Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

Why Kamala Harris might get coattails from the N.C. governor’s race

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:

Robinson has spent most of August trying to tell us that he didn’t really mean all those things he’s been saying for all those years. In order for him to win, he will have to recover from the self-inflicted wounds. Even if he could reverse the damage from what he’s already said about himself, it’s really too little too late.

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.

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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

— Anat Shenker-Osorio 🟧 (@anatosaurus) August 26, 2024

“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.

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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

— Justin Wolfers (@JustinWolfers) August 26, 2024

If you think he won’t do it, you don’t know Trump.

He made Ric Grenell the acting Director of National Intelligence. He made Matthew Whittaker the acting Attorney General. He made Ben Carson the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development.

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.

TLDR: #Project2025 is worse than you think. https://t.co/dIwyibrwBS

— 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

5:25 Ruth Ben-Ghiat on Project 2025

21:40 Faux Populism of Project 2025

46:30 What Happens After the First 100 Days?

Somebody needs to give him a big steaming cup of covfefe to wake him up!

Lmao pic.twitter.com/TPsu8qT4BV

— Brian Beutler (@brianbeutler) August 25, 2024

The Guardian went to Pennsylvania:

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

— Tony Perkins (@tperkins) August 23, 2024

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.

If faced with a Democratic Donald Trump what would you do?

Someone once asked me who I thought would be the Democratic equivalent of Donald Trump would be and I said Kanye West. He’s world famous, extremely wealthy, narcissistic, unstable, politically ambitious, totally unself-aware and manifestly unfit — except it turned out that he’s actually a right wing anti-semite. I might have said Robert F. Kennedy Jr too at one time, except he’s now endorsed Donald Trump. I’m sure there must be some truly crazy lefty out there who would be a bridge too far for many Democrats but that combination of authoritarianism, pathological character flaws, overwhelming ignorance and demagogic talent seems to inevitably drift toward the right these days.

That is not to say that voters aren’t always subject to emotional attachment to their leaders in both parties. In recent decades, Republicans practically worshipped Ronald Reagan and Democrats were head over heels for Barack Obama. There was even a time when even George W. Bush was practically deified.

But the Trump phenomenon is different from those examples because he is so manifestly unfit for office that it has shaken many Americans’ belief in democracy. How could our system allow such a person to dominate our political culture for more than eight years and be within striking distance of the presidency again after having been roundly defeated in the last election?

I thought about that as I watched the Democratic Convention last week as a small group of Republicans and former Republicans took the stage to speak out against their former president and exhort their erstwhile comrades to vote for Kamala Harris instead. It wasn’t the first time members of the opposing party spoke at a convention. I think of Jeane Kirkpatrick a Democratic foreign policy expert who drifted into the right wing with those other Democratic apostates known as the neoconservatives. At the 1984 Republican National Convention, she gave the keynote speech, calling the Democrats the “Blame America First crowd” for their alleged lack of patriotism.

Back in 2004, former Georgia Gov Zell Miller, a Democrat, also gave the keynote speech at the GOP convention to re-nominate President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney. It was brutal. Still in the throes of the Iraq war, he condemned John Kerry and the Democratic Party as weak on national security.

And 2024 wasn’t the first time that Republicans spoke at a Democratic convention either. In 2020 former GOP Govs. John Kasich of Ohio and Christine Todd Whitman of New Jersey gave speeches exhorting voters not to vote for Donald Trump. This year we heard from former Illinois Congressman Adam Kinzinger, former Trump press secretary Stephanie Grisham. former Georgia Lieutenant Gov. Geoff Duncan and a few others as well.

But it seems to me that the big difference between these GOP apostates and the Democrats who left the party to join the Reagan Revolution or back George W. Bush is that fact that the Democratic apostates left their party over policy differences. They didn’t like what they saw as the leftward ideological drift of the Democrats so they moved over to the Republicans, There were plenty of voters who went that way too, especially during the Reagan years.

But the Republicans who’ve spoken at the last two Democratic conventions have done so almost exclusively out of disgust with Donald Trump personally and his lack of ideological principles. It’s true that there was some talk about the Democrats being better on foreign policy with support for Ukraine and opposition to authoritarian tyrants like Putin and Kim Jong Un. But for the most part their entreaties to vote for Harris were simply based upon the need to defeat Trump because of his bad character, criminality and dangerous unfitness. Some have even gone so far as to say that Harris needs to be elected in order to save the Republican party from the MAGA cult.

These people represent the Never Trump faction which has set ideology aside for the moment in order to create a popular front to defeat Trump. Some of them are openly endorsing Kamala Harris, telling their followers that she is preferable to Trump in some ways on issues but mostly arguing that policy difference just don’t matter at the moment because the threat of Trump is so dire.

But they aren’t the only Republicans who know the threat exists. Former Attorney General Bill Barr knows that Trump tried to overturn a legitimate election. Senate Minority leader Mitch McConnell understands that Donald Trump was a disaster as president. Former S. Carolina Gov.Nikki Haley made it clear that she thinks Donald Trump is unfit to hold office. Yet they are voting for him anyway. Whether it’s because they have Fox News Brain Rot and are convinced that antifa is the greatest threat America faces, as Bill Barr does or that loyalty to the GOP brand is paramount as McConnell does, they are simply incapable of reacting seriously to the threat.

Saying they will write in someone else’s name as former Vice President Mike Pence and former Trump National Security Adviser John Bolton are saying they will do is a silly affectation. And those others who have written books and given interviews spilling the beans from the inside on what an utter catastrophe Trump’s first term was and yet are refusing to step up and publicly endorse Harris or even go on TV to condemn Trump, the only reasonable explanation is that they are, as The Bulwark’s Tim Miller writes, “chickenshit.” Apparently they can’t be bothered.

Miller calls out people like former WH Chief of Staff, Gen. John Kelly, former defense Sec. Gen Jim Mattis, Former Director of National Intelligence Dan Coates and a number of others including former Chief of Staff H.R. McMaster who is out with a new book declaring that Russian President Vladimir Putin had Trump wrapped around his little finger. (Yet he went on TV this weekend and absurdly claimed that he believes by writing his book it will persuade Trump not to let Putin do that in the future.)

Miller writes:

There are two options for president. On the one hand you have a woman who just presented herself as a mainstream Democrat who plans to respect and uphold the fundamental American political traditions at home and abroad.

On the other you have a candidate who you have acknowledged is the most flawed person you have ever encountered, a danger to the country, and an existential threat to our system of government—a convicted criminal, an abuser of women, and a moron. How in God’s name do you justify silence in the face of that choice? This is not a close call!

It is not a close call.

I don’t know if I will ever be faced with a situation like this. But I would like to think that if some famous loon were to capture the imagination of Democratic voters and he or she threatened the future of the nation, I would have the guts to oppose him or her and throw my lot in with the saner other party. Anyone’s first responsibility should be to stop a dangerous demagogue and argue about ideology and policies later. If you don’t do that, as Trump himself likes to say, “you won’t have a country anymore.”

Salon

Trolling, trolling, trolling the Trump campaign

The Harris campaign is trying some mind-fuckery with the former president over debate rules. Donald Trump is still looking for a way to back out and complained Sunday night about holding the next debate on ABC, reports The New York Times:

“I ask, why would I do the Debate against Kamala Harris on that network?” he wrote.

He continued, misspelling the name of the Democratic strategist Donna Brazile and using a disparaging nickname for the news anchor George Stephanopoulos: “Will panelist Donna Brazil give the questions to the Marxist Candidate like she did for Crooked Hillary Clinton? Will Kamala’s best friend, who heads up ABC, do likewise. Where is Liddle’ George Slopadopolus hanging out now? Will he be involved. They’ve got a lot of questions to answer!!! Why did Harris turn down Fox, NBC, CBS, and even CNN? Stay tuned!!!”

Hand the nuclear codes again to that infant?

The Harris campaign responded:

“We have told ABC and other networks seeking to host a possible October debate that we believe both candidates’ mics should be live throughout the full broadcast,” Brian Fallon, a spokesman for the Harris campaign, said in a statement, referring to the scheduled Sept. 10 debate and to an additional debate in October that the campaign has said it is open to negotiating. “Our understanding is that Trump’s handlers prefer the muted microphone because they don’t think their candidate can act presidential for 90 minutes on his own.”

The Trump campaign insists it was Joe Biden who demanded muted mics. The Harris team knows this, of course. The prosecutor is messing with him.

Good.

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Achilles had his heel

It doesn’t require and advanced degree in psychology to see it. Donald Trump has grumbled his entire adult life that “the world” is laughing at “us” (meaning the United States). Mr. Bundle of Insecurities harbors deep anxieties about being laughed at himself.

He’s not very bright. He’s undereducated. He’s overweight. He’s a “tycoon” who sucks at business and cheats at golf. He got where he is with daddy’s money. Underneath the bluster and bullying in recesses of his psyche he dare not explore (self-examination is for the weak), he knows it.

Throughout the sad history of Trumpism, comedians have garnered tons of laughs at Trump’s expense. At the White House Correspondents’ dinner in 2011, Seth Meyers famously quipped, “Trump said he’s running as a Republican. Which is surprising; I just assumed he was running as a joke.”

The audience roared. Trump seethed.

“That evening of public abasement, rather than sending Mr. Trump away, accelerated his ferocious efforts to gain stature within the political world,” wrote The New York Times’s Maggie Haberman and Alexander Burns. “And it captured the degree to which Mr. Trump’s campaign is driven by a deep yearning sometimes obscured by his bluster and bragging: a desire to be taken seriously.”

Until recently, the aging Democratic political class, including President Biden, thought it too impolitic to lampoon Trump as a political leader, and thus struggled to land blows that would undercut his support without also mocking his supporters. Call him a serious threat, yes. Call him an unserious fool, no.

The Harris campaign has less trouble learning new tricks, writes Michael Tomasky at The New Republic:

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?

Trump the Cowardly Bully needs to be respected and feared. Calling him a fascist or an authoritarian empowers him, feeds his ego;. In his mind, it brings him one step closer to admission to the brotherhood of dictators whose acceptance he most desperately desires.

“Sustained ridicule has the potential to reinforce the downward spiral Trump is now in,” Tomasky writes. He fears being laughed at? Pummel him with guffaws.

But, I’d advise, spare his supporters the “deplorables” label. Insults may motivate them. Some are too far gone, yes. But others may yet either stay home in the fall or leave the top race blank.

Tomasky recommends:

Ridicule makes him weaker. Ridicule makes him small. Ridicule makes him desperate. He’ll try to respond with ridicule of his own, but he is not a clever man. He’s a stupid man. He has no wit. He has no sense of mischief. He doesn’t read. He doesn’t think beyond first reactions. These nicknames of his, which the press has made such a big deal of over the years—they’re nothing. They’re dick contests put into words. Little Marco, Sleepy Joe. There’s nothing remotely clever about any of them.

And now he reportedly thinks he’s come up with a great one in “Communist Kamala.” Well, it’s alliterative, I’ll give him that. But I doubt very much that it’ll play beyond the base. First of all, people under 40 barely know what a communist was. Even for older people who do know, is communism the specter it once was?

Exactly. It’s stunning that Republicans think branding an opponent “communist” or “socialist” still bites 35 years after the Berlin Wall fell. I’ve said before, if Republicans expect to lead in the 21st century they might first try living in it.

And after all the flag-waving at the DNC convention (I have mine here), “Communist Kamala” is sauce as weak as Trump’s other schoolyard taunts.

Trump may yet rally. That is, if his decaying mind is not already too far gone. With Trump, what passes for strategy is simply feral instinct. That may survive the decay of what limited higher functions Trump ever had.

Joe Biden’s departure resets the board. Tomasky writes, “Against Joe Biden, Trump looked credible to swing voters, simply because of Biden’s age. Against Harris, he looks old (because he is), confused (because he is), far less intelligent than she (because he is), and less genuinely patriotic (because he is).”

Trump is cut over the eye. Go out and work the eye.

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The headline for this NYT review of David Rhode’s new is puzzling. It says

I thought the story was going to be about DOJ employees being afraid of getting in trouble if they spilled the beans to David Rhode. But it doesn’t really reveal anything like that except a passing reference to the fear for their jobs if Trump wins in November and to say that Merrick Garland wanted to preserve the norms of the Justice Department and that was hard because Trump is such a lying criminal.

Be that as it may, it sounds like an interesting book anyway:

Trump was the first president since Nixon to utterly reject the idea that federal law enforcement should operate independently of the president’s personal desires or prejudices. Rather, he sought to use the attorney general, special prosecutors, U.S. attorneys and the F.B.I. as instruments to help himself and his friends and to punish his enemies.

Although Rohde doesn’t hide his conviction that Trump undermined democracy with his salvos against the Justice Department’s independence, he nonetheless writes in measured, restrained language that should hold up well in the light of history. “Where Tyranny Begins” is a work of reporting and sober analysis, not polemic. While his title might sound shrill, it’s actually an allusion to words from John Locke: “Wherever law ends, tyranny begins.”

Importantly, Rohde understands that there’s tension and ambiguity in the Justice Department’s charge: It’s expected to carry out the president’s policies yet simultaneously to investigate him and his associates neutrally. After Watergate, America enacted reforms to strengthen the latter part of the mission — to preserve the department’s autonomy. Gerald Ford’s attorney general Edward Levi issued guidelines for ensuring impartiality should Watergate-style criminality again pervade the White House.

That framework began to change under the first President Bush. In perhaps the greatest abuse of presidential power since Watergate, Bush issued pardons to six former Reagan administration officials indicted in the Iran-contra scandal, including Reagan’s secretary of defense Caspar Weinberger, in part so that Weinberger wouldn’t be compelled to give testimony at trial that would implicate Bush himself. The erosion of norms upholding Justice Department autonomy continued under the second President Bush, who in 2006 fired several U.S. attorneys for plainly political reasons — a scandal that led to his attorney general’s resignation.

As in so many realms, Trump outdid his predecessors. This is the heart of Rohde’s multipart story: Trump fired the F.B.I. director James Comey after learning that the agency was investigating the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia. He browbeat Attorney General Jeff Sessions for recusing himself from the inquiry. He threatened to sack the special prosecutor, Robert Mueller. He had his next attorney general, William Barr, name another special prosecutor to investigate F.B.I. agents involved in the Russia probe. He punished agency officials, like the deputy director Andrew McCabe, who Trump believed conspired against him. He pardoned Roger Stone, Michael Flynn, Paul Manafort and other cronies. He pressured Barr and other Justice officials to abet his schemes to overturn his loss to Joe Biden in the 2020 election.

There is a bit of a myth that “the guardrails held” and that nobody in the Trump administration actually let him get away with his crazy schemes. To be sure, they sometimes did and we know that it will be worse in a second term because he’s got people around him who have learned the system’s weaknesses and Trump himself is ready to take it to the limit.

But it’s a fact that they succeeded in many norm-busting assaults on the rule of law and just because Bill Barr finally balked at the end, it doesn’t make him a hero. Look at what he actually did do.

Apparently, Rhode got some of the DOJ people to spill how they were pressured into doing Trump and Barr’s will and hating themselves for doing it. And he spends a lot of the book looking at how Garland and his deputies have been trying to resuscitate the Justice Department’s credibility and reputation.

I haven’t read the book and so I can’t say whether ot not that speaks well of the Garland DOJ or not. Rhode writes about “the pernicious consequences of the department’s politicization, as Garland drew fire from the right, for being too partisan, as well as from the left, for not being partisan enough.” I would argue that the left wasn’t ever saying that Garland wasn’t being “partisan enough.” They were arguing that by being so cautious and deliberate he was giving Trump privileges that no other American would receive which is the opposite of the United States’ alleged dedication to equal justice under the law.

Rohde reveals that Garland felt pained that norms of impartiality meant that his department had “a hand tied behind its back, compared to a political actor.” But Rohde adds that for Garland to have discarded these venerable norms just because Trump had done so would have only made things worse. “We would not want to be a political actor,” Garland proclaimed. “That is the end of the rule of law.” As Trump advances toward a possible second presidential term, we would all do well to reread our Locke.

I get that this is a complicated call. And there are political actors who have even more responsibility for what Trump has done (such as Republicans who refused to convict him in his second impeachment trial which would have ended the specific threat of Trump in 2021.) But being a stickler for norms that the other side doesn’t recognize is a recipe for being run over. I understand the need to keep them alive but I’m not sure they couldn’t have survived more aggressive action to hold Trump accountable.