Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

Yesterday, the NY Times reported on Donald Trump’s agenda for a second term should we have the misfortune to see him get one. It led with this:

Donald J. Trump and his allies are planning a sweeping expansion of presidential power over the machinery of government if voters return him to the White House in 2025, reshaping the structure of the executive branch to concentrate far greater authority directly in his hands.

Their plans to centralize more power in the Oval Office stretch far beyond the former president’s recent remarks that he would order a criminal investigation into his political rival, President Biden, signaling his intent to end the post-Watergate norm of Justice Department independence from White House political control.

Mr. Trump and his associates have a broader goal: to alter the balance of power by increasing the president’s authority over every part of the federal government that now operates, by either law or tradition, with any measure of independence from political interference by the White House, according to a review of his campaign policy proposals and interviews with people close to him.

Shocker, right? Well, it would be if you didn’t read this blog because I wrote about this months ago. I don’t reprise it here just because this story has been out there in plain sight for quite some time but because I’m worried that people aren’t paying enough attention to the fact that Trump is not alone in this. The whole party is turning in this direction and it means the fight is not going to end with him. I just hope people understand that.

The ambitious Republican plot to take it all down

Picture if you will, it’s January 21, 2025 and Donald Trump has just been inaugurated for his second term after the Biden interregnum. Yes, it would be a horrific time, not unlike those first horrible weeks in 2017 when over half the country struggled to grasp how it was possible that an ignorant, bombastic, game show host had eked out a win through an electoral college fluke. But those feelings of despair are where the similarities will end. The next Trump administration will be ready to hit the ground running with their leader’s Retribution Agenda and it won’t be because Trump is any more effective at presidential leadership. It will be because right-wing institutions will have spent their four years in the wilderness preparing for their chance to enact a radical overhaul of the federal government unlike anything we’ve ever seen in this country.

Even some members of the GOP establishment are getting nervous:

Former Defense Sec. Robert Gates tells @margbrennan he's "concerned" that former Pres. Trump is the current front-runner for the 2024 GOP nomination because he's been "very clear that he wants to dramatically change, if not dismantle, some major institutions" in U.S. government. pic.twitter.com/uBUlpHcGPE

— Face The Nation (@FaceTheNation) May 21, 2023

There was always talk of this among the original Trumpers, even though the president himself didn’t have a clue what they were talking about. Recall former adviser Steve Bannon bellowing about the “deconstruction of the administrative state” and former Attorney General Bill Barr’s assertions of unchecked executive power for example. As it happened, Trump was so far in over his head and ran such a chaotic, scandal-filled administration that they were unable to institute many systematic changes to test their theories but they came away with the knowledge that given another chance with a corrupt demagogue they could make changes to the system that could help them stay in power indefinitely.

Republicans have come to believe that the entire federal government is filled with woke liberals.

There has been a cascade of stories discussing the poor roll out of Trump’s campaign and how he’s still stuck in the repetitive groove of his grievances over the 2016 campaign and his loss in 2020. His appearance on CNN’s generous kick-off campaign rally for him a couple of weeks ago reinforced that idea, as he repeated all his punch lines and the audience cheered and clapped ecstatically. It certainly left the impression that if Trump were to win the election next year we would be in for a repeat of his first term: turmoil, scandal and ineptitude in which the most terrifying consequence is that a crisis hits or someone makes a catastrophic error. Last time, you’ll recall, we got hit with the first deadly global pandemic in a hundred years and Trump publicly told America to take unproven snake oil cures and instructed scientists to look into having people ingest disinfectants since they kill the virus on surfaces.

It was a disaster.

Many people died and many more families were decimated but I fear that too many Americans may think that a rerun of the The Trump Show won’t be a catastrophe since most of us survived his tenure. But it won’t be a rerun. Since the day Trump left the White House for his exile at Mar-a-Lago, well-funded right-wing organizations have been planning the return to power with a fully developed agenda and plan to enact it. All they have to do is put the Sharpie in Trump’s hand to sign what they put in front of him after which he can run out to the cameras and whine and complain about whomever is his target that day as his minions turn the executive branch into a full functioning partisan operation.

Last summer, Axios’ Jonathan Swan wrote a long report on what they’ve been planning:

The impact could go well beyond typical conservative targets such as the Environmental Protection Agency and the Internal Revenue Service. Trump allies are working on plans that would potentially strip layers at the Justice Department — including the FBI, and reaching into national security, intelligence, the State Department and the Pentagon, sources close to the former president say…The heart of the plan is derived from an executive order known as “Schedule F,” developed and refined in secret over most of the second half of Trump’s term and launched 13 days before the 2020 election.

Schedule F is an executive order which would reassign potentially tens of thousands of federal employees they determine to have policy influence so they would lose their civil service protections. Republicans have come to believe that the entire federal government is filled with woke liberals intent on depriving them of their natural right to rule without restraint.

The plan is being produced by a number of Republican groups and coordinated by some names with which you are no doubt familiar, like former Justice Department (DOJ) lawyer Jeffrey Clark, former Devin Nunes and Pentagon staffer Kash Patel, and former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows all of whom are caught up in Trump’s legal messes as well. They plan to salt every department with GOP toadies from the military to the DOJ to the Department of Education to the Centers for Disease Control and the National Institutes of Health. And conservative organizations like the Heritage Foundation are drawing up lists of candidates. (That same right-wing institution similarly staffed the provisional government in Iraq with young neocons to disastrous results.)

The beauty of this plan is that it doesn’t actually matter if Trump wins again. They can use it just as easily for another Republican. But it would be especially well-suited for Trump’s principal rival Florida Governor Ron DeSantis. Time Magazine’s Molly Ball reported on DeSantis’ desire to use every bit of executive power to achieve his goals:

“One of my first orders of business after getting elected was to have my transition team amass an exhaustive list of all the constitutional, statutory, and customary powers of the governor,” he writes in The Courage to Be Free. “I wanted to be sure that I was using every lever available to advance our priorities.” Aides from the time have corroborated this account, describing a thick binder of information that DeSantis proceeded to devour.

There’s no need to reiterate all the ways in which he uses every lever and coerces the legislature to enact the most extreme agenda of any state in America and now promises to take it national. Should he win he will run with the Schedule F plan and probably come up with a few of his own. This is what defines him as a political leader.

In fact, from the sound of all the Republicans on the trail extolling the alleged “bombshell” that’s actually a dud of the Durham Report as if it’s some huge indictment of the “deep state” that has to be completely dismantled, it’s obvious that this is going to be a Republican Party project, not a Trump project at all. They are all organizing themselves around blatant lies about elections, democracy, law and justice, health, foreign policy and national security and their partisan institutions are plotting to use those lies to remake the federal government.

It’s an ambitious plan but with the courts on their side and a congressional majority, it’s eminently doable. It’s imperative that the American people do not let them attain power again as long as this is their agenda or there may be no going back. 

Look at the garbage he spreads on Truth Social:

Uh huh. Here’s another caucasian family posing in their mansion:

If you want to understand what Trump might be charged with I recommend reading Just Security’s possible prosecution memo. We don’t know at this moment what Trump might be facing but we do know that he’s facing indictment in the January 6th case now that he’s received a target letter.

This tweet thread from Norm Eisen, one of the authors, offers a succinct summary:

The memo is unique bc ours is the first in-depth application of the relevant criminal law to the facts, building on the more concise criminal referrals the committee offered in its report

We look at that report w/ skeptical eyes as prosecutors do 

We narrow the case to what can confidently be proven to a jury, and for the first time anywhere we consider at length, and of course in good faith, Trump’s defenses and how they will fare

We can do that because of our all-star coauthors @NoahBookbinder, @DonaldAyer6, @StantonLaw, @EDanyaPerry, @DebraPerlin and Kayvan Farchadi, and our amazing editor @RGoodlaw. (4/x)

Moreover, we can now assess prosecution because the public record has grown a great deal since the Select Committee report’s publication in December 2022, and we update it with the information released after the report

We consider the depositions & documents that the Committee itself released after the report came out, as well as a substantial amount of other reported new evidence

& as @JRubinBlogger noted in her write-up: the key is simplicity!

OK now for those three (relatively) simple acts

ACT ONE. Trump knew he lost the election but did not want to give up power, so he worked with his lawyers and others on a wide variety of schemes to change the outcome. 

Those schemes included creating fraudulent electoral certificates that were submitted to Congress, implicating statutes such as 18 U.S.C. § 371, which prohibits conspiracies to defraud the United States in the administration of elections

ACT TWO. When all the other schemes failed, Trump and his lawyers ultimately concentrated on using the false electoral slates to obstruct the constitutionally mandated congressional certification of the election on January 6

This implicates 18 U.S.C. § 1512, which prohibits obstruction of an official proceeding

Their primary goal: have VP Pence in his presiding role either block Congress from recognizing Joe Biden’s win at all–or at least delay the electoral count

ACT THREE. When Pence refused, Trump went to his last resort: triggering an insurrection in the hope that it would throw Congress off course, delaying the transfer of power for the first time in American history

This implicates statutes such as 18 U.S.C. § 2383, which prohibits inciting an insurrection and giving aid or comfort to insurrectionists

Prosecutors rarely charge § 2383. As we discuss below, they only do so with extreme caution

We believe there is sufficient evidence to pursue it—as did the Select Committee in making a criminal referral of Trump under that statute—but prosecutors may make different choices. Much will depend on the evidence the Special Counsel develops.

Throughout this memo, we urge a FOCUSED approach to charging and trying the case that can be done using our three-part structure or another simplifying approach that would allow the case to come to trial within a year

Now let’s dig into each of those three offenses

First is 18 USC § 371, conspiracy to defraud the US

This statute has two different “prongs,” and Trump likely violated both of them

Trump likely violated both the “offense prong” & the “defraud prong”

This means he likely agreed to 1) do something illegal & 2) do something to prohibit a lawful govt function 

Submitting false electoral slates likely constitutes the crime of making a false statement to Congress & interfering with the count of of genuine electoral ballots disrupts a lawful govt function Trump drove both, ergo his potential liability under 18 U.S.C. 371

By the way, it doesn’t matter if the object of the conspiracy is completed or not–a defendant can still be convicted just for attempt 

Trump could also be charged for attempting to obstruct counting of electors via § 1512(c)(2)

The law doesn’t require proof of conscious wrongdoing–but Trump & collaborators likely knew their conduct was wrong anyways

Trump seemingly knew he lost election & court battles 

Counting the electoral votes is an official proceeding–and what counts as impeding one is “expansive,” according to at least one federal judge

When Trump pressured Pence to reject electors, and unleashed a mob on the proceedings, he apparently impeded them

Trump also apparently gave aid to insurrection, which is a crime under 18 USC § 2383

Bipartisan majorities have called the attack on the Capitol an “insurrection” 

Trump’s comments leading up to & on Jan 6 may have incited the insurrection

He told them “fight like hell” and “you’ll never take back our country with weakness”

His tweet at 2:24pm targeted the VP–followed by 187 minutes of inaction

Trump has offered many explanations, denials, and defenses over the last two years

We explain why these defenses will likely fail

Trump claims his Jan 6 speech is protected by the 1st Amendment–it’s not

His speech passes the Brandenburg test, which says that provoking imminent lawless action is not protected speech

By his supporters’ own words, Trump’s speech encouraged them to storm the Capitol

Here’s one of the unique things we do in the report:

We did a deep dive into all Trump’s defenses, factually and legally 

Trump will surely argue (as he has elsewhere) that he has immunity from criminal prosecution for acts he took as president

But that immunity does not apply to criminal acts taken well outside the scope of the presidency like trying to overthrow an election

Trump has also raised an advice of counsel defense

For as many attorneys like Giuliani and Eastman who told him “yes,” many told him “no”

Either way, Trump likely believed in his false election claims long before any attorney convinced him they were true

In any false statements case, like this one, the prosecution has to prove that the false statements were made in bad faith

So, Trump will certainly argue that is not the case

HOWEVER, this defense is likely FACTUALLY & LEGALLY unsustainable

There is ample evidence that Giuliani, Eastman, and the main perpetrators of the fake electors scheme KNEW it was unlawful

We know this because they said as much behind closed doors 

Lastly, Trump and some of his allies claimed that he authorized 10k Nat’l Guard troops for Jan 6 which were rejected by the Mayor of DC

This is likely false based on all available evidence from military leaders’ testimony

So, as you can see, there is a path to prosecuting Trump, and we think that is coming

It’s coming.

It’s only July

Friends got stuck on the tarmac at O’Hare Airport for three hours last Wednesday as rare tornadoes ripped through the Chicago area. (Local newscasters call it Chicagoland, but that just sounds to me like an amusement park.) There was another tornado warning on Friday evening.

The heat is doing more than melt glaciers (Washington Post):

As the Northern Hemisphere approaches summer’s peak, heat is testing the limits of human survival in Earth’s hottest spots — and demonstrating the extremes that are increasingly possible and probable against the backdrop of accelerating global warming.

In recent days, China set an all-time high of nearly 126 degrees Fahrenheit, while Death Valley hit 128 degrees, two shy of the highest reliably measured temperature on Earth. Phoenix was expected to observe a record-breaking 19th consecutive day at or above 110 degrees Tuesday. And in the Middle East, the heat index reached 152 degrees, nearing — or surpassing — levels thought to be the most intense the human body can withstand.

Such conditions are more than enough to overwhelm the body’s ability to regulate its internal temperature, experts said, and offer a glimpse of dangers only expected to become more prevalent as global warming increases extremes in heat and humidity.

Persian Gulf International Airport in Iran reported a heat index of 152°F (66.7°C) today at 12:30 pm.

Those are intolerable conditions for human/animal life. pic.twitter.com/R3RJ9pf4DC

— Colin McCarthy (@US_Stormwatch) July 16, 2023

A friend from India used to talk about it getting so hot that birds overwhelmed by it fell out of trees. Something to look forward to since we seem unwilling to do enough to stop climate change.

Trump works every angle

Whatever else, Donald Trump is relentless. He works every angle, tries every door knob and checks every window for an opening no matter how remote the chance:

ATLANTA — The Georgia Supreme Court shot down Donald Trump’s attempt to derail the 2020 Fulton County election investigation in a unanimous dismissal Monday.

The justices wrote that Trump failed to prove the circumstances were extraordinary enough to warrant their interference. The court also ruled that the former president’s legal team didn’t provide the “facts or law” necessary to mandate the disqualification of Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis.

“(Trump) is asking this Court to step in and itself decide the motions currently pending in the superior court,” the order reads. “This is not the sort of relief that this Court affords, at least absent extraordinary circumstances that (Trump) has not shown are present here.”

But that doesn’t mean he won’t embarrass his attorneys by making them try, spend others’ money and waste still more people’s time.

The two Fulton County grand juries that could hear evidence in the election investigation were sworn in last week. The first grand jury began hearings Monday.

Willis has previously said that potential indictments will come before Sept. 1., but she’s previously hinted that charging decisions will likely happen between July 31 and August 18.

Tick, tick, tick, Donald.

Trump’s feral instincts must be working overtime to get out of the trap. Will he gnaw his own leg off, too?

I know why: sabotaging the Democratic Party is his raison d’etre

This No Labels gambit is such utter bullshit I’m hard pressed not to just start screaming into the void. I’ve been watching Joe Lieberman take a wrecking ball to the Democratic Party for decades now and he’s not done yet.

In this article in the Atlantic, he insists that he doesn’t want Trump to be the nominee and that he just wants to provide a “moderate” “centrist” option since that’s what he believes everyone in America really wants. But he’s very hard pressed to answer why he is determined to threaten his old friend Joe Biden:

Lieberman is clear about his distaste for Trump, but he’s hazier on the question of why—or even whether—Biden has fallen short. He’s said repeatedly that if the choice came down to Biden or Trump, he’d vote for the Democrat, and he speaks affectionately of a man he first met nearly 40 years ago and with whom he served for 20 years in the Senate. Yet he’s still hunting for a better option. I asked him whether he supported a third-party ticket because Biden had done a bad job or because voters think he’s done a bad job. “I think it’s both,” Lieberman replied. “He’s an honorable person, but he’s been pulled off his normal track too often” by pressure from the left. That’s a frequent talking point from Republicans and a complaint Manchin has made from time to time.

The perception that Biden has veered too far to the left, though, is not what has driven his low approval ratings. Indeed, in many ways Biden is the kind of president for whom moderates like Lieberman have long been clamoring. Yes, he signed two major bills that passed along purely party-line votes (the American Rescue Plan Act in 2021 and the Inflation Reduction Act a year later), but he has repeatedly prioritized negotiating with Republicans, most recently over the debt ceiling. Lieberman credited Biden for his bipartisan infrastructure law and the budget deal he struck with House Speaker Kevin McCarthy this spring. “He’s done some significant things,” Lieberman said, also praising the president’s initial handling of the coronavirus pandemic. When I asked him what specifically Biden had veered too far left on, he initially declined to list any issues. Then he pointed to No Labels’ policy plan, noting that it included “commonsense” proposals on guns and immigration.

Although he’s been out of office for more than a decade, Lieberman, at 81, is less than a year older than Biden. He said he believes the president remains up to the job, both physically and cognitively, and he was reluctant to call on him to stand down. But Lieberman gently suggested that might have been the better course. “I’m struck by how intent he is on running again,” he said with a chuckle. “It would have been easier for him not to run, and he could retire with a real sense of pride and just an enormously productive career in public service.”

This is Joe Lieberman in full effect. He’s doing this to own the libs which he relishes and lives for as much as the average deluded Trumper. It’s what he does.

Biden’s record is hardly some wild-eyed liberal freak show. He managed to pass two huge bills in this closely divided congress with bipartisan votes! Is that not exactly what Lieberman says he wants? Well, yeah, but what he really wants is to stab progressives in the back over and over and over again. And if it empowers the right, which it always does, he’s just fine with that.

Lieberman’s life’s work in the last 20 years is to destroy the left. He is, therefore, objectively pro-fascist.

I think you know…

No surprise here:

 A Popular Information analysis of @RobertKennedyJr’s first FEC filing reveals the lion’s share of Kennedy’s biggest donors have PREVIOUSLY DONATED ONLY TO REPUBLICANS

Follow along for details.

 Through 6/30, Kennedy’s campaign has collected the maximum, $6,600, from 96 individuals.

37 individuals have previously only donated to Republican candidates for federal office.

Only 19 have a history of consistently supporting Dem candidates

Mark Dickson, a Californian who amassed a fortune in the aerospace industry, has donated more than 450K to federal candidates since 2015

The total includes $400,000 to Trump Victory

Dickson has NEVER supported a Democrat running for office

Until he maxed out to Kennedy 

 Keith Sheldon, a retired car dealership executive from Argyle, Texas, has consistently backed Trump, maxing out in 2016 and 2020.

He also donated $2.9K to Herschel Walker. And thousands to House GOP candidates.

But nothing to Dems. Until he maxed out to Kennedy. 

Kennedy has dozens of maxed out donors with similar giving histories. And a much smaller number with a history of donating to Dems.

The unusual profile of Kennedy’s financial supporters raises serious questions about their motivations. 

Oh, there’s no question about it. Steve Bannon has been pimping RFK Jr’s campaign for months. I assume they will be pushing Republicans to cross over into Democratic primaries to vote for him wherever it’s feasible. (With their own contested primary that may not be such a great idea.) It’s a ratfuck…

It’s not just Trump donors that are backing Kennedy. It’s Trump himself. Appearing on a radio show on a radio show last month, Trump encouraged Kennedy to “hang in” the presidential race and praised him as “very smart;” Trump said they had a lot in common. 

He’s been very nice to me, I’ve actually had a very nice relationship with him over the years. He’s a very smart guy, and a good guy. He’s a common sense guy, and so am I. So, whether you’re conservative or liberal, common sense is common sense. A lot of what I run on is common sense. He’s doing really well, I saw a poll, he’s at 22. That’s pretty good! That’s pretty good, doing very well.

The feeling appears to be mutual. During a television appearance, Kennedy was asked what he thought of Trump’s comments. “I’m proud that President Trump likes me,” Kennedy said. In 2017, Kennedy was in talks with Trump to potentially chair a commission related to vaccines, according to the Washington Post.

Kennedy has courted Trump supporters and other right-wing voters by appearing frequently on Fox News, where he enjoys unusually favorable coverage. Former Fox News host Tucker Carlson featured Kennedy as a guest on his program on the day of Kennedy’s announcement. Carlson described Kennedy as one of the few people in public life who is not “corrupt” and is “telling the truth.” He introduced Kennedy as ” one of the most remarkable people we have ever met,” saying he was “honored to have him on our show.” 

Kennedy’s collaboration with the right-wing

On July 20, Kennedy will be the star witness at the hearing of the Republican-led House Judiciary Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government. The subcommittee’s hearings have “regularly featured chaotic and often one-sided airings of conservative grievances against agencies like the FBI and the Justice Department,” according to Newsweek. Kennedy is expected to use his appearance “to attack one of his political opponents — Joe Biden.” 

Congressman Jim Jordan (R-OH), the chair of the subcommittee, said the hearing will demonstrate that “the Biden administration is trying to censor their Democrat opponent.” Jordan said he texts regularly with former Congressman Dennis Kucinich (D-OH), who is now managing Kennedy’s campaign. 

Senator Ron Johnson (R-WI), one of the most hardline members of the Senate, recently said that he hoped Kennedy “gains traction and wins the nomination.” Johnson said Kennedy had “extraordinary political courage” and had earned his “respect.” Kennedy has also earned public praise from Congressman Jim Banks (R-IN) and Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX).

Kennedy’s collaboration with Republicans began before his run for the presidency. Popular Information broke the news that, in July 2021, Kennedy’s non-profit, Children’s Health Defense, illegally donated $50,000 to the Republican Attorneys General Association (RAGA). This “fee,” Children’s Health Defense said at the time, was in exchange for an opportunity “to educate attorneys general on health policy issues.” After Popular Information’s report, published in February 2022, RAGA returned the donation. 

In December 2021, a member of RAGA’s leadership, Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry (R), invited Kennedy to testify alongside him against school vaccine requirements. During his appearance, Kennedy falsely called the COVID-19 vaccine the “deadliest vaccine ever made” and peddled countless lies about the risk of the vaccine.

Kennedy has been photographed alongside right-wing figures, including Trump’s former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn (who called for a military coup to overturn the 2020 election), anti-vaccine profiteer Charlene Bollinger, and longtime Trump ally Roger Stone. The photo was taken backstage at Flynn’s ReAwaken America tour, a roadshow Frontline describes as a “recruiting tool” for the “Christian nationalist movement.” Kennedy has participated in ReAwaken America in previous years.

Between him, Manchin flirting with No Labels and Cornel West turnout is going to have to be huge to overcome these saboteurs. Gee, it’s not like there isn’t a lot at stake or anything.

JV Last made an excellent point about the upcoming presidential election:

The 2024 election has no modern precedent and this unprecedented difference (1) Is not properly appreciated, and (2) Explains why the race has been so stable.

This thing is so obvious that you’re going to dismiss it out of hand. But I want you to work through it with me:

No one living has seen an election in which two presidents have run against one another.

And that changes everything. Let me explain.

What is the fundamental hurdle that every presidential candidate has to overcome? When the voter looks at the candidate, she asks, Can he do the job?

That’s it. That’s the big question. And the answer is binary: Voters have to imagine each candidate as the chief executive and decide either, Yes, this person is a plausible president, or No, this person is not up to the office.

One of the (many) advantages an incumbent president has is that he has proven that he can do the job.

This sword has two edges: An incumbent’s presidential record can be attacked. Some voters may like it. Some may not. But at the lizard-brain level, they have all seen him sitting at the big desk in the Oval. They know what he looks like as president.

An insurgent candidate has advantages, too. But having to clear the bar of being plausibly presidential is the biggest and most fundamental disadvantage any insurgent faces. If a candidate can’t do that, then nothing else he has going in his favor matters.

At the risk of stating the obvious: Joe Biden is president of the United States. Donald Trump used to be president of the United States.

Whatever you think of either of them, they have both passed the plausibility test. No voter in 2024 has to imagine whether or not Biden or Trump can “do the job.”

How rare is this? The last time—the only time—it happened was in 1892 when President Grover Cleveland and former president Benjamin Harrison ran it back from the 1888 campaign, in which the insurgent (Cleveland) defeated a sitting president (Harrison).

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Trump actually gets the best of both worlds: He has passed the presidential test—Republican voters have seen him presidenting.

But he’s also the insurgent candidate, because the Republican establishment hates him and is desperate for him to lose.

Correlation is not causation, but it’s not bupkis, either.

Add this structural advantage—being both the incumbent and the insurgent—to all of Trump’s other advantages (his online troll army, owning a social platform, his massive small-dollar donor list) and it’s clear that what people should have been asking themselves in 2021 wasn’t,

How could Trump win the nomination in 2024?

But rather,

How could Trump not win the nomination in 2024?

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Why did they fail to understand the power of running as a former president?

Probably because no one living has seen it happen before.

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What could happen to change the long-running dynamic in the primary?

There are answers to this question, but they are low-probability events:

-Trump could get tired of running and start phoning it in.

-Ron DeSantis could get good at politics.

-GOP voters could start caring about Trump’s alleged crimes.

Of those, only the first was ever a strong possibility. Trump seems to have overcome his initial lethargy and found purpose in his campaign. Say what you will about the guy, but he’s answered the bell.

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Whit Ayres’s second guidestar is that the 2024 race will be fundamentally unstable because voters say they don’t want either Biden or Trump.

In general, I believe that we are in a chaotic era of politics. And you can see how the race could get reshuffled by external events.

But voters always say they don’t like the choices in front of them—just as they always say that they don’t want their incumbent president to run for re-election.

That’s because voters are stupid irrational inconsistent. I do not take their expressed feelings about hypotheticals at face value.

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What I do take at face value: Campaigns are about information and uncertainty.

In the classic re-election campaign, the incumbent president is the known quantity who offers stability and low risk. We have a lot of information and only a little uncertainty about the president. Voters know what they are getting, for good and for ill.

The challenger must offer enough information about himself to clear the “presidential” threshold—but keep the details fuzzy enough that voters can project their own preferences onto him. He is the high-risk, high-upside choice. And the more he tries to hedge against the risk (by giving more information to voters), the lower his upside becomes (because he ceases to be a useful cipher).

The volatility you get in presidential elections stems from this information asymmetry as voters weigh what they know about the incumbent against what they think they are learning about the challenger.

[…]

If Biden and Trump are the nominees in 2024, then we will have total informational symmetry. Everyone will know everything about both of them—all they way down to how they have actually performed as president.

Ask yourself this: How could anyone be undecided between Biden and Trump?

There is no uncertainty. No race to define the candidates. We have perfect information about both of them.

And it isn’t a low-contrast choice—the two men represent very different kinds of presidenting.

All of which is why I would expect a Biden-Trump rematch to be fairly stable and low-variance—even if on the surface it seems chaotic.

I agree with this 100%. The race has been stable since November 8th 2020. The only thing that could have changed it would have been if either Biden or Trump had decided not to run or had kicked the bucket. Other than that, we have been in a state of suspended animation this entire time, waiting for the rematch.

I would just add that one of the dynamics that defines this unprecedented race is the fact that Trump has a rabid cult of personality that’s highly motivated and the other side is equally motivated to stop him. As I have said many times — it’s going to be hand to hand combat. (Metaphorically I hope!)

Philip Bump with a smart take on the DeSantis campaign “retooling”

There was California Gov. Pete Wilson in September 1995, who, the Associated Press reported at the time, was heading “into the fall with a new plan to cut costs but without veteran strategist George Gorton” as he sought the Republican presidential nomination. He’d drop out soon after.

In June 1999, it was Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.) who, according to the Houston Chronicle, “scaled back his [presidential] campaign operation” because of “the difficulties of raising money in a crowded Republican field.” He was out by August.

In June 2003, it was Sen. Joe Lieberman (D-Conn.) who needed to figure out “how to build on the campaign’s fundraising successes while cutting costs,” as the National Journal wrote. He made it to February of the following year.

It seems as though there’s a candidate like this in every cycle, the one who jumps into the presidential race only to quickly overextend themselves, demanding a scaling-back of staff even before winter. In 2011 it was Jon Huntsman Jr. In 2015, Jeb Bush. In 2019, Kamala D. Harris.

As you are probably aware, none of them went on to win their party’s presidential nomination.

It’s useful to consider this history given reports that Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is similarly overextended in the race for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination. After formally beginning his campaign in May, DeSantis has gained no traction in national polling. A memo to donors that leaked last week insisted that his campaign was well-positioned within early primary states, but such memos always say those sorts of things. It was quickly followed by reports that the campaign needed to cut staff as part of a reorganization effort — prompting the comparisons above.

Such comparisons are admittedly facile, particularly since most presidential candidates never win their party’s nomination. Some of the people listed above were never really considered contenders, either; no one was walking into a Las Vegas casino to put $1,000 on the Alexander nomination.

But that’s somewhat besides the point. That a campaign seen as a legitimate contender could overextend so quickly is a bad sign, as Jeb Bush can attest. After all, the job at issue is one predicated on executive management of a large, national organization. Presumably no one comes to the presidency fully ready for the job, but to initiate your bid as the person best suited to manage that system by quickly needing to correct staffing missteps is not ideal.

For rhetorical purposes, I left one name off my initial list: Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), whose 2008 bid needed course correction in October 2007.

“McCain, R-Ariz., spent only $5.5 million, cutting costs to make the most of the meager $5.7 million he raised,” the Arizona Republic reported at the time, “while restructuring his campaign in July, August and September.”

McCain, of course, went on to win the nomination (and got blown out by Barack Obama). But as I wrote last week, McCain also trailed the front-runner at this point in the campaign by less than half as much as former president Donald Trump leads DeSantis according to RealClearPolitics’s averages.

What’s more, McCain’s opponent was former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani, who benefited from good name recognition but soft support. Trump is seeking the nomination from a party whose members have almost all already voted for him for president at least once. He’s also got nearly twice as much support from likely primary voters at this point as Giuliani had then.

Still, we have a small sample size here and making firm predictions based on a dozen previous races is a fool’s errand. So let’s consider the other emerging element of DeSantis’s campaign overhaul, his change in approach.

On Tuesday, he will sit down for an interview with CNN’s Jake Tapper, a rare engagement with nonpartisan media. Over the weekend, DeSantis insisted that he was engaged with traditional media, actually, but that they wanted him to lose because they were scared of him. (This came during an interview on Fox News, naturally.) This theory will presumably be put to the test this week.

It’s worth asking, though, why DeSantis wants to make this shift now. Why, as he reorients his campaign, is he sitting down with CNN?

He or his team will probably claim that they were always going to do this and their campaign is just starting and people aren’t really paying attention, the types of arguments they’ve been using to this point to justify not getting any traction in the polls after formally announcing. (It seems inaccurate to call that announcement a “launch,” given what followed.) But this is obviously something different from what DeSantis has been doing for more than a year as he’s positioned himself for 2024.

At Semafor, Shelby Talcott suggests that DeSantis may be hoping to orchestrate the sort of dispute with Tapper that has repeatedly benefited Trump: fighting a “fake news” journalist for attention and bolstering right-wing bona fides. And, given the past willingness of DeSantis (and his team) to attack traditional media, this is not a bad guess.

But it also possibly marks a recognition that DeSantis’s campaign has strayed from one of its initial value propositions: that he could be the candidate for conservative Republicans who don’t like Trump.

So far, DeSantis has secured a position as the alternative to Trump among Trump voters without carving out a position that significantly escapes Trump’s shadow. (Trump’s gains in recent months have come at DeSantis’s expense.) Is this, then, an effort to solidify support for those — reportedly like Fox honcho Rupert Murdoch — who want a non-Trump nominee? To try to shift back away from the extreme right?

If so, it’s to some extent self-defeating. Joe Biden’s 2020 primary campaign fumbled around for a while but was saved largely by the perception that he was the only candidate who could defeat Trump in the general. Some of DeSantis’s support is based on the hope that he can do the same in the primary — but starting out by tripping over himself directly undercuts that idea. He’d have been more effective at focusing on this line of attack before he had to cut staff, not after.

It’s possible he could still pull off what McCain did in 2008. But it is hard not to assume that the more immediate comparison, for a lot of reasons, is Jeb Bush in 2016.

Scott Walker, perhaps to his credit, never “re-tooled.” He built a top heavy campaign, spent all the money and then dropped out in September without a lot of folderol. Who would have ever thought that he would be the best example of losing with dignity?

Stuart Stevens points out repeatedly that the problem is DeSantis, not his staff. He says, “he’s a small man running for a big office…” Yep.