So they modify their claim: Biden is addled and wandering, except when he is given some sort of medication, perhaps a stimulant, that reverses that effect. And here we are, with Trump and those seeking his reelection to the White House demanding that Biden submit to some sort of drug test before this week’s first presidential debate, purportedly in effort to sniff out this theoretical drug.
Lazy Caturday Reads
Posted: June 29, 2024 Filed under: 2024 presidential Campaign, Corrupt and Political SCOTUS, Donald Trump, Joe Biden, Media, SCOTUS, The Media SUCKS | Tags: Barack Obama, CNN, criminalizing homelessness, Democratic National Convention 1968, Fischer v United States, George McGovern, John Fetterman, Kamala Harris, obstruction of justice, Rachel Bitecover, Steve Bannon 8 Comments
Girl reading with a cat, by Aaron Shikler
Happy Caturday!!
I was really depressed on Thursday night after the “debate.” I couldn’t stop scrolling Twitter and obsessing on the horrible CNN “moderators,” who might as well have been replaced with cards with their idiotic questions on them. But it never occurred to me that Biden should step down and be replaced by “someone else.”
I had a mostly sleepless night, but by morning I had calmed down quite a bit; and after I watched Biden’s energetic speech in South Carolina, I felt much better. Here’s the way he ended that speech:
From NBC News: ‘I don’t debate as well as I used to’: Biden tries to move on from his tough debate at an energized rally.
RALEIGH, N.C. — President Joe Biden tried to turn his disappointing debate performance into a rallying cry for his supporters at an event on Friday, painting himself as down but not out as some in his party whisper about replacing him atop the ticket.
“I know I’m not a young man. I don’t walk as easy as I used to. I don’t speak as smoothly as I used to. I don’t debate as well as I used to, but I know what I do know — I know how to tell the truth!” an energetic Biden said, nodding at the criticism he received following Thursday night’s debate while contrasting it with assessments about the accuracy of several statements by former President Donald Trump.
“When you get knocked down, you get back up,” Biden yelled, to a cheering crowd
“I intend to win this state in November,” Biden said about North Carolina. “We win here, we win the election.”
The campaign event, in a state that hasn’t voted Democrat for a presidential candidate since Barack Obama in 2008, comes after what many political observers and some Democrats have said was a poor debate performance by Biden Thursday night against former President Donald Trump.
About last night, Biden said on Friday, “I spent 90 minutes on the stage and debated the guy who has the morals of an alley cat.”
Though he coughed at times during Friday’s remarks, Biden’s demeanor was more lively, delivering attack lines and riling up the crowd.
A small child reading to a cat by Emile Munier
Biden said that when he thought about Trump’s 34 felony convictions, his sexual assault on E. Jean Carroll, and being fined millions of dollars for business fraud, “I thought to myself, Donald Trump isn’t just a convicted felon — Donald Trump is a one-man crime wave.”
A senior Biden adviser said the campaign team worked closely with the president Friday morning to draft his closing remarks in Raleigh about the debate. It was not, the adviser said, a response to negative coverage or the calls growing in the party for him to consider stepping aside. Biden, the adviser said, knows full well he didn’t deliver the performance he needed to last night and knew he needed to directly address it Friday.
This is what Barack Obama tweeted yesterday:
Bad debate nights happen. Trust me, I know. But this election is still a choice between someone who has fought for ordinary folks his entire life and someone who only cares about himself. Between someone who tells the truth; who knows right from wrong and will give it to the American people straight — and someone who lies through his teeth for his own benefit. Last night didn’t change that, and it’s why so much is at stake in November. joebiden.com
Biden’s performance in the debate was dreadful, but it was just one night; and as Lawrence O’Donnell pointed out on MSNBC last night, very few people actually watched it. Probably most of the people who watched were political junkies like us.
This morning I see that lots of pundits are still calling on Biden to step down. Most of the young white men who are calling for a replacement (e.g. Ezra Klein, Greg Sargent) have no good suggestions for how this would happen and how that person would get on the state ballots and raise millions in donations to fund his/her campaign. They mostly want to pass over Kamala Harris too. Can you imagine the turmoil that would cause in the Democratic base, which is dominated by African Americans and women?
The last time the Democrats replaced a presumptive nominee was in 1968. Ezra Klein probably isn’t old enough to remember what happened then. Click below to watch a sample video of the Chicago riots.
There was a “police riot” outside and chaos on the Convention floor. Hubert Humphrey was chosen, even though he didn’t enter a single primary. He went on to lose to Richard Nixon, and the rest is painful history. And this year the Democratic Convention is once again in Chicago!
I didn’t realize that the new rules that George McGovern pushed through in 1972 changed the nomination process so much that replacing a nominee would much harder now than in 1968. Political scientist Rachel Bitecofer explains on Twitter:
[O]nce the direct primary evolved from the McGovern-Fraser commission after the 1968 shitshow the conventions really lost their institutional role. It is an officiating ceremony that *could* get disrupted given the rules but which neither party could ever really do bc so much of the state level infrastructure runs way ahead of the formal moment of nomination. Thus it would guarantee destruction to broker a convention. If Election Twitter had bothered to get academic training I have, they would understand that too. Military ballots mail months ahead of the election. It’d be like nuking ourselves trying to change him out. Even if he wanted us to.
In my opinion, we have to keep ridin’ with Biden.
A couple more examples of pushback on the “he should step down” crowd:
Mediaite: Biden Team Hits Back After Debate With Whopping ’50 Lies Trump Told On The Debate Stage.’
President Joe Biden’s campaign hit back after a widely-panned debate performance by listing a whopping 50 “lies” ex-President Donald Trump “told from the debate stage.”
President Biden and Trump finally went head-to-head at CNN’s debate Thursday night in the earliest general election presidential matchup ever, and the reviews are in. After some deadly early stumbles, President Biden’s performance improved, but not enough to ward off abject panic from some Democrats, and calls for him to drop out.
Vice President Kamala Harris made the rounds after the debate, including during CNN’s Debate Night in America coverage to defend Biden’s “slow start” and to assail Trump over his many falsehoods.
And shortly after midnight, Biden-Harris 2024 released a memo listing 50 of them:
All 50 of Trump’s Lies
16 More Lies Than Felonies, 48 More Lies than Impeachments
Here it is. Every single lie Donald Trump told on the debate stage.
He lied about the economy. He lied about foreign policy. He lied about his record. He lied about his crimes. He lied about women’s rights. He lied about immigration. He lied about his lies. He lied about our soldiers he disrespected. He lied about law enforcement attacked by his supporters. He lied about who he has had sex with. He lied about his racism. He lied about our country.
That is what the substance of this debate was about: Donald Trump, a liar and a felon vs. Joe Biden, a fighter for our families.
Read the entire list at Mediaite.
Huffpost: ‘Chill The F**k Out’: John Fetterman Urges Democrats To Stick With Joe Biden.
Sen. John Fetterman (D-Pa.) urged Democrats panicking about President Joe Biden’s rough debate performance against Donald Trump to chill out.
Phan Linh Bao Hanh, Lady with cat reading book
“I refuse to join the Democratic vultures on Biden’s shoulder after the debate. No one knows more than me that a rough debate is not the sum total of the person and their record,” Fetterman said Friday on X, formerly Twitter.
Fetterman, who is 54, suffered a stroke while running for Senate in 2022 but later went on to debate his Republican opponent Mehmet Oz. It didn’t go well. He struggled to complete sentences, stumbling over words and pausing altogether as a result of the auditory processing disorder he suffered from the stroke.
Some Democrats expressed similar alarm at the time and wondered whether deciding to the debate had tanked Fetterman’s odds of winning the seat.
“Morning-after thermonuclear beat downs from my race from the debate and polling geniuses like 538 predicted l’d lose by 2. And what happened? The only seat to flip and won by a historic margin (+5),” Fetterman added. “Chill the fuck out.”
Before I get to more of today’s news, here is a review of Rachel Bitcofer’s (quoted above) book, Hit ‘Em Where It Hurts: How to Save Democracy by Beating Republicans at Their Own Game.
Paul Rosenberg at Salon: Rachel Bitecofer’s tough-love lesson for Democrats: Time to Fight Dirty. (The article was published in February.)
America’s future — as a multiracial democracy or an ethno-nationalist authoritarian state — is very much on the ballot this year, as a wide range of observers have noted. But you’d be hard-pressed to see that reality reflected in the mainstream media, much less from the mouths of the randomly-selected potential voters interviewed on the ground, the folks who will supposedly determine the outcome in November. It’s a dire situation that political scientist turned election strategist Rachel Bitecofer tackles head-on in her new book, “Hit ‘Em Where It Hurts: How to Save Democracy by Beating Republicans at Their Own Game.” She describes it as “a battle-tested self-help book for America’s fragile democracy.”
Back in 2019 I first noted Bitecofer’s acumen for election predictions, shown in her forecast of Democrats’ big 2017 gains in the Virginia legislature and then her spot-on prediction of the 2018 blue wave, based on fundamental voter demographics and her perception of partisan polarization and negative partisanship, rather than following the polls. In 2021, I interviewed Bitecofer about her evolution from academic into brand messenger, as she put those methods to work in fighting to counter the expected “red tsunami” of 2022. The Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision and its aftermath helped shift a substantial number of campaigns along the lines she predicted, as she lays out in the book, drawing on insights from decades of political science research.
Bitecofer’s most basic point is simple: Democrats as a whole — despite their “reality-based” self-image — have been unable or unwilling “to accept that the American voter is, at best, rough clay,” and to work with it accordingly. On the other hand, she writes, “Republicans have long understood this and have built an electioneering system that shapes the electorate and meets voters where they actually are.” The point of “Hit ‘Em Where It Hurts” is to convince Democrats to change their strategic approach while there’s still time to rescue democracy, and to focus relentlessly on the threat posed by Republicans in terms that hit voters where they are.
The good news is that some Democrats have already made that shift, while others are groping their way towards it. But to be effective, this needs to be comprehensive, bottom-to-top systemic change, Bitecofer believes, and that hasn’t happened yet. She also discusses the effects of the right-wing media ecosystem, and the think-tank and donor infrastructures that underlie it, to paint a fuller picture of America’s perilous political situation. But in fact, she argues, Democrats and their allies can turn the tide by focusing on low-hanging fruit — the things that are easiest to change. Salon interviewed her with a particular focus on those most immediate concerns and the 2024 election. This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
Head over to Salon to read the interview.
More stories to check out today:
Dan Froomkin at Press Watch: CNN fails the nation.
The signal failure of the American media during the Trump era has been the refusal to hold Donald Trump accountable for his behavior – and, in particular, his endless lies.
That has never been more obvious than it was at Thursday night’s presidential debate.
The CNN moderators who should have corrected Trump’s outrageous and easily disproved assertions – about immigration, abortion, Covid, Jan. 6, NATO, you name it – instead thanked him obsequiously.
Girl reading with a cat, by Merle Keller
The result was a debate where performance meant everything, and substance meant nothing.
Biden’s performance was stumbling and inept – highly concerning to anyone who fears a Trump victory.
But Trump’s incessant lying, refusal to answer direct questions, and general lunacy would have been the other major takeaway from the debate if the moderators had done their jobs instead of acting like polite potted plants.
They even let him know ahead of time that they wouldn’t do live fact-checking – an obvious and colossal mistake that I decried earlier this week. That gave Trump the green light to let loose without consequences.
Twitter (I still call it that) is not a reliable forum for much of anything these days, but it was alive and well Thursday night as people I follow realized, in real time, what a debacle CNN’s no-fact-checking rule had become.
Richard Stengel wrote: “A debate where one candidate flagrantly lies again and again without a mechanism for correction is not a debate.”
David Rothkopf wrote: “The lack of challenges from moderators has the effect of making it appear that the lies flowing from Trump’s mouth are the same as the facts in which Biden is dealing.”
Jessica Valenti wrote: “I’m sorry, but Trump just claimed that Democrats allow ‘after birth’ abortion and the moderators’ only response was ‘thank you’???”
Ruth Ben-Ghiat wrote: “The debate is about information warfare for Trump. As I said earlier today, you don’t let a proven propagandist on stage without stopping him when he lies. Instant refutation is key. Have we learned nothing in the last 9 years?”
Will Bunch wrote: “CNN’s lack of fact checking and wooden questions are just as bad for democracy as everything else that’s happening.”
Read more comments at the link.
Josh Fiallo at The Daily Beast: Bannon Is ‘Quite Concerned’ About His New Prison Digs: Source.
MAGA loyalist Steve Bannon is dreading his soon-to-be-reality of being housed alongside sex offenders and violent criminals when he reports to prison in Connecticut on Monday, a source close to him told The Daily Beast on Friday.
Bannon, 70, was told to face the music on Friday when the nation’s highest court declined to indulge his pleas for a last-minute reprieve. With a one-sentence ruling, the Supreme Court ordered that he could no longer delay his sentence while he appeals the conviction.
Woman reading, by Will Barnet
Bannon is set to spend four months at FCI Danbury—a low-level prison in Connecticut where he’ll be housed alongside people convicted of sexual and violent crimes. The source said that’s something Bannon is “quite concerned with.”
His charges stem from him blowing off a subpoena from the House committee investigating the Capitol riot. He has spent two years since then trying every avenue of appeal, arguing that he was only following the advice of his lawyer, who told him then-President Donald Trump had evoked executive privilege. (Multiple courts ruled that there was no executive privilege since Trump had already left office.)
Bannon, however, insists publicly that he has no regrets and will only benefit from a prison sentence, according to ABC.
“I’m a political prisoner… It won’t change me. It will not suppress my voice. My voice will not be suppressed when I’m there,” he told This Week co-anchor Jonathan Karl.
“If it took me going to prison to finally get the House to start to move, to start to delegitimize the illegitimate J6 committee, then, hey, guess what, my going to prison is worth it,” he said.
Politico prisoner? I don’t think so.
Joyce Vance is always a good read. From Civil Discourse: Thursday in the Courts.
These days, it’s a race to the bottom to see who can move more slowly to decide important issues related to the former president that are in front of them: Judge Aileen Cannon or the Supreme Court. It is a tense moment in our history, abetted by a slow-moving federal judiciary.
The Supreme Court has yet to decide whether Donald Trump will be cloaked in presidential immunity for his efforts to steal an election he lost. That’s something that seems completely nonsensical when you try to write it out in a sentence. But it has apparently kept the Court, or at least some of the Justices, tied up in knots for months now.
Hugo Lowell at the Guardian reported today that DOJ still holds out a slender hope that, depending on how the Supreme Court decides the case and whether it sends it back to the Court of Appeals or to Judge Chutkan, there could be a very narrow potential trial window in September. The sun, moon, and stars would have to all align for that to happen now. But, it didn’t have to be this way. We are here because this Supreme Court didn’t act expeditiously like the Court did with President Nixon or in Bush v. Gore.
Judge Cannon, too, is allergic to ruling on matters before her when it comes to Donald Trump. Earlier this week, she heard argument from the lawyers on the Special Counsel’s motion to change Trump’s conditions of pre-trial release—the government wants the Judge to prohibit him from continuing to say the FBI was out to assassinate him when they executed the search warrant at Mar-a-Lago. That’s something that even his own lawyer was forced to concede isn’t true in court.
Elizabeth Allan Fraser, Seated Reading with a Cat, by Patrick Allan Fraser
Rather than making a decision (which would be immediately appealed by the losing party to the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals), Judge Cannon has ordered another go-round of briefing by the lawyers with a due date on July 5….
Judge Cannon is also going to reconsider the decision made by Judge Beryl Howell, in Washington, D.C., that the government is entitled, because of the crime-fraud exception to the attorney-client privilege, to use notes kept by one of Trump’s attorneys to prove the former president’s intent to obstruct the investigation into his retention of classified material. The hearing before Judge Howell was detailed and Trump was provided with the opportunity to make all of the same arguments he will raise again before Cannon. It’s surprising to see a judge relitigate an issue between the same parties that a court previously decided, but Judge Cannon wrote that because the first decision took place before Trump was indicted, she is entitled to revisit the issue. This issue has been pending for some time and Judge Cannon seems to be in no hurry to rule.
A Judge’s job is, literally, to make decisions. We see precious little of that going on in the Southern District of Florida. Delay. Delay. Delay.
This slow-walking of the cases essential to holding the former president accountable came to a crescendo just as Trump and Biden took to the debate stage in Atlanta. Trump lied shamelessly. With no fact-checking, it sounded a lot like a typical Trump stump speech. For instance, Trump lied and said he was responsible for lowering Insulin prices. That’s a bald-faced lie—it was done by Biden. But it went unchecked. President Biden’s performance was off; his raspy voice sounded like he was coming down with something, and especially early on, he didn’t convey the same State of the Union speech energy people hoped to see tonight.
Nicole Santa Cruz at ProPublica: U.S. Supreme Court Ruling Will Allow More Aggressive Homeless Encampment Removals.
The U.S. Supreme Court’s decision to give cities broader latitude to punish people for sleeping in public when they have no other options will likely result in municipalities taking more aggressive action to remove encampments, including throwing away more of homeless people’s property, advocates and legal experts said.
In its 6-3 decision on Friday, the conservative majority upheld Grants Pass, Oregon’s ban on camping, finding laws that criminalize sleeping in public spaces do not violate the Eighth Amendment’s protections against cruel and unusual punishment.
Writing for the majority, Justice Neil Gorsuch said that the nation’s policy on homelessness shouldn’t be dictated by federal judges, rather such decisions should be left to state and local leaders. “Homelessness is complex,” Gorsuch wrote. “Its causes are many. So may be the public policy responses required to address it.”
“At bottom, the question this case presents is whether the Eighth Amendment grants federal judges primary responsibility for assessing those causes and devising those responses. It does not,” he wrote.
A lower court ruling that prevented cities from criminalizing the conduct of people who are “involuntarily homeless” forced the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit to confront what it means to be homeless with no place to go and what shelter a city must provide, Gorsuch wrote. “Those unavoidable questions have plunged courts and cities across the Ninth Circuit into waves of litigation,” he wrote.
In a dissenting opinion, Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote that, for some people, sleeping outside is a “biological necessity” and it’s possible to balance issues facing local governments with constitutional principles and the humanity of homeless people. “Instead, the majority focuses almost exclusively on the needs of local governments and leaves the most vulnerable in our society with an impossible choice: Either stay awake or be arrested,” she wrote.
Criminalizing homelessness can “cause a destabilizing cascade of harm,” Sotomayor added. When a person is arrested or separated from their belongings, the items that are frequently destroyed include important documents needed for accessing jobs and housing or items required for work such as uniforms and bicycles, Sotomayor wrote.
Brandi Buchman at Law and Crime: The Trump Docket: SCOTUS hands victory to Jan. 6 rioters, but Trump should hold off on celebrating.
With the Supreme Court handing down its ruling in Fischer v. United States, there are many convicted Jan. 6 rioters who have something to celebrate this weekend — but whether the same can be said for Donald Trump isn’t so clear.
Undoubtedly, the Fischer ruling is a win for Trump politically speaking: Now he can hit the campaign trail and cite the high court’s opinion that federal prosecutors misapplied their efforts when charging some of his supporters.
But no matter what he says — or how he may or may not distort the legally-complex decision itself — there’s still the problem of his own case for alleged crimes connected to Jan. 6. The high court said Friday that its last opinions for the term will be released on Monday and by all expectations, that means that the question of whether Trump has so-called “total immunity” from his Jan. 6 case is imminent.
But short of receiving that immunity, Trump still faces four charges in Washington, D.C., two of which are related to obstruction….
The way the justices in Fischer linked prosecution of the statute to documents and records, specifically, matters because this is part of what underlies Trump’s prosecution in Washington, D.C.: Prosecutors argue he acted corruptly and arranged a set of shadow electoral slates, using falsified records in seven states, to certify him as the winner. In his original indictment for the Jan. 6 prosecution, Smith wrote that Trump was “attempting to mimic the procedures that the legitimate electors were supposed to follow under the Constitution and other federal and state laws.”
You can also read a longer piece on this by Richard Hasan at Slate: That Big Jan. 6 Supreme Court Decision Is Not the Win for Trump People Think It Is.
That’s it for me today. I hope you all are having a nice weekend, despite the disappointing debate.
Finally Friday Reads: CNN, Shame Shame Shame!
Posted: June 28, 2024 Filed under: U.S. Politics | Tags: 2024 Supreme Court Rulings, @repeat1968, Donald Lies more than he breathes, John Buss, June 2024 Presidential Debate 12 Comments
“I’ve got the real debate covered, so you can watch baseball this debate night. Here it is in one screenshot. You’re welcome.” John Buss, @Repeat1968
Good Day, Sky Dancing!
The last thing I remember about the debate last night was Donald spewing the usual christofascist lies about abortion. At some point, I refilled my wine glass, turned it all off, and fell asleep looking at real estate in Mexico. I even tried to comment at the start, but it became too shocking for me to continue with that at some point. I didn’t get a live thread up last night. I woke up at 5 a.m., unable to process what I had seen.
I remember why I never watch CNN anymore, and I’m more firmly committed to that decision. Here’s the best they could do this morning. It’s a healthy dose of bothsiderism. “Fact-checking the CNN presidential debate — Both President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump made false and misleading claims during CNN’s presidential debate on Thursday – but Trump did so far more than Biden, just like in their debates in 2020. — Trump made more than 30 false claims at the Thursday debate.”
The entire thing was a clusterfuck. I’m going with Rebecca Solnit first today. Here is her headline at the Guardian. “The true losers of this presidential debate were the American people. We didn’t need this show. Each candidate has had time to show us who they are, and one is a felon trying to destroy democracy.”
The American people lost the debate last night, and it was more painful than usual to watch the parade of platitudes and evasions that worked in the debate format run by CNN. The network’s glossy pundit-moderators started by ignoring the elephants in the room – that one of the two men standing at the podiums was a convicted felon, the leader of a coup attempt, an alleged thief of national security documents who was earlier this year found liable in a civil court for rape, and has promised to usher in a vengeful authoritarian regime if he returns to office.
Instead they launched the debate with the dead horse they love to beat in election years, the deficit and taxes. Throughout the excruciating evening, Joe Biden in a hoarse voice said diligent things that were reasonably true and definitely sincere; Donald Trump in a booming voice said lurid things that were flamboyantly untrue. The grim spectacle was a reminder that this is a style over substance game.
Debates are a rite in which not truth but showmanship wins the day, and in which participants get judged as though it was a sporting event – which it pretty much is, in high school and college debate events. Before 2016, presidential debates were relatively decorous events in which the participants slammed each other, but more or less within the parameters of the true and the real with maybe a little distortion and exaggeration.
Then came Trump. You cannot win a debate with a shameless liar, because what you’re supposed to be debating are facts and positions. A lie is a kind of poison; once it’s in the room it makes an impression that is hard to undo, and trying to undo it only amplifies it.
Trump’s positions on anything and everything shift and slide at will, and he lies about his own past with pathological confidence – in this debate he both denied that he had sex with Stormy Daniels and that he praised the white supremacists who stormed Charlottesville in 2017. More substantively he lied – unchallenged, except by Biden – about his role in the January 6 coup attempt, and the CNN pundits did not trouble him further about his crimes. Trump talked about whatever he wanted – asked about the opiates crisis, he reverted to the lurid stories about sex crimes and open borders that obsess him and inflame his followers.
Most outrageous of all, and of course utterly unchecked, was one of the falsehoods Trump has been pushing for years – the claim that abortion continues on into infanticide, that doctors and new mothers are murdering babies at birth. That one candidate has long supported reproductive rights and the other has led the attack on them was not something you would learn from this debate.
I will also share this analysis by Historian Heather Cox Richardson from her substack Letters from an American.
Tonight was the first debate between President Joe Biden and presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump, and by far the most striking thing about the debate was the overwhelming focus among pundits immediately afterward about Biden’s appearance and soft, hoarse voice as he rattled off statistics and events. Virtually unmentioned was the fact that Trump lied and rambled incoherently, ignored questions to say whatever he wanted; refused to acknowledge the events of January 6, 2021; and refused to commit to accepting the result of the 2024 presidential election, finally saying he would accept it only if it met his standards for fairness.
Immediately after the debate, there were calls for Biden to drop out of the race, but aside from the fact that the only time a presidential candidate has ever done that—in 1968—it threw the race into utter confusion and the president’s party lost, Biden needed to demonstrate that his mental capacity is strong in order to push back on the Republicans’ insistence that he is incapable of being president. That, he did, thoroughly. Biden began with a weak start but hit his stride as the evening wore on. Indeed, he covered his bases too thoroughly, listing the many accomplishments of his administration in such a hurry that he was sometimes hard to understand.
In contrast, Trump came out strong but faded and became less coherent over time. His entire performance was either lies or rambling non-sequiturs. He lied so incessantly throughout the evening that it took CNN fact-checker Daniel Dale almost three minutes, speaking quickly, to get through the list.
Trump said that some Democratic states allow people to execute babies after they’re born and that every legal scholar wanted Roe v. Wade overturned—both fantastical lies. He said that the deficit is at its highest level ever and that the U.S. trade deficit is at its highest ever: both of those things happened during his administration. He lied that there were no terrorist attacks during his presidency; there were many. He said that Biden wants to quadruple people’s taxes—this is “pure fiction,” according to Dale—and lied that his tax cuts paid for themselves; they have, in fact, added trillions of dollars to the national debt.
Dale went on: Trump lied that the U.S. has provided more aid to Ukraine than Europe has when it’s the other way around, and he was off by close to $100 billion when he named the amount the U.S. has provided to Ukraine. He was off by millions when he talked about how many migrants have crossed the border under Biden, and falsely claimed that some of Biden’s policies—like funding historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) and reducing the price of insulin to $35 a month—were his own accomplishments.
I refuse to listen to calls for Joe to quit. Me, the nagging naysayer about Joe’s days in the Senate.
This morning, we woke up to more bad news. This is from the Washington Post. “Supreme Court curbs federal agency power, overturning Chevron precedent. The Chevron precedent was targeted by conservatives who say the government gives too much power to federal bureaucrats.” This is reported by Ann E. Marimow. They are shamelessly turning us over to their Corporate Overlords. I wonder what gratuity Alito and Thomas get for this one?
The Supreme Court on Friday curtailed the power of federal government agencies to regulate vast swaths of American life, overturning a 40-year-old legal precedent long targeted by conservatives who say the government gives unaccountable bureaucrats too much authority.
For decades, the court’s decision in Chevron U.S.A. v. Natural Resources Defense Council directed judges to defer to the reasonable interpretations of federal agency officials in cases that involve how to administer ambiguous federal laws.
Writing for the majority in the 6-3 ruling, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. said that framework has proved “unworkable” and allowed federal agencies to change course even without direction from Congress.
The court is finally ending “our 40-year misadventure with Chevron deference,” Roberts said, reading parts of his opinion from the bench.
The court’s three liberal justices — Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson — dissented, with Kagan writing that the majority has turned itself into “the country’s administrative czar,” taking power away from Congress and regulatory agencies.
“A rule of judicial humility gives way to a rule of judicial hubris,” she said, reading part of her dissent from the bench.
The precedent, established in 1984, gave federal agencies flexibility to determine how to implement legislation passed by Congress. The framework has been used extensively by the U.S. government to defend regulations designed to protect the environment, financial markets, consumers and the workplace.
While lower courts have relied on the Chevron in tens of thousands of cases evaluating federal rules and orders, conservatives have balked at the legal precedent, and the approach has fallen out of favor in the last decade as the Supreme Court moved to the right. The high court’s conservative supermajority includes three justices nominated by President Donald Trump, whose administration put a premium on judges skeptical of federal government power and the so-called administrative state.
The second decision announced today was an Appeal from one of the January 6th rioters. This is from the Washington Post. “Supreme Court says prosecutors improperly charged hundreds of Jan. 6 rioters Supreme Court’s decision on obstruction charge will impact trials of hundreds of Jan. 6 rioters and, potentially, former president Donald Trump.” It’s also reported by Ann E. Marimow.
Federal prosecutors improperly charged hundreds of Jan. 6 defendants with obstruction, a divided Supreme Court ruled on Friday, upending many cases against rioters who disrupted the certification of the 2020 presidential election.
After the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol, federal prosecutors charged more than 350 participants in the pro-Trump mob with obstructing or impeding an official proceeding. The charge carries a 20-year maximum penalty and is part of a law enacted after the exposure of massive fraud andshredding of documents during the collapse of the energy giant Enron.
Writing for the majority, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. said the government’s broad reading of the statute would give prosecutors too much discretion to seek a 20-year maximum sentence “for acts Congress saw fit to punish only with far shorter terms of imprisonment.”
One last debate thought from David Frum’s article today for the Atlantic. “Trump Should Never Have Had This Platform. The debate was a travesty—because its whole premise was to treat a failed coup leader as a legitimate candidate for the presidency.”
The first question about January 6 was asked at minute 41.
Donald Trump replied with a barrage of crazy lies, ending by seeming to blame Nancy Pelosi’s documentarian daughter.
Then, just to be fair, CNN moderator Jake Tapper followed up with a question to President Joe Biden. Did he really mean to imply that Trump’s voters were a danger to democracy?
Biden fumbled the answer, as he fumbled so many other answers. The octogenarian president delivered a fiasco of a performance on the Atlanta debate stage. But the fiasco was not his alone.
Everything about the event was designed to blur the choice before Americans. Both candidates—the serving president and the convicted felon—were addressed as “President.” The questions treated an attempted coup d’état as one issue out of many. The candidates were left to police or fail to police the truth of each other’s statements; it was nobody else’s business.
Today, CNN is hinting a producer thinks it was just terrific. But as Frum states, this is not a choice between Colgate and Crest, which is basically how the Nixon-Kennedy debate was presented back in the days of real Don Drapers. David Kurtz of Talking Points Memo has a similar analysis. How can you present a debate highlighting a sociopath with a proven performance of madness as just another presidential choice regardless of the presumed issues with President Biden?
I’m going to the dentist this afternoon. It’s a nice, mundane thing to walk down the street, head into the office, and sit in the waiting room with everyone else. Not my favorite mundane thing, but mundane none the less. I’m going to try escapism again like retired Lt. General Honore. I’m not sure what the form will be, but I enjoyed seeing all those nice little houses in Mexico.
What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
Wednesday Reads
Posted: June 26, 2024 Filed under: "presidential immunity", 2024 presidential Campaign, Donald Trump, Joe Biden, just because | Tags: Biden-Trump debate 2024, Biden-Trump debates 2020, FBI search of Mar-a-Lago, Judge Aileen Cannon, Murthy v Missouri, No Biden won't be on drugs, Snyder v United States, stolen documents case, Supreme Court, Trump attacks on FBI agents, Trump storage methods 4 CommentsGood Day!!
Studio Scene, by Kayoon Anderson
Today, the press and cable TV are mostly focused on tomorrow’s debate and how Biden can deal with Trump’s insanity and incoherence. I don’t find the discussions about this very interesting. I think Biden knows how to bait Trump, and no one really knows what crazy nonsense Trump will unleash. I hope Biden will mock Trump’s fear of sharks and electric boats; his claims that there’s not enough water in shower heads and dishwashers; and his claim that he got his vast knowledge about “nuclear” by osmosis from his uncle the MIT professor. Trump has absolutely no interest or knowledge about policy and Biden can demonstrate that too.
It is concerning that Trump is claiming Biden will be “jacked up” on drugs, because low information voters appear to be incredibly stupid and will likely believe it. Of course, Trump is the one who could be using drugs as a crutch.
Philip Bump at The Washington Post: No, Biden won’t be on performance-enhancing drugs for the debate.
Allies of Donald Trump have painted themselves into a cognitive corner. President Biden is unfit for office, they argue, because he is so old, and his mental abilities have deteriorated markedly. But then Biden will, say, deliver a State of the Union address in which he is energetic and pointed for more than an hour.
Experts who spoke with The Washington Post, though, confirm that no such medicine exists.
At the outset, we should recognize that this claim is generally not offered seriously. It is, instead, an effort to escape the aforementioned contradiction, a way to hold both that Biden is incapable of serving as president and yet, unquestionably at times, not demonstrating any such impairment. What’s more, the demand that Biden undergo a drug test is itself not serious. It is, instead, meant to create a condition that allows Trump and his allies to continue to claim that any strong performance from Biden is a function of medication. The result is win-win for Trump, who can blame any loss on this wonder drug.
The wackos at Fox “News” are busy speculating about what drugs Biden could be using.
Host Maria Bartiromo — no stranger to conspiratorial argumentation — hosted Rep. Eric Burlison (R-Mo.) where she offered an observation made by Rep. Ronny Jackson (R-Tex.).
“Jackson says Biden will have been at Camp David for a full week before the debate,” Bartiromo said, “and that they’re probably experimenting with getting doses right. Giving him medicine ahead of the debate.”
Burlison agreed that this was possible, though he offered that it might be more innocuous than medication. Perhaps, he said, Biden’s team is “jack[ing] him up on Mountain Dew.”
“Nothing like that exists,” Thomas Wisniewski, director of the NYU Langone Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center, told The Washington Post by phone. “There are no medications or stimulants that can reverse a dementing process transiently.”
but quite often that can just exacerbate their confusion, as well,” he added. “They can be more stimulated, but they are not going to be behaving in a more cogent or normal fashion as a result of being stimulated by anything. Very often it’s the reverse.”
Adam Brickman, associate professor of neuropsychology at Columbia University Irving Medical Center, concurred with that assessment.
“I’m not aware of any medications that would reverse or mask cognitive decline,” Brickman said. What’s more, he noted that “the association between energy and cognition is a very weak one. In other words, someone could have low energy but totally intact cognition and vice versa.”
Of course the goal of these drug claims is to prepare the idiots who support Trump for the likelihood that Biden will wipe the floor with Trump during tomorrow’s debate.
Amanda Marcotte at Salon: Trump’s claim that Biden is “jacked up” on drugs is more than projection — it’s cult conditioning.
Donald Trump has been thinking a lot about cocaine lately, even though drug-running is one of the few felony charges he’s not been indicted or convicted for. He has been routinely accusing President Joe Biden of using drugs, with the usual vivid details Trump injects into all his weird fantasies. “So a little before debate time, he gets a shot in the a—,” Trump told rallygoers in Philadelphia Saturday. “I say he’ll come out all jacked up,” he added, before going off on a diatribe accusing Biden of being the owner of a bag of cocaine found in a White House visitors’ closet last year.
La Lecture, 1877, by Henri Fanton-Latour
Since there’s no flight of Trump’s fancy too bizarre for right-wing media, this obsession of Trump’s is getting echoed by Republican politicians and MAGA talking heads. Fox News hosts, Republican politicians, MAGA media influencers, and every right-wing troll on Twitter have been playing their part as well-trained parrots, repeating the lie. The National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC) is even putting the lie in paid advertising.
Everyone knows that Trump’s favorite rhetorical tactic is psychological projection. You’d think Republicans would be a little more worried this would raise questions about what Trump has been ingesting. But no: The campaign tapped disgraced former White House doctor Rep. Ronny Jackson, R-Tex. to be a major Trump surrogate pushing this lie. Jackson’s been hitting both TV and podcasts to toss around drug names like “Adderall” and “Provigil.” This only reinforces suspicions that this accusation is a confession, however. When Jackson was Trump’s White House doctor, he earned the nickname “Dr. Feelgood” for relentlessly pushing these drugs on people who do not need them. Jackson’s behavior was so egregious that the Navy stripped him of his rank.
What’s telling about this lie is, as with many MAGA falsehoods, it seems few, if any, of the people repeating it actually believe it. Trump and his allies have accused Biden not just of being a little tired at times, but of having dementia. As Mona Charen pointed out on the “Daily Blast” podcast, if Adderall could restore a demented person’s brain, they’d be mass distributing it to the millions of people who are suffering from this disease. As for the cocaine accusation, even the most naive person in the country knows cocaine makes people less coherent, not sharper. It causes people to ramble on about nonsense, which is closer to describing your average Trump speech, not anything Biden has been up to.
Trump is using his second favorite trick, besides projection: Tricking his followers into believing they’re in on his con.
Trump isn’t trying to convince anyone of this lie. He’s convincing them that, by repeating the obvious lie, they can share in what they believe is his mastery over reality itself. The lie is not a thing the MAGA person sincerely believes. It’s a weapon Trump has provided them. When he loses the debate, which they clearly expect he will, the lie gives them a way to participate in the post-debate spin. But it’s also the stupidity of the lie that makes it so fun. Saying something deliberately dumb is a reliable way to drive the liberals mad. Angering liberals is the emotional core of the MAGA base….
As I’ve written about before, this strategy is the oldest technique in the con artist’s book. The best way for a grifter to gain a mark’s trust is to make him feel like he’s in on the con. Cult leaders operate the same way, by creating this sense of intimacy with their victims. Once the mark feels he’s part of the conspiracy, it’s that much easier to victimize him. The mark feels like the predator and not the prey, and so he lets his guard down around the actual villain picking his pocket. Trump does this to his followers over and over again, and they always fall for it. Even the Capitol insurrection is a good example. Trump convinced the rioters that they were his partners in the attempted coup. In reality, they were his patsies, set up to take the fall while he hid away in the White House.
Read the whole piece at Salon. It’s good.
NPR has an interesting article on the Biden and Trump “debates” in 2020: COVID tests and crosstalk: What happened the last time Trump and Biden debated.
With Trump and Biden now near even in the latest polls, and many Americans unenthused — and still undecided — about voting for either of them, Thursday’s debate offers both candidates an opportunity. But it’s not without risks.
It’s likely to be a memorable night if 2020 is any indication. Here’s a look at what happened last time Trump and Biden took the stage together….
Albert Edelfelt, Portrait of the artist’s sister Bertha Edelfelt, 1881
The first round, in September 2020, was by many accounts a disaster. NPR’s Domenico Montanaro called it “maybe the worst presidential debate in American history.”
Trump arrived on the debate stage trailing in the polls and, apparently, jonesing for drama. He interrupted Biden constantly, peppering him with questions and personal slights despite moderator Chris Wallace’s pleas for order.
At one point, while Biden was talking about his late son Beau’s military service, Trump jumped in to attack his other son, Hunter, for his drug use (which Biden managed to seize as a sympathetic moment).
Biden tried in vain to ignore Trump talking over him throughout — but called the then-president a “clown” more than once. At one point he had clearly had enough.
“Will you shut up, man?” he said exasperatedly, as Trump continued accusing him of wanting to pack the Supreme Court. “This is so unpresidential.”
Trump even bulldozed over Wallace, prompting the then-Fox News anchor to declare, “Mr. President, I am the moderator of this debate and I would like you to let me ask my question and then you can answer.”
A bit more on the first “debate”:
Still, a few substantive moments stood out amidst the chaos and crosstalk.
One was when Wallace asked if Trump was willing to condemn white supremacists and tell them to “stand down.”
Trump blamed the “left-wing” instead, but said he was prepared to do so. At that point, both Wallace and Biden urged him to go ahead. Trump asked for a name, and Biden suggested the Proud Boys.
“Proud Boys, stand back and stand by,” Trump said, in what sounded more like a call to action, and quickly became part of the far-right extremist group’s new social media logo.
Trump also repeatedly made baseless claims about the upcoming election being rigged, saying “This is going to be fraud like you’ve never heard.”
When Wallace asked if he would urge his supporters to stay calm during a potentially prolonged period of counting ballots, Trump demurred. He said instead that he was “urging my supporters to go into the polls and watch very carefully.”
“If it’s a fair election, I am 100% on board,” he said. “But if I see tens of thousands of ballots being manipulated, I can’t go along with that.”
Read the rest at NPR.
The Supreme Court is still releasing decisions. Once again, they have held back the one on Trump’s claim of “presidential immunity.” They announced two decisions today.
The Guardian: US supreme court allows government to request removal of misinformation on social media.
The US supreme court has struck down a lower court ruling in the case of Murthy v Missouri, finding that the government’s communications with social media platforms about Covid-19 misinformation did not violate the first amendment. The court’s decision permits the government to call on tech companies to remove falsehoods and establishes boundaries around free speech online.
The court ruled 6-3 that the plaintiffs had no standing to bring the case against the Biden administration, with conservative justices Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch dissenting.
The ruling is a blow to a longstanding Republican-backed effort to equate content moderation with censorship. Plaintiffs in the lawsuit, which included the founder of a far-right conspiracy website, argued that the government and federal agencies were coercing tech companies into silencing conservatives through demands to take down misinformation about the pandemic.
Bloomberg Law: Supreme Court Further Weakens Public Corruption Prosecutions.
The US Supreme Court again pared back a public corruption law, this time saying that state and local officials who accept “gratuities” aren’t covered by a federal bribery statute.
The 6-3 ruling by Justice Brett Kavanaugh on Wednesday was the latest in a string of cases cutting the reach of federal corruption laws and prosecutorial discretion to bring charges against government officials.
Woman reading in garden. Ignacio Díaz Olano
In the latest case, Snyder v. United States, the justices said a law which makes it a crime for certain state or local officials to “corruptly” accept anything of value over $5,000 doesn’t reach gratuities paid in recognition of past actions.
The ruling undoes the conviction of former Portage, Indiana, Mayor James Snyder for receiving $13,000 from a trucking company after it was awarded city contracts.
A contrary ruling had the potential to criminalize “commonplace gratuities” like a Dunkin’ Donuts gift card, Chipotle dinner, or tickets to a Hoosiers game, the court said.
The ruling split the justices along ideological lines. Writing for the liberal justices in dissent, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson said “Snyder’s absurd and atextual reading of the statute is one only today’s Court could love.”
The justices’ concern over prosecutorial overreach could have implications for a number of criminal cases over the Jan. 6 Capitol riot. The justices in Fischer v. United States are considering whether federal prosecutors went too far in charging some defendants with an Enron-era statute prohibiting obstruction of an official proceeding.
Judge Aileen Cannon held another hearing yesterday in her efforts to waste as much time as possible and prevent the stolen documents case from going to trial. Here’s some of what happened:
Adam Klasfeld at Just Security: Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Search Challenge Flounders: Judge Signals Warrant Passed Muster.
Nearly two years after the FBI’s search of Mar-a-Lago, former President Donald Trump’s effort to suppress the evidence that agents found inside his personal residence and social club appeared to fall flat on Tuesday.
Trump’s attorney, Emil Bove, argued that the search warrant was not detailed enough to survive Fourth Amendment scrutiny.
U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon pointedly disagreed: “It seems like it is, based on the caselaw that’s been submitted,” she said, minutes before court adjourned.
Though Cannon did not immediately issue a ruling, Trump’s challenge hinges on the “particularity” of the warrant, and her remarks throughout the proceedings left little doubt as to her leanings.
“It’s clearly delineated there to search for documents with classification markings,” she remarked toward the start of the hearing.
Click the link to read more about the hearing.
At Public Notice, Liz Dye wrote about Trump’s claims that he should be able to attack anyone involved in the legal cases against him: Trump asserts constitutional right to harass FBI agents.
In the stolen documents case in Florida, Trump called the special counsel’s motion to stop him from spreading vicious lies about the FBI agents who searched Mar-a-Lago a “naked effort to impose totalitarian censorship of core political speech, under threat of incarceration, in a clear attempt to silence President Trump’s arguments to the American people about the outrageous nature of this investigation and prosecution.” [….]
In Florida, Special Counsel Jack Smith moved to bar Trump from accusing the FBI agents who executed the search warrant at Mar-a-Lago of trying to assassinate him.
The backstory is that on May 21, Trump claimed to have been “shown Reports” that President Biden “AUTHORIZED THE FBI TO USE DEADLY (LETHAL) FORCE” back in August 2022 when it raided the private club where he was storing stolen government documents.
Sleeping Woman with a Book, by Ferdinand Max Bredt
In fact, the “Report” was boilerplate language from the FBI’s operations order for the warrant, attached as an exhibit to his own motion to suppress the evidence kicked up on that raid. The FBI took great care to execute the warrant at a time when the club was shuttered for the season and there was no prospect that the former president and his family would be there. Nevertheless, Trump and his MAGA henchmen spent several news cycles claiming that President Biden had sent in agents “locked and loaded” ready to shoot him.
Those agents will necessarily be witnesses at the trial (should it ever happen), and yet Trump is falsely accusing them of attempted murder. Two of them were already publicly outed back in 2022 when someone gave the unredacted warrant to Breitbart and a former Trump aide, both of whom published it with the agents’ signatures visible.
After the agents were doxxed, they and their families were threatened and harassed, which influenced Magistrate Judge Bruce Reinhart’s decision to keep under seal parts of the affidavit in support of the warrant.
“Given the public notoriety and controversy about this search, it is likely that even witnesses who are not expressly named in the Affidavit would be quickly and broadly identified over social media and other communication channels, which could lead to them being harassed and intimidated,” he wrote.
Judge Cannon doesn’t seem to think this is a big deal.
Trump insists that his lies about the FBI are “core political speech” protected by the First Amendment. He also deliberately distorts the “heckler’s veto,” as he has done many times before, claiming that he cannot be silenced to prevent foreseeable, violent acts by his supporters. But as the DC Circuit wrote in its order upholding the gag order in the election interference case, “That doctrine prohibits restraining speech on the grounds that it ‘might offend a hostile mob’ hearing the message.” [….]
The DC Circuit judges noted that the trial judge need not find that the defendant’s statements had led to violent attacks in this case, they could infer the danger from attacks on everyone from Atlanta poll workers, to grand jurors in Fulton County, to the jury foreperson doxxed in the Roger Stone case. Applying the standard set out by the Supreme Court in Gentile v. State Bar of Nevada, the judges blessed the gag order based on a finding that Trump’s attacks on witnesses, jurors, and court staff posed a “substantial likelihood of materially prejudicing” the proceedings.
But that may not matter to Judge Aileen Cannon, who showed marked hostility to this (and every other) prosecutorial motion at a hearing Monday in Fort Pierce, where she waved away the ample record of Trump endangering witnesses and law enforcement, as well as an exhibit showing threats to FBI agents by a man who was killed in an attempted attack on an FBI building in Cincinnati just days after the warrant on Mar-a-Lago was executed.
“There still needs to be a factual connection between A and B,” the judge said, rebuffing Assistant US Attorney David Harbach’s efforts to make the government’s case.
“Mr. Harbach, I don’t appreciate your tone,” she fumed in response to the complaint that she wasn’t letting the government articulate its position, according to Just Security’s Adam Klasfeld, who was in the courtroom. “I expect decorum in this courtroom at all times. If you cannot do that, I’m sure one of your colleagues can take up this motion.” [….]
It seems highly unlikely that Cannon will do anything to curb Trump’s speech, until someone else gets hurt — and, if and when that happens, she will blame the government for failing to properly argue in favor of the gag order.
One more on the stolen documents case from Justin Rohrlich at The Daily Beast: New Pics Show Nuclear Secrets Stashed Beside the Diet Cokes at Mar-a-Lago.
On Monday night, following Trump’s latest disingenuous contention—that the FBI agents who seized and reviewed the contents of boxes upon boxes of sensitive materials stored at Mar-a-Lago “failed to maintain” the exact order of the documents within, which Trump now claims could somehow exonerate him—government lawyers filed a scathing response letting the air out of Trump’s contentions.
Nikolai Bekker Portrait of Countess Maria Hilarionovna Worontsov-Dachkova (1919).
Far from a neatly ordered system under which Trump, a notorious pack rat, maintained a precise inventory of important documents, Special Prosecutor Jack Smith, along with prosecutors Jay Bratt and David Harbach, noted the “cluttered collection of keepsakes,” which “traveled from one readily accessible location to another” around the Palm Beach, Florida club.
“[T]his is not a case where reams of identically-sized documents were stacked neatly in file folders or redwelds, arrayed perfectly within a box,” the filing states. “To anyone other than Trump, the boxes had no apparent organization whatsoever.”
Trump kept highly guarded secrets in boxes with “personally chosen keepsakes of various sizes and shapes from his presidency—newspapers, thank you notes, Christmas ornaments, magazines, clothing, and photographs of himself and others,” the government’s filing goes on.
“After they landed in stacks in the storage room, several boxes fell and splayed their contents on the floor; and boxes were moved to Trump’s residence on more than one occasion so he could review and pick through them,” the filing continues. “Against this backdrop of the haphazard manner in which Trump chose to maintain his boxes, he now claims that the precise order of the items within the boxes when they left the White House was critical to his defense, and, what’s more, that FBI agents executing the search warrant in August 2022 should have known that.”
Smith, Bratt, and Harbach included a slew of exhibits to back up their position, with numerous previously unseen pictures of Trump’s decidedly chaotic storage methods. One shows assorted wadded-up golf shirts side-by-side with a folder marked “CONFIDENTIAL.” Another shows extremely sensitive defense-related documents carelessly stacked up on the floor beside cases of Diet Coke, a Hermes tie box, and a “Save America” cap, several toppled boxes with papers, binders, and folders spilling out, and a box containing a Christmas pillow and a random length of bubble wrap, beneath which, as national security analyst and writer Marcy Wheeler pointed out, at least one document prosecutors say was related to America’s nuclear weapons program.
In one exhibit, Smith & Co. provide a new photo of a storage closet at Mar-a-Lago where the contents of at least five upturned bankers boxes can be seen spilling out onto the floor. Several suit jackets in plastic dry cleaning bags hang from a rack above them, a Gibson guitar case leans against the wall, and what appears to be a piece of rococo plaster molding teeters atop a cardboard box nearby. According to the indictment, one of the boxes seen here contained a 2019 document marked “SECRET//REL TO USA, FVEY,” which denotes the Five Eyes intelligence alliance that includes Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the U.S.
Read more and see photos at the Daily Beast link.
This post is getting really long, so I’m going going to end there. I’ll add a few more links in the comment thread. Have a great day, everyone!!
Mostly Monday Reads: Unravelling the Graft and Threat of Donald’s Campaign
Posted: June 24, 2024 Filed under: U.S. Politics | Tags: classified documents case, Donald Trump, Fox News, Joe Biden, Presidential Debates 2024, Project 2025, Randy Rainbow, Republicans 7 Comments
“Meanwhile… at Mar-a-Lardo, debate prep is in full swing for the convicted felon and presumptive Republican presidential candidate.” John Buss, @repeat1968
Good Day, Sky Dancers!
The media might finally be waking up to the threat to democracy and our country that Donald, his thralls, his plan, and the people who have planted themselves around him pose. Perhaps their short attention spans have turned toward the Thursday Presidential Debate. It’s also possible that the more you know about Project 2025, the more you realize how dangerous these people are. More news outlets are beginning to report on it.
The AP is reporting today that a “Conservative-backed group is creating a list of federal workers it suspects could resist Trump plans.” This shows how seriously the MAGA crowd is taking it. They’re already doing the necessary research to implement it. There will be no guardrails if Donald gets back into the White House.
From his home office in small-town Kentucky, a seasoned political operative is quietly investigating scores of federal employees suspected of being hostile to the policies of Republican Donald Trump, a highly unusual and potentially chilling effort that dovetails with broader conservative preparations for a new White House.
Tom Jones and his American Accountability Foundation are digging into the backgrounds, social media posts and commentary of key high-ranking government employees, starting with the Department of Homeland Security. They’re relying in part on tips from his network of conservative contacts, including workers. In a move that alarms some, they’re preparing to publish the findings online.
With a $100,000 grant from the Heritage Foundation, the goal is to post 100 names of government workers to a website this summer to show a potential new administration who might be standing in the way of a second-term Trump agenda — and ripe for scrutiny, reclassifications, reassignments or firings.
Today, Donald will be in Sleazy Steve Scalise’s district for fundraising. I can only imagine which of the outstate Republicans will come to lay out his trough. This is reported by nola.com, the remnants of the once-great Times-Picayune. “Donald Trump to visit New Orleans on Monday to raise cash for his presidential campaign.” I imagine our new D’ohvenor will be there to take the knee. The Oil and Gas Companies down here will shovel cash in his direction, and there will be White Christian Nationalists to encourage his angry, hateful, bigoted tirades.
Former President Donald Trump is scheduled to visit New Orleans on Monday for a fundraiser, less than a month after he was convicted on 34 felony charges in a New York courtroom.
The first criminal conviction of a U.S. president seems to have only cleaved supporters to him even closer.
Business owner Boysie Bollinger, who is hosting Trump at his Uptown New Orleans home, said organizers were originally hoping to raise $2 million but now believe they’ll collect $5 million.
“The obvious abuse by the (legal) system has got people upset,” Bollinger said. “It’s empowered people and made them feel stronger about him having a viable chance to run a good race.”
U.S. Rep. Steve Scalise, whose district includes the slice around Tulane University that includes Bollinger’s home, will be the special guest at the event.
“The stakes have never been higher,” said Scalise, the number two Republican in the U.S. House. “The Democratic Party has moved so far to the left under Biden that Barack Obama looks like a moderate.”
Trump’s visit takes place only three days before he and President Joe Biden engage in the first televised debate of the 2024 campaign. Tens of millions of people are expected to watch the 90-minute telecast on CNN.
There’s some good news on the polling front, at least. However, it’s still too early to count on anything. This is from Politico, as reported by Adam Wren. “Trump is on a fundraising blitz. But there are other warning signs for Republicans. For the first time this year, the Fox News poll had Joe Biden leading Donald Trump by two points, within the poll’s margin of error.”
For Republicans who spent much of the year crowing about Joe Biden’s weaknesses, Donald Trump’s massive fundraising haul looked like an affirmation, with the former president erasing Joe Biden’s longstanding cash advantage.
But outside of the money race, a series of other developments in recent days have left even Republicans with the impression that November may not be quite as good for the GOP as it once seemed.
First came the GOP’s underperformance in a special House race in a deep-red swath of Ohio that included a swing county. Then, after Republicans over the weekend nominated a far-right candidate for lieutenant governor in Indiana, a top national GOP lawyer predicted a “serious” threat to the top of the ticket even in the heart of MAGA country.
Now, new polling from Fox News shows an 11-point swing in President Joe Biden’s favorability among independents: They prefer Biden by 9 points, a reversal from May, when they favored Trump by 2 points.
For the first time this year, the poll has Biden leading Trump by two points, 50-48, within the margin of error.
Trump may be raking in donations. But across the country, the mood of Republicans has dimmed, according to nearly a dozen Republican operatives, county chairs and current and former GOP officials. It comes amid ongoing concerns about the effect of abortion on Republican candidates. And it follows defections from Trump in the primaries and, most recently, polling that has found Trump’s conviction in his New York hush-money trial hurting him with independents.
There’s also evidence that young voters back Biden/Harris in another poll reported by The Hill. “Young voters backing Biden over Trump by 23-point margin: Poll.” However, this news is no reason to be complacent about anything. Back to Project 2025. The Guardian Explainer is one source to get basic information. “What is Project 2025, and what does it have to do with a second Trump term? Conservatives have created a guide for how Trump and allies could dismantle the US government if he wins the election.” This is from May of this year. Remember, the AP is already reporting they’re preparing to implement the plan.
The June edition of The Nation also provided a primer on what the plans will do. “Why Trump’s Second Victory Would Be Worse. There’s now a real, organized effort to transform his resentments and impulses into policy. It’s called Project 2025.” This effort was organized by Robert L. Borosage.
How far might Donald Trump go, if given a second chance? The estimates range from dictatorship to a rerun of his first term, when indolence, ignorance, and incompetence mitigated his menace.
But this time promises to be different—and far worse. Trump’s tempestuous stump performances, which meld vaudeville with venom, provide a clue. He has repeatedly promised to round up and deport millions of immigrants, pardon the January 6 offenders, prosecute his persecutors, impose tariffs on all imports—perhaps higher than 60 percent on goods from China—and “Drill, baby, drill!”
What’s different this time, as this special issue details, is that there is now an organized effort to transform Trump’s resentments and impulses into policy. Trump’s MAGA acolytes have not only dethroned the Republican establishment in Congress and red-state legislatures; they have taken over the party’s think tanks, including the Heritage Foundation, once the bastion of Reagan conservatism.
Now these MAGA operatives are, in the words of Heritage president Kevin D. Roberts, intent on “institutionalizing Trumpism.” The foundation’s Project 2025 includes a 900-page book, Mandate for Leadership, that lays out a Trumpist agenda for every corner of the government; a still-secret 180-day Transition Playbook for the first six months in office; a right-wing version of LinkedIn to recruit and vet candidates for political appointment; and a Presidential Academy to train them.
The essays in this issue describe core aspects of what is more assault than agenda, revealing how Project 2025 turns Trump’s insults and grievances into policy predicates. The result is a chilling guidebook to a second Trump term.
Please check it out. Donald and his minions and thralls are always up to something. BB pointed me to Emptywheel, where Marcy writes this. With Putin reportedly learning Mandarin, this paints a very unpleasant landscape. “AN EGYPTIAN BANK CLAIMED DETAILS OF A SUSPECTED $10 MILLION PAYMENT TO TRUMP MIGHT BE IN CHINA.”
Back on September 19, 2018, then DC Chief Judge Beryl Howell denied a motion brought by an Egyptian bank to quash a subpoena for information on a suspected $10 million payment made to then-candidate Trump in fall 2016. That set off litigation that continued, at the District, Circuit, and Supreme Courts, for at least nine months.
As CNN described in 2020, not long after the investigation got shut down under Bill Barr, investigators had been trying to see whether Egypt (or some entity for which Egypt served as go-between) provided the money that Trump spent on his campaign weeks before the election.
For more than three years, federal prosecutors investigated whether money flowing through an Egyptian state-owned bank could have backed millions of dollars Donald Trump donated to his own campaign days before he won the 2016 election, multiple sources familiar with the investigation told CNN.
The investigation, which both predated and outlasted special counsel Robert Mueller’s probe, examined whether there was an illegal foreign campaign contribution. It represents one of the most prolonged efforts by federal investigators to understand the President’s foreign financial ties, and became a significant but hidden part of the special counsel’s pursuits.
The investigation was kept so secret that at one point investigators locked down an entire floor of a federal courthouse in Washington, DC, so Mueller’s team could fight for the Egyptian bank’s records in closed-door court proceedings following a grand jury subpoena. The probe, which closed this summer with no charges filed, has never before been described publicly.
Prosecutors suspected there could be a link between the Egyptian bank and Trump’s campaign contribution, according to several of the sources, but they could never prove a connection.
It took months of legal fight after Judge Howell denied that motion to quash before the Egyptian bank in question complied, and once they got subpoena returns, prosecutors repeatedly complained that the bank was still withholding information, which led prosecutors to reopen the investigation with a new grand jury.
That much we know from documentation unsealed back in 2019 (part one, part two, part three), in response to a Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press request for unsealing.
On August 17, 2023, while she was still Chief Judge, Beryl Howell ordered the government to post newly unsealed sets of some of the orders she issued during the litigation. On Thursday, Chief Judge Boasberg ordered that newly redacted set of opinions to be released. While Howell released six opinions in June 2019 along with the other materials from the case — with redactions done digitally, thereby hiding the length of redactions — just three new versions of her orders got released last week:
- September 19, 2018 memorandum denying motion to quash
- January 15, 2019 memorandum regarding sanctions
- January 30, 2019 memorandum limiting ability to refer to proceedings
These may be limited to orders incorporated as appendices in prior appeals, which might also explain why the first two appear twice in the newly-released materials.
Much of the newly unsealed material pertains to a fight over how much Alston & Bird, the law firm representing the Egyptian bank, could say about the litigation publicly
Feeling any better? So, not only Russia but also China was actively backing Trump in the 2016 election. ABC News has some more background on the Documents case, which is languishing in Loose Cannon’s court. “Special counsel probed Trump Mar-a-Lago trip that aides ‘kept quiet’ weeks before FBI search: Sources. One witness was told Trump was “checking on the boxes,” sources said.”
A trip to Mar-a-Lago taken by former President Donald Trump that aides allegedly “kept quiet” just weeks before FBI agents searched the property for classified materials in his possession raised suspicions among special counsel Jack Smith’s team as a potential additional effort to obstruct the government’s classified documents investigation, sources familiar with the matter told ABC News.
The previously unreported visit, which allegedly took place July 10-12 in the summer of 2022, was raised in several interviews with witnesses, sources familiar with the matter said, as investigators sought to determine whether it was part of Trump’s broader alleged effort to withhold the documents after receiving a subpoena demanding their return.
At least one witness who worked closely with the former president recalled being told at the time of the trip that Trump was there “checking on the boxes,” according to sources familiar with what the witness told investigators.
Trump pleaded not guilty last year to 40 criminal counts related to his handling of classified materials after leaving the White House, after prosecutors said he repeatedly refused to return hundreds of documents containing classified information and took steps to thwart the government’s efforts to get them back. His longtime aide, Walt Nauta, and Mar-a-Lago property manager Carlos De Oliveira pleaded not guilty to related charges.
I’m glad more details on the Crime Spree, which is the Trump Campaign, are coming out. It may not impact the red state thralls, but it sure would play well with Independents and young voters if the Biden/Harris campaign can motivate them to turn out.
Anyway, Happy Monday! We’ll have a live thread on the night of the debate. However, WordPress has had endless problems lately since they made changes involving Jet Pack. It’s getting impossible for me to even comment on my post. I’ll try to call them on Wednesday, which is a day off from student time for me.
What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
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.
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