Finally Friday Reads: Bye Bye Wade!

Posted: March 15, 2024 | Author: | Filed under: just because | Tags: , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

Good Day, Sky Dancers!

It’s another busy news week and Friday. The most consequential headline this morning is on the decision of Fulton County Superior Court Judge Scott McAfee on the “appearance of impropriety” brought about by Willis’ romantic relationship with special prosecutor Nathan Wade. This analysis is from NBC News.

A Georgia judge ruled Fridaythat Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis should not be disqualified from prosecuting the racketeering case against former President Donald Trump and several co-defendants — with one major condition.

Fulton County Superior Court Judge Scott McAfee found the “appearance of impropriety” brought about by Willis’ romantic relationship with special prosecutor Nathan Wade should result in either Willis and her office leaving the case — or just Wade, whom she’d appointed to head the case.

The choice is likely to be an easy one: If Willis were to remove herself, the case would come to a halt, but having Wade leave will ensure the case continues without further delay.

The judge said the prosecution “cannot proceed” until Willis makes a decision.

Trump attorney Steve Sadow said in a statement that, “While respecting the Court’s decision, we believe that the Court did not afford appropriate significance to the prosecutorial misconduct of Willis and Wade.”

“We will use all legal options available as we continue to fight to end this case, which should never have been brought in the first place,” he added.

Willis’s office did not immediately comment on the ruling.The judge found there was no “actual conflict” brought about by the relationship, a finding that would have required Willis to be disqualified. “Without sufficient evidence that the District Attorney acquired a personal stake in the prosecution, or that her financial arrangements had any impact on the case, the Defendants’ claims of an actual conflict must be denied,” the judge wrote.

“This finding is by no means an indication that the Court condones this tremendous lapse in judgment or the unprofessional manner of the District Attorney’s testimony during the evidentiary hearing. Rather, it is the undersigned’s opinion that Georgia law does not permit the finding of an actual conflict for simply making bad choices — even repeatedly — and it is the trial court’s duty to confine itself to the relevant issues and applicable law properly brought before it,” he added.

The judge did, however, also find “the prosecution is encumbered by an appearance of impropriety.”

“As the case moves forward, reasonable members of the public could easily be left to wonder whether the financial exchanges have continued resulting in some form of benefit to the District Attorney, or even whether the romantic relationship has resumed,” he wrote. “As long as Wade remains on the case, this unnecessary perception will persist.”

The Manhattan D.A. has joined the list of Judiciary officials letting Trump delay trials on frivolous and specious arguments. This is from the New York Times. “As Trump Seeks Trial Delay, N.Y. Prosecutors Offer 30-Day Postponement. The Manhattan district attorney’s proposal came in response to Donald J. Trump’s request for a 90-day delay to allow his lawyers time to review a new batch of records.”

Less than two weeks before Donald J. Trump is set to go on trial on criminal charges in Manhattan, the prosecutors who brought the case proposed a delay of up to 30 days, a startling development in the first prosecution of a former American president.

The Manhattan district attorney’s office, which accused Mr. Trump of covering up a sex scandal during and after the 2016 presidential campaign, said the delay would give Mr. Trump’s lawyers time to review a new batch of records. The office sought the records more than a year ago, but only recently received them from federal prosecutors, who years ago investigated the hush-money payments at the center of the case.

In response to the records — tens of thousands of pages of them — Mr. Trump’s lawyers requested that the trial be delayed 90 days. Although the former president frequently requests such delays, prosecutors consenting to any postponement makes one far more likely.

Mr. Trump, who clinched the Republican presidential nomination for the third time this week, faces four criminal trials and several civil lawsuits. The Manhattan case had been the only one of the four criminal cases not mired in delays.

“Mired in delays” is the understatement of the year-to-date. Meanwhile, Trump gets more incoherent by the day. His appearance is more startling than usual. Susan B. Glasser of The New Yorker has this analysis. “I Listened to Trump’s Rambling, Unhinged, Vituperative Georgia Rally—and So Should You. The ex-President is building a whole new edifice of lies for 2024.”

And yet, like so much about Trump’s 2024 campaign, this insane oration was largely overlooked and under-covered, the flood of lies and B.S. seen as old news from a candidate whose greatest political success has been to acclimate a large swath of the population to his ever more dangerous alternate reality. No wonder Biden, trapped in a real world of real problems that defy easy solutions, is struggling to defeat him.

This is partly a category error. Though we persist in treating the 2024 election as a race between an incumbent and a challenger, it is not that so much as a contest between two incumbents: Biden, the actual President, and Trump, the forever-President of Red America’s fever dreams. But Trump, while he presents himself as the country’s rightful leader, gets nothing like the intense scrutiny for his speeches that is now focussed on the current occupant of the Oval Office. The norms and traditions that Trump is intent on smashing are, once again, benefitting him.

Consider the enormous buildup before, and wall-to-wall coverage of, Biden’s annual address to Congress. It was big news when the President called out his opponent in unusually scathing terms, referring thirteen times in his prepared text to “my predecessor” in what was, understandably, seen as a break with tradition. Republican commentators grumbled about the sharply partisan tone of the President’s remarks and the loud decibel in which he delivered them; Democrats essentially celebrated those same qualities.

Imagine if, instead, the two speeches had been covered side by side. Biden’s barbed references to Trump were all about the former President’s offenses to American democracy. He called out Trump’s 2024 campaign of “resentment, revenge, and retribution” and the “chaos” unleashed by the Trump-majority Supreme Court when it threw out the decades-old precedent of Roe v. Wade. In reference to a recent quote from the former President, in which Trump suggested that Americans should just “get over it” when it comes to gun violence, Biden retorted, “I say: Stop it, stop it, stop it!” His sharpest words for Trump came in response to the ex-President’s public invitation to Russia to do “whatever the hell they want” to nato countries that don’t spend what Trump wants them to on defense—a line that Biden condemned as “outrageous,” “dangerous,” and “unacceptable.”

Trump’s speech made little effort to draw substantive contrasts with Biden. Instead, the Washington Post counted nearly five dozen references to Biden in the course of the Georgia rally, almost all of them epithets drawn from the Trump marketing playbook for how to rip down an opponent—words like “angry,” “corrupt,” “crooked,” “flailing,” “incompetent,” “stupid,” and “weak.” Trump is, always and forever, a puerile bully, stuck perpetually on the fifth-grade playground. But the politics of personal insult has worked so well for Trump that he is, naturally, doubling down on it in 2024. In fact, one of the clips from Trump’s speech on Saturday which got the most coverage was his mockery of Biden’s stutter: a churlish—and, no doubt, premeditated—slur.

Trump still is unhinged when it comes to Hillary Clinton. This analysis was written by Phillip Bump for the Washington Post. “Trump goes on a weird riff about acid — again. The former president claimed that Hillary Clinton destroyed some emails with acid, an assertion that is not only untrue but has been debunked countless times.”

For his interview with Newsmax’s Greg Kelly, Donald Trump didn’t stray far from home. The two sat down in uncomfortable-looking, formal chairs in one of Mar-a-Lago’s self-consciously ornate rooms for a discussion about how inept President Biden is.

“We have a man that can’t talk,” Trump said of Biden. “He can’t negotiate. He doesn’t know he’s alive.” As a result, the former president concluded, “this is a very dangerous time for our country.”

All of this came shortly after Trump claimed that Hillary Clinton had destroyed some emails with acid — an assertion that is not only untrue but has also been debunked countless times over the past eight years. But it’s still lodged in his brain, somehow, and he is unable or unwilling to dislodge it.

Because this claim is so old and because it has been debunked so many times (for example), we’ll just run through this quickly. In August 2016, after House Republicans investigating Clinton had stumbled onto her use of a private email server, former South Carolina congressman (and current Fox News host) Trey Gowdy announced that Clinton’s team had used free software called BleachBit to erase a hard drive that once contained her emails. (Messages determined by her attorneys to pertain to her government work had already been turned over.)

…

In his most recent telling, the claim is very specific. Clinton used “acid testing,” or, I guess, “essentially acid that will destroy everything within 10 miles.” This is very Trumpian, the effort to take a minor detail and inflate it to apocalyptic proportions. Not only has debunking this claim not had an apparent effect, he is now so used to making this nonsensical assertion that he feels like the baseline misinformation isn’t enough for his audience.

This is common behavior from Trump, certainly, in the abstract and the specific example. But it is more fraught now than it used to be, given the extent to which Trump and his allies have focused on mental sharpness as a necessary qualification for the presidency. Americans are asked — as Trump endeavors in his conversation with Kelly — to view Biden as muddled and addled.

That has triggered some blowback, including from Biden’s campaign team, focused on elevating moments in which Trump himself seems to be confused. Just this week, Democratic lawmakers responded to criticism of Biden’s memory by compiling clips showing Trump misspeaking or misidentifying people.

Meanwhile, the TikTok and social media battle continues. We have a Supreme Court Decision plus an interest by MAGA cultists to buy TikTok to use as a propaganda tool. NBC News reports on the latest SCOTUS foray into social media control. “In shadow of Trump tweets, Supreme Court outlines when officials can be sued for social media use. Former President Donald Trump’s frequent use of Twitter lurked in the background as the justices weighed whether an official’s online activities can constitute government action.” This analysis is written by Lawrence Hurley.

The Supreme Court ruled Friday that members of the public in some circumstances can sue public officials for blocking them on social media platforms, deciding a pair of cases against the backdrop of former President Donald Trump’s contentious and colorful use of Twitter.

The court ruled unanimously that officials can be deemed “state actors” when making use of social media and can therefore face litigation if they block or mute a member of the public.

In the two cases before the justices, they ruled that disputes involving a school board member in Southern California and a city manager in Michigan should be sent back to lower courts for the new legal test to be applied.

In a ruling written by Justice Amy Coney Barrett, the court acknowledged that it “can be difficult to tell whether the speech is official or private” because of how social media accounts are used.

The court held that conduct on social media can be viewed as a state action when the official in question “possessed actual authority to speak on the state’s behalf” and “purported to exercise that authority.”

While the officials in both cases have low profiles, the ruling will apply to all public officials who use social media to engage with the public.

During October’s oral argument, Trump’s use of Twitter — before it was renamed X — was frequently mentioned as the justices considered the practical implications.

The cases raised the question of whether public officials’ posts and other social media activity constitute part of their governmental functions. In ruling that it can, the court found that blocking someone from following an official constitutes a government action that could give rise to a constitutional claim.

But the court made it clear that conditions have to be met for a claim to move forward, with Barrett noting that government officials are also “private citizens with their own constitutional rights.”

Determining whether a claim can move forward is not based simply on whether the person is a government official, but on the substance of the conduct in question, she added.

Factors such as whether the account is marked as official and the official is invoking his or her legal authority in making a formal announcement can be taken into account, Barrett said.

“In some circumstances, the post’s content and function might make the plaintiff’s argument a slam dunk,” she added

The TikTok story just keeps getting weirder and weirder.

The Washington Examiner had this screaming Op-Ed today by someone named Jeremiah Poff. “TikTok needs a conservative US buyer.” Yup, just what we need; more Rupert Murdoch and Elon Musk to create a more violent and unhinged right wing.

The prospect of TikTok needing a U.S. buyer increased this week after the House of Representatives passed a bill that would require the social media app’s parent company, ByteDance, to divest from the app or face a ban.

On a 352-65 vote on Wednesday, the House showed unusual bipartisanship and passed a bill that would force the app to decouple from China or be banned in the United States. The app’s connection to the Chinese Communist Party has raised serious national security concerns that have motivated the legislative action.

While the bill’s fate is uncertain in the Senate despite President Joe Biden pledging to sign it, there needs to be some consideration about what will happen to the app if the bill becomes law and TikTok is sold to a U.S. investor.

Social media companies such as Meta and Google are dominated by the Left. As was evidenced by the 2020 election, they have a sizable influence on what content people see and their political perceptions. A similar concern was obvious with Twitter until it was bought by Elon Musk and rebranded as X.

TikTok has an enormous user base of 170 million in the U.S. Its potential for influencing the population at large is vast, which means Silicon Valley tech companies with an overrepresentation of left-wing views must not be allowed to buy it, lest censorship and liberal propaganda replace Chinese government propaganda.

So, that last sentence is why we don’t need right-wing hysterical and culturally nasty propaganda replacing Chinese government propaganda. You heard it from me first.

My last word is, please remember where and who we were four years ago with President (sic) Trump and his bumbling management of Covid-19. I think it’s an excellent answer to Stefank’s question with a loud YES. The media should remind us how awful it was. Refrigerator trucks with dead bodies and no toilet paper are just two reminders. This is from Mediaite. “Hannity Claims Democrats’ Cannot Run on, Are You Better Off Than You Were Four Years Ago?” Michael Luciano has the lede. Hannity is still carrying Trump’s diseased water.

Sean Hannity said President Joe Biden and Democrats will be unable to make the case that Americans are better off in 2024 than they were four years ago.

Biden is seeking a second term and will face former President Donald Trump as congressional Democrats try to retake the House of Representatives and undertake the tall order of holding the Senate.

“They spread fear, hysteria, all things hate Trump, hate Trump 24/7,” Hannity said of Democrats during his opening monologue Thursday on Fox News. “And of course, Democrats will call Republicans racist, sexist, xenophobic, homophobic, Islamophobic, transphobic that want dirty air and water. In other words, Democrats are using fear and division to mask what has been a terrible four years under Biden.”

Hannity then invoked an election refrain made famous by Ronald Reagan during a 1980 debate with then-President Jimmy Carter: “Are you better off today than you were four years ago?”

“I repeat, they cannot run on, ‘Are you better off than you were four years ago?’” Hannity said. “This is all they have left.”

Some quick, back-of-the-napkin math indicates that four years ago, the year was 2020. History buffs may recall that this period in time was marred by a once-in-a-century global pandemic that wound up killing more than one million Americans and torpedoed the economy. Trump’s handling of the country’s pandemic response arguably cost him reelection.

In the early days of the pandemic, Trump sought to downplay the threat posed by Covid-19. In February 2020, he reacted to the news that a handful of Americans had been diagnosed with the virus by saying, “And again, when you have 15 people, and the 15 within a couple of days is going to be down to close to zero, that’s a pretty good job we’ve done.”

This headline made me giggle. It’s from Raw Story. It’s written by Kathleen Culliton. “‘Freudian slip?’ RNC chair says America is better off under Biden than Trump:” It takes a lot of energy to keep lies going in the face of obvious truth.

The Republican National Committee’s new chair Friday gave a resounding “No” to a question he asked himself on nationally broadcast television: Was the nation better off under former President Donald Trump?

Whoops.

Michael Whatley appeared on Fox News to promote the presumptive Republican nominee and the RNC’s co-chair Lara Trump’s father-in-law in his bid to reclaim the White House in 2024.

Have a great weekend! We’re about to get a rainstorm, and I’m getting ready to make a good-sized meatloaf and potatoes, which was basically my mother’s weekly recipe.

What’s on your reading and blogging list today?

 

 

 

 

 

Mostly Monday Reads: What to do with the Tempest in the Gold-plated Trump Pot

Posted: March 11, 2024 | Author: | Filed under: just because | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , | 4 Comments

“Now he’s going after the Grey Vote.” John Buss @repeat1968

Good Day, Sky Dancers!

It’s tough to understand why the rapist, racist, Orange Fraudster continues to be supported by anyone other than the insane right wing of this country. Trump’s speeches and social media posts are that of a madman with advanced dementia. It’s even more challenging to understand why so much of the media still can’t figure out how to report about him. This is from Stephen Robinson, who wrote in Public Notice. “The media is still selling a fantasy version of Trump. We should all know better by now.”

Yes, major news outlets, including the New York Times, are now more likely to acknowledge that Trump outright lies than simply makes “false” statements, but the press still resists definitively calling him out for the terrible and dangerous person he is. Because their baseline assumption is that Trump is erratic and malevolent, it’s not generally regarded as big news when Trump does awful things, such as mocking Biden’s speech impediment during a speech over the weekend. (Watch the footage below, though it should be mentioned that the NYT published an article noting that Trump mocked Biden’s stutter.)

Implicit in the media’s ongoing coverage of Trump is the idea that he might suddenly stop behaving like Donald Trump. Case in point was an absurd article Axios ran last week from national politics reporter Sophia Cai with the headline, “Top Trump advisers try to steer him off personal drama.” The top of the article is bad enough, as it presents Trump’s unhinged vendettas like a “Sex and the City” brunch scene, but the low point is Cai’s suggestion that Trump is “toning down” his rhetoric as he attempts to woo college-educated voters.

On what was once Twitter, the caption above Axios’s article read, “Looking to November, Trump tempers his claims about the 2020 election — a little.” (An earlier version of the tweet that didn’t hedge as much and was widely criticized was deleted — see it at top of the post.) Cai wrote, “In some recent speeches, Trump has used different terms in describing his typical complaint that the 2020 election he lost was ‘stolen’ — saying, ‘We were interrupted,’ or ‘something very bad happened.’”

These are obvious euphemisms for Trump’s ongoing election lies, but Cai’s assertion isn’t even true. He told supporters at a North Carolina rally just days before the Axios article that “what happened at that last election is a disgrace, and we’re not going to let it happen again. Did you ever notice they go after the people that want to find out where the cheating was — and, by the way, 82 percent of the country understands that it was a rigged election, OK? You can’t have a country with that.” (Surprise! Trump’s “82 percent” claim is a lie.)

I don’t have much hope for the New York Times, but maybe the Washington Post is coming around. This analysis popped up on the Memorandum feed.  “Trump’s freewheeling speeches offer a dark vision of a second term. A close examination of one appearance in Rock Hill, S.C., offers an anatomy of a signature rally by the former president.”  Three authors share the byline;  Ashley Parker, Marianne LeVine, and Ross Godwin.

A Donald Trump rally is a freewheeling extravaganza. A festival of grievance and retribution. A dystopian vision of darkness and despair. A political rock show. A bacchanalia of lies and mistruths. A pitch to voters.

Since bursting onto the presidential scene in 2015, Trump has transformed the American public’s conception of a political rally, taking the stage after hours ofeardrum-shattering decibels of a self-curated playlist and offering a spectacle that changes depending on the place, the news cycle and the former president’s mood.

On the last Friday in February, the day before the South Carolina primary, Trump took the stage in Rock Hill, S.C., where he spoke for just over an hour and a half. A close examination of his remarks that day offers an anatomy of a Trump rally speech.

Like many of his recent speeches, it was long and laden with resentments, offering a dark vision for the nation that terrifies Democrats and animates his Republican base. It touched on recurring themes, including his election denialism, his promise of a sudden transformation in another Trump term and his claims of persecution and martyrdom.

Perhaps more importantly, Trump’s stump speech provides a road map of what a second Trump term might look like — fulfilling his promises to root out the so-called “deep state” of civil servants, harshly cracking down on illegal immigration and crime, and pulling back from the world stage. It also reveals many of his weaknesses as a candidate, such as sometimes slurring his words, confusing names of world leaders and attacking minorities in offensive ways.

At times, Trump hews to a teleprompter, while at others he careens gleefully off script. He can channel both comedy and rage,charisma and revenge.

Over time, his stump speech has evolved, though certain hallmarks remain. One constantis that it is certain to contain a slew of falsehoods and mistruths, ranging from hyperbole to outright lies, like his false claim that the 2020 election was stolen.

The one specific prop at any Trump rally is the assortment of disheveled, obviously low-education, wipipo misfits behind him, with the occasional black man who is either a paid prop or seriously deluded. Well, this is South Carolina, the state of perpetual revolt. But Trump voters don’t have their wits about them, and that’s if they possess any.  I am very tired of getting way too much information on cult behavior. But seriously, how do you explain this analysis from the Washington Post’s Phillip Bump last week? “A fifth of Trump supporters think he committed a serious crime.”

Juries will — or, perhaps, may — decide whether former president Donald Trump committed serious federal crimes. He faces trial in Washington, D.C., and Florida on felony charges, and, unless he’s reelected to the presidency or cuts a deal with prosecutors, those will result in verdicts adjudicating his guilt.

Most Americans, though, already think he has committed serious federal crimes. A poll conducted by Siena College for the New York Times found that more than half of registered voters thought he’d done so. That includes more independents, nearly all Democrats and even a fifth of Republicans.

It also includes a fifth of people who say they plan to vote for him in November.

In other words, a fifth of Trump’s support in a general election rematch against President Biden thinks their preferred candidate committed a serious crime.

 

He goes on ad infinitum about the same damn things. The one thing you think he would shut up about is E. Jean Carol.  But he doesn’t, he isn’t, and he won’t. This is from CNBC. “E. Jean Carroll lawyer suggests third Trump defamation lawsuit possible after new comments.”  The story is reported by Kevin Breuninger.

Donald Trump on Monday once again denied allegations by E. Jean Carroll that he raped and defamed her, despite facing nearly $90 million in civil penalties for making similar statements about the writer.

Carroll’s attorney quickly responded that they are closely monitoring Trump’s latest remarks about her — and suggested that a third defamation lawsuit could be in store for the former president.

Trump in an interview on CNBC’s “Squawk Box” claimed that several civil court judgments against him in New York — two of them in Carroll’s favor — will cause companies to leave the state.

“People aren’t moving into New York, because of the kind of crap they’re pulling on me,” he said.

They’re “the most ridiculous decisions,” Trump said, “including the ‘Ms. Bergdorf Goodman,’ a person I’d never met.”

Carroll has said Trump raped her in a dressing room in the Bergdorf Goodman department store in Manhattan in the mid-1990s.

“I have no idea who she is, except one thing, I got sued,” he said in Monday’s interview. “From that point on I said, ‘Wow, that’s crazy, what this is.’”

“I got charged, I was given a false accusation and had to post a $91 million bond on a false accusation,” Trump added, referring to the bond he secured in recent days to guarantee a judgment in Carroll’s favor.

The interview echoed remarks Trump made about Carroll over the weekend at a campaign rally in Georgia, where the presumptive Republican presidential nominee accused her of making “false accusations.”

After the CNBC interview aired, Carroll’s lawyer Roberta Kaplan in a statement obtained by NBC News said, “The statute of limitations for defamation in most jurisdictions is between one and three years.”

“As we said after the last jury verdict, we continue to monitor every statement that Donald Trump makes about our client, E. Jean Carroll,” Kaplan said.

https://twitter.com/VABVOX/status/1767170121158590744

So, we know from the moment that Trump started down that escalator and the first words out of his mouth that Trump has no shame.  The Atlantic‘s  John Hendrickson has this to say on Trump’s second mocking of a disabled person. “Trump Finds Another Line to Cross. The former president used to exercise a modicum of restraint around Joe Biden’s stutter. No longer.”

Former president Donald Trump, perhaps threatened by President Joe Biden’s well-received State of the Union address, mocked his opponent’s lifelong stutter at a rally in Georgia yesterday. “Wasn’t it—didn’t it bring us together?” Trump asked sarcastically. He kept the bit going, slipping into a Biden caricature. “‘I’m gonna bring the country tuh-tuh-tuh-together,’” Trump said, straining and narrowing his mouth for comedic effect.

Trump has made a new habit of this. “‘He’s a threat to d-d-democracy,’” Trump said in his vaudeville Biden character at a January rally in Iowa. That jibe was also a response to a big Biden speech—one tied to the anniversary of the January 6 insurrection. (Guess who the he was in that sentence.)

More than Trump’s ugly taunt, one thing stands out to me about these moments: the sound of Trump’s supporters laughing right along with him. This is a building block of Trumpism. The man at the top gives his followers permission to be the worst version of themselves.

Those who are used to somewhat civil discourse continually feel beaten down by all this nastiness.  What is it about the Trump Cult that digs it?  Here are some strong statements from analysts in the media that are finally coming to print. This first report is from Chauncey DeVega at Salon.  He argues that the only way we defang the Trump Cut and the Fascist Christian Right is to kill the Republican Party. “The GOP can’t leave MAGA — “Americans must electorally mercy-kill the Republican Party”. An ex-MAGA activist warns “no civic savior is coming” as Donald Trump’s cognitive decline becomes undeniable.”

What if Donald Trump defeats President Biden and takes control of the White House in 2025? He has already announced his plans to become the country’s first dictator, and to launch a reign of terror and revenge against his so-called enemies. As detailed in documents such as Project 2025, Agenda 47, and elsewhere, the infrastructure is being created right now to put Trump’s neofascist plans to end multiracial pluralistic democracy in effect on “day one.” The so-called resistance will not have the courtesy of ramping up or mobilizing to stop Dictator Trump’s onslaught. It will be a “shock and awe” campaign visited upon the American people.

Dictator Trump’s reign of terror will be made even worse by the fact that as shown during recent speeches, interviews, and at other events he appears to be encountering severe difficulties in cognition, language, and memory.

In a series of recent conversations with me here at Salon, Dr. John Gartner, a prominent psychologist and contributor to the bestselling book “The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 27 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President,” has issued this warning: “Not enough people are sounding the alarm, that based on his behavior, and in my opinion, Donald Trump is dangerously demented. In fact, we are seeing the opposite among too many in the news media, the political leaders and among the public. There is also this focus on Biden’s gaffes or other things that are well within the normal limits of aging. By comparison, Trump appears to be showing gross signs of dementia. This is a tale of two brains. Biden’s brain is aging. Trump’s brain is dementing.”

If Dr. Gartner and the other medical professionals I have spoken to, both here at Salon and off the record, about Trump’s apparent mental and emotional challenges are in fact correct about how the corrupt ex-president will only get worse and not better, the American people will then be confronted by a horrible reality where Donald Trump will be both a dictator and a mad king. In total, there will be a horrific synergy between an American pathocracy and how the worst people seek political power and a leader who appears to have a diseased mind – which makes Trump easily manipulated by individuals and forces who are even more malevolent and dangerous than he is.

Philip Bump gave this analysis at WAPO today.  “The twin challenges of warnings about Trump’s support of authoritarianism.”

Donald Trump welcomed Hungarian leader Viktor Orban to his Mar-a-Lago home last week, offering unqualified praise for Orban’s strongman approach to politics.

“There’s nobody that’s better, smarter or a better leader than Viktor Orban. He’s fantastic,” Trump said during a reception Friday evening. “He does a great job. He’s a noncontroversial figure because he says, ‘This is the way it’s going to be,’ and that’s the end of it. Right? He’s the boss.”

This sort of rhetoric is exactly what President Biden and others warn about with Trump’s elevation to his party’s presidential nomination. The former president has repeatedly made obvious his support for centralized, hard-line executive power in the United States and elsewhere, something that is clearly at odds with American democracy and divided government.

Because Trump has effectively framed Biden as behaving as an autocrat to his supporters and because modern autocrats don’t necessarily look like those in the past, many Americans are likely to consider those warnings hollow.

“Starved for attention, that one.” John Buss @repeat1968,
Me: “Truck Stop Tart”

Chris Lehmann of The Nation adds this. “The MAGA Aesthetic Is Beginning to Rot. The stable of imagery associated with the far-right insurgency no longer seems as fresh as it did when Trump first donned his red cap.”  It was rotten from the beginning, but at least more of the media is pointing at it.

For headline writers and Beltway pundits, the takeaway from last week’s State of the Union address was clear: Despite ongoing speculation about President Joe Biden’s cognitive decline, he delivered a pugnacious, energetic, and policy-driven speech, which served as the unofficial debut of his 2024 reelection pitch. But beyond the forensic attention devoted to Biden’s delivery from the podium, there was another pronounced theme amid the SOTU pageantry: the corresponding enfeeblement of the MAGA aesthetic, which played such a central role in Donald Trump’s surprise election to the presidency in 2016.

The MAGA brand crisis was telegraphed most dramatically in the immediate run-up to the speech, as Biden did the traditional presidential slow-walk toward the podium, greeting assembled lawmakers along the way. Georgia GOP Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene approached Biden wearing a red MAGA hat and handed the president a badge commemorating Laken Riley, the Georgia nurse allegedly murdered by a suspect who entered the country illegally. Greene also sported a “Say Her Name” T-shirt, again in reference to Riley. When Biden espied Greene’s ensemble, he delivered an astonished double take as eloquent as any line in his speech.

Biden’s shock no doubt stemmed in part from the knowledge that such overt electioneering is illegal in the Capitol. More than that, though, it registered a broader truth: The stable of imagery associated with the right-wing Trump insurgency is showing signs of wear and tear. Where Trump-branded messaging and merchandise once had the power to upend establishment mores and expectations, they now feel like the political equivalent of a rock ensemble’s county fair tour: a purely formalist effort to satisfy the nostalgic longings of a diminishing fan base.

What was most telling about Greene’s stunt wardrobe was the date on the hat: Instead of being minted for the looming 2024 general election, it came from Trump’s 2020 reelection campaign, which—despite the lies of Trump, Greene, and other MAGA leaders— he lost decisively. And make no mistake: Greene, a perfect specimen of do-nothing right-wing congressional service, lives for these camera-ready moments of political theater. She certainly didn’t descend to the same level of sartorial carelessness back when she dressed as a Chinese spy balloon.

Amazingly, Greene’s get-up wasn’t even the most outlandish clothes-themed show of MAGA sympathies in the chamber. That honor fell to Texas Representative Troy Nehls, who wore a “Never Surrender” T-shirt featuring Trump’s mugshot and displayed a Laken Riley badge of his own on his lapel. To pull the look together, he sported an American flag bow tie. The outfit didn’t evoke a fearless mustering of Real American patriots so much as a Chippendale dancer gone to seed.

CNN’s Jim Sciutto has a new book out. Josephine Harvey at HuffPost has this to say about that. “John Kelly Shares His ‘Theory’ On Why Trump Likes Dictators So Much: New Book. The book by CNN’s Jim Sciutto also contains quotes about the former president’s reported “admiration” of Hitler.”

John Kelly, Donald Trump’s former White House chief of staff, discussed the former president’s apparent dictatorial aspirations for a new book by CNN’s Jim Sciutto.

“My theory on why he likes the dictators so much is that’s who he is,” Kelly said, according to an article published Monday about the forthcoming book by the CNN anchor and chief national security analyst.

Kelly told Sciutto, “Every incoming president is shocked that they actually have so little power without going to the Congress, which is a good thing. It’s Civics 101, separation of powers, three equal branches of government.”

“But in his case, he was shocked that he didn’t have dictatorial-type powers to send U.S. forces places or to move money around within the budget,” the quote continued. “And he looked at Putin and Xi and that nutcase in North Korea as people who were like him in terms of being a tough guy.”

Kelly was one of several former Trump administration officials who spoke to Sciutto for his book, “The Return of Great Powers,” reportedly warning that Trump is ill-prepared to lead the country in the current global climate, and that “they believe that the root of his admiration for these figures is that he envies their power.”

The book also revisits previously reported allegations that Trump praised Adolf Hitler, including Kelly’s claim that the former president lamented that his senior staff were not as loyal to him as the Nazi leader’s officers were.

“He truly believed, when he brought us generals in, that we would be loyal — that we would do anything he wanted us to do,” Kelly told Sciutto.

Sciutto writes this at CNN. “Former advisers sound the alarm that Trump praises despots in private and on the campaign trail.”  I’d like to think this might get into the thick skulls of some people but then I’ve become quite jaded over the last decade or so.

To Donald Trump, Hungarian strongman Viktor Orbán is “fantastic,” Chinese leader Xi Jinping is “brilliant,” North Korea’s Kim Jong Un is “an OK guy,” and, most alarmingly, he allegedly said Adolf Hitler “did some good things,” a worldview that would reverse decades-old US foreign policy in a second term should he win November’s presidential election, multiple former senior advisers told CNN.

“He thought Putin was an OK guy and Kim was an OK guy — that we had pushed North Korea into a corner,” retired Gen. John Kelly, who served as Trump’s chief of staff, told me. “To him, it was like we were goading these guys. ‘If we didn’t have NATO, then Putin wouldn’t be doing these things.’”

Trump’s lavish praise for Hungarian Prime Minister Orbán while hosting him at Mar-a-Lago on Friday, just days after all but sealing the Republican nomination on Super Tuesday, shows it’s a worldview he’s doubling down on.

“There’s nobody that’s better, smarter or a better leader than Viktor Orbán,” Trump said, adding, “He’s the boss and he’s a great leader, fantastic leader. In Europe and around the world, they respect him.”

The former president’s admiration for autocrats has been reported on before, but in comments by Trump recounted to me for my new book, “The Return of Great Powers,” out Tuesday, Kelly and others who served under Trump give new insight into why they warn that a man who consistently praises autocratic leaders opposed to US interests is ill-suited to lead the country in the Great Power clashes that could be coming, telling me they believe that the root of his admiration for these figures is that he envies their power.

“He views himself as a big guy,” John Bolton, who served as national security adviser under Trump, told me. “He likes dealing with other big guys, and big guys like Erdogan in Turkey get to put people in jail and you don’t have to ask anybody’s permission. He kind of likes that.”

“He’s not a tough guy by any means, but in fact quite the opposite,” Kelly said. “But that’s how he envisions himself.”

I just hope it’s not too late but it feels less toothy now then it would’ve had they done something when he was still in office.  So this is my first post on my new PC and I’ve advanced to the bigger screen, bigger key board part of aging.  It feels great!  Now, I just gotta pay for it.

What’s on your reading and blogging list today?

Finally Friday Reads: Grandpa Joe kicks Maga Ass

Posted: March 8, 2024 | Author: | Filed under: just because | Tags: , , , , , , , | 4 Comments

“You could tell The State of the Union is great just by watching Little Modern Day Moses Mike Johnson last night.” John Buss, @repeat1968

Good Day, Sky Dancers!

I’m getting started late today because I had a dentist appointment. Also, I’m evidently Low-energy Kat. I fell asleep during the 45 minutes of people shuffling into the House last night for the State of the Union. I’m watching the live-action now with no sportzpols calling the horse race. The only editorial commentary I see is the face of Ayatollah Mike Johnson. As you can tell from the featured funny today by John Buss (@repeat1968), Johnson’s discomfort was notable. It’s also a headline in the media like this one for The New Republic. “Forget Biden’s SOTU Performance, and Focus on Tiny, Weak Mike Johnson. The House speaker lived down to the moment at the State of the Union on Thursday night.” The analysis is provided by Michael Tomasky.

Joe Biden more than made it through Thursday night’s State of the Union address. That moment that his supporters always fear—the major brain fart, the confusing of Nikki Haley with Nancy Pelosi (oh wait, that was someone else)—never came. Not only did it not come, but most of the energy was dramatically positive. As is the morning-after conventional wisdom. Politico’s Playbook called it the “turn-the-tables SOTU,” reporting that the Biden campaign’s best two hours of fundraising in this cycle were from 9 to 11 p.m. last night. A CNN flash poll found that 62 percent thought the policies Biden laid out would move the country in the right direction.

He had his stumbles, and that Laken Riley moment was pretty cringey. But mostly he threw punches—and he landed almost all of them. As TNR’s Osita Nwanevu wrote: “That overall impression—of a vigorous president, strong enough to take the fight to his detractors⁠—will linger more deeply in the minds of most who watched than the substance of anything he said.”

But let’s not talk about Biden. Let’s talk instead about that little guy in the chair over the president’s left shoulder. House Speaker Mike Johnson showed, in his histrionic facial expressions, everything that’s wrong and idiotic and dangerous and even treasonous about the Republican Party.Johnson was ridiculous. He was small. Granted it’s not always easy for an opposition party leader to figure out how to comport him or herself during a State of the Union. The camera is on you for an hour or more, yet you can’t speak. You’re not going to join in on the frequent applauses, except rarely. Johnson did applaud Biden’s call for aid to Ukraine early in the speech, which he does seem to support personally, even though he’s too afraid of his wingnut caucus to allow a straight-up vote and thus may go down in history as the one person more than any other who handed Vladimir Putin the keys to Kyiv. So you sit there awkwardly.

Johnson decided that the State of the Union was the right time to mug for the camera. And he laid it on like a silent-movie actor, so thick that you could practically see the girl tied on the railroad tracks and hear the piano music. He nodded and nodded—you know, that solemn, “more in anger than in sorrow” nod. And those eye rolls! He rolled his eyes more than a teenage girl listening to her father’s jokes (that’s an eye roll I know rather well).

Joe became more animated and articulated as he moved into the ‘vision thing.’ His speech was powerful and inspirational, clearly describing what he considered ‘American Values’. He called them his “North Star.” He sliced and diced ‘his predecessor.’ He ends with a plan and optimism. This one may be one for the history books, which is a ‘big fucking deal’ considering his primary reference to the State of the Union speech given by FDR in 1941. He took the opportunity to blast Putin as the enemy abroad and his predecessor and his cult in Congress as the enemy within. His speech is getting great reviews.

The speech that is not getting rave reviews is the Republican Response. This one is getting grilled more than the Jindal rebuttal. This is the headline from Newsweek. “Republican Katie Britt Ruthlessly Mocked for SOTU Response.” Ouch. Social media has dubbed her the poster child for The Handmaid’s Tale.

Alabama Senator Katie Britt on Thursday faced widespread backlash after delivering the Republican Party’s response to President Joe Biden‘s State of the Union address.

Many users on X, formerly Twitter, described Britt’s recorded response as “creepy” and “overly dramatic.”

The speech even received criticism from prominent conservatives like Michael Steele, former chair of the Republican National Convention, who posted on X: “Well, that Katie Britt experience was … experiential.”

Others felt her delivery was reminiscent of The Handmaid’s Tale, a television show based on a famous novel that centers on a dystopian society where women are treated cruelly. Multiple people said Britt was overacting in a way that was almost humorous and compared her rebuttal to a Saturday Night Live sketch.

Newsweek reached out to a representative for Britt on early Friday morning via email for comment.

This is from Monica Hesse, who is writing for the Washington Post. “A lot of moms can’t see themselves in Katie Britt’s kitchen. The Alabama senator’s performance seemed aimed at suburban women whom Republicans have done little to win back.” I once was a Republican suburban mom. It definitely insulted the intelligence of every woman I know. I’m pretty sure only the creepy white christian evangelical women remotely identified with this. They’ve already got that niche, so I don’t expect this will get them more votes for the racist, rapist, twice-impeached fraudster.

Before Sen. Katie Boyd Britt (R-Ala.) had even begun her State of the Union rebuttal on Thursday night, an ally reportedly had already sent around a helpful list of talking points that conservative pundits could use to describe her — again, as-yet undelivered — speech. They should make comparisons to Ronald Reagan, according to the New York Times, which reported the memo. They should say that Britt came across as “America’s mom.”

When Britt did appear, it became clear she’d gone balls-to-the-wall with the mom theme, broadcasting solo from her Alabama kitchen in such a way that, if you were watching with the volume down, you would have assumed you had stumbled upon a commercial for either stain remover or Il Makiage. Turn the volume up and there was Britt opening by saying that her proudest role was being a “wife and mother,” before segueing into describing a violent gang rape, before calling Biden “dithering and diminished,” and explaining that we were all “steeped in the blood of patriots,” which, ladies — if that’s a menstruation euphemism, I hadn’t heard it before. Somehow she wrapped up by talking about how America put a man on the moon.

It’s not hard to imagine why Republicans chose Britt to deliver their rebuttal. At 81, Biden’s greatest liability is his age. Britt, at 42, is the youngest woman ever elected to the Senate, with school-aged kids at home.

Was she effective? Hard to say. Somehow, despite also being a White 42-year-old mom who watched the State of the Union from my own kitchen, I did not feel I was her target audience.

This is the third State of the Union for which Republicans have chosen a woman to deliver the response (last year was Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the year before was Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds). Clearly, someone in charge is trying to sell the GOP as the party for women, and specifically, for moms.

The trouble is that they are trying to sell it that way once a year, via a televised State of the Union rebuttal, rather than by selling it via policies and legislation. So much of the rest of the night revealed a contrast between what Britt’s party had done for women, and how women and mothers were actually living their lives.

Let’s just say I’d have quite the babysitter coop in my neighborhood had this woman been on the list. No way I’d let her near my girls. I’d also be worried about her husband, her pastor, and her church’s youth minister. The review news is much better for Biden. This is from Dan Pfiefrer. “The Smart Political Strategy Behind Biden’s Big Speech. The President gave a pugilistic speech and took direct aim at Trump.”

Last night was a very good night for Joe Biden. The President delivered a vigorous, pugilistic speech with the highest possible stakes for his presidency. He was strong and in command. Most importantly, he made his best case yet for reelection.

The President never mentioned Donald Trump’s name, but the speech was written — and delivered — with the disgraced former President in mind. He swung at Trump several times throughout the speech, hitting him for inviting Russia to invade a NATO country, for the Big Lie, demonizing immigrants, and more.

This certainly didn’t escape Trump’s notice since he began the day with a bizarre rebuttal and then uncorked a series of unhinged “Truths.”

The speech hit all the right notes. Biden touted his accomplishments, criticized Congressional Republicans for failing to pass bipartisan bills to secure our border and support Ukraine’s border security, and called for laws to protect our freedoms by codifying Roe v. Wade and access to IVF.

The press and partisans cheered his tone and delivery. Democrats were excited, and Republicans were mad, but Biden’s energy on the dais is only part of the story.

Unlike my Pod Save America co-hosts, I was never a speechwriter. I don’t watch these speeches regarding rhetoric, writing, and history. I take a much more pedantic — and hackier — approach. I watched to discover how Biden and his team saw the forthcoming campaign against Trump, their strategy, and whether they executed it.

This was a very political speech, and that’s a good thing. The President sought out conflict with his opponent and his opponent’s party. Also good. Biden recognizes how to wage information warfare in 2024.

Read the point-by-point analysis at the link. Axios has the walk-in moment where Biden spotted Marjorie Taylor Greene, proving that she is an insurrectionist. “Watch: Biden comes face to face with MTG at State of the Union.” The troll named Shriek was doing her performance art schtick again. This is by Zachary Basu.

President Biden came face to face with one of his most outspoken critics — Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) — as he shook hands with members of Congress ahead of his State of the Union address.

The latest: After the brief confrontation, Greene heckled Biden during his speech — demanding that he recognize the alleged murder of Georgia nursing student Laken Riley by an undocumented immigrant last month.

  • In a remarkable moment, Biden responded to the outburst by holding up the “Say Her Name” pin Greene had handed him during his entrance — and appealing to Republicans to pass the bipartisan border security deal.

“Laken Riley, an innocent young woman who was killed by an illegal,” Biden said, going off script. “To her parents, I say my heart goes out to you.”

Catch up quick: Greene, a fierce ally of former President Trump, broke convention by donning a MAGA hat to greet Biden as he walked into the chamber for his address.

  • “Say her name,” Greene urged Biden, who appeared to stop and listen.
  • Earlier Thursday, the House passed the Laken Riley Act requiring the detention of any migrant who commits burglary or theft. 37 House Democrats joined all Republicans in voting for the legislation.

The big picture: Biden has sought to turn the border crisis — his top political vulnerability — into a potent campaign weapon, after Trump pressured Republicans to derail one of the most significant border security bills in decades.

  • “If my predecessor is watching — instead of playing politics and pressuring members of Congress to block this bill, join me in telling Congress to pass it,” Biden said in his speech.
  • “We can do it together.”

All I can say is I’m glad she’s never taken a class from me. She’s a teacher’s worst nightmare.

So, one more thing. Today is International Women’s Day! Do you know where your rights are?

Check out The Guardian for some great pictures. I love the cover with women doing a sunrise dip in the North Sea. The bravery of Scottish women is legendary.

So, Happy Women’s Day. Get out there and vote like a woman after her reproductive rights!!!!

What’s on your reading and blogging list today?

Not the old school I am Woman. This is from 2022, and Meli writes some great lyrics.

I am woman, I am fearless
I am sexy, I’m divine
I’m unbeatable, I’m creative
Honey, you can get in line
I am feminine, I am masculine
I am anything I want
I can teach you, I can love you
If you got it goin’ on
If you got it, got it, got it, got it, got it, got it
If you got it, got it, got it, got it, got it goin’ on
Got it, got it, got it, got it, got it, got it
If you got it, got it, got it, got it, got it goin’ on
Got it on goin’ on, yeah
(Got it, got it, got it, got it, got it goin’ on)
(Got it, got it, got it, got it, got it goin’ on)
I am classy, I am modern, I live by my own design
I’m cherry, I’m lemon, I’m the sweetest key lime pie
I’m electric, I’m bass, I’m the beat of my own drum
I could make your goosebumps raise with the tracing of my thumb
Only love can get inside me
I move in my own timing
Voice of the future, speak to me kindly
I feel what I want and somehow it find me
Somehow it find me
Somehow it find me
Yeah, hey, hey
I am woman, I am fearless
I am sexy, I’m divine
I’m unbeatable, I’m creative
Honey, you can get in line
I am feminine, I am masculine
I am anything I want
I can teach you, I can love you
If you got it goin’ on
If you got it, got it, got it, got it, got it, got it
If you got it, got it, got it, got it, got it goin’ on
Got it, got it, got it, got it, got it, got it
If you got it, got it, got it, got it, got it goin’ on
Got it goin’ on, yeah
(Got it, got it, got it, got it, got it goin’ on)
(Got it, got it, got it, got it, got it goin’ on, yeah, yeah)
Hear no evil, speak no evil
I am not the one to cross
They can talk that shit about you
Long as you know that it’s false
I am earthly, I am heaven
I am what I like to be
When I ask for what I want
Somehow it find me
Somehow it find me
(Hey, hey)
I am woman, I am fearless
I am sexy, I’m divine
I’m unbeatable, I’m creative
Honey, you can get in line
I am feminine, I am masculine
I am anything I want
I can teach you, I can love you
If you got it goin’ on
If you got it, got it, got it, got it
Got it, got it, got it goin’ on
Got it goin’ on
Got it goin’ on
Got it goin’ on

Monday Reads: Broken Institutions Edition

Posted: March 4, 2024 | Author: | Filed under: just because | Tags: , , | 9 Comments

Good Day, Sky Dancers!

The big news is that after taking its sweet time, the Supreme Court unanimously decided that states cannot remove Trump from their ballots even though they may have their own version of the 14th Amendment. “Supreme Court keeps Trump on ballot, rejects Colorado voter challenge. While the decision was unanimous, the liberal justices wrote a sharp concurrence that accused the conservative majority of going further than needed.” This is from the Washington Post and reported by Ann E. Marimow.

The Supreme Court on Monday unanimously sided with Donald Trump, allowing the former president to remain on the election ballot and reversing a Colorado ruling that disqualified him from returning to office because of his conduct around the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.

The justices said the Constitution does not permit a single state to disqualify a presidential candidate from national office, declaring that such responsibility “rests with Congress and not the states.” The court warned of disruption and chaos if a candidate for nationwide office could be declared ineligible in some states, but not others, based on the same conduct.

“Nothing in the Constitution requires that we endure such chaos — arriving at any time or different times, up to and perhaps beyond the inauguration,” the court said in an unsigned, 13-page opinion.

While the decision was unanimous, the court’s three liberal justices also wrote separately, saying the conservative majority went further than necessary in the ruling and decided an issue that was not before the court in an attempt to insulate itself and Trump from “future controversy.”

The court’s decision to keep Trump on the ballot leaves him as the leading candidate for the Republican nomination and for now removes the Supreme Court from directly determining the path of the 2024 presidential election. The justices fast-tracked the challenge from voters in Colorado and issued their decision one day before Super Tuesday, when that state and more than a dozen others hold nominating contests. The ruling applies to other states with similar challenges to Trump’s candidacy.

In a sign of the high court’s awareness of the election calendar, the justices took the unusual step of announcing the opinion on the Supreme Court’s website on a day when the court is not in session, instead of issuing it from the bench later this month.

I think the high court’s awareness was more based on the intense criticism they are getting right now for slowing down the process of getting Trump into the Federal Court to face charges.  Maybe this is a sign of hope that we’ll hear their take on “Presidential Immunity.” Plus, Clarence Thomas is facing denunciation for his absolute refusal to recuse himself from participating in cases where he has apparent conflicts of interest. Liz Dye at Public Interest makes it even more pronounced. “The Supreme Court saves Trump’s bacon.”

The Supreme Court sparked general outrage last week when it agreed to hear Donald Trump’s claim of absolute presidential immunity in his election interference case, with commentators predicting the end of democracy as we know it if the Court rules that a president is immune for crimes committed while in office.

Histrionics serve no one, however, and so it bears speaking plainly: The Supreme Court is not going to find that Donald Trump is immune from prosecution for crimes committed in office. That’s ridiculous.

But the Court’s right-wing majority is going to run exactly the same playbook they did in 2020, when they gifted the then-president almost two years of delay in turning over his financial documents to prosecutors in New York and investigators in Congress. By the time Trump wound up having to comply, he was already out of office.

This time, the consequences of delay will be even more profound. Thanks to the Supreme Court, Trump will now be able to stand for election again without facing trial for his attempts to overturn the last one.

The Supreme Court has joined the House of Representatives in becoming a dysfunctional, political, conflicted institution. The Washington Diplomat had this blunt headline last month. “US political dysfunction a threat to world stability: report.”  We can no longer be trusted to behave like a developed, functioning democracy.  This loss cannot be overstated in historical terms or ramifications. They refer to the US as the world’s most “dysfunctional advanced democracy.”

Many in the United States look beyond their borders and see a dangerous world with raging wars, surging violence and deepening instability.

But a new report by the Eurasia Group, a leading political risk firm, suggests that Americans would be well advised to look in the mirror and recognize that political dysfunction and threats of violence in the United States are frightening people around the world and constitute a serious threat to international stability.

“Fully one-third of the global population will go to the polls this year, but an unprecedentedly dysfunctional U.S. election will be by far the most consequential for the world’s security, stability, and economic outlook,” the Top Risks 2024 report argues.

“The outcome will affect the fate of 8 billion people, and only 160 million Americans will have a say in it, with the winner to be decided by just tens of thousands of voters in a handful of swing states… The world’s most powerful country faces critical challenges to its core political institutions: free and fair elections, the peaceful transfer of power, and the checks and balances provided by the separation of powers.”

The Eurasia Group, which was created in 1998 by political scientist and entrepreneur Ian Bremmer, analyzes global affairs through the prism of political developments and risks. Bremmer, the president of the Eurasia Group, and Cliff Kupchan, its chairman, are the authors of this year’s report, which outlines the 10 top risks the world faces. The report also discusses several issues that are less serious than they appear.

“Three wars will dominate world affairs: Russia vs. Ukraine, now in its third year; Israel vs. Hamas, now in its third month; and the United States vs. itself, ready to kick off at any moment,” the report says.

Political polarization and social disarray in the United States are seen in the report as the most serious global risk. It predicts that this year’s presidential election “will worsen the country’s political division, testing American democracy to a degree the nation hasn’t experienced in 150 years and undermining U.S. credibility on the global stage.”

“Undecided” November 4, 1944. Man in voting booth w/newspaper. by Norman Rockwell

In a June 2023 article at The Atlantic, Peter Turchin writes “America Is Headed Toward Collapse. History suggests how to stave it off.”

How has America slid into its current age of discord? Why has our trust in institutions collapsed, and why have our democratic norms unraveled?

All human societies experience recurrent waves of political crisis, such as the one we face today. My research team built a database of hundreds of societies across 10,000 yearsto try to find out what causes them. We examined dozens of variables, including population numbers, measures of well-being, forms of governance, and the frequency with which rulers are overthrown. We found that the precise mix of events that leads to crisis varies, but two drivers of instability loom large. The first is popular immiseration—when the economic fortunes of broad swaths of a population decline. The second, and more significant, is elite overproduction—when a society produces too many superrich and ultra-educated people, and not enough elite positions to satisfy their ambitions.

This is a long read but worth your time.  Several events point to the shift in power due to our dysfunctional federal institutions.  NATO is just one of the institutions that a return of Trump will endanger. This is from The Guardian.  “Norway, Sweden, and Finland host NATO military exercises. Nordic Response aims to strengthen cooperation between countries and bolster alliance’s ability to defend region.”

Trump complains that NATO nations are slackers.  The Europeans more than understand the current threat from Putin’s Russia.  NATO must stand united with its most significant military defender of democracy in place for the continent to be safe.  Miranda Bryant reports on the event.

A first-of-its-kind training exercise involving more than 20,000 soldiers from 13 countries has launched across northern Norway, Sweden and Finland as the region prepares to become a fully Nato territory within days.

The joint defence exercise, which runs until 14 March, was previously known as Cold Response and held in northern Norway, a founding Nato member, every other year. In recognition of Finland’s recent membership of the western military alliance, and with Sweden expected to join imminently, this year it is being designated Nordic Response for the first time.

The training exercise across air, land and sea – which will also include soldiers from the UK, US, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, the Netherlands, Belgium and Canada – will incorporate a cross-border operations exercise in the Arctic Circle.

The Norwegian military said the exercise was intended to demonstrate “a unique level of cooperation and interoperability as they cross borders on land, sea and air”.

Nordic Response is part of an ongoing series of Nato exercises, Steadfast Defender, involving 90,000 soldiers. It is also closely aligned with the UK-led naval exercise Joint Warrior, which ran between Scotland, Norway and Iceland last week.

The latest exercise, which started on Sunday, will involve more than 50 submarines, frigates, corvettes, aircraft carriers and amphibious vessels at sea, over 100 combat, maritime surveillance and transport aircraft, and thousands of soldiers on the ground using artillery systems, tanks and tracked vehicles.

Most of the activity will be centred on northern Troms county and the west of Finnmark county in Norway, but there will also be maritime activity along the coast of the north of the country and exercises across borders in northern Finland and Sweden.

The newly elected Finnish president, Alexander Stubb, the Norwegian prime minister, Jonas Gahr Støre, and the Swedish crown princess Victoria are all scheduled to visit.

November 1940, illustrated by Dorothea Cooke.

There are many headlines today about how Trump is more trusted than Biden and rated as better at handling all kinds of things, including the economy.  Then there’s the Biden is ‘too old’ headlines (”Biden’s mental acuity is doubted by 6 in 10 Americans, AP-NORC survey finds” via the AP) concurrent with headlines like this one from The Independent. Trump crowd goes silent as he confuses Biden and Obama again.” 

They’re both too damn old, frankly  Plus, some wonderful people aren’t stale old white men out there. But please, Biden is sane and moral. Trump has the worst personality disorders possible and definitely has dementia.  Plus, Trump cheats at everything and lies about it!  Here’s the latest on the Trump Team’s campaign of deceit. And yes, it’s yet another headline from across the pond. They are old buddies, the Brits. The BBC reports that “Trump supporters target black voters with faked AI images.”  This is on top of Russia outwardly influencing Republican Congress members! 

Donald Trump supporters have been creating and sharing AI-generated fake images of black voters to encourage African Americans to vote Republican.

BBC Panorama discovered dozens of deepfakes portraying black people as supporting the former president.

Mr Trump has openly courted black voters, who were key to Joe Biden’s election win in 2020.

But there’s no evidence directly linking these images to Mr Trump’s campaign.

The co-founder of Black Voters Matter, a group which encourages black people to vote, said the manipulated images were pushing a “strategic narrative” designed to show Mr Trump as popular in the black community.

A creator of one of the images told the BBC: “I’m not claiming it’s accurate.”

The fake images of black Trump supporters, generated by artificial intelligence (AI), are one of the emerging disinformation trends ahead of the US presidential election in November.

Unlike in 2016, when there was evidence of foreign influence campaigns, the AI-generated images found by the BBC appear to have been made and shared by US voters themselves.

One of them was Mark Kaye and his team at a conservative radio show in Florida.

They created an image of Mr Trump smiling with his arms around a group of black women at a party and shared it on Facebook, where Mr Kaye has more than one million followers.

This is Trump speaking on the SCOTUS decision and using the occasion to attack Special Prosecutor Jack Smith and all the Judges still holding him to account.

How do people not see this man’s severe Personality Disorders?  I will end here with a political analysis from the Washington Post by Philip Bump.  “The institutions of government aren’t going to protect democracy.” This is why it is up to ‘We the People’ to fucking VOTE!  If I can hold my nose to vote for Biden twice, you certainly can, too!

The effort to reframe Trump’s actions as understandable, if not acceptable, has been broadly successful. It is not only the case that most Republicans think that Biden’s election was illegitimate, it is also the case that traditional media outlets have at times treated as controversial not the question of whether Trump met the unclear standard of “insurrection” but even whether he tried to subvert the election results. Other Republicans have internalized the idea that the way in which Trump responded to his loss was within the bounds of acceptability — not only by petulantly refusing to concede defeat but by treating the relentless, norm- and law-bending effort to wring victory from defeat as part of the process of winning power.

Because there has been no accountability for Trump.

On Monday morning, the Supreme Court offered its assessment of a state Supreme Court decision in Colorado barring Trump from the ballot. Unsurprisingly — given the ideological constitution of the court — it declined to endorse the idea that Trump was ineligible to hold the presidency. But the decision was unanimous.

“Responsibility for enforcing Section 3 against federal officeholders and candidates rests with Congress and not the States,” the decision read. “The judgment of the Colorado Supreme Court therefore cannot stand. All nine Members of the Court agree with that result.”

Justice Amy Coney Barrett emphasized that latter point again in a concurrence.

“All nine Justices agree on the outcome of this case,” the Trump appointee wrote. “That is the message Americans should take home.”

But several liberal members of the court added some nuance, arguing that the conservative majority also decided “novel constitutional questions to insulate this Court and petitioner” — that is, Trump — “from future controversy.”

“Today, the majority goes beyond the necessities of this case to limit how Section 3 can bar an oathbreaking insurrectionist from becoming President,” Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson write. “Although we agree that Colorado cannot enforce Section 3, we protest the majority’s effort to use this case to define the limits of federal enforcement of that provision.”

The superficial agreement on the decision erodes in the details, which isn’t uncommon. The result, though, is that the institution of the Supreme Court has decided that the institution of Congress is the only element of the American system that can apply the 14th Amendment to a candidate. And Congress, very obviously, won’t do so for Trump.

One would assume that a democratic system predicated on checks and balances would have some process in place to enforce punitive measures when democracy itself was threatened or undermined, but it does not. It has decisions from motivated actors, enough of whom agree politically or ideologically with Trump that his specific actions are waved away. Instead of a defense of democracy, we are repeatedly asked to believe that anything short of Trump retaining power doesn’t count as a substantive challenge to democracy and, therefore, that his participation in the democratic process should be defended.

Had he retained power after Jan. 20, 2021? Then, perhaps, his efforts to do so would have been considered a legitimate threat. And by then, the system that we would assume might hold him to account would already be destroyed.

What’s on your reading and blogging list today?

Finally, Friday Reads: Justice Delayed is Justice Denied

Posted: March 1, 2024 | Author: | Filed under: just because | Tags: , , , , , , | 3 Comments

Good Day, Sky Dancers!

It’s been a week! At least New York State is going after #DeadbeatDon and his millions of dollars owed. However, the Trump Syndicate’s stall tactics are making it more unlikely we will see any kind of federal trial before the election season in the stolen documents or insurrection trials. The weirdest news on all the Trump trials is today’s headline about the Georgia Courts having a hacker ransom on the Election Interference Case. This headline is from Business Insider. “Hackers threaten to release Trump documents from Georgia case if they don’t get a ransom by Thursday.” This looks like there is likely more interference from Russia with Trump Chaos Love. Jacob Shamsian reports on what details we have at the moment.

The hacking group responsible for taking down Fulton County’s websites in Georgia is threatening to publish documents from the state’s court system — including ones related to the criminal case against Donald Trump — unless it gets paid a ransom.

In a message posted online Saturday, in both English and Russian, the hacking group called LockBit said the stolen documents “contain a lot of interesting things and Donald Trump’s court cases that could affect the upcoming US election.”

Initially, LockBit set a Saturday, March 2, deadline for the payment, according to the cybersecurity reporter Brian Krebs.

It has since moved up that deadline to 8:49 a.m. ET on Thursday, February 29, LockBit’s restored website shows.

It’s not clear how much money the group is demanding. The hacking group’s demands are often negotiated in private, Dan Schiappa, the chief product officer at the cybersecurity firm Arctic Wolf, said.

The group — led by a hacker using the pseudonym LockBitSupp — appeared to become operational again over the weekend after a February 20 law-enforcement raid. A group of agencies, including the FBI and the United Kingdom’s National Crime Agency, took down 34 of its servers and changed its website to a series of messages bragging about the law-enforcement operation. The same day, the US Department of Justice unsealed an indictment accusing two Russian nationals of being involved in the group’s hacking operations.

By Saturday, LockBit was back.

On a new website, the group posted a message claiming it had backup copies of documents taken from the Fulton County government’s website. It also renewed its ransom demands.

The post claimed that the FBI acted quickly because the leak of documents in Trump’s criminal case could affect the 2024 presidential election — although court documents show that the FBI’s investigation into LockBit and coordination with international law-enforcement agencies has been ongoing for years. It characterized LockBit’s relationship with the FBI as a sort of romantic rivalry and promised that the group would hack more government websites in the future.

“Personally I will vote for Trump because the situation on the border with Mexico is some kind of nightmare, Biden should retire, he is a puppet,” the message said.

Joyce Vance provided this depressing analysis on her Substack Civil Discourse. “We’re Going To Need More Coffee.”

The legal landscape in three of the four criminal cases against Trump continues to shift in his favor this week, following the Supreme Court’s decision to hear the presidential immunity appeal in the D.C. election interference case, creating at least a two-month delay for Trump. Today, requests for trial dates emerged in the Mar-a-Lago case, giving rise to concerns that the scheduling Trump requested, if adopted by Judge Aileen Cannon, would effectively block the D.C. case from going to trial before the election, even if the Supreme Court rules against Trump.

That’s only one of the important things that happened today. E. Jean Carroll filed a stinging response to Donald Trump’s efforts to get out of filing an appeal bond, pointing out that his appeal to the court to trust him was worth about as much as a promise to pay up written on a paper napkin. A transcript released of Hunter Biden’s testimony on the Hill yesterday shows him sparring with Matt Gaetz, suggesting that Gaetz wasn’t the right person to lay into Biden about drug use. A federal judge in Texas halted enforcement of a new state law that would allow Texas police to arrest people suspected of illegally crossing the border because immigration enforcement is the job of the federal government under the Constitution’s Supremacy Clause. In other words, it wasn’t exactly a slow news day. But we’ll focus tonight on the scheduling issues in the Mar-a-Lago case.

Today, Donald Trump, “on behalf of all of the defendants,” filed a proposed schedule for the Mar-a-Lago case. He led with the claim that, “As the leading candidate in the 2024 election, President Trump strongly asserts that a fair trial cannot be conducted this year in a manner consistent with the Constitution, which affords President Trump a Sixth Amendment right to be present and to participate in these proceedings as well as, inter alia, a First Amendment right that he shares with the American people to engage in campaign speech.”

But his lawyers note that since the Judge wants them to propose a trial schedule, they will, although it’s clear that their real request is for a trial after the election. Trump and his co-defendant Carlos De Oliveira propose an August 12 trial date, which means jury selection will start that day, and trial commences after the jury has been seated. Interestingly, their co-defendant Walt Nauta doesn’t want the trial to start until September 9. This is likely because his trial counsel is unavailable between August 5 and August 23, 2024, for “personal reasons.” It’s not unheard of for a judge to direct lawyers to change their vacation plans, if that’s what’s going on here. But if the government wants to try all defendants together and the Judge doesn’t intervene, then this is really a request for trial to start September 9 at best but really, never.

The government’s counterproposal, also filed today, was for a July 8 start. That seems to suggest that Jack Smith believes the Supreme Court won’t be sending the D.C. case back to Judge Chutkan in time for a trial in July or perhaps even in August.

Former Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull was interviewed Thursday afternoon by MSNBC’s Nicolle Wallace on her first week back from 3 months of maternity leave. This wasn’t the only interview she had that shows the world and the nation’s lawyers are worried about Trump’s return to the White House. Some scariest thoughts came from Conservative Judge J. Michael Luttig, a former Judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit.

 

Former Wyoming Congresswoman Liz Cheney had this to say at The New Republic. As reported by Greg Sargent. “Liz Cheney Nukes the Supreme Court Over Trump Delay—and Hands Dems a Weapon. What percentage of voters know that Trump can cancel prosecutions of himself if he wins back the White House?”

In the wake of the Supreme Court agreeing to hear Donald Trump’s demand for absolute immunity from prosecution—potentially delaying his insurrection-related trial until after the election—Democrats should take careful note of Liz Cheney’s response to the decision:

The court’s decision is terrible news, to be sure, but it gives Democrats an opportunity to clarify a few crucial points, and they should seize it.

First, Democrats should stress that voters need to know before the election whether Trump committed crimes—and this is due to them as a matter of right. Second, Trump is seeking these delays to end all prosecutions of himself if he regains the White House—to corruptly place himself above the law by pardoning himself or having his handpicked lickspittle attorney general do it. Democrats must say clearly that if the court helps delay the trial until after the election, it will be enabling him to do that.

As many have noted, the Supreme Court didn’t have to agree to review an appeals court ruling against Trump, who is demanding immunity from prosecution for conspiring to obstruct the official electoral count and defraud the United States, among other charges. The high court could have simply let the lower court ruling stand, given that Republican-appointed and Democratic-appointed judges unanimously ruled that Trump’s efforts to overturn the election don’t constitute official acts—and thus don’t get immunity—a clear-cut legal case.

“This is not a difficult legal question,” Maryland Representative Jamie Raskin, a constitutional law professor, told me. “All the Supreme Court has done is to introduce several months of gratuitous delay right before the presidential election.”

Speculation is rampant about that “gratuitous delay.” I don’t care much for Nikki Haley and her endless head fakes, but I agree. This is from NBC News. “Nikki Haley calls for all Trump legal cases to be ‘dealt with’ before November. The Republican presidential candidate’s comments came in an interview with NBC News’ “Meet the Press” moderator Kristen Welker in Virginia. I’m not a big fan of Kristen Welker, but at least there was a discussion.

Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley said that all of former President Donald Trump‘s legal cases should be “dealt with” before the presidential election.

“I think all of the cases should be dealt with before November,” she said Thursday in an interview with NBC News’ “Meet the Press” moderator Kristen Welker in Falls Church, Virginia, where voters will cast their primary ballots Tuesday.

“We need to know what’s going to happen before it, before the presidency happens, because after that, should he become president, I don’t think any of it’s going to get heard,” she continued.

Haley spoke a day after the Supreme Court agreed to decide whether Trump could claim presidential immunity in response to criminal charges. It could take months for the high court to reach a decision, pushing back the potential timeline for his election interference trial.

“I just think a president has to live according to the laws, too. You don’t get complete immunity,” she said, addressing the Supreme Court’s decision to take the case. She added that presidents should not get “free rein to do whatever they want to do.”

This headline from The Rolling Stone says it all. “Trump’s Team’ Literally Popping Champagne’ Over Supreme Court Taking Up Immunity Claim. The former president is unlikely to stand trial in the Justice Department’s election interference case before November.”

Various Trump advisers and sources close to the former president and 2024 GOP frontrunner were jubilant about the Supreme Court’s decision, with all of them now viewing it as highly unlikely that a federal election interference trial will happen before Election Day. Though a Trump criminal trial in New York is expected to begin next month, the former president’s team had long viewed a Jan. 6-related trial as more politically damaging. For months, Trump’s lawyers expected the federal trial to start this summer, and they have actively prepared for that scenario. Now, they likely don’t have to worry about that timeline.

The Trump 2024 campaign was fundraising off the court’s latest move hours after it happened. “BREAKING FROM TRUMP: My case is going to the SUPREME COURT!” the campaign texted supporters. “Presidents NEED IMMUNITY.” (This is, however, a position that Trump doesn’t actually hold when it comes to President Joe Biden, who he wants prosecuted.)

Trump has long been campaigning on the idea that presidents, particularly himself, should have free rein to commit crimes while in office — including crimes that “cross the line,” as he wrote on Truth Social in January.

Yes, Trump is doing his usual KKK rally speech wherever he goes. This time, it was at the US/Mexico border. This is from Raw Story. “‘Visible cringe’: Serviceman scowls amid Trump rant on ‘people who don’t speak languages.'” We all know the answer to the question: does Trump have no decency. Nope! None at all! This is reported by Kathleen Culliton.

Trump’s visit to Eagle Pass, Texas, was capped with a press conference to discuss U.S. border patrol policies likely to be at the heart of the 2024 presidential campaign.

“Nobody can explain to me how allowing millions of people from places unknown, from countries unknown, who don’t speak languages,” Trump said in a fragment sentence. “They’re truly foreign languages — nobody speaks them.”

Meanwhile, Chris Hayes had this to say on Threads.

I feel like I’m losing my mind, but it’s…pretty wild for SCOTUS to just not have issued an opinion on the Colorado ballot case with the actual voting happening on Tuesday. I know the Colorado Supreme Court decision is stayed and he’s on the ballot. And we all know they’re gonna find a way to over rule the CO SC but still seems like you should issue the opinion before the voting in question actually happens.

Colorado votes on March 5th.   I really feel that we’ve already lost our democracy in so many ways that something significant needs to be done NOW. At least the Democratic Majority in the Senate is trying to legislate. Today,  Senators Durbin, Warnock, Schumer, Booker, Blumenthal, and Butler reintroduce the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. This bill would update and restore critical safeguards of the original Voting Rights Act. Another necessary action to Stop the Runaway Supreme Court. Don’t even get me started on all this hoopla on the border when Ayatollah Mike is blocking a bi-partisan bill led by a Conservative Republican Senator that would pass. This is from the Brookings Institute. William A Galston writes, “The collapse of bipartisan immigration reform: A guide for the perplexed.

Last October, Senate Republicans made it clear that they would not back additional aid for Ukraine without a bill that would help secure the southern border of the United States. With the blessing of both Senator Chuck Schumer, the Majority Leader, and Senator Mitch McConnell, the Minority Leader, a bipartisan team of senators began negotiations to produce a bill that enough members of both parties could accept to overwhelm objections from progressive Democrats and America First Republicans.

The team negotiated for four months to produce this bill. It took less than four days for its support among Republicans to collapse. Why?

The easiest explanation is that Republicans in both the House and Senate yielded to objections from their all-but-certain presidential nominee, former president Donald Trump. Once the House Speaker stated publicly that he would not allow the Senate bill to reach the House floor for a vote, Republican senators were unwilling to run the political risk of supporting a measure that would not become law.

However, there are deeper reasons for the deadlock over immigration. The last comprehensive immigration reform was enacted almost four decades ago, during Ronald Reagan’s presidency. This bill represented a grand bargain between elected officials who sought to extend legal protection to millions of migrants who had entered the U.S. illegally and officials who were most concerned about stemming the flow of such migrants. The bill accomplished the former but had no discernible impact on the latter, leading many conservatives to denounce it as an “amnesty” bill.

This failure to launch legislation, along with the complete inability to pass a budget for a fiscal year about half-gone, is misgovernance on the part of the MAGA cult.

So, this has been a rough week. I hope we can relax some this weekend. It just kills me that so many of our institutions have given Trump impunity. That’s more appropriate than this entire fakery of presidential immunity. The Constitution says no one is above the law. You don’t need a fancy schmancy law degree to know that. You should learn it in Civics class sometime in your secondary education. No one should be able to walk away from the rule of law in this country.

What’s on your reading and blogging list today?

 

 

 

 

 

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