Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

The Washington Post did a fact check on this absurd brouhaha about the FBI instructions when they served the warrant on Mar-a-Lago. He points to a particular right wing reporter, Julie Kelly, as the source of the hysteria and laid out the timeline:

1:28 p.m.

To her first tweet, Kelly attached another tweet in which she highlighted another document: “Oh my God. Armed FBI agents were preparing to confront Trump and even engage Secret Service if necessary. They were going to go door to door to terrorize MAL guests and even pick the locks. Gestapo.”

This page from the filing, titled “contingencies,” laid out procedures in the event the media or Trump unexpectedly arrived at the scene. The document, laden with abbreviations, says that if Trump were to appear, the Miami FBI executive manager and the on-scene coordinator “will be prepared to engage with FPOTUS [former president of the United States] and USSS [Secret Service] Security team.” In this context, “engage” means talk and coordinate. If the Secret Service agents on the ground were to resist, then the document directed that the discussion would be elevated to more senior officials, including “points of contact” that the FBI has with Secret Service through existing liaison relationships. (Two names are redacted.)

In an interview over the summer with the House Judiciary Committee, former FBI assistant director in charge Steven D’Antuono described what was planned. D’Antuono had disagreed with the decision to send the FBI to Mar-a-Lago, believing that Trump’s attorneys should have been given another chance to provide missing documents. But he said he lost the argument because there was concern that without quick action these highly classified documents could leak out, given the poor security at Trump’s estate.

In the interview, he disputed the idea that it was a raid. Officials knew that Trump was not in the state, residing at the time at his estate in New Jersey. (During the operation, he was visiting Trump Tower in Manhattan.)

“It wasn’t even a show of force, right, because we were all in agreement,” D’Antuono said. “We didn’t do a show of force, right. I was adamant about that, and that was something that we agreed on, right, the FBI agreed on, right. No raid jackets, no blazed FBI. We interact. We made sure we interacted with the Secret Service to make sure we could get into Mar-a-Lago with no issues. We’re not banging down any doors. We weren’t bringing any like FBI vehicles, everything that was reported about helicopters and a hundred people descending on, like a Die Hard movie, was completely untrue, right. That is not how we played it.”

He added that executing a search warrant was “not against policy or against the law.” During the search, the FBI seized 102 additional classified documents. Seventeen were marked top secret, 54 secret and 31 confidential.

1:54 p.m.

Kyle Becker, who has bounced around conservative media and now has his own news site, became the first to use the “assassin” language in a post for his nearly 500,000 followers.

“NEW: The FBI was basically authorized to assassinate Trump if necessary in Mar-a-Lago raid,” he wrote over Kelly’s original tweet.

3:08 p.m.

Mike Cernovich, a right-wing social media personality with 1.2 million followers, weighed in with his own take on Kelly’s tweet: “The FBI raid was designed to provoke a response. This was an assassination attempt on President Trump.”

Again, when the FBI agents went to Mar-a-Lago, they knew Trump was not in the state.

3:19 p.m.

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), with 3.2 million followers, quickly elevated the stakes, also with a post over Kelly’s first tweet. “This is grounds for impeachment of Wray and Garland,” she wrote, referring to FBI Director Christopher A. Wray and Attorney General Merrick Garland. “Trump and team was cooperating the entire time with the FBI. Was deadly force authorized against Biden for his docs? Were they going to shoot SS then Pres Trump, Melania, and Barron too???”

Other Republican lawmakers follow up with their own posts.

4:13 p.m.

Trump’s Truth Social account posts an image of Biden with the headline: “Biden’s DOJ authorized use of deadly force against President Trump in the Mar-a-Lago raid.”

5:21

Trump posts his own comment on his Truth Social Account: “WOW! I just came out of the Biden Witch Hunt Trial in Manhattan, the ‘Icebox,’ and was shown Reports that Crooked Joe Biden’s DOJ, in their Illegal and UnConstitutional Raid of Mar-a-Lago, AUTHORIZED THE FBI TO USE DEADLY (LETHAL) FORCE. NOW WE KNOW, FOR SURE, THAT JOE BIDEN IS A SERIOUS THREAT TO DEMOCRACY. HE IS MENTALLY UNFIT TO HOLD OFFICE — 25TH AMENDMENT!”

As noted, the “reports” came from Trump’s own legal filing, so this should not have been a surprise to him.

6 p.m.

Trump issues a fundraising appeal: “BIDEN’S DOJ WAS AUTHORIZED TO SHOOT ME! It’s just been revealed that Biden’s DOJ was authorized to use DEADLY FORCE for their DESPICABLE raid in Mar-a-Lago. You know they’re just itching to do the unthinkable.”

7:11 p.m.

Christina Bobb, who was on Trump’s legal team at the time of the search, posted: “WTF?!! They were prepared to kill me?! A few dozen FBI agents v. me and they were ready to kill me?!!! What in the world happened to the United States of America?!”

Months before the FBI search, Bobb had signed a document swearing that she had been told that “a diligent search” was conducted of boxes of records shipped from the White House to Florida when Trump left office, The Post reported.

8:17 p.m.

Former Trump aide Stephen K. Bannon, on his war room podcast, declares: “This was an attempted assassination attempt on Donald John Trump or people associated with him.”

The right is now totally bought into the lie that Biden tried to have Trump assassinated. It’s all over their social media and propaganda networks.

This is just a way to turn the creepy immunity argument that a president has the right to order Seal Team Six to kill his political opponent inside out — the “I know you are but what am I” tactic they love so much. But it’s also dangerous. This ratchets up the lie that Biden is the extremist who threatens democracy and the rule of law but the difference is that MAGA is full of violent, gun toting weirdos who have already shown a willingness to take matters into their own hands. It’s as irresponsible as it gets. But then, what else is new?

Trump has his people fanning out all over the world meeting with foreign leaders making god-knows-what promises. I’m sure there’s an understanding between him and Vlad over this just as the Iranians released the hostages on the day Reagan was inaugurated. (It was no a coincidence.)

Trump doesn’t even have to try to hide his cozy relationship with Putin. Nobody even comments on it anymore. Selling out Americans has been completely normalized.

It's not just Justice Alito.

Here's the "Appeal to Heaven" flag flying outside of conservative powerbroker Leonard Leo's home in Maine.

Photo taken by a nearby resident who shared it with @ProPublica and gave us permission to publish it. 1/x pic.twitter.com/dmwRAvNkMM

— Andy Kroll (@AndyKroll) May 23, 2024

As you know, Leonard Leo is the mastermind of the right wing legal assault on democracy. And he and his good buddy Samuel Alito are obviously part of an insurrectionist cabal. Some might even call them traitors.

As Tom discussed this morning, Dahlia Lithwick has a great piece today on this subject over at Slate and I want to highlight the same conclusion he did:

No, I have come to conclude that this is an us problem. Because rather than hurling ourselves headlong into the “Alito Must Recuse” brick wall of “yeah, no,” we need to dedicate the upcoming election cycle, and the attendant election news cycle, to a discussion of the courts. Not just Alito or Thomas, who happen to go to work every day at the court, and not just Dobbs and gun control, which happen to have come out of the very same court, but the connection between those two tales: what it means to have a Supreme Court that is functionally immune from political pressure, from internal norms of behavior, from judicial ethics and disclosure constraints, and from congressional oversight, and why that is deeply dangerous. More so, why justices who were placed on the court to behave as well-compensated partisan politicians would do so in public as well as on paper. Until we do that, Alito will continue to fly around the world, giving speeches about his triumph in Dobbs and Thomas will keep taking gifts and failing to disclose them. That won’t be the end of the Supreme Court story; it will be just the start of it.

I could not agree more. I am more convinced than ever that part of our current MAGA funk is directly due to our inchoate feeling of impotence over what to do about it. We must have this bigger conversation so that we can at least begin to define the problem in order to somehow dredge up the strength to fix it.

The judiciary has been completely corrupted by Leo and the far right billionaires who fund him. And Leo has entered the larger culture war in a big way:

With success has come public attention. Leo’s summer home in Maine has become the site of regular protests. He’s also attracted legal scrutiny. Last summer, Politico reported that the Washington, D.C., attorney general launched an investigation into whether Leo has misused nonprofit laws for personal enrichment, following a watchdog complaint pointing out that nonprofits under Leo’s control have paid tens of millions to his for-profit firms.

In November, the Senate Judiciary Committee voted to authorize a subpoena after Leo refused to provide lawmakers with a full accounting of all gifts and payments that he has directed to Supreme Court justices and their spouses. The vote followed reports that Leo steered secret consulting payments to Justice Clarence Thomas’ wife, and arranged Justice Samuel Alito’s seat on a private jet — paid for by a billionaire hedge-fund chief — as part of an undisclosed luxury fishing trip in Alaska in 2008. 

Leo has publicly refused to cooperate with the reported D.C. probe, with his lawyer arguing that the district’s attorney general, Brian Schwalb, has “no legal authority to conduct any investigatory steps or take any enforcement measures.” Leo has also refused to comply with the promised Senate subpoena, saying in a statement: “I will not cooperate with this unlawful campaign of political retribution.” (The subpoena has not yet been issued.)

A devout Catholic, Leo is one of the most powerful political operatives in the United States. In 2021, he was gifted an unprecedented $1.6 billion dark money fund, with the purpose of shifting American society further to the right. 

He’s way beyond MAGA and Trump. He’s playing a very long game and he has the resources to do it:

In a recent report on the strained relationship between Leo and Trump, The Washington Post wrote that Leo “has told others he no longer talks to Trump’s advisers and is largely focused on spending billions to reshape the country in a more conservative direction with a focus on non-election issues.” 

Constant, serious scrutiny of this man would be one way to start. Make him the “George Soros ” of the right wing.

Look for more of this. Using civil rights laws to crack down on diversity hiring is just *chefs kiss*

Florida’s top legal officer on Wednesday said the state will investigate Starbucks, the multinational chain of coffeehouses, for its diversity, equity and inclusion practices.

“So many of these DEI policies that have been pushed in corporate America that were meant to address and prevent discrimination are now pushing policies and programs and initiatives that may in fact be unlawful employment practices, in fact becoming discriminatory themselves,” Florida Attorney General Ashley Moody said, while appearing on Sean Hannity’s radio show, which Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis guest hosted.

Moody filed a complaint with the Florida Commission on Human Relations, which she said would launch a “full investigation.” The decades-old commission is meant to enforce the Florida Civil Rights Act and address discrimination issues.

[…]

The governor, an opponent of DEI programs who signed a bill last year banning such initiatives at state universities, thanked her for the work: “You should treat people as individuals, judge them based on the content of their character, not the color of their skin or their ethnicity or anything like that.”

Uh huh.

As the majority becomes a minority in this country over the next few years they’ll undoubtedly bring these law back in order to enforce hiring of more white people. They know how to work the system.

With Haley endorsing Trump it’s now up to Trump and his surrogates to follow up and convince her voters to do the same. Marge Green has a strategy to get that done:

I’m sure that will persuade them.

Tomorrow belongs to them

CNN’s Abby Phillip ran through Donald Trump’s plans for his next administration. He may be a basket case, but he has a cadre of extremists ready to step up to help him implement his plans and theirs.

Phillip: Trump has given the country plenty of new evidence about what he plans to do if he captures the oval office… so let's go headline by headline pic.twitter.com/gSPSn5wnZz

— Acyn (@Acyn) May 22, 2024

Let’s talk about projection. What we see blossoming more boldly than ever among the authoritarianati is entitlement. Unspoken, mostly, but present. When the conservative elite speak derisively of the social safety net, they insist that entitlements must be cut. Just not theirs, naturally.

An ‘us’ problem

What we see displayed by Supreme Court Justices Thomas (with his undeclared gifts) and Alito (with his insurrectionist flags) is the sense that they are untouchable, writes Dahlia Lithwick. And their behaviors are not anything Chief Justice Roberts seems inclined to address by imposing a strict code of ethics. The justices stand imperial:

We have a judicial enterprise that rules over us with absolutely no one ruling over them. Nobody should be all that surprised that Sen. Dick Durbin has announced that the Senate Judiciary Committee will not launch a probe into Alito’s recent conduct. The Senate has also been trying to unearth the financing for Thomas’s quarter million dollar salt-of-the-earth RV amid other ethics violations, and Leonard Leo has declined to comply with subpoenas related to it. Yes, the Senate should be acting to resolve this problem, but that seems to have largely stalled at “asking them to recuse.”

So just to review, this isn’t really a Sam Alito problem, or a Clarence Thomas problem, or a John Roberts problem—but it also isn’t even a Senate-Dems-who-can’t-muster-the-energy-to-close-the-deal problem.

No, I have come to conclude is that this is an us problem. Because rather than hurling ourselves headlong into the “Alito Must Recuse” brick wall of “yeah, no,” we need to dedicate the upcoming election cycle, and the attendant election news cycle to a discussion of the courts. Not just Sam Alito or Clarence Thomas who happen to go to work every day at the court, and not just Dobbs and gun control, which happens to have come out of the very same court, but the connection between those two tales: what it means to have a Supreme Court that is functionally immune from political pressure, from internal norms of behavior, from judicial ethics and disclosure constraints, and from congressional oversight and why that is deeply dangerous.

As I said: imperial.

Margaret Brennan recently confronted Sen. J.D. Vance (R) of Ohio with his suggesting the government emulate Hungarian autocrat Viktor Orban’s crackdown on alleged “left-wing domination” of universities. They must be given a choice, Vance had said, “between survival or taking a much less biased approach to teaching.”

Q: Viktor Orbán seized control of universities and put them in foundations that were run by his allies. He rewrote the Constitution, he neutered the courts, and he has tried to control the media. Is that what you're advocating for in the US?

Trump VP contender Vance: I think… pic.twitter.com/1DOl2z69yL

— Biden-Harris HQ (@BidenHQ) May 19, 2024

That isn’t a choice. It’s an ultimatum. An ultimatum Vance feels his fringe is entitled to enforce. He answered with word salad about universities being “part of a social contract in this country” and, since taxpayers help finance college educations, taxpayers should exercise more control over how that (loan?) money is spent.

(I look forward to Vance working with Sen. Elizabeth Warren on seeing to it that corporations receiving government contracts and subsidies uphold their end of the social contract.)

What we see among the Supremes, among federal legislators like Vance, and among state Republican legislators angling to impose permanent minority rule is an attitude that they can do what they please with impunity. Where could they have gotten that idea?

That sense of inevitability is spreading. See the story of OpenAI CEO Sam Altman vs. actress Scarlett Johansson. After Johansson declined to allow OpenAI to use her voice for its new digital assistant, Altman released it nonetheless with a voice remarkably like hers. She threatened to sue:

On the day that OpenAI released ChatGPT’s assistant, Altman posted a cheeky, one-word statement on X: “Her”—a reference to the 2013 film of the same name, in which Johansson is the voice of an AI assistant that a man falls in love with. Altman’s post is reasonably damning, implying that Altman was aware, even proud, of the similarities between Sky’s voice and Johansson’s.

The Atlantic‘s Charlie Warzel writes:

On its own, this seems to be yet another example of a tech company blowing past ethical concerns and operating with impunity. But the situation is also a tidy microcosm of the raw deal at the center of generative AI, a technology that is built off data scraped from the internet, generally without the consent of creators or copyright owners. Multiple artists and publishers, including The New York Times, have sued AI companies for this reason, but the tech firms remain unchastened, prevaricating when asked point-blank about the provenance of their training data. At the core of these deflections is an implication: The hypothetical superintelligence they are building is too big, too world-changing, too important for prosaic concerns such as copyright and attribution. The Johansson scandal is merely a reminder of AI’s manifest-destiny philosophy: This is happening, whether you like it or not.

They are the elite. They are in charge. They make decisions for you.

This is the unvarnished logic of OpenAI. It is cold, rationalist, and paternalistic. That such a small group of people should be anointed to build a civilization-changing technology is inherently unfair, they note. And yet they will carry on because they have both a vision for the future and the means to try to bring it to fruition. Wu’s proposition, which he offers with a resigned shrug in the video, is telling: You can try to fight this, but you can’t stop it. Your best bet is to get on board.

[…]

When your technology aims to rewrite the rules of society, it stands that society’s current rules need not apply.

Tomorrow belongs to them. So, whether we’re talking about the Supreme Court’s entitled MAGA faction, or MAGA Republicans, or Silicon Valley’s tech bros, here’s their offer: Accept their future. It’s coming anyway. Resistance is futile.

What they’re entitled to is a whupping. Delivering it, as Lithwick suggests, “is an us problem.”

Update: A SCOTUS ruling just dropped. Guess how it went?

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For The Win, 5th Edition is ready for download. Request a copy of my free countywide GOTV planning guide at ForTheWin.us.

Think twice

“No one insults the intelligence of Trump voters more than Donald Trump,” said MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell Wednseday night. Nobody, that is, except Marjorie Taylor Greene and MAGA TV.

Jimmy Kimmel assembled a MAGA TV gag reel:

The Independent reported on MTG’s “wild claim”:

Marjorie Taylor Greene has made the wild claim that the Justice Department had authorised the use of “deadly force” during an FBI search of Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence as a plan to “assassinate” the former president. The FBI have denied the accusation, saying that “standard protocol” was followed.

That raid on the former president’s Florida residence on 8 August 2022 ended with the FBI seizing hundreds of documents. On Tuesday, newly-unsealed court filings showed that four additional classified documents were discovered in Mr Trump’s bedroom in the months following the bureau’s search at Mar-a-Lago.

Mr Trump faces 40 felony counts for allegedly mishandling top secret documents taken to his estate after he left office. He denies all the charges against him.

In a fiery response, Mr Trump accused the Biden administration of soliciting the use of “deadly force” during the raid – which he called “unconstitutional” on Truth Social. He also sent his Maga followers a fundraising email with the subject line: “They were authorized to shoot me!”

Right. The FBI sent a team of agents to Mar-a-Lago, in broad daylight, to execute a kill order on Donald Trump who was at the time with his Secret Service detail 1,000 miles away in New Jersey.

“I nearly escaped death,” Trump added.

“Nearly escaped death?” asked Stephen Colbert to audience laughter.

Yes, the claim is laughable. Yes, MAGA TV’s very business model is stoking daily outrage. And yes, it’s a liberal guilty pleasure to mock Trump cultists, as O’Donnell does, for the “layers of stupidity” it takes to reply to that Trump fundraising email with their money. But it’s unhelpful. There was nothing funny about them storming the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6. Trump is preparing the ground for them to do it again. MAGA TV is dedicated the deadly project.

Anti-Trump attorney George Conway advised Greg Sargent recently that Team Biden needs to “keep making fun of Trump” during the debates until he loses it. “If the Biden campaign plays its cards right … we could have a Captain Queeg or a Colonel Jessup moment with Donald Trump” that could break through to the sensible elements of the American public that otherwise pay little attention to politics.

So mock Trump to his face. Mock the propagandists on Fox and OANN and Newsmax. And Marjorie Taylor Greene. But do not mock Trump followers. Calling them stupid is counter-productive and anchors them more strongly to the grievances Trump uses to exlpoit them. They will identify with him until they don’t. Hasten that. And welcome them when they turn against him. It’s not as satisfying as saying “I told you so,” but it’s more strategic.

BREAKING: In light of Nikki Haley’s announcement, the Biden campaign has put together a montage of all the Haley voters who are supporting President Biden. Retweet so all Americans know the majority of Haley voters are for President Biden. pic.twitter.com/bPkQa1XOjS

— Biden’s Wins (@BidensWins) May 22, 2024

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For The Win, 5th Edition is ready for download. Request a copy of my free countywide GOTV planning guide at ForTheWin.us.

There is no longer any doubt

I guess someone at the beach must have called Mrs Alito the c-word too. The NY Times reports:

Last summer, two years after an upside-down American flag was flown outside the Virginia home of Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., another provocative symbol was displayed at his vacation house in New Jersey, according to interviews and photographs.

This time, it was the “Appeal to Heaven” flag, which, like the inverted U.S. flag, was carried by rioters at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. Also known as the Pine Tree flag, it dates back to the Revolutionary War, but largely fell into obscurity until recent years and is now a symbol of support for former President Donald J. Trump, for a religious strand of the “Stop the Steal” campaign and for a push to remake American government in Christian terms.

Three photographs obtained by The New York Times, along with accounts from a half-dozen neighbors and passers-by, show that the Appeal to Heaven flag was aloft at the Alito home on Long Beach Island in July and September of 2023. A Google street view image from late August also shows the flag.

The photographs, each taken independently, are from four different dates. It is not clear whether the flag was displayed continuously during those months or how long it was flown overall.

Justice Alito declined to respond to questions about the beach house flag, including what it was intended to convey and how it comported with his obligations as a justice. The court also declined to respond.

What is the “Appeal to Heave” flag? It’s a revolutionary war flag that has been appropriated by the radical right in recent years:

In the 2010s, the flag became appropriated as a religious and political symbol by some conservative, nationalist, and Christian nationalist activists within the United States…In 2021, some Trump supporters carried the flag during the January 6 United States Capitol attack. 

By the way, in 2023, Mike Johnson, newly elected Speaker of the United States House of Representatives, hung the flag outside his Congressional office.

No more rainbow colors, damn it! Red, white and blue ONLY for Freedom Summer.

By the way, Florida Freedom extends to your dietary choices as well.

So far this year, lawmakers in Florida and Alabama have made it a criminal act to manufacture and sell lab-grown meat in their states. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) went first, signing a bill earlier this month and warning cellular agriculture companies: “Take your fake lab-grown meat elsewhere … we’re not doing that in the state of Florida.”

It isn’t actually available but damn it, red states are banning it anyway. Apparently, the mere idea of saving the planet and making it possible to not have to actually kill animals for animal protein is oppressive.

I feel so free, don’t you?

“He only cares about holding on to power. I care about you.”

If you haven’t seen Trump’s “Reich” video, that’s it. He didn’t make it but he did share it. Nazis just love the guy. Republicans say it’s no biggie:

Republicans refuse to condemn Trump for posting a pro-Nazi ad calling for a 'unified Reich' if he's reelected in November pic.twitter.com/cAbdVu9xJ1

— Biden-Harris HQ (@BidenHQ) May 22, 2024

Here’s Biden’s response:

Biden records video reacting to Trump’s now-deleted “Unified Reich” clip pic.twitter.com/QMxYItIfwH

— Jacob N. Kornbluh (@jacobkornbluh) May 21, 2024

Dan Pfeiffer looks at the strategy behind the Biden campaign’s approach in his newsletter:

What’s interesting to me is how and why the Biden Campaign is waging the fight this time and what it says about their strategy.

Keep Trump on the Defensive and in the News

Since officially kicking off the campaign earlier this year, the Biden Campaign has aggressively pursued every Trump misstatement and misdeed. Their BidenHQ account tweets day and night to lift up everything Trump does — from falling asleep in court to suggesting he wants to repeal the Affordable Care Act. 

It is in their strategic interest to focus the electorate on Trump and remind them who he is and what kind of President he was. This is also why Biden is so eager to debate Trump. This election is currently functioning as a referendum on Biden, and they very much need it to become a choice between two candidates.

I have made this point many times in this newsletter, but most voters never see or think about Trump. The only way to learn about the news is to actively seek it out, so it’s in the Biden Campaign’s interest to pour gasoline on the controversies that break out of the political news bubble and go viral on social media.

People Know Less than You Think

It feels like Trump has been in our lives for seven millennia and that everyone knows everything there is to know about him, but some recent polling from Blueprint Research shows that’s not actually the case. As Russell Berman wrote in The Atlantic:

In polling conducted by Blueprint, a Democratic data firm, fewer than half of registered voters under 30 said they had heard some of Trump’s most incendiary quotes, such as when he said there were “very fine people on both sides” demonstrating in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017, or when he told members of the Proud Boys, the far-right militia group, to “stand back and stand by” during a 2020 debate. Just 42 percent of respondents were aware that, during his 2016 campaign, Trump called for “a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States.”

There is a clear upside in highlighting Trump’s comments and contextualizing them against his other misdeeds and cruel words. This is particularly important for Biden who decided to run for President specifically because of what happened in Charlottesville.

Fitting It into the Broader Narrative

Democrats are destined to repeat the mistakes of 2016 and swing at every pitch if we don’t stitch together a broader narrative about Trump. On Monday, he’s a moron; on Tuesday, a criminal; on Wednesday, a feeble old man; and on Thursday, he’s a dangerously powerful dictator. The way Biden responded to the Trump video was a fascinating window into what he views as the best attack against Trump — “He only cares about holding on to power. I care about you.”

He then references this interesting piece:

TRUMP FOREVER? My new @BW piece on a hidden fear strategists see cropping up among swing voters – that if Trump is reelected, he'll refuse to leave (gift link): https://t.co/vss9tPIgY4

— Joshua Green (JoshuaGreen.bsky.social on 🟦) (@JoshuaGreen) May 21, 2024

A short excerpt follows. (You can use the gift link by clicking on that tweet above to read the whole thing and it’s worth it.)

Seiji Carpenter, vice president at David Binder Research, noticed this fear in early April while conducting focus groups of people who had voted for Biden in 2020 but became disillusioned and were considering switching sides. “We were talking to Latino men and Asian American-Pacific Islander women in battleground states,” Carpenter recalls, “and they went straight to the issue of, what if Trump won’t give up power?”

Carpenter has a decade of experience running focus groups for Democrats, but he’d never encountered this fear in earlier cycles. “It’s not something we’d been testing for,” he says. “But what we’ve seen so far indicates a real concern there.”

Republican strategists have encountered the same thing. “It’s showing up in our focus groups,” says Sarah Longwell, the chief executive officer of Longwell Partners and publisher of the conservative website the Bulwark. “It happened just the other day.”Longwell shared a video of a group of undecided swing-state voters who had been asked if they were worried that Trump might violate the constitutional amendment limiting him to one more term if he wins in November.

“Does anybody think he may not abide by the 22nd Amendment of the Constitution and leave office after the 2028 election? Anyone worried about that?” the moderator asked.In response, seven of the eight participants raised a hand. A Pennsylvania man worried that Trump might go further and try to institute a dynasty. “I wouldn’t put it past him, now that he owns the RNC,” the man said, “to say, ‘Don Jr. is going to do the next term, and he’ll get two. And then Barron will get two.’ And we’ll just have some fake monarchy.”

As far-fetched as it may sound, the prospect of Trump overriding or simply ignoring the constitutional provision that limits a president to serving two terms seems to be pushing some undecided voters toward Biden, despite significant reservations about the incumbent’s age, turmoil in the Middle East and high inflation. Now strategists in both parties are probing to see how widely this sentiment has spread, particularly among the undecided voters likely to sway the election.

He’s said repeatedly that he thinks he should have more than two terms. Just last weekend at the NRA convention he talked about it again:

“You know, FDR 16 years — almost 16 years — he was four terms. I don’t know, are we going to be considered three-term? Or two-term?”

“Three!” shouted some convention attendees,

Green notes:

The fear that Trump might do something unprecedented to undermine democracy is a new variable in an otherwise familiar race between two unpopular candidates who’ve faced off before. Several political professionals who talk to voters for a living say they’ve detected a fundamental shift in the way people view Trump’s motivations and intentions as compared with other politicians.

“Typically, when we raise concerns about a candidate’s agenda, people are skeptical and want to do their own research first or think it’s an attack,” says Carpenter, the focus group director. “With Trump, that’s not true. Voters believe that he would try to remove term limits, and they’re nervous about what’s possible.”

This would explain why the Biden campaign is hitting the “Trump only cares about power” message. It rings true.

And that’s because it is true.