Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

McCarthy snaps to

On August 28th, Donald Trump had had enough of his House Republicans dilly-dallying around. He took to his social media platform Truth Social and issued an order:

The Republicans in Congress, though well meaning, keep talking about an Impeachment ‘Inquiry’ on Crooked Joe Biden.Look, the guy got bribed, he paid people off, and he wouldn’t give One Billion Dollars to Ukraine unless they ‘got rid of the Prosecutor.’ Biden is a Stone Cold Crook-You don’t need a long INQUIRY to prove it, it’s already proven. These lowlifes Impeached me TWICE (I WON!), and Indicted me FOUR TIMES – For NOTHING!Either IMPEACH the BUM, or fade into OBLIVION. THEY DID IT TO US!

Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy heard him loud and clear. On Tuesday he announced that he was unilaterally ordering an impeachment inquiry into the president during his term as Vice President nearly a decade ago. No one was surprised that he went back on his stated principle that an impeachment inquiry can only be launched with a full vote of the House or the still binding determination by Trump’s Department of Justice which came to the same conclusion. He doesn’t have the votes to launch a legitimate inquiry so this was the only thing he could do to stave off a temper tantrum from Donald Trump and the Freedom Caucus. He was, as he has been since the day he took the speaker’s gavel, just trying to get through the day.

This particular day has been coming since November 2022 when the Republicans managed to eke out a very narrow victory in the House. The fact that their majority was much smaller than they expected did not daunt them anymore than it daunted the House Republicans in 1998 when they when they unexpectedly lost seats as they pursued the impeachment of President Clinton. When they want to impeach a president, they don’t care what it costs.

They have already established that in the months and months of investigations they’ve waged since they got their majority that there is no evidence to support an impeachment inquiry. Nonetheless, McCarthy laid out six specific allegations which sounded as though they are proven but they are nothing but innuendo about Hunter Biden’s business about which the president has never been shown to have knowledge or involvement. And anyway, we know what this is all about, don’t we?

Either IMPEACH the BUM, or fade into OBLIVION. THEY DID IT TO US!

This is payback as anyone with eyes can see. And Trump is no doubt thrilled that they are going after Biden for the same stale lie that got him impeached the first time. The so-called investigation revolves around the disproved nonsense about then Vice President Biden demanding the Ukrainians fire a prosecutor to help his son’s business in Ukraine. The timeline doesn’t line up any better now than it did when Trump was trying to sell it to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in his “perfect phone call.” Maybe he thinks that by having an impeachment tying Biden to the case it will prove him innocent of wrongdoing and lead to the “expungement” of his impeachment. (McCarthy has said that he’s all for it even though expungement isn’t a thing.)

But it has some other utility for the Republicans. Trump instinctively projects his own shortcomings and problems on his enemies and then attacks them which is what he’s doing with the “Biden Crime Family” thing. I don’t know what specific psychology is at work but it serves a tactical purpose for him and his allies by muddying the water and contributing to the widespread cynicism in American life that leads people to think everyone is corrupt and there’s nothing to be done about it.

It’s already worked to some degree in this case. According to a recent CNN poll, “61%, say they think that Biden had at least some involvement in Hunter Biden’s business dealings, with 42% saying they think he acted illegally, and 18% saying that his actions were unethical but not illegal.”

There is literally no evidence of any of that. Well played, Republicans, well played.

McCarthy also got the impeachment inquiry demand off the table to appease the extremists in his caucus but some of them don’t seem to be appeased. Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz has been agitating for impeachment for months and threatened on Monday to make a motion to vacate the chair the next day, essentially calling for a no confidence vote for McCarthy, if the speaker didn’t step up. After McCarthy did as he asked, Gaetz took to the floor and had this to say:

Gaetz: Mr. Speaker, you are out of compliance with the agreement that allowed you to assume this role. The path forward for the House of Representatives is to either bring you into immediate total compliance or remove you, pic.twitter.com/KbrkpZ14hZ

— Acyn (@Acyn) September 12, 2023

You just can’t please some people. In the meantime, Marjorie Taylor Greene who has been filing impeachment papers against Biden since the first day of his presidency is angry that Gaetz is taking credit:

Correction my friend.

I introduced articles of impeachment against Joe Biden for his corrupt business dealings in Ukraine & China while he was Vice President on his very first day in office.

You wouldn’t cosponsor those and I had to drag you kicking and screaming to get you to… https://t.co/kArIYslAFi

— Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene🇺🇸 (@RepMTG) September 12, 2023

Greene might have a point. She had dinner with Trump on Sunday and met with McCarthy on Monday so she may very well have brought McCarthy an offer he couldn’t refuse from Mar-a-lago.

The truth is that there just aren’t enough votes to impeach Biden in the House and there will never be enough votes to convict him in the Senate. They can draw this out over months to keep it in the headlines and hope that something shakes loose as it did when the Benghazi investigation turned up Hillary Clinton’s personal email server. The media will be paying very close attention out of a misplaced belief that they must treat this sideshow with the same seriousness they treated the Trump impeachments.

Conventional wisdom has it that McCarthy is terrified of losing his job so he’s dancing as fast as he can to please the crazies and the normies as well as their Dear Leader. But hard right Colorado Rep. Ken Buck, a vocal and unexpected opponent of opening the impeachment inquiry (and he’s taking some heat for it) isn’t intimidated by Gaetz and his crew because he doesn’t think McCarthy has anything to worry about. He told CNN’s Anderson Cooper that all this ostentatious talk of “leverage” isn’t going to dislodge the Speaker because there’s no one else who wants McCarthy’s job.

Normally I would think that’s ridiculous. There are always ambitious politicians. But I think he has a point. There is no one stupid enough to want the job who could also be elected. We already know that from the night of the endless speaker votes last winter. Right now, it’s the worst job in the world and that means McCarthy has a freer hand than it appears. Maybe that threat Gaetz and his pals are holding over McCarthy’s head is just another act in the ongoing performance art installation otherwise known as the House Republican caucus.

Salon

Evidence-free since … pretty much forever

We’ve seen this show before. Rudy Giuliani had his law license suspended for bringing meritless lawsuits, unsupported by evidence, alleging massive voter fraud in the 2020 election. He had it, oh yes, massive amounts of evidence he hyped endlessly before cameras but never produced to be independently scrutinized.

House Republicans are playing that game again with their budding Biden impeachment inquiry.

“What actual evidence do you have as opposed to allegations to show to the American public that would merit an actual impeachment inquiry of Joe Biden?” the off-camera reporter asked Rep. Scott Perry (R-Pa.)

Perry did not take it well.

Mediaite:

Notably, during a CPAC event in March Perry made clear his penchant for political revenge. Perry, whose cell phone was seized by the FBI during its investigation into Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election, fantasized aloud at CPAC about “leftists” and “Marxists” “quaking in fear” and “losing weight because they’re not eating” because they are so afraid the government may jail them.

Kevin Kruse posted, “As always, the linchpin of their case is that Biden bragged about getting rid of a Ukrainian prosecutor that everyone — even Republicans — said was NOT prosecuting corruption, but they’ve spun it around completely to claim the opposite.”

Why not just subpoena Hunter Biden and get him to answer questions under oath, a “Wake Up America” interviewer asked Rep. James Comer (R-Miss.), chair of the House Oversight Committee. Comer squirmed. Facts are not his friends.

So it goes.

House Republicans choose to open an impeachment inquiry against President Joe Biden. They could choose to join (most) Democrats to re-fund the pandemic-period child tax credit expansion, but no:

Five million more American kids fell into poverty last year. Or maybe it’s more accurate to say they were pushed.

The child poverty rate more than doubled in 2022, the U.S. Census Bureau reported Tuesday, in the largest annual increase in child poverty on record. For the most part, these kids didn’t become poor because the economy is lousy, or their parents were fired, or they were newly orphaned. Most fell below the poverty threshold because, as a country, we chose to make them poor. Specifically, we chose to make them poor again, by snatching a short-livedsafety-net program away.

Governing is not what they’re in Congress for. Most likely their constituents don’t care. “Handouts” they care about. Paying for political reality TV they’re okay with.

Bloody Tradies!

For those looking for an excuse to use “gobsmacked.”

An X-post video clip from Tuesday: Gurner Group founder Tim Gurner tells the Financial Review Property Summit workers have become “arrogant” since COVID and “We’ve got to kill that attitude.”

Financial Review:

The current unemployment rate needs to rise by 40 per cent to 50 per cent to boost the Australian economy’s productivity, Tim Gurner has said.

“In my view, we need to see pain in the economy. We need to remind people that they work for the employer, not the other way around,” he said.

Gurner told the Summit that the cultural shift towards a more pro-employee climate had led to tradies pulling back on productivity.

“When there’s been a systematic change where employees feel the employer is extremely lucky to have them as opposed to the other way around it’s a dynamic that has to change. We’ve got to kill that attitude.”

Gurner has received some blowback over his remarks about “tradies.”

“Just a reminder corporate profits and CEO pay are at historic highs,” wrote Greens MP Stephen Bates. “Workers deserve a fairer slice of the pie.” (The Guardian):

The Labor MP Jerome Laxale wrote the comments were what you’d “associate with a cartoon supervillain, not the ceo of a company in 2023”.

“Reminder that major CEOs have skyrocketed their own pay so much that the ratio of CEO-to-worker pay is now at some of the highest levels *ever* recorded,” shot back Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

There were blunter responses.

“Couldn’t script a better distillation of why capital hates tight labor markets and full employment. Also lol at ‘Property Summit.'” replied Chris Hayes.

“Wow. Quiet part out loud. Capitalism raw and uncensored?” posted Mehdi Hasan.

Capitalism, my ass. What Gurner and his revanchist cohort represent is a pining for feudalism and an iron hand to keep the “filthy peasants” in line, a longing not unlike that of white supremacists for the good old days of chattel slavery. Like fascism, the latter went into hiding more recently. But like Michael Meyers, all three never fully died out. Like the poor they despise (and like cinematic homicidal maniacs), they are with us always and, like zombies, periodically rise to shamble again.

Gurner might have launched into an anecdote about The Lady of the Lake, “her arm clad in the purest shimmering samite” bestowing on him a sword “from the bosom of the water.”

Our American experiment in government by consent of the governed was frought from the beginning. Our unsteady truce with slavers held barely more than 70 years before erupting into civil war, the bloodiest in U.S. history.

Those who fancy themselves the ruling class know, for the most part, to keep their monarchial impulses to themselves. Instances of candor as blatant as Gurner’s are rare. They’ll otherwise cloak royalist sentiment in meritocratic clothing, in boasts of entrepreneurial genius, and in free-market fundamentalism. Occasionally, they’ll let slip a belief in genetic superiority. People such as Gurner believe themselves not exploiters of workers but “job creators” to whom their lessers owe obeisance.

Recall what venture capitalist Nick Hanauer said at TED about job creators in 2012:

Significant privileges have come to capitalists like me for being perceived as “job creators” at the center of the economic universe, and the language and metaphors we use to defend the fairness of the current social and economic arrangements is telling. For instance, it is a small step from “job creator” to “The Creator”. We did not accidentally choose this language. It is only honest to admit that calling oneself a “job creator” is both an assertion about how economics works and a claim on status and privileges. 

Not just privileges, but a claim to a mandate to rule.

As it happens, I stumbled Tuesday morning across this clip from Ghandi (1982) depicting the 1919 Jallianwala Bagh massacre during the British Raj. The YouTube clips above are satirical. This one is not.

“I was going to give them a lesson,” Gen. Reginald Dyer told the Hunter Commission after his troops fired on unarmed men, women and children. “My idea was that it should make a wide impression throughout the Punjab.”

The lower classes must know their place.

Josh Marshall has a smart column on the right’s attempt to jettison the phrase “pro-life” because it’s toxic.(As a twitter wag quipped, “when ‘pro-life’ is a losing slogan for you, you’ve got bigger problems.”) Marshall points out just how thoroughly the anti-abortion movement has been pushed back on its heels:

It now seems clear that the only thing that will be at all memorable about the GOP’s first presidential debate of the 2024 cycle on August 23rd will be that brief speech from Mike Pence in which he staked his campaign on his bible-rooted, evangelical, pro-life record and endorsed a 15-week national ban.

I remember finding it stunning in the moment. Kate Riga took it up the next day. The U.S. doesn’t keep perfect data on abortion care in the United States. The most readily available numbers look at the number of abortions on or before the 13th week (91.1%) and 21st week (98.7%). Even this anti-abortion rights group says that 6% of abortions take place on or after week 15, for instance. It is likely that roughly 95% of abortions in the United States happen within the 15-week window that dyed-in-the-wool pro-life politicians now claim to endorse. If the most diehard of pro-life evangelical politicians are now willing to concede 95% of abortions in the U.S., it’s as though they never meant the whole decades long argument in the first place.

It’s probably best to see Pence’s statement, all the more telling and striking for how comparatively little attention it attracted, as marking the end of the “Pro-Life” movement itself. Of course, this doesn’t mean that the fight for abortion rights is over. Far from it. Abortion rights are more restricted today than at any time in the last half century. Indeed, even the proposed 15-week “national” ban turns out to be a clever sham. It’s not a uniform standard to apply across the United States. It leaves all the draconian red-state bans in place. It’s simply a national “maximum,” a kind of freebie ban Republicans and pro-lifers can get in blue states for nothing in return. But Republicans who have made pro-life politics a sheet anchor of Republican campaigns for four decades now seem unwilling to make any affirmative case for their notional position.

Indeed, it’s not just politicians, who by definition will usually move with public opinion. Even many pro-life ideologues are now proposing comparable bans as a way to at least halt the hemorrhaging of support for pro-life policies or simply batten down behind gerrymandered legislatures and an all-out push to prevent as many state referenda as possible. As Patrick T. Brown put it somewhat optimistically, pro-life governors can win elections after signing draconian abortion bans. (In other words, when it’s packaged in with countless other issues voters care about.) The problem is that “the pro-choice side beats the pro-life side when the issue is heads-up in the ballot box.” The fact that Pence, running in a Republican primary felt it necessary to endorse the national 15 week ban suggests that the evolving reality of post-Dobbs politics makes even Brown’s argument about avoiding “heads-up” votes outdated.

Movements that can’t make positive arguments for their favored positions, even to friendly audiences, cease to be political movements properly understood and become something more like rearguard actions. They seek to use inertia, incumbency and stratagems to hold on to gains and do their best to avoid fights on the open ground of public opinion where at least incremental losses seem inevitable. That’s where anti-abortion, “pro-life” politics stands on the eve of the 2024 election.

I hear DeSantis side-step questions about his 6 week ban and instead take credit for earlier signing the 15 week ban that’s still in the courts. They are on the run.

And they aren’t getting a federal 15 week ban either. After decades of bleating about states’ rights and a Supreme Court decision that was explicitly based on that,. I’m fairly sure it’s going nowhere. It’s their new “overturn Roe vs. Wade” but it’s not going to have the same moral logic they’ve always evoked. Getting rid of their pro-life identity proves it.

They have awakened a sleeping giant and it’s going to hurt them for some time to come.

You’ve probably already heard about the Ukraine/Russia controversy surrounding Walter Isaacson’s new book about Elon Musk. (If not, you can click this link.) But there’s a lot more in the book apparently, which is discussed here in this piece by Matt Pearce in the LA Times:

Musk is already one of the most well-known and extensively covered leaders in American corporate life (and one of its most unavoidable figures on the service he has renamed X). Isaacson’s biography is a Musk agonistes: a portrait of a (largely) self-made, emotionally volatile entrepreneur from South Africa who has a tortured relationship with his father and an addiction to crises of the self-inflicted variety.

Musk is tormented, erratic and rude, over and over again

Musk’s moods are variously described as cycling through “light and dark, intense and goofy, detached and emotional, with occasional plunges into what people around him call ‘demon mode’”; he’s “childlike, almost stunted,” “a drama magnet,” “not bred for domestic tranquility”; he has “a craving for storm and drama” and “erratic emotional oscillations.” Multiple people describe him as having undiagnosed Asperger’s. At one point, Musk calls himself bipolar. His volatile emotional states are the biggest constant in a book that zigzags from cars to rockets, tunneling to AI, solar energy to neural implants.

Isaacson repeatedly likens Musk to his estranged father, Errol Musk, also reportedly prone to volatile moods, abrasive behavior, credit-grubbing, flimflammery and conspiracy theories. Elon’s mother, Maye, said Errol “hit her” before the pair divorced, something that Errol denied. Musk cut off his father after Errol had a child with a woman Elon considered his half-sister — Jana — whom Errol had raised as his stepdaughter since she was 4. In an email Errol wrote to Elon for Father’s Day in 2022, he called Joe Biden a “freak, criminal, pedophile president” and that in South Africa, “with no Whites here, the Blacks will go back to the trees.”

Nothing Elon Musk says in the book is as jarring as his own father’s sometimes bizarre and racist comments. But elsewhere, Elon’s own frequent lack of empathy is bolstered by ample evidence. During the first dance at his wedding with his first wife, Justine, he whispered to her, “I am the alpha in this relationship.” In 2016, he accused journalists of “killing people” (by discrediting self-driving technology) after they asked questions about the first drivers to die in Tesla Autopilot accidents. He was briefly estranged from his brother, Kimbal, after the latter — who once helped rescue Tesla financially — asked for help with his own restaurants. Elon replied that they were doomed, and “I think they should die.”

It’s natural for a reader to wonder whether trying to decarbonize the auto industry or avoid humanity’s extinction justifies the chaos, the bullying, the poor labor standards — the trouble. Isaacson weighs in on the subject only at the end of his book: “Do the audaciousness and hubris that drive him to attempt epic feats excuse his bad behavior, his callousness, his recklessness? The times he’s an a—? The answer is no, of course not.”

Then, a few paragraphs later, the needle on Isaacson’s moral compass wobbles: “But would a restrained Musk accomplish as much as a Musk unbound? … Sometimes great innovators are risk-seeking man-children who resist potty training. They can be reckless, cringeworthy, sometimes even toxic. They can also be crazy. Crazy enough to think they can change the world.”

And they can be incredibly destructive too, as Musk is showing himself to be. Please…

The two Elon Musks, before and after 2018’s Tesla ‘production hell’ (or Amber Heard, or his daughter’s transition)

The year 2018 was an inflection point in the perception of Musk as a public figure, one that foreshadowed his pandemic evolution in 2020 from moderate Democrat to trolling conservative. When a group of children were trapped in a cave in Thailand, Musk tweeted that one rescue diver who dismissed his offer to build a submersible was a “pedo guy.” (Musk later apologized, but not easily.) On Joe Rogan’s podcast, he smoked marijuana, risking his status as a U.S. government contractor. He shot a Tesla Roadster into space.

Behind the scenes, the summer of 2017 through the fall of 2018 encompassed the most “hellacious” period of Musk’s life, Isaacson writes: “Musk went through periods when he oscillated between depression, stupor, giddiness, and manic energy.” Isaacson traces Musk’s tailspin to the news of his father’s relationship with his stepdaughter — as well as his own stormy relationship with the actor Amber Heard, who had recently gone through a tumultuous divorce with the actor Johnny Depp.

Heard “drew [Musk] into a dark vortex” around 2017, Isaacson writes, “that lasted more than a year and produced a deep-seated pain that lingers to this day. … His brother and friends hated her with a passion.”

There were plenty of other stressors that didn’t involve a public figure who’s already taken enough public bludgeoning after the Depp-Heard defamation trial. One of the biggest was the “production hell” at Tesla in 2018, when the survival of the company (and Musk’s reputation) hinged on meeting a seemingly impossible production target for the Tesla Model 3. Musk prowled the factory in a “frenzy of insanity,” he recalled later, “getting four or five hours’ sleep, often on the floor. I remember thinking, I’m like on the ragged edge of sanity.”

What gave his turmoil a political bent was his daughter Jenna’s gender transition around 2020, followed by her decision to cut ties with him. Musk blamed this on her becoming “a full communist” as a result of her progressive education at a Los Angeles private school, Crossroads. This is around the time “woke mind virus” worked its way into his vocabulary.

There’s more and it all points to Elon Musk being a very, very unstable, fucked up human being who has no business having any power over our politics (much less national security.) At this point I’m just hoping for a total breakdown — which may be imminent.

Krugman discusses why people people believe things that just aren’t true:

Remember “American carnage?” Donald Trump’s 2017 inaugural address was peculiar in many ways, but one of the most striking oddities was his obsession with a problem — urban crime — that had greatly diminished over the past generation. For reasons we still don’t fully understand, violent crime in America fell rapidly from around 1990 to the mid-2010s:

True, there was a crime surge after the pandemic, which now seems to be ebbing. But that lay in the future. Trump talked as if crime was running rampant as he spoke.

Yet if Trump had false beliefs about trends in crime, he had plenty of company. Gallup polls Americans about crime every year, and all through the great decline in violent crime a majority of Americans said that crime was increasing:

Were the crime statistics misleading? Homicide numbers are pretty solid. And people behaved as if crime were falling; notably, there was a wave of gentrification as affluent Americans moved into newly safe central cities. But all the same, people told pollsters that they believed crime was rising.

Why am I talking about public perceptions of crime? Well, last week, I wrote about the gap between public perceptions of a terrible economy and the reality of an economy that is doing very well by normal standards. I also noted that Americans seem relatively upbeat about their own financial circumstances; they just think that bad things are happening to other people.

Not surprisingly, I got a lot of pushback. That’s OK; after all these years writing for The Times I have a pretty thick skin, although I have to admit to being annoyed at pundits who try to cut off discussion by asserting that anyone who questions widely held beliefs is an “elitist” who thinks Americans are stupid. For the record, I don’t think Americans are stupid. I think they have jobs to do and children to raise and lives to live. They don’t have time to study policy issues, so most of them get their sense of what’s happening to the country from what they see on TV or hear from politicians. Unfortunately, some of what they’re told isn’t true.

But in any case, I thought it might be useful to draw parallels with the discourse on crime, where there is a similar disconnect between what people tell pollsters they believe is happening and what the available facts say. In fact, the resemblance between how people talk about crime and how they talk about the economy is eerily strong.

Many of those talking about a disconnect on views about the economy cite, among other sources, Federal Reserve data that compares household views of their own financial situation with their views of the economy (highlighting added):

Notice that the survey also asks people about the state of their local economy, where they are likely to have at least some personal experience of what’s going on; these views are much more favorable than their views of the national economy. Now look back at that chart on perceptions of crime. Gallup also asks Americans about crime “in your area,” and sure enough, people’s perceptions of local crime were much more favorable than what they said about the nation as a whole.

Wait, there’s more: Perceptions of crime, like perceptions about the economy, have become strongly partisan, with people becoming more pessimistic when the party they don’t support holds the White House:

And there are huge partisan gaps in assessments of how safe cities are:

As it happens, the Republican perception of Los Angeles and New York as unsafe compared with southern cities is wildly off base. Both have low homicide rates — half as high as Miami’s — and New York City is overall one of the safest places in America.

What does all this tell us, besides the fact that Americans are very confused about crime? It shows that on an important public issue, people can hold beliefs about what is happening to other people — people who live in other places, or in the nation as a whole — that are not just false but also at odds with their personal experience.

Why should this kind of disconnect be restricted to crime? There are, in fact, strong reasons to believe that there’s a similar disconnect when it comes to the economy. And we shouldn’t be afraid to say that out of fear that we’ll be considered elitist.

He doesn’t mention the media in this but they play a huge part. If you are watching local TV in the morning as you get ready for work to see the traffic or the weather, all you see is the old “if it bleeds it leads” and doom and gloom about the economy. If you follow the right wing media or have people on social media who feed you that stuff you’ll get the same thing. For a lot of busy people the idea that the country is falling apart from crime and recession is just conventional wisdom.

By the way, Trump has an instinct for this. Steve Benen writes:

During Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, the Republican faced a dilemma. On the one hand, the economy was relatively healthy at the time, and the unemployment rate was steadily improving in the runup to Election Day. On the other hand, Trump wanted voters to believe the United States was in the midst of an economic disaster, which only he could fix.

The GOP nominee settled on a specific rhetorical strategy to resolve the tension: Trump would simply peddle nonsense and tell the public to believe him, instead of reality. As we discussed at the time, at different points during the campaign, the Republican publicly argued, for example, that the unemployment rate was 20% — or possibly 42% — even as reality pointed to a rate below 5%.

After the election, at a pre-inaugural press conference, Trump declared there are “96 million really wanting a job and they can’t get,” which was ridiculous, even for him. Around the same time, the then-president-elect declared that the unemployment rate was “totally fiction.”

Soon after, as Trump settled into the White House, and the economic conditions he inherited continued to improve, the then-president decided he believed economic data after all.

That was nearly seven years ago. Now, wouldn’t you know it, the Republican has re-embraced the same outlandish rhetorical tactics he used during his successful candidacy in 2016. At a campaign event in South Dakota on Friday night, for example, Trump told attendees, in reference to economic data on employment:

“Now you’re given phony numbers — because far fewer people are looking for jobs. … They throw around 3.5%, 3.6%, 3.7%, but it’s a different group of people. … So it’s a fake number.”

He went on to describe the unemployment rate as “crooked,” before declaring, “During Biden’s first 30 months in office, just 2.1 million new jobs have been created.” As part of the harangue, the former president concluded, “The fact is, we’re probably heading into a Great Depression.”

So, a few things.

First, the unemployment rate is not “phony,” “fake,” or “crooked.” Yes, it fluctuates based on people looking for work and exiting the workforce, but that was true during Trump’s term, too, and it didn’t stop him from touting the data when he saw encouraging jobs reports.

Second, during the first 30 months of Joe Biden’s presidency, the U.S. economy created 13.6 million jobs, not 2.1 million. (If we start the count in February 2021, instead of January 2021, economy created 13.5 million jobs over Biden’s first 30 months.) Trump and some of his allies apparently want the public to believe that the rapid economic recovery that began after Trump left office led to job growth that doesn’t really count, but that’s not a serious argument.

Third, there is literally zero evidence of the domestic economy “heading into a Great Depression.”

But as relevant as these details are, let’s also not forget that the incumbent Democratic president has recently taken some rhetorical shots at his predecessor’s weak record on job creation. On Friday night, Trump was apparently eager to return fire.

The problem, of course, was that the Republican, unable to rely on facts, was firing imaginary bullets.

In his newsletter today, Dan Pfeiffer looks at the bizarre phenomenon of a presidential candidate getting much more popular after he’s indicted four times:

A number of theories surfaced to explain this unexpected and deeply concerning outcome — Republicans are a cult, Ron DeSantis sucks, etc. Elections are dynamic enterprises. There are a lot of interrelated factors that lead to an outcome. It’s not as simple as “Ron DeSantis sucks,” even if he is one of the most maladroit candidates in modern political history. Here are X findings from recent polls that help explain why Republican voters are flocking to Trump as his likelihood of spending the rest of his life in prison skyrockets:

1. Republicans Trust Trump Over Everyone Else

Donald Trump is one of the most prolific and obvious liars the world has ever known. Here’s how the Washington Post fact checker summarized Trump’s presidency:

Over time, Trump unleashed his falsehoods with increasing frequency and ferocity, often by the scores in a single campaign speech or tweetstorm. What began as a relative trickle of misrepresentations, including 10 on his first day and five on the second, built into a torrent through Trump’s final days as he frenetically spread wild theories that the coronavirus pandemic would disappear “like a miracle” and that the presidential election had been stolen — the claim that inspired Trump supporters to attack Congress on Jan. 6 and prompted his second impeachment. The final tally of Trump’s presidency: 30,573 false or misleading claims — with nearly half coming in his final year.

Trump’s dishonesty is so blatant that most Americans find it disqualifying, but Trump’s voters see only qualifications. They do not believe he is dishonest. They think he is the only honest man in public life. A CBS News/YouGov poll asked Trump voters who they feel tells them the truth. Trump was seen as more truthful than friends and family or religious leaders.

This finding helps explain why all of this damaging information about Trump from the various indictments, not to mention the January 6th committee or the media, keeps voters in Trump’s corner — they trust Trump more. If Jack Smith or Fani Willis says Trump did all these bad things and Trump says (or Truths) “I’m innocent” it’s clear who they will believe. Trump isn’t their most trusted source of information, he is their only trusted source of information.

2. A Hermetically Sealed Information Bubble

In addition to not believing the negative information about Trump, many Republican voters simply aren’t getting the other side. If they do encounter news about Trump’s crimes, it’s refracted through the lens of the Right Wing media.

In August, a New York Times/Sienna poll asked Republican voters which news source they trusted most:

Fox News 26%

Social Media 12%

National Broadcast TV 11%

Conservative News Sites 6%

Local Broadcast News 6%

Newsmax 5%

The Republican base lives in a hermetically sealed information bubble that protects Trump from the damaging revelations that have undone so many other political figures.

3. Republicans Think Trump Can’t Lose

If you have spent any time recently on Twitter or in group chats with politically active Democrats, you’ve witnessed their mild panic about the 2024 election. Poll after poll show an alarmingly close race, which has sent Democratic blood pressures skyrocketing. Even though these very same polls have Trump tied with Biden, Republican voters are not concerned. According to a CBS News/YouGov poll, 61% of Republican voters think Trump would DEFINITELY beat Biden.

The level of confidence is delusional given two facts. One, Trump is in grave legal jeopardy; and two, Biden beat Trump less than three years ago. This delusion is fueled by the Right Wing media’s caricature of Biden’s age and competence, but also explains why Republicans are sticking with Trump — they believe to their core that he is the best chance to beat Biden.

DeSantis’s pitch that he is Trump without the baggage falls flat because GOP voters simply don’t believe Trump has baggage.

They also don’t believe Trump really lost in 2020. They think he’s a proven winner against Biden.

4. GOP Voters are Nonplussed by the Charges

There is a possibility that Donald Trump will be sentenced to prison before the 2024 election. Presidential primary voters support candidates for two reasons — they think a candidate can win and if that candidate wins, they will be a president who effectively implements their vision. On paper, at least, it would seem that campaigning in prison would pose a real obstacle to one’s success and a functional presidency. Even if you believed to your core that Trump was innocent — as most Republican voters do — the circumstances of his indictments should give you some pause about his ability to win and govern.

For whatever reason, Republicans are not in the least worried about the logistical or political impact of the indictments. A recent CNN poll found that majorities of Republicans are not at all concerned about the political or substantive impact of the charges.

Nearly seven in ten Republicans are unconcerned about 91 felony counts that could lead to decades of prison time. They don’t believe it will impact Trump’s efficacy as president. This is the whole story of the GOP primary contest that is barely a contest.

That’s crazy. But they think he has magical powers apparently and will be able to function as president even though he’s a convicted felon looking at jail time. The only explanation for this is that these people are cult followers or they are so cynical they just don’t care and are willing to say anything because they want to win. It’s ridiculous.

Keep in mind that this is probably the biggest cult in world history. Over 50 million people are participating to one degree or another.

But he did it anyway

McCarthy doesn’t take questions. He told Breitbart 11 days ago he wouldn’t launch an impeachment inquiry without a House vote. Opening one now unilaterally is a major reversal for the speaker. It comes as he doesn’t appear to have the votes to proceed. pic.twitter.com/H0rSVvqLlt

— Sahil Kapur (@sahilkapur) September 12, 2023

McCarthy pulled the trigger as we knew he would. He didn’t have the votes for a real inquiry, however, which means that the new rules they say they need will have to be litigated because a full vote of the House is required. So, this may end up being yet another performance art project which the extremists hope will make voters assume there must be something to it and write off Trump’s corruptions and criminality because “both sides do it.”

It’s ridiculous but we expected nothing less. Now let’s see if McCarthy bought himself at least an extension to get the government funded. I won’t be surprised if they say, “that’s nice, but we also need to have the DOJ and the “woke” Pentagon de-funded. McCarthy will try to do whatever they want but at some point he’s going to have to put something to a vote and he doesn’t have them. The whole thing is a farce.

Designed-in countermajoritarian features contribute to minority rule

Michelle Goldberg speaks with Harvard government professors Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt. The authors of “How Democracies Die” (2018) released “Tyranny of the Minority: Why American Democracy Reached the Breaking Point” this morning. What shocked them since 2018 was how swiflty the GOP slid sown the behavioral sink into insurrection. They did not consider the Republican Party an authoritarian party in 2018, and “did not expect it to transform so quickly and so thoroughly.”

Goldberg writes:

“Tyranny of the Minority” is their attempt to make sense of how American democracy eroded so fast. “Societal diversity, cultural backlash and extreme-right parties are ubiquitous across established Western democracies,” they write. But in recent years, only in America has a defeated leader attempted a coup. And only in America is the coup leader likely to once again be the nominee of a major party. “Why did America, alone among rich established democracies, come to the brink?” they ask.

A disturbing part of the answer, Levitsky and Ziblatt conclude, lies in our Constitution, the very document Americans rely on to defend us from autocracy. “Designed in a predemocratic era, the U.S. Constitution allows partisan minorities to routinely thwart majorities, and sometimes even govern them,” they write. The Constitution’s countermajoritarian provisions, combined with profound geographic polarization, have locked us into a crisis of minority rule.

These features have enabled Republicans to chalk up three Electoral College wins despite having won a majority of presidential votes “in only one out of the last eight presidential elections.” Add in their post-2010, RedMap gerrymandering and Republicans “don’t need to win over the majority of voters.” As their base has become more radical, so have elected Republicans.

All liberal democracies have some countermajoritarian institutions to stop popular passions from running roughshod over minority rights. But as “Tyranny of the Minority” shows, our system is unique in the way it empowers a minority ideological faction at the expense of everyone else. And while conservatives like to pretend that their structural advantages arise from the judicious wisdom of the founders, Levitsky and Ziblatt demonstrate how many of the least democratic aspects of American governance are the result of accident, contingency and, not least, capitulation to the slaveholding South.

“The poor you will always have with you,” Jesus said. And the legacy of slavery, the country’s original sin?

Levitsky and Ziblatt think it is unavoidable that reformers “engage in the glacial slog of constitutional reform,” and naive to think things will just work out if the country keeps on as it is.

More consolidation of population in cities in blue states will simply exacerbate the antimajoritarian lean of the Senate and of state legislatures if Democrats keep ceding the countryside.

Goldberg concludes:

“I think the United States faces a high risk of serious and repeated constitutional crisis, what I would call regime instability, quite possibly accompanied by some violence,” said Levitsky. “I’m not as worried about the consolidation of autocracy, Hungary or Russia-style. I think that the opposition forces, civil society forces, are probably too strong for that.” Let’s hope that this time he’s not being too optimistic.

I did not think Americans were dumb enough or crazy enough to elect Donald Trump in 2016. Now reading David Dayen’s pre-insurrection “Monopolized: Life in the Age of Corporate Power” (2020). It’s enough to make me crawl into a hole. I’m not sure which will end us first, metastasized capitalism or allied autocracy.

They’re making every effort to prove it

First thing this morning, up pops a Kaitlan Collins CNN interview with Rep. Nancy Mace (R-S.C.). Collins posts:

Rep. Nancy Mace says she supports a House impeachment inquiry. Asked isn’t it supposed to be the evidence that leads you to pursue an impeachment inquiry, Mace responds, “That’s what the inquiry is for, to get more evidence.”

Marcy Wheeler (@emptywheel from Ireland) responds:

BREAKING: @NancyMace admits, 1) She hasn’t read Biden’s tax releases, which unlike Trump, Biden releases 2) she’s willing to engage in a constitutional abomination of impeaching BECAUSE there’s no evidence of wrongdoing.

Trump wants his retribution NOW

Let’s cut to the chase. Digby summarized what’s behind this nonsense on Monday:

It’s absolutely the case that they are doing this for Trump because he has demanded it. That goes without saying. But since they are all bent on destroying democracy and the constitutional order, de-legitimizing the impeachment process is a no brainer. If they have the power (meaning a 2/3 Senate majority) they will remove any Democratic president for whatever trumped up charges they come up with. If they don’t have the power they will use it as yet another of their patented performance art projects. Impeachment will be devalued so that even if Democrats have the evidence and the power to remove, it will be seen as illegitimate. Win win for the bad guys.

For further proof, it is not just Republicans inside the Beltway pursuing an “if you can’t beat ’em, impeach ’em agenda.” * Wisconsin Republicans, secure in their heavily gerrymandered districts and with a supermajority in the state legislature, intend to engineer the suspension (via impeachus interruptus) of the newly elected state Supreme Court Justice Janet Protasiewicz. Earlier this year, Jamelle Bouie reminds us, the Milwaukee liberal won her seat on the court by double digits in a special election with record turnout, ending the partisan advantage held by Republicans.

What has Protasiewicz done so soon to merit impeachment? Nothing, yet. So what? (Bouie):

Wisconsin Republicans can’t strip a judicial officer of her power. But they can remove her, which is what they intend to do. “Republicans in Wisconsin are coalescing around the prospect of impeaching a newly seated liberal justice on the state’s Supreme Court,” my newsroom colleague Reid J. Epstein reports. “The push, just five weeks after Justice Janet Protasiewicz joined the court and before she has heard a single case, serves as a last-ditch effort to stop the new 4-to-3 liberal majority from throwing out Republican-drawn state legislative maps and legalizing abortion in Wisconsin.”

Republicans have more than enough votes in the Wisconsin State Assembly to impeach Justice Protasiewicz and just enough votes in the State Senate — a two-thirds majority — to remove her. But removal would allow Governor Evers to appoint another liberal jurist, which is why Republicans don’t plan to convict and remove Protasiewicz. If, instead, the Republican-led State Senate chooses not to act on impeachment, Justice Protasiewicz is suspended but not removed. The court would then revert to a 3-3 deadlock, very likely preserving the Republican gerrymander and keeping a 19th-century abortion law, which bans the procedure, on the books.

If successful, Wisconsin Republicans will have created, in effect, an unbreakable hold on state government. With their gerrymander in place, they have an almost permanent grip on the State Legislature, with supermajorities in both chambers. With these majorities, they can limit the reach and power of any Democrat elected to statewide office and remove — or neutralize — any justice who might rule against the gerrymander.

Or Protasiewicz could rule to overturn the state’s 19th-century abortion law. MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow provided a primer Monday night, calling the maneuver “a nice trick”) :

Republicans in this swing state also plan to fire Wisconsin Elections Commission administrator Meagan Wolfe. The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reports that “the Democratic Attorney General and the Legislature’s nonpartisan attorneys concluded earlier this month” that the Senate technically has no power to remove Wolfe. So what?

Evidence not required

Regarding the Republican threat to impeach Biden, Rep. Jamie Raskin (D) of Maryland, Ranking Member of the Committee on Oversight and Accountability, rebuked Chairman James Comer (R) of Kentucky in a letter for promoting debunked claims and second-hand allegations.

In a statement, Raskin denounced the committee’s efforts as:

… a transparent effort to boost Donald Trump’s campaign by establishing a false moral equivalency between Trump—the four time-indicted former president now facing 91 federal and state criminal charges, based on a mountain of damning evidence for a shocking range of felonies, including lying to the FBI, endangering national security by illegally keeping classified documents, and conspiring to subvert the U.S. Constitution—and President Biden, against whom there is precisely zero evidence of any wrongdoing whatsoever.  To the contrary, Chairman Comer’s investigation has conclusively disproven the Republican allegations against President Biden.

Raskin provides receipts:

Not only does this voluminous evidence fail to even suggest any wrongdoing by President Biden, it in fact proves the opposite.  Specifically:

• None of the bank records Comer has released shows any payments to President Biden. 
• None of the SARs the Committee reviewed alleges, or even suggests, any potential misconduct by President Biden, nor do the SARs show any involvement by President Biden in Hunter Biden’s financial or business relationships. 
• Not one of the witness accounts provided to the Committee has shown any evidence of wrongdoing by President Biden, including accounts from two IRS agents and a former FBI Supervisory Special Agent, who were involved in the DOJ’s investigation of Hunter Biden. 
• Former business associates of Hunter Biden who have been interviewed by the Committee—Eric Schwerin and Devon Archer—explicitly stated that they have no reason to believe President Biden had any involvement in Hunter Biden’s business deals, much less any reason to believe President Biden took any official action on behalf of his son’s business ventures.
• Mr. Schwerin, who performed bookkeeping and other administrative tasks for then Vice-President Biden and therefore had access to his bank records, stated that he was not aware of any involvement by President Biden in the financial conduct of his relatives’ businesses, much less any transactions into or out of the then-Vice President’s bank account related to business conducted by any Biden family member.
• Two IRS agents who testified before the Committee affirmed that they do not have any evidence of political interference by President Biden or Attorney General Merrick Garland. 
• The Former FBI Supervisory Special Agent interviewed by the Committee rejected Republicans’ claims that prosecutorial decisions by U.S. Attorney David Weiss or his team were the result of any political interference. 

So what? Dear Leader wants his revenge and he wants it now. And a compliant press is abetting the GOP by reporting the faux controversy over “bribery” and repeating “too old” stories about Biden in their accustomed “but her emails” style.

Really, the GOP should have to turn in their pocket Constitutions, American flags, and red-white-and-blue trinkets. There’s little American left of them but the branding. Just like Brand Trump.

* Before reminding me of Donald Trump’s two impeachments by Democrats, reference Donald Trump’s 91 criminal charges across four jurisdictions with more likely to come.

** For some reason, ‘X’ embeds are not working this morning.