But by the end of the lunch, Sen. John Fetterman of Pennsylvania had enough.
“You have legacies, too,” Fetterman said, according to the people, asking what those legacies would become “if you fuck over a great president over a bad debate.”
Lazy Caturday Reads
Posted: July 13, 2024 Filed under: 2024 presidential Campaign, cat art, Cats, caturday, Donald Trump, Joe Biden | Tags: Biden speech in Detroit, Christian nationalism, Heritage Foundation, mainstream media, Mark Zukerberg, Meta, Milwaukee, Project 2025, Republican National Convention 2024, suffragettes and cats, women's suffrage, Ziklag 6 CommentsHappy Caturday!!
I recently learned that cats were used by both sides during the battle for women’s suffrage. They were used on posters and postcards to supposedly dehumanize women fighting for the right to vote, but were also used in support of women’s suffrage.
From John’s Hopkins exibits: The Suffrage Cat
The women’s suffrage movement was an exceptionally controversial topic in both the United States and England. Postcard manufacturers hired artists to create visually appealing postcards about women’s suffrage. A popular subject was the suffrage cat, which was used for both pro- and anti-suffrage messaging. In Victorian culture, the cat was often associated with the female sphere; the indoor cat represented the passive, ideal homemaker, and the outdoor cat was brazen, feral and fallen. Defining how the cat was intended to be viewed as a symbol in women’s suffrage postcards can be a challenge, as seen in some of the selections below.
At that link, you can see descriptive text about some of the images I’ve posted here.
From The National Park Service: Women’s Suffrage and the Cat
In the 1800s and early 1900s, many women and men supported women’s suffrage (the right to vote). There were, however, people that opposed the idea. One of the prevailing beliefs was that voting power would diminish a woman’s role as caretaker of the family. Some women and men felt so strongly about this that they founded anti-suffragist organizations. Cartoonists also created advertisements and postcards supporting anti-suffragists. These ads often featured animals to make a point.
In popular mainstream culture at the time, women were associated with animals perceived as passive, like cats. Social norms dictated that middle class, white women should stay in the home. Men, however, were expected to occupy public spaces and partake in physical exercise. As a result, men were often associated with physically active animals like dogs. Anti-suffrage artists used these animals symbolically in their cartoons.
Cats were more often used in British anti-suffragist ads. Anti-suffrage organizations in Britain used cats to try to make the point that women were simple and delicate. The cartoons implied that women’s suffrage was just as absurd as cat suffrage because women (and cats) were incapable of voting.
Cats were also used symbolically in some American anti-suffrage ads. A number of American cartoons showed men at home with a cat, taking care of the children. The cat symbolized a loss of the man’s masculinity. Some people believed that if women participated in politics, men would be left at home to raise the children.
Suffragists took back the meaning of the cat in 1916. That April, suffragists Nell Richardson and Alice Burke started a cross-country road trip in a two-seater car they called “The Golden Flier.” Members of the press at the send-off ceremony in New York City reported that the car looked like “a little yellow ant scuttling off through the crowds of limousines and autotrucks which lined the streets” (New York Tribune, April 07, 1916).
Over the next several months, the women stopped in New Jersey, Maryland, Virginia, Ohio, Texas, California, Washington and other states across the country to talk about the importance of women’s suffrage. During their trip, the women adopted a cat that became their unofficial mascot. They named him Saxon, after the manufacturer of the Golden Flier.
Over the next several months, the women spent long hours standing on street corners and in public parks making speeches about suffrage. Alice Burke commented that they were in the sun so often that they let their “noses blister and burn” and their “hair sizzle.” Burke and Richardson were not the only ones enduring the hot weather. Burke wrote in her diary:
The little black kitten is suffering as much as we are from the heat, but he keeps under a cover, and all we can see around the corner of it is a pink nose and a youthful whisker.” (New York Tribune, May 29, 1916)
Now for some news. The mainstream media and some Democrats are still trying to get President Biden to end his campaign for a second term; but last night he gave a speech to an enthusiastic audience in Detroit that should begin to quiet the naysayers. I hope you were able to watch it, because it was impressive. Biden spoke extemporaneously for 35 minutes–no teleprompter and no notes. And the audience loved it. They chanted “Don’t you quit” and “We’ve got your back.” These people are the base of the Democratic Party, and they still love Joe Biden. Biden is also up 2 points on Trump in the latest polls, despite the massive efforts to bring him down.
Here’s the speech:
It’s difficult to find honest reporting on the speech, because most in the press are still hoping to end Biden’s campaign. I really think some of these “journalists” really want Trump back in the White House because they think it will further their careers. Here’s just one example from Politico: Inside Biden’s sputtering campaign to restore Dems’ confidence.
Three of Joe Biden’s senior aides entered a Senate Democratic lunch on Thursday armed with internal and external polls showing the presidential race still within the margin of error, hoping to keep this last bastion of support from abandoning his embattled campaign.
During a difficult and at times tearful meeting with Mike Donilon, Steve Ricchetti and Jen O’Malley Dillon, senators aired concerns about the president’s ability to serve for another four years, his path to defeat former President Donald Trump and the effect Biden’s poor polling might have on Democrats running down the ballot, according to five people familiar with the meeting who were granted anonymity to describe private discussions.
Then, the first-term senator called the question: Who was with him — committed to sticking with Biden as the party’s nominee?
No more than four people signaled that they were, according to four of the people familiar with the meeting. While not every Senate Democrat was in attendance and some had trickled out of the lunch already, Fetterman, Sens. Chris Coons of Delaware and Tammy Duckworth of Illinois thought Biden should continue.
The paltry show of support for Biden behind closed doors revealed that for all the indecision about whether and how to confront Biden, elected Democrats’ confidence in the president had plunged to a ruinous low. While Senate Democrats have largely kept quiet publicly, Biden may have to plow ahead despite an overwhelming lack of confidence from his former Senate colleagues. The majority of the Democratic caucus left Thursday’s meeting just as, if not more, concerned about the path the party is on with Biden atop the ticket.
Of course, the naysayers are always anonymous. Fuck them! Use you name or STFU.
Here’s another take from Sahil Kapur at NBC News: Biden blasts Project 2025 in Michigan and ties it to Trump in effort to regain footing.
DETROIT — President Joe Biden tore into the “right-wing Project 2025” and made it a central theme of his speech at a rally Friday in battleground Michigan as he seeks to put a lid on Democratic calls that he withdraw from the presidential race.
“Folks, Project 2025 is the biggest attack on our system of government and on our personal freedom that’s ever been proposed in the history of this country,” Biden told the crowd, adding that the initiative “is run and paid for by Trump people” and is “a blueprint for a second Trump.”
Biden, rousing the crowd with a more energetic performance than usual, said it would unleash a “nightmare” on the country if his Republican rival is elected and implements it. “Another four years of Donald Trump is deadly serious. Project 2025 is deadly serious,” Biden said, describing it as a threat to American values
When he took the stage, Biden was greeted to chants of “Don’t you quit!” and “We got your back!” The president told them there’s “a lot of speculation lately” about whether he’ll stay in the race.
“I am running, and we’re going to win!” he said….
Biden is zeroing in on Project 2025 as a mechanism to unify the Democratic Party as it splinters over his future in the race, following a shocking debate performance that some in the party see as politically fatal to his re-election prospects. Numerous voters at the rally stood by him and voiced displeasure with the Democrats calling on him to step aside. And it was clear the right-wing document has caught on across within the Democratic Party as a rallying cry for those eager to keep Trump out of the White House.
A Biden aide said the president’s campaign plans to continue focusing on Project 2025 at next week’s GOP convention.
Kapur asked voters about Project 2025:
Before Biden’s remarks at the Detroit rally, the first seven Michigan voters NBC News spoke to were all aware of Project 2025 — and had strong opinions on it.
“It’s horrific. It would totally dismantle our democracy, fill the whole government with loyalists to Trump,” said Deanna Zapico, of Royal Oak. “It would be like Hitler in 1933. There wouldn’t be an election in a long time. That’s my fear.”
“I’m sharing it with everybody,” Zapico said.
Deborah Fuertes, of Brighton, summed it up in one word: “Scary.”
“This is an existential threat,” she said.Trump’s “name’s all over that thing,” said Angela Heard, a sales manager based in Grosse Pointe Woods. “If we don’t get our s— together we’re gonna be like ‘The Handmaid’s Tale.’”
Here’s an indication that Project 2025 could be getting the attention people who don’t generally follow politics closely–People magazine published an in-depth article on the Trump plan. Kyler Alvord writes: What Is Project 2025? Inside the Far-Right Plan Threatening Everything from the Word ‘Gender’ to Public Education.
A sweeping proposal for how Donald Trump should handle a second term in office has sparked concern for its implications on the role of federal government and its calls to eliminate a number of basic human rights.
The 2025 Presidential Transition Project, more commonly known as Project 2025, released a 900-page manifesto last year titled “Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise.” The policy guidebook — compiled by the conservative think tank Heritage Foundation in partnership with more than 100 other conservative organizations — lays out a far-right, Christian nationalist vision for America that would corrode the separation of church and state, replace nonpartisan government employees with Trump loyalists and bolster the president’s authority over independent agencies.
Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts, a rumored candidate for Trump’s chief of staff in a second term, promoted his group’s extreme positions during a July interview, saying, “We are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.”
Down with the tomcats
Shortly after Roberts’ controversial interview, Trump attempted to distance himself from Project 2025, saying on Truth Social that he knows “nothing” about it and has “no idea who is behind it,” before adding that he disagrees with some of its propositions.
While Project 2025 is not formally a part of Trump’s campaign platform, it has been led and supported by several influential people in his orbit. The project’s top leaders all worked in Trump’s White House and a number of the manifesto’s contributors also served in the Trump administration, including but not limited to former Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson and imprisoned former trade adviser Peter Navarro.
Equally damaging to Trump’s claim that he is unfamiliar with Project 2025 is that he worked closely with the Heritage Foundation when he was first elected president. He was provided a similar “Mandate for Leadership” back in 2016, and enacted nearly two-thirds of the group’s proposals within his first year in office.
The Heritage Foundation also reportedly played a behind-the-scenes role on Trump’s presidential transition team and had a significant hand in staffing the administration.
Alvord also addressed Project 2025’s goal of eliminating the wall between church and state.
Project 2025 establishes a framework for guiding the federal government through a biblical lens. Across nearly 1,000 pages, the mandate pushes an unpopular interpretation of the Christian agenda that would target reproductive rights, LGBTQ+ people and people of color by effectively erasing mention of all related terms, protections and troublesome historical accounts.
Though the mandate accuses the “woke” left of infringing on people’s religious freedoms, its policies are rooted in a singular, extremist view of how society should function based on its authors’ own Christian nationalist values. It repeatedly calls for the punishment, even imprisonment, of people who do not conform to the think tank’s platform.
The proposed policies in Project 2025’s mandate stem from four stated goals. In its words: restoring the family as the centerpiece of American life, dismantling the administrative state, defending the nation’s sovereignty and securing God-given individual rights.
Through a holistic approach to restructuring the government, it would seek to give Trump heightened authority to enact his backers’ platform in every city and state — often encouraging the president to creatively subvert congressional approval.
Read the rest at People Magazine. It’s very detailed.
Speaking of Christian nationalism, ProPublica has an investigative article on a shadowy organization of rich people working to influence the 2024 election. Andy Kroll and Nick Surgey: Inside Ziklag, the Secret Organization of Wealthy Christians Trying to Sway the Election and Change the Country. The subhead reads: “The little-known charity is backed by famous conservative donors, including the families behind Hobby Lobby and Uline. It’s spending millions to make a big political push for this election — but it may be violating the law.”
A network of ultrawealthy Christian donors is spending nearly $12 million to mobilize Republican-leaning voters and purge more than a million people from the rolls in key swing states, aiming to tilt the 2024 election in favor of former President Donald Trump.
These previously unreported plans are the work of a group named Ziklag, a little-known charity whose donors have included some of the wealthiest conservative Christian families in the nation, including the billionaire Uihlein family, who made a fortune in office supplies, the Greens, who run Hobby Lobby, and the Wallers, who own the Jockey apparel corporation. Recipients of Ziklag’s largesse include Alliance Defending Freedom, which is the Christian legal group that led the overturning of Roe v. Wade, plus the national pro-Trump group Turning Point USA and a constellation of right-of-center advocacy groups.
1908
ProPublica and Documented obtained thousands of Ziklag’s members-only email newsletters, internal videos, strategy documents and fundraising pitches, none of which has been previously made public. They reveal the group’s 2024 plans and its long-term goal to underpin every major sphere of influence in American society with Christianity. In the Bible, the city of Ziklag was where David and his soldiers found refuge during their war with King Saul.
“We are in a spiritual battle and locked in a terrible conflict with the powers of darkness,” says a strategy document that lays out Ziklag’s 30-year vision to “redirect the trajectory of American culture toward Christ by bringing back Biblical structure, order and truth to our Nation.”
Ziklag’s 2024 agenda reads like the work of a political organization. It plans to pour money into mobilizing voters in Arizona who are “sympathetic to Republicans” in order to secure “10,640 additional unique votes” — almost the exact margin of President Joe Biden’s win there in 2020. The group also intends to use controversial AI software to enable mass challenges to the eligibility of hundreds of thousands of voters in competitive states.
In a recording of a 2023 internal strategy discussion, a Ziklag official stressed that the objective was the same in other swing states. “The goal is to win,” the official said. “If 75,000 people wins the White House, then how do we get 150,000 people so we make sure we win?”
According to the Ziklag files, the group has divided its 2024 activities into three different operations targeting voters in battleground states: Checkmate, focused on funding so-called election integrity groups; Steeplechase, concentrated on using churches and pastors to get out the vote; and Watchtower, aimed at galvanizing voters around the issues of “parental rights” and opposition to transgender rights and policies supporting health care for trans people.
In a member briefing video, one of Ziklag’s spiritual advisers outlined a plan to “deliver swing states” by using an anti-transgender message to motivate conservative voters who are exhausted with Trump.
But Ziklag is not a political organization: It is a 501(c)(3) tax-exempt charity, the same legal designation as the United Way or Boys and Girls Club. Such organizations do not have to publicly disclose their funders, and donations are tax deductible. In exchange, they are “absolutely prohibited from directly or indirectly participating in, or intervening in, any political campaign on behalf of (or in opposition to) any candidate for elective public office,” according to the IRS.
Read the whole thing at ProPublica.
In other news, you probably heard that Mark Zuckerberg has bowed down to Trump. Raw Story:
Critics shredded Meta’s decision to ease restrictions placed on former President Donald Trump’s Instagram and Facebook accounts.
Axios reported Friday the social media titan planned to soon roll back limits it placed on Trump’s accounts as it aimed to allow for more parity leading up to the Nov. 5 election. The tech giant said a minor violation could lead to his accounts being suspended up to two years or restricted.
The move comes more than a year after he was reinstated to the platforms but with limits such as suspensions and advertising restrictions for violating company rules.
Stunned social media critics blasted the decision.
“So the despotic threats worked?” asked @JenBaty, pointing to Trump’s threat on Truth Social that the “ZUCKERBUCKS (sic),” a reference to Facebook cofounder Mark Zuckerberg, “will be sent to prison for long periods of time.”
Trump has previously said Zuckerberg “cheated” in the 2020 election.
“Why isn’t he being prosecuted?” he wrote last year. “The Democrats only know how to cheat. America isn’t going to take it much longer!”
A few stories on the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee next week:
AP: Deeply Democratic Milwaukee wrestles with hosting Trump and the Republican National Convention.
Milwaukee loves its Miller Beer, Brewers baseball and “ Bronze Fonz ” statue.
The deepest blue city in swing state Wisconsin, Milwaukee also loves Democrats.
So it can be hard for some to swallow that Milwaukee is playing host to former President Donald Trump and the Republican National Convention this coming week while rival Chicago, the larger city just 90 miles to the south, welcomes President Joe Biden and Democrats in August.
It didn’t help smooth things over with wary Democrats after Trump used the word “horrible” when talking about Milwaukee just a month before the convention that begins Monday.
Adding to the angst, Milwaukee was supposed to host the Democratic National Convention in 2020, but it didn’t happen due to COVID. Owners of local restaurants, bars and venues say the number of reservations that were promised during the RNC aren’t materializing. And protesters complained the city was trying to keep them too far away from the convention site to have an impact.
“I wish I was out of town for it,” Jake Schneider, 29, said as he passed by the city’s statue of Fonzie, the character played by Henry Winkler in the 1970s sitcom “Happy Days” that was set in Milwaukee. “I’m not super happy that it’s the Republican Party coming to town.” [….]
Ryan Clancy, a self-described democratic socialist who is a state representative and serves on the Milwaukee County Board, puts it more bluntly: “It is shameful that we rolled out the red carpet for the RNC.”
Former President Donald Trump will be officially renominated next week to be the Republican Party’s standard-bearer for the third presidential election in a row as he seeks to return to the Oval Office.
GOP delegates from around the country will gather in Milwaukee for the Republican National Convention, with much of the country following along through the primetime speeches each night.
These speeches have historically allowed presidential candidates to unify discord from aggressive primary campaigns, and the conventions offer a high-profile platform to sway undecided voters.
While an official list of speakers hasn’t yet been announced, here are some of the people who’ve reportedly been tapped to demonstrate their support for Trump on stage next week.
The list includes Donald Trump, Jr., Ron DeSantis, Sean O’Brien (Teamsters president), David Sacks (Elon Musk’s pal), Kari Lake, Elise Stefanik, and more. She’s not listed, but I heard that Margery Taylor Green will also speak.
Politico: The unusual legal risk Trump will have to navigate at the RNC.
Donald Trump will be rubbing elbows in Milwaukee with a crowd that may include dozens of witnesses and alleged co-conspirators in his criminal cases — people he has sworn not to communicate with about details of the charges against him.
Avoiding them may not be possible for the former president during the four-day convention, creating an unusual dynamic, and a potential legal liability for Trump, against the backdrop of a national nominating convention.
1911
“If I were a Trump attorney, my biggest fear might be that Trump finds himself in close quarters with a defendant and starts running his mouth off,” said Anthony Kreis, a law professor at Georgia State University.
Several false electors for Trump in 2020 who were charged with crimes in Arizona, Nevada and Georgia are expected to be at the Republican National Convention. In addition, many of Trump’s former White House aides who testified to grand juries in Washington and Florida are likely to be on hand. Though the roster of speakers hasn’t been publicly shared, there’s a high likelihood that others embroiled in Trump’s alleged crimes — a long list of GOP officials and activists — will also be there.
The situation is, like many things associated with Trump, unprecedented, and it’s hard to gauge the likelihood that an interaction in a crowded convention hall could become legally perilous for the former president. But it’s not zero, according to legal experts.
“I imagine the tight scripted nature of the convention will help isolate Trump from that danger,” Kreis said. “But you also never know.”
General attacks on the prosecutions he’s facing in Washington, Florida and Georgia — familiar themes in Trump rallies and speeches — or superficial encounters with people involved in his cases are unlikely to raise prosecutors’ eyebrows. But legal experts say there are lines Trump could cross if he mentions codefendants or witnesses by name or has more substantive interactions with them. And even general remarks, whether scripted or extemporaneous, could present risks if they could be interpreted as pressure on witnesses against cooperation or an attempt to influence their future testimony.
Those are my recommended reads for today. I hope you find something that interests you.
Lazy Caturday Reads
Posted: July 6, 2024 Filed under: "presidential immunity", 2024 presidential Campaign, cat art, Cats, caturday, Donald Trump, Joe Biden, just because | Tags: Biden-Trump debate 2024, fascism, George Stephanopoulos, Kamala Harris, Project 2025, The Heritage Foundation 11 CommentsHappy Caturday!!
By Paul Bond
The U.S. media and the pundit class are still trying to drive Joe Biden out of the presidential race, and I’m sick and tired of it. These privileged people have the wherewithal to leave the country if Trump gets back in the White House; I don’t.
I see no evidence that Biden is experiencing “cognitive decline,” and he certainly does not have dementia. Democrats should be rallying around Biden, whether they like him personally or not. He is the only thing standing between us and a MAGA dictatorship. Biden needs to stay in the race and beat Trump. He did it once; I believe he can do it again.
Once he’s elected, if Biden wants to retire before the end of his term, Kamala Harris will be there to take over. If he leaves now, Harris will likely be unable to appoint someone as VP, because both houses of Congress have to confirm her choice. The Republicans would joyfully block anyone she picks.
Last night Biden submitted to an interview with ABC’s George Stephanopoulos. I tried to watch it, but I had to turn it off. Stephanopoulos’s questions were ignorant, insulting, and patronizing. I just couldn’t handle it. You can read the full transcript at ABC News.
I recommend this piece by Rebecca Solnit at The Guardian: Why is the pundit class so desperate to push Biden out of the race?
I am not usually one to offer diagnoses of people I’ve never met, but it does seem like the pundit class of the American media is suffering from severe memory loss. Because they’re doing exactly what they did in the 2016 presidential race – providing wildly asymmetrical and inflammatory coverage of the one candidate running against Donald J Trump.
They have become a stampeding herd producing an avalanche of stories suggesting Biden is unfit, will lose, and should go away, at a point in the campaign in which replacing him would likely be somewhere between extremely difficult and utterly catastrophic. They do this while ignoring something every scholar and critic of journalism knows well and every journalist should. As Nikole Hannah-Jones put it: “As media we consistently proclaim that we are just reporting the news when in fact we are driving it. What we cover, how we cover it, determines often what Americans think is important and how they perceive these issues yet we keep pretending it’s not so.” They are not reporting that he is a loser; they are making him one.
According to one journalist’s tally, the New York Times has run 192 stories on the subject since the debate, including 50 editorials and 142 news stories. The Washington Post, which has also gone for saturation coverage, published a resignation speech they wrote for him. Not to be outdone, the New Yorker’s editor-in-chief declared that Biden not going away “would be an act not only of self-delusion but of national endangerment” and had a staff writer suggest that Democrats should use the never-before-deployed 25th amendment.
Since this would have to be led by Vice-President Kamala Harris, it would be a sort of insider coup. And so it goes with what appears to be a journalistic competition to outdo each other in the aggressiveness of the attacks and the unreality of the proposals. It’s a dogpile and a panic, and there is no one more unable to understand their own emotional life, biases, and motives than people who are utterly convinced of their own ironclad rationality and objectivity, AKA most of these pundits.
Serial Cuddlers, by Daniel Ryan
Speaking of coups, we’ve had a couple of late, which perhaps merit attention as we consider who is unfit to hold office. This time around, Trump is not just a celebrity with a lot of sexual assault allegations, bankruptcies, and loopily malicious statements, as he was in 2016. He’s a convicted criminal who orchestrated a coup attempt to steal an election both through backroom corruption and public lies and through a violent attack on Congress. The extremist US supreme court justices he selected during his last presidential term have themselves staged a coup this very Monday, overthrowing the US constitution itself and the principle that no one is above the law to make presidents into kings, just after legalizing bribery of officials, and dismantling the regulatory state by throwing out the Chevron deference.
His own former staffers are part of the Heritage Foundation’s team planning to implement Project 25 if Trump wins, which would finish off our system of government with yet another coup. “We are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be,” said the foundation’s president the other day. This alarms me. So does the behavior of the US mainstream media, which seems more concerned with sabotaging the only thing standing between us and this third coup.
“Why aren’t we talking about Trump’s fascism?” demands the headline of Jeet Heer’s piece in the Nation, to which the answer might be a piece by the Nation’s own editor-in-chief titled “Biden’s patriotic duty” that proposes his duty is to get lost. Sometimes I wonder if all this coverage is because the media know how to cover a normal problem like a sub-par candidate; they don’t know how to cover something as abnormal and unprecedented as the end of the Republic. So for the most part they don’t.
Biden is old. He was one kind of appalling in the 27 June debate, listless and sometimes stumbling and muddling his words. But Trump was another kind of appalling, in that almost everything he said was an outrageous lie and some of it was a threat. I get that writing about the monstrosity that is Trump faces the problem that it’s not news; he’s been a monster spouting lurid nonsense all his life (but his political crimes are recent, and his free-associating public soliloquies on sharks, batteries, toilets, water flow, and Hannibal Lector, among other topics, are genuinely demented). He’s a racist, a fascist, and a rapist (according to a civil-court verdict).
We are deciding if this nation has a future as a more-or-less democratic Republic this November, and on that rides the fate of the earth when it comes to acting on climate change. If the US falters at this decisive moment in the climate crisis, it will drag down everyone else’s efforts. Under Trump, it will. But the shocking supreme court decisions this summer and the looming threat of authoritarianism have gotten little ink and air, compared to the hue and cry about Biden’s competence.
Click the link to read the rest.
It has been more than a week since the debate now, and polls are beginning to reflect voters’ reactions. Gregory Korte and Mark Niquette report at Bloomberg: Biden Narrows Gap With Trump in Swing States Despite Debate Loss.
President Joe Biden registered his best showing yet in a Bloomberg News/Morning Consult tracking poll of battleground states, even as voters offered withering appraisals of his debate performance amid panic within his party.
Cat in a cardboard box, by Ruskin Spear
Republican Donald Trump led Democrat Biden by only 2 percentage points, 47% to 45%, in the critical states needed to win the November election. That’s the smallest gap since the poll began last October. Biden now leads Trump in Michigan and Wisconsin. He’s within the poll’s statistical margin of error in Arizona, Georgia, Nevada and North Carolina, and is farthest behind in the critical state of Pennsylvania.
Swing-state voters thought Biden acquitted himself poorly in the debate, with fewer than one in five respondents saying the 81-year-old was the more coherent, mentally fit or dominant participant.
The poll results land as the Democratic Party finds itself in an extraordinary bind mere weeks before its nominating convention. To pressure Biden into releasing delegates would be to abandon a candidate who has beaten Trump before and has portrayed his debate debacle as the latest surmountable setback in a career marked by personal tragedies and three previous White House campaigns.
Voters’ reactions to Biden’s debate performance:
The Bloomberg News/Morning Consult poll is the first comprehensive survey of the states most likely to decide the outcome in the Electoral College since the debate on June 27. Its findings run counter to some recent national polls, which showed a worsening picture for Biden. The poll could turn out to be a statistical outlier.
While the results show a “modest boost” in concerns about Biden’s mental acuity, they’re “nothing to match the level of alarm expressed by prominent voices in the Democratic Party,” said Eli Yokley, US political analyst for Morning Consult. “This suggests the age matter was already baked into most voters’ minds: The only difference now is more Democrats are acknowledging it.”
The view from the swing states could be affected by an advertising blitz from Biden and his Democratic allies, who have lately outspent their Republican rivals 5-to-1 in those places.
The Bloomberg News/Morning Consult poll also started four days after the debate — later than some national polls — giving voters more time to evaluate Biden’s performance.
The poll’s first responses came on the day the Supreme Court granted Trump immunity for criminal acts he may have committed as part of his “official responsibilities.” The issue of democracy now rivals immigration as the second-biggest concern among swing-state voters, and it’s one of few issues — including climate change, abortion and health care — where Biden enjoys a significant edge in voter trust.
Read more if you can get past the paywall. I signed up for free articles for one day.
NBC News has a gossipy article about supposed conflicts between President Biden’s family and staff. I’m no going to quote from it; it’s very similar to the gossip column-like pieces that the NYT and WaPo like to publish. But here’s a link, if you want to read it. It’s quite melodramatic, so have a fainting couch and smelling salts handy: ‘It’s Shakespearean’: Long-simmering tensions between Biden’s family and aides spill out.
Meanwhile, Trump is up to no good, as usual. He and his thugs have noticed that Americans might not want to have an unfettered strongman in place of a normal president. They are starting to hear about the Heritage Foundation and “Project 2025, and it’s not going over well with normal people as opposed the MAGA maniacs. So yesterday, someone post at Truth Social in Trumps name, claim to know nothing, nothing at all about Project 2025. (I know Trump didn’t actually write the post, because there were no misspellings or oddly capitalized words; and it included words like “abysmal.”
Maya Yang at The Guardian: Donald Trump claims to ‘know nothing’ about Project 2025.
Donald Trump is trying to claim he has “nothing to do” with Project 2025, a political roadmap created by people close to him for his potential second term.
The project, which is led by the Heritage Foundation, a conservative thinktank, seeks to crack down on various issues including immigration, reproductive rights, environmental protections and LGBTQ+ rights. It also aims to replace federal employees with Trump loyalists across the government.
From the book “Tell us a story,” by Dolores McKay, 1923
Trump wrote in a post on his Truth Social network: “I know nothing about Project 2025. I have no idea who is behind it. I disagree with some of the things they’re saying and some of the things they’re saying are absolutely ridiculous and abysmal. Anything they do, I wish them luck, but I have nothing to do with them.”
The former president’s post came a day after the Heritage Foundation’s president, Kevin Roberts, said the US was in the midst of a “second American revolution” that can be bloodless “if the left allows it to be”. He made the comments on Steve Bannon’s War Room podcast, adding that Republicans are “in the process of taking this country back”.
In response to Trump’s post, several critics were quick to point out that it appears unlikely that he is unaware of Project 2025, given that many individuals involved in the project are his closest allies.
“Many people involved in Project 2025 are close to Trump world & have served in his previous admin,” CNN’s Alayna Treene said.
Also from The Guardian, Robert Reich: We should all be terrified of Trump’s Project 2025.
“Project 2025” is nothing short of a 900-page blueprint for guiding Donald Trump’s second term of office if he’s re-elected.
After the Heritage Foundation unveiled Project 2025 in April last year, when Trump was seeking the Republican nomination, he had no problem with it.
But now that the nation is turning its attention to the general election, Trump doesn’t want Project 2025 to draw attention. Its extremism is likely to turn off independents and moderates.
So Trump is now claiming he has “no idea who is behind” Project 2025….
The Project 2025 playbook was written by more than 20 officials who Trump himself appointed during his first term. If he has “no idea” who they are, he’s showing an alarming cognitive decline.
One of the leaders of Project 2025 is Russ Vought. Vought was Trump’s director of the Office of Management and Budget, a key position in the White House. Vought is also drafting Trump’s 2024 GOP platform.
Another Project 2025 leader is John McEntee, another of Trump’s top White House aides. (McEntee recently went viral in a video in which he claimed he gives counterfeit money to homeless people to get them arrested.)
Even the national press secretary for Trump’s campaign appears in the Project 2025 recruitment video.
A bit more:
Trump says he “knows nothing” about Project 2025. And he says he “disagrees” with it.
As the former chairman of the Republican party, Michael Steele put it, “Ok, let’s all play with Stupid for minute … so exactly how do you ‘disagree’ with something you ‘know nothing about’ or ‘have no idea’ who is behind, saying or doing the thing you disagree with?”
Artist unknown
Trump may also be worried that Heritage president Kevin Roberts could alarm independents and moderates. On Wednesday, Roberts raised the prospect of political violence. “We are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be,” Roberts told the War Room podcast, founded by Trump adviser Steve Bannon.
But let’s be clear. The Trump campaign platform is basically Project 2025. Trump’s Make America Great Again Pac is running ads calling it “Trump’s Project 2025”.
The Make America Great Again Pac also created the website TrumpProject2025.com. In case there’s any doubt that Trump and the Heritage Foundation are working in close partnership, Trump can be seen in this video praising the Heritage Foundation and saying he “needs” them to “achieve” his goals.
The close relationship between Trump and the Heritage Foundation goes back years. In 2018, the Heritage Foundation bragged that Trump implemented two-thirds of their policy recommendations in his first year – more than any other president had done for them.
The goals of Project 2025 are the same goals Trump tried to achieve in his first term or has been advocating in this campaign.
One key goal of Project 2025 is to purge all government agencies of anyone more loyal to the constitution than to Trump – a process Trump himself started in October 2020 when he thought he would remain in office.
Trump has promised to give rightwing evangelical Christians what they want. Accordingly, Project 2025 calls for withdrawing the abortion pill mifepristone from the market, expelling trans service members from the military, banning life-saving gender affirming care for young people, ending all diversity programs, and using “school choice” to gut public education.
Read the rest at The Guardian.
Trump is trying to use the SCOTUS “immunity” ruling to get rid of the espionage and other charges against him for stealing and hoarding secret government documents.
Kyle Cheney at Politico: Trump seeks new pause in classified documents case, citing Supreme Court’s immunity ruling.
Donald Trump says the Supreme Court’s ruling that he has blanket immunity from prosecution for his “official acts” as president should result in a monthslong pause of his criminal proceedings in Florida.
The Friday filing by Trump’s legal team with U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon is the latest move by the former president to seize on the high court’s landmark immunity ruling to sideline his lingering criminal cases. He is asking Cannon for a chance to argue the immunity issue before her between now and early September, effectively pausing all other proceedings in the case by two months.
Trump has argued that his decision to transmit classified documents to his Florida home as he prepared to leave the presidency should be treated as an “official act” and be removed from special counsel Jack Smith’s case against Trump for allegedly hoarding national security secrets at his Mar-a-Lago estate. Now, he says, the Supreme Court’s ruling requires that the case be put on hold until the immunity issue is resolved.
The push by Trump is the latest effort to wield the Supreme Court’s decision as a weapon in his ongoing cases in Florida, Washington, D.C. and Georgia, each of which implicate some of Trump’s actions in his final months in the White House. The ruling has already scrambled plans for New York state judge Juan Merchan to sentence Trump on his 34-count conviction for concealing evidence of his alleged 2006 affair wiAlth porn star Stormy Daniels. Though that case centered on Trump’s private actions, some of the evidence prosecutors relied on overlapped with his first two years in the White House, which Trump contends should have been treated as off-limits.
A few more interesting stories to check out:
Thom Hartmann at Common Dreams:
AP via HuffPost: Kansas Supreme Court Strikes Down Two Anti-Abortion Laws.
AlJazeera: World leaders congratulate Iran’s Pezeshkian on presidential election win.
CNN: Hamas ready to drop key demand in truce and hostage deal, official says.
That’s it for me today. I hope you all are enjoying the long weekend.
Lazy Caturday Reads
Posted: June 22, 2024 Filed under: cat art, caturday, Corrupt and Political SCOTUS, Donald Trump, SCOTUS | Tags: immigration, Judge Aileen Cannon, Justic Sonia Sotomayor, Obergefell v. Hodges, same sex marriage, Special Counsel Jack Smith, Supreme Court 6 CommentsHappy Caturday!!
Cat Thief, by Pil Hwa
Not surprisingly, there is quite a bit of Supreme Court news today. The right wing justices seem determined to help Trump prevent his criminal trials from going forward before the November election. We are waiting for SCOTUS to release a decision on Trump’s claim of “presidential immunity” for crimes he committed in office, and it looks like they are going to hold off announcing that decision until the bitter end.
And, of course, District Court Judge Aileen Cannon is working to help Trump avoid being tried for stealing and hoarding top secret government documents in a bathroom, a ballroom stage, an unsecure storage area, and of course, in his bedroom and even his desk.
Here’s the latest on the Supreme Court’s activities:
Josh Fiallo at The Daily Beast: What the Hell Is Going on With the Supreme Court’s Trump Ruling?
The Supreme Court released a slew of new rulings on Friday morning, but, once again, none of them included the decision weighing heaviest on Americans’ minds—whether Donald Trump should be granted king-like immunity for his criminal indictments.
Friday marks 114 days since the case was accepted by the high court—an inexcusable amount of time to rule on something so consequential to the country, a top legal expert tells The Daily Beast.
Laurence Tribe, a constitutional law professor at Harvard University, said Friday it’s clear that the Supreme Court, which has operated with a comfortable conservative majority since Trump’s presidency, is doing the ex-president’s bidding.
With each day that passes without a decision, the chances of a Trump trial before the 2024 election grow slimmer.
“They’re obviously delaying to benefit Donald Trump,” he said.
Tribe said, realistically, an appropriate time for the court to reach a decision on Trump would have been sometime in December, and Trump’s trial would’ve been completed by now.
Instead, it’s taken the Supreme Court more than twice the time to rule on Trump’s immunity—a matter an appeals court comprehensively rejected—than it took to rule on the much more complex United States vs. Richard Nixon case, which took 54 days.
What’s more, the arguments in Trump’s case were so outlandish that it should have been easy for the court to dispatch with them quickly, one former Supreme Court law clerk said this week.
Robert Reich agreed, saying that the court is in effect giving Trump immunity by their delay tactics. Another legal expert, Robert J. DeNault, told Fiallo:
While just a theory, he said it’s possible the court is contemplating two things—slating Trump’s case for “re-argument,” which would delay things even longer, or potentially ruling that special prosecutors like Jack Smith, whose team brought the election-subversion charges at the heart of Trump’s case, are unconstitutional
With their slow-walking of this case, the court has deliberately interfered in the 2024 election.
Wooster and Sauce, by Richard Adams
Lia Litman, a professor at the University of Michigan Law School and former court clerk to Justice Anthony Kennedy, published an op-ed at The New York Times on June 19: Something’s Rotten About the Justices Taking So Long on Trump’s Immunity Case.
For those looking for the hidden hand of politics in what the Supreme Court does, there’s plenty of reason for suspicion on Donald Trump’s as-yet-undecided immunity case given its urgency. There are, of course, explanations that have nothing to do with politics for why a ruling still hasn’t been issued. But the reasons to think something is rotten at the court are impossible to ignore.
On Feb. 28, the justices agreed to hear Mr. Trump’s claim that he is immune from prosecution on charges that he plotted to subvert the 2020 election. The court scheduled oral arguments in the case for the end of April. That eight-week interval is much quicker than the ordinary Supreme Court briefing process, which usually extends for at least 10 weeks. But it’s considerably more drawn out than the schedule the court established earlier this year on a challenge from Colorado after that state took Mr. Trump off its presidential primary ballot. The court agreed to hear arguments on the case a mere month after accepting it and issued its decision less than a month after the argument. Mr. Trump prevailed, 9-0.
Nearly two months have passed since the justices heard lawyers for the former president and for the special counsel’s office argue the immunity case. The court is dominated by conservatives nominated by Republican presidents. Every passing day further delays a potential trial on charges related to Mr. Trump’s efforts to remain in office after losing the 2020 election and his role in the events that led to the storming of the Capitol; indeed, at this point, even if the court rules that Mr. Trump has limited or no immunity, it is unlikely a verdict will be delivered before the election….
Mr. Trump’s lawyers put together a set of arguments that are so outlandish they shouldn’t take much time to dispatch. Among them is the upside-down claim that, because the Constitution specifies that an officer who is convicted in an impeachment proceeding may subsequently face a criminal trial, the Constitution actually requires an impeachment conviction before there is any criminal punishment.
That gets things backward: The Constitution confirms that impeachment is not a prerequisite to criminal prosecution. And yet Mr. Trump’s lawyers continued to take the untenable position, in response to questioning, that a president who orders the assassination of a political rival could not face criminal charges (absent impeachment by the House and conviction in the Senate).
It does not take weeks to explain why these arguments are wrong.
Read the whole thing at the NYT.
On another issue, Justice Sonia Sotomayor suggests that previously decided marriage rights could soon be in jeopardy. The New Republic: Sotomayor Issues Dire Warning on Supreme Court Ruling on Noncitizens.
In a ruling delivered Friday, the Supreme Court decided 6–3 that U.S. citizens have no constitutional interest in their noncitizen spouses being able to enter the United States—despite the fact that a married person has an inherent interest in their spouse being able to live in the same country as they do. Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor warned the ruling is an obvious sign the court will seek to overturn protections for marriage equality next.
Sotomayor issued a dire warning in her dissent, accusing the conservative supermajority of chipping away at constitutional protections for married couples and saying they’re making “the same fatal error” as they did in Dobbs v. Jackson, the 2022 Supreme Court ruling that overturned federal abortion protections.
By Stephanie Lambourne
“The majority, ignoring these precedents, makes the same fatal error it made in Dobbs: requiring too ‘careful [a] description of the asserted fundamental liberty interest,’” Sotomayor wrote. “The majority’s failure to respect the right to marriage in this country consigns U.S. citizens to rely on the fickle grace of other countries’ immigration laws to vindicate one of the ‘basic civil rights of man’ and live alongside their spouses.”
The case involved Sandra Muñoz, a U.S. citizen whose husband was denied a visa by the U.S. consulate in El Salvador. That denial came from a broad provision in U.S. immigration law that disqualifies a person from obtaining a visa if the consulate knows “or has reasonable ground to believe” that a person is trying to enter the U.S. “to engage solely, principally, or incidentally in” unlawful activity. Her husband was denied because of tattoos he has, which a court-appointed gang tattoo expert later determined were not gang-related.
Muñoz sued the State Department, arguing that her husband’s inexplicable denial of entry into the U.S. infringed on her constitutional liberty interest in her husband’s visa application and their inability to start a life together in the U.S. In upholding the denial, the Supreme Court’s conservative justices decided not just that the State Department doesn’t need to provide reason for denying a visa but that a citizen’s right to be married doesn’t supersede the state’s strict, and often questionable, immigration processes. The conservative supermajority of the Supreme Court’s ruling chips away at the core of Obergefell v. Hodges—the landmark ruling that legalized same-sex marriage in 2015—which decided that citizens have a right to marriage.
In her dissent, Sotomayor cast urgent warnings on the impact of restricting who is allowed to be married in the U.S., noting that the conservative decision will extend to couples “like the Lovings and the Obergefells, [who] depend on American law for their marriages’ validity.”
We knew this was coming. Clarence Thomas told us so after the Dobbs decision.
Yesterday, Judge Aileen Cannon began holding hearings on the question of whether the appointment of Special Counsel Jack Smith was unconstitutional.
Gary Fineout and Kyle Cheney at Politico: Judge Cannon wants to know whether Merrick Garland is supervising Jack Smith.
The federal judge overseeing Donald Trump’s classified documents case grilled special counsel Jack Smith’s prosecutors Friday on how closely Attorney General Merrick Garland oversees their work.
Under persistent questioning from U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon, the prosecutors declined to divulge details and seemed caught off-guard by the inquiries. At one point, Smith deputy James Pearce said he was “not authorized” to discuss the level of communication that occurred between the attorney general and the special counsel.
“I don’t want to make it seem like I’m hiding something,” Pearce then said.
The questioning came at the end of a five-hour hearing focused on a long-shot effort by Trump to have the charges against him thrown out. Smith has accused Trump of hoarding national secrets at his Mar-a-Lago estate after his presidency and obstructing the government’s efforts to retrieve them.
Trump contends that Smith’s appointment by Garland as special counsel in November 2022 is unconstitutional and that Smith lacked the legal authority to bring the case against the former president.
Sophie Sperlich’s Solo Cat
Though other courts have uniformly swept aside similar challenges to the validity of special counsel appointments, Cannon — a 2020 Trump appointee to the bench — scheduled lengthy oral arguments on the matter, a sign that she was taking it seriously. During Friday’s proceedings, she gave little indication of how she intends to rule….
In questioning prosecutors about Garland’s supervision, Cannon seemed to be trying to determine how much independent authority Smith has in practice.
Smith’s team, led by Pearce, sharply rebutted arguments that Smith’s appointment was illegal and described Smith’s role as an uncontroversial exercise of Garland’s ability to organize the Justice Department as he sees fit. Pearce emphasized that Smith was “in compliance” with longstanding Justice Department rules and regulations regarding his appointment and his handling of the case.
The exchanges marked the beginning of a three-day stretch of intense hearings called by Cannon that will continue Monday and Tuesday. Monday’s hearing will focus on another aspect of Trump’s effort to invalidate Smith’s appointment — a claim that he is being improperly funded by an indefinite Justice Department budget line item.
The judge’s intense dive into an issue that has been brushed aside by most other courts has caused head-scratching in the legal community and drawn renewed criticism of her handling of the sensitive case. Adding to the unusual dynamic: Cannon permitted three outside experts — two in favor of Trump’s position and one in favor of Smith’s — to address the court for 30 minutes apiece, nearly unheard of in criminal matters.
The good news is that if Cannon does decide that Smith was illegally appointed, he will be able to appeal the decision to the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals–which is why Cannon probably won’t decide that. She’ll just keep wasting time until it’s too late to try the case before the election.
The rest of this post is devoted to insane Trump news, so be forewarned.
Asawin Suebsaeng and Adam Rawnsley at Rolling Stone: Trump’s Not ‘Bluffing’: Inside the MAGA Efforts To Make a Second Term Even More Extreme.
“OF COURSE WE aren’t fucking bluffing.” That’s the message one close Trump adviser and former administration official — who requested anonymity to speak candidly — wants to get across to the press and public, when asked about Donald Trump’s 2024 campaign vows of “retribution,” unprecedented force, and militaristic action.
Indeed, this sentiment is shared widely among the upper echelon of Trumpland and the MAGAfied Republican Party, with various officials and conservatives with a direct line to the former president insisting that so-called “moderates” or alleged “establishment” types will be tamed or purged, if Trump retakes power next year.
Rolling Stone spoke with a dozen sources who are playing roles in Trump’s “government-in-waiting” or are in regular contact with the ex-president, including GOP lawmakers, Trump advisers, MAGA policy wonks, conservative attorneys, and former and current Trump aides. They universally stress that the former (and perhaps future) U.S. president and top allies are serious about following through on his extreme campaign pledges. These promises run the gamut from siccing active duty military units on not just American cities but also Mexican territory, all the way to prosecuting and potentially imprisoning Trump foes.
Several of these sources say that a wide range of litmus tests, loyalty screenings, and “guardrails” are already being implemented, or discussed with Trump, to root out so-called “RINOs” (Republicans in Name Only) and MAGA-skeptical conservatives from embedding themselves within a possible second Trump administration. These processes would be largely aimed at drastically curtailing the number of squishy Republican officials who would be able to get in Trump’s ear to, in the words of one GOP lawmaker on Capitol Hill, try to “scare Trump off of what needs to be done or should be.” This lawmaker cited former senior administration officials such as Mark Esper and John Kelly who, at times, urged the then-president to moderate his policy desires.
The long engagement, by Susan Herbert
One idea regularly kicked around Trump’s government-in-waiting is a dramatic increase in the use of “lie detectors” across the federal apparatus, to root out or charge leakers and other subversives. These devices, called polygraphs, are frequently unreliable and inadmissible in courts of law….
Sources close to the former president and several of those counseling him on second-term policy add that one big reason they feel confident a revived Trump White House won’t be, in their minds, tamed in the ways it was during the first term is because Trump presumably won’t be running for reelection….
Further, many of Trump’s political and policy allies feel emboldened by the federal judiciary being (thanks to Trump) significantly more right-wing than it was when he first came into office. This would allow Team Trump, in the words of one conservative attorney close to the ex-president, to “get away with a lot more” than elected Republicans used to, in the face of an expected barrage of constitutional challenges to their executive actions or policies, if Trump wins in November.
There’s more at the link if you can get past the paywall. I got through by just wiping out my search history.
Politico: Trump keeps flip-flopping his policy positions after meeting with rich people.
Donald Trump privately hinted at a shift in immigration policy at a Business Roundtable meeting last week. He told the group “we need brilliant people” in this country, according to one of the attendees, who was granted anonymity to describe a private meeting. And when he talked about finding ways to keep American-educated talent at home, some top CEOs, like Apple’s Tim Cook, were seen nodding their heads.
The public move came a week later: On “The All-In Podcast” on Thursday, Trump said foreign nationals who graduate from U.S. colleges and universities should “automatically” be given a green card upon graduation.
It was the latest major policy shift from a candidate who has proven equal parts hardline and chameleon-like over time. Trump’s pivot on immigration followed his reversal on TikTok, embracing an app he once tried to ban, and his shift on cryptocurrency.
To the former president’s allies, the reversals are evidence of a nuanced politician taking thoughtful new positions on rapidly changing issues.
But there is also plainly a pattern of Trump aligning his political stances with the views of wealthy donors and business interests.
An automatic green card on graduation? Wouldn’t that attract even more immigrants to the U.S.? And hasn’t Trump said he was going deport all immigrants, whether they are here legally or not? I wonder how Stephen Miller feels about this latest Trump policy?
More on the green card promise from Chris Cameron at The New York Times: Trump Says He Would Give Green Cards to All Foreign College Students at Graduation.
Donald J. Trump said he would push for a program that would automatically give green cards to all foreign college students in America after they graduate, a reversal from restrictions he enacted as president on immigration by high-skilled workers and students to the United States.
But hours after Mr. Trump’s remarks aired, his campaign’s press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, walked back the former president’s comments, saying in a statement that there would be an “aggressive vetting process” that would “exclude all communists, radical Islamists, Hamas supporters, America haters and public charges” and that the policy would apply only to the “most skilled graduates who can make significant contributions to America.”
By Dee Nickerson
Appearing with the host David Sacks, a Silicon Valley investor who backs the former president’s 2024 campaign, on a podcast that aired Thursday afternoon, Mr. Trump had repeated his frequent criticism of high levels of immigration as an “invasion of our country.” But he was then pressed by Jason Calacanis, another investor who hosts the podcast, to “promise us you will give us more ability to import the best and brightest around the world to America.”
“I do promise, but I happen to agree,” Mr. Trump said, adding “what I will do is — you graduate from a college, I think you should get automatically, as part of your diploma, a green card to be able to stay in this country, and that includes junior colleges.”
It would have been a sweeping change that would have opened a vast path to American citizenship for foreigners. The State Department estimated that the United States hosted roughly one million international students in the academic year that ended in 2022 — a majority of whom came from China and India. The United States granted lawful permanent residence to roughly one million people during the year that ended in September 2022, so such a policy change would significantly increase the number of green cards issued.
Mr. Trump suggested on the podcast that he had wanted to enact such a policy while in office but “then we had to solve the Covid problem.” The Trump administration invoked the pandemic to enact many of the immigration restrictions that officials had wanted to put in place earlier in Mr. Trump’s term.
Mr. Trump also lamented “stories where people graduated from a top college or from a college, and they desperately wanted to stay here, they had a plan for a company, a concept, and they can’t — they go back to India, they go back to China, they do the same basic company in those places. And they become multibillionaires.”
It’s crazy, but obviously it will never happen.
Luke Broadwater at The New York Times: On the House Floor, Republicans Gag Mentions of Trump’s Conviction.
The history-making felony conviction of former President Donald J. Trump has raised some historic questions for the House’s rules of decorum, which have existed for centuries but can be bent to the will of whichever party controls the majority-driven chamber.
The Republicans who now hold the majority have used those rules to impose what is essentially a gag order against talking about Mr. Trump’s hush-money payments to a porn actress or about the fact that he is a felon at all, notwithstanding that those assertions are no longer merely allegations but the basis of a jury’s guilty verdict. Doing so, they have declared, is a violation of House rules.
Scene from a Train, by Richard Adams
In short, perhaps the only place in the United States where people are barred from talking freely about Mr. Trump’s crimes is the floor of what is often referred to as “the people’s House,” where Republicans have gone so far as to erase one such mention from the official record.
In recent weeks, Republican leaders have cracked down on Democrats who refer to Mr. Trump’s court cases on the floor, citing the centuries-old rules of decorum, which date back to the days of Thomas Jefferson. Merely mentioning that Mr. Trump is a felon prompts an admonishment from whomever is presiding when the offending fact is uttered. (Mr. Trump is also indicted on felony charges in cases related to his handling of classified documents and attempting to overturn the 2020 election.)
“The chair would remind members to refrain from engaging in personalities toward presumptive nominees for the office of the president,” is now a common phrase heard in the chamber after the mention of the words “Trump” and “felon.”
On one occasion, Republicans barred Representative Jim McGovern, Democrat of Massachusetts, from speaking for the rest of the day and deleted his comments from the Congressional Record after he railed against Mr. Trump and his court cases.
“When they censor any mention of Donald Trump’s criminal convictions, they are essentially trying to ban a fact,” Representative Jamie Raskin of Maryland, the top Democrat on the Oversight Committee, said in an interview. “I am not aware of any precedent where factual statements have been banned in our lifetime.”
So what else is new?
At The New Republic, Greg Sargent writes that Trump will try to blame Biden for crimes committed by immigrants: Trump Just Revealed How He’ll Attack Biden at Debate—and It’s Vile.
You can’t say you weren’t warned: At the upcoming presidential debate on June 27, Donald Trump plans to highlight a handful of horrific murders—allegedly by undocumented migrants—and blame them on President Biden. We know this because Trump told us so right on his Truth Social feed.
“We have a new Biden Migrant Killing—it’s only going to get worse, and it’s all Crooked Joe Biden’s fault,” Trump seethed, referring to the horrible death of a 12-year-old Texas girl. “I look forward to seeing him at the Fake debate on Thursday. Let him explain why he has allowed MILLIONS of people to come into our Country illegally!”
Now that Trump has telegraphed this coming assault, the Biden campaign has time to prepare a response. What should it be?
First, let’s be clear on why this line of attack is pure nonsense. Trump and MAGA figures have aggressively highlighted such killings lately, in many forms: Trump sometimes brings up victims at campaign events. MAGA lawmakers put them on T-shirts. Fox News airs visuals of migrant mug shots. And as Aaron Rupar shows, Fox sometimes even puts individual crimes in chyrons.
The argument is always that Biden’s policies are to blame for these horrors. But at the most obvious level, this is absurd, because immigrants do not commit crimes at higher rates than native-born Americans do. That includes undocumented immigrants. There is no link between immigration and violent crime.
Of course, the real Trump-MAGA message is that all undocumented immigrants should be presumed violent and dangerous, regardless of what any pointy-headed statistics say. MAGA figures are highlighting specific killings to smear millions—that is, they’re arguing by anecdote.
But even at the anecdotal level, the claims implode under scrutiny. Take Rachel Morin, a young mother who was horrifically murdered in Maryland, allegedly by a migrant from El Salvador. Trump highlighted her at a recent rally, and MAGA figures regularly cite her to criticize Biden’s new legal protections for the undocumented spouses of U.S. citizens.
We’ll just have to wait and see what happens on Thursday. I’m sure Trump’s behavior will be deranged and nonsensical. I don’t know if I can stand to watch it. At least we know that their mikes will be shut off while the other candidate is speaking.
That’s all the politics news I have for you today. I hope the cat art will make it somewhat bearable.
Lazy Caturday Reads
Posted: June 15, 2024 Filed under: 2024 presidential Campaign, cat art, Cats, caturday, Donald Trump, Joe Biden | Tags: Anthony Fauci, bump stocks, disinformation, doctored video, gun violence, intersex cats, mass shootings, Supreme Court, tortoiseshell cats, Trump's dementia 4 Comments
Cinder, previously Cindi
Happy Caturday!!
I read an interesting cat news story yesterday about a “rare” male tortoiseshell kitten. From The Oregonian: ‘Unicorn’ kitten, born intersex, adopted from central Oregon shelter.
Central Oregon veterinarians are excited about a rare tortoiseshell kitten that was brought into a shelter earlier this spring, and adopted into a new family last Friday.
That’s because the kitten, Cinder, was born intersex, with both male and female genitals.
The Central Oregon Humane Society announced the news about about the kitten on Friday, saying it was like “spotting a unicorn.”
“Even though I’ve only been in the veterinary field for nine years, this very well could be a once-in-a-career moment,” Bailey Shelton, clinic manager at the shelter, said in a news release. “They always talked about how rare male tortoiseshells are back in school, but seeing one in person is something else.”
Due to a stroke of genetics, tortoiseshell colored cats, known for their swirling coats of black and orange, are almost always female. And while Cinder does have some female genitals, including what appears to be a vulva, the shelter said, it does not have a uterus or ovaries, born instead with a pair of testicles (which have since been removed).
Crystal Bloodworth, medical director for the shelter, said now that Cinder has been neutered, it will grow up appearing to be female. However, given its anatomy at birth, the shelter has opted to label the kitten as male.
“To call it a male is tough, but with the binary nature of animals and people’s perception of animals, we chose male,” Bloodworth said.
While rare, incidents of hermaphroditism in cats is not unheard of, the shelter said. Like humans, intersex cats can be born with many variations of both male and female genitalia. This cat likely has three chromosomes, XXY, with two Xs that allow for the tortoiseshell coloring and a Y that allows for the testicles.
Cinder was brought into the central Oregon shelter in April, part of a litter relinquished by a local cat owner. The kitten, presumed to be female, was taken into a foster home and named Cindi. Veterinarians discovered the male genitals during a routine spay surgery, after which the cat was renamed Cinder.
More cute photos at the link.
Here are some of the stories topping the news today.
As I’m sure you know, yesterday the corrupt Supreme Court struck down the Trump era ban on bump stocks, thus making it easier for angry men with guns to murder huge numbers of people quickly. NBC News: Supreme Court rules ban on gun bump stocks is unlawful.
In a 6-3 ruling on ideological lines, with the court’s conservatives in the majority, the court held that an almost 100-year-old law aimed at banning machine guns cannot legitimately be interpreted to include bump stocks.
The Trump administration imposed the prohibition after the Las Vegas mass shooting in 2017, in which Stephen Paddock used bump stock-equipped firearms to open fire on a country music festival, initially killing 58 people. Then-President Donald Trump personally called for the accessory to be banned.
Writing for the majority, Justice Clarence Thomas said that a firearm equipped with the accessory does not meet the definition of “machinegun” under federal law.
The ruling prompted a vigorous dissent from liberal Justice Sonia Sotomayor.
“When I see a bird that walks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, I call that bird a duck,” she wrote in reference to bump stocks enabling semiautomatic rifles to operate like machine guns. Sotomayor also took the rare step of reading a summary of her dissent in court.
Even with the federal ban out of the picture, bump stocks will still not be readily available nationwide. More than a dozen states have already banned them, according to Everytown for Gun Safety, a nonprofit gun-control group. Congress could also act.
A response to the decision from Mark Joseph Stern at Slate: Clarence Thomas’ Opinion Legalizing Bump Stocks Is Indefensible.
The Supreme Court’s conservative supermajority carved a huge loophole into the federal prohibition against machine guns on Friday, striking down a bump stock ban first enacted in 2018 by the Trump administration. Its 6–3 decision allows civilians to convert AR-15–style rifles into automatic weapons that can fire at a rate of 400–800 rounds per minute. One might hope a ruling that stands to inflict so much carnage would, at least, be indisputably compelled by law. It is not. Far from it: To reach this result, Justice Clarence Thomas’ opinion for the court tortures statutory text beyond all recognition, defying Congress’ clear and (until now) well-established commands. As Justice Sonia Sotomayor explained in dissent, the supermajority flouts the “ordinary meaning” of the law, adopting an “artificially narrow” interpretation that will have “deadly consequences.” This Supreme Court will be squarely at fault for the next mass shooting enabled by a legal bump stock.
A Boy with a Cat, by Pierre Auguste Renoir
Friday’s decision, Garland v. Cargill, is not a Second Amendment case. The plaintiffs do not (yet) argue that the Constitution guarantees a right to own bump stocks. Rather, they claim that the Trump administration stretched existing law too far when it outlawed bump stocks following the 2017 Las Vegas shooting. The gunman committed that massacre with the assistance of a bump stock, allowing him to murder 60 people in 10 minutes from 490 yards away, the deadliest single-gunman mass shooting in U.S. history. To use this device, a gunman attaches it to his AR-15, then holds his finger on the trigger and leans forward to maintain pressure on the bump stock. A semiautomatic requires the shooter to pull the trigger to fire each round. When done correctly, by contrast, “bump firing” can then unleash a spray of bullets without repeated pulls of the trigger, and at the rate of an automatic weapon. This barrage is audible in many videos of the Las Vegas shooting; victims were mowed down in rapid succession because the bump stock enabled nonstop fire.
For years, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives had been monitoring these devices; the agency found some unlawful, depending on their precise mechanisms, but did not take a formal position overall. The Las Vegas shooting prompted ATF to conclude that bump stocks transform semiautomatic rifles into machine guns, rendering them illegal under a long-standing federal statute. That’s because this law bans “any part designed and intended solely and exclusively” for “converting a weapon into a machinegun.” And a “machinegun” is defined as any firearm that fires “automatically” by “a single function of the trigger.” After extensive deliberation, ATF found that bump stock–equipped rifles do exactly that.
Now the Supreme Court has decided that it understands firearms better than the ATF. Thomas’ majority opinion reads like the fevered work of a gun fetishist, complete with diagrams and even a GIF. The justice, who worships at the altar of the firearm, plainly relished the opportunity to depict the inner workings of these cherished tools of slaughter. (It’s no surprise that he borrowed the images from the avidly pro-gun Firearms Policy Foundation.) To reach his preferred result, Thomas falsely accused ATF of taking the “position” that bump stocks were legal, then “abruptly” reversing course after the Las Vegas shooting. This account is dead wrong: ATF took a careful, case-by-case view of different bump stock–like devices as gunmakers developed them, deeming some permissible and others unlawful. The gun industry pushed these devices into the mainstream by deceiving ATF about their purpose; in one case, for instance, a manufacturer won approval from the agency by claiming a bump stock was designed to accommodate people with limited hand strength—then turned around and marketed it as the next best thing to a machine gun.
Read the rest at Slate.
The Supreme Court still has a large number of cases to decide before they wrap up this session. One of those decisions will be on Trump’s claim of absolute immunity from anything he did as “president.” Adam Liptak at The New York Times: Supreme Court’s Leisurely Pace Will Produce Pileup of Late June Rulings.
The Supreme Court has been moving at a sluggish pace in issuing decisions this term, entering the second half of June with more than 20 left to go. That is not terribly different from the last two terms, when the pace at which the court issued decisions started to slow….
There are two main theories for why the court has started moving slowly, and they reinforce each other. The first is that the proportion of blockbusters is high, in this term in particular. In the coming weeks, the justices will weigh in on criminal charges against former President Donald J. Trump, abortion, guns, social media, homelessness, the opioid crisis and the power of executive agencies.
Morning Kiss, by Raphael Vavasseur
Of the 23 remaining cases, perhaps a dozen of them have the potential to reshape significant parts of American society.
The second theory is that the justices are not getting along very well in the aftermath of the leak of the decision overturning Roe v. Wade in 2022, the decision itself, the drumbeat of ethics scandals, the announcement of an ethics code that seems toothless and the drop in public respect for the court.
The justices themselves, whose party line has long been that they are a collegial bunch, have let slip a darker view in public appearances.
Soon after the leak, Justice Clarence Thomas said it was “like kind of an infidelity.”
“Look where we are, where that trust or that belief is gone forever,” he said. “And when you lose that trust, especially in the institution that I’m in, it changes the institution fundamentally. You begin to look over your shoulder.”
In her own remarks last month, Justice Sonia Sotomayor said the court’s direction has reduced her to tears.
“There are days that I’ve come to my office after an announcement of a case and closed my door and cried,” she said. “There have been those days. And there are likely to be more.”
On Friday, Justice Sotomayor announced a dissent in a case on a firearms law from the bench, a rare move that signals profound disagreement.
The court has said that it will not issue more decisions until Thursday. It will doubtless add days for decision announcements the last week of June, the court’s self-imposed deadline for finishing its work before the justices’ summer break. But it will be a challenge to issue all of the remaining decisions by then.
Maybe Thomas and Alito are getting too old to keep up? That’s another important reason why Biden just has to win in November. If Trump is elected, those two will step down and be replaced by even worse people, if that is possible.
Speaking of old people, Donald Trump turned 78 yesterday. Yes, President Biden is a few years older, but he kept up an amazing pace during his two recent trips to Europe. In fact, the Biden-Harris campaign Twitter account noted that in a speech in Palm Beach yesterday, “Trump attack[ed] President Biden for being too energetic: He flies back and forth and back and forth between countries.” Meanwhile, Trump has been playing golf more than campaigning.
Meanwhile, Trump met with a group of CEO’s on Thursday, and it did not go well for him. Christina Wilke and Brian Schwartz at CNBC:
Former President Donald Trump failed to impress everyone in a room full of top CEOs Thursday at the Business Roundtable’s quarterly meeting, multiple attendees told CNBC.
“Trump doesn’t know what he’s talking about,” said one CEO who was in the room, according to a person who heard the executive speaking. The CEO also said Trump did not explain how he planned to accomplish any of his policy proposals, that person said.
A girl with her cat, by Emile Vernon
Several CEOs “said that [Trump] was remarkably meandering, could not keep a straight thought [and] was all over the map,” CNBC’s Andrew Ross Sorkin reported Friday on CNBC’s “Squawk Box.”
Among the topics on which Trump offered scant details were how he would reduce taxes and cut back on business regulations, according to two other people in the room who spoke to CNBC….
The same CEOs who were struck by Trump’s lack of focus “walked into the meeting being Trump supporter-ish or thinking that they might be leaning that direction,” Sorkin reported.
“These were people who I think might have been actually predisposed to [Trump but] actually walked out of the room less predisposed” to him, Sorkin said….
Trump’s energy in the meeting was also noticeably subdued, according to two people who were in the room. At no time during his remarks was there any noticeable applause for Trump, two attendees told CNBC.
It’s difficult to understand why anyone is surprised by Trump’s idiocy at this point. I guess they must only watch Fox News and read the Wall Street Journal.
This week, the New York Post doctored a video to make President Biden look spaced out like Trump often is. William Vaillancourt at The Daily Beast: White House Rips ‘Desperate’ Murdoch Press Over Deceptive Biden Video.
A member of the White House communications team went after The New York Post on Thursday after it posted on social media a deceptively edited video of President Joe Biden at the G7 economic summit in Italy.
White House Senior Deputy Press Secretary Andrew Bates responded to a post by the publication on X that had the caption, “President Biden appeared to wander off at the G7 summit in Italy, with officials needing to pull him back to focus.”
“The Murdoch outlets are so desperate to distract from @POTUS’s record that they just lie,” Bates wrote….
The fake video showed Biden walking away from the other people to talk to some skydivers who had just landed nearby. The Post cut out the skydivers and show Biden appear to be walking away for no reason.
“Here, they use an artificially narrow frame to hide from viewers that he just saw a skydiving demonstration,” Bates continued. “He’s saying congratulations to one of the divers and giving a thumbs up.”
Bates included a wider version of the same clip which shows Biden walking over toward one of the skydivers, who could not be seen in the Post’s video.
The Post isn’t the only Murdoch-owned paper that the White House’s press team has criticized lately. In taking issue with a report in The Wall Street Journal claiming that Biden’s mental acuity was “slipping,” Bates called attention to how some Democrats in Congress said their quotes to the contrary were cut from the article.
A girl with a cat, by Pierre Bonnard
Disinformation is very serious problem in the presidential campaign, particularly because of Trump’s stochastic terrorism and his followers’ responses. Check out this story by Joseph Menn at The Washington Post: Stanford’s top disinformation research group collapses under pressure.
One more story, before I wrap this post up. Anthony Fauci has a tell-all book coming out, and Martin Pengally writes about it at The Daily Beast: Anthony Fauci: Volcanic Donald Trump Screamed F-Bombs, Then Said He Loved Me.
Donald Trump shouted foul-mouthed abuse at Anthony Fauci, then lurched into telling him he loved him—and claimed he would win the 2020 election in a “fucking landslide,” the top medical adviser reveals in his new memoir.
In the eagerly awaited book, Fauci describes conversations with Trump during the COVID-19 pandemic in which the then-president would “announce that he loved me and then scream at me on the phone.”
By Edouard Vuillard
“Let’s just say, I found this to be out of the ordinary,” Fauci writes, of conversations peppered with f-bombs, including the claim Fauci had cost the U.S. economy “one trillion fucking dollars.”
The book, On Call: A Doctor’s Journey in Public Service, will be published in the U.S. next week—as Trump and President Joe Biden’s rematch gathers pace. The Daily Beast obtained a copy.
On the page, Fauci describes interactions with Trump as the administration wrestled with the president’s opposition to public health measures including masking; Trump’s desire to reopen the country; his indulgence of advisers with dubious qualifications pushing untested treatments; his bizarre suggestion that bleach might kill the virus; and, ultimately, his own hospitalization with COVID….
In 2020, within weeks of the first COVID cases, Fauci became a Republican punching bag. Enemies saw him as an avatar of the medical establishment when he relentlessly urged COVID precautions, starting with social distancing, moving to lockdowns, then masking and vaccines.
He told Congress this month that he, his wife, and his adult daughter were the subjects of death threats. During the pandemic he received a full-scale security detail.
In his book, Fauci reports his last conversation with Trump, in which Trump said he would win re-election “by a fucking landslide” against Biden, whom he deemed “fucking stupid.”
Those are my offerings for today. I hope you find something of interest to you here.
Lazy Caturday Reads: Trump is Back on the Campaign Trail, and it’s Frightening
Posted: June 8, 2024 Filed under: cat art, Cats, caturday, Donald Trump | Tags: Autocracy, Monuments to famous cats, Trump campaign's unconstitutional plans, Trump fantasies of violence, Trump's narcissism and selfishness 6 CommentsGood Afternoon!!
This monument is located in Kyiv, Ukraine. The statue depicts a cat named Panteleimon, who was famous for his habit of sitting near a pharmacy in the city during the 19th century.
During his trial in Manhattan, Trump repeatedly claimed that he was being prevented from campaigning, even though he chose not to do so during his off days. Then, after his conviction, he spent a week golfing. But he has returned to the campaign trail now, and we’re learning more about his violent fantasies, his extreme narcissism and selfishness, and, worst of all, his authoritarian ambitions.
He gave two revealing interviews to Sean Hannity and Dr. Phil McGraw. Some reactions:
Donald Trump Friday was accused of making a threat against U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland in a Fox News interview.
In the interview with Trump, the conservative network asks the former president what he thinks of Garland. Garland was first chosen by then-President Barack Obama to be a Supreme Court justice, but was made A.G. by President Joe Biden after Republicans tanked his judicial nomination during the election.
“What do you say about Merrick Garland?” the host asked.
“I’m disappointed in him,” Trump said, adding that Garland is known as being “very liberal.”
“But I always looked upon him as being a very legitimate person,” Trump then added. “And I’m very disappointed that he’s allowed this all to happen. A raid of Mar-a-Lago. They could have had whatever they wanted!”
Responding to that clip, former prosecutor Ron Filipkowski said, “Make no mistake, this is a threat.”
Dem strategist Adam Parkhomenko echoed those comments.
“Trump pretends he would’ve supported Merrick Garland for the Supreme Court while, as [Filipkowski] points out, making a threat,” he wrote on Friday.
It’s not explicit, but Trump knows he doesn’t have to do much to get his rabid followers to start harassing people he designates as enemies.
Mediaite: Trump Says ‘Sometimes Revenge Can Be Justified’ During Interview With Dr. Phil: ‘I Have to be Honest.’
Former President Donald Trump told Dr. Phil McGraw on Thursday that “sometimes revenge can be justified” after the television host suggested Trump wouldn’t “have time to get even” with his enemies in a second term in the White House.
“I think you have so much to do, you don’t have time to get even. You only have time to get right,” said McGraw during an interview with Trump on Dr. Phil Primetime.
“Well revenge does take time, I will say that,” replied Trump. “And sometimes revenge can be justified, Phil. I have to be honest. Sometimes it can.”
Phil questioned, “But is the country better or worse for going after you?”
“I think the country is really worse for what they’ve done and I think you see that when you look at the poll numbers,” said Trump. “When you see that almost $400 million has poured in since this horrible decision [in the New York hush money trial] was made, that was a few days ago. Numbers that nobody’s ever heard of in politics before. It’s a great honor.”
After Trump was found guilty of 34 felony counts of falsifying business documents, the former president suggested on Fox News’ Hannity this week that he could get revenge on President Joe Biden if he wins a second term in November.
“Look, when this election is over, based on what they’ve done, I would have every right to go after them, and it’s easy because it’s Joe Biden,” he said.
Greg Sargent at The New Republic: Trump’s Bizarre Moments With Dr. Phil and Hannity Should Alarm Us All.
During just this week, two of Donald Trump’s friendliest interviewers handed him big prime-time opportunities to unequivocally renounce any intention to retaliate against Democrats for his criminal conviction by a jury of his peers in Manhattan. Both times, Trump demurred.
“Sometimes revenge can be justified,” Trump told Dr. Phil McGraw, after he suggested that seeking retribution for Trump’s criminal charges would harm the country. Though Trump graciously said he was “open” to showing forbearance toward Democrats, he suggested revenge would be tempting, given “what I’ve been through.”
Miss Chippy, tribute to the feline companion of Sir Ernest Shackleton, a renowned Antarctic explorer.
Trump voiced similar sentiments to Sean Hannity after the Fox News host practically begged him to deny he’d pursue his opponents. “I would have every right to go after them,” Trump said. Though Trump nodded along with Hannity’s suggestion that “weaponizing” law enforcement is bad, Trump added, “I don’t want to look naïve,” seemingly meaning that if he doesn’t seek revenge, he’ll have been victimized without acting to set things right.
These moments have been widely mocked as a sign that even Trump’s media pals can’t help him disguise his true second-term intentions. That’s true, but there’s another point to be made here: The exchanges should awaken us to what a monstrous scam it is when Trump and his allies talk about unleashing prosecutions of foes as “revenge” and “retribution.”
We have to stop letting Trump get away with this. It’s actually spin, and we should all say so….
In the media, this story tends to be framed as follows: Will Trump seek “revenge” for his legal travails, or won’t he? But that framing unwittingly lets Trump set the terms of this debate. It implies that he is vowing to do to Democrats what was done to him.
But that’s not what Trump is actually threatening. Whereas Trump is being prosecuted on the basis of evidence that law enforcement gathered before asking grand juries to indict him, he is expressly declaring that he will prosecute President Biden and Democrats solely because this is what he endured, meaning explicitly that evidence will not be the initiating impulse.
You might think this distinction is obvious—one most voters will grasp instinctually. But why would they grasp this? It’s not uncommon to encounter news stories about Trump’s threats—see here, here, or here—that don’t explain those basic contours of the situation. Such stories often don’t take the elementary step of explaining the fundamental difference between bringing prosecutions in keeping with what evidence and the rule of law dictate and bringing them as purported “retaliation.” Why would casual readers simply infer that prosecutions against Trump are legally predicated while those he is threatening are not?
Read the rest at TNR.
Hugh Lowell at The Guardian on Trump’s violent fantasies: Trump to escalate blame on trial judge Juan Merchan if sentenced to prison.
Donald Trump is determined to avoid jail, but if he does get handed a prison sentence after his conviction on 34 felony counts in New York last week, the former president’s inner circle is certain he will lay the blame squarely at the judge’s feet, sources familiar with the matter said.
The precise way Trump might blame the judge, Juan Merchan, remains unclear because Trump has been avoidant of the issue and the matter was not resolved when he huddled with his top advisers at a Trump Tower meeting immediately after the verdict on Thursday, the sources said.
But Trump is likely to double down on his attacks against Merchan, directing his supporters at rallies and in Truth Social posts to take up their grievances with the judge, one of the sources added.
The consequences of Trump’s likely rhetoric are difficult to predict. Trump has been railing against Merchan for months as being unfair and in conspiracy cahoots with the Biden administration to prevent him from campaigning – and nothing concrete has happened.
Still, Trump’s supporters have a history of making threats against judges Trump has assailed, including death threats to Tanya Chutkan, the US district judge who is presiding in his federal 2020 election interference case, and to the chambers of the New York judge who oversaw his civil fraud trial.
Trump believes – correctly – that the ultimate decision with sentencing rests with Merchan, who has wide discretion to sentence him to fines or probation on the low end, to a carceral sentence on the high end, regardless of what prosecutors might request.
That reasoning would be the basis for Trump to hold the judge responsible for any fallout, in the event he hands down a jail term days before the Republican national convention – even if the sentence would almost certainly be stayed pending appeal.
Trump has already spent weeks railing against Merchan, taking advantage of the fact that the judge himself is not protected by the gag order. Both before and during the trial, Trump slammed the judge’s rulings as unfair and biased, and falsely suggested he was trying to stop him campaigning.
Read more at The Guardian.
As for his obvious narcissism and selfishness, look what happened at a rally in Arizona, and what could happen again tomorrow at his afternoon rally in Las Vegas.
BBC News: Extreme heat sends 11 to hospital at Arizona Trump rally.
Extreme heat in Arizona sent 11 people to hospital as thousands waited to enter a campaign rally with former President Donald Trump.
As Trump took the stage just after 17:00 EDT (22:00 GMT) at a mega-church in Phoenix, the temperature was 111F (44C).
Hamish McHamish was a beloved ginger cat that became a local celebrity in the town of St. Andrews, Scotland.
It was his first rally since his criminal conviction in a New York hush-money case, which found him guilty of falsifying business records in relation to a payment to adult-film actress Stormy Daniels.
Trump used the campaign event to repeat accusations that the case against him was politically motivated and called for the conviction to be overturned.
“I just went through a rigged trial in New York,” he insisted. “It was made-up, fabricated stuff.” [….]
Fans started lining up early outside the massive Phoenix Dream City Church to see him speak, and strict security measures meant it took time for everyone to get in.
As supporters waited outside the campaign rally, BBC News saw several people being treated for heat-related issues and two were taken to hospital.
On Thursday – two weeks before summer even officially starts – the National Weather Service (NWS) forecast record-breaking temperatures in interior California, and parts of Nevada and Arizona.
Temperatures were expected to reach 121F (49C) in California’s scorching Death Valley during the heatwave.
In Phoenix, an excessive heat warning is in place on Friday, with people being asked to limit time outdoors and stay hydrated.
Why would the campaign schedule a rally in the afternoon in Phoenix? Because Trump had date with big donors at a fundraiser on Thursday night in San Francisco.
Talia Jane at The New Republic: Team Trump Brags About Letting Supporters Pass Out From Heat Stroke.
Team Trump boasted about people “braving” extreme heat in Arizona while waiting to watch Trump ramble incoherently at a campaign rally for over an hour on Thursday, making no mention that at least 11 people collapsed and were hospitalized for heat exhaustion.
“That’s an enthusiasm that Joe Biden will never see,” Trump’s newsletter proclaimed of the crowds stuck roasting on unshaded concrete. “That’s the enthusiasm Americans have to Make America Great Again!”
The intense loyalty to Trump from his supporters—largely elderly and more prone to heat stroke—is a disturbing example of how far his extremist base is willing to suffer just for a glimpse of their dear leader. Their queasy dedication speaks to the religious fervor cultivated by Trump who touts himself as a messiah who has come to save the masses from the satanic swamp, a Jesus preaching gobbledygook from the mountaintop of Dream City megachurch in Phoenix. On Friday, Trump boasted about a song that refers to him as “the chosen one”—words he has explicitly said in the past.
That Team Trump apparently took no measures to meet its base’s most basic human needs amid an anticipated high of 108 degrees on Thursday—neither handing out water nor setting up cooling tents in anticipation of the heat—and instead touted their suffering as “enthusiasm” speaks to the level of appreciation Trump has for those who support him, which is to say obviously none.
Michael Gold at The New York Times: As Trump Rallies in the Southwest, Extreme Heat Threatens MAGA Faithful.
This week, with former President Donald J. Trump holding campaign events in the Southwest, his team is grappling with an extreme heat wave that has threatened the health of some of his most ardent fans.
On Thursday, Mr. Trump went to Phoenix for a campaign event at a megachurch, where hopeful attendees waited for hours to enter as the temperature climbed above 110 degrees. The heat was so scorching that some of those waiting collapsed, and 11 people were taken to hospitals to be treated for heat exhaustion.
Tombili the Cat was a beloved street cat from Istanbul, known for his relaxed and laid-back posture while sitting on a step.
The Trump campaign is taking steps to avoid similar circumstances on Sunday, when Mr. Trump is scheduled to speak at an outdoor rally at noon at a park in Las Vegas. Forecasts expect the temperature to be around 105 degrees.
Much of the western United States has been contending with a heat wave all week. Both Phoenix and Las Vegas have been under an excessive heat warning for days, with afternoon temperatures hovering in the triple digits.
And the temperatures have been historic: Phoenix peaked at 113 degrees on Thursday, and Las Vegas at 111, both daily records for those cities….
The Weather Service’s excessive heat warning in Las Vegas is set to expire at 9 p.m. on Saturday, the night before Mr. Trump’s rally. But temperatures are currently expected to hit a high of 104 on Sunday with little cloud cover.
Supporters eager to attend a Trump event will generally arrive hours before the candidate does, standing in long, slow-moving lines to get through security screenings and secure a good vantage point. The wait can be trying in normal circumstances.
This time the campaign says they will have bottled water available along with tents to provide some relief from the sun. It still seems inhumane to schedule and event like this in the afternoon in a hot climate.
This is what MAGA expert Ron Filipkowski posted on Twitter:
Why is Trump holding his rally in the middle of the afternoon outside in Las Vegas tomorrow after dozens of people went to the hospital a few days ago at his AZ rally from the heat? And AZ was inside – those people went down in line just waiting to get through the magnetometers.
On the threat of autocracy if Trump is elected again:
The Washington Post: Trump plans to claim sweeping powers to cancel federal spending.
Donald Trump is vowing to wrest key spending powers from Congress if elected this November, promising to assert more control over the federal budget than any president in U.S. history.
The Constitution gives control over spending to Congress, but Trump and his aides maintain that the president should have much more discretion — including the authority to cease programs altogether, even if lawmakers fund them. Depending on the response from the Supreme Court and Congress, Trump’s plans could upend the balance of power between the three branches of the federal government.
The Constitution gives control over spending to Congress, but Trump and his aides maintain that the president should have much more discretion — including the authority to cease programs altogether, even if lawmakers fund them. Depending on the response from the Supreme Court and Congress, Trump’s plans could upend the balance of power between the three branches of the federal government.
During his first term, Trump was impeached after refusing to spend money for Ukraine approved by Congress, as he pushed Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to provide incriminating evidence about the Biden family. At the time, Trump’s aides defended his actions as legal but largely did not dispute that the president is bound to adhere to budgetary law.
Since then, however, Trump and his advisers have prepared an attack on the limits on presidential spending authority. On his campaign website, Trump has said he will push Congress to repeal parts of the 1974 law that restricts the president’s authority to spend federal dollars without congressional approval. Trump has also said he will unilaterally challenge that law by cutting off funding for certain programs, promising on his first day in office to order every agency to identify “large chunks” of their budgets that would be halted by presidential edict.
“I will use the president’s long-recognized Impoundment Power to squeeze the bloated federal bureaucracy for massive savings,” Trump said in a plan posted last year. “This will be in the form of tax reductions for you. This will help quickly to stop inflation and slash the deficit.”
That pledge could provoke a dramatic constitutional showdown, with vast consequences for how the government operates. If he returns to office, these efforts are likely to turn typically arcane debates over “impoundment” authority — or the president’s right to stop certain spending programs — into a major political flash point, as he seeks to accomplish via edict what he cannot pass through Congress.
More details at the WaPo link.
Also from The Washington Post, by Beth Reinhard: Trump loyalist pushes ‘post-constitutional’ vision for second term.
A battle-tested D.C. bureaucrat and self-described Christian nationalist is drawing up detailed plans for a sweeping expansion of presidential power in a second Trump administration. Russ Vought, who served as the former president’s budget chief, calls his political strategy for razing long-standing guardrails “radical constitutionalism.”
Again, read more at the WaPo.
Finally, at The New York Times, Charlie Savage, Jonathan Swan, and Maggie Haberman have an article that summarizes the campaign’s plans for the country: “If Trump Wins.”
It’s a pretty bare-bones summary in the following catgories:
Crack down on illegal immigration to an extreme degree.
Use the Justice Department to prosecute his adversaries
Increase presidential power
Aggressively expand his first-term efforts to upend America’s trade policies
Retreat from military engagement with Europe
Use military force in Mexico and on American soil
That’s it for me today. Trump is back campaigning, and the press is focusing on him.
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