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That’s Trump talking about the country

President Trump x @UFC Unfiltered#UFC290 pic.twitter.com/4g76WlWYuv

— Steven Cheung (@TheStevenCheung) July 8, 2023

Excerpts from Trump’s softball interview with the Nevada Globe:

TNG: What do you think that they would be saying to you now as you’re going through another campaign and this legal persecution, if you will?

President Trump:

It is persecution. It is. I call it election interference, more than anything else.

These are terrible people, disgusting people.

My father would be angry at these people. My mother would be– she’d feel a little remorse for me, because, you know, it’s very unfair.

It’s a total…this witch hunt has been going on from the beginning–from the time I came down the escalator, and it has been proven to all be false.

Everything has been proven to be false.

If you look, every single thing that they’ve done, from Russia, Russia, Russia…it has all turned out to be a hoax.

That’s what Democrats are good at is just these hoaxes.

They’re not good at policy. They’re not good at, frankly, many things.

All Democrats do is disinformation and hoaxes.

But, I think that it has been an amazing period of time.

We had an amazing presidency.

We’re leading in the polls by a lot, tremendously. We’re way up above everybody, including Biden.

But with the Republicans–we are way up over, I call him Sanctimonious—because I got him elected. But, he’s doing poorly. I don’t think he’ll do well because he has got no personality and we’re doing great.

We’ll see what happens. I think we have a really very good chance of winning it and bringing the country back by making America great again.

We were energy independent. We had tax cuts, we had regulation cuts at a level that never seen before.

We had no wars. I didn’t start wars, but I finished wars. We beat Isis.

Everything we did worked out incredibly well, and we had to do it through the guise of these witch hunts all the time. Constantly,

Adam Schiff… Shifty Shiff…and all of these people that are sick. They’re psychos.

It was an amazing period of time, and I think the reason we’re doing well now is they see how badly it is and how bad it was.

There’s more spirit now.

I got more votes than any sitting president in history in 2020, and there’s more spirit now than there was in 2016 or in 2020. I think a lot of that is because of the fact that they see how bad, just how bad they’re doing.

They’re destroying our country.

Waaaaah!

TNG: So with the indictments, we actually saw your polling numbers go up. How do you explain that phenomenon?

President Trump:

Because people are very smart. The public is actually very smart and they’ve studied it, and they saw it’s a hoax.

It’s all a big hoax.

Biden has boxes all over. Nobody does anything about it.

I come under the Presidential Records Act which allows me… it’s perfect for explaining exactly what this is all about. It gives the full authority and power to the President.

Biden doesn’t come under that act because he wasn’t the president when he took all of these documents. But I was, and they don’t mention that. The fake news doesn’t cover it.  But the people understand it. You’ve heard me speak about it. The people understand it.

I come under the Presidential Records Act which isn’t criminal, nothing.

It’s not criminal and everything I did was absolutely fine. But, it’s a very important, very important distinction when you look…when you look at the fact that one person is targeted, and the other person gets away with murder.

Look at all the money that Biden has stolen from China.

He takes money.

He take bribes.

Call it whatever you want.

But, we have a compromised president.

They paid him millions and millions of dollars through Hunter.

And, Ukraine. Money comes in, and from other countries money comes in–it comes pouring in, and the fake news doesn’t want to even cover it.

I think the Republican congress is doing a great job. Jamie Comer is doing great. Jim Jordan is doing great.

But, the fake news doesn’t want to cover it. And, yet, this is the biggest story probably in the history of our country.

This is 100 times bigger than Watergate, but they don’t want to cover it, because they want to shield the Democrat.

And, I think it’s really showing how sick the press is. It’s sick, it’s corrupt. It’s as corrupt as anything I’ve ever seen. And it’s not only what they talk about, it’s what they don’t talk about.

They won’t talk about things, and that came out with the judge’s opinion the other day where he said you couldn’t talk through Facebook and Twitter and all of these different places because you’re giving them false information…the FBI, the DOJ, et cetera, the government, the Democrats.

So it’s big stuff. I mean, it’s big stuff.

It, at some point, it must explode. It must absolutely explode.

I wonder what he’s talking about? Hmmmmm?

The following is all lies. Of course:

TNG: In the decision, the judge referred to the government as the “Ministry of Truth” in reference to Orwell’s 1984, and with that, we now know that there was election interference via massive censorship during the 2020 election cycle. Now that the judge has rendered this decision, how do you think this is going to impact the 2024 election?

President Trump:

I think it impacts it greatly because people realize…look, you had True The Vote where they found hundreds of thousands of votes. They stuffed it, right? Catherine Englebrecht. She is a fantastic woman.

They stuffed the ballot boxes.

We have it on tape and people don’t want to talk about it.

You have so many other things, but now you have a judge who made a statement, it’s a very powerful statement. Brilliant judge, brilliant man, highly respected.

But even before that, you had the 51 intelligence officers saying that it was Russian disinformation, and they knew it wasn’t.

And, even before that you had Twitter, Facebook and you had FBI Twitter.

The FBI Twitter thing was unbelievable.

The FBI Facebook and the DOJ Facebook, all of these scandals, and the pollster said it made a 17 point difference. 17 points… and just with a quarter of a point…

Look, the election was rigged. It was a rigged election.

We have no borders in our country and we have rigged elections. You can’t have a country like that.

It’s one of the reasons I am running and I’m doing it, and I think it’s one of the reasons we’re doing so well.

People see what happened, but this, the judge’s decision, the recent judge’s decision, from two days ago, was amazing.

He goes on to say that he had the greatest government the world has ever seen with the country being the richest and most successful it’s ever been under his fantastic policies which only he can produce. Or something to that effect.

This brief litany of his massive achievements and complaints about Nevada being “disgraceful state” because he won it both times and they cheated him out of it and that was it. It’s truly all he wants to talk about. And from the sound of it, the right wing press is happy to indulge him.

It’s going to be a long 16 months listening to this extended whine. Don’t his people ever get tired of hearing it? Doesn’t it sound childish and … weak?

Next time he’ll get ‘er done:

Donald Trump wanted to “tap the phones” of White House aides who he suspected of leaking information, according to bombshell claims made by a former Trump administration official.

Miles Taylor, who served as the Department of Homeland Security’s chief of staff under Mr Trump, has claimed in his new book Blowback that the then-president floated the idea “to pursue leakers by tapping phones” at some point in 2018.

The idea was quickly shut down by then-White House Chief of Staff John Kelly who warned Mr Trump he would be breaking the law.

Mr Kelly “quickly nixed the suggestion, knowing it would be illegal,” Mr Taylor writes in the book excerpt, obtained by Axios.

I suspect that Chief of Staff Kash Patel won;t be quite so squeamish.

Delay, delay, delay

Mentor Roy Cohn taught Donald Trump well. Basic Rules for the Unscrupulous for defeating all enemies, according to one documentary: “Deflect and distract, never give in, never admit fault, lie and attack, lie and attack, publicity no matter what, win no matter what, all underpinned by a deep, prove-me-wrong belief in the power of chaos and fear.”

Delay, delay, delay is not in there explicitly. Perhaps it is a Trumpian riff on deflect and distract. But it is by now a familiar Trump tactic. Run out the clock or else bleed out an opponent’s funds for fighting. Hard to do the latter when the opponent is the federal government. So delay, it is.

Thus (Politico):

Donald Trump on Monday called for a lengthy delay before he goes to trial for allegedly hoarding military secrets at his Mar-a-Lago estate, contending that proceeding while he remains a candidate for president would make it virtually impossible to seat an impartial jury.

“Proceeding to trial during the pendency of a Presidential election cycle wherein opposing candidates are effectively (if not literally) directly adverse to one another in this action will create extraordinary challenges in the jury selection process and limit the Defendants’ ability to secure a fair and impartial adjudication,” attorneys for Trump and his personal aide and co-defendant, Walt Nauta, said in a court filing Monday night.

Standard operating procedure:

The tactic is in keeping with Trump’s typical legal strategy: to drag out matters he’s facing as long as possible while hoping the legal landscape changes. But this time, it’s an effort to stave off a criminal trial that could result in a lengthy prison sentence if he’s convicted — the first ever prosecution of a former president.

“Flexibility is the first principle of politics,” Richard Nixon once instructed a new staffer. It may not have been one of Cohn’s principles, but like many other conservatives, it’s one Trump lives by. When he was running against Hillary Clinton in 2016, Trump made her handling of classified information a key campaign issue. Special counsel Jack Smith cites Trump’s hectoring on the matter in his indictment.

Now that his document handling is a campaign issue, well…. “Lock her up!” is now “Wait till later!” says Marcy Wheeler about the Trump filing:

Note that Trump misrepresents what his filing attempts to do (and few journalists are calling him on it). The filing is titled, “Response in Opposition to the Government’s Motion for Continuance and Proposed Revised Scheduling Order” — that is, it claims to be responding only to the government’s pitch for a December trial. But the first paragraph admits that it is also asking Cannon to entirely withdraw her own orders setting trial in August.

The Defendants, President Donald J. Trump and Waltine Nauta, in the above captioned matter, respectfully request that this Court deny the Government’s proposed scheduling order, withdraw the current Order (ECF No. 28), and postpone initial consideration of any rescheduled trial date until after substantive motions have been presented and adjudicated. [my emphasis]

Wheeler notes in the filing, “There’s a funny progression where Trump first says his day job running for President doesn’t leave him time to be prosecuted for stealing documents the last time he was President, then admits that he has found time in his busy schedule for two other trials.”

There is an ancient ad for Borden dairy products that goes, “If it’s Borden, it’s got to be good.” In this case, if it’s Trump, it’s got to be bullshit.

But, given that he got elected the last time by promising he would be more careful with classified information than his opponent, the most remarkable paragraph in the filing is this one, where Trump says there is no exigency to scheduling this trial (as opposed to his hush money or corporate fraud trials) before the election.

While the Government appears to favor an expedited (and therefore cursory) approach to this case, it cannot point to any exigency or urgency requiring a rapid adjudication. There is no ongoing threat to national security interests nor any concern regarding continued criminal activity

I suspect the paragraph is designed to elicit a response to the question, “is there any concern regarding continued criminal activity?” That is, I think it is an attempt to probe for what more the government continues to investigate.

And yes, the government may well respond to this by answering, “funny you should mention ongoing threats to national security because we’re still looking for all the things that disappeared up at Bedminster.”

But the underlying premise is even more remarkable, given how Trump’s got elected the last time.

Trump ran in 2016 promising he would protect government secrets. Not like that dastardly Hillary Clinton, no. And now? His lawyers argue that the “guy accused of using the access to the nation’s secrets he got by getting elected President on false promises the last time, should get a shot at accessing those secrets again, without first letting a jury decide whether he had abused his position of power the last time.”

That is, without letting the voters find out if he did before they go to the polls and give him a chance to crime all over again. But that’s our crime First Family.

Inculcating hate

A friend from the reddest part of my county once described how GOP candidates there rally support. In every group of voters, find out what issue pisses them off, then wedge the hell out of it. As the late Howard Phillips put it, “We organize discontent.”

It’s just that on the right, wedge issues come and go (for those of a certain age) like fad products by Wham-O or their support for the U.S. Constitution. The issues are not the issue. Organizing discontent is.

Tess Owen at Vice News examines the controversy du jour in Los Angeles schools. Recognition of Pride Month that touched off parent protests:

This was grooming, said the protesters, many of whom were parents wearing T-shirts emblazoned with the slogan “Leave Our Kids Alone.” The June 2 protest quickly turned violent. Videos show parents and their right-wing supporters brawling with pro-LGBTQ counterprotesters, beating them, and kicking them. 

It was hardly an isolated incident in the LA-area. Fights also broke out at two more protests in June, both outside Glendale School Board meetings. Like the earlier protest at Saticoy Elementary, many in the crowd were from the Armenian community. Videos of those brawls were shared widely across right-wing media circles, as influencers praised “Brave Armenian Dads” for “standing up to “trantifa.”

In the last year, culture warriors and extremists, bolstered by mainstream GOP policy and rhetoric, have gone all in on false narratives that claim educators are “grooming” kids by teaching them about Pride and the LGBTQ community. Christian nationalists, neo-Nazis, Proud Boys, and other extremists have menaced school board meetings, called in bomb threats to Drag Queen Story Hours, and faced off with counter-protesters across the country—all with the goal of making the LGBTQ community and their allies feel less safe. 

I’m not sure how the fight began, was on my way out. Large scale fight, a few people hurt visibly on the pro-Pride side. pic.twitter.com/ACDjjlrlqP

— acatwithnews (@ACatWithNews) June 2, 2023

The more conservatives feel out of the mainstream, the more reactionary they become and the more tightly bound together by shared grievances.

Hate crimes targeting the trans community were higher in LA than any other major city last year, an increase of nearly 70% compared to 2021, according to data collected by Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University, San Bernardino. 

Local activists and journalists say the far-right is becoming increasingly emboldened in southern California, as thought-leaders of the movement reach and radicalize new recruits, including parents. 

“The parents were so violent,” said Kelly Stuart, a local photographer who’s been documenting the far-right around LA for the last few years, about the protest outside Saticoy Elementary. She followed and photographed some of the protesters that day as they marched around the perimeter of the school—out of sight from local law enforcement. 

“They told me, ‘there’s no cops here now, we could just smash your head in,’” recalled Stuart, who is 62.

“So that kind of viciousness … has always been present” in the movement, historian Rick Perlstein told Fresh Air in 2020.

So why this issue now?

Owen suggests that “Critical Race Theory” (CRT) simply did not have the staying power to keep the discontent on the edge of a boil. “It was a little too nebulous and theoretical for it to really take hold.” Owen writes. “Grooming” carries more octane.

“I think they’re getting more radical. They’re finding a sense of identity and purpose, being in a group, feeling right, unified. It’s almost like mob violence, when they’re all chanting together. It’s like they’re getting high off it,” said Stuart. “When I leave the rallies, I’m so exhausted from the energy. It’s not personal, it’s just the energy of the crowd is so full of hate.” 

Getting back to wedge issues:

“The combination of Trump and the pandemic created this elastic and familiarized network of villains and heroes in the culture wars. Not everyone who shows up to protests necessarily has the same depth of prejudice or embrace of violence,” said Brian Levin, who heads the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University, San Bernardino. “But it doesn’t matter because what these wedge issues do is enable people from different backgrounds but who have extreme emotions to work together.”

Local culture war drama may be especially pronounced in progressive strongholds, like California, said Levin, because hard-right activists know that the only way they can leverage any sort of power is within local politics. The types of angry scenes that have recently played out in Glendale are unlikely to play out in Florida, for example, because extremists and culture warriors know they have an ideological ally in Gov. Ron DeSantis. 

To every wedge issue there is a season. Maybe not like not wearing white after Labor Day —some are simply faddish and others, like fashions, come back around. Discontent is the thing. When one culture war issue loses steam, reactionaries will find another.

Right now grooming is all the rage. Literally. Except to understand it in context, “grooming” is in the eye of the beholder, observes Dave Neiwert, a chronicler of the alt-right, Neo-Nazis, and the like.

Same genre. pic.twitter.com/2MgsrV6UFs

— David Neiwert (@DavidNeiwert) July 11, 2023

In fact, Trump won every voter in the country both times he ran. It’s just the Deep State rigged it so it looked like he didn’t

Trump just gave an interview to The Nevada Globe. The interviewer notes Trump lost Nevada 2x in the general election, and asks how he is going to win this time.

Trump responds by saying he actually won both times "by a lot" and calls Nevada "disgraceful" state.

Great start! pic.twitter.com/wJ31hp1K4G

— Judd Legum (@JuddLegum) July 10, 2023

I hope they have that on tape. I think it could be useful in an ad, don’t you?

There’s something amiss in the whistleblowers’ tale

CNN reports:

US Attorney David Weiss, who is overseeing the Hunter Biden criminal probe, says in a letter obtained by CNN that he did not ask to be named as a special counsel and was never refused authority to bring charges anywhere in the country, refuting two key allegations from IRS whistleblowers.

Weiss’ comments, in a letter sent Monday to GOP Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, go against claims from IRS whistleblower Gary Shapley and one of his deputies, who said they witnessed political interference in investigation of President Joe Biden’s son.

They testified to Congress that during an October 2022 meeting, Weiss said he had requested to be named as a special counsel but was denied by Justice Department leadership. But Weiss said in the new letter that he never requested special counsel status, but rather explored becoming a “special attorney” under a different statute.

“I have not requested Special Counsel designation,” Weiss wrote to Graham on Monday. “Rather, I had discussions with Departmental officials regarding potential appointment under 28 U.S.C. § 515, which would have allowed me to file charges in a district outside my own without the partnership of the local U.S. Attorney.”

Weiss said he got these assurances “months before the October 7, 2022, meeting referenced throughout the whistleblowers’ allegations.”

The prosecutor also wrote that he has “never been denied the authority to bring charges in any jurisdiction.” Shapley claimed that Weiss said in that same October 2022 meeting he wasn’t the deciding person on whether to indict Hunter Biden, because political appointees had blocked him from bringing charges in Los Angeles and Washington, DC.

Shapley and his deputy raised their concerns in congressional testimony that was made public last month by House Republicans. The Justice Department and Attorney General Merrick Garland have denied that there was any political interference in the Hunter Biden criminal probe, which led to a plea deal where the president’s son will admit to two tax misdemeanors, resolve a felony gun charge and likely avoid jail time.

Lawyers for Shapley told CNN on Monday that the letter shows that “Weiss’ story continues to change.”

“As a practical matter, it makes no difference whether Weiss requested special counsel or special attorney authority. Under no circumstances should ‘the process’ have included the political appointees of the subject’s father, because Congress and the public had been assured it would not – but it did,” they said.

In the letter, Weiss also declined to comment on the internal FBI document from 2020 that contained uncorroborated allegations that Joe Biden and his son Hunter were involved in a foreign bribery scheme. Weiss said Graham’s questions about the matter “relate to an ongoing investigation.”

But Rod Rosenstein and Bill Barr were neck deep in the Trump investigations and that wasn’t a problem for these folks.

I don’t know what Shapley and his deputy’s deal is. Maybe they misunderstood what was said or maybe they’re just disgruntled Trumpies who believed they’d found a smoking gun and it was really just another dud. Weiss is a Trump appointee, not a Biden political appointee, so I don’t know what that attorney is talking about.

I simply do not believe that Garland or Weiss or the FBI went easy on Hunter Biden. They just aren’t the types to play that game.

If you want to get into the weeds on all this, Marcy Wheeler has been down the rabbit hole for the last couple of weeks. This thing is a mess.

Well, it looks as though they’ve another way to perform for the cult. It’s a meaningless waste of time but it does have the benefit of degrading our democracy even further. Hunter at DKos has the story:

Well, here we go again. House Republicans have been shrieking that they’re going to impeach a whole passel of top officials in the Joe Biden administration for supposed crimes that include investigating seditionist Donald Trump too much and investigating Hunter Biden too little, but every once in a while one of them remembers that Congress also has the power to simply zero out the salaries of any executive branch employees they don’t particularly like.

It’s akin to a bill of attainder targeting a particular executive official’s career. Frustrated congressional cornballs have been sporadically remembering the power for years now, especially whenever some government agency does something that they really super do not like but can’t muster the legislative votes to actually change.

Politico reports that House Republican cranks are again threatening to use this power, probably after someone in the Freedom Caucus sobered up long enough to remember it existed. The possible targets reportedly include Attorney General Merrick Garland, FBI Director Christopher Wray, and “some are hoping to use the procedure on investigators working for special counsel Jack Smith.”

That last part is another bit of nice, clean proof that at least “some” House Republicans are eager to use their positions as U.S. congresscreatures to interfere specifically with the ongoing investigations and criminal charges against the coup-attempting, document-stealing Donald Trump. As House Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s bag of deplorables prepare to begin impeachment proceedings against Garland for not finding anything except petty crimes to indict Hunter Biden on, yet again disrupting one of Rudy Giuliani and Republicanism’s most grand pro-Russia, anti-Ukraine conspiracy theories, and enraging the petty fascists of the party beyond all hope of reason, there are at least some bozos in the caucus eager to target the Jack Smith investigation specifically.

It’s a simple enough strategy: Zero out the salaries of any Department of Justice or FBI official involved with prosecuting Trump for lying to federal officials about stolen national security documents, and you’ll neatly empty out the offices of anyone willing to pursue Trump’s crimes. It’s a gleefully corrupt act, all premised on the House Republican insistence that the government must arrest their enemies for committing crimes they can’t prove while letting powerful Republicans get away with crimes even if they’re caught in the act.

And this is why it’s perfectly reasonable to conclude that the Freedom Caucus and allies are not so much a political caucus as an organized crime ring. Not a well-organized crime ring, mind you, but organized enough.

Now that Politico has brought us this news, it’s time for the usual caveats. Guess what? House Republicans won’t actually be able to zero out salaries whether they “want” to or not, and that’s because the whole scheme has the same flaw that supposed impeachment of federal officials does. The Democratic-held Senate would have to agree, and the Senate has no interest in helping Jim Jordan’s crime spree along. A bill to do this would go nowhere.

It’s also an arcane enough move that one imagines it wouldn’t be worth all that much for House Republicans to try it for the sake of campaign trail bragging rights: “I tried to take away Merrick Garland’s paycheck but it didn’t work” isn’t the best bullet point for a campaign flier. House Republicans will instead probably keep moving forward with a Garland impeachment “investigation,” solely because it would be an opportunity for an extended, months-long spectacle. Jordan and other House Republicans are still clamoring for revenge against House Democrats who had the audacity to impeach Trump twice: once for attempting to extort the Ukrainian government for personal gain, and once for that whole “attempting to violently overthrow the United States government” thing.

Remember, too, that Jordan’s been demanding state and federal prosecutors turn over their case materials to him in the cases where Trump has already been indicted. House Republicans aren’t just interfering with the multiple criminal investigations of Trump, they’re doing it repeatedly, continually, and as an explicit strategy. And why wouldn’t they? They were willing to obstruct investigations of an attempted Republican coup, they’re hardly going to recoil at this sort of old-school corruption.

They are all completely corrupt and we have come to accept that that’s just the way it is.

We are in trouble, folks.

The real problem is the right’s massive case of arrested development

This is enough to make me hurl. And it’s not just Elon and Zuck. With Nikki Haley being the only woman in the race, the GOP primary is also a dick measuring contest:

Francis Suarez is bragging about placing sixth in an Independence Day 5K in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. Vivek Ramaswamy, a former nationally ranked junior tennis player, is flexing his weekly pickup victories over former collegiate athletes at a Life Time Fitness outside Des Moines. And Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the muscle-bound, 69-year-old longshot Democratic presidential hopeful, went viral for doing pull-ups shirtless at a Gold’s Gym.

Even Asa Hutchinson, the 72-year-old former Arkansas governor, is boasting about still playing full-court basketball.

More than a month before the election cycle’s first debates, the 2024 presidential contest has careened into a kind of testosterone primary, a frenetic fit boy summer sidequest in which candidates are drawing fewer contrasts on policy and proving more keen on comparing feats of strength.

Brawn and bravado are in demand, particularly among a GOP base conditioned by a steady dose of both in the Trump era. Thirst traps are a new wedge issue.

“Republican candidates are now needing to play to a base that has really been defined by the Trump presidency and just the Trump persona,” said historian Kristin Kobes Du Mez, who has traced the ideological and theological roots of masculinity in conservative and evangelical political circles in her book, “Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation.” “Now, to win as a Republican, you need to play that game. This kind of masculinity — physical fitness — goes hand in hand with masculine toughness.”

Displaying physical prowess is nothing new for American politicians. Former President Teddy Roosevelt extolled the virtues of the “strenuous life” and practiced Judo in the White House basement. Joe Biden, when he was vice president, posted a video of himself doing arm curls.

But in 2023, as Du Mez put it, “It’s getting out of hand.”

“Are they just so in this alpha male competition that they lose all sense of reality?” she asked. “And if you’ve got a mediocre 5K, that’s what you work with? Or, are they a little bit smarter, knowing that this is performative and just putting that signal out there, and being perfectly fine when they get kind of ratioed on Twitter because it just elevates their profile just a bit?”

It may all just be kayfabe. But it also underscores undercurrents in modern politics; chief among them, a discomfort with the top of the presidential contest, in which the leading candidates are a septuagenarian and octogenarian. With polls showing voters want a pugilistic candidate, a premium is being placed on testosterone by the modern GOP — one that at the moment seems more obsessed with the idea of being ripped than the ideas of the Ripon Society.

Masculinity has become a major point of focus for the party. Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley, who ultimately decided against his own presidential campaign, tackled the topic earlier this year in his 248-page meditation on the matter, “Manhood: The Masculine Virtues America Needs.” Last month, not long after straddling a Harley-Davidson in a leather vest at Iowa Sen. Joni Ernst’s Roast and Ride and then announcing his own presidential campaign, Mike Pence made a stop at Gridiron Men’s Conference in Alabama, an Evangelical gathering with the mission of “BUILDING UP GODLY MEN TO BE CLEAR. BOLD. STRONG.” Former President Donald Trump attacks his chief rival, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, as “Tiny D,” a swipe at the Florida governor’s figurative and literal manhood.

[…]

The competition has spawned whole rounds of skirmishing among the candidates and their supporters about the legitimacy of their athletic achievements. Suarez issued a flex over his 5K pace on Twitter, despite clocking in at a little under 8 minutes a mile.

“Name another presidential candidate who can place 6th in a 5K with a 24-and-a-half minute run time. Go,” he said.

A number of people took him up on the offer, pointing out that he actually placed 87th overall and 6th in the 45-49 age group. They offered up former Rep. Beto O’Rourke’s 21:44 time in Houston’s 2022 pride run and Pete Buttigieg’s 1:42 half marathon in Afghanistan. A Ramaswamy staffer pointed out that her boss had a 5K time that was nearly a minute faster than Suarez’s.

In an interview with POLITICO, Suarez, who launched his campaign with an ad featuring him running, didn’t repeat his boast about his time. Instead, he downplayed it, saying he had not been training and that he “surprised himself” with his pace.

Told of Ramaswamy’s faster finish, he said: “Oh, I could definitely beat 23 minutes. There’s no doubt about it.” Then he challenged Ramaswamy to a 5K duel before adding that his best personal record actually came in the CrossFit challenge known as the “Murph,” consisting of a one-mile run, 100 pull-ups, 200 push-ups and 300 bodyweight squats, followed by another mile run while sporting a weighted vest.

Suarez declined to give his time, saying, “I don’t want to put it out there, and then [have] people say that it’s too good or too bad.” He told POLITICO he is contemplating a future ad in which he goes shirtless.

“I think physical fitness should be considered an asset for a president in terms of someone who has a comprehensive sense of what it is to be healthy,” Suarez said. “And I think that’s something we should want in our candidates. I’m not sure if my wife would let me be without a shirt on film, but you know, I’m working on it.”

In an interview, Ramaswamy declined Suarez’s 5K challenge, citing his weekly tennis matches with former college tennis standouts. He said that even though he posted a faster 5K time than Suarez, “that’s not something I wanted to beat my chest about.” But he did not exhibit the same restraint when talking about his recent run of tennis match wins on the trail, saying “I’m probably about the level of somebody who was, if they were a Division 1 college tennis player, but they were like, maybe five to 10 years out.”

It wasn’t always like this. Back in 2016, there was only one candidate who seemed outwardly gleeful about discussing his record of physical fitness and that of the field. When he first announced his 2016 presidential campaign, Gary Johnson promised he would be “the fittest president of the United States ever.” Days after the announcement, he brought a journalist with him for a run down Tuckerman Ravine on Mount Washington in New Hampshire. “These guys were like, ‘What the fuck? This is serious’” he once recalled. “It was extreme.”

In an interview with POLITICO, the former Libertarian presidential candidate and New Mexico governor turned self-described “ski bum” (he now skis 110 days out of the year in Taos, N.M., he says) declined to criticize others’ athletic accomplishments. But Johnson was quick to tout his own, including a 2:47 marathon (a per-mile pace across 26.2 miles that is nearly two minutes faster than Suarez’s pace over 3.1 miles), and a 33:45 10K pace.

“Politicians,” Johnson said, “are all narcissists.”

As for the recent rash of physical stunts posted by candidates, Johnson said he, too, had taken notice.

“It’s all about the alpha candidate,” Johnson said.

But this year, Johnson said, it’s legitimate for candidates to tout their physical health. And it’s not like anyone could stop them, the way machismo is coursing like a vein in a swole bicep just beneath the GOP primary’s skin.

“It does take discipline to run an eight-minute mile,” Johnson said of Suarez’s time. “That does take some effort. You can’t just do that. I think it relates to your calmness, your demeanor, your whole makeup. Somebody who is physically fit is better off than somebody that’s not.”

After an initial interview, Johnson called back minutes later. He’d forgotten something important, apparently, in modern politics — it involved the Seven Summits, the highest mountains on each continent.

He said he’d scaled them all.

He had never heard of Aleppo…

I get that they want to contrast themselves with the two ancient mariner frontrunners, Biden and Trump. But running around acting like teenage bullies isn’t exactly reassuring. Does anyone think these macho little boys are an improvement?

Trump said over the weekend that Joe Biden is the most corrupt president in history. Uh huh. Check out his latest grift with his good pals the Saudis:

The LIV Golf League’s season-ending team championship will be played at Trump National Doral Golf Club in Miami for the second straight year.

LIV Golf League officials announced Monday that the $50 million team championship will be played Oct. 20-22 at Trump National Doral, which is owned by former U.S. President Donald Trump.

The three-day team championship was originally scheduled to be played Nov. 3-5 at Royal Greens Golf & Country Club in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. LIV Golf League officials have been working to move it back to Trump National Doral, where it was staged in the league’s inaugural season in 2022. The Jeddah event, now scheduled for Oct. 13-15, will be the final regular-season tournament.

The Republicans are relentlessly investigating Hunter Biden’s alleged influence peddling from years ago. This is not of interest to them. Hmmm.

Why Trump is beating DeSantis

It’s still a long way until the first Republican primaries but unless something changes quickly, it is looking more and more grim for Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and more and more secure for former President Donald Trump. The polls in the early primary states show that Trump is still polling at least 20 points higher than DeSantis who still isn’t catching on.

DeSantis appeared on Fox News’ Maria Bartiromo’s show this weekend and insisted that he’s floundering because the News Media doesn’t want him to be the nominee which isn’t true at all. If anything they were champing at the bit for a real horse race against Donald Trump because that would make excellent copy. But it is reasonable to ask why has been sinking in the polls over the last few months.

The consensus among the pundit class seems to be that he’s just unlikable so the more people see of him the less they like him. I suspect there’s some truth to that. But it may just be the contrast between him and Trump, the political superstar. As Kate Briquelet of the Daily Beast reported from the Moms for Liberty presidential cattle call after Trump’s keynote speech:

“He has so much charisma,” a man told me in the elevator afterward. “The guy is just electric! I love DeSantis, he’s my guy, but he doesn’t have the same charm.”

I long ago chalked up this inexplicable attraction to Trump to the fact that his following still views him as a celebrity, which he was before he got into politics, and now they have turned him into a superhero. He really isn’t seen as a politician at all. Poor, dull Ron DeSantis can’t compete with that.

There’s no doubt that Trump’s cult of personality is very powerful and it almost has a life of its own. But there is more to it than just his personality. It’s about his message as well.

We know all about Ron DeSantis’ message by now. He’s been relentlessly pushing his “anti-woke” agenda and enacting it in every way he could manage in Florida to show that he is the guy who will make the MAGA crowd’s internet memes come true. There is nobody out there who takes the culture war as seriously as DeSantis and he doesn’t just confine himself to a few hot button issues, he embraces all of them and there is literally nothing else he seems to care about.

Yair Rosenberg in the Atlantic submits that DeSantis turned Florida into a right wing hellscape and obsessively said the word “woke” for a year and half as his strategy to win Iowa which is full of white conservative evangelical voters. I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s true but it’s yet another example of his general ineptitude. It’s certainly possible that he could ride the culture war to a win in Iowa just as President Cruz, President Huckabee and President Santorum did but let’s just say it’s a little bit short-sighted to create your entire persona and record for the purpose of winning the state that specialized in producing also-rans. Since 1980, a GOP candidate who won Iowa (aside from incumbents) only went on to win the nomination twice.

And anyway, it appears that Trump is likely going to win Iowa because the conservative evangelicals like him too.And it’s not as if he isn’t a hardcore culture warrior too. Despite DeSantis’ attempt to paint him as soft on “the gender issue” which seems to be the issue that has the Iowa evangelicals all riled up, he’s got some nasty anti-trans policies he can point to, like his order to expel transgender members of the military when he was president and his orders to redefine sex discrimination to exclude protections for transgender people in education, housing, and employment, as well as health care. And he’s announced that when he is returned to the White House he will “revoke every Biden policy promoting the chemical castration and sexual mutilation of our youth and ask Congress to send me a bill prohibiting child sexual mutilation in all 50 states” and has even gone so far as to promise, “on Day One, I will sign an executive order instructing every federal agency to cease the promotion of sex or gender transition at any age, they’re not gonna do it anymore” which even the anti-trans warrior DeSantis hasn’t proposed.

Trump is also taking credit for reversing Roe v Wade and is fine with the “parents rights” movement pushing Christian education in public schools. He and DeSantis spar over the pandemic response but that issue is rapidly losing salience. In other words, DeSantis can’t really get to Trump’s right no matter how hard he tries. When Trump says stuff like “‘Democrats are pushing the transgender cult” on young people while “persecuting Christians” and “demonizing patriots'” it goes straight to the wingnut lizard brain. Nobody does it better.

But unlike DeSantis, Trump understands that the base isn’t just about the culture war defined by the outrage of the day or some far right think tanker’s obscure jargon laden hobby horse like “DEI” or “CRT.” Sure, he’ll go along with it. (Remember how he would blurt out that he was going to do away with “Common Core” during the 2016 election?) But his themes are much simpler and much broader. He understands that what moves the Republican base is grievance writ large and he speaks directly to that.

Much of the Trumpian rhetoric that penetrates the national consciousness is about his personal legal travails and his persecution complex — but that plays into the grievance in new ways in this campaign. He claims he’s being indicted “for you”, his loyal followers, and that he’s the only thing standing between the government and them. That’s the superhero/messiah appeal.

And he knows that what drives the base isn’t really sincere concern about “woke ideology” or Christian morality. (That’s obvious since he is a corrupt libertine, pathological liar and they love him anyway.) What drives them is loathing of their perceived enemies and it applies to whatever those enemies are doing whether it’s supporting Ukraine’s fight to repel the invasion by Russia or teaching that slavery was bad and had longterm consequences that still reverberate today. The details don’t really matter. Whatever the “other side” is against they are for and vice versa, without regard to the substance.

Donald Trump understands this. He told them in his announcement speech, “I am your retribution” which is what they really care about. DeSantis’ laundry list of “anti-woke” achievement miss the big picture. None of that really resonates unless you can tap into the emotional wellspring of resentment and sense of injustice that fuels the MAGA right. Trump does that instinctively because he is one of them.

The Republican base yearns to be a movement (some might call it a cult) rather than a political party and under Donald Trump they’ve completely moved beyond politics as we used to define them.. DeSantis is just another politician — and that’s the last thing these people want.

Salon