Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

JV Last at the Bulwark points to a column by Noah Smith, a centrist (ish) economist who just can’t find a good reason to say that the Biden economy is terrible:

[H]ere’s economist Noah Smith struggling not to praise Biden—and failing—in a post titled: “If this is a bad economy, please tell me what a good economy would look like.”

I do not want to be a shill for the Biden administration. Yes, I like most of what Biden is doing on industrial policy. But I really want to resist being one of those center-left pundits who always just blasts out the latest press release of a Democratic administration and trumpets how many jobs the President has “created”. . . .

And yet when I look at how the U.S. economy is doing right now, I find it difficult to describe it in terms that allow me to avoid sounding like a shill. I know lots of Americans still think the economy is doing poorly, and are upset about that. But when I look at objective measures, I just can’t rationalize that negative viewpoint. Because as far as I can tell from the actual numbers, this economy is doing really, really well.

Here’s Noah again:

What do we want from the macroeconomy?

We want employment to be high, meaning that as many people as possible who want jobs can get them.

We want inflation to be low, so that people have certainty about how far their paycheck and their savings will go in the future.

We want real incomes to rise, meaning that we’re able to consume more than we could in the past, or save more if we want to. . . .

Basically, this is the whole list. . . .

And when we look at the objective numbers, they are great.

Smith goes on to give detailed explanations of the employment, inflation, and real income indicators—go read the whole thing—before trying to put Biden’s accomplishment in perspective:

This economy isn’t just good; it’s impressive

Anyway, this is all very good news. But I want to point out how improbable and surprising it is, from a macroeconomic standpoint. The basic theory of macroeconomics — still, in this day and age — includes the idea of the Phillips Curve. That means that when the government takes action to reduce inflation — raising interest rates, cutting deficits, etc. — it’s supposed to reduce real income growth and employment. There’s supposed to be a tradeoff there!

And yet instead there seems to have been no tradeoff at all. OK, maybe the Fed’s rate hikes just haven’t had time to work their way through the system yet — maybe 1.5 years isn’t enough. Maybe we’ll still eventually get that recession that everyone was forecasting up until a short while ago. But so far it looks like we’ve managed a macroeconomic miracle — bringing inflation down without damaging the real economy noticeably. . . .

This is a remarkable achievement. Who gets the credit? Because we don’t really know how macroeconomics works, we can’t actually give a definitive answer to this. Some of it was probably luck. . . .

But there’s a good argument for U.S. policy doing a lot here too. We’ll probably never know just how much the Fed’s rate hikes were responsible for taming inflation, but to think that rates can go from 0% to 5.5% with no effect would be quite an assumption. . . .

There’s also the financial side of things. Remember that a large-scale collapse of financial institutions very reliably causes economic downturns — 2008 being the most dramatic example. This could have happened in the U.S. banking system last year — rate hikes put a lot of banks in danger, and a few mid-sized regional banks like Silicon Valley Bank actually failed. But the FDIC, the Fed, and the Treasury stepped in and guaranteed bank deposits and provided emergency loans, and the banking crisis that lots of people were predicting never materialized. In fact, financial conditions in the U.S. actually improved after SVB’s collapse! . . .

In addition, the Biden administration might have had something to do with low oil prices. Biden released a bunch of oil from the strategic petroleum reserve back in 2022, and teamed up with Europe to put a price cap on Western purchases of Russian oil that may have allowed China and India to negotiate lower prices as well. Biden also mended fences with Venezuela and encouraged U.S. companies to start investing there again, which is starting to bring that country’s production back on line after a long hiatus. Remember that a drop in oil prices is a positive supply shock, which economic theory says should boost growth while also reducing inflation — i.e., exactly what we’ve seen over the last year or so.

And finally, there’s the investment boom. The CHIPS Act and the Inflation Reduction Act are spurring a ton of private investment in semiconductors and green energy . . .

[I]t seems fairly likely that this is making a positive impact right now. Morgan Stanley and other banks think it’s having a major impact, in any case. . . .

So although I always stress that the President has a limited impact on the economy, there are several reasons — oil policy, bank rescues, and industrial policy — that I feel inclined to give Biden some credit for the economy’s surprisingly stellar performance. Not all, but some.

While we’re all doing back flips to account for the public’s unrelenting negativity (*cough* the media *cough*) the numbers don’t lie.

Trump’s own words are being used against him. Again.

We’ve mostly forgotten about the Manhattan hush money case but it’s chugging along. Here’s the latest:

The Manhattan district attorney seeking to jail Donald Trump over his hush money payment to a porn star is seeking to potentially weaponize the same piece of damning evidence that nailed the former president at his rape trial: the deposition where he said stars like him get away with sexual harassment “unfortunately—or fortunately.”

It’s now up to a federal judge to decide whether those prosecutors can get a video that shows Trump at his worst: unapologetic about sexual assault, uttering misogynistic comments, and willing to lie to the American public to save his own skin.

It’s a testament to the breadth of Trump’s legal problems that we’re witnessing the collision of two totally separate cases: a civil defamation case about rape and a criminal case about a cover-up. And it all comes down to a closed-door question-and-answer session Trump had on Oct. 19, 2022.

That shocking testimony first came out in a federal courtroom in May in New York City, where jurors ultimately decided that Trump did indeed sexually abuse the journalist E. Jean Carroll decades ago. In the video, the former president talked about his previous gloating that he could grab women “by the pussy”—and answered whether he felt that the rich and famous could get away with it.

“Historically that’s true with stars. If you look over the last million years, that’s largely true, unfortunately—or fortunately,” he said, later adding that he considers himself a star.

At the time, the video stunned those in the federal courtroom, going a long way to show how Trump remained defiant about his predatory sexual behavior. He called Carroll a liar and viciously attacked her female lawyer. At one point, he told the attorney, “You wouldn’t be a choice of mine either.”

Now, the Manhattan DA wants that video for his own criminal investigation.

According to court records, Manhattan prosecutors plan to use it to show the way Trump “dealt with allegations of a sexual nature,” which could get them closer to proving that he was desperate to keep the lid on bad news that could have sunk his 2016 campaign.

It shouldn’t be too hard. He’s on record calling many of the many women who have accused him of assault liars, scam artists, you name it. This deposition is just one piece of such evidence — he’s repeatedly said it on twitter and television.

The LA Times’ Jonah Goldberg discusses the idea that Republicans are hooked on victimization, believing that they are under siege by powerful forces that are destroying their way of life:

Among his core supporters, about 37% of the party according to a breakdown of the poll by the New York Times’ Nate Cohn, literally nobody thinks he committed any crimes and 94% think the party needs to rally around him against these presumably bogus charges.

[…]

 If the Republican establishment forces were as powerful as Trump and his voters think, they’d be able to do something about it. If the Deep State were half as formidable as they think, Trump would never have been president in the first place.

But large segments of the GOP suffer from the delusion that they are victims of the ruling classes and that the woke left is running everything — or will — if Trump doesn’t stop them.

Even in states with Republican governors and legislative supermajorities, like Tennessee, a certain paranoia that the left could take over at any moment dominates politics. As one GOP state legislator recently said on a leaked conference call, “The left wants Tennessee so bad because if they get us, the Southeast falls and it’s ‘game over’ for the republic.”

Of course, if these left-wing overlords were as fearsome as all that, the GOP would not be in total control of the Volunteer State in the first place. Similarly, if the “RINO” establishment were in charge, Trump wouldn’t be the runaway front-runner.

This is the paradox of Republican politics today. The populists run or at least dominate the party but they derive their power and intensity from the bizarre conviction that they’re powerless victims — and that only Trump can save them.

The delusion is vexing but it also points to the only way to prevent Trump from getting the Republican nomination. The last decade has shown that the only kingmakers in American politics are precisely who they’re supposed to be: the voters. In 2008 Hillary Clinton proved that big money and establishment backing weren’t enough in the face of a popular opponent. Jeb Bush proved the same thing in 2016.

Much of the left and right have convinced themselves that American democracy has been hijacked, to one extent or another, by powerful special interests, billionaire donors, the Deep State, hegemonic party establishments and/or the media. And yet, time and again, the string-pullers have proved to be ordinary people.

He’s right up to a point. Our democracy hasn’t been so degraded that ordinary voters have no power at all. They certainly do. But I think the left, at least, is quite cognizant of that fact. They know that the MAGA right is composed of tens of millions of ordinary people who are enthralled by a deranged demagogue who has convinced them that they have been targeted for extinction by a non-existent conspiracy. That is not a delusion. It’s all too real. And it is terrifying.

Bankruptcy, fistfights and leather couches

Rachel Maddow’s staff noticed a sprawling story that while not exactly headline news ought to be. (I’d missed it until her show Monday night.) Multiple state Republican parties are at or near bankruptcy. The headline for Jim Geraghty’s National Review column last week dubbed it a “quiet collapse” in four key states.

Political donations follow power. Especially in the states. Especially in non-general election years. So it is not surprising that in four states with Democratic governors that state Republicans are not seeing their coffers as full as when the GOP holds the governor’s mansion. What Geraghty sees in that less is something more. In Arizona, Colorado, Michigan, and Minnesota Republicans are “going broke and devolving into infighting little fiefdoms.”

Arizona Republicans are down to their last $23,000 in their federal account while their failed gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake barnstorms the country as “real” governor in exile. She could be raising money to help her fellow Arizona Republicans, but no. Four years ago at this point in the cycle, the party had nearly $770,000 in the bank.

Colorado Republican Chair Dave Williams is attacking his own legislators and threatening to disenfranchise from the primary process “more than 900,000 Republicans” and “more than 1.8 million unaffiliated voters, 47% of the electorate,” reports the Colorado Gazette:

Stolen election conspiracist Dave Williams, the new state chairman, has announced the Colorado Republican State Central Committee (CRC) will vote on August 5 on whether to cancel the 2024 Republican primary election. And to accomplish this act of political suicide, they want to make a change in the committee’s voting rules that would make the old Soviet Politburo proud.

(What was it I wrote about the Republicans’ Soviet leanings yesterday?)

Minnesota Republicans have “barely $54 cash on hand” and “more than $335,000 in debt, according to the FEC paperwork filed in late June.“

Four county Republican parties in Michigan are at odds with one another, Geraghty recounts from a June Washington Post story:

At least four county parties in Michigan have been at open war with themselves, with members suing one another or putting forward competing slates that claim to be in charge. The night before an April state party meeting, two GOP officials got into a physical altercation in a hotel bar over an attempt to expel members. The state party’s new chairwoman, Kristina Karamo, has struggled to raise money and abandoned the party’s longtime headquarters.

Michigan Republicans have but $93,000 in their account under 18 months ahead of the 2024 elections. Donors who’d rather their money was well spent are closing their wallets.

Then there is Georgia. Gun-toting Republican Brian Kemp is governor and Republicans have a firm grip on the legislature. Yet the party’s accounts are bleeding for the legal defense of its “alternate” electors in the scheme to overturn the 2020 presidential results. They still have $1.4 million banked after raising $722,000 through June this year. But they’ve spent over a half million in legal expenses, reports the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, more than $340,000 of it defending the fake Trump electors.

The Lincoln Project’s Rick Wilson called it five years ago: “Everything Trump Touches Dies.”

Geraghty laments:

In these states, we are seeing the self-marginalization of the Republican Party. No outside force came along and forced these state parties to spend money, alienate traditional supporters and donors, pick nasty fights with their own lawmakers, turn loyalty to Trump into the preeminent litmus test on all issues and disputes, and alienate and repel once-persuadable swing voters. No, the people who took over these parties chose this path.

Political operatives who handle the boring day-to-day of party operations do some things right: “get more money coming in than is going out, pay attention to down-ballot races, and avoid infighting and messy public squabbles.” The MAGA Republicans who have replaced them are “blustering nutjobs” in the mold of Dear Leader, himself not exactly a paragon of financial or managerial competence.

As zealots (the left has its own), they are more interested in ideological purity and “not interested in attracting the votes of anyone they deem insufficiently dedicated to the MAGA vision.” Geraghty concludes, “The MAGA crowd now running these state parties insisted they didn’t need anyone else. And now we see where that got them.”

Truthfully, there was an outside force. It was not a boat accident. It wasn’t any propeller, it wasn’t any coral reef, and it wasn’t Jack the Ripper. It was Donald Trump. And even he was not the cause. Just the catalyst.

Talked about Barbie bein woke this weekend. pic.twitter.com/8rj8C5my5L

— Trae Crowder (@traecrowder) July 31, 2023

Consider the now regularly scheduled, near-unintelligible culture-war freakouts on the right. Over BLM. Over CRT. Over DEI. Over “woke.” Over “grooming,” drag shows, and kids’ books. The right has been slowly melting down over losing its cultural dominance for decades. Trump was an accelerant.

Consider Tucker Carlson’s and Josh Hawley’s embarrassingly public insecurity over manliness. Consider Ben Shapiro’s extended-cut rant — excuse me, rants — over the Barbie movie. These men don’t need more testosterone, bigger audiences, bigger guns or bigger penises. They need therapy.

The Republican Party as well. Not that they’d fund it.

Maddow’s segment is here:

To all who celebrate

This will only be effective if EVERYONE refrains from tweeting (X-ing?) on August 1st a/k/a #TweetlessTuesday. Let's show the owner the POWER OF THE PEOPLE. Honestly, would it kill you to keep your thoughts to yourself for 1 damn day? Read a book! 👀 #August1stTweetOutDay https://t.co/0apu2XsbAC

— Mark Hamill (@MarkHamill) July 30, 2023

An old GOP hand on Ron DeSantis

Oh my:

Last year, longtime Republican strategist Ed Rollins was leading the Ready for Ron PAC, and announcing his plans to help DeSantis — then an undeclared 2024 candidate —  take on Trump in the primary. A longtime Trump supporter, Rollins wanted to turn the page on the twice-impeached former president, and he thought DeSantis was the candidate to do it. But in just a few months, that hope vanished. Today, Rollins says he is “not involved” anymore in the pro-DeSantis efforts.

“I don’t think it’s the campaign’s fault at all; it’s his,” Rollins tells Rolling Stone. “I think he’s been a very flawed candidate. I know some of the people around him, and some of them are good, talented people. But every time he opens his mouth, he has a tendency to — shall we say — think out-loud, and he clearly doesn’t understand the game. … When you get into these culture wars the way that he has, the vast majority of people don’t understand what they are.

But Rollins doesn’t see another threat to Trump in the 2024 primary field: “At this point in time, I would be shocked if Trump were not the nominee.”

Rollins is also predicting that, “unless something serious happens,” President Biden is on track toward reelection.

Yep.

Wow, that is just depressing.

The original Woodstock featured The Who, Jimmy Hendrix, and The Grateful Dead.

Republican Woodstock features Donald Trump doing his jerking off two giants dance. pic.twitter.com/oYbIXV50nN

— Joe is Me (@YeahJeeetsYeah) July 31, 2023

Update:

The NY Times had this quote explaining why they love Donald Trump:

“He might say mean things and make all the men cry because all the men are wearing your wife’s underpants and you can’t be a man anymore,” David Green, 69, a retail manager in Somersworth, N.H., said of Mr. Trump. “You got to be a little sissy and cry about everything. But at the end of the day, you want results. Donald Trump’s my guy. He’s proved it on a national level.”

There is nobody, NOBODY, who is a bigger whiner and cryer that Donald J. Trump. Not even the world’s most spoiled five year old princes snivel as much as he.

But they just want to feel good about saying things like “make all the men cry because all the men are wearing your wife’s underpants and you can’t be a man anymore” and Trump gives them permission.

And, by the way, what results????

I think DeSantis and the gang see this as a feature not a bug. But it isn’t. There comes a point at which turning your state into an antediluvian hellscape starts costing real money:

With the start of the 2023-24 academic year only six weeks away, senior officials at New College of Florida (NCF) made a startling announcement in mid-July: 36 of the small honors college’s approximately 100 full-time teaching positions were vacant. The provost, Bradley Thiessen, described the number of faculty openings as “ridiculously high”, and the disclosure was the latest evidence of a brain drain afflicting colleges and universities throughout the Sunshine state.

Governor Ron DeSantis opened 2023 with the appointment of six political allies to the college’s 13-member board of trustees who vowed to drastically alter the supposedly “woke”-friendly learning environment on its Sarasota campus. At its first meeting in late January, the revamped panel voted to fire the college president, Patricia Okker, without cause and appoint a former Republican state legislator and education commissioner in her place.

Over the ensuing weeks, board members have dismissed the college’s head librarian and director of diversity programs and denied tenure to five professors who had been recommended for approval.

In a statement given to 10 Tampa Bay about faculty vacancies that was issued earlier this month, NCF officials said that six of the openings were caused by staff resignations and one-quarter of the faculty member departures “followed the changes in the New College board of trustees”. One of those resignations was submitted by Liz Leininger, an associate professor of neurobiology who says she started looking for an exit strategy as soon as she learned about the DeSantis appointments in the first week of 2023.

The 40-year-old scientist joined the New College faculty in 2017, drawn by the opportunities of living near her ageing parents on Florida’s Gulf coast and working closely with undergraduates at a relatively small school where total student enrollment hovers around 700. But as the Republican-controlled Florida legislature passed a series of bills over the last two years that sought to curtail academic freedom and render a professor’s tenure subject to review at any time, Leininger witnessed first-hand the devastating effects of the new laws on her colleagues’ morale.

“All of the legislation surrounding higher education in Florida is chilling and terrifying,” said Leininger, who is rejoining the biology department at St Mary’s College in Maryland this fall where she had been teaching before moving to central Florida. “Imagine scientists who are studying climate change, imagine an executive branch that denies climate change – they could use these laws to intimidate or dismiss those scientists.”

The new laws have introduced a ban on the funding of diversity, equity and inclusion programs at Florida’s public colleges and universities, withdrawn a right to arbitration formerly guaranteed to faculty members who have been denied tenure or face dismissal, and prohibited the teaching of critical race theory, which contends that inherent racial bias pervades many laws and institutions in western society, among other changes.

In the face of that and other legislation backed by DeSantis and Republican lawmakers that has rolled back the rights of Florida’s LGBTQ+ community, many scholars across the state are taking early retirement, voting with their feet by accepting job offers outside Florida or simply throwing in the towel.

I wonder if the Democrats and apathetic Floridians will wake up and realize that he’s ruining their education system from Kindergarten to college. It will take a lot of effort to build it back once it’s gone.

Roy Edroso breaks it down — and everything he says is right on:

Back when I did a regular “rightbloggers” column for the Village Voice, I covered a few of the loonier rightwing conspiracy theories those folks promulgated. I didn’t make a habit of running them down, though. I thought the bloggers’ and web propagandists’ ridiculous interpretations of major events were loony enough themselves, and also more germane to way conservatives were polluting our political discourse and indeed our politics, than the occasion crackpot cock-and-bull story about, for example, Barack Obama’s secret gay life.

Back then, despite what Tommy Lee Jones said in Men In Black, what one might read in the supermarket tabloids or their web equivalents was not considered the best investigative reporting on the planet.

Not that I didn’t occasionally enjoy the spectacle of conservative writers working one of these obvious slanders for political advantage — as when, for example, a transparently fake claim that Michelle Obama had gone on a rant about “Whitey” was, during the 2008 Presidential race, circulated by operatives, promoted by rightbloggers, passive-agressively shoveled into the mainstream by National Review (“My guess is that even most Democrats recognize she’s capable of remarks like that”) and then, when it became clear no one was going for it, reimagined by some of these guys as a Democratic dirty trick against Republicans to make them look like credulous fools.

But by and large in those days I ignored the political-celebrity-specific conspiracy theories that were most popular among the rightwing rabble — such as the “Clinton body count” stuff about all the people Bill and Hillary Clinton had allegedly ordered killed. True, its first great effulgence was promoted by no less than the Wall Street Journal editorial page, which JAQed off to the rumor that Vincent Foster had not, as his suicide note indicated and two investigations confirmed, killed himself, but was personally ordered whacked by Bill and Hill.

But back in those days it was easy — easier, certainly, than it later became — to assume no one took these stories seriously — not even their promoters; they were just stirring the muck to muddy the waters, as it were, to raise vague suspicions rather than rouse true believers, and thus suppress voter enthusiasm. It stank, but at least it made some kind of sense.

Also, it seemed back then that the Clinton Body Count thing really had lost its effectiveness. When Clinton was making her big Presidential run, having already made the Congressional Republicans who tried to Benghazi her look foolish, the brethren pushed the hazy accidental death of a minor U.N. official as the latest of Red Hillary’s murders, and got approximately zero bites.

But Her Emails and other bullshit pushed President Hillary off-course, and she mostly went quiet — and, apart from the unending calls for her arrest by Tubby and his minions, so did the Clinton Body Count industry. Occasionally we’d get a Bill Clinton reference whenever someone ran the tape of Trump partying with Jeffrey Epstein, but the CBC theorists clammed up, which made sense — no Clinton would be running for anything anytime soon.

But as we’ve seen, in the MAGA era conservatives have gone bugfuck crazy for even weirder conspiracy theories. There are a lot of little ones — like the “Biden Orders US Dollar Replaced with Trackable ‘Spyware’ Version” gibberish I cover in my Hardcore editions — but it’s the big ones that are most alarming, like all the COVID conspiracy theories (that Democrats and Anthony Fauci worked with the Chinese to cause COVID, or that COVID isn’t real, or that it is real but that masks are just tools of repression and the vaccines are full of microchips), the Stolen 2020 Election, J6 as false flag, etc.

You don’t need me to tell you (though I often do!) that this endless series of Big Lies reveals a conservative movement and Republican Party increasingly unmoored from reality. But I have to tell you there’s something about the smaller, political-celebrity-specific fantasies they’ve been pushing lately that strikes me as ominously extra weird.

The Joe Biden fantasies made vivid by the Republican House investigations are by now something any Democratic president would have to expect. But did you see the one about how Fauci burned down Rand Paul’s office?

Others have picked up the theme — and if you’re thinking, yeah, well, this is just a fringe thing just like the old days, be aware that Fash Beardo here has more than a million followers and none of them is going to be skeptical about this absurd insinuation.

Also you may have heard that Barack Obama’s chef died in a paddleboarding accident the other day, and if you follow conservative media, you will also “know” that Obama had him murdered:

QAnon conspiracy theorist Liz Crokin alleged that “it’s about time we start discussing the Obama Body Count” and asked of Campbell, “What did he know?”

Conspiracy theorist Roger Stone shared a screenshot of an article on Campbell’s death and implied that his death was purposeful, saying, “Clearing the decks for her 2024 candidacy. Tying up the loose ends #MichelleObama2024.”

White nationalist Stew Peters posted, “Clinton White House Chef: DEAD. Obama White House Chef: DEAD. If I’m Joe Biden’s chef, I’m quitting and getting FAR AWAY from that family.”

This story is now being spread by unaccountably-popular bullshit artist Benny Johnson (“The Obamas said they were nowhere near Martha’s Vineyard when the tragedy of Tafari Campbell’s death occurred…”), prominent conservative intellectual Catturd2, and the Washington Free Beacon (“Axis of Evil? Obamas, Clintons Linked by Suspicious Deaths”).

So it’s not just the little fish nibbling at this. Once upon a time conservatives of any prominence — and yes, calling these guys “prominent” may seem a stretch, but who in their movement is more qualified for the term? — would have been silent or at least a lot cagier about promoting this murder fantasy. But now it’s standard procedure: If a Democrat is popular and prominent, conservatives will declare them them the prime suspect in any crime that occurs in their vicinity.

Given my previous lack of interest in this kind of thing, and the larger and more consequential fantasy versions of national events to which conservatives are now devoted, you may wonder why I care about these alt Body Counts.

Well, for one thing, highly personal political fantasies have a way of turning into stochastic terrorism, as with the guy who got excited when Tubby reported Obama’s address, got his arsenal and went looking for him.

But it’s also, and I guess mainly, this: I’ve said before that Republicans and conservatives don’t have policies as such anymore — just sadism and paranoia and related pathologies. Back in the Clinton Body Count days, they at least seemed to know that they were peddling bullshit in order to achieve coherent political goals.

But now there’s only the slander, and increasingly their pitch for elections is that they need power so they can throw their opponents in jail, because those opponents are all groomers and murderers and arsonists — read about it in our tweets! — and what else can you do with supervillains like that?

This animates all of what we once would have called their politics. They’re trapped in this lurid cartoon version of reality, and they want to make us all live it out with them.

I don’t normally reprint Edroso’s work but I read it every day. It’s one substack that’s really worth subscribing to. Highly recommend.

God knows why…

Donald Trump stepped on to the stage in Des Moines Iowa on Friday night to the ubiquitous GOP rally song called “Only in America” just as the lines, “one could end up going to prison, one just might be president” were blaring over the loudspeakers. Everyone in that room has probably heard the song a thousand times, Trump included, but never have the words been more relevant.

Omg. That line hits right when he gets on stage. https://t.co/nXOGcw9Ol1

— Dave Aronberg (@aronberg) July 29, 2023

If they were mad at Gov. Reynolds they shouldn’t have been. The song was played for every candidate who spoke. It’s just that those particular lyrics only apply to one of them.

The crowd cheered lustily for the former president and current front runner for the Republican nomination anyway ,as they always do. It’s doubtful any of them even heard those lyrics, and if they did they no doubt saw it as more evidence of the massive conspiracy against Donald Trump. We know this because earlier in the evening one lone Republican candidate tried to tell them the truth:

Reporters inside the room said the booing was much louder and more energetic than what appears on the video. One man reportedly yelled, “go home you son of a bitch!”

Hurd said “the truth is hard” but these people don’t think so. Here’s a typical Trump voter from the next day at Trump’s rally in Erie, Pennsylvania:

Guy at Trump rally is asked why he came: “Because I believe in the man. He tells the truth, never lies, and he’s fighting for our country.” pic.twitter.com/kEX5MvEQQv

— Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) July 29, 2023

The scene of those surreal moments with Trump and Hurd came this weekend at the Iowa Republican Party’s Lincoln Day dinner on Friday night where a whole gaggle of candidates appeared to make their pitch to Republican Real Americans. Trump was fairly low key, mostly sticking to his prepared speech and staying under the allowed 10 minutes. It was low-energy enough to even be noticed by some in the crowd.

You can understand why. All week long the press had been on indictment watch in DC waiting for news about the assumed impending charges against Trump in the January 6th investigation but instead a superseding indictment had been brought against Trump and another conspirator in the Mar-a-lago stolen documents case. As of now he’s facing 40 felony charges in that case and 32 state felony charges in New York in the Stormy Daniels hush money case. It’s enough to make any criminal defendant feel a little bit despondent.

And anyway, Trump hates appearing in venues with other candidates. He feels it lowers him to have to compete head to head with people he considers his inferiors. Although he’s qualified for the upcoming first debate in Iowa next month he’s said he doesn’t think he’ll bother. I’m not sure why. The crowds loved it back in 2016 when he talked about his penis size and crudely demeaned and insulted his rivals and the moderators.

A spat with the popular GOP Gov. Reynolds over her refusal to endorse him (or anyone) in the primary and the not so paranoid suspicion that she favors Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis may have affected some inside players in the Iowa GOP, at least one of whom switched his allegiance to DeSantis, is all inside baseball. The GOP base still loves Trump. He’s polling 30 points ahead of DeSantis with everyone else in the crowded field still trying to get a foot hold. When Trump said, “there’s only one candidate — and you know who that candidate is — to get the job done” the crowd went wild.

It’s possible that there has been a slight shift in the national polling in light of all his felony indictments. According to a new NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist National Poll , only 13% of Republicans believe Trump did something illegal, a number unchanged since the last poll, but they report that “Republicans who say Trump has done nothing wrong dropped 9 points (50% to 41%) since our June poll. ” And he’s dropped 6 points, from 64% to only 58%, who say they are more likely to back Trump if he stays in the race. Clearly, quite a few Republicans who believe he did something wrong are more than happy to vote for him anyway. Such is the MAGA phenomenon. You can see why the rest of the GOP field is stuck in low numbers. There is no shaking him loose from the top spot.

The Republican primary looks like it’s going to be a re-run of 2016 at this point. And that’s pathetic since back then nobody really knew what to make of Trump but you’d think they would have figured out a different strategy by now. This crop each have their own reasons for trying it, some more understandable than others, and they probably all figure that they might be the last man (or Nikki Haley) standing in case Trump drops out.

DeSantis clearly thought he was presidential timbre and could go one-on-one with Trump and he has learned otherwise. The spectacle of his floundering campaign is downright pitiful these days and it’s illustrated by the fact that he no longer seems to be running against Trump the front runner and is instead in a race for second place with S. Carolina Sen. Tim Scott .

Scott is a media darling and is reportedly starting to get some attention from donors, especially those who are feeling disenchanted with the anti-woke Florida governor as he’s rolled out his very expensive and ineffectual campaign. And former Vice President Mike Pence persists in believing he has a constituency as does former S. Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley. Previously unknown gadfly Vivek Ramaswamy is having his 15 minutes and former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie is eagerly invited on every cable news show to deliver some zingers against Trump.

A few others are pretending to run as well but the strategy is the same as 2016: don’t alienate the Trump vote, challenge the other candidates so they will drop out and you will be Trump’s heir apparent when he flames out. It didn’t work then and it’s highly unlikely it will work now, especially since Trump’s minions are changing the rules all over the country to make it harder for second place finishers to collect delegates.

The Washington Post reports that in California this past weekend Trump operatives finagled a change to the delegate rules giving him a much better chance at securing all of the state’s 169 delegates. Similar changes have been engineered in other states after Trump’s henchmen set about working the state parties some time back. Whether it’s pushing for winner-take-all or caucuses over primaries or any number of other strategies, his operation has fully wired the primaries for Trump’s advantage.

Events like that Lincoln dinner and probably the debates as well are really just a political pageant designed to give the impression that there is a contested primary in the Republican Party. There’s a lot of money to go around to line the pockets of media companies and Republican operatives for months so why not? But unless something catastrophic happens to Trump (and criminal indictments obviously don’t count) all indications are that he’s going to be the nominee. The rest of these people are just running in place hoping that it does.

Salon