The wife of an Arkansas Republican state lawmaker has expanded the culture wars to miniature free libraries that encourage passersby to take a book and maybe leave one.
“I have been swapping out books in little free libraries for awhile,” Jennifer Meeks announced in a Facebook post. “From what I have seen a lot of these books and other things don’t align with Christian values.”
The Aug. 1 post has since been either deleted or made private, but not before it was screenshot by the Faulkner County Social Justice Coalition, which displayed it on the group’s website.
“Today, I saw a bunch of Pride stuff in one,” Meeks said in the post. “There’s a group of leftists, especially in Conway, who are very active in keeping little libraries well-stocked.”
Meeks wrote that she had been doing some stocking of her own.
“Recently I have been picking up free Bibles at flea markets and thrift stores,” she reported. “Sometimes I find good devotion books or kids’ Bible stories at a good price to add. Or just great books, and a gospel tract is a nice idea, too.”
Meeks did not respond to a call from The Daily Beast about her literary vigilantism.
But after the coalition publicized Meeks’ post, her husband tried to claim her words were being twisted into “a complete lie” perpetrated by “a leftist, activist group.”
“She’s not removing books that she disagrees with and does not advocate … that anybody else do that,” Rep. Stephen Meeks told the Arkansas Times, insisting that his wife had only been adding “Christian-related books as well as history, science and other books.”
“The point that she was trying to make is that she saw the Pride material in there,” he said, “As Christians, it would be a good opportunity that we too should be stocking those resources with Bibles, devotionals, things like that.”
He tried to make it sound like an act of civic virtue.
“In other words, we want to give people more choice, and I think everybody would agree that having more choice is a good thing.”
But that is not what Jennifer Meeks said in her post, as one local resident noted.
“Does she not know what ‘swapping out’ means?” asked Stephanie Vanderslice, the steward of the Little Free Library outside St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Conway, one of seven that appear in photos Meeks included in her post.
If people re worried about Pride books, thjey really won’t like some of the depraved stories in the Bible. Oof — it’s got some doozies.
Polling shows that over half of Republicans don’t approve of book banning (which this is, in small scale form.)
The NPR/Ipsos poll shows 51 percent of Republicans oppose state lawmakers passing laws to ban certain books and remove them from classrooms and libraries, including 31 percent who said they strongly oppose it. More than 45 percent also said they oppose individual school boards banning books.
Democrats and independents were even more opposed to book bans; About 85 percent of Democrats said they oppose bans from school boards and lawmakers, and about two-thirds of independents said the same.
It’s yet another unpopular far right “anti-woke” issue. But they just can’t help themselves.
In May 2022, Willis empaneled a grand jury to investigate Trump and his allies’ efforts to interfere with Georgia’s 2020 election outcome, including the former president’s so-called “perfect” call to Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, during which he pressured him to “find” the votes necessary for him to win the election.
Trump has repeatedly attempted to discredit prosecutors investigating him, and while it’s unclear what Trump was talking about when he accused Willis of having an affair with “gang member,”, recent social media posts indicate that he is wildly misrepresenting a case she handled in 2019.
In January, Rolling Stone spoke to rapper YSL Mondo, who co-founded the Young Stoner Life (YSL) music label with Young Thug. Willis represented Mondo during a 2019 aggravated assault case, and would later go on to prosecute YSL’s Young Thug and 13 other defendants in a RICO case alleging that the music group had affiliations with gang violence in the Atlanta area.
According to Mondo, Willis’ prosecution of Young Thug ran contrary to the impression he’d developed of the prosecutor when she represented him. “This is not her character, this is not who she is,” he told Rolling Stone. “I done had auntie-to-nephew, mother-to-son type of talks with her. I know this not her character. This is what made me start looking at [the YSL case] like I know it’s bigger than just her. It’s politics behind this shit. It’s other people that’s behind her pulling strings.”
Mondo did not immediately respond to a request for additional comment from Rolling Stone. Willis also did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
On Friday, Trump posted a video on Truth Social painting Willis as a member of a “fraud squad” of prosecutors unfairly targeting him under the command of President Joe Biden. The video featured the headline of Rolling Stone’s interview with Mondo, and claimed that Willis “got caught hiding a relationship with a gang member she was prosecuting.”
While there’s no indication that Willis hid her representation of Mondo — or that their relationship was romantic in nature — far-right commentator and Trump ally Laura Loomer seized on the claim in the video to suggest that Willis had a sexual affair with her client.
“Atlanta DA, Fani Willis, who is targeting Donald Trump in Georgia is a straight up THOT,” Loomer wrote along with the video in a Twitter post last week. “Turns out she failed to disclose a previous relationship she had with a gang banger she was supposed to be prosecuting. Baby girl belongs in a Trap House. Not a court house.”
In case you were wondering, “THOT” stands for “that Ho over there” — a promiscuous woman. In other words, Laura Loomer, a fringe character from Florida, and Donald Trump are calling DA Willis a whore. That’s how low they have already gone and there haven’t even been any indictments yet.
Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis on Wednesday flatly denied that she had a relationship with a former client and other rumors spread by former President Donald Trump in a new campaign ad.
In an email to her colleagues, obtained by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Willis called the information in a television spot bankrolled by the Trump campaign “derogatory and false.” She urged her staff not to respond to any of the allegations.
“You may not comment in any way on the ad or any of the negativity that may be expressed against me, your colleagues, this office in the coming days, weeks or months,” Willis wrote in the email, sent early Wednesday. “We have no personal feelings against those we investigate or prosecute and we should not express any.”
That is how professional prosecutors have to deal with psychos like Donald Trump.
In this image obtained from the County of Maui, a wildfire burns on the island of Maui near an intersection at Hokiokio Place and Lahaina Bypass in Lahaina, Hawaii, August 9, 2023. (Photo courtesy of County of Maui / Zeke Kalua)
Arizona was deadly hot during the month of July. We know this. But it didn’t convince the climate deniers that maybe, just maybe, it might be smart to consider that climate change could be responsible.
Every single day of July had reached 110 degrees or hotter, demolishing the previous record for the longest 110-plus-degree streak that Phoenix — nicknamed the Valley of the Sun for a reason — had ever seen. Most of those days were above 115 degrees, and most nights, the low stayed above 90 degrees, setting records on both fronts.
All told, the average daily temperature — the average of the high and low — was 102 degrees, or more than 7 degrees above normal for July, which is also a record, according to the National Weather Service.
Meanwhile, dozens of people have died amid the extreme heat. Maricopa County, where Phoenix is located, recently brought in new refrigerated storage containers to hold all the dead bodies, a tactic it first employed during the peak of the pandemic.
But among some Arizona Republicans, saying this summer has been especially hot is akin to saying the 2020 election was especially free and fair or that Covid-19 is an especially deadly virus.
With extreme and growing heat waves almost certainly fueled by climate change, Arizona might, in theory, be the kind of place where lawmakers grapple with this new reality. But the politics of climate change are just as paralyzed here as the rest of the country. Or perhaps it’s even worse, with the Arizona GOP taken over by its fringe elements in recent years and largely refusing to acknowledge the issue at all. Democrats, meanwhile, lament that their leaders aren’t doing nearly enough to address the heat — even as heat-related deaths are climbing.
Even the most ardent climate change deniers don’t deny that the Valley is hot. Instead, the heat skeptics question how hot it is, exactly, along with who’s saying it’s hot and why.
“This weather is normal,” Justine Wadsack, a hard-line Republican in the state Senate, tweeted recently. “If ya can’t stand the heat in Arizona, you’re welcome to leave.”
Some conservatives suggest thermometers, like past vote counts, are rigged because they’re placed at the sun-scorched asphalt airport. Others say a national media frenzy is intended to promote the left’s climate change narrative and drive people to seek government solutions to a naturally occurring phenomenon.
The campaign account for failed GOP gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake, for example, accused Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs and Democratic Rep. Ruben Gallego of “pushing mass hysteria in an effort to declare a climate emergency” and blamed the heat-related deaths on “the METH their policies allow to flow freely on our streets.”
One of Arizona’s most vocal heat-skeptical lawmakers is GOP state Rep. Justin Heap. He’s engaged in frequent online skirmishes in which he dismisses the “media narrative” of climate change and suggests it’s part of a push on behalf of “global elites” who stand to benefit from massive government subsidies on green technology.
“Apparently the national media has decided we are all insufficiently frightened about climate change so it’s time to portray normal summer heat as the apocalypse,” he wrote recently.
It’s true that the New York Timesrecently declared Phoenix “hell” and July “an entire month of merciless heat that has ground down people’s health and patience” in one of more than a half-dozen recent pieces about how Phoenix was coping with the heat wave.
Is it too much hype about the heat?
The Times’ description isn’t necessarily wrong. But Heap told POLITICO Magazine that this summer is no different than past ones — it’s always unbearably hot.
“I don’t recall feeling that this July was particularly hotter than any other July that I remember,” says Heap, a native of the Phoenix suburb of East Mesa, when asked about his comments during a recent Twitter Spaces event. “It’s just that all of a sudden, every media story was telling me it was hotter than it’s ever been.”
Phoenix was, in fact, hotter than it has ever been, at least in terms of days over 110 and 115 degrees. No, the Sonoran Desert city didn’t break its all-time high of 122 degrees, set back in 1990. But it did have three days that reached 119 degrees last month.
Heap acknowledges micro-climate change. Clearly, cutting down vegetation and pouring concrete makes the desert hotter, he says. It’s a well-known phenomenon in the desert called the urban heat island effect. And Heap even believes that greenhouse gasses could have the same effect on the entire globe, to some degree.
What he can’t stomach is the idea that the heat is an urgent problem that the government must address.
“I think it is pretty clear that it’s true: Human beings have some effect on our climate,” he says. “And it’s possible that CO2 emissions contribute to it. … The issue that I have with it is the solutions that are presented are always the same, which is basically to say we have this massive climate change and the only way it can be fixed is through massive government control.”
I’d love to know what he thinks should be done, Apparently, government action is such a grotesque impingement on “freedom” that it’s better to fry to death that allow it to deal with the problem at the scale it’s actually happening. (And I hate to bring it up but it actually requires a global effort. Oh no.)
These are the same people who think asking people to wear a mask or get vaccinated during a deadly pandemic is worse than being in a concentration camp. So I guess it’s not surprising.
Meanwhile …. oh my God
Utter devastation left by the wildfires in Maui, Hawaï. It is far from hyperbole to say that Lahaina has been wiped off the map.
If you have a chance, listen to this whole thing. It is astonishing:
John Eastman says that if Trump's effort to overturn the 2020 election had been successful, "one hopes that our military" would have understood its obligation to quell any riots because failure to do so would mean "subjecting yourself to mob rule." https://t.co/zPAu4mOCM7pic.twitter.com/snwXF6Iwqq
Eastman says they were trying to save the Republic from “the mob” — and prepared to sic the military on anyone who protested. That’s right, they prepared for a military coup.
Now Trump is hedging. I hope Eastman enjoys being underneath the bus.
“We actually see a lot of the same problems …. We’re more of a politically homeless faction …” “I would vote for a Bernie Sanders before I’d vote for a Ted Cruz or a Marco Rubio.” “The working class has gotten beaten up by the loss of small businesses.”
Click-bait coverage of Trump rallies makes it easy to believe that the country is hopelessly divided. Or at least the 70% from the fringe-right 30%. If Trumpers don’t get their way, it’s civil war, etc., etc. As if these two below will lock and load and defend march to war behind some 21st-century Robert E. Lee.
If Donald Trump were to be found guilty by a jury, where do you see this going?
Trump supporter: “A civil war. Divide it up, because we can’t live together, obviously.” pic.twitter.com/kNr0fjG2T9
— Republicans against Trump (@RpsAgainstTrump) August 10, 2023
Capitalism and democracy being strange bedfellows, it’s those voices that get air time because they draw eyeballs and generate clicks. But is it really as bad as quickie profiles of the blowhard right make it seem?
We asked this guy about the Tennessee drag law and he said it was “stupid” and “government overreach.” pic.twitter.com/77WiGPDqpl
Under cover of mullet, John Russell of The Holler discovered that there is more common ground between the left and right than footage appearing on social media and in news coverage makes it seem. “Solidarity is waiting to have a moment.”
“You would never know [this]” about people at a Trump rally, Russell explains, “if you just watched Fox or CNN.”
“They’re trying to divide people,” one young woman says of the dominance of hot-button social issues.
Would you expect to hear about how anti-trust laws were used to break up the telephone monopoly, Bell Systems, in the 80s and that it might be time to dust them off again? Or about small businesses being squeezed out by corporate consolidation? Or how the world’s largest asset managers, Blackrock and Vanguard, command nearly $20 trillion dollars of wealth?
I went to the Trump rally in Erie, Pennsylvania, and heard all of this and more from people waiting in line.
It’s not surprising to me. I poured drinks in a rust belt dive bar for the last year where plenty of the Trump faithful slaked their thirst. When your county votes for Trump by 71% and the bartender is me, a white guy with a mullet, most people assume you’re on the same page. When they find out that I’m a card-carrying labor leftist, there’s always shock that we occasionally *are* on the same page.
All of us live in a petri dish of engineered division. If the working class on the left and right ever united on things like reining in billionaire power, ending forever wars that enrich the already wealthy, breaking up corporate power structures, and unionizing major industries, the world would look a lot different than it is, and the ruling class would have far to fall.
One commenter (among over 10k) writes, “These are the conversations we need to see to bring people back together. It’s easy to punch down at Trump’s supporters and assume they’re all racists and idiots, this right here is the actual track to mending the country.”
It’s twelve, eye-opening minutes well worth your time. I subscribed, and I never subscribe.
Gaslighting, brainwashing, or just dominating the information battle-space?
Blowhards have a way of attracting attention. They thrive on it. They put on a good show. Rush Limbaugh made his fortune as one, as have a biblical flood of TV preachers. Rupert Murdoch erected a global media empire around blowhards. The decibels they generate and maintain day after day do more than entertain audiences and generate cash flow.
What Bill McKibben once said of the Christian right might have presaged the rise of the flag-bedecked MAGA cultist: “They’re like the guy who gives you directions with such loud confidence that you drive on even though the road appears to be turning into a faint, rutted track.”
Is it gaslighting, brainwashing, or simply dominating the information battle-space? Blowhards organize discontent to “groom” their base and work the media refs. Donald Trump, Rudy Giuliani, the Freedom Caucus, and fringe-right disinformers succeeded in convincing followers that the 2020 election was “stolen” from their savior-king. The blowhard right has long convinced the media that they represent majority opinion.
Philip Bump’s analysis of the Issue 1 vote in Ohio reflects that biasing even as his data demonstrates the opposite:
A review of six statewide votes since last year, including Ohio’s, shows that in 500 of 510 counties, access to abortion outperformed President Biden’s 2020 results. Across those counties, including a lot of deep-red ones, the margin of support for abortion access topped Biden’s 2020 margin by an average of 26 points, a significant shift to the left.
No. That’s not a “shift to the left.” That majority support for abortion rights was always there. It was just so drowned out by the blowhard right that it created the illusion that, as Matt Novak of Paleofuture blog observes, “an extremely loud 30% of the country … convinced a lot of people they’re half the country but they’re not.”
There’s an extremely loud 30% of the country that’s pro-Trump, anti-choice, and anti-trans. They’ve convinced a lot of people they’re half the country but they’re not. They’re 30%. https://t.co/kLiN4zUUmB
The blowhard right “are not actually popular.” But they believe, says Tennessean Trae Crowder, “if the hearts of the people cannot be won, then the will of the people must be quashed.”
Republican officials, write Melissa Murray and Kate Shaw, “are afraid of their constituents when it comes to abortion and … are taking increasingly aggressive steps to prevent voters from making their voices heard.”
Or as Rep. Shontel Brown (D) put it, they reach for the “‘If you can’t beat ’em, cheat ’em’ Republican playbook” (timestamp 4:52).
Democracy, popular sovereignty, government of the people, are more popular than the blowhard right. Ohioans proved that again on Tuesday.
Craig Robertson is seen in an undated photo.Facebook
A Utah man was shot and killed during an FBI raid early Wednesday morning, the FBI confirmed to ABC News. The raid was in connection with an investigation into alleged threats against President Joe Biden and others, according to two officials briefed on the case.
One of the officials told ABC News that the investigation began in April and the U.S. Secret Service was notified by the FBI in June. In addition to threatening posts, the official said, the man under investigation suggested online he was making plans to take physical action. The threats had been deemed “credible,” the official said.
The FBI in Salt Lake City said the shooting occurred around 6:15 am. local time while special agents attempted to serve arrest and search warrants at a residence in Provo.
“The FBI takes all shooting incidents involving our agents or task force members seriously,” the FBI said in a statement. “In accordance with FBI policy, the shooting incident is under review by the FBI’s Inspection Division. As this is an ongoing matter, we have no further details to provide.”
The deceased suspect was Craig Robertson, according to multiple sources and a federal complaint obtained by ABC News.
Robertson was facing three counts, according to the complaint — interstate threats, threats against the president, and influencing, impeding and retaliating against federal law enforcement officers by threat.
The complaint includes numerous social media posts believed to have been made by Robertson threatening to kill Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, as well as several officials involved in prosecuting former President Donald Trump.
The president is scheduled to visit Utah on Wednesday.
Among the posts allegedly made by Robertson was one published on Aug. 6, three days before Biden’s scheduled visit, according to the complaint. “I hear Biden is coming to Utah. Digging out my old ghillie suit and cleaning the dust off the M24 sniper rifle,” the post said, according to the complaint, which referred to the post as a “willful true threat to kill or cause injury to kill President Biden.”
THIS ⬇️ is why a protective order is needed in Trump’s criminal cases to prevent Trump’s identifying witnesses to his deranged loyalists. Who he incites. https://t.co/Ptl8CZVX2q
— Andrew Weissmann (weissmann11 on Threads)🌻 (@AWeissmann_) August 9, 2023
Hugh Hewitt says that voters in Ohio yesterday were confused:
Abortion was not on the ballot – not at all! The measure was the only thing on the ballot and the measure was about the ballot measure process. While it is true that a ballot measure concerning abortion is pending that is not what this election was about. And so, voters were (mis)lead to vote about something that has much broader implications based on something very immediate. And so, in pursuit of abortion rights in Ohio much mischief entirely unrelated to abortion will unquestionably ensue.
They weren’t confused. They knew that the ballot measure was immediately about abortion but that the Republicans were trying to make it harder to amend the state constitution so they could continue their increasingly unpopular minority rule.
Abortion is the issue that symbolizes what these throwbacks are trying to do generally: deprive Americans of their freedom and their rights in service of their base voters’ grievance and anger at democratic norms that force them to share power with people they don’t like.
Former President Donald Trump on Tuesday vowed that he “will talk” about the criminal charges he faces over his efforts to overturn the 2020 election and accused federal prosecutors of “taking away my First Amendment rights.”
Last week, special counsel Jack Smith asked U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan to impose a so-called protective order that would prevent Trump from disclosing evidence the government turns over to his lawyers as part of the discovery process.
Trump’s own lawyers chose not to object to a protective order and instead requested that the judge put in place a version that is “less restrictive” than the one proposed by the government. Trump’s lawyers asked Chutkan to shield only “genuinely sensitive materials” in order to protect his rights.
But Trump is fighting on multiple fronts as he tries to beat three indictments and win back the presidency. On Tuesday, when he chided prosecutors and President Joe Biden, Trump was battling in the political arena at a rally here.
Trump told the raucous crowd that Biden “wants the thug prosecutor, this deranged guy, to file a court order taking away my First Amendment rights so that I can’t speak.”
He said failing to answer the media’s questions about the case is “not good for votes” as he seeks to defeat Biden.
“I will talk about it, I will,” he said. “They’re not taking away my First Amendment rights.”
In addition to the federal charges related to the 2020 election, Trump is under indictment in state court in New York and in federal court in Florida. He may also face state charges in Georgia, where he sought to upend his defeat in the state in 2020.
Trump has profited from the indictments on the campaign trail, consolidating a massive polling lead in the Republican nomination fight as he argues that adversaries are targeting his political movement.
“I’m being indicted for you,” he told supporters Tuesday, a line that has become part of his stump speech.
Anything they provide in discovery that he thinks will help him will be shared, I have no doubt.And he’ll continue to insult and threaten all the witnesses, prosecutors and judges in his cases without giving it a second thought. And frankly, I fell pretty confident that he will get away with it because nobody’s going to put him in pre-trial detention. It just won’t happen.
He is a rogue monster who knows very well that he has an armed cult backing him up.
Anyone involved with his legal case in any capacity should get bodyguards for themselves and their families. That’s just common sense.
As I was crisscrossing Iowa following the third indictment of Donald Trump, I caught wind of a fresh perspective regarding the right time to winnow the field.
The conventional wisdom has always been that Trump’s opponents need to consolidate around the strongest challenger as quickly as possible to avoid dividing the opposition votes. Mitt Romney argued that the drop-dead date should be February 26, in a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed. (My view: Even that might be too late.)
But now at least one of Trump’s opponents is wondering if the frontrunner’s legal troubles could change the calculus and require candidates to stay in for the long haul in order to try and amass delegates in case there is a convention battle because the former president is . . . otherwise indisposed.
“This is about meeting the moment while also thinking long-term,” said a DeSantis super PAC staffer on the condition of anonymity pointing to their massive super PAC war chest.
The long-term game theory takes into consideration what might happen should the January 6th trial move fast enough to prevent Trump from accepting the GOP nomination (I’m lighting a Jack Smith votive candle as we speak). If the legal calendar presents that possibility, might his opponents have to consider earning as many delegates as they can ahead of a convention fight, rather than dropping out of the race once it’s clear they can’t win?
This possibility could be simply the case of consultants with a lot of super PAC dough trying to ride their moneymaker as long as possible. (Which is what one of DeSantis’s rival campaigns’ spokespeople suggested to me.)
But is it so crazy to think that these campaigns might be caught in a prisoner’s dilemma that disincentivizes them from getting out of the race—and thus helping Trump . . . again? Wasn’t that possibility the reason so many anti-Trump Republicans were warning about a big field to begin with?
A hypothetical: If the early contests offer a muddied result that doesn’t elevate a single challenger above the herd—but also Trump is staring down the barrel of spring court dates—it would not be illogical to assume that candidates would have incentive to stick around and try to earn delegates in the later states where they are allocated proportionally, just in case things get wild in Milwaukee.
This wishcasting candidacy would surely be met with some resistance and mockery, but that hasn’t stopped ambitious politicians before. And let’s be honest, after getting schlonged by a man under multiple federal indictments in the first few contests, the remaining candidates might figure there’s no point in getting out to preserve dignity that, by that point, would be long gone.
I don’t expect that we live in the beautiful timeline where Trump rots in jail while his sycophants fight on the convention floor. But it would be about par for the course for the sweet dream of this possibility to freeze a fragmented field—and help him coast to a third nomination.
If I recall correctly, that idea was bandied about in 2016 as well. At one point everyone thought that Trump would be forced to drop out at some point because he was so beyond the pale. There was even a tepid floor fight and Ted Cruz refused to endorse him.
Yeah. That’s how that went.
Ron DeSantis: Noble Warrior
I was chatting with two women in the cafe outside the livestock auction in Tama, Iowa, where DeSantis was about to hold a sparsely attended event when a field staffer from the Never Back Down Super PAC approached us with some commit-to-caucus cards.
Both women were undecided on whom to support at this stage and politely declined, so the young man went into his spiel.
He began by credentialing himself as a former Trump 2020 staffer before offering the case for his candidate. “We shouldn’t have to pick between policy and personality,” he said. (I presume the subtext here is that he thinks DeSantis has both?)
But then it got interesting. He said that Republicans deserve somebody who is “mobile.”
Well, at least, that’s what we heard.
The three of us at the table began laughing and I asked him for clarification. As it turns out this was not a dig at Biden and Trump’s advancing age. He clarified that he was saying that he thought the party deserves someone “noble.”
Now that is an interesting argument we haven’t heard much from Trump’s top-tier opponents! The staffer quickly pivoted to more anodyne talking points about the importance of winning the election because he’s worried his generation is succumbing to socialism. Then he moved on to the next table.
This suggestion that Trump might not be noble has not been something we had been hearing from DeSantis to date, but the candidate did get as close as he has come to making the moral case against his rival the previous day at a town hall in New Hampshire.
These insults are juvenile. That is not the way a great nation should be conducting itself. That’s not the way the president of the United States should be conducting himself. . . . I’m not going to insult somebody. Somebody’s looks or somebody’s dress or something like that. I wouldn’t teach my kids to treat people like that. We have a 6-, 5-, and 3-year-old, we teach our kids to treat people the way you would want to be treated yourself.
And here is the crux of the other DeSantis dilemma.
Everything the Florida governor said in that town hall in New Hampshire and that his super PAC staffer told us at the table in Tama is obviously true.
Trump has not acted with nobility. His insults are juvenile. No responsible parent would teach their kids to emulate him.
But making that argument now, after years of extolling Trump’s virtues, after running an ad where DeSantis read TheArt of the Deal to his kids, makes DeSantis sound like he’s the disingenuous, ignoble heel, not Trump. In fact, it might even help Trump, further cementing his claim that DeSantis is a normie cuck in MAGA wolf’s clothing.
Which has been the foundational flaw of the deal Republican politicians made with the Orange Devil eight years ago. Once they submitted to his terms, there was no take-backsies. The time for Republicans to win the argument about nobility was August 2015, or at the latest February 2021. The hour now is far too late. That’s why they are stuck in a confidence game, trying to extend the clock as long as possible, hoping Jack Smith and a jury of their peers will finally set them free.
Not to mention the fact that DeSantis is a roaring asshole himself. He’s rude and mean and nasty and any parent who wanted to raise something other than a sociopath would never see this creep as any kind of role model. He is anything but noble.
-a real one among the MAGA voters who like Trump and will determine the nominee; and
-a fantasy primary among Republican elites who secretly loathe Trump and are hoping that voters will soon come to their senses.
You can imagine my surprise when I learned that the fantasy primary is so ingrained in the old guard GOP mindset that it even extends to campaign events out in real ’Merica!
On Sunday, I attended Ashley’s BBQ Bash in Cedar Rapids, hosted by GOP Rep. Ashley Hinson. The event was a campaign cattle call featuring the local Iowa GOP politicians and many of the Republican candidates for president. But not Trump.
For the first hour of the event I sat in a daze as speaker after speaker came to the lectern without mentioning Trump’s name. What world are these people living in? It’s not as if there isn’t anything to say! He was the most recent Republican president, is currently winning the primary in a landslide, and just this week was indicted for the third time. You’d suspect leading members of his party would have some thoughts on that! Apparently not.
The only sign of the former president in the first half dozen speeches was a large man sitting in the front row holding an actual TRUMP sign right in front of DeSantis’s face as he was finishing speaking.
About halfway through tepid remarks from the next speaker, North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum, I went to the concessions for a water. In the back of the barn, I noticed two older women emblazoned with Trump flair sitting at the tables where people had been eating. I was curious if they had also noticed the lack of discussion about their candidate. And boy did I strike a nerve.
Paula said that “all the cool kids” are having their event and the “rest of us” who like Trump are being left out. “I just think that’s weird.”
Donna, who volunteered that she had taken a bus to the National Mall on January 6th and thought it was “awesome” getting to talk to Trump supporters from all over that day, said she was “shocked” by the lack of support for Trump from the event organizers.
“If Trump was here this place would be packed,” she said.
I’m sure Paula and Donna hold many views that I would find to be a bit out there—but on this score I gotta say it seems like they were the ones who were seeing things clearly.
Having a Republican party BBQ and pretending Trump doesn’t exist isn’t going to make it a reality, no matter how much the politicians in the fantasy primary wish it were so.
There’s big money in it apparently, DeSantis is blowing through it as fast as he can and vastly wealthy people who have more money than they know what to do with are writing numerous 8 figure checks to candidates who have no chance to win. Nice work if you can get it.
Miller is right. There is no real primary. There’s a death watch. If Trump drops dead on the gold course there will be someone left to pick up the pieces. That’s all there is.
