Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

This piece by Paul Waldman takes up one of my longest standing pet peeves, this notion that somehow rural and small town America is not only more authentically American, its values are far superior to those who live in urban America (where most of the people are.) This is taken as a given and is so accepted that they are allowed to bash cities mercilessly while screaming like wounded harpies if anyone criticizes their “way of life.”

I’m sick of it.

North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum did not announce his bid for the GOP presidential nomination by grabbing a guitar and crooning out the chorus to John Mellencamp’s “Small Town,” but he came awfully close. “I grew up in a tiny town in North Dakota,” he says at the opening of the video meant to introduce him to voters. After touting his business success, he concludes, “A kid from small town North Dakota: That’s America.”

Burgum is practicing a version of small-town identity politics. “Small-town values have guided me my entire life; small-town values are at the core of America,” he says. “And frankly, big cities could use more ideas and more values from small towns right now.”

I heard his speech and it made me want to throw something. What an arrogant fuck. This guy is a billionaire tech bro who thinks he has “small town” values when he’s just another rich Republican with too much money who arrogantly believe that he’s a master of the universe qualified to run America. Grrrrr.

The glorification of small towns is a familiar political trope, repeated so often that most of us don’t bother to question it. As one pair of scholars put it, “Rural America is sometimes viewed as a kind of safe-deposit box that stores America’s fundamental values.”

But it’s about time we do question it.

Imagine how refreshing it would be to hear a candidate touting their “big-city values” and explaining how important and useful the things they learned in the city can be. Plenty of U.S. presidents — William Howard Taft, Barack Obama, Donald Trump — came from cities. But they were more likely to extol the small towns they didn’t hail from than to argue that the city is where the tools of governing can also be cultivated.

What exactly are the small-town values that are supposed to be not only so admirable, but also so useful for governing? If you ask their advocates, you’ll usually get answers that are vague to the point of meaninglessness. In small towns, we’re told, people tell the truth, they work hard and they lend a hand. All of which are good things, but there’s no evidence that those virtues are any more common in small towns than in big cities or the suburbs (and when politicians praise “small towns,” they’re definitely not talking about the suburbs).

There are undoubtedly things that distinguish the small town from the city — and when it comes to the demands of governing, the distinctions favor the lessons one can gain in urban environments.

If you grow up in a city, you’ll learn to navigate a complex world. You’ll deal with people of diverse backgrounds, languages and religions — just like America. You’ll negotiate with their desires and interests, because when you’re all packed together, you have no choice. And you’ll learn to react to change.

That’s one of the central facts of urban life: Cities are and always have been about change. Immigrants come in from abroad, migrants flow in from other parts of the state and the country, and the changing population constantly remakes the city’s politics, its food, its music and every other part of its culture. Even the landscape is remade as old buildings come down and new ones rise up.

In the small town, by contrast, the slow pace of change is precisely what many people value. The rural ethos is saturated in nostalgia, the desire to hold on to or recapture the way things used to be. That nostalgia is often about simplicity, a yearning for a time when the world wasn’t so complicated, change didn’t happen so fast and you could count on life being pretty much the same for you as it was for your parents and grandparents.

Which might be fine for a person to value, but it won’t help you navigate the complexities of policymaking in a dynamic nation of almost 335 million people. For that, you’d do better to cultivate big-city values.

Let’s return to Burgum, who wants to bring his small-town values to D.C. He did come from a small town. But the most important factor in his business success is probably this: He left.

That’s true of ambitious people in small towns and rural areas everywhere: To find opportunity, they often have to go elsewhere. Cities are full of people who grew up in small towns but decided to leave, either to fulfill their economic ambitions or because they found small-town culture stifling and intolerant.

After finishing college, Burgum headed to Silicon Valley, attending Stanford Business School. After a stint as a management consultant in the big city of Chicago, he returned to North Dakota and started a software company — not in his hometown of Arthur (pop. 328), but in Fargo, the largest city in the state.

Democrats are constantly asked why they aren’t doing more to “reach out” to rural and small-town voters, to approach them with open ears and respectful hearts. Nobody ever asks Republican presidential candidates to do the same with urban voters. Maybe if they did, they’d learn a thing or two about the country they aspire to govern.

And maybe they’d learn a little humility while they’re at it.

Either way, ​L’état c’est lui

More on the subject of my earlier post. William Saletan at the Bulwark catalogues all the ways in which the right endorses his status as an autocrat:

Once again, Trump is testing America’s tolerance for autocracy. And once again, his allies on the right are backing him up with extreme and dangerous theories of vast presidential power. Here are some of their arguments.

1. A former president is entitled to obstruct investigators if he doesn’t trust them.

John Yoo, a former deputy assistant attorney general, says Trump’s lawyers can argue that “he didn’t initially cooperate with DOJ or the FBI because of the way he’d been mistreated by them.” Alan Dershowitz, who represented Trump at his second impeachment trial, goes further. According to Dershowitz, it doesn’t matter whether Trump was truly mistreated; his subjective perception is enough. In defense of Trump’s defiance of the FBI, Dershowitz asserts: “A president doesn’t have to cooperate with people he believes are trying to get him.”

2. A former president is entitled to withhold documents from investigators based on his belief that he declassified the documents.

Here, again, Dershowitz suggests that facts don’t matter; all that matters is the former president’s perception. According to Dershowitz, “If President Trump believes he had declassified the material before he left the White House, then he had no obligation to turn them over to the [National] Archives.”

3. Federal law grants a former president sole authority to decide what he can keep.

“The only statute that applies to Donald Trump on this is the Presidential Records Act,” says Christina Bobb, a Trump lawyer. The PRA “specifically says the president, and only the president, is the one who has authority to make this call.” Bobb is wrong. The PRA is one of several laws pertaining to such records; others are mentioned in the indictment. But like many other Trump apologists, she uses the PRA to reason that no other laws apply to Trump.

4. The mere act of taking documents makes them the former president’s rightful property.

According to Fox News host Jesse Watters, “When Bill Clinton took [certain] records from the White House back to Chappaqua, the act itself of taking them home—to his home—made them personal records,” beyond the government’s jurisdiction. Based on this premise, Watters asserts, Trump’s lawyers in the Mar-a-Lago case could have “squashed the subpoena immediately.”

5. A former president is entitled to hide documents from investigators, as long as he doesn’t destroy them.

On Friday, Fox News anchor Martha MacCallum, reading from a summary of the indictment, explained to fellow Fox News host Mark Levin that Trump had allegedly directed an accomplice “to move boxes of documents to conceal them from Trump’s attorney, the FBI, and the grand jury.” Levin replied that these evasive maneuvers weren’t important, even if the documents were under subpoena, since Trump apparently hadn’t destroyed them. “So he moved boxes around. . . . So what?” scoffed Levin. “Was there a subpoena out there? It doesn’t matter.”

6. A former president is entitled to destroy documents.

Jim Trusty, another Trump attorney, suggests that because Trump had the power to declassify documents as president—which is true, but no longer applies after he left office—he was entitled, at Mar-a-Lago, to destroy them at will. “You can’t even obstruct a non-crime,” says Trusty. Therefore, Trump “could have had a party throwing stuff in a bonfire, and it wouldn’t be obstruction.”

7. A former president can ignore rules about sensitive documents because the people who make and enforce those rules are corrupt.

“It’s the intelligence community that determines what our government secrets are and what the protocols are with that information,” says CPAC chairman Matt Schlapp. “This is the same community that corruptly and illegally spied on Trump,” Schlapp argues, and now “it’s the same intelligence community that, when Trump is out of power, is still trying to get him on jaywalking and parking tickets.” Many of Trump’s allies view the FBI this way: They think it’s biased and illegitimate, so Trump can defy it with impunity.

8. Former presidents are exempt from the classification system.

Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy argues that Trump can’t be prosecuted because “the classification scheme itself was defined not by statute, but by executive order,” and “executive orders, appellate courts have held, do not bind a U.S. president with the force of law.” By this logic, Trump’s entire argument about having declassified the documents is irrelevant because, according to Ramaswamy, the system simply doesn’t apply to Trump.

9. Congress can’t constrain a former president’s treatment of documents.

Jesse Binnall, yet another Trump lawyer, contends that even if Congress tried to make “former presidents subject to the Espionage Act for documents created during that president’s term of office,” such a law “may very well be found to be unconstitutional,” because “traditionally, presidents actually owned the presidential documents created during their term.” Francey Hakes, a former federal prosecutor, told Fox News that any law passed by Congress might be nullified by a president’s “inherent authority to take documents when he leaves office.” On this theory, nothing short of a constitutional amendment could hold Trump accountable to federal statutes.

10. No former president should be prosecuted.

Yoo says the feds should “let Donald Trump go” because America’s “institutional norm” is to “leave former presidents alone.” Prosecuting Trump would cause too much harm, according to Yoo, because it would “make future presidents worry about being prosecuted for their tough decisions.” Yoo hasn’t suggested that this defense should be applied to shooting somebody on Fifth Avenue. But in theory, it could be.

11. Prosecution of a former president who seeks re-election is like a coup.

Kimberly Guilfoyle, Trump’s daughter-in-law-to-be, says the federal law enforcement officials who retrieved documents from Mar-a-Lago, and who are now prosecuting Trump, “are literally themselves leading an insurrection against this country, trying to do a coup against the president when he was in office and now trying to prevent him from getting in office again.” Even after voters expelled Trump from office, Guilfoyle portrays any threat to him as an attack on America.

Of course. But be advised that they will accuse a Democrat of many of the same crimes that Trump has committed (as they are doing with Biden) and insist that all of the above does not apply to him.

“Gaslighting” and “projection” are overused terms but they actually are the primary political tactics of the right wing. It’s enough to drive you mad. But that’s the point.

A tale of two blowhards

The Brits show that a political party doesn’t have to blindly back its leader even when he’s popular:

An angry, aggrieved former leader attacks the institutions he once led for accusing him of flouting the rules and lying about it. His allies whip up supporters against what they call a witch hunt. A country watches nervously, worried that this flamboyant, norm-busting figure could cause lasting damage.

There are obvious parallels in the political tempests convulsing Britain and the United States, but also stark differences: Former President Donald J. Trump faces federal criminal charges while Boris Johnson was judged to be deceitful about attending parties. And yet, Britain’s Conservative Party has regularly stood up to Mr. Johnson while the Republican Party is still mostly in thrall to Mr. Trump.

Conservative lawmakers in Britain form the majority on a committee that found Mr. Johnson, a former prime minister, had deliberately misled Parliament over lockdown-breaking parties in Downing Street during the coronavirus pandemic. Mr. Johnson’s conduct, they said, would have warranted a 90-day suspension from the House of Commons had he not preemptively resigned his seat in protest last week.

On Monday, the House of Commons will vote on whether to accept or reject the committee’s findings. The government said it would not pressure Tory lawmakers to vote one way or the other. That sets up a potential repudiation of Mr. Johnson by his party that could go far beyond the token number of Republican lawmakers in the House of Representatives who voted to impeach Mr. Trump in 2019 and 2021.

Even before the vote on Monday, the condemnation of Mr. Johnson by his Tory colleagues on the privileges committee was striking. Not only was it a stinging rebuke of a popular, if factually challenged, politician, but it was also a clarion call for the restoration of truth as the bedrock principle in a democracy.

“The outcome is much worse than expected,” said Kim Darroch, a former British ambassador to Washington, who noted that the committee had been expected to recommend at most a 30-day suspension. “Its severity suggests the committee had a broader purpose in their decision: that of reaffirming the fundamental importance of truth in British politics.”

While a few Republicans, like former Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey and Senator Mitt Romney of Utah, have called out Mr. Trump for his erroneous statements, many more have stayed quiet — implicitly or explicitly accepting his false claim that he won the 2020 presidential election, for example.

So far, the multiple indictments of Mr. Trump have yet to shake most Republicans from their support for him. His arraignment this week on charges of mishandling classified documents and obstructing justice brought fresh cries from Republican leaders like Speaker Kevin McCarthy of the House that President Biden was “weaponizing” the Justice Department to go after his political enemies.

Mr. Johnson has deployed similar charges against the committee. In a vitriolic statement after its report was made public, he said, “This decision means that no M.P. is free from vendetta, or expulsion on trumped-up charges by a tiny minority who want to see him or her gone from the Commons.”

The language was vintage Trump, if clothed in an English accent. The committee’s report, Mr. Johnson declared, was “rubbish,” “deranged” and a “complete load of tripe.”

He accused a senior Tory committee member, Bernard Jenkin, of breaching lockdown rules by attending a gathering to celebrate a birthday. And he veered into obscure personal jibes, describing one of the report’s claims as “an argument so threadbare it belongs in one of Bernard Jenkin’s nudist colonies.”

“This is all straight out of the Trump playbook,” said Frank Luntz, an American political strategist, noting that Mr. Trump had influenced the language of other world leaders. “He’s condemning the messenger, similar to Trump in the U.S., Netanyahu in Israel and Bolsonaro in Brazil.”

Mr. Luntz, who knew Mr. Johnson when they were students at Oxford University, said he was surprised that Mr. Johnson had resorted to that language. Mr. Luntz has long resisted comparisons of Mr. Johnson and Mr. Trump, saying that “Boris has written more books than Trump has read.”

But having spent two days this week in Parliament, Mr. Luntz said his overriding sense was that Mr. Johnson had little support and that most Conservatives simply wanted to put the drama behind them.

Very few Conservatives have taken up Mr. Johnson’s cry of a political vendetta. Many pointed out that not a single lawmaker sought to block his referral to the privileges committee in April 2022, when the questions about the veracity of his statements to Parliament about the parties had reached a crescendo.

The committee reflects the party balance in the House, with four members from the Conservatives, two from the opposition Labour Party and one from the Scottish National Party. By tradition, it is chaired by a lawmaker from the main opposition party, in this case Harriet Harman, whom Mr. Johnson accused of having the “sole political objective of finding me guilty and expelling me from Parliament.”

Unlike Mr. Trump, whose personal attacks often go unanswered, the committee lashed back at Mr. Johnson. It accused him of “impugning the committee and, thereby, undermining the democratic process of the House” and “being complicit in the campaign of abuse and attempted intimidation of the committee.” It plans a special report into Mr. Johnson’s behavior during the inquiry.

[…]

“It’s the first time where he has finally been caught out,” said Sonia Purnell, who worked with Mr. Johnson in the Brussels bureau of The Daily Telegraph in the 1990s and wrote a critical biography of him. “If he hadn’t been caught out today, that would have been pretty much a mortal blow to British democracy.”

Sigh…

Johnson has not been the mortal threat that Trump is to our democracy but he arguably did something that was just as destructive by campaign for Brexit on a Big Lie. The Tories have to take their share of responsibility for that. But they are not tolerating the Trump, Bolsonaro, Netanyahu full-blown descent into authoritarian cultism. Good for them. It would be really great if the Republican Party could do the same thing here.

Elise Stefanik, with no evidence whatsoever, on Fox & Friends asserts that Joe Biden "committed multiple criminal acts" pic.twitter.com/y8sxfc7A7d

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) June 16, 2023

If you ever wondered how it came to be that people loathed and despised Hillary Clinton on such a visceral level, this is how. They did this over and over and over again for eight years screeching about “the rule o’ law!” and calling them the Clinton Crime Family. It’s very effective. It makes people who don’t have strong feelings about the person or knowledge of the facts figure there just must be something to it. In the face of Trump’s obvious criminality, it also has the effect of feeding into the cynical “they all do it” attitude which leads to apathy.

The Republicans spent decades degrading Clinton and it was only by a fluke that she lost the election in 2016. And, yes, misogyny played a part. But the constant drumbeat that she was a criminal going all the way back to the 90s took its toll and Donald Trump, the instinctive asshole that he is, took advantage of it. And too many Democrats and independents bought into it.

Luckily Biden is an incumbent president and Trump is going to be on the ballot so those dynamics are not going to be very strong. But never think it’s just a reflexive reaction to the charges against Trump. This is a patented GOP strategy. Character assassination is their go-to.

Donald Trump gave them an opening

It stands to reason that once the Republicans succeeded in corrupting the Supreme Court confirmation process to pack it with far right justices they would turn their attention to the Justice Department. What good is having a partisan High Court if the Justice Department is going to refuse to do the bidding of whatever Republican is in the White House? If you want to corrupt a democracy you need to do it holistically to ensure that all the levers of power are working together.

It’s been a long time coming but it looks like they believe they’ve finally found their moment. They’re openly announcing their intention to discard all the rules and norms that have governed the arms length relationship between the president and the DOJ for the past 50 years. Donald Trump made that clear in his speech at his Bedminster Golf Club on Tuesday night:

Crowd chants “Lock him up!” after Donald Trump announces he will appoint "a real special prosecutor" to go after President Biden and his family if elected. pic.twitter.com/WR6ug04aGA

— The Recount (@therecount) June 14, 2023

Donald Trump has always said he intended to do this, of course. He cried throughout his presidency “where’s my Roy Cohn?” the execrable lawyer who mentored the young Donald Trump (when he wasn’t serving every nefarious character in American life from Joseph McCarthy to Richard Nixon to John Gotti.) When he ran in 2016 he told Hillary Clinton to her face in a national debate that he planned to put here in jail and constantly demanded that the Justice Department prosecute his enemies.

The Attorneys General knew what the boss wanted. The White House counsels all knew what he wanted. In fact, everyone in America knew what he wanted because he openly demanded it in speeches, on television and on social media. The DOJ didn’t entirely follow through but they made a stab at it. As I wrote the other day, he was plotting behind the scenes against the advice of White House lawyers to make it happen and eventually former Attorney General Bill Barr did relent and assigned a US Attorney to review all the Clinton investigations. (He found nothing new.) And in an unprecedented move, Barr also stepped in to save two of Trump’s top cronies, Former National Security adviser Michael Flynn and Roger Stone and named John Durham as Special Counsel to investigate the FBI’s investigation of the Russian interference in the 2016 election.

But Trump was held back from doing his worst at various choke points in the system, particularly the rules and norms that have governed the relationship between the president and the Justice Department after the revelations that came out of the Watergate scandal. For 50 years the DOJ has operated as a quasi independent agency in which it was understood that the president would make general policy but would not be involved in individual cases. Now the Republican party has decided it’s time to change all that.

The New York Times reported on Tuesday that the new MAGA establishment, led by coup conspirator Jeffrey Clark and Russell Vought, Trump administration director of Office of management and budget (and Freedom Caucus guru) have some big plans:

Mr. Clark and Mr. Vought are promoting a legal rationale that would fundamentally change the way presidents interact with the Justice Department. They argue that U.S. presidents should not keep federal law enforcement at arm’s length but instead should treat the Justice Department no differently than any other cabinet agency.

They are condemning Mr. Biden and Democrats for what they claim is the politicization of the justice system, but at the same time pushing an intellectual framework that a future Republican president might use to justify directing individual law enforcement investigations.

Republicans enamored of the “Unitary Executive” theory, such as Bill Barr, have always believed that those post-Watergate reforms were foolishly restrictive and unrealistic but they worried that the silly voters would react badly to blatantly hackish partisanship so they always kept up the pretense of an independent Justice Department. Both parties have complained about politicized DOJs over the years but it’s only the Republicans who’ve made it clear that they don’t even believe in the concept — when Republicans are in power, anyway.

Ironically, by engaging in blatant corruption and open criminal behavior as both a president and presidential candidate, Donald Trump has given them the opportunity they’ve been waiting for. The fact that he doesn’t try to hide his depraved indifference to rules, norms and laws means that the Justice Department under a Democratic administration was left with no choice but to completely abandon the rule of law or enforce it knowing that the Republicans will cynically stage a monumental tantrum so they can use it as an excuse to do what they want to do anyway. And that’s exactly what they’re doing.

This goes way beyond Trump. In fact, I suspect they will be happy if Trump is convicted and they can wave the bloody shirt to justify removing any barriers to total control of the federal law enforcement. Certainly, the next generation of MAGA leaders are all-in on this idea. Take Florida Gov. Ron Desantis who has backed this vacuous claim of a “weaponized” Department of Justice and promised to follow the same program only on steroids:

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has been working for months on plans to tear down and rebuild both the Department of Justice and the FBI, consulting with experts and members of Congress to develop a “Day One” strategy to end what conservatives see as the weaponization of the justice system. The governor has privately told advisors that he will hire and fire plenty of federal personnel, reorganize entire agencies, and execute a “disciplined” and “relentless” strategy to restore the Justice Department to a mission more in line with what the “Founding Fathers envisioned.”

The plan is massively ambitious and apparently he believes he can do it all unilaterally:

This kind of innovation suits DeSantis, who takes a broader view of executive authority than is typical of constitutional conservatives and who has told advisors he “doesn’t buy” the idea that presidents can’t fire anyone on the federal payroll.

With a mind-boggling lack of self-awareness, the Governor who is banning books, abridging the speech of educators, firing elected prosecutors, creating his own police forces, attacking private businesses and much much more said, “You can’t have one faction of society weaponizing the power of the state against factions that it doesn’t like.”

The fact is that the Republican Party’s alleged hostility to the “Deep State” is nothing more than a set-up to co-opt state power for themselves. They’ve chafed under the rules and regulations that preclude them from behaving like crooks and liars such as Richard Nixon and Donald Trump for the last 50 years. They don’t want to get rid of the “Deep state”, they just want to get rid of all the impediments to using it the way they believe it’s meant to be used: against their political enemies. Trump’s flagrant criminality has perversely given them exactly the excuse they need to do it.

Salon

2012? Bring back 1220, bro!

If you follow The Daily Wire, you may know this guy. I don’t, but David Simon of The Wire does.

This clown below would like to see western civilization return to the customs and mores of 1220. Because only RINOs want to return to the 1950s. Only fauxnies like Grover Norquist (he married a Muslim!) want to return to the McKinley era. Real men, ball-tanning men, men who embody manly virtues (Tucker Carlson? Josh Hawley?) want to “get medieval on your ass,” America.

Yup. The Enlightenment ruined everything if you were white, male, straight, Christian and kissed the ass of whichever nobleman was going to win whatever war was ongoing to determine who rules you absolutely by divine right. Also, the Black Death willing, you might live past 30. https://t.co/BDznZ1HhxT

— David Simon (@AoDespair) June 16, 2023

So much of the reactionary right is fueled by performative, over-the-top, in-your-face rejection of what the rest of us in Well-Adjusted America™ consider normal. MAGAs and incels tune in to shows like this for the rhetorical equivalent of WWE, monster trucks, and nitro-powered funny cars. Anything to get a rise (pun intended).

The problem is, as with professional wrestling and Trump rallies, some of the fans take the kayfabe seriously.

Abortion, Jan. 6, and your freedom are on the line

Here in our fortress of progressivism, it sometimes seems as if the rest of the country — the left-leaning part, anyway — is oblivious to broader trends at work behind current events. News junkies know, but that’s because we are news junkies. Forward scouts, I tell legislators engaged in trench warfare with authoritarians in the capitol.

Movement conservatism propelled the American right from the 1970s through the Reagan years to George W. Bush’s two terms. We might call what followed movement authoritarianism. Anat Shenker-Osorio, host of the podcast Words to Win By and messaging authority, found signs in a recent survey that the public has caught on (Slate):

In May, the Research Collaborative, a group that I advise, fielded a 1,400-person survey with Lake Research Partners on the Supreme Court. Voters agreed, by double-digit margins, that the Supreme Court “rules for wealthy and powerful few” and that its “decisions take away our freedoms.” Conversely, positive descriptors that the court “has made the right decisions lately,” that it “ensures everyone has equal justice under the law,” and that its “decisions protect our freedoms” were all underwater—most by double digits.

In a split sample experiment, among respondents asked whether a potential president’s Supreme Court nominations factored into their past voting decisions, 79 percent of Democrats and 71 percent of independent voters responded affirmatively. These numbers rose to 90 percent and 76 percent, respectively, for respondents answering about whom they will consider for president in 2024. Similarly, 73 percent of Democrats and 86 percent of independents said they’d factor support for a Supreme Court candidate into how they voted in future congressional elections, up from 39 percent and 51 percent, respectively.

After hearing a list of recent and pending cases, we asked voters forced-choice questions in order to guard against acquiescence bias. Fifty-four percent “worry that the majority on the Supreme Court is taking away our freedoms,” as opposed to 33 percent who “believe that the Supreme Court is doing its job upholding the law and Constitution,” with 14 percent unsure. Moreover, by a margin of 52–29, voters believe that the Supreme Court is “part of a larger authoritarian movement” as opposed to “acting independently,” leaving 19 percent unsure.

While Florida’s authoritarian governor is making that movement headlines week after week, his presidential campaign is fading. There remains the risk that without constant reminders the threat could fade into background noise.

Shenker-Osorio suggests that Democrats need to message more and better on the stakes to people’s freedoms posed by that larger authoritarian movement, and the Supreme Court specifically. The survey found that the court’s underwater approval rating, “while still 2 points underwater—has recovered from its nadir of -8 percentage points in July 2022.”

The Dobbs decision to take away Americans’ freedom to decide and, of course, the constant public discourse that put this issue front and center. As soon as that pressure stops or slows, the court’s standing is given the unearned opportunity to recover.

The dark analogy I picked up somewhere comes from boxing. Once you’ve cut your oponent over the eye, work the eye. Don’t let up.

If there were anything for Democrats to learn from the averted “red wave” last year, it’s that you win debates—and elections—by setting the terms. Had the midterms been the usual referendum on the incumbent president and economic conditions, precedent and pundits would have been right and Democrats would have been doomed. But instead, in the places and races where Democrats prevailed, it was because they brought abortion, Jan. 6, and the need to protect our freedoms top of mind. We must once again apply that same wisdom to how we confront the MAGA justices on the Supreme Court—making clear to voters that our freedoms, our families, and our futures are still very much on the line.

As the teaser for Mark Joseph Stern’s Wednesday post for Slate put it, “The Next GOP Supreme Court Pick Will Make Brett Kavanaugh Look Like a RINO.” Compared to the judges Trump seeded into lower courts during his administration, “Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Barrett may appear, at times, like lily-livered centrists,” Stern warns:

What Republicans want now are pugilistic partisans who are outright committed to the authoritarian project. They want fidelity to the party, its leaders, and its policies rather than some hazy devotion to “the law as written,” or even “democracy.”

Get serious about this. Remind friends and neighbors regularly that black robes matter.

… Desantis, that is

DeSantis’ numbers suck with the general electorate, and are getting worse in some polls this week in the GOP primary electorate. #notwinninghttps://t.co/gWHSvCjQtP https://t.co/2zVeoC09VZ

— Simon Rosenberg (@SimonWDC) June 13, 2023

What Rosenberg says is very important. DeSantis’ extremist positions are even losing him traction in the Republican party! It’s destroying him in a general election. I think that even if Trump doesn’t make it to the convention for some reason, DeSantis is too damaged to win. He can’t pivot away from fascism.

Of course, when Fox News initially tried to push an outrage cycle about this, they strategically cropped out images showing that the White House did have the US flag flying atop the building and above the Pride flag. https://t.co/IBLJYitfOf

— Justin Baragona (@justinbaragona) June 15, 2023

Officer Dunn, bringing the receipts! 🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥 https://t.co/FV6AFmv93M

— Kristi Rothschild (@KDRothschild) June 15, 2023

They really, really hate the LGBTQ, don’t they? Did we ever think otherwise?

Saturday was a tale of two flags. One was flown at the White House: a rainbow Pride flag, specifically the trans- and racially inclusive “Progress” variation. “Today, the People’s House—your house—sends a clear message to the country and to the world,” President Biden tweeted, alongside an image of the flag hanging from the south portico. “America is a nation of pride.” The other one was held aloft—or rather, several of them were—in a small demonstration outside the entrance to Disney World in Orlando, Florida: the Nazi swastika. Some of the demonstrators were reportedly with the neo-Nazi group National Socialist Movement, and they also held signs with anti-gay slurs that need not be reproduced here.

You don’t have to guess which flag the leading right-wing sycophants were up in arms about.

“America has been humiliated, debauched and debased. A warning about how civilizations unravel from within,” former Trump adviser Stephen Miller tweeted. “The ideological coup is complete,” said The Daily Wire’s Ben Shapiro. Benny Johnson, of the right-wing youth group Turning Point USA, decreed, “The enemy is inside the castle walls.” Several Republican members of Congress claimed Biden had violated the “flag code,” with Representative Mike Johnson of Louisiana going on to deem it part of Biden’s “twisted agenda” and Senator Roger Marshall of Kansas calling it “a disgrace.” On Fox on Monday, Washington Examiner deputy editor Kaylee McGhee White claimed that the Biden administration was sending the message, “This ideology runs America.”

Rarely is the anti-LGBTQ crisis illustrated so clearly, where queer and trans people are being scapegoated and demonized by Republican officeholders and would-be stormtroopers alike. But there was a third flag of note on Saturday: A “DeSantis 2024” flag flew alongside the swastikas. That was no coincidence. DeSantis, more than any other Republican official today, stands for wielding the power of the state to enforce heterosexuality and eradicate transgender people.

Florida is the testing ground for sex and gender authoritarianism in the United States, with DeSantis now campaigning to “make America Florida” as president in 2024. DeSantis declared war on Disney after it opposed his signature “Don’t Say Gay” law, which has been used to chill any classroom discussion of queer and trans people. That combined with a raft of anti-LGBTQ laws passed by the state legislature has led queer and trans Floridians to leave the state, as The Washington Post reported this month. Florida is now at the vanguard of barring trans adults from gender-affirming care, by adding onerous requirements and restrictions like making it a crime to offer or obtain care via telehealth and allowing doctors and pharmacists to deny care outright. The goal is to dehumanize queer and trans communities. One Republican state lawmaker, Representative Webster Barnaby, likened trans people to “mutants” and “demons” this past session; another, Representative Randy Fine, called the anti-LGBTQ laws being passed part of their fight against “evil.”

Florida is also home to Moms for Liberty, who have galvanized if not kicked off the nationwide fight to remove books from schools and libraries for their LGBTQ content, and who are working to take over school boards and recruiting state legislators in their fight to mandate anti-LGBTQ policies in education and health care. This month, the Southern Poverty Law Center named them one of the leading extremist groups in the country, with links to Christian nationalists, the so-called “constitutional sheriffs” movements, and the Proud Boys. As just one example: Daily Salinas is a onetime DeSantis campaign volunteer who joined Moms for Liberty in disrupting a Miami-Dade school board meeting last year to demand the removal of sex ed curricula. She is also a supporter of the Proud Boys, appearing at their rallies and even greeting one released from the hospital.

Saturday is hardly the first time that pro-DeSantis and Nazi flags have stood side by side at demonstrations in the state. It happened in May 2022, also outside Disney World, and in July 2022 outside the Turning Point USA conference in Tampa. DeSantis has not condemned or even commented on the latest instance. If he does so, it will likely only be to distance himself: After other Florida lawmakers condemned two days of neo-Nazi demonstrations in January 2022, DeSantis spokeswoman Christina Pushaw asked, in a since-deleted tweet, “Do we even know they’re Nazis?” DeSantis, meanwhile, claimed the demonstrations were evidence that his opponents wanted to “smear me as if I had something to do with it.”

It was a nice gesture for the White House to celebrate Pride, signifying some measure of inclusion, especially this year, when symbols (like Target and its Pride merchandise) may matter more than before. In contrast, in Florida this year, Pride season opened with travel advisories from the NAACP and Human Rights Campaign, warning that the state is unsafe for queer and trans people. Several Pride events in the state were canceled or relocated as a result of the new laws, not to mention the threats posed by groups like the Proud Boys or the open neo-Nazis who took to Disney World. DeSantis may reject them yet, but he cannot deny that they see their struggle aligned with his: to rally others to join them in demonizing, driving out, and eradicating queer and trans people.

I need a drink…

Note the DeSantis 2024 flag among them.

Although this whole thing is stupid…also note that the Flag on top of the Capitol was flying.

… ’til your daddy takes the country away

I’ve long written that one of Trump’s great gift is that, for his followers, he makes politics fun. This NYT newsletter piece observes that phenomenon:

When Donald Trump was indicted on criminal charges in New York City two months ago, I tried to make sense of the political fallout with my colleague Nate Cohn, The Times’s chief political analyst. After poring over traditional markers about fund-raising and poll numbers, Nate mentioned another standard I’ve been thinking about over the past few days: Do Trump’s legal challenges make him more (or less) fun?

The question is awkward, as it suggests that the reasons some Americans are drawn to politicians are divorced from the seriousness of their office. But after Trump’s arraignment in federal court in Miami this week, I’m reminded of its importance. Nate wasn’t calling Trump fun as a self-evident fact, but rather identifying a set of voters who are attracted to showmanship and celebrity, are distinct from Trump’s base and follow politics only casually, if at all.

These voters matter for Trump’s 2024 campaign. Five percent of Trump’s voters in 2016 were disengaged from politics, a study by Democracy Fund, a pro-democracy group, found, and that is the type of margin that made a difference in such a close contest.

What distinguishes this group? Perhaps you have a friend who doesn’t care about politics, but can’t believe Trump said THAT. Or who recognizes the belittling nicknames he bestowed on Republicans in the 2016 primary, like “Little Marco” Rubio and “Lyin’ Ted” Cruz, monikers that have stuck beyond Republican circles.

Such awareness is part of the effect of Trump’s celebrity and ability to command attention in ways no other candidate can. When Trump was at his political peak, that quality extended beyond his most ardent supporters to political outsiders who were attracted to his style — or were at least entertained by it.

2024 challenge

Ahead of the 2024 election, though, Trump’s crusade for supporters is failing to live up to his 2016 effort. At both of Trump’s arraignments, the number of people who came to the courthouse to defend him was smaller than expected. I’ve heard from Republican leaders — on Capitol Hill and in early voting states like Iowa — who say they have gotten fewer calls defending Trump than they anticipated. Even his return to CNN, in a widely criticized town hall last month, fell short of the ratings that Trump once delivered for cable networks.

Perhaps most important, Trump himself looks miserable. Even as Republican voters have largely rallied behind him, and even as he remains the front-runner to secure the Republican nomination despite his cascading legal problems, he appears to be wrestling with the reality that his freedom is in jeopardy.

“Some birthday,” he grumbled in Miami this week, ignoring a clear attempt by supporters to cheer him up on the week he turned 77.

According to my colleagues Shane Goldmacher and Maggie Haberman, who have closely followed Trump’s political career, his speech in New Jersey after his arraignment brought down the mood of the party instead of jump-starting it. Trump turned what was meant to be a moment of defiance into a familiar litany of grievances. He invoked the tone of personal victimhood that Republicans have told me cost them votes in the 2022 midterms, when Trump focused on the lie that the 2020 election was stolen from him.

It’s not just that the indictments distract Trump from laying out an affirmative vision for the country. They can also stop him from being the most free version of himself.

In a competitive Republican primary where another candidate can gain traction with the electorate (a possibility that remains to be seen), Trump’s inability to summon his freewheeling style is the type of difficult-to-quantify factor that can keep him from securing votes — and leave opportunities for opponents.

Trump can, of course, return anytime to the unconstrained approach that won him so much attention in 2016 and since. His Republican primary competitors are already dreading the amount of media coverage they will lose this summer to his indictments, my colleagues Jonathan Swan and Jonathan Weisman reported.

Yet these factors are part of the reason that many Democrats feel good about a potential matchup between President Biden and Trump. They argue that the electorate is simply exhausted with the chaos that he brought to national politics and that his legal troubles are a reminder of that aspect of his presidency. What was once fun (for some) no longer is.

I think this is an important factor. The Trump show has always been a huge part of his appeal. (God knows why…) If he gets too dour and too, dare I say, boring, there is a not negligible portion of his voters who may look elsewhere. Or, just as likely, not bother to vote. It’s not as if his rivals are Mr and Mrs excitement.

We’ll see. He may get his mojo back. But the only change he’s made to his act is to whine about his personal troubles and that may be getting old even for some of his ardent cult members. Self-pity isn’t a good look for anyone.