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Project 2025 Is In The Can

Published by digby on July 30, 2024

Trump doesn’t have anything else

The Trump campaign issued a very weird statement yesterday disavowing the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025— again. As the campaign managers Susie Wiles and Chris LaCivita point out, they’ve been trying to get them to shut up for over a year:

President Trump’s campaign has been very clear for over a year that Project 2025 had nothing to do with the campaign, did not speak for the campaign, and should not be associated with the campaign or the President in any way, Reports of Project 2025’s demise would be greatly welcomed and should serve as notice to anyone or any group trying to misrepresent their influence with President Trump and his campaign — it will not end well for you.

The Trumpian threat at the end was a nice flourish but they do mean it. The professional campaign’s frustration with the group has been obvious ever since the Democrats jumped on the 900 page manifesto and made it into another Trump branded product. No matter how hard they tried they couldn’t get people to stop talking about it.

Trump has personally tried to distance himself from it calling “appalling” and “extreme” at different times and claiming he didn’t know anything about it,even though his own VP nominee JD Vance has extensive ties to the organization and has even written the foreword to Heritage President Kevin Roberts’ upcoming book Dawn’s Early Light, Taking Back Washington to Save America. And as has been thoroughly documented, most of the people associated with it are Trump alumni, such as his former HHS Secretary Ben Carson, Trade adviser Peter Navarro, White House Adviser Johnny McEntee and former Director of Office of Management and Budget Russell Vought. In fact, one report showed that 31 of 38 authors and editors of the 900 page tome had been on Trump’s team at one time or still are. This is not surprising since Trump and his MAGA movement have devoured what was once the conservative movement of which The Heritage Foundation was a founding institution. Conservatives are MAGA now or they are no longer relevant.

Wiles’ and LaCivita’s statement was issued on the news that Paul Dans, the person who was in charge of producing the “Mandate For Leadership” governance guide announced that he was leaving the project in August which was immediately interpreted to mean that the Trump people had engineered the ouster and had successfully gotten the Heritage Foundation to back away from it. But is that really the case?

The 900 page Mandate for Leadership is already written. In fact, it was largely finished over a year ago when we first started talking about it. It’s all over the internet. The producers of the document are MAGA movement operatives and it is a MAGA document whether Trump wants to claim it or not. Certainly, the Harris campaign is not going to let him off the hook:

Project 2025 is on the ballot because Donald Trump is on the ballot. This is his agenda, written by his allies, for Donald Trump to inflict on our country. Hiding the 920-page blueprint from the American people doesn’t make it less real – in fact, it should make voters more concerned about what else Trump and his allies are hiding.

Trump is running around pandering to every constituency and donor group, promising anything and everything in order to get reelected. And most of what he’s promising is in Project 2025 except for the third rail issue of abortion which he fatuously insists he’s “solved” by having it go back to the states, claiming that’s what everyone on all sides always wanted. That is, of course, absurd. But pretty much everything else from policies on law enforcement, trade, deregulation. education, executive power, civil rights and immigration are all listed on his own Agenda 47 website with very little to distinguish them from the Project 2025 except for the level of detail. In other words, they see Project 2025 as a branding problem not a substance problem and the media needs to be much more careful to explain that.

The Mandate for Leadership guide is only part of Project 2025. The other component is the vast personnel database that a new Trump administration will use to staff the federal government once they implement “Schedule F”, an executive order that strips federal civil service protections from workers allowing them to fire thousands of federal workers and replace them with Trump loyalists. There is no doubt that this is a Trump initiative since they first wrote Schedule F during his administration. This database is as much a part of Project 2025 as the manifesto.

Trump has every intention of implementing its vision. It’s his vision too. And not only would it be terrifying and dangerous, it would also be dangerously incompetent. That wouldn’t be the first time. As I noted back in 2016, when it became news that since Trump had no experience at government he was relying on the Heritage Foundation during its transition, it has a very poor record when it came to staffing government. As the Washington Post reported over 20 years ago, they were instrumental in one of the most disastrous policies of the Bush administration:

They had been hired to perform a low-level task: collecting and organizing statistics, surveys and wish lists from the Iraqi ministries for a report that would be presented to potential donors at the end of the month. But as suicide bombs and rocket attacks became almost daily occurrences, more and more senior staffers defected. In short order, six of the new young hires found themselves managing the country’s $13 billion budget, making decisions affecting millions of Iraqis.

Viewed from the outside, their experience illustrates many of the problems that have beset the U.S.-led Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA), a paucity of experienced applicants, a high turnover rate, bureaucracy, partisanship and turf wars.

[…]

For months they wondered what they had in common, how their names had come to the attention of the Pentagon, until one day they figured it out: They had all posted their résumés at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative-leaning think tank.

This epic debacle was documented in the book “Imperial Life in the Emerald City” by Rajiv Chandrasekaran which revealed that the Bush administration had decided they wanted ideological litmus tests for the people who were going to build the new Iraq government from the ground up. Among the criteria were questions like were they “pro-life” and did they believe in unfettered gun rights, none of which had the slightest relevance to the jobs at hand. You may recall that this starry-eyed experiment in nation building was an embarrassing failure.

It appears that if Trump wins in November they’re going to try it again, only this time they’re experimenting on their fellow Americans. And they still have clearly learned nothing from all their previous humiliating failures.

Salon

Best President Money Can Buy

Published by digby on July 30, 2024

In this piece yesterday, I mentioned Trump’s meeting at the Bitcoin convention and his newfound love for crypto. As you can see from the above clip by Rachel Maddow, he’s just pretty much selling out all policies to the highest bidder these days. Here are a few other policies he’s put on the auction block:

Here are just a few of the policies he is selling to donors.

$1bn from oil companies

At a lavish dinner at Mar-a-Lago in April, the former president gathered with around two dozen executives from the biggest oil companies in the country. His campaign was facing a sizeable cash shortfall against his opponent, President Joe Biden, and he was desperate to make up the difference.

As the executives complained about how the Biden administration’s environmental regulations were hurting their business, Trump made a starkly transactional pitch: raise $1bn to send me back to the White House. If he won, he said he would immediately reverse dozens of Biden’s environmental rules and policies. The $1bn would be a “deal” for the companies, he added, because of the money they would save from deregulation.

The account of the meeting, first reported by the Washington Post, came from several people who attended. Among them were 20 executives from  ExxonMobil, EQT Corporation and the American Petroleum Institute, which lobbies for the oil industry. It was reportedly organized by oil billionaire Harold Hamm. Specifically, Trump vowed to undo a Biden administration freeze on permits for new liquefied natural gas (LNG) exports “on the first day” of entering office, one attendee told the Post.

[…]

TikTok flip-flop

As president, Trump spearheaded efforts to ban TikTok. “As far as TikTok is concerned, we’re banning them from the United States,” the then-president declared to reporters aboard Air Force One in July 2020. Indeed, he signed an executive order in his last year in office that would have effectively prohibited the video app, which is majority-owned by a Chinese company. But just this month he joined TikTok himself. And more recently he has spoken out against efforts from both the Biden administration and his own party to regulate it.

On March 7, a House committee advanced a bill that would ban the app if it didn’t divest, even as TikTok users flooded congressional lines with thousands of calls urging lawmakers to back off. That same day, Trump wrote on Truth Social that “if you get rid of TikTok, (then) Facebook and Zuckerschmuck will double their business,” referring to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

“I don’t want Facebook, who cheated in the last election, doing better,” wrote Trump, echoing a baseless conspiracy theory that social media platforms rigged elections against him. “They are a true Enemy of the People!” What prompted this dramatic change?

Some clues may be derived from the fact that his words came swiftly after a very public rapprochement with Republican mega-donor Jeff Yass. Yass has a $20bn stake in TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, and is the largest donor in this election campaign cycle. At the request of Yass, Trump spoke at a conference of the influential right-wing Club for Growth, which the former president previously blasted as “Club for No Growth”.

[…]

West Bank-rolling

Perhaps the most brazen quid pro quo of Trump’s first term came with a giant donation from casino mogul Sheldon Adelson, the Republican Party’s biggest funder over the past decade.According to New York Times writer Maggie Haberman in her book ‘Confidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America,’ Adelson made a $20m donation to a political action committee to pressure then-president Trump to adopt the highly controversial decision to move the US embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. For his second term, Trump may be poised to sell another controversial policy to the Adelson family.

Sheldon died in 2021, but his wife Miriam has continued his cause and may even surpass Yass to become Trump’s biggest patron in this election cycle. A New York Magazine profile of Miriam, published last month, suggested that Trump’s support for the Israeli annexation of the West Bank was top of her wish list for a second term.

[…]

“I’ve been the best president in history to Israel by a factor of ten because of all the things I do. The embassy, Jerusalem being the capital. Then you have Golan Heights … Nobody even thought that was going to be possible. I did that,” he said.Ten days after the publication of the New York Magazine profile, Politico reported that Adelson would fund a massive political action committee for Trump’s re-election.

Trickle-up tax cuts

During his presidency, Trump implemented sweeping tax cuts for the top 1 per cent of earners and cut the maximum corporation tax rate from 35 per cent to 21 per cent. His cuts were “one factor helping the fortunes of US billionaires grow by a collective $1 trillion during the pandemic, from March 18 to December 7, 2020,” according to the non-partisan group, Americans for Tax Fairness.

The group said that an analysis of donations to Trump found that he was “enabled with a total of almost a quarter billion dollars in campaign contributions from 134 of America’s billionaires during his short, violent political career”. Trump is looking to replicate that windfall by promising even more tax cuts for the wealthy, should he win a second term. Several billionaire donors backed off following the riot on January 6, 2021 — they are now finding their way back to Trump, largely thanks to that promise.

Speaking at a donor event at the luxury Pierre Hotel in New York last month, Trump warned the wealthy attendees that taxes would go up unless he wins in November because Biden has vowed to let his tax cuts expire at the end of 2025. “You’re going to have the biggest tax increase in history,” he said. “So whatever you guys can do, I appreciate it.”

The comments are part of a pattern of offers to wealthy donors from Trump. Donate to me, he says, and I’ll make you richer. Speaking at Mar-a-Lago in December last year, Trump drew laughs as he described the audience as “rich as hell” before declaring: “We’re gonna give you tax cuts!”

And as Maddow mentions in her piece, he’s suddenly done a reversal on electric cars, no doubt because Elon Musk has promised to write checks for 45 million dollars every month until the election.

He is a convicted criminal after all and has been found liable for almost half a billion dollars worth of fraud in Manhattan, not to mention his bogus charity and “university” so none of this should be surprising. What is still shocking is that tens of millions of Americans are fine with it.

Democrats Find Their Groove

Published by Tom Sullivan on July 30, 2024

“It’s an incel platform, dude”

MAGA Republicans: Totally not weird.

If you’ve watched Democrats flounder for years to find messaging that actually catches on, that actually smacks down Republicans’ vapid posturing over family and patriotism, you’re not alone. Remember Rep. Steny Hoyer’s (D-Md.) stillborn effort to sell how you can make it in America if we “make it in America”? I winced.

Well, with a new generation comes more facile minds, quicker wits, and sharper tongues.

Consider if you will, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg and his response to Sen. J.D. Vance’s suggestion that Americans without children have “no physical commitment to the future of this country.”

Buttigieg responds, “When I was deployed to Afghanistan, I didn’t have kids back then. But I will tell you, especially when there was a rocket attack going on, my commitment to this country felt pretty, pretty physical.”

And the crowd goes wild.

Republicans’ economic populism is just posturing, Buttigieg argues. It’s more body language than policy. It’s an act.

The New Republic considers GOP whines about being branded “weird“:

Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Monday shut down Vivek Ramaswamy’s attempt to fire back at the Kamala Harris campaign’s criticisms of Republicans as “weird.”

It started when Ramaswamy posted on X (formerly Twitter) on Sunday night about how “this whole ‘they’re weird’ argument from the Democrats is dumb & juvenile.”

Don’t mess with AOC. She’s not from the Hoyer wing of the Democratic Party.

“It’s an incel platform, dude. It’s SUPER weird,” AOC answers Vivek Ramaswamy’s attempt to counterpunch.

It appears that the criticisms of Vance and Trump are starting to get to Republicans, which signals that they’re working. For the past week, Vance has been heavily mocked, as his campaign speeches fell flat and a false internet rumor circulated about him conducting a sex act with a couch. Old remarks where he compared Democrats to “childless cat ladies” resurfaced and drew criticism from celebrities as well as lawmakers.

It doesn’t help deflect the “weird” label when the GOP’s presidential candidate doesn’t just cover his baldness with a combover but sculpts his hair into an architectural wonder. He then trowels on bronzer to conceal his pastiness before going online to fish for compliments from dictators. And when your party’s celebrities look like Batman villains.

Anat Shenker-Osorio self-promotes the fact that Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz’s recently celebrated messaging cleverness has a history. Democrats sold a brighter future in Minnesota that Walz’s policies made real.

Go, and do likewise.

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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.

Slowly, And Then All At Once

Published by Tom Sullivan on July 30, 2024

Heather Cox Richardson on our state of play

Signals abound that the political ground has shifted to the Democrats. The Kamala Harris Zooms, for example. The latest last night, “White Dudes for Harris,” raised $4 million in three hours. Jeff Bridges, “the Dude,” dropped by along with 180,000 others. “Harris leads Trump 44% to 42% in US presidential race,” blares a Reuters headline from Thursday. I cited some local signs on Monday. Republicans are experiencing a “weird” problem they’re having trouble shaking.

Trump, The Man Who Never Laughs, is making fun of Harris for having a sense of humor. Eugene Robinson notes, “Think about it: We’ve heard Trump snarl and mock, we’ve seen him smile, but can anyone remember him laughing out loud? I can’t. Kind of weird, no?”

Sen. J.D. Vance, Donald Trump’s pick for vice president, demonstrates yet again that Trump’s boast that he picks only the best people is as good as the 34-felonies former president’s promise to produce a replacement health care plan in “two weeks.” That is, if it doesn’t conflict with his next “Infrastructure Week.”

“Donald Trump hired 44 cabinet members; 75 percent of them want nothing to do with the guy,” Jon Stewart reminded “The Daily Show” viewers Monday night. The man who once boasted he couldn’t be bought is openly selling policies to the highest bidders. When the going gets tough, the weird get weirder.

It’s a new day, historian Heather Cox Richardson observes:

Just a week ago, it seems, a new America began. I’ve struggled ever since to figure out what the apparent sudden revolution in our politics means.

I keep coming back to the Ernest Hemingway quote about how bankruptcy happens. He said it happens in two stages, first gradually and then suddenly.

That’s how scholars say fascism happens, too—first slowly and then all at once—and that’s what has been keeping us up at night.

But the more I think about it, the more I think maybe democracy happens the same way, too: slowly, and then all at once. 

At this country’s most important revolutionary moments, it has seemed as if the country turned on a dime. 

In 1763, just after the end of the French and Indian War, American colonists loved that they were part of the British empire. And yet, by 1776, just a little more than a decade later, they had declared independence from that empire and set down the principles that everyone has a right to be treated equally before the law and to have a say in their government.

The change was just as quick in the 1850s. In 1853 it sure looked as if the elite southern enslavers had taken over the country. They controlled the Senate, the White House, and the Supreme Court. They explicitly rejected the Declaration of Independence and declared that they had the right to rule over the country’s majority. They planned to take over the United States and then to take over the world, creating a global economy based on human enslavement. 

And yet, just seven years later, voters put Abraham Lincoln in the White House with a promise to stand against the Slave Power and to protect a government “of the people, by the people, and for the people.” He ushered in “a new birth of freedom” in what historians call the second American revolution. 

The same pattern was true in the 1920s, when it seemed as if business interests and government were so deeply entwined that it was only a question of time until the United States went down the same dark path to fascism that so many other nations did in that era. In 1927, after the execution of immigrant anarchists Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, poet John Dos Passos wrote: “they have clubbed us off the streets they are stronger they are rich they hire and fire the politicians the newspaper editors the old judges the small men with reputations….” 

And yet, just five years later, voters elected Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who promised Americans a New Deal and ushered in a country that regulated business, provided a basic social safety net, promoted infrastructure, and protected civil rights.

Every time we expand democracy, it seems we get complacent, thinking it’s a done deal. We forget that democracy is a process and that it’s never finished.

And when we get complacent, people who want power use our system to take over the government. They get control of the Senate, the White House, and the Supreme Court, and they begin to undermine the principle that we should be treated equally before the law and to chip away at the idea that we have a right to a say in our government. And it starts to seem like we have lost our democracy. 

But all the while, there are people who keep the faith. Lawmakers, of course, but also teachers and journalists and the musicians who push back against the fear by reminding us of love and family and community. And in those communities, people begin to organize—the marginalized people who are the first to feel the bite of reaction, and grassroots groups. They keep the embers of democracy alive.

And then something fans them into flame. 

President Joe Biden’s passing-the-torch moment, compelled or self-inspired, has relit the flame that felt all but snuffed out by creeping authoritarianism just weeks ago. But Trump is no Smokey Bear. He failed to properly drown democracy’s embers. The Dobbs decision overturning Roe “made it clear that a small minority intended to destroy democracy and replace it with a dictatorship based in Christian nationalism.” Bad move. It fanned the embers.

But Biden did not pass the torch to Harris, Richardson suggests. He passed it to us.

It is up to us to decide whether we want a country based on fear or on facts, on reaction or on reality, on hatred or on hope.

It is up to us whether it will be fascism or democracy that, in the end, moves swiftly, and up to us whether we will choose to follow in the footsteps of those Americans who came before us in our noblest moments, and launch a brand new era in American history.

Perhaps as Benjamin Franklin said of the chair in which George Washington sat during debates over the Constitution, the sun carved into it is rising, not setting.

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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.

Nicely Done

Published by digby on July 29, 2024

Meanwhile, the youts are involved too:

The Supremes Have Trashed Their Credibility

Published by digby on July 29, 2024

I wonder why?

President Biden has endorsed three important reforms to the Supreme Court. He’s asking for binding code of conduct, which is long overdue. He wants no immunity for former presidents accused of crimes while in office. And the biggie is that he’s asking for terms limits for Supreme Court Justices.

The right wing is having a fit as usual. They love corruption so that’s not surprising. But it’s the term limits that have them screaming. Unfortunately, as with so many issues, they are on the wrong side of that one too:

Even most Republicans think it’s a good idea. But the “influencers” are very up in arms. Keep it up.

Raising Arizona

Published by digby on July 29, 2024

Bolts has a very important primer on the Arizona primaries tomorrow. It’s interesting because the GOP slate is full of MAGA weirdos and that’s going to have an effect on what happens in November (just as it did in 2022.) If Arizona is in play for the Democrats it could be decisive:

Donald Trump’s false claims that he won the 2020 presidential race have rocked Arizona politics in recent years, causing threats against election officials, and leading many conservatives to demand election audits, resist certifying elections, and push for new voting restrictions. 

Now these aftershocks are showing up all over this swing state’s Republican primaries.

There’s the fake Trump elector from 2020 who is now running for Congress. The lawmaker who proposed a bill locking in the state’s 2024 electoral votes for Trump. The election deniers who want to take over local election administration. The Republicans who never conceded their own statewide losses two years ago and are now mounting comebacks, including Kari Lake and Mark Finchem.

To help guide you through these races, here’s your Bolts primer on what to follow on July 30.

Also on the menu, Democrats are hosting several noteworthy contests—including a sheriff’s race in Tucson marked by disagreements over immigration enforcement, and an expensive Phoenix-area U.S. House race to replace Ruben Gallego, who is running for Senate.

Be sure to return to this page on election night: We’ll update this page with results. And note that this guide is not exhaustive; it is Bolts’ selection of important races to monitor.

Click over for the rundown. This is a big one.

Shaking The Heavens

Published by digby on July 29, 2024

The Atlantic’s McKay Coppins took a look at the prayers people say at Trump rallies. Yikes. It’s not that there aren’t always prayers at political events in America. I’ve always found it a little presumptuous but it is what it is. But the praying at Trump rallies is different. It’s not just done to appeal to God for protection or what have you. They have changed over the years to be a celebration of Donald Trump as God’s anointed representative on earth and his political opponents as instruments of Satan if not actual demons themselves:

[I]t’s easy to see the danger in internalizing the concept of politics as spiritual combat. Trump’s rallies become more than mere campaign events—they are staging grounds in a supernatural conflict that pits literal angels against literal demons for the soul of the nation. Marinate enough in these ideas, and the consequences of defeat start to feel existential. “This is not a time for politics as usual,” a Pentecostal preacher declared at a Trump rally in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, last year. “It’s not a time for religion as usual. It’s not a time for prayers as usual. This is a time for spiritual warriors to arise and to shake the heavens.”

As I was reviewing these prayers, I wondered what Trump’s most zealous religious supporters would do if they didn’t get the result they were praying for in November. With so much riding on the idea that Trump’s reelection has a divine mandate, what would happen if he lost? A destabilizing crisis of faith? Another widespread rejection of the election’s outcome? Further spasms of political violence?

It wasn’t until I came across a prayer delivered in December in Coralville, Iowa, that a more urgent question occurred to me: What will they do if their prayers are answered?

Onstage, Joel Tenney, a 27-year-old evangelist with a shiny coif of blond hair and a quavering preacher’s cadence, preceded his prayer with a short sermon for the gathered crowd of Trump supporters. “We have witnessed a sitting president weaponize the entire legal system to try and steal an election and imprison his leading opponent, Donald Trump, despite committing no crime,” Tenney began. “The corruption in Washington is a natural reflection of the spiritual state of our nation.”

For the next several minutes, Tenney hit all the familiar notes: He quoted from 2 Chronicles and Ephesians, and reminded the audience of the eternal consequences of 2024. Then he issued a warning to those who would stand in the way of God’s will being done on Election Day.

“Be afraid,” Tenney said. “For rulers do not bear the sword for no reason. They are God’s servants of wrath to bring punishment on the wrongdoer. And when Donald Trump becomes the 47th president of the United States, there will be retribution against all those who have promoted evil in this country.”

Yes, that’s unnerving. And it appears that Trump knows exactly what he’s dealing with when he says, “don’t worry, you won’t have to vote after this election, my beautiful Christians.”

Trump On The Stump

Published by digby on July 29, 2024

He’s getting worse

After having spent most of the last two years playing golf and dining with his paying fans at Mar-a-Lago, former President Donald Trump picked up the pace of his campaign a little bit this past weekend. He met with a Christian group on Friday night and then made two appearances back to back, first at a Bitcoin convention in Tennessee followed by a rally in Minnesota.

You might think that just coming off of the RNC 10 days ago and after last weeks dramatic events in the Democratic Party going to a Bitcoin convention might not be among your top priorities. But Trump is always hungry for money and his campaign’s been collecting Bitcoin donations for a couple of months while observing that large cryptocurrency PACs have put over $180 million into some congressional races. So he went there along with some other high profile Republicans and Vivek Ramaswamy to make a bunch of promises at the behest of donors which he clearly didn’t understand and make a pitch for votes from people who had listened to independent candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr the night before.

He promised to create a “Bitcoin and crypto presidential advisory council” made up of people who “love your industry, not hate your industry.” When he promised to fire Gary Gensler, the Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman, the crowd went wild prompting Trump to exclaim, “I didn’t know he was that unpopular. Let me say it again: On day one, I will fire Gary Gensler.” Look for him to repeat that one on the trail even though your average MAGA follower probably won’t know what he’s talking about. But there’s nothing unusual in that.

Gensler is hated by this crew because he has filed lawsuits and fined members of the industry when they put the system at risk such as when one of the founders of an exchange was convicted of fraud and his exchange collapsed. Trump wants to fire anyone who wants to enforce the rule of law against fraudsters, especially himself.

Speaking of enforcing the law, judging from his rally speech in Minnesota and his incessant posting on social media, he seems to think he’s found the poison arrow that will destroy Vice President Kamala Harris. Rather than immigration, which I thought they’d emphasize over everything else, aside from some half-hearted slams at her for being the “border czar”he’s been attacking her relentlessly for allegedly saying that she wanted to “defund the police” when she was running for president. He’s repeatedly posted and reposted a misleading CNN headline claiming that she said it. (What she actually told The New York Times  was that she agreed with the idea of assessing “what public safety looks like” and the size of police budgets, “but, no, we’re not going to get rid of the police. We all have to be practical.”)

This might be a good attack line against a former prosecutor and Attorney General if it weren’t for the fact that Trump himself is a convicted criminal who has promised to pardon hundreds of fellow criminals he incited to assault police officers on January 6th.

Perhaps he would like to explain his own calls to defund law enforcement?

As Steve Benen at MSNBC’s Maddowblog chronicled, Trump has nothing but contempt for any law enforcement agency he doesn’t see as loyal to him over the rule of law:

In recent months, the former president has equated the FBI with “the Gestapo.” He’s told the public that the bureau is led by “Marxist Thugs.” He’s promoted a piece that referred to the FBI as “the Fascist Bureau of Investigation.” He’s condemned the FBI as “corrupt” and “crooked.” He’s described FBI officials as “mobsters” and a “real threat to democracy.” He’s slammed the FBI as the “Fake Bureau of Investigation,” before accusing the bureau of secretly paying people to “steal” the 2020 election from him, as part of the FBI’s plot to “rig” the election and “illegally change” the results.

Last March his minions in the U.S. House of Representatives did his bidding and voted to cut the FBI by 6% and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) by 7 percent. They were disappointed it couldn’t be more but they have promised to return to it as soon as they are back in power. And needless to say, if they are able to fulfill the Project 2025 agenda of firing all civil service employees who do not pledge fealty to Donald Trump, they will then provide full funding for the new East German STASI-style FBI. Until then, they are an enemy of the cult.

Trump said a few other weird things this weekend. He spoke at a Turning Point Actions conference on Friday night where he offered up an astonishing promise to his Christian followers that they won’t have to vote anymore after four years if they elect him:

If it weren’t for his constant praise for dictators and tyrants and his repeated comments that he should be allowed to stay in office beyond two terms, I might be willing to believe some people’s interpretations of this startling remark to mean that he will fix everything in four years so they will have no reason to be involved in politics after that. But that makes no sense since unless he means he’s not leaving office, people will always have to vote lest their opponents reverse their gains as Trump himself is promising to do right now. No, he said what he said and we know what he means.

He admitted that all that talk about “unity” was just momentary hype.

“I want to be nice,” Mr. Trump said. “They all say, ‘I think he’s changed. I think he’s changed since two weeks ago. Something affected him.’”

But to a cheering crowd of thousands, Mr. Trump quickly conceded the point. “No, I haven’t changed,” he said. “Maybe I’ve gotten worse. Because I get angry at the incompetence that I witness every single day.”

He must be talking about his campaign. It’s understandable that he’s angry but he has no one to blame but himself. Despite having been given a priceless gift with that awful debate and an assassination attempt that mercifully missed, he’s now slipping in the polls and is saddled with a national joke of a Vice Presidential candidate. He was born lucky but he has a unique gift for squandering it through hubris and ineptitude. And yes, he’s gotten worse.

Salon

Don’t Let It Go

Published by Tom Sullivan on July 29, 2024

Trump is too good at wiggling out of trouble

https://bsky.app/profile/sarahposner.bsky.social/post/3kycb52qjo32i

Donald Trump’s selection of Sen. J.D. Vance (R-Ohio) for his running mate is the biggest Republican candidate blunder since Sen. John McCain of Arizona chose Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin to join him in defeat. But stupidity is not a crime. Insurrection is. Don’t let the press forget it. Nor his attempts to overthrow the democratic process. He’s planning another coup if he loses in November.

Jason Statler on Mastodon:

TAKE THIS COUP SERIOUSLY

Trump is doing everything he can to delegitimize democracy.

The press needs to put the coming coup attempt and his last attempt in context, explains Marcy Wheeler.

I emphasized over the weekend that the press will move on from Trump’s promise to Christian nationalists to a) end all elections in his second term, or to b) render elections (the consent of the governed) irrelevant. The press will move on to the next news cycle. You must not.

Marcy Wheeler agrees, but castigates “horse race journalists” for finding it initially “more important to repeat and therefore magnify Trump’s latest slur on Vice President Harris” before acknowledging his threat to democracy. Only hours later did that story surface.

Marcy writes:

That story included Trump’s comment about voting, along with Gold’s spin of it as a claim that Trump would address the concerns of Christian voters sufficiently that they would no longer have to vote, buried in ¶14.

At the end of his speech, Mr. Trump urged the religious crowd to vote in November, suggesting that if elected he would address their concerns sufficiently enough that they would no longer need to be politically active. Earlier, he had lamented that conservative Christians do not vote proportionately to their size, a complaint he has made repeatedly in recent weeks.

“Christians, get out and vote. Just this time,” Mr. Trump said on Friday. “You won’t have to do it anymore, you know what? Four more, years, it’ll be fixed, it’ll be fine, you won’t have to vote anymore, my beautiful Christians.”

Let it be noted that one of NYT’s allegedly professional horserace journalists believes that the white Evangelical Christians who have been among Trump’s most important supporters vote in disproportionately low numbers or that any Republican would forego that most important part of their coalition. (That said, for demographic reasons Trump can’t change with a speech, white Evangelicals make up an increasingly smaller proportion of the voting public, which poses an entirely different kind of threat than apathy.)

In spite of disinterest by journalists paid to write horserace stories, the clip went viral on social media, setting off a debate about what Trump meant. Right wing trolls pushed the same horseshit claims of low turnout (again, we’re talking about the in-person and TV audience for a Turning Point conference!) that Gold provided. Others attributed it to Trump’s narcissism, a suggestion that he only cares about votes so long as he would be on the ballot.

Three Sunday morning shows dealt with it — all abysmally.

Martha Raddatz for example, let Chris Sununu dismiss the comments as a “classic Trumpism,” without asking what he meant by “this stuff” when he said it “can be fixed.” Then she went back to the horse race.

Let’s get real, Wheeler continues:

There are several things people are ignoring.

First, Trump said something quite similar — and he said it at another Turning Point conference — just a month and a half ago, in Detroit.

Only, at that point, before Joe Biden had dropped out of the race, Trump said,

I said, we don’t need votes. And Charlie Kirk is helping. He’s got his army of young people. These are young patriots. They don’t want to see happen what’s been happening in our country.

Thank you Charlie.

[USA chants]

And I said to Charlie, and I said to Michael [Whatley], listen, we don’t need votes. We’ve got more votes than anybody’s ever had. We need to watch the vote, we need to guard the vote.

We need to stop the steal.

In mid-June, before Biden dropped out, Trump wasn’t concerned about turnout. Now he is.

This comment — to the people Charlie Kirk had assembled to listen to Donald Trump — is best understood as a comment about Trump’s plan to win. As the January 6 Committee discovered, when Trump decided in late December 2020 that he was going to speak and march to the Capitol, Carline Wren turned to Kirk to help turn out bodies. Turning Point was also allegedly used to launder speaking fees to Don Jr and his girlfriend. As it happened, Kirk backed out of attending and deleted his boasts about arranging dozens of busses so others could do so. He pled the Fifth rather than explain to the January 6 Committee anything about all that.

But nevertheless, Charlie Kirk got busloads of people to Trump’s insurrection.

To the extent that Trump needs lots of bodies to be somewhere, Charlie Kirk is a key part of that process. And in June, he wanted them out to surveil polling centers, once again mobilizing Stop the Steal. Friday, he emphasized he actually needs some people to show up to the polls.

If you follow Tim Alberta, he’s reported that Trump axed the GOP’s field operation and turned it over to “allied organizations such as Turning Point Action, America First Works, and the Faith and Freedom Coalition.” But especially to Turning Point. Kirk’s org had become a punch line among the GOP’s strategists after promising to win big in Kirk’s Arizona in 2022 and losing bigger. The RNC wanted to invest in field, in GOTV. Trump would rather invest in “election integrity,” that is, in blocking the vote, Alberta reported:

The marching orders were clear: Trump’s lieutenants were to dismantle much of the RNC’s existing ground game and divert resources to a colossal new election-integrity program—a legion of lawyers on retainer, hundreds of training seminars for poll monitors nationwide, a goal of 100,000 volunteers organized and assigned to stand watch outside voting precincts, tabulation centers, and even individual drop boxes.

Doubling down on the Big Lie is a helluva tell, Wheeler notes. But that was before Biden dropped out. Now he needs GOP turnout too.

I’d noted an important Blue Sky thread by Sarah Posner but could not get to commenting. Wheeler does:

The point is, Trump’s audience of Christian nationalists do view taking over government in apocalyptic terms. They did, on January 6. And it nearly worked the first time.

This was only a Trumpism, as Sununu called it, to the extent that Trump is an epic conman who knows how to mobilize his audience, even Christian nationalists with whom Trump shares little more than a fondness for authoritarianism.

So sure: Perhaps this was just an attempt to juice more turnout out of a group that already turns out in high numbers, almost exclusively for Republicans. Or maybe — as his comments in June were — it’s part of a larger effort to delegitimize democracy.

But even beyond Trump’s last coup attempt, there’s a context here, one you need to at least acknowledge if you’re going to claim to assess his comments.

Trump is too good at wiggling out of trouble. The press is going to move on to the next heat in the horse race. We have to hold him accountable for his words and his plans in the streets, on people’s doorsteps, and on social media. The press will not.

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