DeSantis wouldn’t be seen with him. Naturally.
Luckily some people in Florida still have good manners:
And here’s a surprise:
Heh. Somebody just stuck it to both Trump and DeSantis.
"what digby sez..."
Digby's Hullabaloo Posts
That’s pretty much what Truth Social is all about. Just Trump worship. Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem to be enough:
The complex deal to take Donald Trump’s social-media platform Truth Social public faces a crucial test next week that could determine whether it becomes a multibillion-dollar company that the former US president once vowed would stand up to “big tech” or instead languish in financial limbo.
Under the terms of the deal, announced in October 2021, Trump’s Trump Media & Technology Group was destined to merge with Digital World Acquisition Corp, a special-purpose acquisition company, or Spac.
But shareholders in Digital World are now being asked to give the company another year to complete the deal. If they refuse to do so at a meeting on 8 September, the enterprise may never become the $1.7bn company it once envisioned.
The path to tech riches the deal floated for Trump and his supporters has not been smooth.
Jay Ritter, a University of Florida finance professor, told the Washington Post this week that the merger has “been pretty much unprecedented in terms of all of the glitches”. The Post published a detailed exploration of the platform’s current position, prompting Shannon Devine, a spokeswoman for Trump Media, to accuse the paper of posting “a heaping pile of bias”.
Soon after it was announced Digital World’s plan to merge with Trump Media was hit with allegations that conversations between the two had taken place before they were permitted under Spac rules.
In March, Patrick Orlando was fired as CEO by Digital World’s board and a former board member was accused of insider trading.
Deadlines for closing the deal have already been extended five times. Digital World is facing warnings from the tech-heavy Nasdaq stock exchange that its shares could be delisted over a reporting issue.
In July, Digital World’s shares rallied 93% before a preliminary $18m settlement with the Securities and Exchange Commission over accounting fraud charges.
Last month, the company and Trump Media urged investors to vote for an extension to prevent DWAC’s dissolution.
“If you are a DWAC stockholder who believes in Truth Social’s mission to reopen the Internet and give people their voices back, we strongly urge you to vote TODAY,” the notice said, Bloomberg reported.
But Trump Media has blamed regulators for the deal’s delays. Last year, it accused the SEC of working to “sabotage” the merger, telling the Washington Post that agency had tossed “the matter into a bureaucratic black hole of inaction” and violated its own charter.
Even his businesses whine and complain that everything is rigged against Trump. But if you look at that comment to Trump’s bleating above you can see that he’s such a martyr to his followers that it all serves to reinforce his position as the second coming.
He seems to really loathe teenagers
We all know that Ron DeSantis has a real problem with kids. Scolding a little kid for eating ice cream because it has too much sugar was bad enough. Humiliating those high school students who wore masks waseven worse. Now this:
Quinn Mitchell has seen at least 35 presidential candidates in person since 2019, when he first started showing up at New Hampshire primary events to ask them questions.
Not a single one of them had ever treated the now-15-year-old as if he were a threat—until Ron DeSantis came to town.
It all started with a straightforward question. In June, when DeSantis stopped for a town hall event in Hollis, Mitchell raised his hand in the crowd.
“Do you believe that Trump violated the peaceful transfer of power,” the teenager asked the governor, “a key principle of American democracy that we must uphold?”
DeSantis dodged the question and said Americans shouldn’t get stuck in the past, but not before remarking—in a somewhat impressed, incredulous tone—on Mitchell’s age. “Are you in high school?” the governor asked.
The moment went viral, with DeSantis’ non-answer encapsulating how even Donald Trump’s lead primary rival could not bring himself to acknowledge the former president’s efforts to undo the 2020 election. CNN even played it during an interview with Chris Christie to tee up a question to the Trump foe.
[…]
Across all of the reboots and turmoil, a consistent thread apparently remained: the DeSantis team’s willingness to go to unusual lengths to prevent a teenage boy from having a chance to follow up with the candidate on his question—and, to hear Mitchell tell it, personally express regret that he made the governor look bad.
More broadly, the teenager’s story distills some key reasons why DeSantis’ presidential bid is struggling: a candidate with clear difficulty making personal connections, a team obsessed with managing every detail on the campaign trail, and a pervasive anxiety over the idea of alienating Trump voters.
Combined together, those factors may ensure DeSantis gets nowhere near the White House in 2024. In New Hampshire, they’ve already pushed a precocious and passionate teenager to consider quitting politics altogether.
“I may be older now and know I can handle this a lot more, but if they had done that to me a few years back, I don’t know if I could have handled that,” Mitchell said. “It’s unfortunate, because I just want to ask my question.”
In the nation’s first primary state, where individual voters can have an outsized impact on the process, Mitchell made himself a staple of the New Hampshire political scene before he was even a teenager.
A self-described political independent who loves history and politics, Mitchell sees it as his “civic duty” to show up to ask questions, especially on behalf of “people who live in other states and the people who want to ask those questions,” who “don’t always get the opportunity.”
Before DeSantis, presidential candidates have not just tolerated the teenager but seemed to genuinely appreciate him. In the 2020 Democratic primary, Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) met with Mitchell and later worked his enthusiasm for politics into her stump speech.
More recently, Christie not only gave him a shoutout during the CNN interview—“he goes to every town hall meeting… he asks really tough questions”—but was quoted in a recent USA Today profile of Mitchell. “Quinn, remember me when you are president,” the former New Jersey governor quipped.
‘They’re Watching You’
After his question about Jan. 6 blew up on DeSantis, Mitchell—who was not intending to land a punch on the governor—said he “genuinely felt bad about it.” A few days later, he woke up early for the hour-and-a-half drive to Merrimack, where he intended to personally say as much to DeSantis at the town’s Fourth of July parade.
Once there, the high level of security around the governor’s contingent stood out to Mitchell and other observers. Staffers for the super PAC, Never Back Down, “were nudging the security guys and pointing at me,” Mitchell said. “I actually had a reporter come up and just say, ‘They’re pointing at you and they’re watching you.’”
Unfazed, Mitchell patiently walked along as the candidate crossed from curb to curb, shaking hands with voters; each time he came close to DeSantis, however, the security guards would hold their arms out in front and parry him away.
Finally, Mitchell was able to get within earshot of the governor. When he passed by, he told him, “I’m so sorry that I got you in all that trouble,” and offered him a chance to give a different or more detailed answer to the question.
According to Mitchell, DeSantis nodded in response, at least acknowledging his question, and the two had a quick handshake. That’s when things went south: right after the handshake, Mitchell recalled his shock when he felt a firm tug on his shirt, pulling him away from DeSantis. Suddenly, all he could see were the outstretched arms of security guards and plain clothed aides.
“Usually what they do is they don’t push you or anything, but they put their hands out and kind of body you, so you just don’t move, basically,” Mitchell said, describing a shuffling motion more akin to an offensive line on a football team than a presidential candidate’s security detail.
If that were not startling enough, right after the fracas, a DeSantis security guard cornered Mitchell and ordered him not to move from the spot for another five minutes. In response, he did what almost any 15-year old would do.
He texted his mom.
Toward the end of the parade, Mitchell’s mother reunited with her son and then demanded an explanation from DeSantis for why his security detail was putting their hands on her boy, an interaction that was observed by a Boston Globe reporter on the scene.
What the Globe didn’t catch was the involvement of the second most important person in the DeSantis campaign: Casey, the governor’s wife and arguably his top political adviser.
Instead of diffusing the situation, however, the Florida First Lady suggested to Mitchell’s mother that she was overreacting—and that her son was fibbing.
“Well, I’m a mother, too,” Casey said, according to Mitchell and other witnesses, along with multiple sources who shared contemporaneous communications on the incident with The Daily Beast. “I know what you’re experiencing, and we’re all very afraid for our children—even if they’re exaggerating.”
As for the candidate himself, DeSantis told Mitchell he would “get to the bottom” of the one-sided encounter with security, and even told the teenager to come to his next event.
‘Got Our Kid’
Ahead of their August 19 event, a staffer for Never Back Down reached out to Mitchell. USA Today let the PAC know that a photographer wanted to come photograph Mitchell for the upcoming profile. The staffer just wanted to confirm he would be in attendance.
The teenager obliged. But after walking into the event, held in a firearm factory in Newport, he noticed something odd.
It wasn’t just that he saw a pair of security guards flanking him as he made his way to the far side of the venue. The weird part was that Never Back Down staffers were taking photos of him. It was notable to Mitchell, even before he learned of the ominous caption—“got our kid”—that one staffer was seen attaching to a Snapchat photo.
The governor kept audience questions to a tight 15 minutes, throwing Mitchell a glance but ignoring his outstretched hand, though the teenager now stands over 6 feet tall.
Security kept their defensive posture as Mitchell tried to make his way to stage right—where DeSantis was attempting to chat with voters and take selfies—blocking him from getting toward the group of voters waiting to chat with the candidate.
Even after Mitchell gave up on his months-long pursuit of a follow-up question to DeSantis about his views on Trump and the transfer of power, security prevented him from crossing the room to see a family friend, until they eventually relented.
Since the incidents, Mitchell has not heard from the DeSantis campaign, or the PAC, though he expected to. He could not reach an in-state contact for the governor’s team himself.
“The campaign, they could have called and said, ‘We’re so sorry, this should have never happened, we’ll get to the bottom of it,’” Mitchell said. “Never got a call like that. They never apologized to us for any of it.”
Mitchell often says that it’s a privilege to live in New Hampshire, a state where even a determined teenager can have the power to influence the presidential election in a small way. His dream is to become a political reporter, but he said the DeSantis events almost made him want to hang it up for good.
Whatever happens, Mitchell is likely to keep up his rigorous primary schedule—even if he’s unlikely to try to see DeSantis again anytime soon. But the teenager said if he ran into him “at conventions or a multiple candidate event, I will do my best to press him.”
I guess this is the sort of thing they’ve spent their hundreds of millions on. The campaign is like their candidate, creepy, paranoid and cruel. And I especially like that wife Casey shows up to claim the kid is a liar. Sweet lady. Really nice.
We’re still waiting for Jan. 6 ‘masterminds’ to get theirs
A federal judge on Thursday sentenced Proud Boy leader Joe Biggs to 17 years in prison this week. Someone on “formerly known as Twitter” snarked that by the time he gets out of jail, Biggs will be a proud man.
The Lincoln Project is having fun with the fate of the furious.
Comeuppance is a guilty pleasure we were denied in the wake of the banking collapse of 2008. Those assholes got $1.6b in bonuses.
But these threats are not funny. We covered some of this nascent Rwanda talk on Friday. But threats of violence against election workers are widespread enough to deserve an Election Threats Task Force. At least some people are being charged:
More than a dozen people nationally have been charged with threatening election workers by a Justice Department unit trying to stem the tide of violent and graphic threats against people who count and secure the vote.
Government employees are being bombarded with threats even in normally quiet periods between elections, secretaries of state and experts warn. Some point to former President Donald Trump and his allies repeatedly and falsely claiming the 2020 election was stolen and spreading conspiracy theories about election workers. Experts fear the 2024 election could be worse and want the federal government to do more to protect election workers.
The Justice Department created the Election Threats Task Force in 2021 led by its public integrity section, which investigates election crimes. John Keller, the unit’s second in command, said in an interview with The Associated Press that the department hoped its prosecutions would deter others from threatening election workers.
I got dispatched in 2022 to investigate reports that some guy with a weapon (unspecified) was spotted outside a local polling station standing (legally) just outside the electioneering limit. He was gone by the time I arrived. The photo I received on my phone was of some morbidly obese dude wearing a .38 revolver that looked so tiny on his hip that it might have come in a box of Cracker Jack.
He may have been a joke, but these real threats are no joking matter.
A Texas man was given 3 1/2 years earlier this month after suggesting a “mass shooting of poll workers and election officials” last year, charges stated. In one message, the Justice Department said, the man wrote: “Someone needs to get these people AND their children. The children are the most important message to send.” His lawyer did not return a message seeking comment.
One indictment unveiled in August was against a man accused of leaving an expletive-filled voicemail after the 2020 election for Tina Barton, a Republican who formerly was the clerk in Rochester Hills, Michigan, outside Detroit. According to the indictment, the person vowed that “a million plus patriots will surround you when you least expect it” and “we’ll … kill you.”
Barton said it was just one of many threats that left her feeling deeply anxious.
“I’m really hopeful the charges will send a strong message, and we won’t find ourselves in the same position after the next election,” she said.
Maybe. Maybe not. Although some of Trump’s followers who found out are figuring it out:
Pam Hemphill was sentenced in May 2022 to 60 days in jail for her involvement in the U.S. Capitol riot. She told Trump to stop using her story for personal political gain.
A self-avowed “ex-MAGA Granny” who served jail time for participating in the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot has called out Donald Trump for “using” her story for political gain.
[…]
“Please,” she wrote in a tweet directed at Trump, “don’t be using me for anything.”
“I’m not a victim of Jan6, I pleaded guilty because I was guilty!”
How long, O Lord?
Progressives? You’re not as smart as you think you are. As a friend said many times, “Republicans speak to create their own reality, through the constant repetition of their claims.” We find repetition boring.
Behold, a word from our proprietress:
A lot of stupid decisions? Name five. Stupider than not wearing a mask or talking up junk cures and drinking bleach?
https://apnews.com/article/donald-trump-pandemics-public-health-coronavirus-pandemic-f6e976f34a6971c889ca8a4c5e1c0068
A few more words on repetition:
https://kffhealthnews.org/news/nation-records-400000-covid-deaths-on-last-day-of-donald-trump-presidency/
Am I getting through to you, Mr. Beale?
Whale rescue!
Watch the whole thing. It’s beautiful.
Each day, former President Trump‘s staff presents him with a stack of mostly supportive letters, op-eds and printouts of tweets. They’re meant to keep him informed — but perhaps just as important, to boost his spirits.
Trump, signature black Sharpie in hand, often scrawls responses on them and has his aides text a photo of the comments back to the writers. The Trump-signed hard copies are sent back by U.S. mail.
Why it matters: It’s an ego-soothing exercise for Trump that winds up creating a series of viral threads, as recipients of Trump’s comments — some of whom are essentially pen pals with large digital followings — post them on social media.
For Trump — whose online rants against critics, prosecutors and judges are escalating as the four felony cases against him proceed — the virality of such personal notes provides a constant chain of support, commiseration and shared anger.
Zoom in: Paul Ingrassia, a former Trump White House intern, says he’s received more than a dozen notes from Trump since October in response to supportive articles Ingrassia wrote for conservative outlets.
After he wrote Trump recently to flag an article “you may have overlooked,” Trump wrote back: “Never! Just posted” — Trump had reposted Ingrassia’s piece on Truth Social.
Recalling a visit Ingrassia had made to the former president’s golf club in Bedminster, N.J., Trump added: “Great seeing you — the man behind the great writing — you are looking good.”
Like many of Trump’s pen pals, Ingrassia posts the former president’s replies on his own social media accounts. He says Trump’s handwritten notes, which he’s framing, encourage him to keep writing articles.
Trump’s circle of flattery includes allies across the country who flag their own work, tweets, messages or video of their TV appearances to Trump aide Natalie Harp, senior adviser Jason Miller, communications director Steven Cheung and others, two people familiar with the process tell Axios.
Material deemed significant enough for Trump’s eyes is printed out aboard Trump’s jet or at one of his clubs to be presented to him.
One ally whose messages typically reach Trump is Laura Loomer, a far-right activist who narrowly lost a bid for the U.S. House last year in the district that includes Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort.
“If [Trump] had people in his first term who were as loyal as I am, he wouldn’t have a lot of the issues” he has now, Loomer wrote to the former president’s staff recently, adding that she would “sniff out” the “traitors” to Trump.
“Laura, I hear you!” Trump responded in bold letters on a printout of her message.
“Sounds good to me,” he added beside Loomer’s line about traitors.
His reply was signed “Donald,” in Trump’s large, jagged signature.
Trump recently praised Garrett Ventry, a GOP strategist and former congressional aide who frequently goes to bat for him on Fox News, for a TV appearance after Trump was indicted on charges of withholding classified documents.
“Thank you Garrett, great job,” Trump wrote on printout of a text message from Ventry to a Trump aides.
“It’s a great pat on the back and it’s smart because it really doesn’t take him that much time,” Ventry said.Between the lines: Trump’s handwritten responses have come to be coveted by young Republicans who haven’t gotten a response.
“How do I get one?” other young conservative influencers wrote to a Trump aide after a 17-year-old podcaster who goes by “GOP Josh” posted a reply from Trump on his social media account.
On the other hand: Trump’s notes also can be a lot like his dismissive, insulting posts on social media — particularly when his staff prints out a critical story for him to see.
Journalists are a favorite target, but Trump’s shots don’t always involve politics — sometimes they have the ring of a status-conscious New Yorker.
Emily Smith, former editorial director for the New York Post’s Page Six, posted a photo of a handwritten note she got from Trump last year about a story she’d written about him being snubbed from a wedding invitation.
“Fake news,” Trump wrote on top of a printed copy of the newspaper. “Not interested in going, never would have gone … just a made up PR hit job.”
Loomer and Ingrassia aren’t just “far-right activists. Loomer is certifiably insane and Ingrassia is an incel who worships trafficker Andrew Tate. I’m sure they’ll be in the cabinet in a second term.
Cancun Ted is desperate for a Fox gig
The manly man being manly with his manly beard and his manly beer. And yet nobody can stand the guy, not even the people who vote for him.
If you have some time today, take a look at this video from a leading activist in Hungary about the growing ties between Viktor Orbán and the Republican Party. It’s not good:
This is the story of how has the far right ruling party of Hungary been building its connections with the Trumpist wing of the American Republicans. In our video, we show that Orbán’s party, the Fidesz, and its publicly funded political machinery have been consciously working for years on developing a network of lobby groups, think tanks and media organizations that creates and nurtures the international comradery between the hardline nationalists of Hungary and America. It is not a coincidence that former Fox News host Tucker Carlson visited Orbán and had been presenting Hungary in his interviews as the Trumpian Utopia Country, nor that the Hungarian PM was invited to speak at the CPAC Texas and Hungary hosted the first Conservative Political Action Conference held in Europe, nor that Florida’s infamous “Don’t Say Gay Bill” has a striking similarity to Hungary’s anti gay law passed in 2021 – two years before Ron DeSantis had built up the courage to copy it in the US.
In an urgent appeal to wealthy Republicans who had assembled in Milwaukee ahead of the first GOP presidential primary debate, top brass for the super PAC backing Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis told donors they needed an injection of $50 million over the next four months, according to leaked audio obtained by CNN.
“We just need your help getting $50 million more by the end of the year, and $100 million more by the end of March,” Never Back Down CEO Chris Jankowski told donors hours before DeSantis stepped on the stage Aug. 23, according to the audio. “I’m not worried about the second 50. We need the first 50.”
Throughout an hour-long presentation, Jankowski, chief operating officer Kristin Davison and chief strategist Jeff Roe walked donors through their inside view of how DeSantis is faring just five months before the Iowa caucus kicks off primary season. Their frank but upbeat assessments touched on perceived shortcomings in media exposure compared to the Trump campaign, their push to lean more heavily on Florida first lady Casey DeSantis and their goal of getting more than 100,000 Iowans to caucus for DeSantis.
Among the information shared was the “DeSantis index,” an in-house metric that measures the likelihood someone will back the Florida governor.
“If you have an education, if you have higher income, if you read the Bible and if you go to church regularly, you happen to be a DeSantis supporter,” Roe told the room.
The audio provides an inside look at the strategy behind a super PAC that has assumed an unusually outsized role in DeSantis’ presidential campaign – one that has attracted the attention of campaign finance watchdogs and has, at times, led to friction with DeSantis’ official operation. The tension spilled into the open just days before the Milwaukee event, when the super PAC released a memo with debate pointers for DeSantis. The unsolicited advice was poorly received.
Never Back Down – initially funded in large part by $82.5 million transferred from DeSantis’ state political committee – has operated as a de facto shadow campaign for the governor. It has assumed traditional campaign duties, including building out an extensive field operation in early nominating states, training operatives, enlisting endorsements from local leaders and planning DeSantis’ travel and staging his events. Last week, DeSantis toured northwest Iowa on a bus operated by Never Back Down.
Roughly 60 donors attended the fundraising lunch, hosted at a DoubleTree hotel blocks away from the debate venue, sources familiar with the event details told CNN. Among the attendees was Dallas businessman Roy Bailey, the former co-chair of the Trump campaign’s finance committee who has since changed allegiances.
Davison told CNN Thursday “every investor wants to see how you get to the final round and how you win, and almost all the donors left confident that that we had a clear path to victory to help the governor win.”
[…]
Jankowski, Davison and Roe spent much of their presentation hyper-focused on former President Donald Trump and his inherent ability to out-gain all other GOP candidates in earned media, meaning organic and free coverage on television, online and in newsprint. Both Davison and Roe emphasized the positive impact Trump’s indictments are having on the former president’s White House bid, something they used to try and persuade donors to help them overcome.
“Donald Trump probably gets roughly at least $30 million of earned media every single day. We’re number two, with roughly $5 (million) to $6 million every single day. Where you see the spikes are after every indictment,” Davison said. “After every indictment, it goes up to $100 million of earned media, and in a presidential race, no news is bad news. What we really learned in 2016 is that Donald Trump dominated earned media and we see it happening now.”
Roe, meanwhile, made very clear how problematic this is for DeSantis, arguing that Trump is not only a major threat to DeSantis, but to the GOP at large.
“We can’t lose to Trump. If Trump’s the nominee, we’re gonna lose the White House. If we lose the White House, we’re gonna lose the Senate. And if we lose the Senate, we’re gonna lose the House. And [Democrats] are going to be in charge of the full House, Senate and White House for at least two years,” Roe told the audience.
Roe further suggested Democrats would add two new states if given the chance, including Puerto Rico. DeSantis while serving in the US House co-sponsored a bill authored by Puerto Rico’s representative in Congress to provide the US territory with a path to statehood.
Though Never Back Down officials warned Trump’s legal troubles present a challenge, they insisted it had not hardened Republicans’ resolve to nominate him once again.
“Trump gets a bump every time he gets indicted. But there are fewer and fewer and fewer people that will support him in the party,” he added.
The PAC representatives walked the crowd through their internal plans for improving DeSantis’ likeability with voters who remain on the fence. One of the key takeaways from their data, they said, is how messaging around DeSantis’ “bio” — mainly his military record, his family and his background as “a blue-collar worker” — plays better with voters than other topic areas. Super PAC advisers acknowledged many Republicans were unaware DeSantis is the only veteran in the race or that he was a father.
DeSantis mirrored that biographical emphasis later that night at the debate. He called himself a “blue collar kid” who “worked minimum wage jobs to be able to make ends meet” and he touched on his personal responsibilities as a husband and dad to three young kids. He emphasized his military experience at several points, noting that he was “assigned with” and deployed “alongside” Navy SEALs — leaving out that he was a JAG lawyer.
The PAC is running the campaign and all the evidence shows they are terrible at it. It isn’t really their fault. Desantis is just a terrible candidate. But they are blowing through hundreds of millions. And I just heard on MSNBC that they are pulling their door knocking program in Nevada and Super Tuesday states. It’s not going well.