Finally Friday Reads: The Decline and Fall of the DonOld Empire

“For those wondering, since the press isn’t reporting what happened after the fly left Donold’s face.” John Buss @repeat1968

Good Afternoon Sky Dancers!

Sorry for being a bit late.  I had to be retrained on the same things again this year and then ensure the paperwork got into the right places.  I’ve been at this for two days.  I must get caught up with the world outside compliance with Higher Ed. Regulations.

Whenever the Former Guy emerges from his hidey hole in Mara Lardo, his lies, bizarro stories, and slurring worsen his travails.  I still refuse to watch this stuff on the Boob Tube, but I’m sure up to reading about it.  There’s just something about his demeanor and voice that I cannot take.  So far, he’s attacking veterans, decided that illegal immigrants have taken more than 100% of the jobs that have been created, and then there is this. “Trump Warns That if Kamala Harris Wins, ‘Everybody Gets Health Care. Donald Trump repeatedly lies about single-payer health care — an idea he and Harris both previously supported but no longer do’” That headline is in Rolling Stone.  CNN also has an explanation but without the ironic headline. “Kamala Harris’ complicated history with Medicare for All becomes a Trump campaign attack line.”  Harris actually dropped her support for Medicare for All when Biden pulled ahead because of his stance for just improving ObamaCare instead.

But Harris has not addressed the question herself, touting the Biden administration’s record while trying avoid any relitigation of the years-old fight, and putting out word now only through campaign aides. Now, Trump is reviving the debate as he seeks to paint Harris as both a radical liberal and a flip flopper.

“Kamala Harris’ spokespeople are once again alleging she has flip flopped on her positions – this time saying she no longer supports socialist Medicare for All,” Trump campaign spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt said on Wednesday, calling on Harris “to explain why she is running from every liberal policy she has ever supported.”

The Trump camp’s focus on Medicare for All is emerging as the centerpiece of a wider strategy to use Harris’ 2020 primary positions against her now, less than 90 days before the general election. Harris dropped out of the Democratic primary before the first votes werecast, but her campaign that year frequently jousted with Sanders and reporters trying to pin down her position on the plan, which would eliminate private insurance plans and replace them with a government-funded and operated single-payer system.

That debate quieted when Biden consolidated the party on his way to winning the nomination and, eventually, the presidency with Harris as his running mate. Trump – who repeatedly attempted to repeal ACA, also known as Obamacare, without success and to significant electoral backlash – has never spelled out a clear plan of his own.

“She wants to outlaw private health insurance,” Trump said in late July at the conservative Turning Point Action’s Believers’ Summit in West Palm Beach. “A lot of people have private health insurance. They want to keep it that way. It’s phenomenal.”

Harris responded the next day at a fundraiser in Massachusetts, raising Trump’s 2017 campaign to end Obamacare.

“He intends to end the Affordable Care Act and take us back to a time when insurance companies had the power to deny people with preexisting conditions,” Harris said. “You guys remember what that was? It was real. Children with asthma. Breast cancer survivors. Grandparents with diabetes.”

The Harris campaign, in response to CNN, pointed to the record high number of Americans now enrolled in Obamacare and other initiatives, including moves to lower prescription drug prices.

“Vice President Harris believes real leadership means bringing all sides together to build consensus. It is that approach that made it possible for the Biden-Harris administration to achieve bipartisan breakthroughs on everything from infrastructure to gun violence prevention,” campaign spokesperson Sarafina Chitika said. “As President, she will take that same pragmatic approach, focusing on common-sense solutions for the sake of progress.”

The Affordable Healthcare Act still continues to be popular.  It may need some upgrading, but there’s no reason to invent an entirely new public option.  You would think he’d move on after John McCain sunk the last attempt to get rid of it.  But since he still hasn’t found a way to do his usual dirty tricks on Vice President Harris, I suppose he is just throwing anything at the wall, including ketchup. But the Harris/Walz tickets aren’t the only ones that are getting his bile and vile treatment.  He’s after Vets again, which brings McCain back to mind.

This is from Politico. Cadet Bonespurs strikes again. “Trump veteran comments spark controversy — again. The former president has a history of making controversial comments about veterans, receiving backlash during both his 2016 and 2020 campaigns.”  Here’s the quote first.

“But [the] civilian version, it’s actually much better because everyone [who] gets the Congressional Medal of Honor, they’re soldiers. They’re either in very bad shape because they’ve been hit so many times by bullets or they’re dead,” former President Donald Trump said Thursday.

Irie Sentner writes this analysis.

Former President Donald Trump is facing backlash over his comments about veterans. Again.

Trump said Thursday that the country’s top civilian honor was “much better” than its top military honor, because the service members who receive the latter are “in very bad shape” or “dead” — the latest in a yearslong pattern of inflammatory comments the former president has made about veterans as barbs over military service are being traded by both campaigns during a heated election.

Speaking at an event on antisemitism at his Bedminster, New Jersey, estate, Trump was discussing Miriam Adelson and her late husband Sheldon Adelson, the billionaire pro-Israel GOP megadonors who set a donation record in 2020 by spending over $170 million. Trump bestowed the Presidential Medal of Freedom to Miriam Adelson in 2018 for her history of contributions to U.S. national interests and “world peace.”

“That’s the highest award you can get as a civilian. It’s the equivalent of the Congressional Medal of Honor,” Trump said Thursday. “But [the] civilian version, it’s actually much better because everyone [who] gets the Congressional Medal of Honor, they’re soldiers. They’re either in very bad shape because they’ve been hit so many times by bullets or they’re dead.”

Trump has a history of making controversial comments about veterans, receiving backlash for them during both his 2016 and 2020 campaigns. But now, both parties’ vice presidential candidates are veterans — and as the GOP attacks the service record of the Democratic vice presidential hopeful, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, Trump’s comments Thursday gave Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign ammunition for a counterattack.

“Donald Trump knows nothing about service to anyone or anything but himself,” Harris campaign senior spokesperson Sarafina Chitika said Friday in a statement. “For him to insult Medal of Honor recipients, just as he has previously attacked Gold Star families, mocked prisoners of war, and referred to those who lost their lives in service to our country as ‘suckers’ and ‘losers,’ should remind all Americans that we owe it to our service members, our country, and our future to make sure Donald Trump is never our nation’s commander in chief again.”

“Blinded by light”, John Buss, @repeat1968

As I said, I totally missed this “press conference,” so I’m relying on sources like the AP.  “FACT FOCUS: Trump blends falsehoods and exaggerations at rambling NJ press conference.”

Inflation did not take the toll Trump claimed. Growth surged under Biden

TRUMP: “As a result of Kamala’s inflation, price hikes have cost the typical household a total of $28,000. … When I left office, I left Kamala and crooked Joe Biden a surging economy and no inflation. The mortgage rate was around 2%. Gasoline had reached $1.87 a gallon. … Harris and Biden blew it all up.”

THE FACTS: Trump made numerous economic claims that were either exaggerated or misleading. Prices did surge during the Biden-Harris administration, though $28,000 is far higher than independent estimates. Moody’s Analytics calculated last year that price increases over the previous two years were costing the typical U.S. household $709 a month. That would equal $8,500 a year.

Here’s the more facts on that from CBS News. 

Inflation continued to retreat in July, aided by easing price pressures for consumer staples like food and energy and physical goods like new and used cars.

The consumer price index, a key inflation gauge, rose 2.9% in July from a year ago, the U.S. Department of Labor reported Wednesday. That figure is down from 3% in June and the lowest reading since March 2021.

The CPI gauges how fast prices are changing across the U.S. economy. It measures everything from fruits and vegetables to haircuts, concert tickets and household appliances.

Bruce Plante Cartoon: Trump and the Cashier

Trump set up a little grocery store at this “presser” where he told whopper after whopper. I love this headline from Vanity Fair. “Does Anyone Know What Donald Trump Is Talking About Anymore?  Hannibal Lecter? Cheerios? “Bird cemeteries?” The former president is tying himself in a knot of discursive tangents and in-jokes that only makes sense to an increasingly small sect of the American public.”

Donald Trump has never been what you’d call eloquent. An orator, he is not. And yet, the former president seems to be getting even more incoherent by the day, as his latest “press conference” underscored Thursday.

Speaking to reporters at his Bedminster country club in New Jersey, Trump stood before a display of groceries—coffee, cereal, milk—for what was billed as a presser on the economy, one of those “issues” his allies and advisers wish he’d spend more time talking about. What everyone got instead was a series of rants on subjects ranging from his anger at Kamala Harris calling him and JD Vance “weird” to the “bird cemeteries” under windmills to his math-defying contention that “beyond…100 percent” of job creation under Joe Biden in the past year has “gone to migrants.”

“It’s a much higher number than that,” Trump said, “but the government has not caught up with that yet.”

“I haven’t seen Cheerios in a long time,” he remarked at another point, saying he wanted to “take some of them back to [his] cottage and have a lot of fun.”

What, exactly, does that mean, you might ask? Well, what does any of this mean? Trump isn’t just inarticulate, trying in vain to express his thoughts and emotions with a vocabulary that seems limited to “beautiful,” “perfect,” and maybe thirty other words. He’s now riffing on riffs, becoming so self-referential and so discursive that you need to leave a trail of breadcrumbs to find your way back to the original thought. Take Trump’s latest addition to his repertoire about Hannibal Lecter, the fictional cannibal of page and screen portrayed by Anthony Hopkins: “He’d love to have you for dinner,” the former president said during a rant on immigration during his Republican National Convention speech last month. “That’s insane asylums. They’re emptying out their insane asylums.”

The media is absolutely laughing at him. “Trump’s Magical History Tour. Under siege and self-sabotaging at his New Jersey golf club, Donald Trump is reaching for old familiar faces and enablers to imbue his flailing 2024 campaign with some 2016 magic: Corey Lewandowski, Tim Murtaugh, maybe Kellyanne. Who’s next, Roger Stone? Oh wait…” This is from Puck and Tara Palmer.

I woke up Thursday morning to a storm of text messages saying that it was really happening, and then, within an hour, Trump’s team had leaked the news to Politico. The two had been talking for a while, and Lewandowski traveled with the team on the night of the debate. But from what I hear, Trump was alone in making the call to hire Lewandowski, who has been consulting for the R.N.C. since April. “People in Trumpworld try to stop things and they can’t,” said a former aide. “Sometimes when the ship has left the port, it’s left the port.”

Sheepishly, perhaps, the news of Lewandowski’s reinstatement was bundled with a handful of other, lesser-known new hires: Taylor Budowich, Alex Pfeiffer, Alex Bruesewitz, and Tim Murtaugh—all “veterans of prior Trump campaigns” with “unmatched experience,” per a campaign statement. Spokesperson Steven Cheung told me Lewandowski’s title will be “senior advisor,” and that Wiles and LaCivita will remain as co-campaign managers. (Trump himself referred to Lewandowski during a press conference on Thursday afternoon as a “personal envoy or something.”)

All around Bedminster, where Trump has relocated to escape the South Florida heat, there is a pervasive anxiety that the candidate is trying to recreate the chaos that surrounded his winning 2016 campaign. No one thinks Lewandowski and LaCivita can cohabitate for long, leading some people close to Trump to speculate that he’s trying to push LaCivita out, just as he installed Anthony Scaramucci to fire Steve Bannon and Reince Priebus. “Susie is a survivor; she’s not going anywhere. But then you have LaCivita and Corey Lewandowski, two alpha men,” said a source close to Lewandowski. “It’s like Trump just wants them to kill each other and for one to win so he doesn’t have to actually fire anyone.”

One obvious vulnerability facing LaCivita is his astronomical fee. As Trump stews over his fading poll numbers and whether a once easily winnable election is slipping away, there has been growing chatter in some corners of Mar-a-Lago about the $50,000 that LaCivita’s firm, Advanced Strategies, collects from the campaign and R.N.C. each month, which is included in the nearly $1.7 million he’s invoiced the campaign so far this year for various services like placed media, political strategy consulting, and video production, up from the $1.65 million he billed last year. (Sure, it’s not Jeff Roe money, but it has some tongues wagging.) “I have never told anyone I will be conducting a forensic audit of the campaign, nor have I alluded to, or have any understanding of, how much money Chris LaCivita may or may not have billed this campaign,” Lewandowski told me.

I’m still enjoying the interviews with people who once worked for him.  Have you noticed he’s suddenly coming apart whenever someone mentions he’s coming up on his sentencing deadline in New York? “Scaramucci: Trump Is ‘Coming to Grips’ With Losing the Election, Trump’s former White House communications director says it’s going to be “rough” until Election Day.”  This is from The Daily Beast. This article is by Dan Ladden-Hall.

Anthony Scaramucci, Donald Trump’s one-time White House communications director, thinks his former boss is “coming to grips” with the possibility that he’ll lose the election and is consequently “growing darker.”

“Will be a rough 81 days,” Scaramucci added in an X post Thursday, referring to the time left until Election Day in November. His comment came as Trump spoke at an hour-long press conference at his golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey, in which the Republican nominee explicitly rejected pleas from others in his party to stop personally attacking Vice President Kamala Harris.

“I’m very angry at her that she weaponized the justice system against me and other people,” Trump said at the press conference. “Very angry at her. I think I’m entitled to personal attacks. I don’t have a lot of respect for her, I don’t have a lot of respect for her intelligence, and I think she’ll be a terrible president.”

Trump has become increasingly irate in private as Harris has surpassed him in various polls, according to an Axios report over the weekend. The former president has also reportedly referred to Harris as a “b—h” behind closed doors while growing frustrated by sustained news coverage of her.

Scaramucci was briefly Trump’s White House comms chief in 2017, losing the job after just 10 days over a foul-mouthed tirade against then-White House chief of staff Reince Priebus and strategist Steve Bannon. Scaramucci has since become an outspoken critic of his former boss, describing Trump in a Daily Beast op-ed in May as a “true narcissist” whose “ego-driven and childlike behavior” he’d witnessed up close.

No matter how befuddled or far into advanced dotage he’s become, it’s important to remember the people behind him. “Watch Undercover Video: Project 2025 Co-Author Lays Out “Radical Agenda” for Next Trump Term.”  This is from Democracy Now.   You may also read the Transcript at that link.

As Donald Trump tries to distance his campaign from Project 2025, those behind the right-wing policy blueprint to remake the U.S. government continue to brag in private about their close ties to the Republican presidential nominee and how they intend to push a radical right-wing agenda in a second Trump administration. In July, Project 2025 co-author Russell Vought met with two people he believed to be relatives of a wealthy conservative donor interested in funding the effort. In fact, he was meeting with two reporters with the U.K.-based Centre for Climate Reporting as part of an undercover sting captured on video. Over the course of two hours, Vought described Trump’s disavowal of Project 2025 as mere theater and laid out plans for mass deportations, restricting abortion, gutting independent government bureaucracies, using the military against racial justice protesters and more. The secret plans are “designed to ensure that this kind of radical agenda that the conservative movement has in the U.S. can be implemented from day one,” says Lawrence Carter, founder and director of the Centre for Climate Reporting and one of the reporters who spoke with Vought. “They want to make sure that the mistakes from the first Trump administration, as they see them, where not much got done, are avoided this time around.”

AMY GOODMAN: We begin today’s show with a new undercover video that shows the co-author of Project 2025 bragging about his ties to Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump — even as Trump is trying to distance himself from the right-wing blueprint for his potential second term.

The video features Russell Vought, who was director of the Trump White House Office of Management and Budget. It shows Vought meeting in a five-star Washington, D.C., hotel with two men he thought were relatives of a wealthy conservative donor. But Vought was actually talking to two undercover reporters with the Centre for Climate Reporting, an independent British news outlet. They were secretly recording him.

Here’s some happier reading.  “Vice President Harris Lays Out Agenda to Lower Costs for American Families.” You may read actual policy goals and solutions there.  It’s good to be back when you can see what’s on the table.

Today, Vice President Kamala Harris is announcing several proposals for her first 100 days in office to bring down costs for American families. The steps announced today will cut taxes for the middle class, reduce grocery costs, take on price gouging, lower the costs of owning and renting a home, continue to bring down the costs of prescription drugs, and relieve medical debt for millions of Americans. These bold actions will address some of the sharpest pain points American families are confronting and bolster their financial security.

These proposals are just one part of the Vice President’s economic plan, which also includes protecting and strengthening Social Security and Medicare; bringing together labor, small businesses, and major corporations to invest in America, create jobs, and deliver for Americans; lowering costs of education, child care, and long-term care; empowering workers and their right to come together to bargain for higher wages; creating a stable business environment with consistent and transparent rules; encouraging innovative technologies while protecting consumers; and so much more. Vice President Harris has made clear that building up the middle class will be a defining goal of her presidency. She will deliver for Americans who are demanding a new way forward towards a future that lifts up all Americans so that they can not just get by, but get ahead.

I’m sitting here in my little Kathouse, wondering how anyone could deny climate change as we are deep into the third intense heat wave of the summer and know that August has been the worst month for the last few years. It’s really important that we don’t go back. I was talking to one of my gay neighbors today, saying that he wasn’t going back, and watching the news felt good for a change. I said I’d already be back if I still had working ovaries and a uterus.  I don’t want my girls and the granddaughters to stay where Trump and that dreadful group of throwbacks on SCOTUS put them.  Our governor just signed a law that basically ensures that you will be arrested and your phone will be taken from you if you try to film police officers.   We have to get the correct laws into place to ensure all the book banning, the religious interference with education, and the voter suppression stop. Join in where you can to stop this.

So, I had to skip calling this week, but I will be at it again next week. Do what you can to turn out the vote for Kamala.

What’s on your reading and blogging list today?

For some reason, I’m singing this song a lot these days.  Have a peaceful and wonderful weekend!