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R.I.P. DiFi

Published by Tom Sullivan on September 29, 2023

Interesting times just got more interesting

Photo 2020 by Senate Democrats via Flickr (CC BY 2.0).

Minutes ago (Associated Press):

U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein of California, a centrist Democrat who was elected to the Senate in 1992 in the “Year of the Woman” and broke gender barriers throughout her long career in local and national politics, has died. She was 90.

Three people familiar with the situation confirmed her death to The Associated Press on Friday.

Feinstein, the oldest sitting U.S. senator, was a passionate advocate for liberal priorities important to her state — including environmental protection, reproductive rights and gun control — but was also known as a pragmatic lawmaker who reached out to Republicans and sought middle ground.

She was elected to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors in 1969 and became its first female president in 1978, the same year Mayor George Moscone was gunned down alongside Supervisor Harvey Milk at City Hall by Dan White, a disgruntled former supervisor. Feinstein found Milk’s body.

Feinstein had been in declining health for some time and had obvious memory issues.

New York Times:

Her condition had grown more acute over the past several months, after a bout with shingles that caused serious complications, including a case of encephalitis, and prompted her to begin using a wheelchair in the halls of the Capitol.

Ms. Feinstein’s long and very public decline shone a spotlight on the advanced age of members of Congress and particularly the Senate, where many continue to serve long after retirement age.

Her staff was being officially informed of her death at 9 a.m.

Politico notes the impact on the Democrats’ hold on the Senate:

Her death, confirmed by a person with knowledge of the situation, brings Senate Democrats’ functional majority to 50 votes, with Republicans holding 49 votes. Two other Democratic senators tested positive for Covid this week — and the majority of the caucus is calling on indicted Sen. Robert Menendez (D-N.J.) to resign.

Interesting times just got more interesting.

Feinstein had previously announced she would not run for reelection in 2024. President Joe Biden responded by lauding Feinstein (with whom he served in the Senate) as “a passionate defender of civil liberties and a strong voice for national security policies that keep us safe while honoring our values.”

Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-Calif.) will select a replacement to serve out the remainder of her term.

Stay tuned if you weren’t already.

Astrochurch

Published by Tom Sullivan on September 29, 2023

Manufacturing culture war test cases

A Washington Post investigation pulled back the curtain on a legal advocacy group’s decades-long efforts to sherpa conservative culture war test cases before the U.S. Supreme Court.

The Supreme Court ruled in June that Colorado’s public accommodations law could not force web designer Lorie Smith to design wedding web sites for gay couples because it violates her religious beliefs. The 6-3 decision was not about discrimination, Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote. No. Coercing Smith to create a message with which she disagrees violates her First Amendment rights.

Smith, SCOTUSblog reminds us, is “a devout Christian who owns a website- and graphic-design business [who] wanted to expand her business to include wedding websites – but only for heterosexual couples, and she wanted to post a message on her own website to make that clear.”

Here’s what stood out as weird. Smith cited a request from a man named “Stewart” as the basis for her lawsuit. Except when contacted by The New Republic, Stewart knew nothing about the case (NPR):

“I was incredibly surprised given the fact that I’ve been happily married to a woman for the last 15 years,” said Stewart, who declined to give his last name for fear of harassment and threats. His contact information, but not his last name, were listed in court documents.

That much we knew. And now?

Among the wedding vendors represented by the Christian nonprofit Alliance Defending Freedom were a photographer from Kentucky, videographers from Minnesota and a pair of Arizona artists who created stationery. Each challenged local laws barring businesses from discriminating based on sexuality, which the plaintiffs said violated their First Amendment rights.

In its petition asking the high court to hear the Colorado case, ADF cited favorable decisions it had won in those three cases. Winning meant its clients were free to express their beliefs about marriage through their work “without fear of government punishment,” ADF said in a statement after one ruling.

But an examination by The Washington Post of court filings, company records and other materials found that two of the three vendors cited in ADF’s September 2021 petitionhad stopped working on weddings, and the other did not photograph any weddings for two years. Three additional vendors represented by ADF in similar lawsuits elsewhere also abandoned or sharply cut back their work on weddings after they sued local authorities for the right to reject same-sex couples, The Post found.

Such developments led an opposing lawyer and a judge in two of the cases to separately question whether ADF’s plaintiffs truly intended to exercise the rights they sued for — or if their claims were instead manufactured to be test cases in a national litigation campaign.

Astroturf meets astrochurch

It gets better. ADF was founded in 1993, the Post reports. One of its founders, Marlin Maddoux, “argued in a book published that year that Christians should ‘shift to an all-out culture war’ and build a ‘well-funded, well-trained army of religious rights attorneys’ to prosecute it.”

ADF also had a hand in formally establishing companies for some of its clients, The Post found. Lawyers associated with the legal group signed incorporation paperwork and helped to draft company policies that were later used as a basis for the wedding lawsuits. ADF promoted some of its lawsuits with videos and images of plaintiffs photographing women in bridal gowns at what The Post found were staged events featuring ADF employees.

Legal advocacy groups that challenge federal law in court often seek out individuals who are well-suited to serve as the face of their lawsuits. But ADF’s behind-the-scenes involvement in the businesses and public profiles of a nationwide roster of similar clients — some of whom subsequently showed wavering commitment to the weddings industry — reflects how aggressive the group has been in pursuit of that goal as it sought to overturn laws barring discrimination based on sexual orientation.

It gets better.

In an interview with The Post, ADF senior counsel Jonathan Scruggs said the group’s clients had sincere interests in working in the wedding industry. “These are real companies, real businesses, people who are trying to live their lives,” Scruggs said.

Scruggs, who argued several of the cases in court, said the fact that multiple ADF plaintiffs abandoned the wedding industry did not undermine their claims. “Unfortunately, sometimes in the natural progression of people’s businesses, they happen to close,” Scruggs said.

ADF seems to exist to manufacture culture war test cases for “conservative Christian leaders who opposed LGBTQ+ rights.” The Scottsdale, Ariz. legal firm with 90 lawyers on staff and “maintains a nationwide network of more than 4,000 “allied attorneys” — described as “Christians committed to using their God-given legal skills to keep the doors open for the Gospel.” ADF “collected nearly $97 million in contributions in the 12 months ending June 2022 — a 27 percent increase over the previous year and almost double its 2016-17 total.”

Read the whole thing. Smith’s is not the only case ADF fought in which the plaintiffs subsequently moved on to other ventures than the ones on which ADF “manufactured cases to expand religious exemptions to anti-discrimination laws.”

We’ve seen the same thing with the Texas abortion vigilante law and North Carolina’s independent state legislature theory case. The right complained bitterly for years about “activist” judges until they had in place enough of their own activist judges.

Trump says, “shut up, shut up, shut up!!!”

Published by digby on September 28, 2023

He’s upset that the RNC is hosting debates he refuses to attend:

The former president cloaked his effort to shut down opponents by claiming to be concerned about the Republican Party.

Former President Donald Trump on Thursday called for the cancellation of further GOP debates, perhaps hoping to deprive his rivals of a national stage under the guise of what he claims is best for the Republican Party.

“They have to stop the debates. Because it is just bad for the Republican Party. They are not going anywhere. There is not going to be a breakout candidate,” Trump told the right-wing Daily Caller.

“I am very concerned about the RNC not being able to do their job,” the multi-indicted frontrunner added about the Republican National Committee (RNC).

His comments doubled down on his campaign’s order Wednesday to halt the debates, which Trump has studiously avoided while he enjoys a large polling lead. He confirmed to the Daily Caller that he would also not attend the third one.

“It’s clear that President Trump alone can defeat Biden,” campaign adviser Chris LaCivita said in an earlier statement.

This might be why:

Donald Trump’s speech to Michigan autoworkers on Wednesday was viewed by fewer than half as many people as the second Republican presidential debate on Rumble, a video streaming platform launched as an alternative to YouTube and popular with many right-leaning content providers. The two events took place simultaneously, with the GOP frontrunner opting to skip an official debate for the second time.

In total the debate, broadcast by the Republican Party, received 1.25 million views on Rumble versus 522,000 for Trump speech, which was shared on his official channel.

That’s his own channel. As I write this I don’t know what the TV ratings were but I’m going to guess Fox got higher ratings than his pathetic speech did on Newsmax.

He’s an attention hog so it makes sense that he’d be upset. He also doesn’t want to take any chances. So he wants them all shut down. Let’s see if it works. Will it make him look weak if they don’t? Stay tuned.

Marge’s stand

Published by digby on September 28, 2023

This from Punchbowl is just astonishing. It represents a failure of education that a faction of Republicans has absolutely no knowledge of history and is too stupid and arrogant to listen to anyone who does:

One week after Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky delivered a plea for additional American aid, a sobering reality has set in on Capitol Hill — Congress has no clear path, as of this moment, to approve new funding for the embattled U.S. ally.

The issue has become tied up in the dispute over government funding, with Speaker Kevin McCarthy refusing to include new Ukraine aid in any stopgap spending measure over fears that a conservative revolt could cost him his post. In some ways, McCarthy’s own standing has become tied to this issue.

Ukraine in general has become such a charged issue for House Republicans that party leaders late Wednesday night stripped a small portion of Ukraine aid from their version of the FY2024 Defense spending bill. That came just hours after the House overwhelmingly defeated an amendment to strip this exact same funding from the bill. The vote was 330-104. Those 104 “no” votes were all Republicans — nearly half the GOP conference.

Think about that — the House voted against removing the funding from the bill, yet the GOP leadership did it anyway because they may not be able to pass the Defense package if they don’t. This is because they’re only using GOP votes to jam though funding bills, and Ukraine is toxic to many House Republicans.

This doesn’t mean Congress won’t eventually appropriate new funding for Ukraine; there are clear supermajorities in both chambers that back Ukraine aid. Yet right now, supporters don’t have a viable plan to get it across the finish line, with House Republicans remaining the chief roadblock.

The dynamic is worrying many top lawmakers. They say the congressional debate is creating a level of uncertainty about the United States’ commitment to Ukraine, and that’s playing right into Russian President Vladimir Putin’s hands.

“There’s no doubt in my mind he’s using what’s going on right now to bolster [Putin’s] position and undermine the Western world’s position,” Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.), who backs long-term funding for Ukraine, told us. “This whole debate — I mean, it’s BS.”

In early August, President Joe Biden asked for $24 billion to meet Ukraine’s military, economic and humanitarian needs through the end of the year. That number has now been trimmed to $6 billion in a bipartisan Senate stopgap funding proposal designed to keep the government open past Saturday’s deadline — one that Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell backs.

At one point during those behind-the-scenes talks on the short-term funding bill, the White House and State Department came up with the $6 billion figure, estimating that would keep the funding spigot turned on for Ukraine over the duration of that Senate stopgap bill — 47 days.

Many Senate Republicans now prefer a clean CR so that Congress can consider and pass a longer-term Ukraine package in a single vote next month. Their preference is to pass a year’s worth of funding that could sustain Ukraine through the 2024 presidential election. These Senate Republicans also believe it would help McCarthy and House Republicans avoid a government shutdown by taking the Ukraine Issue off the table for the moment.

Yet this year-long number could be truly staggering — something in the range of $60 billion to $80 billion. That’s going to be a very difficult vote. So voting multiple times on smaller packages would guarantee that the fissures over Ukraine inside the GOP remain in the headlines.

“We can’t be doing this every three months,” House Foreign Affairs Committee Chair Michael McCaul (R-Texas) told us. “It’s going to have to pass eventually. There’s too much support for it.”

House Democrats, meanwhile, want GOP Ukraine supporters like McCaul to be more aggressive in pushing for a vote. The House Armed Services Committee’s top Democrat, Rep. Adam Smith (Wash.), said that without their nudging, McCarthy “is giving all the appearances of having decided to abandon Ukraine.”

“OK, how are you going to make it not a problem? Because the sit-around-with-your-thumb-up-your-ass plan doesn’t seem to be working at the moment,” Smith said.

If McCarthy does this it will prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that he will literally do anything to preserve his speakership — and he will probably lose it eventually anyway.

This is all about Marge. She’s the leader of the anti-Ukraine faction. And this is one she wants very badly. It even goes beyond her loyalty to Trump.

They don’t like any vaccines at all

Published by digby on September 28, 2023

Good Lord. Philip Bump has the story:

America transitioned out of its covid-19 mobilization the same way it transitioned in: awkwardly, unevenly and with mixed results. The Biden administration’s interest in formalizing the end of the official pandemic — under pressure from President Biden’s right — meant that systems that had been cobbled together to measure and address the problem were often just switched off, with varying downstream effects.

Given that the tools we’d used to track the pandemic are now mostly broken or out-of-date, it’s a bit harder to know when and if the virus might again be surging. But in recent weeks, there’s been little question: wastewater measurements and other calculations made clear that infections were again rising. Hopefully, despite the shift to cooler weather in the Northeast, the recent plateau in cases means the trend is reversing.

When KFF earlier this month asked Americans if they thought that cases were surging, however, about a third said they didn’t. That was a minority position, but the demographic divides on the question were revealing. Three-quarters of Democrats said they believed there was a new wave; most Republicans didn’t. Among those who had never been vaccinated against coronavirus, fully 6 in 10 didn’t believe there was a new wave of infections.

That unvaccinated population, of course, is disproportionately made up of Republicans.

In other words, even when just considering the state of the pandemic, partisan differences emerge in a way that overlaps with views of the vaccine. And not just past views; that is, whether people got vaccinated in the past. KFF asked respondents whether they intended to get the newly formulated vaccine, finding that fewer than half of Americans said they did.

But again, there’s a partisan split. Among Democrats, two-thirds of respondents said they’d been vaccinated and would get the vaccine again; a fifth said they’d been vaccinated and that was it. Among Republicans, only about a quarter had been vaccinated and would be again. Most of those who had been vaccinated didn’t plan to do it again.

The causes of this have been examined endlessly. Donald Trump’s insistence on undercutting the recommendations of health experts during 2020 — aimed at waving away the pandemic before the November election — bolstered skepticism about the vaccines for which Trump hoped to take credit. That the rollout was undertaken mostly by the Biden administration gave Trump and other Republicans, most notably Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R), an additional reason to use the vaccines and vaccination efforts as a foil.

The effects of this have also been well-examined. In Florida and Ohio, Republicans were significantly more likely to die of covid-19 after vaccines became available.

KFF’s new research shows that the skepticism about vaccines that was a spillover from doubt about medical experts has itself spilled over into other vaccination programs. KFF asked about the safety of the vaccines for covid-19, influenza and (among respondents ages 60 and over) respiratory syncytial virus (RSV). Democrats were consistently more likely to say that the vaccines were safe than were Republicans. Less than half of Republicans said that the RSV or coronavirus vaccines were safe.

Predictably, Republicans were also less likely to say they planned to get vaccinated to protect against those viruses. Barely half of Republicans said they planned to get a flu shot, 25 points less than the percentage of Democrats who said they would. The gap on the coronavirus, as mentioned above, neared 50 points.

The effects here are also predictable. Fewer vaccinated individuals means more infected individuals and/or individuals contracting viruses who see worse health effects. It means that, if covid-19 or the flu or RSV surge again this winter, more people will get sicker or potentially die.

Vulnerable people should not be around Republicans if they can help it. They don’t care about protecting themselves or anyone else.

We all need a little hit of hopium

Published by digby on September 28, 2023

Political strategist Simon Rosenberg got the 2022 election right when almost everyone else got it wrong. He’s worth listening to. Here, he discusses that Washington Post/ABC poll and suggests, correctly, that they should have just thrown it out. (And the rest of the media should have ignored it.)

He has some other info you might find interesting:

A few other notes on this poll and other recent election data:

-In a recent post I talked about something I’ve been calling asymetrical engagement. It’s the idea that right now, due to Republicans having a robust primary and Democrats not that our two coalitions are not paying equal attention to the Presidential election, and polls are coming back a bit more Republican than is the actual state of things. A confirmation of this theory is the new CNN poll of New Hampshire, a state where voters are paying attention and engaged, which has Biden ahead of Trump 52-40. Biden won NH by 7 pts in 2020. So in this large sample poll of a state where ads are flying Biden is outperforming 2020 by 5 points, similar to our overperformance in special elections across the US this year.

-Given that Democrats have outperformed 2020 by high single digits in dozens of special elections across the US this year, it is very unlikely that Biden is running far below his 2020 results. For the Post poll to be correct, Biden would have to be running 22 points (!!!!!!!) below where Democrats have been running in specials across the US this year. It’s just not possible.

-We need a conversation about what it means for 2024 national polling that the 2022 was not a nationalized election. The country didn’t all move in the same direction in 2022. Most of the battleground states moved towards Democrats in 2022 (AZ, CO, GA, MI, MN, NH, PA), most of the rest of the country moved towards the Republicans. It’s very hard for a national poll to capture and describe an election where regions of the country or states are not all moving in the same direction. It’s why I think to really understand what’s happening in the Presidential race we are going to have to rely much more on large sample, high quality state polls. And the most recent one of those, the NH CNN poll, has Biden up 12 over Trump, 5 points above his 2020 result. Will national polls now need to have a certain percentage of voters in the battleground states to be legit? It’s possible, and it’s something we need to talk about.

Here’s the election data I’m focused on right now:

The Democratic Party Is Strong and On A Very Good Popular Vote Run – Democrats have won more votes in 7 of the last 8 Presidential elections, the best popular vote run of any political party in US history. In the last 4 Presidential elections, Democrats have averaged 51% of the vote, our best showing over 4 elections since FDR’s Presidency. Can we improve on that performance and get to 55% nationally in 2024? I think so.

Democrats Keep Outperforming Expectations – In a “red wave” year, 2022, Democrats gained ground from 2020 in 7 key battlegrounds: AZ, CO, GA, MI, MN, NH, PA. We also picked up 4 state legislative chambers, 2 governorships, and 1 US Senate seat. As we’ve written 2022 was not a single nationalized election, but really two elections – a bluer election in the battleground where we gained, and a redder election outside where we did not. We’ve seen this strong Dem performance continue into 2023 with impressive wins in CO, FL, OH and WI and in special elections across the US. A new 538 analysis: Democrats have been wining big in special elections finds Dems outperforming the partisan lean in districts this year by an average of 10 points in close to 40 special elections across the US – this is a big deal, and similar to what we saw post-Dobbs last year. The Daily Kos special election tracker now has Dems up 7.6 points over 2020 in 27 elections this year. Very encouraging stuff.

The Blueing of the Southwest – Democrats are having their best run in the Southwest since the 1940s and 50s. In 2004 Bush won AZ, CO, NM, NV, Rs controlled 5 of their 8 Senate seats, 14 of their 21 House seats. In 2020 Biden was the first Democratic President to win all 4 of these states in a single election since FDR. Today Rs control none of those 8 Senate seats and we control 14 of 24 House seats there. Our success with Hispanic voters and in heavily Hispanic parts of the country remains one of the Democratic Party’s most successful party-wide efforts over the past generation of US politics.

Here’s how Ron Brownstein wrote up my current take on things in a recent CNN article:

Simon Rosenberg, the long-time Democratic strategist who was proven right as the most prominent public skeptic of the “red wave” theory in 2022, argues that Trump, in particular, is unlikely to match his 47% of the vote from 2020 if the GOP nominates him again. “We are starting at a place where it is far more likely in my mind that he gets to 45% than he gets to 49%,” Rosenberg said. “And if he gets to 45%, we have the opportunity to get up to 55%. The key for Democrats is we have to imagine growing and expanding our coalition for it to happen.”

Beyond the personal doubts about Trump among voters outside the GOP coalition, Democrats such as Rosenberg and Anzalone see several other factors that give Biden a chance to widen his winning margin from the last election. Perhaps the most important of those are the slowdown in inflation, continued strength of the job market, and signs of accelerating recovery in the stock market – all of which are already stirring some gains in consumer confidence. Democrats are encouraged as well by recent declines in the number of undocumented immigrants attempting to cross the Southern border and the crime rate in big cities – two issues on which polls show substantial disappointment in Biden’s performance.

Another change since 2020 is the broad public backlash, especially in Democratic-leaning and swing states, against the 2022 Supreme Court decision ending the constitutional right to abortion, which Trump has directly claimed credit for engineering through his nominations to the court. Finally, compared to 2020, the electorate in 2024 will likely include significantly more young people in Generation Z, a group that is preponderantly supporting Democrats, and fewer Whites without a college degree, now the GOP’s best group.

All of these factors, Rosenberg said, create “an opportunity” for Democrats to amass a bigger majority next year than most consider possible. But to get there, he argues, the party will need to think bigger, particularly in its efforts to mobilize younger voters aging into the electorate. “It’s a man on the moon kind of mindset,” Rosenberg said. “We have to want to go there to get there. We have to build a strategy to take away political real estate from the Republicans because they are giving us the opportunity to take it away from them.”

Many Republican strategists privately agree that the combined effect of the January 6 insurrection and the court’s abortion decision will make it difficult for Trump to expand his support from 2020 if the GOP nominates him again.

The Post poll was bad. We keep winning elections across the US this year, running way ahead of our 2020 results. Joe Biden is a good President, the country is better off and we have a strong case to make for re-election. They are saddled with Trump, Dobbs and insurrection. In every way possible, as we head into 2024, I would much rather be us than them.

Me too …

This may also be of interest:

If you want to do a deeper dive on election data come to one our our upcoming events or my talks to allied grassroots groups in the coming weeks. Here’s the latest schedule. All are free and guests are welcome. And if you want to work on a 2023 election, early vote has begun in Virginia – here are ways you can help.

Trump Org now a High Crime and Misdemeanor?

Published by Tom Sullivan on September 28, 2023

Premise of GOP’s Biden impeachment inquiry

It is a consistent ploy of conspiracy theorist that where supporting “evidence” is concerned, what they lack in quality they make up for in quantity.

That was plenty evident on Wednesday when Republicans introduced their impeachment inquiry into President Joe Biden by releasing 700 pages of bird shot.

It did not go well for House Ways and Means Committee Chair Rep. Jason Smith (R-MO) when asked by NBC’s Richard Neal to explain why whatever Hunter Biden did when his father was a private citizen was somehow an abuse of power and worthy of impeaching Joe Biden now.

But we have 700 pages! Have you read our 700 pages?!

This takes place, of course, against a backdrop of a House GOP-precipitated government shutdown that will, as Marcy Wheeler writes, “lead to millions of government workers and service members either getting laid off, or working without pay, will strain food support for poor families and limit food inspections, and will result in holdups for people traveling by air.”

But, you know, His Indictedness demands a retributive impeachment, so his fawning acolytes will oblige or face his wrath and that of the cult. Their rationale, says Wheeler, “is nothing short of batshit insane“:

That’s true, first of all, because they plan to impeach Joe Biden for actions his son took while Joe wasn’t even in government. One of their latest new fetishes is that in 2019, Hunter Biden used his father’s address as a permanent address and got legal financial transfers at it.

Again, much of this impeachment is about Joe Biden being a Dad.

Crazier still, the premise of this impeachment is that Hunter Biden traded on the family brand and he and his associates (including James Biden, but also a bunch of people who made far more money) made a paltry $24 million by doing so.

In other words, just days after a judge ruled that Trump and two of his sons had wildly inflated his own value — including by adding a brand premium to his properties!!! — continuing into the years he was President, Republicans want to impeach Joe Biden because business interests Joe Biden wasn’t part of tried to do that on a far, far smaller scale.

Republicans are impeaching Joe Biden because his son had business interests with a Chinese company, the most salacious interactions of which occurred the year after the Obama Administration, even though Trump’s own daughter benefited from her own family’s brand and her nepotistic job in the White House to obtain trademarks from the government of China during some of the same years.

Don’t overtax yourselves trying to make sense of it. There’s no sense there.

In the same year Republicans allege that Hunter Biden traded on his family name to make money in China (2017), the Trump family business made $17.5 million there.

Republicans “are going to pursue an impeachment premised on the notion that Trump’s entire business model is a High Crime and Misdemeanor,” Wheeler writes pointedly.

I don’t have Marcy’s eye for legal detail. But skimming through the GOP’s Impeachment Inquiry memorandum, 30 pages of innuendo and 190 footnotes, I can’t spot a citation of a single U.S. Code — none — that the committee believes Joe Biden broke as a public official or as a private citizen. The most they’ve got is a complaint about “classified materials discovered in the President’s home … for which a former president has faced federal indictment.” And Biden has not, they mean.

Good luck with that.

Update from Rep. Jasmine Crockett (D-Texas): “I can’t seem to find the crime. And honestly, no one has testified of what crime they believe the president of the United States has committed.”

Calling out the threat of violence

Published by Tom Sullivan on September 28, 2023

Trump is wounded but not done

There is some good news out there: Democrats keep winning post-Dobbs elections. A recent poll from Univision shows Latinos trust Democrats more than Republicans to lower their cost of living (their No. 1 concern). As you saw yesterday, better polls than the Washington Post’s admitted outlier show Joe Biden better positioned for 2024 than the soon-to-be bankrupt Donald Trump.

The GOP is determined to shut down the government, doing no one any favors. The Lincoln Project’s Rick Wilson summed up the GOP debate Wednesday night by posting, “I’ve attended probably 30 primary debates and watched most of them over the last 30 years. This is the most shambolic trainwreck I’ve ever seen.”

Nevertheless, the threat of violence persists from the fringe right when democracy does not hand them the power they demand. Eric Levitz writes:

Last Friday, the Republican Party’s presidential front-runner suggested that America’s top general deserves to die. In a post on Truth Social, Donald Trump accused chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley of committing treason, “an act so egregious that, in times gone by, the punishment would have been DEATH!”

Specifically, Trump wrote that Milley had been “dealing with China to give them a heads up on the thinking of the President of the United States,” and that this “treasonous act” could have triggered a war between the two countries. The ex-president was seemingly referring to a report that Milley had called his Chinese counterpart shortly before the 2020 election, and after the January 6 insurrection, to assure him that the United States was stable and that Trump would not be ordering any attack against China on his way out the door. Given that this accurately conveyed the administration’s posture, and that the U.S. had no interest in tricking a nuclear-weapons state into believing that America was about to attack it, it’s difficult to see how Milley’s calls would have constituted treason.

Of course, it’s not remarkable for Trump to issue a baseless (yet incendiary) allegation against one of his critics. What is noteworthy — or at least, should be — is a leading presidential candidate deliberately trying to intimidate his perceived enemies through tacit threats of violence. And it seems fair to conclude that this is precisely what Trump is up to.

The ex-president’s remarks about Milley came amid a surge of violent threats against federal law enforcement, threats that his own rhetoric appears to have inspired.

For reasons that remain unfathomable, a reactionary faction of the country, and more than a few supposed “lone wolves,” remain committed to the professional fraud and blustering coward residing (for now) at Mar-a-Lago. It is clear since his mentorship with Norman Vincent Peale and Roy Cohn that the “fantasy” billionaire fancies himself some kind of bargain-basement Mafia don. Lie with abandon. When in doubt, attack. When you’ve lost, claim victory. Bluster and intimidate first, ask questions never.

As the legal walls close in on Trump and his empire of smoke and mirrors dissolves with the Trump Organization, his once thinly veiled threats are now overt. The call and response dynamic between Trump and his cult is more direct today. Trump “gets a rush” out of seeing followers act lawlessly and commit violence in his name, former Sen. Claire McCaskill told “Deadline: White House.” It makes him feel “powerful and successful.”

It brought to mind the scene (above) from Conan the Barbarian in which cult leader Thulsa Doom (James Earle Jones) beckons a young girl to step off a cliff and plunge to her death. “THAT is power!” cries Doom in triumph. Trump just does it in a much, much whinier voice. His Jan. 6 followers can contemplate that in prison.

Levitz itemizes the reel of Trump threats McCaskill wishes his followers could see for themselves rather than hear about second- or third-hand:

The most salient truth about the 2024 election is that the Republican Party is poised to nominate an authoritarian thug who publishes rationalizations for political violence and promises to abuse presidential authority on a near-daily basis. There is no way for a paper or news channel to appropriately emphasize this reality without sounding like a shrill, dull, Democratic propaganda outlet. So, like the nation writ large, the press comports itself as an amnesiac, or an abusive household committed to keeping up appearances, losing itself in the old routines, in an effortful approximation of normality until it almost forgets what it doesn’t want to know.

Referencing the Levitz essay, Ruth Ben Ghiat (“Strongmen Mussolini to the Present“) posted, “Why I continue to call attention to the threat of violence…before it is too late to speak out.”

Never thought I’d see the day

Published by digby on September 27, 2023

This is truly astonishing:

Fox didn’t question any of the kids table about this at the debate last night. In fact, they didn’t mention anything about Trump at all, not the indictments, the fraud verdict, the rape trial or any of it. And the kids table didn’t offer anything. What cowards. All of them.