In a move that perhaps recalls one of their top backers having turned Twitter into the world’s largest echo chamber, Trump insiders now claim to have shelled out just under $50,000 to run ads in and around Mar-a-Lago—apparently for the sole purpose of keeping both the presidential candidate and local donors in good spirits.
A source told the Bulwark that this is really about the donors and Trump’s ego is just a happy side effect. I don’t believe it. I think this is all about his ego. (They do this every time.)
George Conway is already there:
Florida Politics reports [he] has spent upward of “six figures” on a 60-second slot across ESPN, Fox News and the Golf Channel to air in exactly the same cherished Florida spot.
Part of his “PsychoPAC” initiative, Conway’s ad apparently features a solid roster of Trump’s greatest hits, such as references to “the late, great Hannibal Lecter,” claims that “windmill noise causes cancer,” struggles with bottled water and touting bleach as a miracle cure for COVID-19.
Whatever the contents of Trump’s forthcoming Mar-a-Lago clip, it’ll be hard pressed to beat Conway’s overarching message for pithiness. As the PsychoPAC website homepage reads: “Voters have forgotten one important fact: Trump is f—ing nuts.”
Harris’s campaign so far has been a work of genius on several levels, but maybe the most ingenious stroke of all has been the decision to mock Trump—to present him not only as someone to fear but also to ridicule. Harris perfectly encapsulated this two-pronged attack in these memorable lines from her acceptance speech: “In many ways, Donald Trump is an unserious man. But the consequences—but the consequences of putting Donald Trump back in the White House are extremely serious.… Just imagine Donald Trump with no guardrails.”
But the emphasis has been on ridicule (Tim Walz’s “weird” comment, Maryland Governor Wes Moore’s jab at Trump’s bone spurs, Barack Obama’s hilarious hand gesture when he was talking about Trump’s obsession with crowd size). It’s great on three levels. The first is that it must drive Trump nuts, and when he goes nuts, he says especially nutty things. Second, it’s arguably more persuasive to swing voters than calling Trump a fascist. Trump is a fascist, make no mistake. But he’s also ridiculous. Mocking him over his Hannibal Lecter obsession will stick in apolitical people’s minds far more strongly than warning about his plans to wreck the Justice Department, and in its way, it’s just as disqualifying. Do we really want a president who thinks an eater of human flesh, however fictional, was misunderstood?
Apparently, almost half the country thinks that’s just fine.
It’s still hard for me to believe that Judge Aileen Cannon had the unprecedented chutzpah to dismiss the Mar-a-Lago stolen documents case against Donald Trump. She should be impeached. It’s beyond outrageous. David Kurtz at TPM:
The timing was breathtaking.
U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon’s wholesale dismissal in July of the indictment of Donald Trump for hoarding national security information at Mar-a-Lago and obstructing efforts to retrieve the materials came on the Monday following the Saturday assassination attempt against the former president.
That Monday was also the first day of the GOP convention and the day that Trump announced JD Vance as his running mate.
You could be excused if you missed the Mar-a-Lago news that day.
Yesterday, Special Counsel Jack Smith filed his appeal brief with 11th Circuit Court of Appeals to have Cannon’s dismissal reversed. It is an airtight case for why his own appointment as special counsel by Attorney General Merrick Garland and the funding for his work were both lawful. It is also an understated but withering deconstruction of Cannon’s deeply flawed decision. The only real bit of news was what the brief didn’t contain: an explicit request that the appeals court remove Cannon from the case.
It is highly likely that Smith prevails at the appeals court, but that victory will not mask the fundamental systemic and institutional failures to hold Trump to account under the rule of law for his crimes in a timely way that halts Trump’s ongoing threat to national security, gives voters a clear picture of who they’re voting for in November, and bolsters public confidence in the ability of the judicial branch to properly function in a crisis.
It’s easy to blame Judge Cannon for this debacle, and she deserves all the scorn heaped on her, but no one judge should be able to wreak this much havoc in such an important case without recourse or accountability. While we properly vest considerable power in individual federal judges, the system has shown its limitations, weaknesses, and ineptitude when confronted with a case of this magnitude.
Looming over these failures is the prospect of Trump winning back the White House then ordering the Justice Department to dismisses the case against him, and as I’ve suggested before, abusing the powers of the presidency to hamstring the judicial branch in various other ways that will sideline it to his autocratic impulses, especially now that the Supreme Court has sanctified him with presidential immunity. To put it more simply, Trump represents an existential threat to the judiciary, too, though it collectively doesn’t seem to grasp the risk.
This is such an excellent point. The judiciary seems to think they’ve got immunity from Trump’s fascism.
Not bloody likely.
As long as they act like his personal lackeys, as Cannon has done here, maybe. But that’s no guarantee as many of Trump’s erstwhile allies have found. One wrong word and Trump will make an example of you, just to show he can.
Maybe the six right wing Supremes like the idea of being Trump’s personal bitches, I don’t know. But if he is elected again I hope they understand that that’s what they’re going to be.
And yes, like so much else in our system of government Trump has found all the weaknesses that required that our institutions be run by people with at least a modicum of integrity.
People are very, very stupid if they think that the alleged billionaire who lives in a golden estate in Florida and flies around in his own 747 is looking out for them. I hate to say it but: suckers and losers.
One of the nation’s largest Latino civil rights organizations is asking the U.S. Department of Justice to open an investigation into a recent spate of state raids on the homes of Latino elected leaders, candidates and political operatives in South Texas.
State investigators tied to state Attorney General Ken Paxton’s office executed search warrants last week at homes across three counties,as part of what Paxton said wasa two-year investigation of alleged fraud and vote harvesting.
The Republican officeholder said in a statement that his office had “sufficient evidence” to confiscate cellphones, laptops and documents. Paxton’s office targeted a Democratic legislative candidate in a swing district important to state Republicans,her political consultant, campaign workers, a local mayor and a city council member in raids on their small-town homes.
Neither Paxton nor the Department of Justice responded to questions Monday.
“We did nothing wrong,” said Mary Ann Obregón, 80, the mayor of Dilley, Tex.,and one of the workerswho recalled being threatened with arrest if she didn’t hand over her cellphone. “That’s what’s eating at us. It is an insult.”
Obregón was one of four Latina women, three of whom were in their 70s and 80s, who said they were intimidated by the morning visits from armed investigators while they were still in their pajamas. Lidia Martinez, an 87-year-old retired educator, and Inelda Rodriguez, 73, a Dilley City Council member, were forced to turn over their phones and laptops.
“It was horrible, gestapo-style,” said Martinez, who added that investigators spent three hours searching her drawers and garage during the raid. “I thought we lived in a free country, not Russia.”
The fact that it was ordered by an actual criminal, Ken Paxton, who narrowly escaped impeachment makes iit just perfect.
Why Kamala Harris might get coattails from the N.C. governor’s race
N.C. Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson. Photo by Matt Ramey / WUNC.
As well as Vice President Kamala Harris performed in delivering her acceptance speech at the DNC convention last Thursday night (introduced by North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper), I could not help feeling it might be Harris who benefits in North Carolina from coattails provided by Democrats’ candidate for governor, Attorney General Josh Stein. Pundits touted the race to replace term-limited Cooper as the must-watch governor’s contest in the country.
Stein is as competent a public servant as his MAGA Republican opponent, Lt. Gov. Mark “some folks need killing” Robinson, is a train wreck. Robinson’s own statements are sinking him fast in the polls. So much so that veteran Democratic operative Thomas Mills wonders when his own party will stop throwing good money after Robinson’s floundering candidacy.
A lobbyist told Mills last summer that Republicans were giddy at having Robinson, a Black man, atop their statewide ticket. He would draw off enough Black votes in this narrowly divided state to make their retaking of the governor’s mansion a cinch. The NC GOP seems to have put as much effort into vetting Robinson as Donald Trump put into vetting J.D. Vance.
Mills writes:
A year later, Republicans are now deciding when to pull the plug on Robinson’s sinking ship. A SurveyUSA/High Point University poll that came out late last week shows Stein leading by fourteen points, 48-34. Two other polls released within the past two weeks show Robinson down by ten. The Real Clear Politics average, which ignores one of the polls showing him down by ten, has Robinson trailing by 8.7%. This late in the campaign, those are deficits hard to overcome.
Republicans are in a bind. They know that supporting Robinson is almost certainly throwing good money after bad, but if Robinson loses by too large a margin, he could sink other GOP candidates below him on the ballot. If they keep spending valuable resources on him, they’re just trying to keep the race from becoming a blowout. They don’t have good options.
Robinson hates LBGTQ+ people. He claims Democrats are communists. He blames women for unwanted pregnancies and wants a total, no-exceptions ban on abortions. Robinson believes the Civil Rights movement was a mistake, climate change is a “junk science,” etc. It’s as if a sous chef performed a reduction on Donald Trump and the concentrated result is Trump à la Robinson.
But it’s not just what he’s said that’s sinking Robinson, because there’s more:
Stein and company have just begun to unload on him. They aren’t going to let voters forget what Robinson said about himself and they also have plenty more ammunition to take him out. They haven’t even gotten to the fiscal mismanagement and corruption stuff yet.
Democrats would be wise to start wrapping the rest of the Council of State and judicial candidates around Robinson. They chose him to be the GOP standard bearer and now they should be forced to defend him. He should be the centerpiece of the campaign moving forward and they should use him to damage the Republican brand. Not only can they turn off swing voters to the GOP, they can suppress the Republican base, keeping turnout below 2020 levels.
With Robinson sinking fast and the Survey USA poll showing Harris up by a point in North Carolina (other N.C. polls show Harris with a lead between 1 and 3 points), “tanking Robinson” could depress GOP turnout enough to improve Democrats’ chances of flipping the state for Harris. Polling itself theses days is tough enough. Modeling the interaction between the presidential race and the gubernatorial contest even trickier. The Black voters Republicans once thought might help Robinson now could help Harris more.
Meantime (to add to the post just below), the RNC and state GOP officials are suing the State Board of Elections for the second time in a week alleging (without evidence) that large numbers of non-citizens are registering and voting illegally. The suit filed Monday seeks to purge a quarter million registrants from voter rolls within 90 days of the fall election, an action the Board asserts is itself illegal.
MAGA finds it easier to rig elections than win them
Is there a term for an entire political party suffering a case of flop sweat? The GOP’s brows are gleaming. Stuck with their degenerate (and degenerating) candidate for president and faced with an energized Democratic ticket raking in millions by the hundreds and volunteers by the tens of thousands, Republicans are engaged in a frenzied effort not to prop up their own slates but to strip the right of fellow Americans to express their will at the polls.
Republicans have long neglected serious efforts for turning out the vote in favor of suppressing the votes of people they perceive as lower-caste interlopers. Irresponsibles, I’ve called them (ironically). David Frum famously (and belatedly) declared in 2018, “If conservatives become convinced that they cannot win democratically, they will not abandon conservatism. They will reject democracy.”
Frum was years late with that realization. The voter integrity “boot camp” I attended in 2013 was a white-knuckled exercise in “protecting a demographic patch of electoral turf that’s shrinking” beneath Republicans’ feet. Not once in that day-long workshop did any speaker suggest opening up the franchise to greater participation, registering new voters and encouraging them to go the polls to exercise their right to vote. No, the goal was to prevent Them from “stealing” the election from Real Americans™.
The Georgia state election board’s attempt to implement a flurry of last-minute election rule changes has drawn both the ire of Republican Gov. Brian Kemp and a lawsuit by the Democratic National Committee, the Democratic Party of Georgia and county board members. The move by the board’s MAGA majority seems designed to undercut the state law mandating local officials certify election results (NBC News):
At the heart of the civil suit, filed in Fulton County, are two items the election board passed this month: the reasonable inquiry rule and the examination rule.
The suit says that the rules conflict with Georgia’s statutes governing certification and that the election board did not follow procedures for rulemaking as required by state law. It therefore asks the court to pause the two rules to the extent that they conflict with existing law.
The plaintiffs are also asking for a declaration that election results must be certified by Georgia’s statutory deadline of Nov. 12 and that certification is mandatory rather than discretionary.
A conservative party otherwise obsessed with size and strength is putting its weakness on public display. Fair fights are for losers, Donald Trump might say.
In America, voters pick our leaders. Unelected bodies beholden to MAGA Republicans do not pick which voters to heed and which to silence. Georgians deserve the freedom to cast ballot, have them counted & for will of the people to prevail. https://t.co/u3NymkLTWB
“Voters in 28 states will face restrictions that weren’t in place in the last presidential election,” the Brennan Center reported in May. The overwhelming majority were red states in 2020.
“As MAGA Republicans and their plans—especially their assault on reproductive healthcare and the policies outlined in Project 2025—become increasingly unpopular, Republican-dominated states are ramping up their effort to keep the people they assume will oppose them from voting,” Heather Cox Richardson writes, summarizing additional GOP displays of self-doubt:
In Nebraska, Alex Burness reported in Bolts today, two Republican officials—Attorney General Mike Hilgers and Secretary of State Bob Evnen— last month stopped the implementation of a new state law, passed overwhelmingly by a Republican-dominated legislature earlier this year, that granted immediate voting rights to about 7,000 people with past felony convictions. In the process, Hilgers also declared unconstitutional a 2005 law that had allowed those convicted of a felony to vote two years after they completed their sentence. Evnen then told county-level elections offices that they could not register former felons.
The confusion has made people nervous about even trying to register. “People are scared they’re going to get charged with something if they try to vote and can’t vote, so a lot of people will just wash their hands of it,” Pamala Pettes told Burness. “They don’t want to go and vote unless they have a clear idea of what’s going on. They don’t have that.” More than 100,000 people are caught in this confusion. As Burness notes, the election could come down to the city of Omaha, where thousands of potential voters—overwhelmingly Black, Latino, and Native—have been blocked from registering.
As with Georgia’s plans for casting doubt on election results there (to borrow from King Crimson), if MAGA Republicans get their way, confusion will be democracy’s epitaph.
But HCR’s summary is not finished:
Voter intimidation is underway in Texas, too. On August 18, Fox News Channel personality Maria Bartiromo, who was a key figure in promoting the Big Lie, posted a rumor that migrants were illegally registering to vote at a government facility west of Fort Worth. The Republican chair and election administrator there said there was no evidence for her accusation and that it was false, but Texas attorney general Ken Paxton nonetheless launched an investigation.
In addition to feeding the narrative that there is voter fraud at work in Texas, the investigation led Paxton’s team to raid the homes of at least seven Latino Democrats. No one has been charged in the aftermath of the raids. Latino rights advocates call them a “disgraceful and outrageous” attempt to intimidate Latino voters and have filed a formal complaint with the Department of Justice.
Today, Texas governor Greg Abbott announced that since 2021, Texas has removed more than one million people from the state’s voter rolls, and said the process will be ongoing. Abbott’s office said those removed are ineligible to vote because they have moved, are dead, or are not citizens. But more than 463,000 of those on the list have been removed because their county of residence is unaware of their current address.
Even when voters do make their wishes known, in Republican-dominated states, those wishes are not always honored. David Kurtz of Talking Points Memo today pointed out an article in which Adam Unikowsky, who clerked for the right-wing U.S. Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia, eviscerated a recent decision by the Arkansas Supreme Court that will prevent an abortion rights initiative from appearing on the ballot in November.
The reason? A technical defect in the submission: “They didn’t submit a photocopy that wasn’t required” of a document already submitted a week earlier. (The “defect” was quickly corrected.) If the ballot initiative sponsor had failed to count the number of beans in the jar, the court’s ruling would have been no different. Because keeping the abortion rights initiative off the Arkansas ballot, HCR notes, “will generally help Republicans.”
Just as Jim Crow helped southern segregationists maintain white supremacy for nearly a century. MAGA Republicans’ 21st-century attempts at resurrecting it would be humiliating if they were capable of shame. This makes Donald Trump’s sculpted comb over a fitting symbol of Republicans’ desperate efforts to hide their receding popularity from the world and from themselves. Nobody’s fooled.
In all the years of Trumpy absurdity, putting an antivax conspiracy theorist in charge of Health and Human Services might be the most terrifying. pic.twitter.com/S5liJVGx62
Sure he might have trouble getting RFK Jr confirmed. But he learned to get past all that inconvenient folderol by making his minions and henchmen “acting” officials. He would be happy to let RFK Jr. do whatever he wants. After all, Trump will never have to run for president again. (Either he’ll be term limited, he’ll just refuse to leave or he’ll die in office.) He has nothing to lose.
This @StrictScrutiny_ convo with @nyuniversity's @ruthbenghiat was so sobering that I had to lie down in the fetal position afterward. And the two Chicago Recording Company audio techs who helped me tape were similarly shooketh.
— Melissa Murray (@ProfMMurray on Threads 🧵) (@ProfMMurray) August 26, 2024
With all the mockery and joy and good feelings, I hope none of us lose sight of the threat we are facing.
To those of you who listen to podcasts, I highly recommend this one:
To wrap up our Project 2025 series, Kate, Leah and Melissa are joined by NYU’s Ruth Ben-Ghiat, author of Strongmen: Mussolini To The Present to share her perspective as a historian on the Heritage Foundation’s terrifying plans for the country.
CHAPTERS
0:00 Intro 2:17 Trump Continues to Hide His Project 2025 Connections
As Donald Trump emerged to a thunderous roar of approval in the heart of Pennsylvania’s Rust belt, he was back in his comfort zone among the people who once put him in power.
But by the time he stepped off the stage nearly two hours later, even some of the former US president’s supporters were wondering whether his rallies are doing his re-election campaign more harm than good.
Apparently this county is indicative of the entire region where Pennsylvania could be decided by turnout. The Republican party there has been overwhelmed by infighting with hardcore MAGA weirdos who have recently taken over the local party so they really need Trump to get out the vote.
Frank Scavo, a businessman and ardent Trump supporter who was part of a coup that took hold of the county Republican party earlier this year, was clear before the rally about what he wanted to hear from Trump.
“These rallies fire up the base to go out there and knock on doors. His base will walk on fire for him, but plenty of other Republicans don’t vote. Are they demoralised? Do they think their vote doesn’t count? Most of it is apathy. But if we don’t get people out there knocking on doors, Trump’s not going to win Luzerne county,” he said.
That’s not how things worked out.
Trump repeatedly broke away from the prepared speech about economics to make rambling claims that Harris was both a fascist and a communist, to attack her laugh as that of “a crazy person” and a “lunatic”, and to claim he was more beautiful than the vice-president. He also spent time debating aloud with himself how to pronounce the name of the CNN anchor Dana Bash.
By the time he stopped speaking 100 minutes later, a large number of the arena’s 8,000 seats had emptied.
Some people were just not impressed:
“He reminded me why I’m not going to vote for him this time,” said Jenny, a local businesswoman who did not want to give her full name because she didn’t want to alienate customers.
“I voted for him in 2016 and had a Trump flag in the front yard. I voted for him again in 2020 but didn’t put the flag out that time. I’ve been thinking of voting for him again because Biden’s been so bad for the economy and Kamala won’t be any better. But after listening to that, I’m actually afraid of Trump being president again. I don’t know what he was talking about half the time. Perhaps he was always like that but he seems worse, more unstable.”
He is. She’s not mistaken about that. (She is mistaken about the economy but you can’t blame her with the way the news — and not just the right wing media — talks about it.)
As I wrote a few days back, I traveled through rural Pennsylvania recently and was quite surprised to see the lack of Trump paraphenalia festooning the small towns. In 2016 and 2020 it was everywhere. You’d even see people flying big Trump flags alongside confederate flags at Gettysburg. Not this year. There was some but it was very subdued compared to what it has been in the past.
Trump is further hampered by the fact that people like Jenny want him to be more focused and serious but his MAGA freakshow wants the crazy. That’s what they come for. Similarly, as he is trying desperately to neutralize his anti-abortion record by implying that he won’t do anything drastic if he gets elected, his evangelical base is getting very upset:
My advice is, when you’re in a hole, stop digging. This week made clear: the DNC has the corner on the abortion market. Trump is not only suppressing his own support, he is going to hurt the vast majority of Republican candidates who are 100% pro-life. pic.twitter.com/1NbCKOmvKP
No matter how many times he winks and nods at them saying “first ya gotta win elections, ok?” they demand public affirmation of their extremist views.
Does any of this mean Trump won’t win Pennsylvania? Nope. He certainly could. Most of these people will vote for him even if they think he’s lost it. But as the article says, there are a lot of voters who don’t usually vote in this region and Trump has to get them all out to win. (And yes, Harris needs to cut into the margins.) But the “Trump magic” of being able to get his crowds super excited and rushing out to join his MAGA crusade may be wearing off a bit. In a close election that could be decisive.
