There has been an enormous amount of hand-wringing over a recent ABC news poll that showed Joe Biden losing to Trump if the election were held today. The keening, the crying, the rending of garments from otherwise reasonable people was astonishing considering that it was just one poll, we are a long way from the election and most of them are old enough to remember when Barack Obama was toast in 2011 when his numbers were underwater. And yes, back then there was a ton of nervous chatter about replacing him on the ballot with someone else, putting up a serious primary and all the rest. So this is something Democrats do and it’s one their most annoying traits.
As Democrats coalesce around him as their inevitable nominee, President Biden still narrowly leads former President Donald Trump in a 2024 general-election matchup, according to a new Yahoo News/YouGov poll.
Yet the results also expose significant vulnerabilities for Biden — including his advanced age and the widespread perception that his running mate, Vice President Kamala Harris, would not be “ready to assume the presidency” if necessary.
The survey of 1,584 U.S. adults, which was conducted from May 5 to 8, shortly after Biden announced his reelection bid, comes on the heels of a Washington Post/ABC News poll that showed him trailing Trump by 6 percentage points and suffering the lowest approval rating of his presidency — much to the consternation of Democrats from the White House on down.
But the new Yahoo News/YouGov poll detects no such decline for Biden, suggesting that the Washington Post/ABC News survey may be an outlier.
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Not only that:
Bidens age is a problem. It was last time too. There’s nothing to be done about it except face it head on and just let it unfold. It’s not like his rival is a picture of mental acuity. After all, he couldn’t recognise either of his two ex-wives in a picture! As Joe Biden always says, “don’t compare me to the almighty, compare me to the person I’m running against.”
The election will be driven by negative partisanship as elections are these days. It’s not pretty but it is what it is. And it’s important. We’ve already endured four years of that obnoxious piece of garbage and we can’t afford to do it again. We just have to make sure that MAGA is defeated … as many times as it takes.
On Monday of this week, Variety reported that Fox News is experiencing a burst of new advertising sales in the 8 o’clock hour formerly held by the recently fired celebrity Tucker Carlson. He had had the dubious distinction of having cable news’ top ratings for his time period but scaring away most respectable companies from buying time on his show. So it’s possible that despite the ratings slump the time slot has been experiencing since his departure, the network won’t actually suffer any more losses than they already did in their epic $787 million settlement with Dominion voting machines.
They may also be saving a few dollars if it turns out that Tucker Carlson’s latest move results in his breaching the reported non-compete clause in his contract worth $25 million. Carlson posted a twitter video on Tuesday announcing that he’s going to resume his show on twitter as a way of striking a blow for free speech against all the rest of the lying media. If you haven’t seen it, here it is in all its glory:
Since we know that Carlson is interested in money more than anything on earth (I wrote about that here) it stands to reason that the second richest man in the world who also happens to own Twitter, Elon Musk, must have offered him a bundle to give up 25 million dollars. However, after Carlson made his announcement, Musk tweeted:
On this platform, unlike the one-way street of broadcast, people are able to interact, critique and refute whatever is said. And, of course, anything misleading will get @CommunityNotes.
I also want to be clear that we have not signed a deal of any kind whatsoever. Tucker is subject to the same rules & rewards of all content creators. Rewards means subscriptions and advertising revenue share (coming soon), which is a function of how many people subscribe and the advertising views associated with the content.
I hope that many others, particularly from the left, also choose to be content creators on this platform.
Carlson’s announcement came shortly after it was reported that he had filed suit against Fox for fraud and breach of contract which Axios argues positions him “to argue that the non-compete provision in his contract is no longer valid — freeing him to launch his own competing show or media enterprise.” Apparently, they believe that he can make the case that Fox breached the contract before Carlson did when they failed to protect his good name as they supposedly promised to do.
But be that as it may, considering his intense avariciousness, it seems unlikely that Tucker Carlson would make this big announcement without some assurance that he will be paid big bucks for using twitter as the base for his future blatherings. But that’s what appears to be happening.
Obviously, nobody really knows what’s going on with Tucker Carlson in the wake of his firing. The endless speculation about just what it was that broke Rupert Murdoch’s back runs the gamut of the geriatric patriarch being upset that his former fiance said Tucker was a messenger from God to Carlson sending racist and misogynistic emails to his firing being a secret condition of the Dominion settlement. (Both Fox and Dominion deny that.) None of it sounds particularly convincing and it’s not clear that even Carlson knows the real reason.
He must be struggling emotionally a bit and it shows. After all, he has now officially been fired by every cable news network and according to Nicholas Confessore’s in-depth profile of Carlson in the New York Times, the earlier firings left painful scars that led him to the almost desperate lurch to the extremist right he took once he landed his 8pm slot on the last network that would have him. Just this week there were more emails released in which Carlson whined about Trump’s election lies and lamented “it’s so sad. He’s going to break some s***. He already is. Wish I knew where to run. But I’ll die here.” He didn’t even get that dubious privilege.
The D-list right wing news channels all want him of course. Newsmax has even offered to change its name to his. (The Tucker Network?) And there are half a dozen possibilities in the podcasting and streaming realm that do bring in serious cash. But Carlson reportedly doesn’t want to do any of those things, at least not yet, and seems to be intrigued by the idea that Musk the great entrepreneurial genius that he is, is going to create a new television experience on twitter and nobody will ever be able to fire him again.
As Ben Smith at Semafor pointed out, however, that’s easier said than done. He writes, “Musk continues to race through discarded Twitter business models as he seeks to reinvent the platform.” Smith notes that he himself was involved in an earlier version of this at Buzzfeed and it showed promise but ultimately failed because the twitter platform is just not conducive to this kind of engagement:
A former Twitter employee who worked on it told me today that the core issue with attempting to shift Twitter toward television is the contrast between the requirement that you sit still to watch a show and the basic Twitter experience of scrolling.“It’s doomscrolling versus doomstaying,” the former Twitter employee said. The notion that Carlson could build a significant video business on Twitter, he said, was “stupid.”
As far as Musk’s dream is concerned, it might be reassuring that Musk says he wants “content creators” from the left to contribute, but his own political preferences are obvious and they are not just right wing, they are downright conspiratorial, so I wouldn’t get my hopes up for a “let a hundred tweets bloom” campaign to take off. His idea of free speech is to allow the worst people in the world to intimidate anyone they choose so the platform is unlikely to be more than yet another annex in the right wing echo chamber before too long. Tucker Carlson being a marquee attraction can only hasten its descent.
Carlson’s lawsuit and announcement sound an awful lot like someone else we know, the so-called “demonic destroyer” himself: Donald Trump. Filing angry lawsuits claiming that everyone is lying about everything and then taking to a social media platform to keep the brand alive until the next move is right out of old number 45’s playbook. Trump, however, always had his next chapter planned out from the moment he launched his pathetic little cult channel. He knew he was going to run for president again. Tucker Carlson has said he has no intention of doing that and he’s run out of real television networks so all he really has left is something like this.
And as new media journalist Kara Swisher quipped a couple of weeks ago when Carlson tweeted an earlier video from what she called his Wayne’s World basement studio: “he looks astonishingly smaller now.” Indeed he does.
Donald Trump’s believers, Sarah Longwell finds, are as committed as ever to their man-boy-love-god despite standing indictments and indictments yet to come:
“As far as a mug shot goes, he’s going to market the hell out of that,” said Chris, a two-time Trump voter from Illinois, imagining a future arrest. “Every one of us is going to buy one of those shirts.” Most hands went up when I asked who would buy one.
Republicans “are in a trap of their own making,” Longwell writes in The Atlantic:
They thought that by covering for Trump they were tapping into his power, but they were actually giving away their own—mortgaging themselves and their reputations to Trump’s lies and depravities. By defending him then, they have made it impossible to credibly accuse him of anything now.
This problem is compounded by the deep relationship that Trump has cultivated with Republican voters. He’s been a constant presence in their lives for eight years—or, for Apprentice fans, much longer. They defended him on Facebook and argued about him over Thanksgiving dinners. Millions of them have voted for him twice.
[…]
Unless the Republican field coalesces around an alternative soon, Trump will almost certainly cruise to the nomination—just as he did in 2016. Today, Trump is in the pole position, and gaining. Fox and CNN lifted their shadow bans on him. And, thanks to the indictment, he’s back in his sweet spot of aggrieved victimhood.
It’s MAGA’s sweet spot too.
Longwell’s encounters with GOP voters suggested to me why they are so opposed to everything woke, even if Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ attacks on wokeness are beginning to wither under Donald Trump’s attacks on him.
Trump invaded the GOP and turned Republicans into pod people. The party verges on collapsing into a lifeless husk, replaced with soulless drones intent on domination. It’s no wonder they see wokeness as a threat. It’s what keeps the rest of us from turning into shrieking pods.
Biden’s numbers bad for Biden, but Trump’s indictments are not for Trump?
CNN broke news Tuesday night that federal prosecutors have filed criminal charges against New York Rep. George Santos (R). Coverage for now is informed speculation at best. The charges won’t be unsealed until later today when Santos is expected to appear in court in the eastern district of New York.
“When someone has committed as much apparent fraud as Santos has,” Marcy Wheeler notes, “there’s no telling what the real story behind all that fraud is.” So we wait.
Special Counsel Jack Smith and Fulton County, Georgia prosecutor Fani Willis have yet to file federal and state charges against Trump for as much apparent criminality as Trump has committed. So we wait. As Trump continues to run for president again in 2024, we wait.
Walter Shapiro writes in The New Republic that problematic polls for Presdident Biden are no cause for concern for Democrats. His age, his poll numbers, and polling matchups between Biden and Trump ignore the bigger picture.
(And why exactly are Biden’s numbers bad for Biden, but Trump’s and his indictments are not a death rattle for Trump’s 2024 ambitions?)
Biden may never be a compelling candidate, Shapiro reminds readers, and his age does trouble voters. At least he’s stable:
But every election is a choice between two candidates, not a quest for a modern-day Pericles. And whether GOP voters choose Trump the Sexual Abuser or another candidate from the right-wing fever swamps, that nominee is going to come with more baggage than a 1930s movie star on a trans-Atlantic crossing.
Unless the GOP miraculously picks someone like Asa Hutchinson, the former Arkansas governor and ardent anti-Trumper, the Republican nominee will find it impossible to locate the political center even with a guide and a compass. From abortion to book banning, the Republicans are saddled with the politically unpalatable side of almost every emotionally potent issue except immigration. And if the nominee is Ron DeSantis, he may never live down the Peggy Noonan line that he “carries a vibe … that he might unplug your life support to re-charge his cellphone.”
Good line. Had missed that one. Damned accurate.
Negative partisanship drove Democratic victories in 2018 and 2020, and its undertow sucked the overhyped 2022 red wave down to a ripple. How many Americans will go the to polls to vote for “an unhinged president motivated only by ego and revenge”?
As for Biden’s sharpness, he was sharp enough on Tuesday not to be baited by a reporter into accepting the GOP’s framing of the debt negotiations:
REPORTER: Speaker McCarthy said that he asked you numerous times if there was anywhere in the federal budget for cuts, but he did not get an answer, so–
BIDEN: He got a specific answer. He got a specific answer again, today.
REPORTER: Which is what?
BIDEN: Well, you didn’t listen, either, so why should I even answer the question? We cut the deficit by $160 billion, b-i-l-l-i-o-n, dollars on the Medicare deal. We cut the deficit by raising the tax on people making–55 corporations that made $40 billion to 15%. And the list goes on. So–
REPORTER: But in terms of what he is proposing, is there any room for negotiation?
BIDEN: What’s he proposing? Did he tell you?
REPORTER: He talked about–
BIDEN: No, no, I’m not being facetious. Did he tell you what he’s proposing?
REPORTER: He was talking about the bill.
BIDEN: Yeah, but what does it propose? Do you know? I’m not being a wise guy. You all are very, very informed people. Do you know what that bill cuts?
REPORTER: He–there is a long list of things that it cuts.
BIDEN: No, it doesn’t say it. Does it say what it’s going to cut? Or just say generically it’s going to cut?
BREAKING: George Santos is in custody in the federal courthouse. He was charged with seven counts of wire fraud, three counts of money laundering, one count of theft of public funds, and two counts of making materially false statements to the House of Representatives.
Democrats need to understand that we can win big in 2024. It will take a lot of hard work, significant financial investment, and the right strategy, but we go into this election with a lot of confidence that we have a strong chance at a Democratic trifecta. cc @ProgressiveLuxhttps://t.co/RCWyiZqW1p
Former congresswoman Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.), who has vowed to do everything she can to keep Donald Trump from returning to the White House, launched a television ad Tuesday warning viewers that the former president “is a risk America can never take again.”
The ad is running on CNN before and during a high-profile town hall scheduled Wednesday night on CNN featuring Trump — now a 2024 candidate — taking questions from voters in New Hampshire.
The 60-second spot, which Cheney narrates but in which she does not appear, is funded by her political action committee. It recounts Trump losing the 2020 election to Democrat Joe Biden and lying to his followers about the results. Then, Cheney says, “he mobilized a mob to come to Washington and march on the Capitol” on Jan. 6, 2021.
“Trump was warned repeatedly that his plans for January 6th were illegal,” Cheney says, as images of the Capitol being overrun are shown. “He didn’t care, and today he celebrates those who attacked our Capitol. Donald Trump has proven he is unfit for office.”
The ad shows footage of the pro-Trump mob storming the Capitol, attacking members of law enforcement and searching the building for Vice President Mike Pence.
Cheney’s narration echoes her assessments as the vice chairwoman of the now-disbanded House select committee that investigated the attack.
Wednesday night’s town hall at St. Anselm College in Manchester, N.H., will be Trump’s first appearance since the 2016 campaign on CNN, a network he frequently disparages.
“They made me a deal I couldn’t refuse!!!” Trump said in a post Tuesday on Truth Social, his social media platform. “Could be the beginning of a New & Vibrant CNN, with no more Fake News, or it could turn into a disaster for all, including me. Let’s see what happens?”
I noticed that CNN talking heads were saying that Cheney has no influence, nobody in the GOP cares what she says etc, etc.
This is very worrisome. If CNN is really seeing this as an opportunity to raise their ratings we’re going to have a problem.
I will be very interested to see if CNN asks him about the sexual battery verdict at the Town Hall tomorrow night. Over/under?
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) said Tuesday that he signed a major piece of legislation aimed at weakening public sector unions by making it harder for them to collect dues from members.
Senate Bill 256 forbids most unions representing government employees from having dues deducted directly from workers’ paychecks. It also requires that affected unions maintain at least 60% membership in their bargaining units, or else they could face decertification and lose their contracts.
The new law will force public sector unions to develop new ways of getting dues from members — such as setting up electronic bank transfers — and will also imperil the existence of those unions that don’t meet the 60% threshold.
Although DeSantis and other Republicans have cast the bill as “paycheck protection” for workers, they excluded unions representing police, firefighters and corrections officers — i.e., the unions that are typically more likely to support Republicans. The unions that are subject to the law tend to represent teachers, sanitation workers and other government employees.
He does these things in the most blatantly partisan way possible for a reason. And it’s not just because he’s trying to avoid pissing off the base. He’s openly appealing to authoritarians who want a strong man to mercilessly kick the shit out of their enemies. He thinks he is that guy.
I don’t know that there are enough people in this country who want that sort of thing to put him in the White House. And I don’t think he has the personality or physical presence to convey that even to the people who are looking for it. But that’s his message and he’s sticking to it.
I think we’ve all probably pored over Timothy Snyder’s little booklet “On Tyranny: 20 lessons for democracy” more than a few times over the past few years. (If you haven’t, get it. It’s worth it.) Anyway, I was intrigued by this piece by William Saletan for the same reason:
I set out to research the story of Graham’s relationship with Trump because I wanted to understand how authoritarianism arose in the United States. I wanted to see how the poison worked: the corruption, the rationalizations, the vulnerabilities in the system. I wanted to learn how democracies could detect such threats and counteract them.
Here are some of the lessons I learned.
Emerging authoritarianism doesn’t look like an ideology. It appears in the form of a demagogue. It’s easy to support him while laughing off the idea that you’re embracing authoritarianism.
Celebration of fear is a warning sign. When a demagogue brags about intimidating his enemies, and when voters and politicians flock to him for that reason, look out. Maybe he knows who the real villains are. Or maybe he’s the sort of person who attacks anyone in his way.
Authoritarian voters are the underlying threat. In every country, there are people who want a leader to break institutions and rule with an iron fist. These voters form a constituency that can lure politicians to embrace such a leader. At a minimum, they can deter politicians from opposing that leader. And if he loses power, the next authoritarian can exploit the same constituency.
Political parties are footholds for authoritarians. An aspiring strongman doesn’t have to gain power all at once. He can start by capturing a party and becoming its flagship candidate. This gives everyone in the party a reason to help him.
Politicians are blinded by their arrogance. They think they can manipulate an emerging authoritarian by collaborating with him. They underestimate the extent to which what they see as an alliance—but is really subservience—will corrupt and constrain them.
Politicians are misled by personal contact with the authoritarian. He may seem charming or manageable, but that’s because he’s among friends and flatterers. These situations don’t reflect how he’ll treat people who get in his way.
Cowardice is enough to empower an authoritarian. He doesn’t need a phalanx of wicked accomplices. He just needs weak-willed politicians and aides who will go along with whatever he does. Every country has plenty of those.
Authoritarianism is a trait. Politicians can always find reasons why this or that corrupt act by an authoritarian isn’t prosecutable or impeachable. These excuses gloss over the underlying problem: his personality. If he gets away with one abuse of power, he’ll move on to the next.
Democracy becomes a rationale to serve the authoritarian. Once he wins a nomination or an election, politicians can exalt him as the people’s choice. They can use this mandate to dismiss criticism of his conduct and to reject any attempt to remove him from office.
Power becomes a rationale to serve the authoritarian. Once he’s in office, politicians can tell themselves that by defending him, they’re earning his trust, gaining influence over him, and steering him away from his worst impulses.
Rationalization becomes a skill and a habit. The first time you excuse an authoritarian act, it feels like a one-time concession. But each time you bend, you become more flexible. The authoritarian keeps pushing, and you keep adjusting.
Ad hoc legal defenses become authoritarianism. Each time the leader abuses his power, apologists claim he has the authority to do so. Over time, as he commits more abuses, these piecemeal assertions of authority add up to a defense of anything the leader chooses to do.
Normalization and polarization are enough to create a mass authoritarian movement. People get used to a strong-willed leader, and their partisan reflexes kick in. If the leader is in your party, you may feel an urge to attack anyone who goes after him. You become part of his political army.
Exposure of the authoritarian’s crimes galvanizes his base. His supporters turn against the media, the legislature, law enforcement, and any other institution that investigates him. They view his accumulating scandals as more evidence that the true villains are out to get him.
Demonization of the opposition paves the way to tyranny. It lowers the moral threshold for supporting the leader. You must defend him, no matter what he does, because his enemies are worse.
A party detached from its principles becomes a cult. Once the party begins to shed prior beliefs in deference to a leader, it loses independent standards by which to judge him. The party becomes the man, and dissent from him becomes heresy.
Democracy’s culture of compromise is a weakness. Over time, an authoritarian’s will to gain and wield power grinds down politicians who are content to negotiate among competing interests. As he relentlessly imposes his will, they find reasons and ways to accommodate him.
Civil servants are easily smeared and purged. Some of them might investigate, expose, or refuse the leader’s corrupt orders, since they weren’t appointed by him or elected on his ticket. But that independence makes them easy to attack as “Deep State” conspirators who are subverting the people’s will.
It’s easy to provoke and exploit violence without endorsing it. You just say the election was stolen, and the president’s followers take it from there. Then, after their rampage, you warn that any punishment of him might drive them to violence again.
It’s easy to rationalize ethnic or religious persecution. Demagogues tend to use any division in society—ethnic, sexual, religious—as a wedge against their enemies. A skilled politician can excuse this behavior on the grounds that bigotry is only the method, not the motive.
This is part of Saletan’s super interesting deep dive into what happened to Lindsey Graham. It’s not about what a servile fool he is — he is used as a representative for the entire Republican party:
Many other journalists have written about Graham and Trump. Most of them have focused on the personal relationship between the two men. They examine the ways in which Graham’s evolution was distinctive.
I’m not interested in what’s distinctive about Graham. I’m interested in what isn’t. How does his story illuminate what happened to the whole Republican party? How did the poison work?
We need to answer these questions because the authoritarian threat is bigger than one man. Donald Trump’s ascent to the presidency destroyed the myth that the United States was immune to despotism. Our institutions and the people who run them are vulnerable. We have to confront these vulnerabilities and learn how to deal with them before our democracy is threatened again.
So why focus on Graham?
First, because he was a central player in the Republican party’s capitulation to Trump. And second, because he talked constantly. He produced an enormous trove of interviews, speeches, press briefings, and social media posts. Through these records, we can see how he changed, week to week and month to month. We can watch the poison work.
It’s a slow death. The surrender to despotism doesn’t happen all at once. It advances in stages: a step, a rationalization. Another step, another rationalization. The deeper you go, the more you need to justify. You say what you need to say. You believe what you need to believe.
The verdict found him guilty of sexually abusing and defaming Carroll to the tune of over 5 millions dollars. The verdict was unanimous (which it does not have to be in a civil trial) and the jury included at least one MAGA wingnut who admitted that a far right youtuber was his main source of news, which says something.
Trump was not found guilty of rape, however. According to legal commentary on MSNBC, it was probably because while she clearly knew he penetrated her with his fingers, she felt something else but she couldn’t see if it was his penis. (Fingers don’t count in a rape charge, I guess.)
He has been found guilty by a jury of sexual battery and defaming his victim. This is how the right is dealing with it:
Minutes after Donald Trump was found liable for sexual abuse and defamation, a Newsmax guest calls it a "major win" for Trump: "Don't worry about the money. Whether it's $4 or 5 million, that means nothing to Trump. He did not want to be labelled a rapist" pic.twitter.com/nzwyJUbl5O
