The right is systematically boycotting everything they love. Out of hate.
Let’s see how this goes over:
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This piece in the Guardian by Moira Donegal nails it:
On Monday, Jim Pillen, the Republican governor of Nebraska, signed a law that bans abortion after 12 weeks of pregnancy and restricts gender-affirming care for anyone under 19. The ban on trans medical care takes effect in October and the abortion ban goes into effect immediately. And so Nebraska has become the latest state to determine through law what might have once been determined by the more pliable tools of custom or imagination: the way that the sexed body a person is born with shapes the kind of life they can live.
Be it through forced pregnancy or prohibited transition, the state of Nebraska now claims the right to determine what its citizens will do with their sexed bodies – what those bodies will look like, how they will function and what they will mean. It is a part of the right’s ongoing project to roll back the victories of the feminist and gay rights movements, to re-establish the dominance of men in public life, to narrow possibilities for difference and expression and to inscribe in law a firm definition and hierarchy of gender: that people are either men or women and that men are better.
They’re not alone. Abortion bans have been proliferating wildly in the year since the US supreme court eliminated the right in their Dobbs decision, declaring that any state can compel women to remain pregnant, and creating different, lesser entitlements to bodily freedom and self-determination based on sex. But as the abortion bans have spread like an infection across the American south, midwest, and mountain west, they have been accompanied by a related political disease: laws seeking to prohibit minors and sometimes adults, from accessing medical treatments that facilitate gender transitions.
Twenty-five states have enacted pre-viability abortion bans since Roe was overturned last summer, although in some states, like Iowa and Montana, abortion has remained legal pending judicial stays. Meanwhile, 20 states now ban gender-affirming care for minors, with a rush of bills being introduced over the past months. In addition to Nebraska, a slew of states have passed transition-care bans in 2023, including Utah, Mississippi, South Dakota, Iowa, Tennessee and Florida. Texas is soon to join them.
It is not a coincidence that the states which have the most punitive and draconian bans on abortion have also adopted the most aggressive targeting of transgender people and medical care. The bills are part of the same project by conservatives, who have been emboldened in their campaign of gender revanchism in the wake of Dobbs. Both abortion bans and transition care bans further the same goal: to transform the social category of gender into an enforceable legal status, linked to the sexed body at birth and to prescribe a narrow and claustrophobic view of what that gender status must mean.
It is no accident that the states that would forbid a teenager from transitioning are the same that would compel that teenager to give birth; it is no accident that the states with the greatest control over what women do with their reproductive organs are the ones where women’s restrooms have become sites of surveillance and control, with patrons, cis and trans alike, subjected to invasive and degrading inquisitions as to whether they are conforming sufficiently to the demands of femininity. That Nebraska combined these two projects into one bill, then, is less inventive than it is a dropping of pretense: the anti-feminist movement is anti-trans, and the anti-trans panic is at its core anti-feminist.
The attacks on gender freedom from the right are not only united in their ideology, but increasingly in their rhetoric. Abortion and trans rights activists have long insisted that both abortion and transition are healthcare. It’s an apt and worthy argument, considering that both involve the interventions of medical professionals, both facilitate the wellbeing and happiness of those who receive them, and both result in horrific health complications when denied, from the high rates of mental distress and horrific, needless pregnancy complications that have been ushered in by Dobbs, to the dramatic rates of suicidal ideation and mental health problems in trans people who are denied the ability to transition. But increasingly, the right has begun to attack the notion of abortion and trans rights as healthcare, arguing that neither pregnancy nor non-transition constitute “illness”.
At a recent oral argument over the fate of the abortion drug mifepristone, Judge James Ho, a Trump appointee on the fifth circuit court of appeals whose rabidly conservative opinions and trollish affect suggest supreme court ambitions, argued that the drug should be removed from the market in part because “pregnancy is not a serious illness”. “When we celebrate Mother’s Day,” Ho asked, his voice dripping with contempt, “are we celebrating a serious illness?” In that moment, Ho sounded uncannily like anti-trans activists seeking to ban care for young people, who argue, ad nauseam, that “puberty is not a disorder”.
The rhetoric suggests a narrow and myopic view of “health”, the notion that bodies have destinies and should be made to fulfill them regardless of the desires of the people involved. A healthy body, we’re told, is one that conforms to socially imposed gender hierarchies, regardless of how miserable that conformity and imposition makes the people who inhabit those bodies.
But while these practices of abortion and transition care constitute medicine and while their outcomes encourage health, it would be a mistake to fight the political battle for these services only on the ground of what counts as “healthcare”. Because the truth is that conservatives do not care about health – they don’t care about the integrity of the medical profession, or about patient outcomes, or about bodies, not really.
This is absolutely true. If the pandemic showed us anything it was that. And this forced gender conformity is an old patriarchal story that’s having a major revival. The women and the gays have gotten way way too uppity and need to be put back in their proper place.
If you’ve ever wondered about intersectionality, this is the perfect example.
BTW: I just saw a story that Target’s stock price is taking a nosedive do to this ridiculous controversy over PRIDE gear. Bud Light sales are down too. These people are having an effect and it’s kind of terrifying to watch it happen.
And there will be a next time
By the time you read this, it’s possible that the debt ceiling saga will finally be over. Senate leaders have said they have the votes to pass it and as of this writing, Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., is set to call for a vote on the package immediately — and unless he is completely inept (which is very possible), that means he knows he has the votes. Of course, anything can happen with this volatile, slim GOP House majority, as we learned during the epic speaker vote back in January. They like the drama and we may get some yet. But at this moment it appears that the deal struck by McCarthy and President Biden over the weekend is likely going to pass on a bipartisan basis over the objections of some on both the left and right, avoiding a default and any ensuing economic catastrophe.
This agreement has left a sour taste in the mouths of progressives who were led to believe that the Democratic leadership in Congress and the White House had learned their lesson from past debt ceiling showdowns and were not going to engage this time. There is intense frustration in the Democratic ranks over the GOP’s repeated hostage-taking with demands for cuts to vital programs while they behave like responsible leaders whenever a Republican is in the White House and thus engage in budget negotiations in good faith.
This time, Republicans got cuts to programs that help people but a lot of suffering was left on the cutting room floor so they feel cheated. Democrats got a reprieve from the next hostage crisis until after the election and the world was spared a default on the debt. That’s really about it. Nonetheless, there isn’t any question that the Democrats will provide enough votes to get it over the line (unless there is a mass defection among Republicans.) They aren’t terrorists and the default sword of Damocles still hovers.
The Freedom Caucus, on the other hand, is having a temper tantrum and whining about not having time to read a hundred-page bill. Or, at least some members are.
McCarthy ally Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., has been promoting the deal as a huge win and her cohort Matt Gaetz, R-Fl., has been playing the role of savvy insider, moving the goalposts by saying that “if McCarthy tries to pass the debt ceiling bill with Democrats and a minority of Republicans, he would violate his deal with the Freedom Caucus when he became Speaker and would trigger an immediate Motion to Vacate him from the Speaker’s chair.” (It flows from the longstanding “Hastert Rule” which holds that a Republican speaker doesn’t put any vote on the floor that won’t pass without a majority of Republicans, even if the bill would pass the House without it. But triggering an immediate Motion to Vacate is a new twist.) Nobody’s ever heard of that “deal” before but it does help McCarthy if the rest of the Freedom Caucus goes along with the pretense that this was ever at issue. McCarthy still faces the distinct possibility of losing the gavel if just one of his members raises that motion and four decide to vote against him because Gaetz’s feint notwithstanding, there are a number of caucus members, mostly among those who were holdouts against McCarthy in that 15 rounds of voting, who are not happy with the deal.
The ringleader of the opposition seems to be Texas Rep. Chip Roy who said it’s a “betrayal of the power sharing arrangement that we put in place” and contends that if they can’t stop the bill, “then we’re going to have to then regroup and figure out the whole leadership arrangement again.” I think we know what he’s referring to there. According to CNN, Roy claimed that McCarthy had made yet another backroom deal that nobody knew about which would have required a unanimous GOP vote in the Rules Committee to vote out a piece of legislation so it could go to the floor for a vote. That demand was put to bed on Tuesday when Rules Committee and Freedom Caucus member Thomas Massie, R-Ky., voted to allow the bill to go to the floor. Now the action is all in the caucus as a whole.
But it appears that there are still several House members who are at least open to the idea of removing the Speaker over this agreement:
These people are being helped by some of the presidential candidates, none of whom were very interested during the negotiations but who are suddenly against the deal.
Mike Pence gave a typically mealy-mouthed response: “Congress’ debt limit deal doesn’t just kick the can down the road, it uses Washington smoke and mirror games to make small reforms while weakening our military at a time of increasing threats from foreign adversaries.” (The military budget wasn’t touched, but whatever.) Ron DeSantis finally weighed in telling “Fox and Friends” that “our country was careening toward bankruptcy” before the deal was struck “and after this deal, our country will still be careening toward bankruptcy.” Nikki Haley, meanwhile, pointed out that DeSantis had voted to raise the debt ceiling in 2018 and Trump signed it into law, saying that “the best way to fix Washington’s spending addiction is to elect people who have not been part of the problem.”
The only person we haven’t heard from as I write this late on Tuesday night is former president Donald J. Trump, which is odd since he has said numerous times that the GOP House should let the country default if they don’t get everything they want and “the kitchen sink,” too. You’d think he’d be out there slamming the deal, wouldn’t you? It’s unusually savvy of him to be this cautious but perhaps all the losing people and positions he’s endorsed finally convinced him that his popularity doesn’t extend to anyone but himself. He could not care less about the substance so why waste the effort?
We won’t ever know what might have happened had President Biden stuck to his original stance that there would be no negotiation over the debt ceiling but considering how relatively docile the Republicans have been with the deal, it seems pretty clear that despite their caterwauling they weren’t as gung-ho to go over the cliff as they pretended to be. There’s a lesson in that somewhere but whatever it is I’m going to assume no one will remember it the next time the Republicans take the country hostage again. And there will be a next time.
If this deal accomplished anything, it was to guarantee that if Joe Biden wins re-election but the Republicans hold the House, we’ll be right back here in 2025 playing the same stupid game. If the Democrats don’t abolish this monstrous terrorist weapon the next time they get the trifecta, it will be unforgivable.
“I somehow thought (the war) was far away”
At least eight drones hit Moscow on Tuesday, leaving only minor damage to two residential buildings and minor injuries but also uneasiness in Russia.
The Guardian reports:
There has been no suggestion that US-made drones or munitions were used in the attacks on Moscow. There has been speculation that at least one of the drones involved was a UJ-22 produced by a Ukrainian company.
Another Guardian report on the attacks:
According to Russian authorities and media, eight drones were involved in the attack, with five shot down or otherwise disabled with jamming technology. Russian media close to the security services said the number was many times higher, with more than 30 drones participating in the attack.
[…]
The attacks seem designed to bring the war home to Russia’s capital, underlying both the fact that Ukraine is capable of skirting Russian air defences repeatedly and that it has the capacity to strike deep inside Russia.
Axios reports:
Mykhailo Podolyak, a top adviser to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelesnky, claimed Ukraine was not “directly involved” but was “watching with pleasure.”
- Two people were injured, three apartment buildings were damaged, and a number of apartment blocks were evacuated, Moscow’s mayor said.
- Russian President Vladimir Putin — who only rarely responds publicly to events related to the war — accused Ukraine of “terrorist activity,” and said Russia’s air defenses had worked relatively well but would be strengthened.
- Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov claimed Ukraine launched the attack in response to “very effective strikes on a command center” in Ukraine.
- Russian officials have tried to downplay the attacks, some of which seemed to target an upscale neighborhood. Some nationalist commentators have expressed concern that the drones were able to reach Moscow unimpeded.
Podolyak posted to WhatsApp that “Ukraine is not directly connected to the nighttime drone attack in Moscow. There is no strategic sense in this.”
The White House responded that the U.S. does not support attacks inside Russia but has not accused Ukraine of the attacks.
AFP adds:
Tatiana Kalinina, a pensioner who lives near one of the affected buildings in a leafy corner of Moscow, said the attack was “completely unexpected” for her and a “bad surprise.”
“I somehow thought (the conflict) was far away, that it would not affect us,” she told AFP, standing in the bright green grass outside a cordoned off building.
“And then, suddenly, it came to us.”
Meanwhile, in Ukraine, per the Washington Post:
On Tuesday, Russia attacked Ukraine with 31 drones over five hours, almost all of them directed at Kyiv, Ukrainian air defense forces wrote on Telegram.
Falling debris from an intercepted drone killed a 33-year-old woman and injured at least 13 people in the city and surrounding region, said Ivan Vyhivskyi, acting head of Ukraine’s national police.
Dozens of residents reported damage to homes, offices, shops, garages and vehicles.
Ukrainian military officials said Russia was using drones to pinpoint the location of Ukraine’s air defense systems.
“They are trying … to draw themselves a map of the entire operation,” Natalia Humeniuk, a spokeswoman for Ukraine’s southern command, told Ukraine’s Channel 5 on Tuesday.
At The Bulwark, Brynn Tannehill considers what the delivery of F-16s to Ukraine will and won’t do for the Ukrainians. They won’t likely take to the air before the end of the year and are unlikely to “change the balance on the battlefield any time soon.”
The aging F-16s should, however, “be useful for defending Ukraine against Russian cruise missiles (e.g. Kh-101 and Kh-555) and Iranian-made Shahed-131/136 drones. Ukraine’s stockpiles of Soviet-era S-300 surface-to-air missiles has been dwindling, and there are a limited number of Patriot missiles available. The F-16’s air-to-air capability will help those ground-based defenses last longer.”
This war is a slog. For Putin it suggests his dreams of a rebuilt Russian empire are not going anywhere soon.
And it doesn’t always stick
“WTF?!” a niece’s glance shot my way from down the pew. Graduation ceremonies at her cousin’s Christian high school followed the Pledge of Allegiance with a second pledge, this time to the Christian flag.
Wait. What? There’s a Christian flag?
It was a suburban church school, not the home-schools of the Washington Post profile, “The revolt of the Christian home-schoolers.” But it was a subculture related to the one Christina and Aaron Beall grew up in:
Aaron and Christina had never attended school when they were children. Until a few days earlier, when Round Hill Elementary held a back-to-school open house, they had rarely set foot inside a school building. Both had been raised to believe that public schools were tools of a demonic social order, government “indoctrination camps” devoted to the propagation of lies and the subversion of Christian families.
At a time when home education was still a fringe phenomenon, the Bealls had grown up in the most powerful and ideologically committed faction of the modern home-schooling movement. That movement, led by deeply conservative Christians, saw home schooling as a way of life — a conscious rejection of contemporary ideas about biology, history, gender equality and the role of religion in American government.
Christina and Aaron were supposed to advance the banner of that movement, instilling its codes in their children through the same forms of corporal punishment once inflicted upon them. Yet instead, along with many others of their age and upbringing, they had walked away.
“People who think the public schools are indoctrinating don’t know what indoctrination is. We were indoctrinated,” Aaron Beall says now. “It’s not even comparable.”
Taking their daughter to her first day in public school was a refutation of everything their home-schooling indoctinated them to, and the abuse that came with it.
There were still moments when they were condemned by an inner voice telling them that they were doing the wrong thing, that both they and their children would go to hell for abandoning the rod and embracing public schools. But the voice was usually silenced by their wonder and gratitude at the breadth of their children’s education.
Sarah Jones writes at New York magazine that she too was a member/participant/victim of Christian home-schooling:
The Bealls and I are roughly the same age, and I too belonged to the Joshua generation, though my parents appear to be less extreme than their own. Even so, my education was a haphazard affair. My parents homeschooled me for seven years. I also spent two years in a fundamentalist Christian school and three in public school before heading off to a conservative Evangelical college. Like the Bealls, I have rejected the Christian homeschool movement and its political goals. If we were once the Joshua generation, we have since become something much harder to define.
That ambiguity is not what our parents hoped for us. Yet no parent, however controlling, can fend off independence forever. Self-determination is the inheritance of age. A child comes to understand their parents not as the titanic figures of their youth but as people with foibles and pains of their own. That process is uncomfortable for all involved, but it is inevitable, and it can have political implications, too. Indoctrination is heady, but it doesn’t always stick.
I don’t know how common it is for people to leave this subculture as adults. My social circle is not a reliable source of data: It is full of friends who have left either the Christian homeschool movement or the broader conservative world. Some of us grew up in homes characterized by abuse and neglect, but not all. Most are liberal or leftist, but not all. Michael Farris, who coined the term Joshua generation and founded the Homeschool Legal Defense Association before working for the Alliance Defending Freedom, has his own theories. He blames a fraction of homeschooling parents for their extremism. “I view this as the fringe of the fringe,” he told the Post. “And every kid that I know that has lashed out at home schooling came out of this.”
The Post feature is a deeper look into the movement than we usually see, and more immersion than I had at that brief church-school graduation. The graduate that day eventually wound up working for a New York fashion magazine. As Jones wrote, “Indoctrination is heady, but it doesn’t always stick.”
They’re at each others’ throats
This is my daily dose of schadenfreude. Remember: snitches get stitches…
With three anticipated indictments, two ongoing court cases, and an ever-expanding cadre of lawyers, former President Donald Trump is at a critical juncture—and yet his legal advisers are starting to turn on each other.
According to five sources with direct knowledge of the situation, clashing personalities and the increasing outside threat of law enforcement has sown deep divisions that have only worsened in recent months. The internal bickering has already sparked one departure in recent weeks—and that could be just the beginning.
As Trump’s legal troubles keep growing—with criminal and civil investigations in New York City, Washington, and Atlanta—so too does the unwieldy band of attorneys who simply can’t get along.
The cast of characters includes an accused meddler who has Trump’s ear, a young attorney who lawyers on the team suggested is only there because the former president likes the way she looks, and a celebrity lawyer who’s increasingly viewed with disdain. Worst of all, now that federal investigators have turned the interrogation spotlight on some of Trump’s lawyers themselves, defense attorneys on the team seem to be questioning whether their colleagues may actually turn into snitches.
“There’s a lot of lawyers and a lot of jealousy,” said one person on Trump’s legal team, explaining that the sheer number of lawyers protecting a single man accused of so many crimes is without parallel.
Part of the concern over lawyers turning on each other is due to the fact that the Department of Justice already has one Trump attorney’s professional notes, which could position him as a future witness against his own client, and the DOJ has another lawyer who said too much in an unrelated case and has positioned herself as yet another potential witness against her client.
But much of the anger from Trump’s lawyers is directed at the former president’s right-hand man, Boris Epshteyn, who’s accused of running interference on certain legal advice from more experienced courtroom gladiators.
Epshteyn, who’s a lawyer himself, has risen through the ranks in Trumpworld over the years, first as an adviser for Trump’s 2016 campaign, then as a more senior adviser for 2020, and now part of Trump’s innermost circle for 2024.
Epshteyn seems to have the former president’s supreme confidence, with what’s described as a final say on all matters related to public relations and legal issues. But there’s snickering in the shadows. Several sources ridiculed the way Epshteyn refers to himself as “in-house counsel”—normally a term for a company’s corporate attorney—noting how it echoes the way John Gotti’s mafia lawyer used to describe his services for the infamous Gambino crime family.
Epshteyn’s meddling has particularly affected the lawyers working to defend Trump from Department of Justice Special Counsel Jack Smith and his investigation into whether the former president broke the law when he took top secret documents on his way out of the White House in January 2021 and hoarded them at Mar-a-Lago.
“Boris pissed off all the Florida lawyers. People are dropping like flies. Everybody hates him. He’s a toxic loser. He’s a complete psycho,” said a second person, who could barely contain their anger while discussing the matter. “He’s got daddy issues, and Trump is his daddy.”
A source close to the campaign gave a much kinder assessment of Epshteyn: “He is absolutely focused on protecting President Trump from every angle—legal, political, and media.”
Regardless, the infighting came to a head recently, sparking the departure earlier this month of Tim Parlatore, one of the lawyers in the Mar-a-Lago classified documents case.
Parlatore’s sudden departure from Trump’s legal team came after a never-reported meeting last month at Mar-a-Lago, where several lawyers threatened to leave. According to two sources who described it as “an intervention,” the lawyers handling the case put forward an ultimatum: either Epshteyn goes or they do.
Four sources described how Epshteyn would at times stand guard between Trump and his own defense lawyers, demanding that all communication flow through him. One of these sources noted that Parlatore’s first ever one-on-one meeting with his own client was when the defense lawyer recently submitted his resignation.
[…]
This source suggested that, at this stage—with three different criminal investigations closing in and multiple trials scheduled to interrupt the election season—it’s inevitable that high-powered lawyers fully capable of representing someone like a former American president would chide at being questioned by someone like Epshteyn. Another person described him as “a really super-smart guy” who still manages to be “obnoxious, vociferous, and bombastic” because “he has a law license.”
“It doesn’t mean he’s really a lawyer,” this person said.
The closest anyone on the team has come to publicly hinting at in-fighting was Parlatore in a CNN appearance last week, in which he blamed Epshteyn for doing “everything he could to try to block us, to prevent us from doing what we could to defend the president.”
But as another Trump lawyer, Alina Habba, said days later on that same TV news network: “You have type A personalities. We’re all lawyers, and not everybody’s always going to get along.”
Epshteyn declined to comment on the record, but a Trump 2024 campaign spokesman moved to create distance between the remaining lawyers and the departing counsel.
“Mr. Parlatore is no longer a member of the legal team. His statements regarding current members of the legal team are unfounded and categorically false,” Steven Cheung told The Daily Beast.
Then there’s the 33-year-old Lindsey Halligan, a relatively inexperienced lawyer who suddenly appeared in Trump’s orbit sometime last summer as a vocal advocate on the right-wing Steve Bannon’s War Room podcast. She was at Mar-a-Lago during the FBI’s search there in August, quickly became involved in Trump’s bumbling lawsuit in October against CNN for comparing Trump to Hitler, and has since been generally involved in his defense against the feds.
Fellow attorneys advising Trump have seriously questioned why she’s on the team, given that the most notable case she worked on since graduating from law school in 2013 appears to have been second-chair to a more senior lawyer defending an insurance company at a two-day trial against three Miami homeowners with damaged roofs. Even in that case, a judge wouldn’t award her attorney’s fees because he ruled that her team screwed up and didn’t act “in good faith.”
“It waters down the honor to represent a president. It really does, when you think about it,” one of her colleagues told The Daily Beast.
Two current members of Trump’s defense speculated that Trump only keeps Halligan around because he likes to be surrounded by attractive people.
Halligan did not respond to multiple requests for comment. But another colleague came to her defense.
“With a new person coming in, people are looking to undercut her. She’s a young, attractive woman, and people can be pretty sexist,” this person said, noting that such speculation about her hiring was “an easy way to undercut a woman attorney.”
Another Trump source also disputed the characterization, saying Halligan is “a highly experience litigation attorney and served as a partner at one of the largest law firms in Florida.”
Trump’s mounting legal problems have only added to the general anxiety afflicting his attorneys.
The Manhattan District Attorney’s Office, which indicted Trump in March for faking business records, is about to dump thousands of documents of evidence on defense lawyers Todd Blanche, Susan Necheles, and Joe Tacopina—who aren’t allowed to freely share those documents with the former president. They may even have to fight Trump to prevent him from stupidly posting sensitive details on social media.
The DA’s prosecutors are already trying to fracture Trump’s legal team by attempting to disqualify Tacopina and make him seem like a weak link, because he has a tenuous connection to a key witness in the case, the porn star Stormy Daniels whose hush money payment Trump tried to hide while running for president back in 2016.
Meanwhile, defense attorneys Alina Habba and Christopher Kise are gearing up for a civil trial in October against the New York Attorney General, who seeks to bleed the Trump Organization dry and destroy Trump’s ability to do conduct business in the financial capital of the world by holding him personally liable for bank and insurance fraud.
In Georgia, the defense lawyers Drew Findling, Melissa Goldberg, and Jennifer L. Little are preparing for the Fulton County District Attorney to indict Trump in July or August over the way he intimidated the state’s top elections official in 2021 while trying to overturn his loss there—a recorded phone call where he was advised by yet other lawyers he trusted.
And an entirely different team of lawyers split up between the nation’s capital and his oceanside Florida estate—former federal prosecutors M. Evan Corcoran, John P. Rowley, and Jim Trusty up north and Halligan down south—are gearing up for two different fights with the Department of Justice.
Meanwhile, there’s growing resentment against Habba and Tacopina among the some lawyers over the way they handled Trump’s recent rape trial against the journalist E. Jean Carroll. The former president didn’t bother showing up to testify, his attorneys presented no case, and the jury swiftly concluded he committed sexual abuse. One source commended the duo for putting up a fight while dealing with a no-bullshit federal judge and a client who wouldn’t stop digging himself into a hole. But others ripped Habba for failing to get better rulings from the federal judge before the trial and tore into Tacopina over his brutish performance in court.
“She quickly demonstrated herself to have a total lack of understanding, and he totally screwed that case up. That was a winnable case if he presented a defense,” one source said.
While Trump’s sprawling legal battalion occasionally comes together for massive meetings about the overall pitiful state of affairs, each case team operates in its own lane—raising suspicions that some teams are completely under-equipped and could cause others to trip up. Trump has so many simultaneous criminal investigations that they have to coordinate to not double book potential appearances in court—or trials. And they all have to bear in mind that he’s actively campaigning for president of the United States.
But what’s really driving the deepest distrust is the way Smith’s investigators have started turning up the heat on Trump’s own lawyers, driving wedges between the counselors and their client.
It happened when a federal judge, citing the existence of a possible crime, unilaterally and speedily handed prosecutors Corcoran’s professional notes—an odd and highly questionable move involving what are normally highly guarded secrets.
And it happened when those prosecutors questioned Habba, who put herself in an impossible situation when she declared in the New York AG’s case that she thoroughly searched every nook and cranny at Mar-a-Lago for documents relevant in that business fraud case—only to have the FBI later find classified documents in those desk drawers and cabinets months later.
“It’s either perjury or incompetence,” said one insider.
Several attorneys on Trump’s team consider these two events as potential liabilities, given that the feds could pressure them to become witnesses against their client.
The DOJ case is getting so hot, some lawyers have begun to see it as radioactive to their careers. One lawyer on Trump’s team emphatically told The Daily Beast, “I have nothing to do with that. I have a law license to protect.” Another stressed they might slam the eject button before it gets much worse.
“It’s crazy in there. It really is. I’ve heard there’s a mess coming,” this person said.
This is just like the Trump White House which too many people ascribed to his genius at pitting his staff against each other to achieve the best result. In reality it was just him looking for the people who licked his boots most energetically.
We know how that chaos endangered the country. Now it’s endangering his ability to stay out of jail. Good.
Feel the magic
The NY Times reports that Christie thinks he can win. Hookay. I doubt it very seriously because the campaign is already chock full of assholes and there really isn’t room for another one. But he can perform a useful service. He’s going to go after Trump and DeSantis:
Allies of former Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey have formed a super PAC to support him in the nascent Republican primary, as he makes preparations for a likely campaign kickoff in the next two weeks, according to an official with the group and others briefed on the matter.
Mr. Christie’s candidacy is likely to to focus in part on drawing a stark contrast with former President Donald J. Trump. Mr. Christie supported Mr. Trump in 2016 and worked with him during his presidency, but they split over Mr. Trump’s claims on election night in 2020 that the race was stolen from him.
People who have been close to Mr. Christie for years are leading the outside group, Tell It Like It Is, which is laying the groundwork for an imminent announcement, one of the people briefed on the matter said. Brian Jones, an aide who advised Senator John McCain’s presidential bid in 2008 and Mitt Romney’s in 2012, will run the effort.
Mr. Christie “is willing to confront the hard truths that currently threaten the future of the Republican Party,” Mr. Jones said in a statement. “Now more than ever we need leaders that have the courage to say not what we want to hear but what we need to hear.”
It took him long enough. In fact, it wasn’t until he knew Trump had lost that he changed course:
A central challenge of this campaign will be explaining to voters his transformation. He endorsed Mr. Trump in 2016, helped him with debate prep and acted at times as an informal adviser during his presidency. Then, in the earliest hours of Nov. 4, 2020, Mr. Christie split with him when he questioned Mr. Trump’s declaration that there had been widespread fraud in the election.
“We heard nothing today about any evidence,” Mr. Christie said in an appearance on ABC News. “This kind of thing, all it does is inflame without informing. And we cannot permit inflammation without information.”
Since then, Mr. Christie has become a full-throated critic of Mr. Trump, talking as a former federal prosecutor about the former president’s legal travails and describing him as a loser who can no longer command the crowds he once did. Mr. Christie’s candidacy is being watched by donors who either like what he’s saying or see him as the best opportunity to damage Mr. Trump, particularly from a debate stage.
And like some other candidates, such as former Vice President Mike Pence, Mr. Christie appears to be banking on the notion that there are enough vestiges of the old Republican Party to which he can appeal…
Mr. Christie is hoping to tamp down some of the grievance that has seeped into the roots of political discourse in the Republican Party since Mr. Trump became the party’s nominee in 2016. Mr. Christie is approaching the race, allies say, with the goal of delivering a hopeful message.
I dunno. Chris Christie as the “hope and change” guy? Really?
I don’t think he’s going to be able to help himself with DeSantis:
Mr. Christie has also repeatedly taken shots at Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, the distant second to Mr. Trump in most public polls, describing Mr. DeSantis’s fight with Disney in particular as an overreach.
“Where are we headed here now that, if you express disagreement in this country, the government is allowed to punish you? To me, that’s what I always thought liberals did. And now all of a sudden here we are participating in this with a Republican governor,” Mr. Christie said last month.
Let the games begin.
This is starting to shape up as a real knock down drag out. I expect Trump will still win but it’s going to be brutal. Couldn’t happen to a nicer bunch of fascists.
Enjoy
Steve Benen fills in the background:
If this subject sounds at all familiar, it’s not your imagination. In October 2019, while campaigning in Iowa, Biden was asked whether he might follow Gerald Ford’s example in pardoning Richard Nixon after Watergate, at a time when the Republican still faced possible prosecution. Biden said he would choose a different course.
“It wouldn’t unite the country,” Biden said, adding, “I think President Ford, God love him, he’s a good guy, I knew him pretty well. I think if he had to do it over again, he wouldn’t have done it.”
The topic returned to the fore in May 2020, when Biden joined Stacey Abrams for a virtual town hall-style event on MSNBC, and a voter, referencing the Ford/Nixon example, asked Biden whether he’d publicly commit to a more hands-off approach and leave such matters in the hands of prosecutors.
“Absolutely, yes,” the future president replied. “I commit.”
Of course, in 2019 and 2020, the prospect of Trump being indicted was entirely hypothetical. The Republican had not yet tried to overturn his election defeat, for example, and he hadn’t yet refused to return classified materials he improperly took to his glorified country club in Florida.
But in 2023, the question has become highly relevant. The former president has already been indicted once, and no one in either party would be especially surprised if more charges soon follow. Biden wouldn’t be able to pardon his predecessor in response to state charges — in New York and Georgia, for example — but the incumbent president would at least have the authority to intervene in the event of federal indictments.
Biden, however, has said he has no intention of doing so, and the fact that he literally laughed off a question about this yesterday suggested he hasn’t changed his mind.
It’s a safe bet the public would see plenty of commentary about how nice it would be for Biden to be magnanimous in the spirit of bipartisan comity, but by all appearances, if Trump is looking to his successor for a get-out-of-jail-free card, he should keep his expectations low.
I’m pretty sure Biden will pardon Trump when hell freezes over. But I’m also sure that DeSantis will do it and probably any other Republican as well, even the “good ones.” To bind up the nation’s wounds, dontcha know.
Buckle up
From what I’ve read, the Rules Committee is considered the Speaker’s Committee. It is stacked with members of the speaker’s party and is considered to be a rubber stamp for anything he or she wants to bring to the floor. This is the case regardless of party. So this little mess is unusual:
Rep. Chip Roy accused House Speaker Kevin McCarthy on Monday of cutting a deal that could complicate negotiators’ efforts to pass a bill to raise the US debt ceiling this week.
But McCarthy’s allies quickly refuted the Texas Republican, underscoring the tension ahead of a key meeting of the House Rules Committee on Tuesday – and putting new pressure on a conservative holdout, Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky, who has yet to take a position on the plan.
Roy contended that McCarthy cut a hand-shake deal in January that all nine Republicans on the powerful panel must agree to move any legislation forward, otherwise bills could not be considered by the full House for majority approval. That would essentially doom the debt ceiling bill since Roy – who sits on the panel – and another conservative committee member are trying to stop the bill from advancing.
“A reminder that during Speaker negotiations to build the coalition, that it was explicit both that nothing would pass Rules Committee without AT LEAST 7 GOP votes – AND that the Committee would not allow reporting out rules without unanimous Republican votes,” Roy tweeted.
Senior GOP sources acknowledged that there was an agreement for seven Republican committee members to agree to move forward in order to advance a bill to the floor, but they flatly dispute that there was a deal for all nine to sign off for legislation to advance.
“I have not heard that before. If those conversations took place, the rest of the conference was unaware of them,” said Rep. Dusty Johnson of South Dakota. “And frankly, I doubt them.”
The dispute is significant because Roy sits on the committee – which is divided between nine Republicans and four Democrats – as does GOP Rep. Ralph Norman of South Carolina. Both men have emerged as leading foes of the bipartisan debt limit bill to avoid a June 5 default, arguing it does little to rein in government spending.
A third conservative who sits on the panel – Massie – has been mum about how he plans to handle the rule vote in committee. McCarthy agreed to name all three men to the panel as part of the promises he made during his hard-fought speaker’s victory – all to give more power to conservatives on committees, including on Rules, which is typically stacked with the speaker’s closest allies.
If Massie were to join Roy and Norman and vote against the rule at Tuesday’s meeting, he could effectively stall the measure in committee.
But in January, Massie told CNN he was reluctant to vote against rules to stop bills in their tracks.
“I would be reluctant to try to use the rules committee to achieve a legislative outcome, particularly if it doesn’t represent a large majority of our caucus,” Massie said at the time. “So I don’t ever intend to use my position on there to like, hold somebody hostage – or hold legislation hostage.”
Democrats on the committee may also vote for the rule, sources told CNN, and that would ensure it has the votes to advance to the floor. But if Massie were to oppose the rule, only six Republicans would be in favor of it, complicating McCarthy’s efforts to bring the plan to the floor since he previously agreed to only take up bills with the backing of seven committee Republicans.
Massie’s office declined to comment on how he may vote on Tuesday, and neither Roy nor the speaker’s office responded to requests for comments on the Texan’s assertion.
But Republicans close to McCarthy refuted the notion that bills could only advance with unanimous GOP support in the committee.
“I’m a rules guy,” Johnson said. “And when I checked, there wasn’t a rule that something has to come out of Rules Committee unanimously. Now Chip is a rules guy too. So I think he’s going to understand that, that this is a majoritarian institution, and that ultimately, we’re going to serve Americans the best way that the majority of us know how – that’s going to be to pass this bill.”
Other McCarthy allies agreed.
“I don’t know what Speaker McCarthy agreed to, but that has not been something that any of us were familiar with,” Rep. Stephanie Bice of Oklahoma said. “I think that comment was that it had to be unanimous to come out of the Rules Committee to go to the floor is the tweet that I read. And I think that is inaccurate, at best, but I don’t know because I wasn’t in the room. I don’t know how you would have something like that functionally work.”
Massie has now said that he will vote the bill out so that seems secure for the moment. But it doesn’t account for the handshake deal Roy and his allies say McCarthy made to require that all Republicans vote any bills out of the Committee.
I think there’s going to be a motion to vacate. These wingnuts are working themselves up into a frenzy. And McCarthy doesn’t have much room to maneuver. The question is whether they raise it before or after the vote.
There’s a lot of angst in the caucus. Here’s the allegedly “normal” Republican, much beloved by the whole Village press:
Stay tuned.
The polls are all going in the wrong direction for DeSantis:
Nearly half (45%) 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% think he is probably the strongest candidate. Just one-third of GOP voters say another Republican would definitely (13%) or probably (19%) be a stronger candidate than Trump.
Among voters who name Trump as their top-of-mind preference for the GOP presidential nomination, 74% say he is definitely the strongest candidate the party can put up against Biden and 21% say he probably is. Among those who express support for another candidate or have no choice at this stage, nearly 4 in 10 still feel Trump is either definitely (23%) or probably (16%) the strongest nominee the GOP can field. Only 22% of this group says the strongest Republican contender would definitely be someone other than Trump and 33% say it would probably be another candidate.
“If your main argument to Republican voters is that Trump wouldn’t be the party’s strongest nominee, you’ve got a heck of a challenge ahead of you,” said Patrick Murray, director of the independent Monmouth University Polling Institute. “There’s a bit of a chicken and egg problem with assessing electability. As we found in our polling during the 2020 Democratic primaries, if voters back a candidate based on issues or character they also tend to feel that candidate is the most electable. However, this still underscores the larger point in this poll. If your message to voters who support Trump is he cannot win, you are going to hit a brick wall. Even if you eat into the group who thinks he is only ‘probably’ the strongest candidate, you may still not capture enough of the Republican electorate to overcome Trump’s hardcore base support.”
When asked without any prompting whom they would like to see as the Republican nominee for president in 2024, 43% of GOP-aligned and leaning voters name Trump. This is similar to his 41% support level in March and up from prior polls (33% in February and 26% last December). DeSantis is named by just 19%, which marks a steady decline from 39% in December (including 33% in February and 27% in March). No other candidate breaks out of the single-digits as a top-of-mind preference for GOP voters, which has been the case since Monmouth started polling the 2024 contest late last year. Even in a hypothetical 4-person contest with named candidates, Trump (56%) and DeSantis (25%) command the lion’s share of support. The other specified candidates in this scenario, former Vice President Mike Pence and former U.N. Ambassador and South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, each muster just 7% support.
In a hypothetical head-to-head contest between just the top two contenders, 56% of GOP voters would choose Trump for the party’s nomination and 35% would pick DeSantis. Back in February, DeSantis (53%) had more support than Trump (40%). That shifted to an evenly divided contest in March (47% Trump and 46% DeSantis). Currently, Trump now holds an advantage in practically every Republican voting bloc, with the noticeable exception of college graduates. Three months ago, DeSantis led among major demographic groups within the party.
Trump convinced them that he actually won 2020 in a landslide. Why wouldn’t they think he’s the most likely to win again? And since the cowardly clown car that’s running against him won’t say any different they have no reason to question their logic. It’s pathetic.