Mostly Monday Reads: Hell Realm Overexposure

“Quite the fashion statement.” John Buss, @repeat1968

Good Day, Sky Dancers!

I guess the endless TV coverage of Trump’s trials and tribulations wasn’t enough to send most of his followers to our safe space.  We now get to watch Trump dupe the cult with more branding and marketing scams.

Today, I found out there’s a shitty gold ‘parfum’ to go with those shitty gold sneakers. If there is anything like overexposure, this is it!  You may brace yourself and see it here if you have the intestinal fortitude. I guess we know how he thinks he will pay his lawyers now since New York State has shut down the Trump Family Crime syndicate.

If you’ve got Trump Burn-out, you are not alone. I frankly think the East Coast media has some masochistic addiction to it.  This is from the New York Times. “Anti-Trump Burnout: The Resistance Says It’s Exhausted. Bracing for yet another election against Donald Trump, America’s liberals are feeling the fatigue. “We’re kind of, like, crises-ed out,” one Democrat said.” I’m not tired of despising him. I tire of seeing and hearing about him. Katie Glueck has the byline.

Democrats are hardly alone in their political fatigue: A Pew Research Center survey last year found that 65 percent of Americans said they always or often felt exhausted when they thought about politics.

“Exhaustion is underlying the entire attitude toward our presidential election,” said Whit Ayres, a veteran Republican pollster. “When you’ve got two people that are opposed by 70 percent of Americans who want a different choice, it creates frustration, anxiety and discouragement.”

Ah, yes, the patented NYT bothersidersm.

Democratic pollsters and strategists say that no one is more motivating or terrifying to their voters than Mr. Trump.

Buoyed by strong showings in special elections last week, and other recent contests including a successful write-in campaign for Mr. Biden in New Hampshire’s primary, many believe their voters will grow increasingly engaged as the general election nears and Mr. Trump’s legal problems unfold.

He confronts 91 felony charges across four cases, is poised to be the first former president to face a criminal trial and now has staggering financial problems. He has also privately expressed support for a 16-week national abortion ban, with some exceptions, The New York Times reported on Friday, and Democrats see abortion rights as a powerful motivator for their base and for some swing voters.

But there are pronounced warning signs on the left, as well.

A CNN poll recently asked how motivated Americans were to vote in the election. Republicans, out of power and eager to regain it, were more likely to say “extremely motivated.” A Yahoo News/YouGov poll asked voters last fall about their attitudes toward the 2024 election. Thirty-nine percent of Democrats picked “exhaustion” from the list of sentiments offered (a close second to “dread”). Just 26 percent of Republicans chose “exhaustion.”

Broadly, surveys have shown erosion in the party’s standing with traditional Democratic constituencies. On the left, some groups have warned of funding challenges and voter apathy, and the most visible source of in-the-streets energy is progressive frustration with Mr. Biden over his support for Israel.

Lauren Hitt, a spokeswoman for Mr. Biden, said there was tangible evidence of enthusiasm in recent weeks, including on the fund-raising front.

She also signaled that the campaign’s messaging would go beyond simply opposing Mr. Trump, drawing contrasts with Republicans on abortion rights and gun safety as she described the stakes of the election, and nodding to Mr. Biden’s policy accomplishments on issues like combating climate change and child poverty.

“This election determines whether we build on that progress or we lose so many of our fundamental freedoms,” she said in a statement.

This has to end.  Trump is pathologically narcissistic and chaotic. His dementia is worse than ever.  There has to be some way of getting him out of the limelight.  Today’s headlines are scathing. Every Anti-Trump Republican is out there with some form of media presence.   This is even more maddening to me.  Where were these people when they were feeding their base all the red meat that Trump now uses to his benefit?   The last Trump nod to Putin has really got them squawking in the Chicken Hawk coops.  Here are two examples.

This is from CNN. “Cheney warns of Republican Party ‘Putin-wing’ after Navalny death.”  Jack Forrest reports on her interview on Sunday.

GOP former Rep. Liz Cheney on Sunday warned of a Republican Party “Putin wing” after former President Donald Trump responded to the death of outspoken Kremlin critic Alexey Navalny without actually mentioning him or Russian President Vladimir Putin.

“We have to take seriously the extent to which you’ve now got a Putin wing of the Republican Party. I believe the issue this election cycle is making sure that the Putin wing of the Republican Party does not take over the West Wing of the White House,” Cheney told CNN’s Jake Tapper on “State of the Union.”

President Joe Biden and Trump struck dramatically different tones in their respective responses to the death of the jailed Russian opposition figure.

Biden, in his comments at the White House following the announcement of Navalny’s death, forcefully pinned the blame on “Putin and his thugs.”

“Make no mistake: Putin is responsible for Navalny’s death. Putin is responsible. What has happened to Navalny is yet more proof of Putin’s brutality. Nobody should be fooled,” Biden said.

Trump, meanwhile, said nothing directly about Navalny in a post that his campaign said was his official response to the opposition leader’s death – instead posting more than 20 times about a variety of topics including his criminal cases and his political opponents.

“When you think about Donald Trump, for example, pledging retribution, what Vladimir Putin did to Navalny is what retribution looks like in a country where a leader is not subject to the rule of law,” Cheney said Sunday.

The former president earlier this month also said he would encourage Russia to do “whatever the hell they want” to any NATO member country that doesn’t meet spending guidelines and would not offer such a country US protection – a stance that NATO chief Jens Stoltenberg said “undermines all of our security, including that of the US, and puts American and European soldiers at increased risk.”

“He’s basically made clear that under a Trump administration, the United States is unlikely to keep its NATO commitments,” Cheney said. She called Trump’s comments “dangerous” and said they show “a complete lack of understanding of America’s role in the world.”

Bill Kristol has joined the Anti-Trump Republicans at the Bulwark and writes this with Andrew Egger.  “Trump-Putin 2024.  Plus: Some good takes and some terrible takes on the significance of Alexei Navalny.”

We were slow in awakening to the threat of Putin. We have been sluggish in responding to that threat once awakened. But it is the most urgent foreign policy threat we face.

A broad coalition of political forces in the United States, ranging from Mike Pence on the right to Bernie Sanders on the left, is anti-Putin. Against them stand Donald Trump and some of his acolytes, who are pro-Putin.

The likely nominee of one of our two major political parties is pro-Vladimir Putin. This is an astonishing fact. It is an appalling fact. It has to be a central fact of the 2024 campaign.

But the political professionals say foreign policy doesn’t matter in elections. Americans vote on the economy. Or immigration. Or abortion rights.

That’s true to some degree. But not as much as we might think—particularly now that the post-Cold War era has ended in the wake of Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. The world we now live in seems more like that of 1972, or 1980, or 1988. In such a world, issues of foreign policy and national security matter in selecting a president. Putin matters.

And American voters know who Putin is. In an August Gallup poll, 95 percent of all Americans had an opinion of the Russian dictator, making him better known than any American politicians other than Biden and Trump. In that poll, Trump was seen favorably by 41 percent of Americans and unfavorably by 55 percent, while Biden’s favorable/unfavorable split was 41 percent to 57 percent.

Putin’s numbers in that poll? 5 percent favorable, 90 percent unfavorable. A YouGov poll last week was a bit rosier: 13 percent in favor of the Russian dictator, 81 percent unfavorable.

It’s actually striking that all the work of the pro-Putin right—from Trump himself to Tucker Carlson—has had so little effect in improving Putin’s image. Putin turns out to be a very hard sell.

Which is all the more reason to hang Putin around Trump’s neck. It could well make Trump a harder sell to some number of swing voters.

Nice to have to read about the worst president ever on President’s Day!  Kristol apologizes for being Debbie Downer.  I shamelessly will wear the title until we get no more years of Trump Trauma. But here we go!  Off his Rocker is a perfect way to lead into Tim Dickinson’s latest at The Rolling Stone. “Trump Compares Himself to Navalny in Bizarre Presidents’ Day Rant. On Truth Social, Trump groused about his expensive court losses and compared himself to the Russian dissident who died in an arctic penal colony.”

IT’S PRESIDENTS’ DAY, and America’s 45th is having a real one.

Donald Trump spent the morning of the Monday holiday railing against the nearly half-billion-dollar court judgment levied against him for fraud in New York state, and grotesquely comparing himself to the Russian political dissident Alexei Navalny, who died last week in an Russian arctic penal colony.

Trump started shitposting not long after dawn on his Truth Social network. Stinging from his massive court defeat, Trump seemed determined to keep litigating his fraud case in the court of public opinion. In seething ALL CAPS, Trump railed against the court finding that he and his family business had fraudulently and systematically overstated the value of real estate assets — including by inflating the square footage of Donald’s own Trump Tower penthouse apartment.

the “crooked, hand picked judge” whom he claimed failed to include in court calculations the “brand value” of the Trump name, which the former president modestly suggested is “known and accepted to be worth many billions of dollars.” (Over the weekend, Trump attempted to leverage that brand value with the launch of $400 “Never Surrender” high tops at Sneaker Con.)

The annual President’s Day poll of America’s historians ranking Presidents is out.   Here are the results from the New York Times. “Poll Ranks Biden as 14th-Best President, With Trump Last.” President Biden may owe his place in the top third to his predecessor: Mr. Biden’s signature accomplishment, according to the historians, was evicting Donald J. Trump from the Oval Office.  This is reported by Peter Baker.  TRUMP IS OFFICIALLY THE WORST PRESIDENT EVER!!

President Biden has not had a lot of fun perusing polls lately. He has a lower approval rating than every president going back to Dwight D. Eisenhower at this stage of their tenures, and he trails former President Donald J. Trump in a fall rematch. But Mr. Biden can take solace from one survey in which he is way out in front of Mr. Trump.

A new poll of historians coming out on Presidents’ Day weekend ranks Mr. Biden as the 14th-best president in American history, just ahead of Woodrow Wilson, Ronald Reagan and Ulysses S. Grant. While that may not get Mr. Biden a spot on Mount Rushmore, it certainly puts him well ahead of Mr. Trump, who places dead last as the worst president ever.

Indeed, Mr. Biden may owe his place in the top third in part to Mr. Trump. Although he has claims to a historical legacy by managing the end of the Covid pandemic; rebuilding the nation’s roads, bridges and other infrastructure; and leading an international coalition against Russian aggression, Mr. Biden’s signature accomplishment, according to the historians, was evicting Mr. Trump from the Oval Office.

“Biden’s most important achievements may be that he rescued the presidency from Trump, resumed a more traditional style of presidential leadership and is gearing up to keep the office out of his predecessor’s hands this fall,” wrote Justin Vaughn and Brandon Rottinghaus, the college professors who conducted the survey and announced the results in The Los Angeles Times.

Mr. Trump might not care much what a bunch of academics think, but for what it’s worth he fares badly even among the self-identified Republican historians. Finishing 45th overall, Mr. Trump trails even the mid-19th-century failures who blundered the country into a civil war or botched its aftermath like James Buchanan, Franklin Pierce and Andrew Johnson.

The Independent is frank about the dishonorable loser who wears the 45 label. “Trump ranks as worst president in US history in new academics poll. The results are in from the US academics, and it does not bode well for the GOP nominee.”  This is Amelia Neath’s take.

Mr Trump ranked in the very last place, scoring just 10.9/100 – the same spot he occupied in the previous survey (he was not included in the first survey, which was conducted during Barack Obama’s presidency).

He was also awarded “most polarising” president in the poll.

Meanwhile, Abraham Lincoln stood at the top of the presidential rankings, as the country’s greatest president, with an average score of 93.9/100.

Franklin D. Roosevelt came in at number two, followed by the nation’s first president, George Washington. Fourth place went to Theodore Roosevelt and fifth to Thomas Jefferson.

Respondents were able to disclose their own political leanings, which produced an interesting insight into how the presidents fared between differing parties.

Unfortunately for Mr Trump, the Republican scholars did not help his low ranking, as he still came out in 41st place out of 45 among Republicans only. Among Democrat scholars, he placed 45th.

President Joe Biden meanwhile was ranked at number 13 by Democrats and at a low 30 by Republicans.

Mr Rottinghaus and Mr Vaughn said that Mr Biden’s ranking may have been influenced by him being viewed as Mr Trump’s greatest blocker.

“Biden’s most important achievements may be that he rescued the presidency from Trump, resumed a more traditional style of presidential leadership and is gearing up to keep the office out of his predecessor’s hands this fall,” they wrote in an article for the Los Angeles Times.

Makes me proud to be a lowly little undergrad History major.  (sniff, sniff)

Two last things to tie back to the post title and the featured funny by John.

This is a headline from The Guardian.  “John Oliver offers to pay Clarence Thomas $1m a year if he resigns from supreme court. Late-night host gives justice, under fire over undisclosed donations, 30 days to accept offer, which includes a tour bus.”  Hot Damn!

Okay, so I will leave you to your President’s Day activities.   Share your thoughts!

What’s on your reading and blogging list today?

I may binge-watch a few things today, including Northern Exposure. I wonder what wanders around Mar-a-Lardo in Florida since a moose wouldn’t work.