Even if those courts ultimately reject Trump’s immunity arguments — an outcome that most legal experts expect — the protracted delays help the former president, whose strategy across his various trials has been to drag them out for as long as possible. Lengthy delays in his federal criminal cases create the possibility that, if he wins the presidency this November, Trump could avoid the charges altogether by having the Justice Department end the prosecutions or perhaps even by pardoning himself.
Wednesday Reads
Posted: January 31, 2024 Filed under: 2024 presidential Campaign, Donald Trump | Tags: Blue voters in red states, David Weiss, Hunter Biden, MAGA conspiracy theories, Mike Johnson, presidential immunity, Rick Perlstein, Taylor Swift, Texas border standoff, Travis Kelce, Trump legal expenses 7 CommentsGood Morning!!
I’m an old lady now, and I haven’t followed popular culture for years. For example, I’ve never watched a reality TV show or any recent situation comedies. I don’t have that much time left on earth; and I’d rather focus on things I care about, like reading good books and following politics.
Obviously, I’ve heard of Taylor Swift, I know what she looks like, but I’ve never heard her music. It would be difficult not to know that she’s dating a member of the Kansas City Chiefs, Travis Kelce. But now I’m learning more about her, because she has become the focus of the latest insane MAGA conspiracy theories.
HuffPost: The Right’s Newest Conspiracy Is The Super Bowl-Taylor Swift-Joe Biden ‘Psyop.’
It’s a conspiracy involving the deepest of deep states: The world’s most popular entertainer, America’s most popular sporting event and the president of the United States. Its goal, according to theories circulating in the outskirts of MAGA world, is to covertly compel fans to throw the 2024 election to the Democrats.
Right-wing speculation reached a fever pitch this week around pop mega-star Taylor Swift and boyfriend Travis Kelce after Kelce’s team, the Kansas City Chiefs, qualified for Super Bowl LVIII on Sunday, a victory the two celebrated with much-photographed postgame smooch. A day later, The New York Times ran a piece noting President Joe Biden’s re-election campaign is hoping for Swift’s endorsement.
Those two seemingly unrelated events — and the possibility that Swift would use her massive star power and huge online reach to help Biden beat Donald Trump — are driving right-wing media into a meltdown. And that one of the country’s biggest celebrities will use her fanbase to help Biden is already being treated as inevitable by some of the right’s biggest influencers….
But there’s more to this than the possibility of a Swift nod swinging a close election. For years, right-wing conspiracists have pushed the notion that Swift, who began her career in the conservative world of country music and was once referred to as “Aryan goddess” by white supremacists, is somehow a Democratic “agent” because she endorsed Democrats in the 2018 midterms and Biden in the 2020 presidential election. (Swift has admitted she regrets not getting involved in 2016.)
“There have been have claims for several months that she’s a psyop, that she’s a Pentagon asset, that she’s a political weapon,” said Brennan Suen, the deputy director of external affairs for Media Matters, a left-leaning media watchdog. “The claims have gotten completely wild.” [….]
Kelce, for his part, appeared in a Pfizer commercial promoting the COVID vaccine. COVID shots have long been the subject of right-wing conspiracies, with adherents falsely believing the government is covering up adverse reactions or that the vaccines harbor microchips.
Now, high-profile conservative figures are promoting the unfounded idea that Swift, the NFL and the Democratic Party are together involved in a “psyop” campaign to deliver the election to Biden. Fox News host Jesse Watters recently suggested that Swift was a “front for a covert political agenda” and bizarrely called her a “Pentagon asset” — which, of course, the Pentagon denied….
By that logic, Swift’s appearances at Chiefs games isn’t to cheer on her boyfriend or even to promote her tour — it’s really to get the country to vote blue in November.
There’s more nutty nonsense at the HuffPost link.
Rolling Stone: Trump Allies Pledge ‘Holy War’ Against Taylor Swift.
Singer-songwriter Taylor Swift hasn’t even endorsed President Joe Biden for reelection yet. That hasn’t stopped members of MAGAland’s upper crust from plotting to declare — as one source close to Donald Trump calls it — a “holy war” on the pop megastar, especially if she ends up publicly backing the Democrats in the 2024 election.
According to three people familiar with the matter, Trump loyalists working on or close to the former president’s campaign, longtime Trump allies in right-wing media, and an array of outside advisers to the ex-president have long taken it as a given that Swift will eventually endorse Biden (as she did in 2020). Indeed, several of these Republicans and conservative media figures have discussed the matter with Trump over the past few months, the sources say.
While Swift has not yet issued an endorsement in the 2024 race, The New York Times reported Monday that Swift is a key name on Biden aides’ “wish lists of potential surrogates.” A potential Swift appearance at Super Bowl LVIII alongside her boyfriend, Kansas City Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce, has already prompted the MAGA right’s culture-war pugilists into a conspiracy-fueled froth about how this NFL season has been rigged to boost Biden.
Behind the scenes, Trump has reacted to the possibility of Biden and Swift teaming up against him this year not with alarm, but with an instant projection of ego. In recent weeks, the former president has told people in his orbit that no amount of A-list celebrity endorsements will save Biden. Trump has also privately claimed that he is “more popular” than Swift and that he has more committed fans than she does, a person close to Trump and another source with knowledge of the matter tell Rolling Stone.
Last month, the source close to Trump adds, the ex-president commented to some confidants that it “obviously” made no sense that he was not named Time magazine’s 2023 Person of the Year — an honor that went to none other than Swift in December.
Noah Berlatsky at Public Notice: Why Trumpers are losing it over Taylor Swift.
Swift is not running for election and is not really a political figure. Thus targeting her seems at best pointless and at worst counterproductive for a political movement.
But the conservative media marketplace often has different incentives than the Republican Party — which is part of why the Republican Party is such a mess. Swift’s music now effectively functions as the soundtrack for the GOP crawling into a dumpster and setting itself on fire….
Why have Republicans chosen this moment for their much-more-than-two-minutes Swift hate? Well, this week Swift released a provocative album titled The GOP Sucks and So Does Donald Trump.
Ha ha. No, she didn’t do anything like that at all. Instead, her sin was … attending a football game. Last Sunday, she went to see the Kansas City Chiefs/Baltimore Ravens matchup because she’s dating Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce — who has been reviled by the right for making ads for the Pfizer covid vaccine and (gulp) alleged woke beer brand Bud Light. The Chiefs won, giving them a berth in the Super Bowl and destroying right-wing talking points about Swift being the Chiefs’ Yoko Ono.
During the game, cameras kept panning to catch Swift’s reaction, which makes sense since she’s a massively famous pop star and her presence at NFL games this season is driving huge TV ratings.
Swift didn’t ham it up for the cameras to try to make herself a focus of attention. Nonetheless, her presence annoyed right-wing punditry, which saw Swift and collectively started gibbering and snorting like rabid warthogs.
“End Wokeness,” a large right-wing account that Elon Musk is fond of, tweeted that “What’s happening with Taylor Swift is not organic and natural. It’s an op.” [….]
As this newsletter is being readied for publication late Tuesday, examples of right-wing figures revealing that Swift has given them a terminal case of brainworms are so plentiful that it would be impossible to cite them all.
Newsmax host Greg Kelly went as far Monday as to accuse Swifties of “elevating her to an idol … and you’re not supposed to do that. In fact, if you look it up in the Bible, it’s a sin!” Another Newsmax host dismissed the Swift-Kelce relationship as “fake.”
Meanwhile, one of Fox News’ “hard news” shows devoted a segment to attacking Swift, her fans, and Kelce, who a commentator derisively referred to as “Mr. Pfizer.”
But that was nowhere near as wild as a segment earlier this month during which Fox News host Jesse Waters described Swift a “Pentagon asset” developed at a NATO meeting and deployed to help Democrats.
Where do they get this stuff? It’s so difficult for me to comprehend the way these people think.
I’ve mentioned a couple of times that historian Rick Perlstein is now writing a column called “The Infernal Triangle” for The American Prospect. His focus is on the rise of authoritarianism in the U.S. Today he quotes a letter he received from a reader in Arkansas:
Oh, Rick, you get it … My husband and I are old and sitting right slap dab in the middle of red Arkansas with MAGA friends and family all around. They try to pull us into their discussions but we change the subject. I stopped going to church because the churches no longer teach Christ’s message, but Trump’s message. We are too old to move but if I was young I’d get out … Even if Trump doesn’t win, his followers will take up arms (Our relatives love to show off their assault rifles) much worse than Jan. 6 so either way we are screwed … Will my son lose his job as a government inspector? Will my black, gay, openly political blue neighbors be imprisoned or simply lynched the way it was done here in the ’50s or ’60s? And if so, how do I stay neutral while horrible things are happening to good people? I have no fight left in me … Sorry to rant on so long so I’ll wrap this up now. I could use your help though. How do we prepare in a practical sense? How will this affect my everyday life? How do people in Russia go on about their lives and jobs? I assume I will have to kiss ass like in North Korea in order to live but then there are some things worse than death!
I won’t quote the rest of the piece–it’s about the need for fiction that spells out what could be coming if Trump wins and democracy dies. But this letter shows what it’s like for ordinary people in red states who can’t accept the MAGA brainwashing. Dakinikat and J.J. have a better idea what it’s like; here in blue Massachusetts, I have no direct contact with Trump crazies. Reading that letter from Arkansas brought home to me the danger we face.
More interesting reads from today’s news:
Elie Mystal at The Nation: Texas Is Spoiling for a Civil War.
Many Democrats treat the Empire of Texas as an alarming sideshow. Sure, the state executes the most people in the country, places bounties on those who smuggle pregnant people out of state to receive reproductive care, and uses migrants for target practice—but for many liberals Texas is just a sick joke that can be disregarded until Ted Cruz shows up for a football game. Even now, as the state openly repudiates federal laws, the most common refrain from the “always-online” liberal community is “Good: Give Texas back to Mexico.”
Razor wire at the Texas border
That is not the right answer. First of all, Texas doesn’t want to leave. It wants to invade the rest of the United States and remake the country in its own Christofascist image. Moreover, as is typical with these “states’ rights” types, the definition of “freedom” envisaged by the white guys running Texas is one where they are the only ones forever free—and they are allowed to subjugate women and people of color in their grabbable areas. But most important, allowing a state like Texas to thumb its nose at human rights and federal authority does nothing but give aid and comfort to other would-be rebel states to do the same.
Texas is not a sideshow; it is ground zero in the battle to reassert states’ rights over individual rights and the federal government. And, with the help of Republican judges and a Democratic administration that still seems bound by a rule book Texas is eager to torch, Texas is more or less winning the first battle in this Civil War reenactment.
The flash point for this crisis is, of course, the border. I have written before about Eagle Pass, Tex., as a place along the Rio Grande where it is popular for immigrants to make the crossing. Texas Governor Greg Abbott has erected a series of sadistic obstructions across this part of the river—including buoys ringed with razor wire and underwater traps—meant to maim and even drown people trying to swim across the river. Should people, and their children, survive Abbott’s gauntlet, Texas officials on the other side have been accused of pushing them back into the river, or denying the survivors medical aid or even water.
In response to this murder-barrier, which is in clear violation of both federal law and international human rights laws, US Attorney General Merrick Garland… filed a lawsuit. Because when a rebel force erects a literal death trap on federal lands, the right answer is to use the slow and plodding legal process instead of sending, I don’t know, a Zumwalt-class naval destroyer into the river to clear the obstructions. The lawsuit is still pending while people drown, of course.
Whether Donald Trump faces a potential prison sentence in 2024 is at the mercy of a federal appeals court that’s operating on its own schedule — at a time when every day matters.
More than 50 days have elapsed since Trump’s criminal proceedings in a Washington, D.C., trial court — on charges for attempting to subvert the 2020 election — were paused indefinitely. They won’t resume until the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals and, most likely, the Supreme Court resolve the question hanging over the entire case: whether Trump, as a former president, is immune from criminal prosecution.
U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan, who is overseeing Trump’s federal election case, has tried to keep it on an expeditious track, and the trial is officially slated to begin on March 4. Chutkan, though, has strongly suggested she’ll push back that start date to account for each day of delay caused by Trump’s immunity appeal.
Even if the appeal were resolved this week against Trump, that calculation would put his earliest trial date in late April. But if the D.C. Circuit and the Supreme Court take additional weeks or months to deliver a final ruling, the opening days of Trump’s trial could be pushed to the summer or fall.
If, at that point, Trump retains his grip on the 2024 GOP presidential nomination, he and his allies are certain to exert intense pressure to postpone the trial until after the election. Chutkan, an Obama appointee, could plow forward with a trial anyway — and she’s repeatedly indicated that the campaign calendar has no bearing on her own.
The New York Times: Trump’s PACs Spent Roughly $50 Million on Legal Expenses in 2023.
Donald J. Trump piled up legal expenses in 2023 as he was indicted four times, spending approximately $50 million in donor money on legal bills and investigation-related expenses last year, according to two people briefed on the figure.
It is a staggering sum. His lone remaining rival in the 2024 Republican primary, Nikki Haley, raised roughly the same amount of money across all her committees in the last year as Mr. Trump’s political accounts spent paying the bills stemming from his various legal defenses, including lawyers for witnesses.
The exact figure spent on legal bills will be reported on Wednesday in new filings to the Federal Election Commission. But even those totals can be imprecise depending on how certain expense items are categorized by those doing the paperwork.
The broader picture expected to be outlined in the documents is one of a former president heading toward the Republican nomination while facing enormous financial strain….
Mr. Trump, who has long been loath to pay lawyers himself and has a history of stiffing those who represent him, has used funds in his political action committee, known as Save America, to underwrite his legal bills. The account was originally flooded with donations that were collected during the period immediately after the 2020 election when he was making widespread and false claims of voting fraud.
But with Save America’s coffers nearly drained last year, Mr. Trump sought to refill them through a highly unusual transaction: He asked for a refund of $60 million that he had initially transferred to a different group, a pro-Trump super PAC called MAGA Inc., to support his 2024 campaign.
In addition, Mr. Trump has been directing 10 percent of donations raised online to Save America, meaning 10 cents of every dollar he has received from supporters is going to a PAC that chiefly funds his lawyers.
Mr. Trump has paid legal expenses through both Save America and a second account, called the Make America Great Again PAC, which is an outgrowth of his 2020 re-election committee. In the first half of 2023, Save America transferred $5.85 million to the Make America Great Again PAC, which spent almost all of that sum on legal and investigation-related costs….
The net result was redirecting $42.5 million from a super PAC devoted to electing him as president to a committee now chiefly devoted to paying his lawyers. The refund was nearly equal to the $43.8 million the super PAC spent on so-called independent expenditures, such as television advertising, to shape the 2024 primary last year.
Hunter Biden’s lawyers working to dismiss their client’s gun case argued Tuesday far-right extremists and former President Donald Trump unduly pressured prosecutors once willing to cut a deal.
A new filing in Delaware’s federal court — where Hunter Biden stands accused of lying about drug use to purchase a firearm he kept for fewer than two weeks — contends political motivations tainted special counsel David Weiss’ case after a plea deal was in the works last year.
“In response to that outcry from former President Trump, extremist House Republicans, and right-wing media looking to make Mr. Biden’s fate a political issue in the next presidential election, the prosecution blew up that deal,” his lawyers write.
“[Weiss] now has brought felony charges against Mr. Biden both here in Delaware and in California and is seeking a heavy prison sentence for charges the prosecution was willing to resolve for probation just months ago.”
The deal in question would have seen President Joe Biden’s 53-year-old son plead to two counts of willful failure to pay federal income tax and agree to certain legal stipulations, reports show.
After it fell apart in July, Weiss charged Biden with three gun charges in Delaware and nine tax charges in California.
Biden’s lawyers now say those charges would not have been brought had their client’s father not been Trump’s primary opponent in the 2024 presidential election.
Roger Sollenberger at The Daily Beast: The ‘Profound Influence’ of Christian Extremists on Mike Johnson.
A Daily Beast investigation of [Mike Johnson’s] affiliations, influences, and public statements shows that Johnson’s worldview was forged in a radical theological tradition—the leaders and adherents of which have disputed some of the country’s most important constitutional principles, including amendments that freed the slaves and extended basic rights to all citizens.
That may sound dramatic, but Johnson’s connections to one particular strain of Christian fundamentalism elicit legitimate questions about the speaker’s biblical and constitutional interpretations. Those questions are all the more pressing given how open leaders of this movement have been about using anti-democratic means to achieve their desired religious ends—and given Johnson’s own prominent role in the GOP effort to overturn the 2020 election.
While Johnson’s legal endeavors to keep Donald Trump in office have been well documented, so, too, have his ties to that fundamentalist strain, known loosely as Christian dominionism.
In a definitional sense, Christian dominionism is the belief that Christians should hold “dominion” over things like media, culture, and politics. In practice, it’s a radical theology—unifying a number of fundamentalist ideologies—advocating for biblical interpretations of law and society and hard-line views on issues like abortion and marriage.
More broadly, Christian dominionism seeks to establish the United States as a Christian nation governed by biblical law. And several leaders in the dominionist movement have had a profound impact on Johnson personally—by Johnson’s own admission.
In December 2021, for instance, Johnson publicly praised David Barton, a Christian nationalist whose historical studies have been rejected as wildly inaccurate. The Southern Poverty Law Center’s entry on Barton notes that he has repeatedly “demonized LGBTQ persons and communities, arguing that HIV and AIDS are god-given consequences for living out one’s LGBTQ life.”
And yet, Johnson said just two years ago that Barton has had “a profound influence on me, and my work, and my life, and everything I do.”
Those comments came at a national gathering of Christian lawmakers in North Texas, where Johnson said he was first introduced to Barton and his ministry “a quarter-century ago.”
Read the rest at The Daily Beast.
Those are my recommended reads for today. What stories are you following?
peej
Carissa
ecocatwoman
mablue2
peggysue22
quixote
skydancingguestblogger
Mona (aka Wonk the Vote)
Sky Dancing 
Washington Post: Judge orders Tesla to undo Elon Musk’s $56 billion pay package
Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern at Slate: A State Supreme Court Just Issued the Most Devastating Rebuke of Dobbs Yet
Too bad there isn’t a federal ERA. I imagine this will be challenged to the Supremes.
Just imagine. When control of women’s bodies belongs to someone else (isn’t there a word for that? solvery? slivery? something like that) they lose equality. Who knew?
What a tremendously troubling, yet excellent, post. By the way, I think Travis Kelce’s smile is dreamy. Sometimes I think all this insanity is partially attributable to envy, just as the right complained about free love in the 60s.
I agree, this post kicks ass.
As for Kelce …I haven’t really looked at him to make a judgement. I’m like BB, today’s pop culture is a huge blank space for me. (Except for Rupauls Drag Race, but that is so centered around my era of time, I can follow it just fine. )
Taylor is and was a big Hillary fan… https://people.com/music/taylor-swift-hillary-clinton-why-didnt-endorse-2016-election/