“Hundreds of ordinary people have been convicted of attacking the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, yet not one member of Trump’s inner circle of coup-plotters has faced real accountability for it,” Greg Sargent writes this morning in the Washington Post. That may soon change for attorney John Eastman who pleaded the Fifth Amendment over 100 times during questioning by House Jan. 6 committee. Accountability for Eastman remains professional, for now. He faces disbarment in California:
Eastman faces 11 charges from the California State Bar, most concerning his lawyerly lies about election fraud. Importantly, the bar also accused Eastman of advising Vice President Mike Pence that a fabricated legal rationale empowered him to reverse or delay the presidential electoral count in Congress.
“No reasonable attorney with expertise in constitutional or election law would conclude that Pence was legally authorized to take the actions that respondent proposed,” the bar states in its charges. It adds that Eastman knew those actions would violate the law and the Constitution.
If Eastman is disbarred for that charge, it would be genuinely novel. When fellow coup-plotter Rudy Giuliani had his law license suspended in New York last year, it was for the conventional charge of making false statements as a lawyer. Eastman, by contrast, would be sanctioned for corrupting the law to try to subvert our constitutional order and help usurp the presidency.
Eastman and others may yet face criminal indcitment. Even Donald Trump. “But that’s hardly guaranteed,” Sargent explains.
Elite accountability in this country is at a crossroads. Many of the coup-plotters have skated, and though Trump faces prosecution for hoarding classified documents, he might evade accountability for the insurrection. Tucker Carlson’s propaganda about Jan. 6 helped topple the cable host from his Fox News perch, but Elon Musk has created a safe space for his disinformation to continue. Dogged journalism has produced extraordinary revelations about corrupt Supreme Court justices, but Congress’s refusal to place checks on them only reinforces the sense that our elites operate with impunity.
Perhaps someone with entrepreneurial bones will sell “Please be patient, Jack Smith is not finished investigating yet” bracelets if they can squeeze on the acronym. But Pollyannish optimism is a poor substitute for equal justice under law that seems in these United States all the more elusive as economic inequality sinks broader, deeper roots.
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Because this animation popped up first thing, and because former U.S. Ambassador to Russia, Michael McFaul, saw fit to retweet it, I decided to read Fred Kaplan’s Slate column about Donald “I alone can fix it” Trump’s boast that he could end the Ukraine war “in one day.”
This is a brilliant illustration of just how stupid and morally bankrupt are the arguments of people pushing Ukraine to negotiate with russia. You cannot negotiate with someone who came to kill you. pic.twitter.com/uRTYbg1Ixj
His one term in the White House should have disabused him of this notion. The fact that he still believes in his unique talents as a deal-maker—after his bargaining tactics with China, Russia, North Korea, and Iran accomplished nothing or worse—suggests he is incapable of seeing the world as it is, or at least of learning any lessons from it.
One anecdote alone is worth your time.
After George H.W. Bush was elected president in 1988, Trump lobbied to become his Russia negotiator on strategic nuclear arms. Bush’s aides had a good laugh. Instead, Bush chose a seasoned diplomat, Ambassador Richard Burt, and later:
Around 1990, when Burt was beginning a new round of Soviet–American nuclear arms talks, he ran into Trump at a reception in New York. Trump expressed envy of Burt’s position and asked if he’d like some advice on how to cut a “terrific” deal. Burt suppressed a chuckle and said, “Sure.” Trump told him this: Arrive late at the next negotiating session, walk over to where your counterpart sits impatiently, look down at him, poke your finger in his chest, and scream, “Fuck you!”
Burt eventually negotiated the START treaty without taking Trump’s advice. Not that Trump learned humility from it. The real estate grifter who “boosted profits by bilking suppliers and evaded debt by declaring multiple bankruptcies” still thinks he’s the smartest person in any room.
The heart of Trump’s failure as a foreign-policy president was that he had no concept of what U.S. national interests were and therefore tuned all encounters to his own interests and the appeal of personal relationships—as he saw them.
We should all beware presidential candidates who bear “secret plans” to solve some hideous crisis that the incumbent has somehow been unable to handle. In the 1968 campaign, Richard Nixon said he had a secret plan to end the Vietnam War. It turned out to be the “madman theory”—having his national security adviser, Henry Kissinger, tell the North Vietnamese that Nixon was crazy and that he would drop an A-bomb on Hanoi if they didn’t engage in peace talks now. When that didn’t work, Nixon dropped more than 20,000 tons of conventional bombs on North Vietnam in the course of 12 days. That didn’t work either.
Trump has the right to remain silent, really, as he faces prosecutions already under way and those to come. But the living, breathing Dunning-Kruger effect can’t unlearn the “Fuck you!” bravado that brought him down in 2020 and will have him spending the rest of his days in courts or in jail.
From what we know about Trump, what kind of plan might be churning in his head to end the Russia–Ukraine war in a single day of talks? If he actually does have a plan, it probably involves two elements. First, he would halt arms deliveries to Ukraine. He’s leery of foreign commitments broadly, and he dislikes President Volodymyr Zelensky in particular; it was Trump’s “perfect” phone call—in which he held up Javelin anti-tank missiles pending Zelensky’s agreement to dig up dirt on Joe Biden—that led to his first impeachment. Second, he would ask his good friend Putin for a favor.
In short, his idea of a deal rests on the usual combination of personal relationships (animosity toward Zelensky, illusory friendship with Putin), naïvete (the notion that those relationships would drive either leader to abandon his interests), a lack of understanding about the nature and stakes of this war, and a complete indifference toward its outcome.
More than that, it wouldn’t end the war, though it would make things easier for Putin. And that would be just fine for Trump.
As Kaplan suggests, Trump has no concept of where U.S. national interests lie and even less concern for defending them. Unless, of course, there’s something in it for himself. Like a Trump Tower in Moscow if not asylum.
President Biden: "Instead of making the wealthy pay their fair share, some Republicans want Medicare and Social Security to sunset. I'm not saying it's the majority."
[S]etting aside the noteworthy yet individual promises from Republican politicians, earlier this year, in a quick-witted maneuver, President Joe Biden got dozens of Republicans to collectively agree they would not cut funding for Medicare or Social Security during his State of the Union speec
“Instead of making the wealthy pay their fair share, some Republicans want Medicare and Social Security to sunset. I’m not saying it’s the majority,” Biden said.
Republicans quickly cut him off with shouts of “No!,” coupled with visible head shakes and thumbs downs.
Your favorite heckler Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) even stood up to shout, “Liar!” at Biden.
He continued, going off script,“So folks, as we all apparently agree, Social Security and Medicare is off the books now, right?”
Republicans began applauding in response to his question.
Over the past couple of months, Republicans claimed — over and over again — that they will not propose cuts to Social Security and Medicare. But despite the promises, a new budget proposal, released last week by the Republican Study Committee, details the changes and cuts they would make to the entitlement programs some of the nation’s most vulnerable depend on…
Despite the several public declarations that cuts to entitlement programs are off the table, the RSC budget is clear in their proposal and messaging.
The committee has spent decades proposing cuts to entitlement programs with little hope of passing but some House Republicans think this year’s plan could make it to the House floor.
They’ll revert to their old ways as soon as Trump is out of the picture. He forced the party to accept his will on this issue but there is no way they will stick with it down the road. They’ll go back to their old approach which is to say that they won’t hurt any of their senior voters, they’ll just phase it out for young people. It’s never worked and it tends to hurt them but they just can’t help themselves.
And the other one has always been intellectually and morally challenged. Now….?
The networks don’t seem to realize this. Or they don’t care:
In the week following President Joe Biden’s April campaign launch, CNN, Fox News, and MSNBC continuously emphasized Biden’s age, mentioning it 588 times, while mentioning former President Donald Trump’s age only 72 times.
On April 25, Biden announced his reelection bid for 2024. Biden, largely focused on campaigning to protect “freedoms” against “MAGA extremism,” has long dealt with right-wing criticism of his age. In the week following his campaign announcement, Biden’s age and mental “fitness” were repeatedly topics of conversation across cable news.
CNN, Fox News, and MSNBC often described Biden’s age as his campaign’s biggesthurdle. But the networks overwhelmingly failed to mention that his most likely Republican opponent, current GOP front-runner Donald Trump, is only three years younger.From April 25 through May 1, 2023, the week following Biden’s announcement, the three largest cable news outlets mentioned the president’s age nearly 600 times.
Fox News accounted for the most mentions of Biden’s age (236), with only 9 references to Trump’s age, while CNN mentioned Biden’s age 180 times, compared with only 29 mentions of Trump’s. MSNBC mentioned Biden’s age 172 times, with only 34 mentions of Trump’s.
This is journalistic malpractice. It’s one thing to talk about Biden’s age. People are concerned and it’s a legit topic even though I think they make way too much of it. But to not point out that Trump is nearly the same age and has shown even more signs of slippage is wrong. Just because he dyes his hair, trowels on bronzer and plays golf (taking his golf cart on to the green) doesn’t mean he isn’t an old guy too. And since he seems more and more hysterical every day, I think he’s even less stable than before and that’s saying something.
When Theresa M. started attending a support group for breast cancer survivors, she didn’t expect political issues like abortion to be a part of the conversation. But since last summer, when her home state of Florida — freed from the requirements of Roe v. Wade by the Supreme Court — began imposing new abortion restrictions, younger women who were newly diagnosed with breast cancer started to voice concerns. “They worry if you find out you’re pregnant, you might have to stop your cancer treatment,” said Theresa, who is 58 and asked that her full name be withheld for personal reasons. “For some kinds of cancer, that’s a death sentence. But not an immediate death sentence, so you don’t get an abortion.”
Like many other Americans, Theresa’s views on abortion crystallized in the aftermath of last summer’s ruling, becoming sharper and harder to reshape. An issue that was once seen primarily as a mobilizing force for the religious right has risen to the forefront at the state and national level. And as the one-year anniversary of Dobbs approaches, many Americans are more supportive of abortion rights than they’ve been in decades.
When the Supreme Court overturned the federal right to abortion, between 50 and 60 percent of Americans wanted the right to stay in place. But while abortion was legal throughout the country up to a certain point in pregnancy, Americans had the luxury of not having strong or cohesive views on the topic, or thinking much about abortion at all. Their views were messy and sometimes contradictory, and there was little evidence suggesting that the issue was a political priority for anyone except Christian conservatives. In the fall of 2021, with the Dobbs case looming on the horizon, many Americans thought that Roe wasn’t in real danger.
Now, a FiveThirtyEight analysis finds that after one of the most disruptive Supreme Court decisions in generations, many Americans — including women, young people, and Democrats — are reporting more liberal views on abortion than major pollsters have seen in years. Even conservatives, although the changes are slight, are increasingly supportive of abortion rights. There are other signs that longstanding views are shifting: For instance, Americans are more open to the idea of unrestricted third-trimester abortion than they were even a year ago. And although it’s hard to predict what will shape upcoming elections, there are indications that abortion has the potential to be a major motivator for some Americans when they go to vote in 2024.
Women, young people and Democrats are veering left
Even before last summer, there was some evidence that Americans’ views were getting slightly more liberal on abortion, driven mainly by Democrats who were increasingly likely to say that abortion should be legal (and also more likely to prioritize the issue politically). But when asked about their opinions, most chose a middle-ground option that allowed for abortions in at least some cases, and their ambivalence about the issue was clearly visible in other questions. Legal abortion was consistently much more popular in the first trimester than later in pregnancy. Majorities of Americans were simultaneously OK with some restrictions on abortion access, while saying they wanted women to obtain legal abortion in their own communities, without pressure to change their mind.
But over the past couple years, views have shifted. FiveThirtyEight gathered every poll that asked a standard question about abortion — whether it should be legal in all cases, legal in some cases, illegal in some cases, or illegal in all cases — since September 2021, and found that the share of American adults who want abortion to be legal in at least some cases is rising, and the share of Americans who want abortion to be illegal in all cases is falling.
Trend polling from Gallup gives us a glimpse of what’s happening beneath the surface. The share of women, young people (ages 18-34), and Democrats who think abortion should be legal in the first and second trimesters of pregnancy rose between 10 and 20 percentage points in just five years, a huge amount of movement for an issue that’s historically been quite stable. Liz Hamel, director of public opinion and survey research at KFF, said that something similar happened with public opinion when the Affordable Care Act was threatened by Republicans. “When there’s a threat that something might be taken away, or in this case a right that’s been taken away, that rallies the groups that were most supportive to begin with to increase their levels of support,” she said.
[…]
Views are changing, although not as evenly, among other groups too. Gallup found that the share of people with up to a high-school education who want abortion to be legal in the first trimester rose from 49 percent in 2018 to 63 percent in 2023 — the biggest shift of any educational group. Half of self-identified conservatives now think abortion should be legal in the first trimester, up from 39 percent in 2018.
In the past year, there’s been more coverage of how the loss of abortion rights affects ordinary people, as well as future threats to abortion access, which may be shaping people’s perspectives. Polling by KFF conducted last month found that awareness of mifepristone, one of two pills commonly used for medication abortion, has doubled since the beginning of the year, with nearly two-thirds (64 percent) of Americans saying they had heard of the drug in May, compared to only 31 percent in January. Major knowledge gaps still remain: KFF found that most Americans are unaware that mifepristone, when correctly used, is safer than common drugs like Tylenol or Viagra, and there’s widespread confusion in states where abortion is limited or banned about whether abortion is legal. But the topic is much more ubiquitous than it was a year ago.
“People started having conversations about abortion,” said Tresa Undem, a co-founder of the nonpartisan research firm PerryUndem. “And most Americans support abortion rights so if you’re having a conversation, you’re more likely to encounter pro-choice people and their views and attitudes. You’re learning other viewpoints. And that’s when we see attitudes starting to change.”
Perhaps most crucially for Republican politicians, who have mostly doubled down on abortion restrictions despite backlash in swing states during the 2022 midterms, no subgroup in Gallup’s data has become notably more conservative on first-trimester abortion since Dobbs. The KFF poll found that Americans are much more likely to say that the Democratic Party best represents their views on abortion (42 percent), rather than the Republican Party (26 percent).
And a YouGov/CBS News poll conducted earlier this month found that the 57 percent of Americans who think the Dobbs decision has mostly been bad for the country aren’t just worried about the impact on abortion access: 81 percent of that group saw the ruling as bad because a constitutional right was taken away. Steve Baker, 63, lives in Ohio and is registered as a Republican but identifies as an independent. He said that to him, the demise of Roe felt like the canary in the coal mine. “Losing the right to abortion is just the trickle as we start to lose more individual rights,” he said. “The right to marry. Other rights. What’s happening with abortion is important, don’t get me wrong, but I feel concerned about those too.”
The following is what happens when you get people thinking about the reality of abortion and why people might need to get one late in pregnancy. All these stories about women being forced to give birth to babies without heads and the like has obviously focused the minds of some people about what this is all about:
More people think third-trimester abortion should be legal
One of the most surprising post-Dobbs trends is the speed with which some Americans have embraced the view that abortion should be legal with no restrictions at all times, including the late second trimester and early third trimester. Under Roe and the precedents that followed, states were free to enact restrictions on abortion after a fetus could potentially live outside a woman’s body — which meant, in practice, that some states were allowed to ban abortion after about 20 weeks of pregnancy, although medical experts say that viability usually happens between 23 and 26 weeks. That dividing line wasn’t especially controversial. Many blue states, including major Democratic strongholds like California, restricted abortion after viability, and the vast majority of Americans believed that abortion should be mostly illegal in the third trimester of pregnancy.
That’s changing — and fast. Third-trimester abortion is still unpopular overall, but in Gallup’s polling, it has close to majority support among some subgroups, which would have been unthinkable just a few years ago. For example, the share of women who think abortion should be legal in the last trimester of pregnancy jumped from 11 percent in 2018 to 25 percent in 2023. One-third (33 percent) of people ages 18-34 think abortion should be legal in the last trimester, up from 14 percent in 2018. And a stunning 43 percent of Democrats think abortion should be legal in the third trimester, up from 18 percent in 2018. “I’ve become more solidified in the belief that there should be very little law around any abortion,” said Meredith MacVittie, 41, who lives in the suburbs of Philadelphia. “If there were some regulations on abortion after 30 weeks, something like a second opinion, maybe that would be okay.” She paused and added, “It’s very hard for me to give up the sense that politicians just shouldn’t be having a say in this decision at all.”
Prior to Dobbs, Americans like MacVittie didn’t have a lot of reasons to think about why someone would want a later abortion, or what would be involved in getting one. Abortions after 20 weeks are rare — according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, less than 1 percent of abortions performed in 2020 occurred after 21 weeks’ gestation — and highly stigmatized. But the wave of bans that went into effect across the South in 2022 included very few exceptions, suddenly making it difficult or impossible for women in later stages of pregnancy to obtain abortions for health reasons or because of fatal fetal abnormalities. Americans were inundatedwithstories of women forced to carry nonviable pregnancies to term, and tales of people who nearly died because they couldn’t receive an abortion that doctors said was medically necessary. As a result, some Americans are increasingly unwilling to let states draw any lines — a shift that could defang one of the Republican Party’s most effective attacks on legal abortion, which focuses on recent attempts in blue states to loosen abortion restrictions in late pregnancy.
“With later pregnancies, abortion becomes a tough conversation,” said August S., a 23-year-old who lives in Chicago and who asked that his full name be withheld for professional reasons. “But the people who would get abortions in those late trimesters aren’t doing it just to have an abortion. It’s for medical reasons. So I wouldn’t put any restrictions on it.”
That is correct.
And it’s become a voting issue for pro-choice citizens. Sorry wingnuts:
Over the past few months, seven Republican-controlled state legislatures have passed restrictions or bans on abortion in the first trimester of pregnancy — despite the fact that Americans in states where abortion is limited want access to be more available, not less. A poll conducted in late March and early April by the Pew Research Center found that people in areas of the country where abortion is restricted or illegal are likelier than they were four years ago to say that abortion should be easier, not harder, to obtain. The same survey found that 62 percent of Americans — including 39 percent of Republicans — think states are making it too hard, rather than too easy, to get an abortion.
Those findings are part of the reason why abortion is unlikely to fade from voters’ minds as the next major election cycle rears its head. But there are also signs that the issue is becoming personal for many people in a way that it wasn’t before, which could make it harder for abortion rights to fade into the background as other issues, like the economy, come to the fore.
The Dobbs ruling didn’t just change laws — it changed people’s lives. Data collected by #WeCount, a research project led by the Society of Family Planning, and analyzed by FiveThirtyEight estimates that tens of thousands of people were displaced to other states for abortions in the first nine months after the Supreme Court’s decision, and thousands more were unable to receive a legal abortion at all. But polling also shows that people are shifting their behavior in other ways. That KFF survey conducted in May found that reproductive-age women are taking more precautions around pregnancy because of concerns about their ability to access abortion: About 3 in 10 women between the ages of 18 and 49 say that they or someone they know has started using long-term contraceptives or stocked up on emergency contraceptives, and about 1 in 5 delayed getting pregnant, while a similar number got permanently sterilized.
It doesn’t get any more intrusive and personal than what they did. And they call themselves the party of “freedom.”
This lines up with other findings from PerryUndem. In a poll conducted shortly after the decision in July 2022, PerryUndem found that 47 percent of women between the ages of 18 and 44 said that Dobbs made them think about what they would do if they needed an abortion or about their own risk of death if they got pregnant (43 percent). More recently, that YouGov/CBS News poll found that 53 percent of women think becoming pregnant in the U.S. is more dangerous now than it was before Roe was overturned — a view that’s much more common among Democratic women (71 percent) than Republican women (26 percent), although relatively few Republican women (28 percent) think becoming pregnant is more safe now. Even Theresa, who is past her reproductive years, said that Dobbs made her think about how her own health might have been endangered by abortion bans, if they’d been in place when she was having children. “I had a miscarriage and was able to get what is technically an abortion,” she said. “And now — I just think about what it would be like to wait in a parking lot until I was septic before I could have that procedure.”
Perhaps as a result, abortion is gaining much broader political salience among groups that weren’t traditionally motivated by the issue. PerryUndem found that between June and July 2022, groups like suburban women and independent women were increasingly likely to say they wanted to act on the issue of abortion. And according to KFF, 30 percent of voters — including almost half (46 percent) of Democrats and more than one-third of women voters (35 percent) say they will only vote for a candidate who shares their views on abortion. Along those lines, a recent Gallup analysis found that a record-high share of registered voters (28 percent) say that they will only vote for a candidate who shares their views on abortion, with voters who identify as “pro-choice” accounting for a greater share of these people than voters who identify as “pro-life.” According to that analysis, Black voters, Democrats and younger women (ages 18-49) are most likely to say that they’re pro-choice and will only vote for a candidate who shares their views on abortion.
“The ruling on [Dobbs] was a great disappointment and has made me very fearful for all my fellow Americans who have been harmed by pro life laws,” Amanda F., 29, who asked that her full name not be used for personal reasons, told me in an email. “Abortion is the issue that I first look for in a political candidate. If they aren’t unapologetically pro choice, I am not voting for them.”
The groups that seem disproportionately motivated by abortion rights don’t represent a majority of American voters. But the 2022 midterms signaled that they do have a significant amount of power, particularly if abortion is galvanizing voters who might otherwise feel unenthusiastic about Democratic candidates. A recent analysis of the Latino vote by Equis Research found that Latinos who chose abortion as their top issue were overwhelmingly likely to vote for Democrats, and turned out at rates that were higher than analysts had predicted before the election.
All of these findings suggest that abortion will remain a potent political issue as the 2024 election cycle ramps up — and after years of pushing for more abortion restrictions without much backlash, Republicans are on the defensive. In the wake of the Dobbs decision, the country, and particularly key Democratic constituencies, are more supportive of abortion rights than they’ve been in years, and there’s no sign that the issue is becoming less important to them.
Keep up with the demonizing of LGBTQ people too, Republicans, and see where that gets you too. You are making a huge mistake if you think Americans are going to stand for you taking away their rights while bellowing about freedom. You’re going to find out what it’s like to be on the other end of a backlash for once.
Following up on Tom’s post below, here’s Jonathan Chait who takes John Durham downtown:
Former special counsel John Durham, who tried and utterly failed to prove that the Russia investigation was a vast anti-Trump conspiracy, testified Wednesday before the House about his work. Durham’s hearing interestingly revealed a possible explanation for why he threw away a sterling reputation to work with William Barr fruitlessly pursuing a right-wing conspiracy theory: The man seems to have become so hopelessly brain-poisoned by Fox News he has lost all touch with facts outside the Republican information bubble.
More specifically, Durham seemed to be unaware of the major factual elements of the alliance between the Trump campaign and Russia. This ignorance came through in several awkward exchanges with Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee panel.
Eric Swalwell asked Durham about how Trump “tried and concealed from the public a real-estate deal he was seeking in Moscow.” This was a deal, described in the Mueller report, in which the Russian government promised Trump several hundreds of millions of dollars in profit at no risk to himself to license a tower in Moscow. The proposed payoff, and Trump’s public lies at the time about it, gave Russia enormous leverage over his campaign. Durham replied, “I don’t know anything about that.”
When Adam Schiff asked Durham if the Russians released stolen information through cutouts, he replied, “I’m not sure.” Schiff responded, “The answer is yes,” to which Durham reported, “In your mind, it’s yes.”
When Schiff asked Durham if he knew that, hours after Trump publicly asked Russia to find Hillary Clinton’s State Department emails and release them, Russian hackers made an attempt to hack Clinton emails, Durham replied, “If that happened, I’m not aware of that.”
When asked if Trump referred to those stolen emails more than 100 times on the campaign trail, Durham answered, “I don’t really read the newspapers and listen to the news.”
And when Schiff asked Durham if he was aware that Trump’s campaign manager, Paul Manafort, passed on polling data to Konstantin Kilimnik, a Russian intelligence agent, at the time Russia was conducting both a social-media campaign and the release of stolen documents to help Trump, Durham replied, “You may be getting beyond the depth of my knowledge.”
David Corn reacted incredulously to the last profession of ignorance. “The Manafort-Kilimnik connection — which the Senate Intelligence Committee report characterized as a ‘grave counterintelligence threat’ — is one of the most serious and still not fully explained components of the Trump-Russia scandal,” he writes. “It is inconceivable that Durham is unaware of this troubling link.”
On the contrary, it is highly conceivable Durham is unaware of this link. It would, indeed, explain his whole pattern of behavior. If you’re not aware of the major evidence of the alliance between Trump and Russia that was unfolding largely in secret, then of course you would assume the FBI investigation into Trump’s ties to Russia was a witch hunt.
It may seem inconceivable that a high-ranking government official like Durham would have no familiarity with facts pertinent to his work. But there are many powerful Republicans who long ago decided to ignore mainstream media — “I don’t really read the newspapers and listen to the news,” as he put it — and rely on Republican Party–controlled media to understand the world.
Here I thought he did his own research…
Clearly Durham suffers from a bad case of Fox News brain rot. It’s a real problem that afflicts a lot of the Republican elite. Once in a while they get over-exposed to Trump and their immune system starts to kick in but for most it’s terminal. He appears to be one of them.
Read that David Corn piece linked above for even more detail. It’s stunning…
Eight months ago, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis was the great hope of the establishment Republicans who never liked Trump but supported him nonetheless. After a huge reelection victory in previously purple Florida, DeSantis was the hottest ticket in Republican politics. Billionaire Super PAC donors and highly sought-after political operatives flocked to Florida to sign up with DeSantis’s campaign in waiting.
By almost every measure, the DeSantis campaign has been a resounding flop. His announcement was a technological and political disaster. His awkward and cold interactions with voters became an Internet meme. DeSantis trails Trump in every poll and looks smaller and weaker than his chief rival.
Now, this could all change – and quickly. Joe Biden was written off in the 2020 Democratic primaries, as were previous nominees like John McCain and John Kerry. Obama was left for dead by the pundits more times than I care to count. A new CNN poll conducted after the second indictment week showed Trump losing some of his standing with Republican voters (although still leading DeSantis by 21 points).
Still, it’s early and Ron DeSantis could make a comeback. Here are a few of the reasons why his campaign has been a dud.
Candidate Quality Matters
Ron DeSantis’s biggest problem is not Donald Trump, the pro-Trump MAGA media, or the growing field of candidates splitting the non-Trump vote. DeSantis’s biggest problem is that he is Ron DeSantis. To win the Presidency, you must be able to woo people during one-on-one dinners and in VFW halls in places like Iowa and be deft enough to navigate the brutal levels of media scrutiny. DeSantis can do none of the above. His speeches are boring and poorly delivered. The guy has the charisma of a banana slug and the people skills of the Seinfeld Soup Nazi (I am generationally obligated to make this reference). And every time he appears in public, the Florida Governor makes a gaffe that distracts from his intended message
.
My former White House colleague and current Pod Save America cohost often says the most important quality in any politician is the ability to speak like a human. While that may sound easy, most politicians fail this simple test. DeSantis fails it worse than any candidate in recent memory. He uses jargon and acronyms like DEI and CRT without giving explanations. DeSantis assumes that the audience is steeped in the lingua franca of Fox News.
Despite the ads, polls, and digital content, politics remains a people profession. The best candidates are comfortable in their own skin and make people in the audience or in a diner feel like they are the only person that matters in the universe. In every interaction, DeSantis exudes a sense that he would rather be anywhere else.
Candidates can get better over time, but DeSantis has a very long journey to even become mildly terrible.
Electability is a Vibe
Electorally, Donald Trump is a huge loser and Ron DeSantis is a winner. Trump has lost every election since winning in 2016 and DeSantis just won Florida by a huge margin in an otherwise excellent Democratic year. Republicans have won the popular vote once since 1988. They lost the House in 2018 and the White House and the Senate in 2020. In 2022, they suffered a historically miserable midterm performance. Republicans want a winner. And they don’t think DeSantis is a winner.
Nearly half (45 percent) of Republican voters – including those who lean toward the GOP – say Trump is definitely the strongest candidate to beat President Joe Biden in 2024, and another 18 percent think he is probably the strongest candidate. Just one-third of GOP voters say another Republican would definitely (13 percent) or probably (19 percent) be a stronger candidate than Trump.
Electability is hard to quantify. It’s ethereal and subjective. In other words, it’s more vibes than reality. DeSantis gives off loser energy. He seems small and weak in comparison to Trump who is all swagger and unearned confidence.
We are, however, in uncharted waters when it comes to Trump and the electability question. We have never had a major presidential candidate indicted for felonies twice during the campaign. We don’t know how the public will react to a potential nominee wearing an ankle bracelet or awaiting sentencing when they go to vote. But right now, DeSantis seems electable on paper. In practice, he is the biggest loser.
The Culture War is Only Half the Equation
Ron DeSantis rose to Republican fame by stoking the embers of inflammatory and highly effective culture wars. The “Don’t Say Gay” law, his books, his war with “Woke Disney.” He picked the right fights with the chosen enemies of MAGA. DeSantis also had a knack for getting his culture wars covered in the Right-Wing media. The DeSantis presidential campaign is an extension of that strategy. He continues to use the apparatus of the state for publicity stunts like kidnapping migrants and sending them to liberal cities like San Francisco, while trying to be the most virulently anti-trans candidate in the field. DeSantis never begins a sentence without some pablum about woke-ism run amok.
None of these efforts caught fire in the context of the presidential race because the culture wars are only half of the MAGA equation. DeSantis may be MAGA on cultural issues, but on economic issues he looks a lot more like Paul Ryan and Mitt Romney
Trump came to dominate the Republican Party because he understood that culture war politics work best when combined with populism. Trump’s brand of populism is the anti-immigrant, nationalism that propelled Pat Buchanan and others. And while he governed as a corporatist, Trump ran for president in 2016 on an anti-trade platform with promises to raises taxes on the wealthy and protect Social Security, and Medicare. Those positions helped Trump flip some voters who went for Obama in 2012 and jack up turnout in rural counties across the country.
Trump is running that same campaign again. He is relentlessly attacking DeSantis for his efforts to privatize Medicare and cut Social Security. DeSantis has yet to respond in kind. The closest he had come to populism is a ham-handed fight with Disney that has largely blown up in his face.
Fox News is the Smoke-Filled Room
The nominations of party outsiders Obama and Trump led to a lot of discussion about the death of the Party Decides Theory. Political party leaders no longer had sufficient influence to guide the base towards the best choice. The days of power brokers in smoke-filled rooms are long over and the process had become bottom up. That’s an over-simplistic rendering of how it works. It is true that the endorsement of Republican establishment figures like the Bushes or Mitch McConnell would be seen as a net negative for a candidate courting the base, but they are still people of real influence in the primary. The folks at Fox News and the rest of the MAGA elite are the new Republican establishment. The choices they make about whom to give airtime and how to frame the race is massively influential. Nate Cohn of the New York Times summed up this dynamic in a recent newsletter:
But just because an event doesn’t yield a huge swing in the polls doesn’t mean that the event can’t or won’t matter. The indictment might ultimately fall into this category. For now, the way to tell whether it could eventually make a difference may not be to watch the polls, but to watch Fox News instead.
Even more than his loyal base of popular support, Donald J. Trump is protected by a wall of elites — conservative media commentators and politicians who forcefully defend the former president, attack his opposition and deter his rivals from going on offense.
Thus far, the MAGA media barons have stuck with Trump and defended him at all costs. This has given DeSantis little room to run and insufficient oxygen to make a counter-case against Trump. Ever since the first indictment of Trump in the Spring, the prevailing gestalt of the Right Wing media is – you are with Trump or you are with the Deep State. In order to avoided being accused of political treason, Trump’s rivals – DeSantis included – have been forced to echo Trump’s talking points and frame the indictment on his terms.
DeSantis may never figure out why he is losing, but those of us trying to defeat Trump could learn something.
He’s a sour, creepy jerk and he can’t hide it. Even people who love the way he owns the libs know that he’ll take all the fun out of it. And that’s what Trump has always had going for him. He makes hating fun.
A tweet from Austin, Texas got my attention the first thing this morning.
“It’s been hotter before, but this is the most miserable I can ever remember Texas weather feeling. First day of summer and the heat index is 120 at 5pm. The state is going to be unlivable in 20 years,” said freelance journalist Christopher Hooks.
It’s been hotter before, but this is the most miserable I can ever remember Texas weather feeling. First day of summer and the heat index is 120 at 5pm. The state is going to be unlivable in 20 years.
MSNBC’s Chris Hayes replied, “I really think people vastly underestimate the effect that climate change is going to have on the livability of the Sun Belt.”
Saul Elbein, a staff writer for The Hill from Austin, cites the media for decades of failure to properly warn the public of the risks posed by climate change. Scientists themselves have too long “soft-pedaled” climate change, allowing motivated doubters to write them off as acceptable long-term risks:
The findings published Monday in Nature Climate Change suggest a fundamental weakness in the past 30 years of communication by climate scientists: a profound difficulty in assessing the possible impacts of breakdowns in the Earth’s biggest and most complex systems.
The Nature paper focused on sea-level rise — a hallmark of planetary heating that is influenced by a wide range of processes both well and poorly understood.
For some of these processes, “we understand the physics quite well – for example, how the ocean takes up heat and expands in response to that,” said lead author Robert Kopp, a climate scientist at Rutgers University.
Uncertainties in other global processes left room for fossil fuel producers to stall public action the way cigarette manufacturers did with their products.
If emissions remain high, the U.S. could see 6.6 feet of sea level rise by the end of the century, enough “to convert the National Mall into a national salt marsh.”
A breakdown in the ice sheets, for example, could “contribute more than one additional meter of sea level rise by 2100,” the authors wrote.
In D.C., that would be enough to swallow much of the lowlands around Capitol Hill, leaving water lapping at the base of Congress itself. It would also wipe out most of Charleston, S.C., and Miami and tear holes in the fabric of the metro areas of San Francisco, New York and Philadelphia.
But as with cigarettes, the warnings have been out there for decades. We just did not want to listen. “We” still don’t.
The media are about to go into the biggest ‘but you never told us it was this bad’ in history… Don’t let them get away with it. They have buried their heads in the sand and failed on this issue more than any other ever pic.twitter.com/KBQYUGLqHG
“When Democrats control the House we pass the laws—when Republicans control, what do we get? We get stupid stuff like this dumb hearing,” said Rep. Ted Lieu (D-Calif.).
Lieu appeared with MSNBC’s Chris Hayes after Wednesday’s House Judiciary Committee hearing on special counsel John Durham’ report on his investigation into the F.B.I.’s investigation into Russian interference with the 2016 presidential election. (If you have to read that again, I’ll wait.)
And what did Durham find after four years? CNN summarizes, “that the FBI should have only launched a preliminary, but not full, investigation into connections between Trump’s presidential campaign and Russia during the 2016 election.”
A New York Post editorial considers that “gross FBI and Justice Department malfeasance.” Democrats on the committee consider the Durham report, which did not dispute Robert Mueller’s conclusions (and multiple convictions) surrounding 2016 Russian interference, a frivolous waste of time.
.@tedlieu on the Durham hearing: "When Democrats control the House we pass the laws—when Republicans control, what do we get? We get stupid stuff like this dumb hearing." pic.twitter.com/XDFgsJBWyl
— All In with Chris Hayes (@allinwithchris) June 22, 2023
Despite repeated claims from Trump and Republicans that the Biden administration has “weaponized” the Justice Department, Durham said there wasn’t any political interference with his work. He testified that Attorney General Merrick Garland, a Biden appointee, didn’t block any of his moves, didn’t reach out to discuss the probe, and didn’t meddle with the investigation.
[…]
After four years, Durham only secured one conviction against a low-level FBI lawyer for doctoring one email related to the surveillance of an ex-Trump campaign aide. Durham’s jury trials against a Hillary Clinton campaign lawyer and Trump-Russia dossier source both ended with embarrassing acquittals last year.
So Lieu made sure to spotlight the close Trump associates who were convicted for other crimes.
Proving Lieu’s point, Republican Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia and Lauren Boebert of Colorado are pulling each other’s hair (only figuratively, so far) over who gets to try impeaching President Joe Biden (Daily Beast):
The messy feud between two of MAGA world’s biggest stars burst into public view on Wednesday, when Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) called Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-CO) a “little bitch” to her face on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives.
The angry exchange came as the two lawmakers have been swiping at each other over their competing resolutions to impeach President Joe Biden. But tensions came to a head on Wednesday after Boebert leveraged a procedural tool to force a vote on her own impeachment resolution within days—undercutting Greene, who had offered her own resolution, but not with the procedural advantages of forcing a vote.
The two “lawmakers” had an exchange on the House floor captured by C-SPAN’s cameras.
According to two sources that saw the exchange and a third familiar with the matter, the back and forth began when Boebert approached Greene—then seated in the chamber—and confronted her over “statements you made about me publicly.” All three of the sources said Greene called Boebert a “bitch.” One of the sources said Greene called her “a little bitch.”
According to two of the sources, Greene then stood up and alleged that Boebert “copied my articles of impeachment,” to which the Colorado lawmaker fired back that she hadn’t even read Greene’s resolution.
Lieu weighed in again on Twitter: “Democrats put #PeopleOverPolitics and passed a bipartisan infrastructure law to grow our economy. What are MAGA Republicans focused on? Performative stupid stuff.”
“We could just cut to the chase and let them get on with the inevitable pudding-wrestling,” quipped the Lincoln Project’s Rick Wilson.
Cage matches
Still more stupid.
Perhaps Green and Borbert would agree to a double-bill cage match?
After Elon Musk recently tweeted that he would be “up for a cage fight” with Zuckerberg, the Meta CEO shot back by posting a screenshot of Musk’s tweet with the caption “send me location.”
I’ve confirmed that Zuckerberg’s post on his Instagram account is, in fact, not a joke, which means the ball is now in Musk’s court. “The story speaks for itself,” Meta spokesperson Iska Saric told me.
NEW: After Elon Musk recently tweeted that he would be “up for a cage fight” with Zuckerberg, the Meta CEO shot back by posting a screenshot of Musk’s tweet with the caption “send me location.” @verge
In 2020, San Francisco had five murders per 100,000 city residents, according to the FBI — a lower rate than all but five of the 23 city police departments serving 750,000 people or more. https://t.co/UcA7xKVbL7pic.twitter.com/e1YrWTRB0W
