Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

If you’re ineligible to run for president….

If Donald Trump wants admission to the dictators’ club with Vladimir Putin and Viktor Orbán and Kim Jong Un, he’ll have to prove himself worthy. That’s his plan.

You laugh? Just you wait. Right now he’s busy being prosecuted.

The former and would-be president’s antics on the witness stand Monday in his Manhattan financial fraud trial were as Michael Cohen predicted. Question his net worth and he’ll lose it. Trump was so fixated on maintaining his Richie Rich image that according to press accounts he never once mentioned the 2020 election being stolen from him. It’s that important to him.

Trump rambled. He blustered. He bragged. He insulted the judge and New York Attorney General Letitia James. New York Supreme Court Judge Arthur Engoron multiple times urged Trump’s attorneys to get their client under control. It was as useless as expecting a fussy two-year-old to behave in a fancy restaurant.

Former Watergate prosecutor Jill Wine-Banks said of Trump’s courtroom misbehavior, “This is why we need cameras in the courtroom. Hearing reporters describe Trump’s testimony and loss of control is no substitute for seeing it for ourselves. Let elected and appointed officials know you want cameras in all his trials.”

“Part of what Trump accomplished,” Aaron Blake noted, “was setting a tone for his other cases, including the criminal ones. Nothing will come easy when you go after Trump.”

He’ll get even if you try. He’s planning on it already, the Washington Post reported:

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

The 14th Amendment may make Trump ineligible to run for president. But the Constitution says nothing about running for dictator.

“It is time to be very, very afraid,” wrote Post associate editor Ruth Marcus.

Slouching towards Lower Slobbovia

Trump already has an enemies list, “including his former chief of staff, John F. Kelly, and former attorney general William P. Barr, as well as his ex-attorney Ty Cobb and former Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman Gen. Mark A. Milley,” say the Post’s anonymous sources. FBI and Justice Department officials are among his targets too, says another. And “Joe Biden,” of course, for having the temerity to beat him in 2020. And Biden’s family.

To facilitate Trump’s ability to direct Justice Department actions, his associates have been drafting plans to dispense with 50 years of policy and practice intended to shield criminal prosecutions from political considerations. Critics have called such ideas dangerous and unconstitutional.

Trump plans to go full Queen of Hearts if not biblical. “This is third-world-country stuff, ‘arrest your opponent,’” Stubbornovsky the Last said at a campaign stop in New Hampshire in October. “And that means I can do that, too.”

Much of the planning for a second term has been unofficially outsourced to a partnership of right-wing think tanks in Washington. Dubbed “Project 2025,” the group is developing a plan, to include draft executive orders, that would deploy the military domestically under the Insurrection Act, according to a person involved in those conversations and internal communications reviewed by The Washington Post. The law, last updated in 1871, authorizes the president to deploy the military for domestic law enforcement.

The proposal was identified in internal discussions as an immediate priority, the communications showed. In the final year of his presidency, some of Trump’s supporters urged him to invoke the Insurrection Act to put down unrest after the murder of George Floyd in the summer of 2020, but he never did it. Trump has publicly expressed regret about not deploying more federal force and said he would not hesitate to do so in the future.

The New York Times reported in July that Trump plans to “alter the balance of power by increasing the president’s authority over every part of the federal government that now operates, by either law or tradition, with any measure of independence from political interference by the White House.”

What may be most alarming is the lack of alarm among Americans in general, much less mobilization. Trump’s MAGA foot soldiers? They hunger to be led by their man-child-king. The rest seem blissfully unaware that the Party of Trump has abandoned democracy save for going through the motions.

From Salon:

“This is the nightmare scenario that to millions of Americans is unfathomable but realistically possible,” Bennett Gershman, a former New York prosecutor and law professor at Pace University, told Salon. “It is also the scenario that millions of Americans look forward to with glee and the opportunity for retribution against the enemies of Trump.”

What’s a little pogrom if the tree of Trumpism needs watering?

Don’t it always seem to go…

Tom Nichols frets in The Atlantic:

The coalition of prodemocracy voters—I am one of them—is shocked at the relative lack of outrage when Trump says hideous things. (The media’s complacency is a big part of this problem, but that’s a subject for another day.) For many of us, it feels as if Trump put up a billboard in Times Square that says “I will end democracy and I will in fact shoot you in the middle of Fifth Avenue if that’s what it takes to stay in power” and no one noticed.

Trump hasn’t taken out billboards, but at his rallies and press events he’s shouting it all as loud as he can, and the people around him are making plans to carry out his wishes. Meanwhile, millions of voters are folding their arms like shirty children and threatening to sit out the election because they don’t like their choices. Some are threatening to withhold support, in particular, for Joe Biden if they don’t get their way about student loans, climate change, or policy toward Israel. They are living in a booming economy that is outperforming any other developed nation since the start of the pandemic on many measures—and they are miserable and angry about it.

Many voters resent hearing all of this. They think they are being bullied into a binary choice between two candidates they do not like, and so they engage in wishcasting: If only someone could beat Trump for the GOP nomination (no one will); if only Biden would step down (he won’t); if only America didn’t rely on the Electoral College (it does); and so on. Trump and Biden are headed for a showdown unless illness or death intervenes. Even if Trump goes to prison, the Republican Party has become so fully corrupted that he could likely still run and get the nomination anyway. And the Electoral College isn’t going anywhere, either.

Trump aims not to make the mistakes he made in his first term. He’ll make new ones. It’s not clear he’s capable of learning from his old ones, but his antidemocratic acolytes have.

“We don’t want careerists, we don’t want people here who are opportunists,” said Project 2025 director Paul Dans. “We want conservative warriors.”

Guess who they’re going to war against?

The perennial question

The Faye Dunaway character in “Network” explained Howard Beale’s popularity: “The American people are turning sullen. They’ve been clobbered on all sides by Vietnam, Watergate, the inflation, the depression; they’ve turned off, shot up, and they’ve fucked themselves limp, and nothing helps. The American people want somebody to articulate their rage for them.”

Is Trump just Howard Beale? It’s as good an explanation as anything, I guess. But remember, Howard Beale was certifiably nuts.

The man is a disgraceful pig. His antics on the witness stand today were beyond outrageous. Lisa Rubin on NBC describes his testimony as “someone who was not in control of his id today.” He’s not in control of his id any day. And yet, he is leading in the battleground states right now because Joe Biden is old and foolish people have bought into his hype that he personally made the economy perfect when he was in office. (It wasn’t, they just have short memories.) It’s infuriating.

Meanwhile, his cult is so impervious to any facts that tarnish their Dear Leader that they are now living in an alternate universe. Look what happened in Florida this weekend:

Please listen to this message I delivered to the Florida GOP. If you agree with me then go to https://t.co/RzzpNHlC00 and support with a $20.24 contribution.

pic.twitter.com/1ULAcOaRRN

— Gov. Asa Hutchinson (@AsaHutchinson) November 4, 2023

Trump acted the way he did on the stand because he knows he has an armed mob backing him up.

Lest we lose hope, there is this:

If the former president is convicted and sentenced — as many of his allies expect him to be in the Jan. 6-related trial held next year in Washington, D.C. — around 6 percent of voters across Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin say they would switch their votes to Mr. Biden. That would be enough, potentially, to decide the election.

That could do it. But it’s almost paralyzingly depressing to realize that only 6% of voters who currently support Trump would reject him if he’s a convicted felon. It’s stunning. To bring back a common refrain during the Clinton impeachment, “what do we tell the children?”

Look to the Double Haters

Dan Pfeiffer does some useful analysis about the NY Times poll and the “double haters” in his newsletter:

I am still processing this poll and will have more to say in the coming days. But I do not want to sugarcoat it. While some of Trump’s gains among Black, Hispanic, and young voters may be hard to believe, numbers like these are broadly consistent with the trendlines in recent polls. This poll shows that not only can Trump win, he might now be a slight favorite to do so. Even if we don’t take the results literally, we should take them very, very seriously.

Instead of doom-scrolling and tweeting through our panic, we should see this poll as a roadmap on how to reconstitute the anti-MAGA majority. We have to persuade the voters we have lost since 2020. Here’s one place to start.

Who are the “Double Haters”

Every election cycle, the political press likes to identify a specific group of voters as the ones to decide the election. In past cycles, we have seen “Reagan Democrats,” “Soccer Moms,” and “Security Moms.” This entire process is more than a little silly. Voters are much more complex than the buckets into which pundits try to shove them. In recent years, our elections have been so close that every demographic group is make or break.

However, there is utility to identifying segments of the electorate to track progress and test messaging. The flip side of “everyone and everything matters because our elections are so close” is that making even marginal improvements among one segment of the electorate can have an outsized effect on the outcome.

For this upcoming election, a group of voters called “Double Haters” — voters who disapprove of both Biden and Trump — are the focus. Recent polls show why they are so critical and what Democrats can do to win them back.

Why the Double Haters Are Key

Unite the Country, a pro-Biden Super PAC, recently polled the key battleground states of Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. Trump won these states in 2016. Biden won them in 2020 and whoever wins them in 2024 will almost certainly win the election. While Biden and Trump are tied, Trump leads by 3 points among the “Double Haters.”

In 2016, Trump won this group by 17 points. In 2020, Biden won it by 7. Trump’s improved standing among the “Double Haters” helps explain why he is doing better in the polls than at any time in the last eight years.

Who Are the Double Haters?

According to the Unite the Country polling, the “Double Haters” have a few similar characteristics:

Educational Background: 49% of “these voters are more likely to have a bachelor’s degree or higher compared to the full sample (41%).

Partisan Lean: these voters lean more Republican (+12 GOP) than the total sample (+2 Dem).

Gender Composition: 51% are men compared to 47% in the total sample.

Voting Patterns: Trump won these voters by 17% in 2016, but Biden/Trump was a push among them. 

In summary, the “Double Haters” are slightly more Republican, male, and college-educated than the overall electorate. This group also encompasses a large number of people who voted for Trump in 2016 but flipped to Biden in 2020. Holding onto those Trump to Biden voters is a strategic imperative.

One important note on this group: the “Double Haters” who voted for Biden in 2020 are not necessarily the same group of voters in this poll. It’s a fluid group; some folks didn’t approve of Biden then but might now, and the reverse could also be true.

How to Win Them Over

There are a myriad of reasons why these “Double Haters” could be down on Biden — there are Republicans who voted for Biden out of anti-Trump animus, Independents angry about inflation and the border, and younger progressives who disagree with the President’s approach to the crisis in the Middle East. Messaging to such a complex and contradictory group seems like a nearly impossible task. However, a new poll from Navigator Research shows that turning the “Double Haters” into Biden voters is feasible.

Perhaps the simplest explanation of Biden’s political challenges is that he has done a lot of good, popular things, and almost no one knows about them. Navigator tested a series of messages about Biden’s various accomplishments, including allowing Medicare to negotiate for lower drug costs, the bipartisan law to rebuild roads and bridges, and efforts to create more manufacturing jobs in the U.S.

Guess what? All of this stuff is super popular. Medicare negotiating drug prices is supported by 77% of Americans, including 64% of Republicans. The bipartisan infrastructure law has the support of 73% of Americans and a majority of Republicans. Every accomplishment tested in this poll had majority support. It’s hard to overstate how impressive that is in a deeply divided, highly polarized country at a time when the President’s approval ratings are in the low 40s.

That’s the good news. Here’s the bad news: according to the poll, a majority of Americans heard little or nothing about the accomplishments tested. There is a yawning knowledge gap.

Now for more good news (think of this as a positive sandwich); the poll shows that when people are told about what Biden has done, his approval rating goes up. The voters most likely to move are the “Double Haters.”

The Biden campaign and Super PACs like Unite the Country cannot do everything. We all have a role to play. I am confident you have “Double Haters” among your friends and family. I certainly do. The research shows voters are more likely to be persuaded by people they know. Let’s work to educate people about everything Biden has done to grow the economy, create jobs, and lower costs. The best language to use is in the Navigator Poll. When you see ads like the one above or this one from Future Forward, post it online or drop it into the group chat with your family and friends.

There is a clear roadmap to winning in 2024. It won’t be easy, but it can be done. If — and only if — we do the work.

I have had conversations among people I know in which they always start off bemoaning Biden’s age. It’s become the national political conversation. He’s old, old, old. But when you move past that and start to talk about the accomplishments of the administration which many of them are only vaguely aware of and then pivot to the monumental threat of the opposition the conversation shifts. The age thing has become a knee jerk response similar to how people would react to Hillary Clinton (in that case, either “but her emails” or “I just can’t stand that woman.”) It’s a testament to how successful the right continues to be at working the media.

I don’t think this is hopeless at all, as you know. But it will require Democrats who understand the stakes to inform those who have understandably withdrawn from politics that those stakes have never been higher.

Israelis want Bibi gone:

Angry protesters paid Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu a home visit over the weekend, chanting, “jail now!” They were echoing rising cries from across the country for the veteran Israeli leader to step down.

A new poll by an Israeli news station found that 76% of respondents want Netanyahu to resign. Many blame him for the security failures behind Hamas’ Oct. 7 terror rampage across southern Israel.

“He must resign!” shouted Moshe Radman outside Netanyahu’s home over the weekend.

Radman is one of the Israelis who’s been leading the protests against the country’s leader. Asked by CBS News what motivated him, he said it was Netanyahu “lying again and again and again.”

“A leader needs to think 100% about our soldiers and our country and 0% about himself,” he said. “This is for sure not Netanyahu.”

Even before the Hamas attack, anger at the veteran Israeli politician was snowballing — over his move to strike down the Israeli Supreme Court’s independence this year, over corruption charges he’s still battling that date back to 2016, and for billing himself as “mister security” in campaign videos.

In one campaign ad from 2015, he said Israelis would head to the polls to “choose who will take care of our children.”

More than three dozen of those children are believed to be among the 241 people Israel says were taken hostage by Hamas.

The Oct. 7 terror attack was Israel’s biggest security failure in decades, and the prime minister has not apologized or taken any responsibility for the apparent lapses behind it.

“He thinks about 50 years ahead of time,” Tal Schneider, a political correspondent for The Times of Israel, told CBS News. “He doesn’t want to have anything on record saying he has responsibility for anything.”

Schneider said a loyal cult of support has kept Netanyahu in power — “a base of loyalists,” she said, in addition to his own political savvy.

“Netanyahu as a prime minister was compared to President Trump,” she said. “Netanyahu is much more sophisticated.”

But given the most recent polling, it’s unclear if Netanyahu’s political career will survive the next time Israelis are asked to elect a leader.

“Enough with it,” protest leader Radman told CBS News. “Our country deserves better. Our people deserve better.”

He’s hanging on by extending the attack on Gaza. Here you see how having a criminal strongman in charge can go wrong.

Word to the wise.

Whomever made this, bravo!
pic.twitter.com/75H43v32RT

— Majestic (@MajesticResists) November 5, 2023

How do they explain this?

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

— Bill Grueskin (@BGrueskin) November 6, 2023

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

— Brian Klaas (@brianklaas) November 6, 2023

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

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

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

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

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

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

Engoron: “No, not at this point.”

Trump: “Shock”

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

(They’re right next to each other.)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Salon

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

Not a joke:

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

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

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

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

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

— Receipt Maven (@receiptmaven) October 31, 2023

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

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

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

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

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

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) November 5, 2023

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

Speaking of which:

@PeterVroom1

Nov 4 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

If only there were cameras

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

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

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

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

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

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

and the royalist style in American politics

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

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

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

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

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

Who’s really entitled here?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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