Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

We haven’t heard much from His Anti-Wokeness for a bit so I thought I share a little schadenfreude from Ed Kilgore to make your day:

Ron DeSantis remains the most formidable rival to Donald Trump for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination. But it’s been a long, long time since he’s gotten any particularly good news in the polls. A new Emerson College survey shows him dropping into single digits and third place in New Hampshire, behind Chris Christie. In the RealClearPolitics averages of national GOP polls, he’s dropped from 30.1 percent at the end of March to 14.8 percent now. He looks relatively strong in Iowa, where it appears he is making a desperate all-or-nothing stand, but mostly just by comparison. Trump only leads him by 27 points in the first-in-the-nation caucus state, though sparse Iowa polling may disguise a less positive environment for DeSantis.

Polling aside, recent news emanating from the DeSantis campaign has been generally quite bad. He’s had three campaign leadership shakeups, a big round of staff layoffs, and at least one major “reboot” of his message and strategy. Meanwhile, the Trump campaign is still building steam, and its main problem is that too much of his vast financial resources are going into legal costs in connection with indictments that aren’t hurting him at all among Republican voters. Another bad development for DeSantis is that a large field of rivals has remained in the race, spoiling his hopes for a one-on-one battle with the front-runner.

Once an almost obscenely well-funded campaign, the DeSantis effort appears to have a high burn rate and some serious donor defections. And more generally, he’s no longer the darling of Republican and conservative elites, most particularly Rupert Murdoch.

It couldn’t happen to a nicer guy.

Kilgore reminds us of the last Great Whitebread Hope and shares Jonathan Chait’s description of Walker “as he appeared at the beginning of that race and see if it doesn’t sound exactly like the image DeSantis had built until his recent troubles”:

Scott Walker won three statewide elections in Wisconsin, which has supported the Democrat in every presidential election since 1984. He led national Republican polling as recently as March. He led in Iowa by enormous margins as recently as August. The Koch brothers loved him. Walker had spent his entire adult life developing an almost superhuman fealty to the principles of the modern Republican Party, its Reaganolotry, and, above all, a ruthless commitment to crushing its enemies beneath his boot heel. If there was anything that gave Walker joy … it was the goal of wiping organized labor off the map. As Grover Norquist enthused in May, “when you meet him, it’s like seeing somebody who sits on a throne on the skulls of his enemies.” 

It sure sounds familiar to me and was just as stupid as the DeSantis hype. Kilgore notes:

Like DeSantis, he was relatively young, in his 40s, and thus was able to generate a sense of generational change in his party (the two previous GOP nominees were 72 and 65 years old, respectively). Like the Floridian, the Wisconsin governor had found the absolute sweet spot of the GOP Zeitgeist: the strident ideologue who somehow still appeals to swing voters, and who strikes fear into the hearts of liberals everywhere as he destroys their counterparts in his state. Walker’s very colorlessness (like DeSantis’s) enhanced his reputation as a methodical Death Star come to remake America in his state’s increasingly reactionary image.

These whiny little twits create images of tough guys and then crash and burn when people actually see them for what they are. Kilgore notes a Walker timeline by Margaret Hartmann that mirrors DeSantis’ hard-right approach that didn’t seem to work when he got on the ground in Iowa.

Also like Walker, DeSantis seems to have also underestimated Trump. Walker pretty clearly didn’t know what hit him, Hartmann suggested:

With Trump dominating the political conversation and a crowded field of 16 other Republican candidates, Walker’s campaign began imploding in earnest. After months on top, a CNN/ORC poll found Walker had dropped to third place in Iowa behind Trump and Ben Carson.

At this point, Walker’s lack of charisma started becoming a problem for him in the retail political environment of Iowa, just as it’s a problem for DeSantis, especially after he made the dubious decision to promise to appear in all the state’s 99 counties. But what actually did in Walker after his campaign lost its magic were mediocre debate performances, beginning in August:

Walker’s appearance in the first GOP debate was unmemorable. Just before the debate, he had more than 11 percent in an average of the last nine national polls, but afterward he dropped below 5 percent.

In the second debate, in September, Walker was all but invisible, struggling to draw questions and attention. And then he was done, with his support dropping to below one percent in national polls even as Trump soared and Ted Cruz replaced Walker as the “true conservative” in the race.

It’s entirely possible that Ron DeSantis is one poor debate performance away from the sad fate of Scott Walker. He’s supposedly been deep into preparations for the first candidate debate on August 23 for a while now, though he’s handicapped by not knowing if Trump is going to show. But his margin for error has disappeared. He’s hardly the political behemoth he appeared to be earlier this year, and if he can’t turn things around soon, impatient Republicans will either resign themselves to another Trump nomination or quickly find a new alternative like Tim Scott, who is waiting in the wings to steal DeSantis’s thunder and leave him on the dust bin of presidential might-have-beens.

I’ve been drawing the comparison to Walker from the moment he became the next Great Whitebread Hope. There’s always at least one in any open GOP primary. He’s a terrible candidate and a worse human being and what he’s done to Florida in the service of this terrible campaign should be a crime. Let’s hope he’s destroying himself so thoroughly that he will fade into obscurity as completely as Scott Walker has done.

One of the most compelling images that came out of the Jan. 6 House committee hearings was of former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows slumped on his couch on the afternoon in question, disconsolately scrolling through his phone while Donald Trump’s angry mob stormed the Capitol. As the New York Times reported:

[White House aide Cassidy] Hutchinson said around 2 p.m. or 2:05 p.m. that day, she went to Meadows’ office because she saw rioters were getting closer to breaching the Capitol. Meadows was on his couch, scrolling through his phone, as he had been that morning. “I said, ‘Hey, are you watching the TV, chief? … The rioters are getting really close. Have you talked to the president?’ He said, ‘No, he wants to be alone right now,'” she recalled.”I remember Pat saying to [Meadows], something to the effect of, ‘The rioters have gotten to the Capitol, Mark, we need to go down and see the president now.’ And Mark looked up at him and said, ‘He doesn’t want to do anything, Pat,'” Hutchinson said.

This was the man who had been constantly by Trump’s side in the previous tumultuous weeks as the president tried every possible means to overturn the results of the 2020 election. He knew Trump didn’t want to stop the violence at the Capitol. He knew Trump actually relished it. And he knew there was nothing to be done about it. 

Meadows had originally agreed to cooperate with the select committee himself and had turned over a large volume of communications pertaining to the post-election attempts to reverse the results. But after Meadows’ book “The Chief’s Chief” was published, in which he incurred Trump’s wrath by his unflattering portrayal of the president’s behavior after he contracted COVID, Meadows withdrew his cooperation and was eventually referred to the Department of Justice for contempt of Congress.

Unlike podcaster and agitator Steve Bannon and former trade adviser Peter Navarro, both of whom also refused to comply with a congressional subpoena, Meadows was not prosecuted by the DOJ. Neither was former White House communications official Peter Scavino. No explanation was given at the time, but many observers assumed that since Meadows was no longer in Trump’s orbit, he was cooperating with federal investigators.

Meadows has not publicly addressed the events of Jan. 6 or the post-election schemes since he left the White House. CNN reported that he is quietly employed in a high-level job as “the senior partner at the Conservative Partnership Institute, a pro-Trump think tank that pays him more than $500,000 and has seen its revenues soar to $45 million since Meadows joined in 2021, according to the group’s tax filings.” Nice work if you can get it. Meadows also serves as an informal adviser to the hard-right House Freedom Caucus, reportedly helping to guide the group’s rebellion against Kevin McCarthy’s speakership bid and its strategy during the debt ceiling talks. But according to his “best friend,” House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan, with whom Meadows reportedly speaks at least once a week, they “make a point not to talk about” legal matters.

All this has Trump feeling very nervous that Meadows has become a “rat.” According to Rolling Stone, Meadows’ lawyers cut off contact with the Trump team months ago and the latter have had no idea what contact Meadows has had with either special counsel Jack Smith or Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis. Meadows has reportedly testified before the federal grand jury in Washington, but took the Fifth when called before the special grand jury in Georgia. When the federal indictment against Trump finally came down in the Jan. 6 case, Meadows was not mentioned among the “unindicted co-conspirators,” despite ample public evidence that he had been heavily involved in the plots for which Trump was indicted. That seemed like a clear indication that he’d become a key witness.

This week we received another important clue about what exactly Meadows has been up to. He was among the long list of Trump associates indicted in Fulton County on Monday night in Willis’ sweeping conspiracy case. Unlike Trump and other key figures like Rudy Giuliani and John Eastman, Meadows was only indicted on two counts: violation of Georgia’s racketeering act and “solicitation of violation of public oath by a public officer.”

The first of those is the overall conspiracy charge laid out in the indictment, which cites Meadows’ dissemination of false theories of election fraud and his attempts to pressure DOJ officials as well as various state officials in Georgia and elsewhere. The second relates to the fact that Meadows “actively participated in and spoke” in Trump’s infamous phone call with Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, the one when the then-president suggested “finding” enough votes to give him the win in that state. It’s easy to see why Meadows took the Fifth on that one.

On Tuesday, Meadows became the first defendant in the Georgia case (but surely not the last) to announce that he would request moving his case to federal court because his alleged criminal activity “all occurred during his tenure and as part of his service as Chief of Staff.” In his statement, Meadows explained that “arranging Oval Office meetings, contacting state officials on the President’s behalf, visiting a state government building, and setting up a phone call for the President” were all part of his duties and that you would expect the president’s chief of staff “to do these sorts of things.” It sounds like Meadows’ defense will be, as they say, that he was just following orders.

That strategy is not unprecedented and many legal observers suggest Meadows has a good chance of getting his case booted to the federal level. Willis would still be the prosecutor, but would try the case before a federal judge and a jury pool drawn from the entire state, both of them potentially more sympathetic to Meadows. There would be no cameras in a federal courtroom, which is unfortunate since a televised trial might offer one last chance to penetrate the minds of those few remaining Republican voters who aren’t completely far gone.

None of this, however, explains Meadows’ role in Jack Smith’s federal case in D.C., where the former chief of staff has apparently been treated with kid gloves throughout the process. No doubt Trump’s team is anxious to look through all the discovery material to see what they can find out.

I always thought Meadows was a bit thick, not to mention certainly unqualified for the important job that he did remarkably poorly. Apparently, he’s smart enough to hire a highly competent lawyer and take that person’s advice, which makes him a very stable genius compared to his former boss. He may be the one major Jan. 6 conspirator who gets to walk away from this mess relatively unscathed.

It doesn’t work for the GOP

It’s pretty clear that Trump’s obsession with 2020 has hurt the party over the past two and a half years. Candidates for other offices want nothing more than to move on from that unpopular and unpleasant topic. Trump’s legal problems make that impossible and now he’s making it even worse:

Hours after being indicted for his attempts to overturn the election results in Georgia, Donald Trump signaled that he is going to re-litigate the matter once more. This time, it will be part of his campaign to win the presidency, not retain it.

Trump announced on his social media site that he would be holding a “major news conference” on Monday where he’d present a detailed and “irrefutable report” on voter fraud from three years ago.

The post had all the whiffs of a Four Seasons Total Landscaping moment. And it quickly transported the Republican Party right back to a conversation it studiously has tried to avoid for nearly three years.

Sen. Tim Scott (R-S.C.), campaigning at the Iowa State Fair on Tuesday, was asked if pressure Trump put on public officials in Georgia to overturn the election was “anti-American.” At a press conference the same day, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis was also forced to field questions about the indictment. Both Republicans instead criticized what they described as a weaponization of the legal process.

Operatives within the party were less evasive. With Trump doubling down on his stolen-election rhetoric — and his decision to schedule a media event about it two days before the first Republican debate — the consensus was he is all but guaranteeing his GOP rivals would be forced to spend time on stage next week talking about an issue that continues to divide the party.

“This is Politics 303: Mind Games and How Campaigns Fuck With Other Campaigns,” said Dave Carney, a New Hampshire-based Republican strategist. “You do something, you make an announcement — they’re just trying to dominate the news going into the debate and get everyone to defend him.”

But, Carney said, it’s a terrible position to be in for anyone trying to win 2024 for Republicans. “If our party is talking about 2020, we’re going to lose,” he said.

For Trump’s rivals in the primary, there’s no avoiding the question now.

Pressed on whether he had listened to the recorded phone call between Trump and Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, in which Trump urged the GOP election official to “find 11,780 votes,” Scott said, “Yes, but we just draw different conclusions.” He declined to answer whether he, as president, would have made the same request of Raffensperger.

DeSantis called the indictment “an example of this criminalization of politics.”

Trump’s opponents have every reason to be wary of the issue. Though election denialism may be fraught terrain for the party in a general election, in recent Republican primaries, the electorate has most often rewarded those who side with Trump on it.

After Trump’s defeat in November 2020, majorities of Republicans told pollsters they agreed with his claims that the election was stolen. And more recently, a New York Times/Siena College poll last month found three-in-four GOP primary voters said they thought Trump’s actions only reflected “his right to contest the election.”

Sarah Longwell, a Trump-averse Republican strategist who has chided his opponents in the field for not forcefully criticizing him, said focus groups she has conducted show Republican voters are divided on Trump’s 2020 election claims. But as much as half of the GOP primary electorate are fine with the idea of re-litigating the last presidential election, she said.

“Part of the reason he’s leaning into this with his press conference is he only wants people talking about this, and talking about him,” Longwell said. “The other candidates are going to have to talk about it, because it’s going to be the dominant issue in our politics. And it’s how Trump walks to the nomination.”

The problem, as Longwell and others surmise, is that stop-the-steal-style media events won’t do Trump or the party any favors in a general election with independent voters in swing states like Georgia and Arizona.

“Trump’s news conference Monday may set a record for the eyeroll emoji-use in iPhone and Android,” said Barrett Marson, a GOP strategist in Arizona. “Who’s going to believe this wacky bullshit?”

I think we know who will believe that wacky bullshit, don’t we? And there are enough of them to prevent anyone else from getting the nomination.

These Republicans who are wringing their hands over this ought to remember that Donald Trump doesn’t have to run for president again. He’s doing this to them. They just can’t quit him.

If it’s about news coverage, Biden’s buried

Donald Trump’s multiple indictments and ongoing court cases have one upside for Republicans: keeping President Joe Biden off the front pages. I’m skimming the news for Biden and not finding much.

The inferno on Maui offers Biden a chance at some column inches and camera time, but not until next week:

President Joe Biden and first lady Jill Biden will travel to Maui on Monday in the aftermath of the Hawaii wildfires, White House press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre announced on Wednesday.

On Aug. 21, they will meet with first responders, survivors and government officials, she said.

“In Maui, the President and First Lady will be welcomed by state and local leaders to see firsthand the impacts of the wildfires and the devastating loss of life and land that has occurred on the island, as well as discuss the next steps in the recovery effort,” Jean-Pierre said.

Biden today celebrates the one-year anniversary of the Inflation Reduction Act. But most of the coverage seems to be at The Guardian. NPR places Biden coverage far down the list of this morning’s stories. A search of the New York Times landing page turns up no mention of Biden. And only one mention from today at the Washington Post.

But at least there’s a string of updates at The Guardian <sigh>.

There has been around $278bn in new clean energy investments, creating more than 170,000 jobs, across the US in the first year of the Inflation Reduction Act, according to an estimate by the advocacy group Climate Power.

The White House claims that there will be twice as much wind, solar and battery storage deployment over the next seven years than if the bill was never enacted, with companies already spending twice as much on new manufacturing facilities as they were pre-IRA.

On the one-year anniversary of President Biden's Inflation Reduction Act, here's a reminder of what's happened to the CPI since its passage: pic.twitter.com/MSHhJRD2Rk

— Carolina Forward (@ForwardCarolina) August 16, 2023

The Trump trainwreck makes it hard to look away.

Smith paints a portrait. Willis, a landscape.

Special counsel Jack Smith and Fulton County DA Fani Willis issued complementary indictments in the Republican conspiracy to overturn the 2020 presidential election results.

Dahlia Lithwick summarizes:

There’s one other notable contrast between the two stories that will be unspooled regarding the very similar events that took place after Donald Trump learned he’d lost the election and decided he would win it through organized crime. Smith chose to tell the story of an abstraction, crimes against democracy and the peaceful transfer of power. Willis is telling a concrete and detailed story of crimes against voters and election workers; Black voters in particular, female Black election workers in specific. In effect, Trump is on trial in D.C. for trying to break democracy and, in Fulton County, Georgia, for trying to set aside Black votes. The two stories are deeply connected, but they are also two very distinct acts of violence against elections. Smith reminds us what the country nearly lost, and Willis recalls what Black voters have almost never won.

The different emphases mean the stories the two documents tell unspool from different perspectives. Smith’s is more a speaking indictment of a single defendant surrounded by his closest co-conspirators. Willis indicted 19. Hers details the actions the many defendants took, including Trump’s Oval Office cabal, both singly and in concert, in Georgia and elsewhere, in furtherance of the conspiracy to undo Trump’s 2020 loss in Georgia. Here the scattered victims were Georgia voters and election officials.

Smith paints a portrait. Willis, a landscape.

So many actors and actions taking place in Willis’s sweeping portrayal mean the eye cannot take them all in at a glance, not unlike Atlanta’s Cyclorama. “As with many state criminal cases, the indictment is not crafted to tell a story so much as to put the defendants on notice of the allegations against them,” Lawfare notes. “As such, much of it reads like a relatively undifferentiated string of acts committed as part of the grand criminal enterprise it alleges.”

“Willis has declared that she has a monster of a hand. But she now has to play it,” Lawfare’s team explains, and sets out to craft a more digestible narrative. Read it here.

That “relatively undifferentiated string of acts” is already a target for Trump’s defenders bent on the public never perceiving the bigger picture Willis means to tell in court.

Behold:

Brilliant. A perfect response to the gaslighting and misinformation about the charges: pic.twitter.com/Wnr83ibjcv

— Mehdi Hasan (@mehdirhasan) August 15, 2023

Lithwick continues:

Finally—and again, this is both atmospheric and also very important—Fani Willis has not just formally named Trump as a mobbed-up crime boss, but also placed him squarely behind the wheel of a national criminal clown car. For Trump, stripped away from the sober officials who once lent him intellectual heft and political credibility, his final public act may well be honking sadly on the oversize horn, surrounded by the likes of Rudy Giuliani, Sidney Powell, Jenna Ellis, and Jeff Clark. The only thing more piteous than the mental picture of a diminished Donald Trump in the dock standing trial for lies, forgeries, and bullying is Donald Trump doing so in the presence of a whole host of people—tragically, with law degrees—who are living case studies in moral and intellectual mediocrity. His co-defendants are living proof that the personnel equivalent of spray tan that briefly tried to burnish him into looking like a principled and sober commander in chief after 2016—John Bolton, John Kelly, Bill Barr, among others—had well and truly departed the scene by the time of the 2020 election assault.

MAGA-fied Republicans insist they want a second civil war while attempting to erase the memory of the one they waged and lost between November 3, 2020 and January 20, 2021. Pray that in the name of moving on this country does not make the same mistakes it made in the aftermath of the first Civil War.

Update: Found a couple more examples of Price tweet via Roy Edroso.

The Georgia RICO indictment includes a couple of strange operators working the conspiracy in a specifically weird little side story I’ve always wondered about. This is the one about the woman who approached Ruby Freeman and told her that the feds were out to get her:

Here is yet another story from the range of conspiracies and criminal plots that were afoot last winter to overthrow the government of the United States and keep Donald Trump in power after losing the 2020 presidential election. Georgia election worker Ruby Freeman was one of those innocent bystanders who became the target of death threats and harassment tied to a conspiracy theory that she had helped steal the presidential election in Georgia for Joe Biden.

On January 4th 2021 – two days before the Capitol insurrection – a woman named Trevian Kutti knocked on Freeman’s door and told her she was in danger. If Freeman didn’t confess to the truth of Trump’s election rigging charges within 48 hours unidentified persons would come to her home and Freeman along with members of her family would be sent to jail.

Kutti is a publicist and head of Trevian Worldwide, a PR firm. As of 2018 she is also the “Director of Operations” for Kanye West, a friend and political ally of Trump. (Just before signing on with West Kutti had been PR Director for R Kelly. But she quit that job as sex trafficking and assault accusations piled up.) She was there as West’s employee but only identified herself as the emissary of a “high profile” individual with an urgent message and an offer of help.

At various points, Kutti suggested Freeman was in physical danger. Sometimes the threats targeted only her, at other times members of her family. At some points the people out to get Freeman were described as “federal people”. At other points they seemed to be Democrats. “You are a loose end for a party that needs to tidy up.” Threats of violence? Being disappeared? Sent to prison? It doesn’t seem to have been clear – only that Freeman had to confess if she wanted help from Kutti and the “high profile individual”.

Freeman called police saying she felt threatened and things kind of went downhill from there, with Kutti repeating her mix of threats and offers of help. A police officer eventually suggested that everyone take the meeting down to the local police station. The mix of threats and offers of assistance continued and Kutti eventually arranged a conference call with someone identified as “Harrison Ford” (but apparently not that Harrison Ford) who “had authoritative powers to get you protection” and who quizzed Freeman and tried to get her to admit to her role in the election rigging plot.

Kutti repeatedly told Freeman: “If you don’t tell everything you’re going to jail.”

According to Reuters, which broke the story, police took no action and did not further investigate the incident. According to Freeman, two days after Kutti’s visit on January 6th, a large group of Trump supporters did descend on her home with bullhorns. Freeman had already fled her home because of a January 5th tip from the FBI.

Both Trevian Kutti and Harrison Floyd were indicted yesterday. I’ll be very interested to hear what precipitated that approach to Freeman. Did they just come up with this all on their own? Or did a Trump loving rapper one of them worked for have something to do with it?

Just because he wrote it on twitter doesn’t mean it can’t be a crime:

What stands out in the indictment is how it uses Trump’s tweets against him – as Fulton County D.A. Fani Willis alleges Trump and his co-defendants engaged in a criminal enterprise to overturn the 2020 election results as they pressured state and federal officials.

“Wow! Blockbuster testimony taking place right now in Georgia. Ballot stuffing by Dems when Republicans were forced to leave the large counting room. Plenty more coming, but this alone leads to an easy win of the State!” Trump tweeted on Dec. 3, 2020.

“People in Georgia got caught cold bringing in massive numbers of ballots and putting them in ‘voting’ machines. Great job @BrianKempGA!” – Dec. 3, 2020.

“I spoke to Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger yesterday about Fulton County and voter fraud in Georgia. He was unwilling, or unable, to answer questions such as the ‘ballots under table’ scam, ballot destruction, out of state ‘voters’, dead voters, and more. He has no clue!” – Jan. 3, 2021.

“The Vice President has the power to reject fraudulently chosen electors.” – Jan. 5, 2021.

“States want to correct their votes, which they now know were based on irregularities and fraud, plus corrupt process never received legislative approval. All Mike Pence has to do is send them back to the States, AND WE WIN. Do it Mike, this is time for extreme courage!” – Jan. 6, 2021.

These tweets were all in plain sight for everyone to see, which might have blunted their impact at the time the former president was firing off his constant missives. 

But they are now a big part of the latest indictment against Trump.

Can a tweet be a crime?

In remarks late last night, Willis said the indictment included “overt acts” – actions that wouldn’t be a crime on their own but might prove a larger pattern, NBC’s Ginger Gibson writes.

“Many occurred in Georgia and some occurred in other jurisdictions and are included because the grand jury believes they were part of the illegal effort to overturn the result of Georgia’s 2020 presidential election,” Willis said.

Trump is stupid and shameless so he often lied or gave unlawful orders on twitter or some other public forum. He believed that he was totally protected by the first amendment or executive privilege. Those rights are not absolute and if he gave it half a thought (or had half a brain) he would have realized that. Executive privilege (or Article II) does not allow a president to do anything he wants. And when speech is in furtherance of a crime like fraud it’s not protected.

You’d think a snake oil fraudster like Trump would have been aware of that. Of course he’s gotten away with it his whole life so I suppose he assumed he always would.

This is a good piece about Pence from JV Last. I know I should feel more compassion for the man but it’s really hard. All those years of being a cruel right wing theocrat and then eagerly sucking up to the crude libertine Donald Trump makes it impossible for me to see him as anything but a hypocrite — at best.

There is a theory I cannot test, but which I believe to be true:

If Mike Pence were to walk through the crowd at a Donald Trump rally—for instance, the recent giant event where 50,000 Trump supporters swamped the town of Pickens, South Carolina—he would need a security detail. He would not be safe without one, and he might not be safe with one either. In fact, I have a hard time believing that any Secret Service team would agree to go along with such an excursion. Enough Trump supporters hate Pence that much.

By contrast, I believe Pence could safely walk through the crowd at a Joe Biden event—like his June 17 rally in Philadelphia—without any security. Some Biden supporters might make snide comments, but it seems equally possible that others might shake his hand and thank him for saving the republic on January 6, 2021.

Not to belabor the obvious, but, for Pence, this is a problem. Because Pence is running for president as a Republican.

Yet for the country, this isn’t just a problem; it’s an almost biblical tragedy. Mike Pence is the man who told his tribe the truth. They turned on him for it. And now, having finally found the courage to leave, he’s desperate for acceptance among them once again.

For more than a quarter century, Pence was a dutiful and committed conservative. He started in talk radio, where his brand was “Rush Limbaugh on decaf.” On his third try, he got himself elected to the House of Representatives, where he was happy to buck the Republican Party by opposing George W. Bush on two of his big legislative achievements—No Child Left Behind and Medicare expansion—both of which Pence believed violated his commitment to certain small-government conservative principles. But Republicans forgave these heresies. Pence ascended to the No. 3 position in House GOP leadership.

From the House, Pence vaulted to the Indiana governor’s mansion and then, finally, onto a presidential ticket as Trump’s running mate. You know how that went: For four years, Pence defended everything Trump did and said. Behind the scenes, he tried to be the grown-up in the room. A fly camped out on his face on national TV. Yada yada yada, then came the coup.

At which point, Trump instructed several thousand of his supporters to march to the U.S. Capitol “with strength” and prevent Pence from performing his constitutional duty to count and certify electoral votes—which would officially make Biden the president-elect. So a bunch of very fine people who had recently voted to make Pence vice president walked down Constitution Avenue, erected a gallows, and stormed the Capitol. During the course of these events, many raised their voices to chant, “Hang Mike Pence.”

For his part, Pence is sanguine about this unpleasantness. Last month, when asked about Trump’s latest threat—that it would be “very dangerous” for America if he were convicted of crimes—he waved away the possibility. “Everyone in our movement are the kind of Americans who love this country, are patriotic or law-and-order people who would never have done anything like that there or anywhere else,” Pence told CNN’s Dana Bash.

Bash was brought up short. “That’s pretty remarkable that you’re not concerned about it, given the fact that they wanted to hang you on January 6,” she said.

Pence responded, “The people in this movement, the people who rallied behind our cause in 2016 and 2020, are the most God-fearing, law-abiding, patriotic people in this country, and I … won’t stand for those kinds of generalizations, because they have no basis in fact.”

Never in American politics has a candidate so dutifully followed the instruction of Jesus: “To one who strikes you on the cheek, offer the other also.” So whatever you want to say about Mike Pence, I’ll bet that if a bunch of MAGA Proud Boys demanded his tunic, he’d offer them his cloak too. God bless him.

In other ways, Pence reminds me of an Old Testament figure, one of the prophets who told the Israelites news they didn’t want to hear—but stuck around anyway, reviled by the people he was trying to save.

A few weeks ago, Pence attended a town-hall event in Iowa sponsored by the Family Leader. It was an evangelical-forward gathering attended by the kind of midwestern conservative Christians who have been Pence’s people since he was in short pants. Tucker Carlson, the event’s moderator, tore into Pence both for his refusal to overturn the 2020 election and for his hawkish support of military aid to Ukraine. Pence stood up to Carlson and held to his conservative convictions.

And so, given the choice between a TV presenter who has privately talked about how he hates Trump “passionately” and Trump’s own vice president—a man who has dutifully served conservative causes in government for a generation and who stood by Trump for everything except overthrowing American democracy, the evangelicals … cheered for Tucker and booed Pence.

Give us Barabbas.

The rest of America doesn’t quite know what to do with Pence. He’s a complicated figure.

On the one hand, he tolerated and defended all of the depredations of the Trump years. By vouching for Trump with evangelical voters in 2016, he cemented Trump’s takeover of the party. He stood by Trump after Charlottesville, Virginia. He was Trump’s rock during the first impeachment. He tried to clean up the worst parts of Trump’s mishandling of COVID while being at pains to praise Trump for doing a heroic job. He was a loyal running mate in 2020. He did all of this with his eyes wide open.

On the other hand, at the moment when Trump attempted to thwart the peaceful transition of power, Pence was the only man standing between the Constitution and collapse. After a full term of cowardice, he displayed courage in the moment it mattered most. If he hadn’t followed the law on January 6, there is no telling what would have happened.

Some people maintain that Pence does not deserve credit simply for not breaking the law. I sympathize. I did not rob a bank this morning—do I get a cookie? But ultimately, I find Pence’s heroism in the performance of his duty too great to wave away. He faced physical and professional risk on January 6; his career, his life, and the lives of his family were imperiled. He risked all of that to follow the law. It is nice to think that we all would have done the same, but I’m not sure. And I am sure that the overwhelming majority of Pence’s fellow Republicans would not have.

Further, Pence is one of only three Republicans running for president who consistently speaks straightforwardly about January 6 and the rule of law, and he does not couch his criticisms of Trump as merely being “bad for Republican chances to win.” Pence possesses much of what the prodemocracy movement hopes for in a Republican. In some ways, he is an example of what, in the small-d democratic sense, a Republican Party aiming to restore itself to health and liberalism should look like.

It is precisely because of this that Pence is so reviled by so many Republicans, with a favorability rating that barely breaks even.

It turns out that Pence doesn’t quite know what to do with himself either. So he’s trying his luck at becoming the avatar of the same voters who wanted to hang him.

It’s the damnedest thing. Pence overcame a lifetime of political tribalism to break with his team. And now he’s trying to get back on it—because he can’t see what he helped them become.

One of my pet theories is that during the Trump years, we discovered that our political spectrum had two axes. There’s the left–right, progressive–conservative x-axis that we’re all familiar with. But there’s also an up–down, liberal–illiberal y-axis. This has been the case in America for a long time—since its founding, really—but with the end of Jim Crow, a lot of us had forgotten that this y-axis existed. We assumed that everyone on the conservative, right-hand side of the x-axis—the Reagans, the Bushes, the Doles, the McCains, the Romneys—was also at the top (the liberal end) of the y-axis, too. Because they were.

But with Trump’s emergence, some people—both voters and elected officials—began drifting downward on that y-axis toward the illiberal side of the spectrum.

Pence was happy to play along until the chips were down, at which point he chose liberalism and democracy. And for that, America owes him a debt that can never be repaid.

The tragedy of Pence is that, for all of his x-axis conservative policy views, it’s his conviction in favor of liberalism on the y-axis that now matters most to the conservatives he is asking to vote for him.

A liberal society can have arguments about tax rates and infrastructure spending and foreign policy. In an illiberal society, none of those questions really matters—the only thing that matters is who holds power. “Who, whom?” as the Leninists used to put it.

On the biggest issues—democracy, the Constitution, the rule of law—Mike Pence is now much closer to Joe Biden on the y-axis than he is to Republican voters.

And he either can’t see it, or won’t.

He won’t.

This is well-written and though provoking b ut I think he lets Pence off too easily. If January 6th hadn’t happened he would be backing Trump’s play about the stolen election to the hilt. He is just a coward who didn’t want to be the lone guy who made the coup happen. He knew that he’d get blamed when things went wrong.

CNN’s Daniel Dale sets the record straight on Trump’s grotesque insults toward the Fulton County DA:

Former President Donald Trump has launched a barrage of attacks, many of them dishonest, against the Georgia district attorney who is prosecuting him over his attempts to overturn his 2020 election defeat in the state.

Both before and after he was indicted Monday in Fulton County, Trump targeted District Attorney Fani Willis, an elected Democrat, in speeches, social media posts and a television ad released by his 2024 election campaign, which Trump also posted on social media. Below is a fact check of two of his false claims, an inflammatory claim for which there is no evidence, and a misleading claim from the campaign ad.

The legitimacy of the 2020 election

Trump has repeatedly accused Willis of refusing to investigate the supposed theft of the 2020 election.

He wrote in a social media post on Sunday: “The only Election Interference that took place in Fulton County, Georgia, was done by those that Rigged and Stole the Election, not by me, who simply complained that the Election was Rigged and Stolen. We have Massive and Conclusive Proof, if the Grand Jury would like to see it. Unfortunately, the publicity seeking D.A. isn’t interested in Justice, or this evidence.”

Facts First: Trump’s claim of a rigged and stolen election is a lie. The 2020 election was free and fair, in Fulton County and in the rest of the country, and nobody rigged or stole it. Joe Biden’s victory over Trump in Georgia was confirmed by three counts of the ballots and certified by Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger and Republican Gov. Brian Kemp. More than two and a half years after his defeat, Trump has never presented anything remotely resembling proof that he was the rightful winner of Georgia or the presidency. Instead, he has deployed false claims that have been thoroughly debunked by Raffensperger and many others, including Trump’s own senior Justice Department appointees.

For example, Trump has continued into 2023 to claim that Fulton County election workers were caught on video stuffing the ballot box – even though this claim was debunked in 2020 and even though top officials from his Justice Department have testified to Congress that they had personally told him in 2020 that the video did not show any wrongdoing.

Georgia’s final ballot count found that Biden beat Trump by 11,779 votes. In a January 2, 2021 phone call with Raffensperger, Trump pushed the secretary of state to “find” enough votes to give him a one-vote victory over Biden in the state.

Murder in Atlanta

Trump wrote in a social media post on Sunday that instead of spending time on him, Willis “should instead focus on the record number of murders in Atlanta!”

Facts First: Trump’s claim about Atlanta having a “record number of murders” is false. Though Atlanta has struggled with a spike in murders since 2020 – part of a national pandemic-era trend that began before Willis became district attorney in 2021 – the city is nowhere near its all-time murder record.

Atlanta’s 2022 total, 170 murders, was its 23rd-highest annual figure since 1960 and not even in its top 30 highest when population size is taken into account, according to figures provided to CNN on Monday by crime analyst and consultant Jeff Asher, co-founder of the firm AH Datalytics. The 2022 total of 170 murders was Atlanta’s highest since 1996 and well above its 2019 total of 99 murders, so it was certainly high by the city’s recent standard, but Trump’s claim of a “record” is not true; the city recorded 263 murders in 1973.

In addition, as Asher and Atlanta media outlets have noted, murder is down substantially in Atlanta so far in 2023 compared to 2022 – again mirroring a broader trend around the country. Atlanta had a 25% year-over-year decline through August 5, Asher said.

The Trump campaign ad features large text reading, “ATLANTA VIOLENCE: NEARLY 60% MORE MURDERS so far this year.” But that claim is highly misleading because it is not about this year at all. Small and faded text in the ad identifies the source for the claim as a Fox News article from more than two years ago, June 2021, that compared murders so far that year to murders at the same point in 2020.

An evidence-free claim about a Willis affair

Trump claimed in a speech last week that “they say – I guess – they say that she was after a certain gang and she ended up having an affair with the head of the gang or a gang member.” He made a similar claim in a social media post on Sunday, writing that Willis “is being accused of having an ‘affair’ with a Gang Member of a group that she is prosecuting.”

Facts First: There is zero evidence for these Trump claims. Trump never explained what he was referring to, and his campaign did not respond to a CNN request for an explanation on Monday, but it appears that the former president may have been grossly distorting a January article in which the rapper YSL Mondo told Rolling Stone magazine that Willis, who became district attorney in 2021, had represented him in an aggravated assault case when she was working as a defense lawyer in 2019. YSL Mondo was quoted as saying that he had a “cool relationship” with Willis during his case, calling her a “great attorney” who understands real life, but specified that they had “auntie-to-nephew, mother-to-son type of talks.” He was also paraphrased as saying that he had no contact with her after his case was resolved.

The Trump campaign ad cited the Rolling Stone article as supposed support for the ad’s claim that “Willis got caught hiding a relationship with a gang member she was prosecuting.” YSL Mondo is a co-founder of the YSL hip-hop collective; Willis has prosecuted other YSL members since she became district attorney (YSL Mondo is not among those defendants), alleging that the group is also a criminal street gang.

But there was no sign in the article that Willis had made an effort to conceal her ties to YSL Mondo. In fact, she confirmed to Rolling Stone that she had represented him when she was in private practice and said she had liked him and continues to want him to succeed. And there was nothing at all in the article to suggest the two had ever had an affair.

Trump has a long history of attributing baseless and inflammatory claims to unnamed sources, regularly using vague phrases like “they say” or “many people are saying.” Willis sent an email to her staff last week, which was later obtained by CNN, calling unspecified claims in the Trump campaign ad “derogatory and false” and telling them not to comment.

YSL Mondo, whose legal name is Fremondo Crenshaw, faces gun, drug and gang charges after his arrest in early August in a different Atlanta-area county. His attorney did not respond Monday to a CNN request for comment for this article.

Willis is a tough, no-nonsense, 20 year prosecutor so I doubt she’s going to crumble over these inane insults. But it does put her in danger. There are a lot of Trump cultists out there and they are armed. I hope she is well protected.

Sarah Huckasanders is competing for the vaunted title of most racist governor. Florida, Alabama and Mississippi Govs have early leads but she’s making a real run for it:

The Arkansas Department of Education (DOE) abruptly rejected AP African American Studies, saying the course may violate Arkansas law. “The department encourages the teaching of all American history and supports rigorous courses not based on opinions or indoctrination,” Kimberly Mundell, Director of Communications for the Arkansas DOE, told Popular Information on Monday. Mundell said the course may violate a new Arkansas law regarding “prohibited topics” in public schools. 

In March, Arkansas Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders (R) signed the LEARNS Act, which prohibits “teaching that would indoctrinate students with ideologies, such as Critical Race Theory [CRT]” or “that conflict with the principle of equal protection under the law.” The law, however, explicitly allows teaching the history of racism and “public policy issues of the day and related ideas that individuals may find unwelcome, disagreeable, or offensive.” The Arkansas DOE did not explain what in the AP African American Studies course constitutes prohibited indoctrination.

The College Board, which has spent a decade developing the AP African American Studies curriculum, describes it as “an evidence-based introduction to African American studies” that “reaches into a variety of fields—literature, the arts and humanities, political science, geography, and science—to explore the vital contributions and experiences of African Americans.” 

The first signs of trouble for AP African American Studies in Arkansas were reported over the weekend by the Arkansas Times. According to the Arkansas Times, “[a]n official from the Arkansas [DOE] reportedly alerted high school teachers by phone on Friday that the class would not be recognized for course credit by the state in the 2023-24 school year.” The decision by the Arkansas DOE to directly contact teachers — bypassing school district officials, principals, and other administrators — is highly unusual. The teachers reportedly were told they could continue to offer AP African American Studies, but it would not count toward graduation requirements, would not be graded on a 5.0 scale like other AP courses, and the state would not pay the $90 fee for students to take the AP test. 

But Mundell’s statements to Popular Information on Monday raise questions about whether any Arkansas school can still offer AP African American Studies. Mundell warned that anyone who teaches the course would be “at risk of violating Arkansas law.”

Some high schools in Arkansas, including Central High in Little Rock, offered AP African American Studies as part of a pilot program last year before the LEARNS Act was in effect. More high schools, including North Little Rock High School, the North Little Rock Center for Excellence charter high school, and Jacksonville High School, were planning to offer the course this year.

Mundell also told Popular Information that the Arkansas DOE was concerned that the AP African American Studies course would not be recognized for college credit. But, according to the College Board, more than 200 colleges and universities have already decided to award credit for AP African American Studies. The Arkansas Times reports that this includes the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville, the state’s flagship public university.

Mundell noted that other AP courses, including AP European History, were approved and vetted for Arkansas schools. 

This is the new generation of Republicans. They’re making America 1950 again.