Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

Philip Bump has an unusual analysis of the coming race that I find rather depressing but on target:

One of the unusual dynamics of the 2016 presidential race was that neither candidate was particularly well-liked. Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton were viewed more unfavorably than favorably by Election Day, with perceptions of each candidate at historic lows.

Seven years later, though, this seems almost unremarkable. National politics have been mired in toxicity for so long that it’s sort of hard to imagine a contest in which voters were choosing between two candidates that they liked, rather than picking the least undesirable option.

But this is where we are. Meaning that one of the most interesting questions about the 2024 contest — one that will by all appearances feature a rematch of the one three years ago — is how those Americans who view both candidates unfavorably will vote.

After all, they made the difference in 2016.

Not nationally, mind you. Exit polling showed that about a fifth of voters who cast ballots in 2016 viewed both candidates unfavorably. Let’s call them the “haters.” Within that 18 percent, Trump got just under 50 percent of the vote, a 17-point advantage over Clinton.

This pattern trickled down into the states. In Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, which Trump flipped from Democratic victories in 2012, about a fifth of voters viewed both Trump and Clinton unfavorably. Trump won majorities of those voters in each state.

That was important! Had all of those haters stayed home, exit polling suggests that Clinton would have won Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — and the presidency. But they didn’t.

In 2020, the dynamics were different. Trump was still unpopular but Joe Biden wasn’t. By Election Day, only 3 percent of voters indicated that they viewed both candidates negatively. Trump still won that vote nationally and in the swing states of Georgia and Wisconsin, according to exit polls.

Why don’t we know who won the vote in the other states that flipped from red to blue in 2020? Because there simply weren’t enough members of the hater voting bloc to break out their results. It’s a useful point to remember that exit polls are broad estimates of who voted and how, and that the more precision you seek by picking out narrower demographic groups, the less precise they become. The relatively small hater bloc, though, was also a function of Biden having generally positive ratings from voters — a situation that has changed in the subsequent three years.

Because there were far fewer haters, the effects of their preference for Trump was more muted. In neither Georgia nor Wisconsin did they swing things for Trump — obviously, since he lost both.

So now the questions become “how many haters will there be in 2024” and “how will they vote?” Polling released from Quinnipiac University on Wednesday offers an early estimate.

Very early, obviously. We don’t even know who the major-party nominees will be (though we can guess) and lots of things can change between now and the election that will occur a year from now. We have a recent example of this; in November 2019, did you expect 2020 to center heavily on a global viral outbreak? But with those qualifiers stated, the Quinnipiac poll is still useful.

At this point, the school’s polling finds that about 4 in 10 Americans view Biden and Trump favorably. As you’d expect, that’s centered heavily within members of each candidate’s party; most independents view both men unfavorably. (Independents often lean their support toward one party or the other not because they like that party more — they’d just join the party if they did! — but because they dislike the other one.) Overall, only 2 percent of respondents view both candidates favorably. Seventeen percent view both unfavorably.

There’s a trick to comparing polling before the election with polls taken after people vote: many of those who respond to Quinnipiac’s poll won’t cast a ballot. Among those who say they like neither candidate, for example, 1 in 8 say they won’t vote in 2024. Among those who have a vote preference (about 4 in 5 respondents), Biden has a narrow, nonsignificant advantage.

But there’s a twist in 2024: Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Cornel West are running independent candidacies. There are systemic challenges to this; both candidates will have a challenge in getting on the ballot in every state. Quinnipiac included Kennedy in a 2024 preference question anyway, finding that he drew significant support from both candidates. And, among haters with a vote preference, he was the runaway winner.

Again, this will change. About 3 in 10 respondents don’t have an opinion of Kennedy. If they form one over the next year, those opinions may not be favorable, meaning that the haters are again left without someone they view particularly positively. As the polling stands, though, it suggests a possibility that neither major-party candidate might benefit substantially from the hater vote.

Kennedy’s candidacy disrupts the advantage that Trump had in 2016. He was the candidate of disruption, of upending the way things worked. If you held a cynical view of both candidates, you might also have a cynical view of politics in general, meaning that you might lean toward a candidate who — even if you didn’t like him — promised to break the system. In 2024, those same voters might view the new outsider, Kennedy, as the conduit for rearranging how Washington works. Just as Biden’s favorability has constricted following his tenure in office, Trump’s ability to position himself as an outsider is likely to have declined.

There remain a lot of people who dislike both major-party candidates. It’s unusually unclear, though, whether their views will help decide who becomes president in January 2025.

I can’t imagine any Democrats thinking that Biden is just as bad as Trump but the nation’s sour mood dictates a certain amount of irrationality so it’s predictable. I guess I’m hoping that most of them will come to their senses in the next year. It’s really … destructive. (A lot of people are hating on Biden for his backing of Israel but this predates October 7th. )

Whatever the reasons, it’s looking like it will be a very close election, third party spoilers or not, so we all need to gird ourselves for a brutal campaign.

New Q Poll:

In a hypothetical 2024 general election matchup between President Biden and former President Trump, 47 percent of registered voters support Biden, while 46 percent support Trump, a virtual dead heat. This is unchanged from Quinnipiac University’s August and September national polls.

In today’s poll, Democrats support Biden 94 – 4 percent and Republicans support Trump 94 – 4 percent. Independents are split, with 45 percent supporting Trump and 44 percent supporting Biden.

When the hypothetical 2024 general election matchup broadens to include environmental lawyer and anti- vaccine activist Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. who is running as an independent candidate, Biden receives 39 percent support, Trump receives 36 percent support, and Kennedy receives 22 percent support.

Among independents, 36 percent support Kennedy, 31 percent support Trump, and 30 percent support Biden.

When progressive activist Cornel West who is running as an independent candidate is added to make a four-person hypothetical 2024 general election matchup, voters give Biden 36 percent support, Trump 35 percent support, Kennedy 19 percent support, and West 6 percent support.

At this point it doesn’t look as though it changes the dynamic much. But, of course, it al depends upon that undemocratic anachronistic atrocity the electoral college. That’s where the third party candidates will do their mischief.

And, by the way, this doesn’t take into account the No Labels sabotage party.

Why these people feel they need to do this now, of all times, is reminiscent of certain , shall we say, errors on the part of opposition parties in Germany in the 1930s. It’s terrifying.

God has blessed Mike Johnson, hasn’t She?

Associated Press:

Before House Speaker Mike Johnson was elected to public office, he was the dean of a small Baptist law school that didn’t exist.

The establishment of the Judge Paul Pressler School of Law was supposed to be a capstone achievement for Louisiana College, which administrators boasted would “unashamedly embrace” a “biblical worldview.” Instead, it collapsed roughly a decade ago without enrolling students or opening its doors amid infighting by officials, accusations of financial impropriety and difficulty obtaining accreditation, which frightened away would-be donors.

There is no indication that Johnson engaged in wrongdoing while employed by the private college, now known as Louisiana Christian University. But as a virtually unknown player in Washington, the episode offers insight into how Johnson navigated leadership challenges that echo the chaos, feuding and hard-right politics that have come to define the Republican House majority he now leads.

[…]

J. Michael Johnson Esq., as he was then known professionally, was hired in 2010 to be the “inaugural dean” of the Judge Paul Pressler School of Law, named for a Southern Baptist Convention luminary who was instrumental in the faith group’s turn to the political right in the 1980s. The board of trustees who brought Johnson onboard included Tony Perkins, a longtime mentor who is now the president of the Family Research Council in Washington, a powerhouse Christian lobbying organization that the Southern Poverty Law Center classifies as an anti-gay “hate group.”

About Judge Paul Pressler. Houston Chronicle [December 27, 2017]:

A former Texas justice and prominent conservative religious leader has been accused in a state court lawsuit of sexually abusing a Houston man for decades, starting when he was a teenager.

The lawsuit, filed in Harris County court, claims Paul Pressler III sexually assaulted Gareld Duane Rollins Jr. beginning in 1979, when Rollins was 14 and Pressler was a justice on Texas’ 14th Court of Appeals, and continuing until 2004.

Houston Chronicle [April 13, 2018]:

The list of men accusing a former Texas state judge and leading figure of the Southern Baptist Convention of sexual misconduct continues to grow.

In separate court affidavits filed this month, two men say Paul Pressler molested or solicited them for sex in a pair of incidents that span nearly 40 years. Those accusations were filed as part of a lawsuit filed last year by another man who says he was regularly raped by Pressler.

Pressler’s newest accusers are another former member of a church youth group and a lawyer who worked for Pressler’s former law firm until 2017.

The details are predictably salacious. The case was eventually dismissed as too old to pursue in court.

None of this was public in 2010 when Johnson’s job was to launch a law school named after Pressler who had paid Rollins $450,000 in a confidential 2004 settlement. It’s just that these things conform to a predictable pattern among so many whose eyes are very publicly on heaven while their hands are privately in people’s privates.

He’ll stop Hummus from starting WWII in Sioux Falls

The former president has a full schedule of trials and court actions in addition to trying to run for president. It’s no wonder Donald Trump doesn’t know where he is from minute to minute.

In addition to his civil fraud case being tried in Manhattan, and U.S. District Court Judge Aileen Cannon trying to delay his Classified Documents trial for him in Florida, and ongoing probes by special prosecutor Jack Smith in the Jan. 6 case, and Fulton Cpunty D.A. Fanni Willis breathing down his neck in Georgia, Trump has lawyers trying to stop a case in Colorado that would ban him from the 2024 ballot there based on the 14th Amendment. A Colorado judge on Wednesday denied their motion to dismiss that suit.

All that and repeated violations of his gag order stemming from middle-of-the-night tweets from a man who seems to get little sleep. Is it projection that Trump settled on calling President Biden “Sleepy Joe”?

Today it appears Trump’s attorneys will have to defend him in a 14th Amendment case in Minnesota (The Guardian):

Attorneys at the Minnesota supreme court will argue on Thursday that former President Donald Trump should not be allowed to appear on the state’s ballots for president because of his efforts to overturn the 2020 election and role in the insurrection.

A group of voters wants the courts to weigh a clause in the 14th amendment, which disqualifies an “officer of the United States” who has taken an oath to defend the constitution from holding office if they have “engaged in insurrection or rebellion” against the country. In dozens of pages in their initial court filing, they cite examples of Trump’s election interference, from the fake electors scheme to his comments to rioters on 6 January 2021.

“Despite having sworn an oath to support the Constitution of the United States, Trump ‘engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or [gave] aid or comfort to the enemies thereof,’” the voters argue.

With all that going on, is it any wonder Trump’s verbal slip-ups will be coming back to haunt him? (CNN):

Former President Donald Trump has made mocking President Joe Biden and questioning his mental fitness for office a core part of his campaign speeches – even as he experiences his own recent series of gaffes and verbal slips on the campaign trail.

“He’s always looking around, where do I go?” Trump said as he did an exaggerated impersonation of Biden walking around the stage looking confused at a campaign stop in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, last month.

Weeks later, Trump took the stage in Sioux City, Iowa, and mistakenly thanked supporters for coming out to Sioux Falls, South Dakota, before an Iowa state senator tried to discreetly correct him — a moment that was caught on a hot mic.

During a summit in Washington, DC, Trump claimed that Biden could “plunge the world into World War II” – which ended nearly 80 years ago – and appeared to confuse Biden and former President Barack Obama, saying he was leading Obama in election polls.

The recent missteps have created an unwelcome wrinkle for Trump, his campaign team and the larger Republican political apparatus. Republicans have questioned whether Biden is able to serve as commander-in-chief, pointing to his age and mental fitness. But their own primary front-runner seems to be suffering the same predicament, making their argument less potent.

Trump incorrectly said Viktor Orbán, the prime minister of Hungary, was the prime minister of Turkey – he quickly corrected that error. He has repeatedly mispronounced Hamas (huh-maas), the name of the Palestinian militant group that launched a deadly terror attack on Israel, as hummus.

And, during a rally in South Carolina in September, Trump confused former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, one of Trump’s 2016 GOP rivals, with his brother, former President George W. Bush

“When I came here, everyone thought Bush was going to win,” he said at that rally.
“They thought Bush because Bush supposedly was a military person… he got us into the, uh, he got us into the Middle East. How did that work out, right?”

Who’s really sleepy?

Update: Livestream from Minnesota court here.

He’s not worried about it

There’s a lot of talk about whether any of the Trump judges would end up jailing him for violating their orders. Trump’s lawyer says they don’t think about it. Apparently, he believes the Secret Service will stop it:

Alina Habba, who is one of Trump’s lead defense attorneys on his civil cases, said the possibility of Trump spending any time in jail is not something people should think about because the cases are political and because the former president has “done nothing wrong.” The comment comes after Trump incurred fines for violating a gag order.

“He’s protected by Secret Service, period. So, I always tell people when they’re panicked, ‘Listen, he’s protected by Secret Service, No. 1. No. 2, he did nothing wrong,’”

Has the Secret Service discussed this with them? Are they now his Praetorian Guards? Someone should ask.

Trump Will Be Hiring

When the Federalist Society is too woke for them, you know the next Trump administration is going to be lit. Rudy, Jeffrey Clark and John Eastman may be “otherwise engaged” but I’m sure there are plenty more where they came from:

Close allies of Donald J. Trump are preparing to populate a new administration with a more aggressive breed of right-wing lawyer, dispensing with traditional conservatives who they believe stymied his agenda in his first term.

The allies have been drawing up lists of lawyers they view as ideologically and temperamentally suited to serve in a second Trump administration. Their aim is to reduce the chances that politically appointed lawyers would frustrate a more radical White House agenda — as they sometimes did when Mr. Trump was in office, by raising objections to his desires for certain harsher immigration policies or for greater personal control over the Justice Department, among others.

Now, as Trump allies grow more confident in an election victory next fall, several outside groups, staffed by former Trump officials who are expected to serve in senior roles if he wins, have begun parallel personnel efforts. At the start of Mr. Trump’s term, his administration relied on the influential Federalist Society, the conservative legal network whose members filled key executive branch legal roles and whose leader helped select his judicial nominations. But in a striking shift, Trump allies are building new recruiting pipelines separate from the Federalist Society.

These back-room discussions were described by seven people with knowledge of the planning, most of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private conversations. In addition, The New York Times interviewed former senior lawyers in the Trump administration and other allies who have remained close to the president and are likely to serve in a second term.

The interviews reveal a significant break within the conservative movement. Top Trump allies have come to view their party’s legal elites — even leaders with seemingly impeccable conservative credentials — as out of step with their movement.

“The Federalist Society doesn’t know what time it is,” said Russell T. Vought, a former senior Trump administration official who runs a think tank with close ties to the former president. He argued that many elite conservative lawyers had proved to be too timid when, in his view, the survival of the nation is at stake.

Such comments may surprise those who view the Federalist Society as hard-line conservatives. But the move away from the group reflects the continuing evolution of the Republican Party in the Trump era and an effort among those now in his inner circle to prepare to take control of the government in a way unseen in modern presidential history.

Two of the allies leading the push are Stephen Miller, Mr. Trump’s former senior adviser, and John McEntee, another trusted aide whom the then-president had empowered in 2020 to rid his administration of political appointees perceived as disloyal or obstructive.

You know all about Miller, of course. He’s the odious mastermind of Trump’s worst policies on immigration. McEntee isn’t as well known. He’s Trump’s former body man. (He made sure Trump had plenty of diet coke at all times) who was promoted to top hatchet man in the final year.

This story says everything you need to know about Trump’s next term. I don’t know if the average voter is paying attention but the Republican officials who know better and are planning to support him are actually worse than he is at this point.

NEW: @SpeakerJohnson on CBO score for his Israel aid package: “Only in Washington when you cut spending do they call it an increase in the deficit” pic.twitter.com/8C0fY5THGt

— Kelly Phares (@kellyfphares) November 1, 2023

Here’s the reality:

House Republicans’ plan to pay for emergency aid to Israel by cutting the Internal Revenue Service’s budget would increase the deficit by $90 billion over 10 years, the chief of the tax agency said Tuesday.

This shouldn’t be hard for anyone to understand. By cutting funding for the tax collection agency, they will end up collected fewer taxes. Therefore, not only will we spend $14 billion for the emergency aid it will actually cost $90 billion more because of this silly stunt designed to make the right wing media pundits happy. It’s hard to imagine this isn’t just a gigantic troll.

Maga Mike isn’t even trying to pretend he’s not a wingnuts wingnut:

It didn’t take long for the new House speaker, Mike Johnson, to demonstrate to the world that he will not be a serious partner for American allies or for those who still believe that governing is not a petty little game.

On Monday, only five days after being elevated to one of the most important leadership roles in the country, he upended a major foreign aid package for Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan, meekly obeying those Republican House members who see their main role as disengaging from the world and taking self-destructive potshots at Democrats. Nothing in Mr. Johnson’s record suggested he might try to shore up America’s leadership in the world, but his actions show that his new position has not added any gravitas to his thinking; he’s just pandering to his cronies in the far right wing.

Specifically, he stripped money for Ukraine and Taiwan from the $105 billion package requested by President Biden, leaving only the $14.3 billion the administration wants to send to Israel. But then he imposed a condition on the Israel money: Mr. Biden must agree to cut the same amount out of the money the Internal Revenue Service uses to chase down high-income tax cheats. So essentially the U.S. can protect Israel as long as it also protects rich white-collar criminals.

The I.R.S., of course, has nothing to do with the war between Israel and Hamas, but it has everything to do with the Republican desire to score political points whenever possible. Ever since Mr. Biden won $80 billion for stronger I.R.S. enforcement in the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, Republicans have made that money a target, exploiting the agency’s Sheriff-of-Nottingham public image by trying to delude ordinary taxpayers into believing the extra funds meant the agency was coming after them.

But the aim of the extra enforcement was always the wealthy, whose complex tax fraud schemes cost the Treasury billions every year. Reducing the I.R.S. budget would actually widen the deficit, the opposite of what Republicans claim they care about.

But in the end, the I.R.S. cut isn’t really going to happen, as House Republicans know, because Mr. Johnson’s bill will die in the Senate, where many leading Republicans already oppose it. Senator Mitch McConnell, the minority leader, has made it clear the final bill will have to include money for Ukraine, and hawks like Lindsey Graham of South Carolina have said the Ukraine money was related to Israel’s war against Hamas.

“Hamas was just hosted by the Russians in Moscow,” Mr. Graham said, adding, about Ukraine, “I think breaking them out sends the wrong signal.”

Other Republicans like Senator Mitt Romney of Utah and Representative Joe Wilson of South Carolina agreed with the White House that cutting the I.R.S. budget made little sense in the context of national security.

But making sense isn’t really Mr. Johnson’s game. He’s got a few calculations going on that show the kind of cynical strategic planning that current passes for politics in the House. By throwing in the I.R.S. cut, he gets to show the same extremists who deposed his predecessor that he can play rough with the White House. The move will presumably get some House Democrats to vote against the bill, and then Republicans can run misleading attack ads saying those Democrats oppose aid to Israel, as many members are already anticipating.“The new Republican speaker has chosen to put a poison pill” in the aid bill, Representative Ritchie Torres, Democrat of New York, told Axios. “The politicizing of Israel in a time of war is nothing short of disgraceful.”

[…]

If Mr. Johnson has substantive objections to helping Ukraine and Israel that justify the legislative impediments he is constructing, he should state what they are. There is room for a debate over conditions that could be imposed on military aid for Israel, including a detailed plan to protect civilians in the Gaza campaign, or, as my colleague Thomas Friedman has suggested, an agreement not to construct one new settlement in the West Bank outside existing settlement blocs and to rebuild the Palestinian Authority and the two-state solution at the expense of Hamas.

But that would require a serious discussion with serious people. And Mr. Johnson has now shown that he has no place in that room

He’s not called Maga Mike for nothing.

I hate the discourse around Israel Gaza. It’s as depressing a situation as I’ve encountered in my whole life and I can’t see how it ends.

It’s important to listen to the actual words of Hamas:
– Israel must be eliminated, more attacks are coming
– Killing of Jews/Americans in Israel is justified
– Loss of life in Gaza is acceptable, as we are a “nation of martyrs” https://t.co/gsThS9nTzp

— Simon Rosenberg (@SimonWDC) November 1, 2023

This man is in Lebanon.

And then this:

Galit Distel Atbaryan, a Likud Party member of parliament who served as minister for public diplomacy in Benjamin Netanyahu’s government until last month, calls today for a “cruel and vengeful” Israeli military to “erase” Gaza from “the face of the earth.”
(h/t @muhammadshehad2) https://t.co/tNUboKfm5C

— Mehdi Hasan (@mehdirhasan) November 1, 2023

Hitting a refugee camp once to purportedly kill a Hamas commander ensconced within it is contrary to the laws of war. Hitting it two more times after claiming you’ve already killed him is openly contemptuous of international human rights concerns. https://t.co/bdqpTABzbe

— southpaw (@nycsouthpaw) November 1, 2023

It’s just all so awful. Anyone who thinks this is morally simple beyond the obvious “all killing of innocent civilians is wrong and war is bad” is deluding themselves. It’s a horrifying mess.

Trump’s three favorite children will be testifying over the next week. Which one is the smart one?

If all goes according to plan, Donald Trump Jr. will testify at the Trump Organization’s fraud trial in New York on Wednesday, as the first of the Trump offspring to be called to the stand, Eric Trump is scheduled to appear on Thursday and Ivanka Trump will reportedly testify next week. Their illustrious father is himself slated to appear on Monday, which will actually be the second time Donald Trump has personally taken the stand in this case. The first of those was a brief appearance last week, when he was cited for violating the gag order imposed by the judge and ordered to pay $10,000. In any event, we can expect quite a show over the next week, with the Trump family band in full effect.

You may (or may not) recall a deeply strange Trump press conference after the 2016 election, when he claimed he was “turning over” the business to Donald Jr. and Eric, while insisting he didn’t need to do it but wanted to because he “didn’t like the way it looked.” His tax attorney, Sheri Dillon, spoke at length about the arrangement, standing before a table piled high with documents that Trump had supposedly signed but wouldn’t allow the press to examine. In fact, Trump never personally divested from the Trump Organization or his nested network of companies in any way, and continued to market his golf resorts and hotels from the White House — talking them up whenever he got the chance and staying in them wherever he traveled, often at significant cost to the taxpayers. Foreign agents and supplicants of all kinds filled the family coffers, spending millions of dollars at Trump properties to curry favor and gain access during his entire four-year term (and thereafter). It was the most flagrantly corrupt behavior of any president in American history.

But none of that is the actual subject of this fraud trial. Trump was a corrupt businessman for many decades before that, and New York Attorney General Letitia James has collected a massive amount of evidence, which the judge in this case has already determined to prove that Trump’s company has defrauded investors, banks and insurance companies of hundreds of millions over the years, largely by placing much higher values on their properties and businesses than the actual numbers could justify. The trial now taking place will determine what penalty the Trumps should pay.

James is asking for a $250 million fine, and also seeks to bar Trump and his company from any commercial real estate deals in New York or loans from any New York bank for the next five years. Furthermore, she wants to permanently ban Trump and his two adult sons from running any companies in the state. Justice Arthur Engoron has already ruled that the Trumps should be stripped of control over their signature New York properties, although that order has been stayed until this trial is complete. In other words, it’s a lot.

It’s likely that Donald Trump Jr. will testify that he really didn’t know much of anything about the company, and to be fair that’s probably true. He’s not the “smart one.” It actually appears that Eric Trump, despite his dunderhead reputation, was far more involved in running the place. He took the Fifth more than 500 times during his pre-trial deposition and also testified, “I pour concrete. I manage properties. I don’t focus on appraisals. It’s just not what I do in my day-to-day responsibilities.” But other testimony by Trump Organization employees has suggested he was highly involved and James has documents to prove it. And, please: There’s no evidence to suggest that Eric spent much time with the concrete mixer. That’s just ridiculous, even if the Trumps like to pretend that because they are in real estate they do construction work instead of sitting behind desks wearing nice suits like the pampered Richie Riches they’ve always been. 

But what about Ivanka, you ask? Where is she in all this? Well, Trump’s favorite got lucky once again when the courts decided she wasn’t a party to this case because her main involvement in Trump’s schemes took place outside the statute of limitations. At first, it looked like she could skip all this unpleasantness, but James has now called her as a witness and Engoron agreed that her testimony was relevant. (Ivanka’s lawyers have until the end of the day on Wednesday to appeal that decision.)

Honestly, if any family member knows the details of the Trump companies’ inflated valuations, it would be Ivanka. She was the main reason Deutsche Bank agreed to work with Trump in the first place, and bank officials apparently understood her to be the heir apparent. Forbes magazine dealt with Trump’s valuation problems for years, and Ivanka was right in the thick of it. As the magazine reported this week:

The attorney general will have plenty of questions for Donald Trump’s eldest daughter. Ivanka helped lead the acquisition of two assets at the center of the lawsuit, the Trump hotel in Washington, D.C. and the Trump National Doral golf resort in Miami. She also lived in another property caught up in the proceedings, a condo building named Trump Park Avenue in New York City.

The article describe a meeting Forbes staffers had with Donald Trump  in 2015 when he tried to convince them he was far richer than he actually was. After the meeting began, they were “spontaneously” joined by “little Ivanka,” who proceeded to give them a totally bogus valuation on the National Doral resort mentioned above. She and Trump worked the room like a tag team, massively inflating the club’s worth and insisting it had no debt when in fact there were liabilities of more than $100 million. Virtually every detail of the Doral deal they presented was fiction. 

That, it would seem, was Ivanka’s job. She did it with condo sales in the Caribbean and Mexico, she did it with investment banks and she did it with the financial press. Nobody in the family, except perhaps Donald Trump himself, knows more about the Trump Organization’s systematic overvaluation of its businesses and properties than she does. It’s possible that she wasn’t intimately involved with the craptastic paperwork the Trumps submitted to the various entities that lent them money and sold them insurance, but her special relationship with Deutsche Bank would lead one to suspect she did.

If Ivanka were to take the stand and tell the truth, she could take down the company. She’s not on trial so she has no personal exposure, and at this point her husband, Jared Kushner, is now wealthier than Trump, what with all his payoffs — sorry, his financing — from the Saudis and other foreign entities he got to know well while working in the White House. Ivanka doesn’t need to inherit Trump’s money. But of course that’s not how it’s likely to go. It’s far more likely that Ivanka will have come down with the same case of amnesia that has afflicted her brothers. Through thick and thin, she’s still Daddy’s girl.

Salon

“The embodiment of white Christian nationalism in a tailored suit”

Democrats could find it a challenge to turn House Speaker “MAGA Mike” Johnson into a Republican boogeyman before the 2024 elections, the Washington Post suggests. His “mild manner” and previous low profile makes him less of a household name than Nancy Pelosi before the right tried to tag every Democrat running as a clone of “San Francisco liberal” Pelosi.

Nonetheless, the DNC and DCCC campaigns think publicizing “Johnson’s views on the 2020 election (he worked to overturn the results), abortion (he has talked of banning it nationally) and social programs (he has advocated cutting Social Security and Medicare)” can be a useful campaign weapon against Republicans.

There is lots of Beltway he said/she said in the Post story. “Republican strategists say Democrats are misguided if they think they can turn Johnson into a mascot for the entire GOP” even though Democrats have gotten a nice fundraising bump from Johnson’s elevation. Republicans helpfully caution that if Democrats focus too much on Johnson, “they will not be talking about issues that voters truly care about like the economy, crime and the border.” As if Republicans actually run on policy these days.

Oh, tut-tut, say Democrats:

“There is a very good chance he is going to end up being a boogeyman and/or he will end up being the embodiment of the MAGA extremism of the Republican conference,” said Viet Shelton, a spokesperson for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, which coordinates the party’s House races.

MAGA Mike is not “a serious partner for American allies or for those who still believe that governing is not a petty little game,” declares David Firestone of the New York Times Editorial Board:

Specifically, he stripped money for Ukraine and Taiwan from the $105 billion package requested by President Biden, leaving only the $14.3 billion the administration wants to send to Israel. But then he imposed a condition on the Israel money: Mr. Biden must agree to cut the same amount out of the money the Internal Revenue Service uses to chase down high-income tax cheats. So essentially the U.S. can protect Israel as long as it also protects rich white-collar criminals.

Thomas B. Edsall jumps in to examine Johnson’s Christian nationalism:

“Johnson is a clear rebuttal to the overall liberal societal drift that’s happening in the United States,” Ryan Burge, a political scientist at Eastern Illinois University, wrote by email in response to my query. “His views are far out of step with the average American and even with a significant number of Republicans.”

Yet significant Republicans such as Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida, the engineer of the former speaker’s ouster, thinks Johnson (Gaetz calls him MAGA Mike) is just the guy for thumbing reactionary noses at the left and any Republicans who never jumped on the MAGA train.

Matt Gaetz to Steve Bannon: "If you don't think that moving from Kevin McCarthy to MAGA Mike Johnson shows the ascendance of this movement and where the power in the Republican Party truly lies, then you're not paying attention." pic.twitter.com/Fl5l3iO4i9

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) October 25, 2023

“If you don’t think that moving from Kevin McCarthy to MAGA Mike Johnson shows the ascendance of this movement and where the power in the Republican Party truly lies, then you’re not paying attention,” Gaetz told Steve Bannon, calling Johnson “honorable and righteous.” Gaetz is an authority on honorable and righteous.

Refreshing to see Matt Gaetz fuck someone over 18

— The Daily Show (@TheDailyShow) October 3, 2023

But I digress. Edsall continues:

Robert Jones, president and founder of the Public Religion Research Institute, described Johnson in an email as “the embodiment of white Christian nationalism in a tailored suit.”

What is Christian nationalism? Christianity Today describes it as the “belief that the American nation is defined by Christianity, and that the government should take active steps to keep it that way. Popularly, Christian nationalists assert that America is and must remain a ‘Christian nation’ — not merely as an observation about American history, but as a prescriptive program for what America must continue to be in the future.”

Johnson’s election as speaker, Jones went on to say, “is one more confirmation that the Republican Party — a party that is 68 percent white and Christian in a country that is 42 percent white and Christian — has embraced its role as the party of white Christian nationalism.”

Jones argued that “while Johnson is more polished than other right-wing leaders of the G.O.P. who support this worldview, his record and previous public statements indicate that he’s a near textbook example of white Christian nationalism — the belief that God intended America to be a new promised land for European Christians.”

As is Edsall’s habit, he cites polling and several other academics. What does it mean for the country that dominant within the GOP are Christian nationalists with a mandate from God to turn the U.S. into an anti-democratic, authoritarian theocracy? Democrats with the stomach for it could turn that into one helluva set of explosive campaign ads.

And how does a Christian nationalist justify undying support for Donald Trump, self-absorbed, amoral hedonist?

Perhaps Johnson thinks of Trump the same way Trump thinks of evangelicals: “as a means to an end, people to be used, suckers to be played.” Good luck, MAGA Mike, in getting the better of Trump in that deal.

I don’t know. The photo of mild-mannered Johnson that the Post placed atop its story immediately evoked Leland Townsend, the similarly mild-mannered, conservatively dressed ally of demons in Paramount’s EVIL. Mild-mannered and conservatively dressed can be creepy as hell.