Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

ABC obtained recordings of DeSantis’ debate prep in 2018. DeSantis. It’s clear he hasn’t improved in the last five years. The man is, as we’ve seen, unlikable and thin-skinned. It’s interesting though, that he’s always been very concerned about not “pissing off” Trump voters. He’s not alone, of course. Every Republican office holder is almost incontinent at the mere idea of such a thing.

Anyway, here was Ron DeSantis getting ready to debate Andrew Gillum in 2018. Note that the two Florida Republicans helping him have already endorsed Donald Trump:

During his first bid for statewide office in 2018, Ron DeSantis was grappling with a key issue that he could soon face again during his potential 2024 bid for the White House: how to not alienate Donald Trump’s base.

“Is there any issue upon which you disagree with President Trump?” DeSantis was asked by Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz in footage exclusively obtained by ABC News of the team’s mock debate sessions during DeSantis’ 2018 run for governor.

“I have to figure out how to do this,” then-Congressman DeSantis replied, while letting out a deep sigh.

“Obviously there is because, I mean, I voted contrary to him in the Congress,” DeSantis continued. “I have to frame it in a way that’s not going to piss off all his voters.”

DeSantis goes on to suggest that he would respond by saying he would “do what I think is right,” and “support [Trump’s] agenda.”

“If I have a disagreement, I talk to him in private,” he said.

ABC News obtained nearly two and a half hours of raw internal tapes of DeSantis’ 2018 debate prep sessions that have not previously been made public. His comments in the videos provide a rare glimpse into how the Florida governor, who is now poised to enter the 2024 Republican primary, had previously calculated how to effectively appeal to Donald Trump’s fiercely loyal base while also working to carve out his own lane as a candidate — a balance that DeSantis may need to hone if he is to secure the party’s nomination in 2024.

A representative for DeSantis declined to comment when contacted by ABC News.

These new videos come amid ABC News’ recent reporting that DeSantis’ team has already quietly begun debate prep for the upcoming GOP primary, including reviewing past debate performances, sources familiar with the preparations have said. DeSantis is now likely to skip announcing an exploratory committee, despite previous reports, and instead is expected to launch a full campaign next month, sources said.

In the 2018 tapes, DeSantis at times stands behind a podium sparring with his advisers — which include Gaetz and then-state representative Byron Donalds — as they role-play DeSantis’ opponent and work through issues and possible responses to a range of questions, including whether he would accept funding from the NRA.

“Has the NRA donated to me?” DeSantis asks his team at one point.

“I don’t think the NRA is quite the boogeyman the Democrats think it is,” he says later.

Gaetz and Donalds, now both Republican members of Congress from Florida, have both endorsed Trump’s third bid for the White House in 2024.

The tapes, which depict two separate debate prep sessions during DeSantis’ 2018 gubernatorial campaign against Democrat Andrew Gillum, also show DeSantis’ team privately working through what they raise as the governor’s likability issues.

During one session captured on video, an adviser suggests that DeSantis should immediately write the word “LIKABLE” in all caps on the top of his notepad when he gets to the podium on debate night.

“I do the same thing, ’cause I have the same personality, we’re both aggressive,” the adviser, who is off camera, tells DeSantis.

“You want to have that likable, dismissive tone, and not condescending,” an adviser tells DeSantis during an off-camera exchange at another point in the video, to which DeSantis responds: “Yeah, definitely.”

At another point in the session, DeSantis dismisses some of his team’s suggestions regarding how to hit at his opponent.

“Some of the ones that are digs, I don’t think they work,” DeSantis, who is off camera, can be heard saying. “I think it makes me look like an ass—-.”

Sources tell ABC News that during DeSantis’ primary debate prep in recent weeks, his team has been paying close attention to how to help manage the governor’s facial reactions.

DeSantis’ facial expressions were on display during his recent trip to Japan when he was asked a question about trailing behind Trump in polls. His animated answer to the question went viral, with one clip garnering nearly 20 million views.

“Ron always had a problem with letting attacks get to him and getting visibly shaken by them,” one former adviser, who was previously involved in debate prep with DeSantis, told ABC News. “Not sure how that would play with Trump standing across from him.”

The following is one of the memes that he cannot shake, just like the helmet picture above. Note that the tweet is from a rabid Trump supporter…

This exhortation for women to have as many babies as they can possibly have is a huge part of the Great Replacement Theory. And don’t ever kid yourself — by that they mean the great “dark” Replacement Theory. It’s white women who they want breeding like rabbits. (See: Viktor Orban)

This is the intersection of racism, xenophobia and misogyny. Anti-birth control and abortion as a way of forcing the white majority to have very large families so as not to be “out-bred” by the people of color. It’s really not all that complicated.

Here is an example of how that idea is being mainstreamed:

The Deseret News is under fire for promoting an op-ed that praised Tucker Carlson’s views, even after The New York Times unveiled what appears to be a racist text message he sent after the Jan. 6 insurrection.

Driving the news: The Deseret News, which is operated by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, posted a piece late Tuesday in which conservative opinion writer Bethany Mandel extolled Carlson’s advice to have “Mormon levels of children.”

-At about the same time, The New York Times reported Carlson wrote a text message on Jan. 7, 2021, about a group attack on an “Antifa kid,” saying that’s “not how white men fight.” The message was cited in a lawsuit by Dominion Voting Systems, which Fox settled a week before firing Carlson.

-The Desert News continued to promote Mandel’s story on social media after the Times report gained broad attention.

The intrigue: Mandel wrote a political column for the Deseret News until March, when her controversial tweets about race and ethnicity resurfaced after she stammered through an attempt to define “woke” in a viral video interview.

-The newspaper’s editor, Hal Boyd, told Axios at the time that Mandel was “no longer contributing political opinion and culture pieces for the Deseret News, but from her perspective as a mother of six, she will write longer essays and reported features related to parenting and family life.”

What they’re saying: After intense pushback on social media, Boyd tweeted Wednesday: “Tucker was a negative influence on public discourse … But his comments on family relationships highlighted in [Mandel’s] piece were interesting.”

-Neither Boyd nor Mandel responded to Axios’ request for comment.

Meanwhile, supporters of Mandel argued her piece was about family, not politics, and therefore conformed with her assignment at the newspaper.

Yes, but: Carlson’s exhortation to have more children, delivered to Fox’s overwhelmingly white audience in 2021, occurred alongside a pattern of advancing a xenophobic argument known as “replacement theory.”

-Encouraging larger families is central to that conspiracy theory.

Details: “Replacement theory,” or “great replacement” holds that immigrants and other people of color are “replacing” white and natural-born American citizens and will eventually control the country.

Catch up quick: Carlson described “birth rates among native-born Americans” as “the clearest possible measure of optimism in the future.”

-He invited guests like former Iowa Rep. Steve King to his show, who complained: “We have to do something to increase our birth rate, or the vacuum … will be filled by people who don’t believe in our values.” He’s also railed against declining birth rates in relation to immigration.

-Carlson has decried “demographic change” and complained last week that his ouster from Fox amounts to censorship of the topic.

Zoom in: Mandel’s own piece said Carlson’s views of “demographic change and our falling birth rates” deserve more attention.

Between the lines: “By publishing Mandel’s column, the editors assist her in laundering Tucker Carlson’s racist Great Replacement ideology,” said Blair Hodges, a church member who hosts the faith-related podcast “Fireside” and operates the Jazz Fans Against Racism Twitter account.

-“There is nothing Carlson or Mandel offer that couldn’t be explored using more responsible sources,” Hodges told Axios.

The other side: Carlson claimed his arguments aren’t racist because he says immigrants are “replacing” declining populations of natural-born citizens of all races, not just white people.

-Carlson’s critics — like The Hill’s Briahna Joy Gray, who conducted the interview Mandel botched in March — say while he’s “fastidiously race-neutral,” the mask slips in his objections to historic immigration reforms that ended discriminatory quotas against racial and ethnic minorities.

-In a 2021 open letter to Fox News, the Anti-Defamation League’s director said Carlson’s language was “not just a dog whistle to racists – it was a bullhorn.”

The bottom line: Carlson himself blames Democrats for falling birthrates, and fertility decline has been a popular right-wing talking point for years.

-It’s unclear how Mandel’s promotion of Carlson’s views on family planning can be separated from politics, given the context of his campaign for larger families.

Axios is also featuring another big Tucker “scoop” saying that he’s going after Fox and he’s getting all kinds of offers and will likely start his own media company which Bill O’Reilly modeled for him. Wait, what? Is Bill O’Reilly still around? The whole things sounds very dicey to me. If I had to guess, by the time Tucker gets whatever legal impediments out of the way and a new media company up and running, no one will care much about him anymore. Wingnuts are notoriously fickle when it comes to their media heroes. Glenn Beck, anyone?

I’m sure he can bring in millions whatever he does. There are enough suckers to guarantee that. But the influence he had is not going to be the same outside Fox. Unless CNN hires him as their top anchor (which isn’t out of the realm of possibility) I think his star is rapidly waning. His most likely future is as a milder Alex Jones, which is bad enough.

I think we’ve all had our eyes opened about the dangers of letting this extremist GOP take over state houses. They’re building a farm team for national politics and it’s scary as hell. Just take a look at Florida if you want to feel the hair on the back of your neck stand up.

Howie Klein sent this out to Blue America members this morning.

And In The Process Help Your Favorite Candidate Win $1,000 From Blue America

We’ll get into the contest in a second; I just want to make sure that you know that the Virginia legislative elections are this year, 2023, not next year like most elections.

We’re trying to flip the House of Delegates blue and expand the narrow Democratic lead in the state Senate. Blue America has identified 5 crucial progressive races for this contest, 2 for Senate seats and 3 for House seats.

So here’s how the contest works— if you contribute to a candidate through this ActBlue page or any combination of candidates, your e-mail address is entered in a random drawing and one contributor— regardless of amount you give— will win the RIAA-certified Nimrod double platinum award, which was originally given to Howie Klein, then president of Green Day’s record company, now treasurer of Blue America. It’s a beautiful, custom award and would look gorgeous on any wall, but especially on the wall of any Green Day fan you might know.

The contest will run from Sunday, May 7 until midnight on Saturday night May 13 at midnight (technically May 14). And if you really want the Green Day record but can’t afford to make a contribution, send us a postcard to

Blue America PAC
PO Box 27201
Los Angeles, CA 90027

and let us know, and you’ll be in the drawing too!

If you’d rather enter by sending a check, you can send it to that PO box too. Please consider digging a little deeper this week and helping out in Virginia, whether you live there or anywhere else in the U.S.

Just one entry per e-mail address and if you’re a supporter of any of these candidates, there’s a special built into the contest.

The candidate who brings in the most contributions (not the most dollars, the most people– one entry per email address), will get a $1,000 check from Blue America. In these legislative races, $1,000 can make all the difference in the world. And these state legislative races can too.

Both the leaders of Congress, Speaker Kevin McCarthy and Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries got their starts in their respective state legislatures. And many of the most effective members of Congress did as well— like Ted Lieu (CA), Jamie Raskin (MD), Ruben Gallego (AZ), Cori Bush (MO), Jerry Nadler (NY), Bonnie Watson Coleman (NJ), Barbara Lee (CA), Morgan McGarvey (KY), Adam Schiff (CA), Steve Cohen (TN), Ilhan Omar (MN), Nikema Williams (GA), Tammy Baldwin (WI), Jeff Merkley (OR), Summer Lee (PA) and Pramila Jayapal (WA).

In fact, I first met Pramila when she was in the Washington state legislature. She’s very enthusiastic about this contest. “State legislatures across our country,” she told me, “write laws that change the lives of millions across each state, and create blueprints for federal legislation. These can be incredibly positive measures that do things like raise the wage or fight climate change. But as we’ve seen recently they can also be incredibly damaging like bans on abortion access and legislation targeting trans kids. Legislative races couldn’t be a more important tool in fighting back against extremism across our country.” And just to remind you about what a great band Green Day is… and what a great album Nimrod is…

Click here to cast your vote.

Is unsorting America even possible?

Bill Bishop’s “The Big Sort,” considered Americans’ tendency to self-segregate into communities “with people who live, think, and vote like we do.” There are also economic consequences to that. Inequality follows.

American society has “become less random” as it has “become more unequal,” observes Princeton sociologist Dalton Conley. He offers a quirky thought experiment in The New Yorker on how, had we the will, we might tackle inequality resulting from geography and the birth lottery. His answer to the problem that “when rich people are asked to pay more in taxes, or to send their children to school with poorer kids, they tend to move,” is a lottery of another sort.

But is inequality a problem for most Americans? Or do they see inequality as “the way things are.” Meritocracy, the prosperity gospel, and royalist sentiment argue vigorously for the status quo. Whatever. Conley’s is a thought experiment:

The core issue is that our social contract is based on place: we make decisions and fund our government in a fundamentally local way. This means that, the more we live in separate clusters, the less incentive we have to help one another, and that creates a feedback loop that worsens with time. Meanwhile, our political divisions deepen. We are more geographically polarized by social attitudes and partisanship than at any time since the Civil War. This is true across regions, within states, and even among neighborhoods. Political scientists argue about why this is happening—but nobody disputes that it is taking place.

Conley suggests a taxing lottery that follows us wherever we go:

What if, instead of paying taxes where we reside, and then reaping their benefits locally, we sprinkled taxation and revenues randomly—and therefore evenly—across the United States? What if, instead of paying a third of my taxes to New York City and State, I instead paid them to Pod No. 2,264—a group to which I was randomly assigned by a lottery the year I turned eighteen? What if, instead of camping out on the sidewalk the night before the school-enrollment date in hopes of getting my kids into a well-funded public school, I received a monthly check from Pod 2,264 that was meant to pay for my children’s schooling wherever I wanted to send them? In such a system, the retreat of affluent people from the places where they live doesn’t matter. In fact, it doesn’t matter where anybody lives. Nobody can escape contributing to the public sphere, no matter how far they move.

I’m already skeptical. First, because the rich would never consent to such a system and, second, because they’d manage to divert their funds away from public schools to private ones, as they are doing today with vouchers. But do go on.

Organizing everyone into randomly assigned pods may sound insane—and it isn’t likely to happen anytime soon, or at all—but it isn’t any crazier than the way things are set up now. Today, the vast inequalities across school districts, cities, counties, and states depend upon boundaries that evoke a prior, agrarian epoch. The whole idea that we should make policy by parish stems from the Elizabethan Poor Laws, which, at the end of the sixteenth century, set up hyper-local social safety nets; in a time of small-scale agriculture and cottage industries, when economies were regional and most people died within miles of where they were born, hyper-locality made sense. But it doesn’t make sense anymore.

Agreed. What to do about it? Having studied John Rawls and still having my draft card from the Vietnam-era draft lottery somewhere though, let’s see where Conley’s going.

In the midst of the Vietnam draft lottery, the political philosopher John Rawls proposed his own idealized blueprint for a fairer society, in a book called “A Theory of Justice.” In his imagined world, we cast our votes not from our current stations in life but from what he called the “original position”—a Platonic state in which we don’t know what place in the world we might occupy. Imagine if the federal budget were hashed out not by Nancy Pelosi and Mitch McConnell but by unborn souls who had no idea whether they would come into the world poor or rich, Black or white, male or female. Rawls argued that, in such a reality, utilitarianism—the pursuit of the greatest good for the greatest number—wouldn’t prevail. Instead, we would seek to improve the lot of the worst off, since any of us could draw a losing number. When important matters are determined by lottery, we become more empathetic.

Sure, Conley writes, “some of us would lose in a more lottery-based society. But many of us would win.” But that happens now with the birth lottery in which many people die “within miles of where they were born.”

But it’s less stressful to think about over Sunday coffee than whether you’ll die an untimely death from our national bullet lottery.

“the price of freedom”?

“For years now, after one massacre or another,” writes Heather Cox Richardson this mourning, “I have written some version of the same article, explaining that the nation’s current gun free-for-all is not traditional but, rather, is a symptom of the takeover of our nation by a radical extremist minority.” A minority that, like Bill O’Reilly, considers daily slaughter “the price of freedom.”

None of that was normal until about the time Ronald Reagan and Movement Conservatism arrived in full. Fueled by National Rifle Association money, the right twisted the Second Amendment into an “unfettered right to own and carry weapons.” They’ve turned America into a place Old West residents of Tombstone and Dodge City would not recognize.

At least eight dead and nine injured at a suburban Dallas, Texas outlet mall (Washington Post):

Six of the eight people killed were found dead at the scene. At least nine people injured in the shootingwere taken to hospitals by the local fire department, Allen Fire Chief Jon Boyd said. Two of them died, and as of late Saturday, three others remained critically injured. More people could have been injured and transported in personal vehicles, Boyd said.

Children were also among those injured. The victims being treated at Medical City Healthcare trauma facilities ranged from 5 to 61 years old, said Kathleen Beathard, a spokeswoman for the hospital system.

The shooter was killed at the scene by a police officer at the mall on an unrelated call. The Post has reviewed video believed to show the body of the gunman “wearing tactical gear with several magazines of ammunition on his chest” beside what appears to be “an AR-style semiautomatic rifle.”

Film and culture writer, Sara Stewart, opines for CNN:

The entirety of our culture now seems increasingly like the Wild West, where the answer to “could you please stop doing that?” or even just “could you help me?” might turn out to be a bullet.

It’s all a blur anymore.

It’s going to take work to educate people about this issue:

Clear majorities of Americans support restrictions affecting transgender children, a Washington Post-KFF poll finds, offering political jet fuel for Republicans in statehouses and Congress who are pushing measures restricting curriculum, sports participation and medical care.

Most Americans don’t believe it’s even possible to be a gender that differs from that assigned at birth. A 57 percent majority of adults said a person’s gender is determined from the start, with 43 percent saying it can differ.

This is the saddest part:

And some Americans have become more conservative on these questions as Republicans have seized the issue and worked to promote new restrictions. The Pew Research Center found 60 percent last year saying one’s gender is determined by the sex assigned at birth, up from 54 percent in 2017. Even among young adults, who are the most accepting of trans identity, about half said in the Post-KFF poll that a person’s gender is determined by their sex at birth.

Alyssa Wells, 29, a behavior therapist in Daytona Beach, Fla., who participated in the Post-KFF survey, said her views have changed on this issue in recent years as she has learned more, chiefly from Christian podcasts.

“At first I was on the side of acceptance, like using the pronouns and stuff, because I want people to be kind to each other. I don’t want people fighting all the time,” she said. But she has come to see things differently. “My concern with transgender is mostly with the children.”

“We can’t vote until we’re a certain age, we can’t smoke, drink or whatever, but we can change our bodies’ anatomy and how it works?” she said. “It just doesn’t seem like that’s okay to me.” Treatments for trans youth sometimes include hormone therapies, but not genital surgery, which guidelines generally say doctors should not provide until patients are 18.

Still, as the country engages in a national debate over public policy around gender identity, interviews and other poll findings suggest that many Americans hold complicated and sometimes contradictory views on the subject.

A tiny silver lining:

While a majority of Americans oppose access to puberty blockers and hormone treatments for children and teenagers, for instance, clear majorities alsosupport laws prohibiting discrimination against trans people, including in K-12 schools.

I guess that’s something. And it does appear the Ron DeSantis went too far when he banned discussing transgender issues all the way up to the 12th grade:

It’s always something with the right. While it’s understandable that some people haven’t given it much thought and are trying to wrap their minds around all the nuances of this issue, the actively hostile are in the midst of a full-blown panic about “grooming” which is just another version of the 90s “indoctrination” panic about LGBTQ rights. And while it’s obviously good that a large majority disagree with the idea that schools can’t mention trans issues in high school, they really should stop and think about just how this would come up in the lower grades. Nobody’s “teaching” trans in the first grade. But it would come up because it exists in this world and teachers should be able to kindly address it if some little child brings it up. But I guess people think we should instead “teach” it as a taboo subject and perpetuate the idea that there’s something wrong with it.

There is some reason to hope that this is going to change:

These more nuanced views were also expressed in focus groups on trans issues with swing voters conducted by Third Way, a centrist Democratic think tank, said Lanae Erickson, the group’s senior vice president for social policy and politics.

“This is all very new to the American public, so unlike some of the other cultural issues, these opinions are not set in stone,” she said.

As in the Post-KFF poll, Third Way’s research found significant concerns over sports participation and medical treatments, though Erickson said views would shift when focus group participants were presented with specific scenarios. Voters in the Republican base are animated by these topics, she said, but independents have given them far less thought.

“This is not abortion. This is not even marriage equality. People have not talked about the details. The more you talk to people, the more they change,” she said.

She added that independent voters know a lot more about what it means to be transgender than they used to. Five or 10 years ago, she said, people would talk about drag queens or the movie “Tootsie,” a comedy about an actor pretending to be a woman to get cast in a soap opera. Now people understand better that being transgender relates to one’s internal sense of gender identity, Erickson said.

The Post-KFF poll found that 43 percent of cisgender adults personally know someone who is trans, not counting acquaintances. This group was much more likely to say a person’s gender can differ from that assigned at birth, with 53 percent of them saying that it can, compared with 35 percent of those who do not have that personal connection.

Experts say these sort of personal connections were an important part of increased support for gay and lesbian rights, notably marriage. One outstanding question is whether public opinion on trans issues will follow the same trajectory.

The 43 percent of people who know someone who is trans is comparable to the 42 percent who in 1992 said they personally knew someone who is gay or lesbian, per a CBS News/New York Times poll. That 42 percent grew to 77 percent by 2010.

Transgender people represent about 0.6 percent of the U.S. population, according to surveys, though the figure is higher among those 18 to 29 years old — about 2 percent. When people who identify as nonbinary are included, the totals rise to 1.6 percent of all adults and 5.1 percent of young adults. That compares with an estimated 2.4 percent of American adults who are gay or lesbian.

As with issues of sexual orientation, younger people are more accepting of differences in gender identity than older people are, though the generation gap on gender identity is not as pronounced now as it was on sexual orientation then.

“If past is prologue, we can say that we’re looking at an eight- to 10-year timeline” for views to change, said Andrew Flores, a government professor at American University who has studied public opinion on LGBTQ issues.

His analysis of public opinion polls found that the share of Americans with warm feelings toward trans people has climbed over time. And he noted that trans characters are more present in media and entertainment than ever before. Those shifts both preceded a change in attitudes about gay people.

There are other parallels, too. Early conservative campaigns against homosexuality were also focused on schools. In 1977, pop singer Anita Bryant, well known for her orange juice commercials, sought to overturn an anti-discrimination ordinance in Miami on the grounds that it would bar firing teachers for being gay. The issue was also fought out in California, where voters considered (and rejected) a ballot initiative that would have required teachers to be fired if they were gay.

“Transphobia is really rampant today the way homophobia was with Anita Bryant,” said Natalia Petrzela, a historian of contemporary politics and culture at the New School in New York. In an earlier age, she said, there were allegations that gay teachers were “grooming” students for abuse; those allegations have returned, now focused on gender identity. “I think we’ve evolved. But we haven’t evolved that much.”

As I said, it’s always something. I’ll keep hoping that people will adjust and realize that LGBTQ people are not a threat to them or all they hold dear. It’s just another aspect of being human and all these people want is the same right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness that we all want. It’s not too much to ask.

That does not make me feel confident

Washington Examiner: I know you cannot get into any of the specifics about your grand jury appearance, but I’m wondering if you could just peel back for readers what the was process like?

Mike Pence: I really can’t speak in any detail about the proceedings. But I can tell you that the American people can be confident that the story I wrote in my memoir about those difficult days, the story I’ve told in numerous interviews and in the wake of the release of my book, is the same story that I tell in every respect. And so, for me, I just have a lot of peace about the process. I’m very concerned about what I see as the politicization of the Justice Department. I’m very concerned about what I see as the criminalization of politics, but we obeyed the law. We did our part, and the American people can be confident that the story we’ve written, the story we told, is the same story that took place in that setting.

In other words, he didn’t come through with the full truth about Trump’s coup plotting. He never has.

And he said it overseas…

A day after federal prosecutors won their latest high-profile cases against leaders of the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, former president Donald Trump lashed out in a social media post at the Justice Department, claiming it and the FBI are “destroying the lives of so many Great American Patriots.”

“Back in the USA, but sadly I see so many really bad things happening to our Country,” Trump, who broke ground earlier this week on a golf course in Scotland, wrote on Truth Social, his social media platform.

“The DOJ and FBI are destroying the lives of so many Great American Patriots, right before our very eyes,” he wrote. “The Court System is a RUBBER STAMP for their conviction and imprisonment. All this while the Radical Left protects and coddles extremists and murderers at a level, and with intensity, never seen before. GET SMART AMERICA, THEY ARE COMING AFTER YOU!!!”

On Thursday, former Proud Boys chairman Henry “Enrique” Tarrio and three other leaders of the far-rightextremist group were found guilty of seditious conspiracy in the attack on Capitol. The result marked the third decisive victory for the Justice Department in three seditious conspiracy trials held after what it called a historic act of domestic terrorism to prevent the peaceful transfer of power from Trump to Democrat Joe Biden after the 2020 presidential election.

A spokesman for Trump, who is now seeking the 2024 Republican nomination for president, did not immediately respond when asked if Trump’s post was intended as a direct response to Thursday’s verdicts.

Trump has increasingly expressed solidarity with those arrested in connection with the Jan. 6 attack that injured more than 140 members of law enforcement and resulted in the deaths of five people.

Trump, for instance, lent his voice to a recording by inmates in the D.C. jail being held in connection to the insurrection. The song, “Justice for All,” features Trump reciting the Pledge of Allegiance mixed with a rendition of the national anthem. Trump played it at the first rally of his 2024 presidential campaign.

He has previously complained about “people being persecuted so unfairly relating to the January 6th protest concerning the Rigged Presidential Election.”

His Trump impression needs work.