncertainty is actively encouraging local education officials to sweep ever more broadly, undertaking more and more book removals in a kind of ever-expanding vortex. In this, one might argue, those laws are functioning exactly as intended.

Great. maybe the kids should just spend all their time reading the Bible. Nothing sexual in that….. oh wait.

I wonder if any of these parents have heard of the internet. Do they think their kids are spending all their time looking at cat videos and cookie recipes? I have news for them.

Trump doesn’t think it is

Trouble in wingnut paradise?

Fox News was essential to Donald Trump’s success in both of his last presidential runs. Now, as the former president navigates another campaign through a tidal wave of indictments and legal problems, he’s facing a much frostier relationship with the cable giant—and that could be bad news for both of them.

In recent months, Trump’s inner circle has become convinced that Fox News is essentially sidelining the former president by restricting live appearances on the network.

“Trump is not allowed live on Fox,” a Trump operative told The Daily Beast, chalking it up to “fear” that Trump could level a baseless allegation that could leave the network in a legal mess.

A Trump adviser told The Daily Beast a similar story—that the former president isn’t allowed live on air anymore, and that Fox News prefers to have Trump in a pre-recorded setting.

“Fox sent down word from the top that they don’t want to ‘platform’ Trump like they did before,” a Trump adviser told The Daily Beast. “I find it hilarious. For one, it sounds like something MSNBC would do.”

After a lengthy hiatus last year, Trump re-emerged on Fox News in March, but in a diminished capacity in a string of interviews with Fox hosts and anchors including Sean Hannity, Bret Baier, and Larry Kudlow. Gone are the days when Trump could simply call in live and share his stream of consciousness.

According to a search by The Daily Beast and Media Matters for America, Trump last phoned in live to a Fox News program in April of 2022. And Matt Gertz, senior fellow at Media Matters, told The Daily Beast the live freeze-out is no accident.

“Fox News’ record defamation settlement stemmed in part from its on-air Trump fanatics refusing to correct their guests’ election-denial conspiracy theories live, even when they knew their claims were lies,” Gertz said. “It’s wildly implausible to imagine the likes of Sean Hannity pushing back on Trump’s rigged-election fantasies, so it looks like Fox’s lawyers may have engineered a solution that doesn’t require its propagandists to perform journalism.”

One Trump confidant contrasted the apparent ban on Trump’s live appearances to earlier Fox News coverage, when they “used to go live at every single one of his rallies!”

As The Brookings Institution noted this year, Fox News’ “long-term influence may have paved the way for the power of Trumpism.” A poll conducted by The New York Times and Sienna College this year found that—as Brookings put it—the network can substantially impact viewers’ opinions by intensifying their already held right-wing beliefs.

In August, The New York Times reported that, before the first GOP presidential debate, Fox News executives pitched Trump on why he should attend their debate during a dinner at his Bedminster golf club. Trump played footsie with the idea of attending the debate, but ultimately never showed.

As Trump runs for president a third consecutive election—this time, with court appearances taking up much of his schedule—a direct line to Fox and its audience would be a convenient arrangement for him. But after Trump has made a sport of trashing Fox News, as well as that $787 million Fox News settlement with Dominion Voting Systems, Fox doesn’t seem interested in actively promoting Trump—at least not during the primary.

Fox News representatives did not return a request for comment on this story. And a Trump campaign spokesperson declined to offer on-the-record comment.

But a Trump adviser suggested that Fox News’ standoff with the former president risked alienating Trump’s base of MAGA-loving viewers.

“Trump and his supporters are the lifeblood of Fox’s business, so they’re shooting themselves, not in the foot, more like in the face,” this adviser said.

While most aides The Daily Beast spoke with believe Fox News is engaging in a strategic plan to bar Trump from live time, pinning down an official policy regarding Trump’s exclusion from live interviews is tricky. If the policy is explicit, Fox certainly isn’t spreading the word about it.

“I don’t know if it’s a black-and-white rule,” a second Trump adviser told The Daily Beast. “For Fox, they love a controlled environment. And remember, for a long time, they didn’t have him on, for months, so I think this was the next step.”

One of the sources argued that Trump prefers live Fox News interviews because of the lack of edits, something the former president seemingly confirmed at a campaign rally in Clive, Iowa, earlier this week.

“See, I love live television, because they can’t cut you off, or they’re gonna have a lot of open time, if they do,” Trump said.

Earlier this year, Semafor reported that the Trump operation believed there was a “soft ban” regarding Trump appearing on Fox News.

“Everyone knows that there’s this ‘soft ban’ or ‘silent ban,’” the news outlet reported, citing a source “close” to the former president. However, since then, Trump has made a number of appearances on Fox.

Only his appearances all have portions left on the cutting room floor.

Notably, the second Trump adviser said Trump had noticed Fox News editing his interviews—which, this source said, was intentional.

“The last few interviews he’s done, whether it’s been Hannity or [Mark] Levin, or others—they have come to Mar-a-Lago or Bedminster, so those cannot be live because they are a taped piece,” this Trump adviser said.

“One of the reasons they also do it is they are able to edit his words,” this adviser continued—specifically mentioning Trump’s false claims of a fraudulent 2020 election as a topic that’s left out of the final piece.

Following his 2020 election loss, the former president has frequently lashed out at Fox News and their respective executives, often in late-night rants on his social media site, Truth Social.

“FOX SHOULD EMBRACE MAGA,” Trump wrote in a Truth Social post this past June. “DESPITE ALL THE FAKE LIP SERVICE, FOXNEWS [sic] IS PUSHING RON DESANCTUS, OR ANYONE ELSE FOR THAT MATTER, BECAUSE THEY HATE THE GREATEST ‘AMERICA FIRST’ PRESIDENT TO EVER PUT ON A SUIT AND TIE, ME.”

The former president has also claimed the network employs “globalists” and challenged the network’s parent company founder, Rupert Murdoch, to an “acuity test.”

Asked about Trump’s current thinking, a source close to the president told The Daily Beast that Trump’s words on Fox “speak for themselves.”

But the frustration hasn’t only been from the former president. His son, Donald Trump Jr., claimed that the network that once employed his fiancée, Kimberly Guilfoyle, hasn’t welcomed him on air in “months.”

“I used to be on Fox three, four, five, six, 10 times a week. I haven’t been on in nine months. Not a call, not an invite, not anything,” Trump Jr. said back in May, as The Daily Beast reported at the time.

Trump’s other adult son, Eric Trump, appeared on the network in August to speak on his father’s ongoing legal problems. But when it comes to Trump’s relationship with Fox News, it’s long been complicated.

Trump, of course, has steadfast allies at the network—mostly in the form of Hannity and Levin. But both hosts are on the opinion side of the network. The news side, which uses a bit more discretion with fact-checks, has always been a little more oppositional to Trump, just by nature of Trump’s tortured relationship with the truth.

But the reality is, it’s not Fox that has taken up arms against Trump; it’s Trump that has taken up against Fox.

“Why is Rupert Murdoch throwing his anchors under the table, which also happens to be killing his case and infuriating his viewers,” Trump wondered on Truth Social in February.

Trump and his team seem to mostly blame Murdoch for the complicated standoff, touting his positive relationship with Hannity and some other anchors.

But whether Fox warms back up to Trump—or Trump warms back up to Fox—is an open question. Some Trump advisers seem to think both sides will thaw once they’re out of the GOP primary.

“The Murdochs are candidate shopping just like the rest of the donor class that hates Trump,” the first Trump adviser said. “They told their mouthpieces to push DeSantis. Now Haley. Who cares? They’ll go through the whole list and then Trump will still be the guy. It makes them look incredibly weak, which they are.”

While the immediate situation doesn’t seem to be getting any better, Trump allies are betting on the network coming back around.

“The fact is, they will all come and bend the knee soon and they will be begging and pleading,” a Trumpworld operative familiar with the standoff said. “‘Please can I come to dinner? Please will you come on the show?’”

So much winning. And that guy may very well be right. Once Trump officially secures the nomination their audience is going to want to see him constantly and he will be in a position to dictate the terms. They won’t want to leave money on the table.