Late last year, former President Donald Trump announced his endorsement of car dealership owner Bernie Moreno for Ohio’s Senate seat – elevating an untested candidate who’d never held public office over several other more prominent Republicans.
Two days later, Moreno’s campaign spent about $17,000 at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort, and then followed up by spending an additional $79,000 the next month – making him one of the Florida club’s top political spenders.
He wasn’t alone. With glitzy Mar-a-Lago fundraisers, stays at Trump’s hotels, and flights on the former president’s private jet, Republican candidates and political groups are on track to spend more on Trump’s businesses this year than any year since 2016, according to a CNN analysis of federal campaign finance data.
Trump himself has been the biggest spender, both this year and over the last decade. Between his three presidential campaigns, Trump and associated political groups have funneled more than $28 million in campaign donations to his businesses – helping convert the enthusiasm of his political supporters into personal profit.
Other Republicans have followed suit, spending millions at Trump’s properties in an apparent attempt to curry favor with the former president and signal their allegiance to him to GOP voters.
Some of the candidates who’ve spent the most money on Trump businesses in recent years have been new politicians who won the former president’s endorsement despite a lack of past electoral experience or success, including Moreno, former Georgia Senate candidate Herschel Walker and Arizona Senate hopeful Kari Lake.
If he loses I guess he’ll have to go back to shilling cheap consumer goods. Will anyone buy them?
If the Democrats thought that having Republicans speak at the convention might help persuade some Trump skeptical GOP voters to come over to the other side, it’s doubtful it worked, unfortunately. At least if those voters were watching on Fox:
Fox News did not air a second of the speeches from alienated GOP leaders and former Trump officials who endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris at this week’s Democratic National Convention.
The DNC speakers included former Illinois Rep. Adam Kinzinger, who spoke in prime-time before Harris’ Thursday keynote; former Georgia Lt. Gov. Geoff Duncan; former Trump White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham; Olivia Troye, who served as a homeland security aide to former Vice President Mike Pence; and Mesa, Arizona, Mayor John Giles.
MSNBC and CNN treated those speeches as newsworthy, airing each of them in full, according to a Media Matters review of the networks’ convention coverage. But Fox hid the content of all of those speeches from their viewers, often displaying the video on screen without audio as the network’s on-air hosts and guests offered commentary.
It’s not hard to figure out why: Fox is a Trumpist propaganda organ that helped the former president purge the GOP of his critics and is working tirelessly to return him to the White House.
Say what you will about MSNBC being a liberal version of Fox, they would not do something like this. If Democrats were speaking at the RNC, they would show them. In fact, it would be a big story. Fox is just shamelessly shilling for Trump and protecting the GOP.
The figure is 14% higher than for Trump’s speech, which scored 25.4 million viewers July 19. Harris also drew substantially more than the 24.6 million viewers who watched Joe Biden’s acceptance speech at the convention in 2020 and about the same as the 29.8 million viewers who tuned in to Hillary Clinton in 2016.
Harris helped herself by keeping her speech to 37 minutes. Trump’s 90-minute-plus stem-winder went on well past midnight on the East Coast.
The speech caps a successful week for the Democratic National Convention, which topped the audience for the GOP’s gathering every night this week.
A prominent Republican group is citing one of the most reviled Supreme Court (SCOTUS) decisions in American history to justify its case that Vice President Kamala Harris should be deemed ineligible to run under the U.S. Constitution.
In an official resolution, the National Federation of Republican Assemblies (NFRA) – a 90 year-old GOP-aligned organization that counted former President Ronald Reagan among its membership — took the position that Harris should not be allowed to hold the office of president, citing several “precedent-setting U.S. Supreme Court cases.” Among the six cases the NFRA cited was the Dred Scott v. Sandford decision of 1857, which is regarded as one of the worst SCOTUS decisions of all time, if not the worst ever.
“Several states, candidates, and major political parties have ignored this fundamental Presidential qualification, including candidates Nikki Haley, Vivek Ramaswamy and Kamala Harris whose parents were not American citizens at the time of their birth,” the NFRA’s resolution read.
The resolution — which attorney Andrew Fleischman posted to the social media platform Bluesky — cited Article II, Section 1, Paragraph 5 of the Constitution, which pertains to only natural-born U.S. citizens being eligible to serve as president. The NFRA argued that the phrase “natural born citizen” is defined as “a person born on American soil of parents who are both citizens of the United States at the time of the child’s birth.”
However, as numerous Bluesky users observed, applying the NFRA’s interpretation of that clause would have made multiple U.S. presidents ineligible to hold office, including George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, among others. Dallas-based attorney Santiago Reich pointed out that because those presidents’ parents were born on land classified as British colonies at the time, they would not meet the standard the NFRA set to define natural-born citizenship.
One of the other SCOTUS decisions the NFRA cited in its resolution was the 1939 Perkins v. Elg case, which states: “A child born here of alien parentage becomes a citizen of the United States.” Reich called the NFRA “pretty f—ing bold” to cite a decision that undermines their core argument.
Other Bluesky users responding to Fleischman’s post further argued that the mere existence of the 13th Amendment (the abolition of slavery), the 14th Amendment (equal protection for formerly enslaved Americans) and the 19th Amendment (universal women’s suffrage) make the cases the NFRA cited in its resolution invalid.
“All of these cases except Perkins v. Elg have been abrogated or are completely unrelated,” one user wrote. “Dredd[sic] Scott was overturned entirely by the 14th and its text cannot be meaningfully cited for any reason whatsof—ingever.”
The Dred Scott case concerned a slave from Missouri who then lived in the free states of Illinois — which sided with the Union in the Civil War — and Wisconsin (which was initially a part of the Louisiana Territory that did not have slavery due to the 1820 Missouri Compromise). When Dred Scott sued for his freedom, the Supreme Court denied his petition stating that he lacked the standing to sue in federal court.
In the decision, Chief Justice Roger Taney asserted that Article III of the U.S. Constitution made it impossible for the descendants of slaves to have the rights of citizenship. The Supreme Court’s own website has since referred to Dred Scott v. Sandford as “a legal and practical mistake.”
Donald J. Trump isa legal and practical mistake too. Not that it matters when defending white Christian nationalists from having to share this country with people not like themselves.
A quick perusal of the NFRA document reveals it advocates the constitutional sheriff movement-adjacent “Doctrine of the Lesser Magistrates,” “Holy Scripture,” and “natural and revealed laws of God” as the basis for governance. Oh, and the upholding of “natural societal order of submission to legitimate authority, parents and children, employers and employees, coaches and athletes, teachers and students, etc.” Guess who’s legitimate and natural and who’s not?
Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D) of Massachusetts holds back tears Thursday night in Chicago.
An old speaker’s trick at the end introductory applause is to settle one’s hands on the sides of the podium to quiet an audience and signal time to begin speaking. When Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts tried that on Thursday night, the cheers seemed for a moment as if they might subside. But Democratic National Convention delegates packed to the rafters in Chicago’s United Center were not having it. The cheers swelled anew, and louder still. Overcome with emotion, Warren pulled back from the podium a half step and wiped away a tear.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., wipes away tears as the crowd erupts in cheers for her as she takes the stage for her DNC speech. pic.twitter.com/mSTryxkqFn
Warren’s ovation was the loudest and longest of any speaker save for President Joe Biden’s hero’s welcome late Monday night, and Vice President Kamala Harris’s on Thursday as the Democrats’ presidential nominee. President Barack Obama’s matched Warren’s welcome in length but not in intensity. It was immediate and rapturous, as if springing from delegates’ hearts and souls.
Joe Biden’s and Nancy Pelosi’s legacies will not be fully appreciated until historians weave together how their personal stories and battle scars, legislative accomplishments and deep political skills, built the country this generation’s children will inherit.
Nevertheless, what we witnessed in Chicago was not only a generational passing of the Democratic Party’s torch from Biden to Harris, but the passing of an entire generation of Democratic establishment, though they may not yet know it.
The term netroots gained traction in the early aughts as a label for progressive bloggers and activists who found each other and built community on the Internet. The annual activist conference that became Netroots Nation sprang from that community in 2006. (Warren has been a regular speaker since before becoming senator from Massachusetts in 2013.) A running joke was that the Democratic establishment considered them “dirty hippies.” DFH is the family friendly acronym the community adopted for how establishment Democrats really saw the upstarts without saying so out loud, at least in public.
As brusque congressman and then Vermont senator and presidential candidate, independent Bernie Sanders championed their progressive policy goals. But Warren’s ovation reflects how firmly her warmer populism has taken root in the wider party and won Democrats’ hearts.
The DNC convention’s message was clear, US editor Betsy Reed writes this morning in The Guardian: “this is Harris’s party now.”
But is it?
Democratic Socialists of America candidate, former bartender Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, then 28, came from nowhere in 2018 to upset Rep. Joe Crowley in the Democratic primary in his Bronx and Queens district after outraising her 10-1. The veteran Crowley, leader of the local Democratic machine, was seen as possible next in line to Speaker Nancy Pelosi. He’s gone. DNC delegates chanted A-O-C when she took the stage on Monday night.
Harris has moved left since arriving in Washington, but despite Donald Trump’s branding her far left, she is not. But if Warren’s stunning welcome was any indication, Harris may be lagging somewhat behind the party she now leads. If progressive politicos are DFHs, the United Center was filled to the brim with them on Thursday night.
This is no longer Sens. Chuck Schumer’s or Dick Durbin’s Democratic Party, nor even Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi’s. Did they get the memo?
Recently, three healthy wolf pups and one adult from the Copper Creek pack were spotted playing together. Wolves are wild animals; like bears, elk, and other wild animals, they should be treated with respect.
Listen to some of this wolf pup’s first howls from only a few weeks ago! A little warning: the pup is pretty loud for only being 4-weeks old! (1/7) pic.twitter.com/sPUntEHOdx
— Voyageurs Wolf Project (@VoyaWolfProject) May 19, 2021
When we visit dens, we try to count the number of pups in the den. However, we often cannot see all the way in the den so we set up trail cameras at the den to see how many pups are in it.
Sometimes the trail camera footage verifies our initial pup count and other times we realize how many pups we “missed”. E.g., when we visited this den a few weeks ago we counted 5 pups. When we checked our trail camera footage, we realized there were actually 8 pups!
There’s a lot of that pearl clutching on the right today. But I think every official in the Democratic party sent their thoughts and prayers right after it happened and now it’s passed through the memory hole. Isn’t that how this is supposed to work?
Comer: "Minnesota is not your normal state … you have a huge population of residents in Minnesota that have come from other countries and have very different ideologies that don't really respect capitalism." pic.twitter.com/v1XdFYSeyj
That’s right. Minnesota is teeming with foreigners and Tim Walz is a Chinese agent. You heard that right. James Comer has sent a letter to FBI Director Wray telling him that his committee is conducting a big investigation into Chinese political warfare and has some questions about Walz:
It has come to the Committee’s attention that Governor Walz has longstanding connections to CCP-connected entities and officials that make him susceptible to the Party’s strategy of elite capture, which seeks to co-opt influential figures in elite political, cultural, and academic circles to influence the United States to the benefit of the communist regime and the detriment of Americans. Reporting about Governor Walz’s extensive engagement with CCP officials and entities while serving in public office raises questions about possible CCP influence in his decision-making as governor—and, should he be elected, as vice president.
FFS. Public Notice has Walz’s story and it’s actually pretty great:
In 1989, when he was all of 25-years-old, Walz spent a year teaching high school in China. He went on to lead many student trips to the country, something Comer and his fellow goons have tried to spin as nefarious.
Comer got some help spreading his latest innuendo campaign Monday evening from Fox News’s Jesse Watters.
“If an American goes to China 30 times in the ‘90s, they have surveillance footage of him,” Watters vamped.
“China thinks long term,” Comer agreed, affecting grave concern while invoking old-timey Orientalist stereotypes. “It’s very possible that China would be grooming an up-and-coming rising star in the political process to try to have a foothold in our government.”
How wise of the CCP to have noticed this high school teacher 35 years ago and intuited that he would one day be the vice president!
“When you look at Hunter Biden’s ties with Communist China, it was for money,” Comer went on. “It looks like Walz’s ties may be for ideology. And this is something that we should be concerned about.”
From Walz’s 24-year military service and his career as a school teacher Comer deduces that the governor harbors communist leanings.
“If you look at Walz’s background, if you look at his ideology and the things he talked about when he ran for attorney general and he ran for governor, this is a guy that really has embraced China’s view of the world,” he went on, despite the fact that Walz is not a lawyer and never ran for attorney general.
But that didn’t stop the intrepid congressman from denigrating a lifetime of public service and a modest bank account as red flags for Red China.
“We have a guy who’s never been in the private sector, he’s worked for the government his whole life, from looking at his financial background, it doesn’t look like he owns any stocks, his retirement’s in a government pension plan,” said Comer, who has held public office since 2001 when he was 28-years-old and will collect both state and federal pensions. “This guy’s very dependent on the government, and I believe he thinks that the business model that China’s had may be the ideal business model for the united states.”
The usual suspects profess to be very disturbed.
“Tim Walz owes the American people an explanation about his unusual, 35-year relationship with Communist China,” Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton tweeted.
Florida Sen. Marco Rubio went even further, calling Walz “an example of how Beijing patiently grooms future American leaders” to “push for policies that allow China to steal our jobs & factories & flood America with drugs.”
In reality, Walz has been a steadfast critic of the Chinese government’s human rights abuses, while at the same time advocating for greater engagement with the Chinese people. He’s met with the Dalai Lama and accused the CCP of ethnic cleansing of minorities, including the Uyghurs.
“What I saw was not just modernization. I saw the cultural shift, or the culturacide, if you may,” then-Rep. Walz said at a 2009 congressional hearing on Human Rights and the Law in China.
None of which is going to please the Chinese government or allow Beijing to “steal our jobs & factories & flood America with drugs.” But that will not stop the GOP from pretending the former football coach and National Guardsman, who retired and then re-enlisted after September 11, is a Chinese spy.
Sen. Ron Johnson further condemned him for getting married on the anniversary of Tiananmen Square. Seriously.
Walz is a very interesting person who is not only a salt-o-the-earth guy who spent his life in public service. Hes also a sophisticated man of the world who has spent time outside the country and understands how the world works. We should value these things in our leaders instead of extolling phonies like Orange Julius Caesar whose entire worldview was formed by watching Larry King back in the 1980s and reading the NY Post.
Tim Walz’s knowledge and experience in China are a huge asset. Anyone who thinks otherwise is a fool. .
I don’t know if its 2016 PTSD or simply a recognition that almost half the country is still in thrall to a con man but it’s obvious that the Democrats. as giddy as they are after a successful convention, are not going to take anything for granted this time.
In his speech to the convention Wednesday night, Bill Clinton alluded to two elections it must have killed him to see Dems lose: his vice president’s and his wife’s. “We’ve seen more than one election slip away from us when we thought it couldn’t happen,” he warned, “when people got distracted by phony issues or overconfident.”
Overconfidence and phony issues alike derailed Hillary Clinton’s campaign, and Bill Clinton was not alone worrying they could overtake Harris’s too. Michelle Obama articulated more precisely how the early Harris momentum might slip.
“No matter how good we feel tonight or tomorrow or the next day, this is going to be an uphill battle,” she said. “We cannot be our own worst enemies. No. See, because the minute something goes wrong, the minute a lie takes hold, folks, we cannot start wringing our hands. We cannot get a Goldilocks complex about whether everything is just right. And we cannot indulge our anxieties about whether this country will elect someone like Kamala instead of doing everything we can to get someone like Kamala elected.”
This, too, was about 2016—about the likelihood that Republicans will stumble upon a line of attack that turns out to be sticky, or that Harris takes a position that some of her natural allies view as too extreme or too conservative. Beating Trump is more important than that everything is just so.
Against the backdrop of a four day party, this was the flipside of mobilization: insurance against demobilization.
Barack Obama’s role, by contrast, was persuasion—to widen the party’s appeal by depicting it as an organization that will generously welcome all people of good faith. “We’ve all got our blind spots and contradictions and prejudices,” he said. “If we want to win over those who aren’t yet ready to support our candidates, we need to listen to their concerns and maybe learn something in the process. After all, if a parent or grandparent occasionally says something that makes us cringe, we don’t automatically assume they’re bad people. We recognize that the world is moving fast, that they need time and maybe a little encouragement to catch up. Our fellow citizens deserve the same grace we hope they’ll extend to us.”
In past elections, particularly in 2016, progressive Democrats would grouse about the party’s willingness to share the stage with Republicans. This year, there was much less complaining. For one thing, progressives are now among the leaders in the party, and can expect prominent speaking roles without having to fight for them. But Democrats understand the assignment better now.
As Brian Schatz noted Wednesday, “Our message is simple. We can fight about the rest of it later. We can fight about the size and the scope of government later. We can fight about libertarian issues or social issues later. We have freedom and democracy to preserve together, and there are certain principles that are bigger than party politics.”
He also noted that, to be truly effective, the proposition has to come from Republicans, like when Adam Kinzinger spoke Thursday and said of Harris, “whatever policies we disagree on pale in comparison with those fundamental matters of principle, of decency, and of fidelity to this nation… to my fellow Republicans, if you still pledge allegiance to those principles, I suspect you belong here too.”
(Consider subscribing to read the whole thing. It’s very good as are all of his writings. )
He’s right about this. There are many things that could happen to derail us. If there’s one thing I’ve learned the hard way over these past few years (decades, actually) it’s to never assume you have it in the bag. Too many times I’ve sat up on election night staring blankly at the returns, feeling like I’ve been hit over the head with a 2×4. Elections are almost always close these days and you just can’t assume anything.
The Democrats have been given a second chance in this election and they know it. Let’s hope everyone can just keep their heads down, get out the vote and be prepared for what the GOP has in store for election day and beyond.
The convention was extremely respectful and appreciative of women and elder statesmen and it was really good to see. An it was especially welcoming to progressive champions like Warren which has not happened much in the past. The unity was not feigned. It was real and it was sincere.
