“I’m going with this. Lock him up. Guilty 34 counts.” John Buss, @repeat1968
Good Day, Sky Dancers!
Donald stands in front of many flags, noticeably shaken and spouting the usual lies. It’s the same old, same old from the same old, same old. This old, tired man has a lot of old, tired excuses and blame-shifting. This is the most spaced-out presser I think I’ve ever seen. He’s just rambling on. Maybe he’s just discovered he’s mortal and is in shock. Who knows what goes on in that addled old mind of his? However, it’s still a clarion call for the KKKult.
This is from Reuters. “Trump supporters call for riots and violent retribution after verdict.” Isn’t that against the Law? Lock them up with him!
Supporters of former President Donald Trump, enraged by his conviction on 34 felony counts by a New York jury, flooded pro-Trump websites with calls for riots, revolution and violent retribution.
After Trump became the first U.S. president to be convicted of a crime, his supporters responded with dozens of violent online posts, according to a Reuters review of comments on three Trump-aligned websites: the former president’s own Truth Social platform, Patriots.Win and the Gateway Pundit.
Some called for attacks on jurors, the execution of the judge, Justice Juan Merchan, or outright civil war and armed insurrection.
“Someone in NY with nothing to lose needs to take care of Merchan,” wrote one commentator on Patriots.Win. “Hopefully he gets met with illegals with a machete,” the post said in reference to illegal immigrants.
On Gateway Pundit, one poster suggested shooting liberals after the verdict. “Time to start capping some leftys,” said the post. “This cannot be fixed by voting.”
Some Trump supporters were considered unconsolable. Poor, nasty, racist, bigoted, homophobic, women-hating deplorables! The New York Timesattempts to gauge America’s response to the verdict. “The Trump Verdict: Americans React. Initial reactions nationwide to former President Donald J. Trump’s conviction on all 34 counts of falsifying business records.” This was my favorite woman-on-the-street response.
Ashley Daniels, 38, Los Angeles
“My first initial thought was joy, because it’s been going on for so long, just waiting for some sort of justice,” she said.
“But I feel a little amazed, when I looked it up, that he actually can still run for president now that he’s been convicted for 34 felonies. Like you can get denied for regular-Joe jobs, but you can be president for 34 felonies. It’s kind of crazy. But I’m hoping we’re moving in a good direction.”
The Guardian also asked some folks on the street. “‘I’d enjoy seeing him go to prison’: voters react to guilty verdict in Trump trial. Some are ‘glad to see him held accountable’ while others call conviction a ‘travesty’ and believe it will embolden his base.”
Inside the Wisconsin state capitol on Thursday evening, Brian Schimming, the chair of the Wisconsin Republican party, decried Donald Trump’s conviction in blistering terms. The conviction was an embarrassment. The verdict, “rigged”. The legal system, akin to that of a “banana republic”.
On the sprawling lawn outside the state capitol building, in deep-blue Madison, Cheyenne Carter, a 25-year-old administrative assistant, reflected on the verdict more matter-of-factly.
“I’m glad to see him be held accountable in some criminal way,” said Carter. “I would actually enjoy seeing him go to prison, or see some type of actual prison time – unfortunately, I’m sure that won’t happen.”
Like many voters, Carter made up her mind about the former president long ago, and figures others have too.
The jury’s verdict – guilty of 34 felony charges in connection with his hush-money payments to adult film star Stormy Daniels – makes Trump the first US president, current or former, in history to be convicted in criminal court. It’s not clear that will change minds.
“I feel like people have made their opinion about him for years now, and it’s like, you can’t change it this far in,” said Carter.
Will Ford, an air traffic controller from Wisconsin, agreed. He hasn’t settled on Joe Biden and could see himself voting for a third-party candidate, but has never considered voting for Trump, whom he sees as a menace.
“He’s a different breed, a different kind of person,” said Ford. “If he gets elected, I think we’d be in trouble a little bit, because he’s for sure going straight after everybody who was against him.”
For Dave, a retiree from northern Wisconsin who preferred not to share his last name, the verdict proved what Trump has been claiming for months and what the Republican party establishment, evidenced in Schimming’s speech at the Capitol, appears to have settled on as a unifying message – that the cases against Trump are unfair and politically motivated.
“I think this will make him even greater – Trump will win in a landslide,” he said.
At the link, there’s another set of voter comments from the state of Georgia. Both of these will be key states in November. All I can continue to say is that I’ve never met a smart Trump voter. They’re either choking on racist bile, blissfully unaware of reality, or both. The big discussion last night after the verdict was how much Trump’s involvement with his defense tanked his chances of getting at least one holdout. This is from Politico. “Trump Bungled the Trial. A conviction wasn’t inevitable.” This analysis is provided by Ankush Khardori.
It may not have been the trial that the country deserves, but it’s the trial that we got.
On Thursday, Donald Trump became the first president in U.S. history to become a convicted felon thanks to a jury of 12 New Yorkers. The verdict was swift, coming after less than two days of deliberations in the hush money trial.
But a conviction was not inevitable. The legal issues were intricate and in some key respects novel, and some of them will credibly be at issue on appeal. The state’s evidence was voluminous but far from airtight, and there were weaknesses and gaps in the prosecution’s evidence as the case unfolded.
In fact, this was probably a winnable case — not in the form of an acquittal perhaps, but in the form of a hung jury that could have resulted by persuading one or more jurors that a case built around Michael Cohen — the former Trump lawyer/fixer turned convicted felon turned media personality — was simply not strong or reliable enough to warrant this watershed moment in American history. Trump also probably could have gotten off with convictions on misdemeanor counts of falsifying his company’s business records instead of felonies, but he never asked the judge to instruct the jurors on that point, perhaps fearing that the request might make him look weak — the worst offense of them all in his mind.
In life and in the law, hindsight is 20/20. In close political campaigns, analysts are often tempted to treat the eventual winner as the candidate that made the right decisions at the crucial points, and to treat the loser as having fumbled along. The same dynamic applies to legal proceedings too, so some caution is warranted. At some point, we may hear from some of the jurors themselves about what guided their decision, which would be a welcome addition to the historical record.
In the meantime, we are left to our own devices and to a tentative but unavoidable conclusion — that Trump and his lawyers bungled this trial.
They made a series of significant strategic and tactical errors before Cohen even took the stand that appeared likely to be the product of Trump — the client’s — decision-making. They foolishly claimed that the porn star Stormy Daniels had fabricated her story in the run-up to the 2016 election, then pilloried her ineffectively during cross-examination. They elevated peripheral witnesses (like Daniels’ lawyer) through drawn-out cross-examinations when they should have downplayed their actual relevance to the charges.
It was legal Trumpism — deny everything, attack indiscriminately.
I think also Trump and his lawyer/slaves underestimated how much they could undermine Cohen. Cohen and his lawyer made a long appearance on MSNBC. The funniest part was Cohen’s characterization of Blanche, Trump’s lawyer, as SLOAT, which is an acronym for ‘Stupidest Lawyer Of All Time.’ Cohen argued that Blanche listened to Trump’s trial strategy and that, like everything Trump touches, it died. The most behind-the-scenes lawyer who deserves kudos is Cohen’s lawyer, Danya Perry. She revealed that Blanche was her paralegal when he 1st started working at the same office. When Cohen was describing his prep for testimony, it was obvious that Perry’s influence had helped him greatly. She told him to lay off the social media, make the facts surrounding him a given, and move on. You can watch the interview with Rachel and the rest of the MSNBC night team with Cohen and Perry at the link. He admitted to his lies and errors and just moved on. She argued it was part of why the jury wound up trusting him.
Another item discussed last night was the law in Florida that stops convicted felons from voting. Today, in the Miami Herald, a detail in the law shows that Trump may still vote in the November election. “Trump was found guilty of crimes in New York. Can he still vote in Florida?”
Former President Donald Trump may officially be a convicted felon, but he’ll still likely be able to vote for himself in Florida this November. While Florida law bars people convicted of most felonies from voting until they’ve fulfilled all terms of their sentence, Trump, a lifelong New Yorker who changed his residency to Florida in 2019, was convicted Thursday in his former home state.
The Florida Secretary of State’s website states that a “felony conviction in another state makes a person ineligible to vote in Florida only if the conviction would make the person ineligible to vote in the state where the person was convicted.” Under New York state law, even convicted felons are allowed to register to vote, so long as they’re not currently in prison.
For now, it’s unclear what kind of punishment Trump could receive. His sentencing hearing is currently scheduled for July 11. New York state law calls for a maximum four-year prison sentence for each of the 34 counts of falsifying business records that Trump was found guilty of on Thursday.
Trump could avoid prison time altogether, according to The New York Times, if the judge overseeing the case imposes a sentence of probation. Trump has also promised to appeal his conviction, which would have an effect on his voting status.
Trump’s sentencing hearing will occur on July 11. Catherine Christian, Former Asst. The District Attorney for the Manhattan DA also had a lot of good information on what’s to follow for both the sentencing hearing and the appeal. The interesting thing I learned was that Trump does not have to attend the Appeal Court proceedings. Her interview with Rachel is at the link.
There are a lot of big questions left. I’m sure we can hear and read a lot of speculation. At this point, only Judge Marchan holds the keys to many of them. I hope his sheriff’s detail is large and well-armed. In these six convening weeks, we’ll see if Trump can really call out the crazies. We’ll also be watching the Biden campaign’s response. They seem to be determining what will work best. Are there enough disaffected Republicans to attempt some outreach efforts? I’m not sure anyone can do anything, but I guess right now. I do feel we will see some violence from those heavily armed white lone wolves out there. It’s never good when you’re a fanatic–religious or otherwise–and you go on an armed crusade. We shall see.
Today Judge Juan Merchan will give instructions to the jury in the Trump hush money case and then they will begin deliberations. Some experts are predicting there will be a verdict today. I kind of doubt that, but what do know? A decision could certainly come this week.
Justice Merchan will describe the legal meaning of the word “intent” and the concept of the presumption of innocence. He will remind the jurors that they pledged to set any biases aside against the former president before they were sworn in, and that Mr. Trump’s decision not to testify cannot be held against him.
Then, according to a person with knowledge of the instructions that Justice Merchan plans to deliver, he will explain the 34 charges of falsifying business records that Mr. Trump faces. It will likely be the most important guidance that the judge offers during the trial. And it is no simple task.
Judge Merchan
In New York, falsifying records is a misdemeanor, unless the documents were faked to hide another crime. The other crime, prosecutors say, was Mr. Trump’s 2016 violation of state election law that prohibited conspiring to aid a political campaign using “unlawful means.”
Those means, prosecutors argue, could include any of a menu of other crimes. And so each individual false-records charge that Mr. Trump faces contains within it multiple possible crimes that jurors must strive to understand.
The moment that the jurors begin to deliberate will mark the first time that the complicated case will be assessed not by judges or a parade of commentators, but by everyday New Yorkers. The group may be aided by the two jurors who are also lawyers — though neither appears to have criminal experience, and one said during jury selection that he knew “virtually nothing about criminal law.”
Marc F. Scholl, who served nearly 40 years in the district attorney’s office, noted that jury instructions are often difficult to follow, particularly given that, in New York, jurors are barred from keeping a copy of the guidance as they deliberate. And he said that defendants are often charged with several different crimes, requiring even more elaborate instructions.
Still, Mr. Scholl said, one point of complexity stood out: “Usually you don’t have this layering of these other crimes,” he said.
Justice Merchan, according to the person with knowledge of his legal instructions, will proceed through each of the 34 charges count by count, explaining to jurors what each requires prosecutors to have proved.
The knotty legal instructions were the product of intense argument between the prosecution and the defense, culminating in a hearing last week in which each side sought to persuade the judge to make minor edits that could have had a major impact.
Read more details about those arguments at the NYT link.
People who have been covering the trial inside the courtroom, eg, Harry Litman, have expressed concerns about one juror who appears to be sympathetic to the defense. This is from Marc Caputo at The Bulwark: Trump Legal Team Pins Hopes on Hung Jury.
AS THE JURORS FILED into the Manhattan courtroom, day after day, almost none of them would look at Donald Trump. It’s one of those unsettling signs for defendants and their lawyers who worry about a guilty verdict.
Those worries have only grown in Trump’s orbit as allies have all but abandoned hope of acquittal. Even Trump, though he railed Monday on social media about the judge and the case, has privately sounded a note of resignation.
Trump sleeping in court
“Whatever happens happens,” Trump told one person recently. “I have no control.”
But there is one clear hope MAGAville clings to: a hung jury that results in a mistrial.
If that happens, Trump allies suspect that it will be chiefly due to the one juror who has made friendly eye contact with Trump from time to time as the jury enters the room and walks right past the defense table.
“There are eight people on that jury who definitely hate Trump. If there’s one person who doesn’t, it’s [this] juror,” said one court attendee who, like others for this story, relayed their observations on condition of anonymity to The Bulwark, which is also protecting the privacy and safety of the juror in question by not disclosing identifying details.
As the trial has progressed since April 15, these sources relate, this juror has appeared to nod along in seeming accordance with the defense at times. On other occasions, the juror has seemingly reacted favorably to and made eye contact with Trump’s congressional surrogates who began joining him in court in recent weeks.
I hope they’re mistaken. All we need it to have this end in a mistrial.
Donald Trump is not behaving like someone who expects to be found “not guilty.” In a series of posts over the Memorial Day weekend, the former president deviated from the norm of honoring soldiers who fought and died for the United States by instead posting on his website, Truth Social, about how unfair it is that standard courtroom procedures are not being bent in his favor.
Posting in all caps, Trump – facing 34 felony counts of falsifying business records to cover up a hush payment to an adult film star – on Monday raged against the order in which closing arguments will be made in his Manhattan trial. It is a “big advantage,” he said, and “very unfair” that the prosecution gets to go second. “Why can’t the defense go last?”
Whether he knows this and is just riling up gullible followers or if he simply never retained the information his defense counsel could surely provide, Politico’s Kyle Cheney noted that Trump is here complaining about a fact of life “in virtually every criminal court.” Per Cheney, “Prosecutors typically get a rebuttal during closings because [the] burden or proof lies with them, not [the] defense.”
Trump prosecutor Joshua Steinglass gives final arguments
Trump, then, is complaining about an order that exists because of the far higher standard that prosecutors must meet. The defense only needs to sow doubt about the government’s case, and it really only needs one juror to entertain the former president’s argument that the case is a “witch hunt”; the prosecution must show that its case is not just probable, but prove it beyond a reasonable doubt.
“Trump is finally being treated like every other defendant,” said Joyce Vance, a former U.S. attorney who has been following his hush money trial. “[R]eally,” she argued, “that’s what he objects to.”
In another weekend rant about the case, Trump again opined that it was wrong to bring a case against him while he’s running for president. If there was evidence of a crime, he wrote, referring to himself in the third person, “it should have been brought seven years ago, not in the middle of his Campaign for President.” [….]
Since Trump is no longer president, and can no longer pick those charged with enforcing the law, he is now just another man who must stand before and be judged by it. For a man who has long enjoyed impunity, it is intolerable. And while he may be able to evade financial penalties, at least for a time, in this case his actual liberty is at stake: it is not inconceivable that, when closing arguments conclude this week, jurors return a guilty verdict and Judge Juan Merchan decides that this particular defendant deserves some time behind bars.
George Conway, a conservative attorney turned harsh critic of the former president, believes Trump is reacting to his loss of control. “The defendant,” he posted on Threads, “is clearly in full panic mode.”
A couple of articles about the stalled Mar-a-Lago stolen documents case:
In the up-is-down world of the Mar-a-Lago classified documents case, prosecutors attempted to stanch Donald Trump’s vitriolic attacks on federal law enforcement – the kind of thing criminal defendants would not typically be allowed to engage in while on pre-trial release – and wound up themselves threatened with sanctions by the judge.
As Morning Memo recounted yesterday, the move by prosecutors to modify the terms of Trump’s pre-trial release came late Friday before the Memorial Day weekend and prompted a heated response from Trump.
U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon weighed in Monday, denying the prosecution motion, chastising them for playing loose with the local court rules, and threatening to impose sanctions on them in the future. On small bright spot, if you can call it that, is that she didn’t accede to Trump’s request to sanction the prosecution team immediately. Cannon’s denial was without prejudice, meaning prosecutors can refile their motion:
Cannon insisted that prosecutors had not sufficiently conferred with the defense team before filing and ordered that all future filings contain a statement of no more than 200 words by the opposing side of its position.
In a normal case, I’d applaud a judge keeping a tight leash on the prosecution team. But we’re in such uncharted territory here that you can’t attribute this to i-dotting or t-crossing by Cannon. Given any chance to chide the prosecution, she takes it. Given deplorable behavior by Trump that would normally never fly, she finds herself mute again and again.
The judge’s routine has become so predictable that even the analysis by legal observers bakes in a certain Cannon quotient: Anything that DOJ does that even arguably deviates from the rules leaves an opening that Cannon will take. So DOJ ends up graded on a weird Cannon curve while the Trump’s dangerous and unprecedented conduct gets set to the side.
One pattern emerging with Cannon is that when prosecutors implore her to assert herself and take more control over the case like so many judges do, she retreats to treating everything as an adversarial contest that she merely referees. But when it’s a matter of importance to Trump, she regularly asserts herself, going so far as to raise issues on her own. It’s another way in her handling of the case is imbalanced to Trump’s advantage.
…[A]t seven public hearings over more than 10 months, Judge Cannon has left an increasingly detailed record of her decision-making skills and judicial temperament.
The portrait that has emerged so far is that of an industrious but inexperienced and often insecure judge whose reluctance to rule decisively even on minor matters has permitted one of the country’s most important criminal cases to become bogged down in a logjam of unresolved issues.
She rarely issues rulings that explain her thinking in a way that might reveal her legal influences or any guiding philosophy. And that has made the hearings, which have taken place in Federal District Court in Fort Pierce, Fla., all the more important in assessing her management of the case.
Aileen Cannon in court in stolen documents case
Regardless of her motives, Judge Cannon has effectively imperiled the future of a criminal prosecution that once seemed the most straightforward of the four Mr. Trump is facing.
She has largely accomplished this by granting a serious hearing to almost every issue — no matter how far-fetched — that Mr. Trump’s lawyers have raised, playing directly into the former president’s strategy of delaying the case from reaching trial.
It appears increasingly likely that the documents case will not go to a jury before Election Day, and that the only trial that Mr. Trump will face this year will be the one now ending in Manhattan, where jurors are expected to begin deliberating on Wednesday over whether he falsified business records in connection with hush money payments to a porn star.
Still, the next few weeks will bring Judge Cannon’s handling of the case in Florida into even sharper focus.
After a hearing in June, Judge Cannon will also have to make a significant decision on whether to give Mr. Trump’s lawyers access to communications between Mr. Smith’s team and top national security officials. The lawyers made that request hoping to bolster their contention that the so-called deep state colluded with the Biden administration to bring the charges.
The police in Fairfax County, Va., received an unusual phone call on Feb. 15, 2021. A young couple claimed they were being harassed by the wife of a Supreme Court justice.
“Somebody in a position of authority needs to talk to her and make her stop,” said the 36-year-old man making the complaint, according to a recording of the call reviewed by The New York Times. The officer on the line responded that there was little the police could do: Yelling was not a crime.
The couple placed the call after a series of encounters with Martha-Ann Alito, wife of Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., that had gone from uneasy to ugly. That day, Emily Baden, whose boyfriend (now husband) contacted the police, had traded accusations with Mrs. Alito, who lived down the street. In a recent interview, Ms. Baden admitted to calling her a lewd epithet.
The clash between the wife of a conservative Supreme Court justice and the couple, who were in their 30s, liberal and proud of it, played out over months on a bucolic block in Alexandria. It was the kind of shouting match among private citizens, at the height of tensions over the 2020 election, that might have happened in any mixed political community in America. But three years later, that neighborhood spat — which both sides said began over an anti-Trump sign — has taken on far greater proportions.
Interview with Ms. Baden:
Amid the controversy, Ms. Baden said she was surprised to find herself playing a central role in Justice Alito’s account about a war of words, political signsand a flag. “I never saw the upside-down flag, never heard about it,” she said.
The Alitos
To better understand the clash, The Times interviewed Ms. Baden, her mother and her husband, as well as other neighbors, and reviewed the texts that Ms. Baden and her husband sent to friends after the episodes. Justice Alito, who did not respond to questions for this article,has in recent weeks given his own explanation of what happened.
There are some differences: For instance, the justice told Fox News that his wife hoisted the flag in response to Ms. Baden’s vulgar insult. A text message and the police call — corroborated by Fairfax County authorities — indicate, however, that the name-calling took place on Feb. 15, weeks after the inverted flag was taken down….
The justice later elaborated in an interview with Fox News, saying that in January 2021 a neighbor on the block displayed a vulgar anti-Trump sign, near where children wait for the school bus. Mrs. Alito complained to the neighbor. “Things escalated and the neighbor put up a sign personally addressing Mrs. Alito and blaming her for the Jan 6th attacks,” tweeted the Fox News reporter who interviewed the justice.
While the Alitos were on a neighborhood walk, “there were words between Mrs. Alito and a male at the home with the sign,” the network reported. The justice said the man used “vulgar language, ‘including the C-word,’” After that exchange, “Mrs. Alito was distraught and hung the flag upside-down,” the Fox reporter relayed.
But in the Baden family’s version, the justice’s wife initiated the conflict. “Aside from putting up a sign, we did not begin or instigate any of these confrontations,” Ms. Baden said later.
During the Covid crisis, Baden moved in with Baden’s mother Barbara, who lives in the Alito’s neighborhood. Her boyfriend, who grew up in the area also moved back home.
The couple participated in Black Lives Matter protests in Washington, propped up Biden-Harris signs, and on the Saturday in November when the election was called, whooped and danced in the streets of the nation’s capital. When they got home, they displayed a political sign they had made from torn-up Amazon boxes, saying “BYE DON” on one side and “Fuck Trump” on the other….
Shortly after Christmas, as Emily Baden was with her dog in her front yard, an older woman approached and thanked her for taking down the sign, which had merely blown down. Ms. Baden realized that the woman was Martha-Ann Alito. The sign was offensive, Mrs. Alito said, according to both the justice’s account and a text message from Ms. Baden to her boyfriend.
Martha-Ann Alito and Emily Baden
Ms. Baden told her the sign would stay up, she recalled in the interview. The family was taken aback: Though the Badens and the Alitos lived just a short distance apart, Barbara Baden couldn’t recall ever communicating with the justice’s wife beyond a neighborly wave. In the interview, Emily Baden could not remember whether she put the signs up again.
Then came Jan. 6. Rocked by the violence and threat to democracy, the couple soon put up new signs in their yard, saying “Trump Is a Fascist” and “You Are Complicit.” Emily Baden said in interviews that the second sign was not directed at the Alitos, but at Republicans generally, especially those who weren’t condemning the Capitol attack.
Soon afterward, her mother took them down, out of safety concerns. “Look what these people can do,” she said in an interview, recalling her fears at the time about the mob that had stormed the Capitol. “I do not want to mark my house.”
It’s not clear whether Mrs. Alito saw those signs, but the day after the Capitol riot, as the couple parked in front of their home, she pulled up in her car, they said. She lingered there, glaring, for a long moment, recalled the couple, who texted their friends about the encounter.
In another incident, the young couple drove by the Alito’s house.
Mrs. Alito happened to be standing outside. According to interviews with Ms. Baden and her husband, as well as messages they sent to friends at the time, Mrs. Alito ran toward their car and yelled something they did not understand. The couple continued driving, they said, and as they passed the Alito home again to exit the cul-de-sac, Mrs. Alito appeared to spit toward the vehicle.
The couple, still shaken by the Capitol riot, said the encounter left them feeling uneasy and outmatched by the wife of someone so powerful.
When Donald Trump met some of the country’s top donors at a luxurious New York hotel earlier this month, he told the group that a businessman had recently offered $1 million to his presidential effort and wanted to have lunch.
“I’m not having lunch,” Trump said he responded, according to donors who attended. “You’ve got to make it $25 million.”
Another businessman, he said, had traditionally given $2 million to $3 million to Republicans. Instead, he said he told the donor that he wanted a $25 million or $50 million contribution or he would not be “very happy.”
As he closed his pitch at the Pierre Hotel, Trump explained to the group why it was in their interest to cut large checks. If he was not put back in office, taxes would go up for them under President Biden, who vows to let Trump-era tax cuts on the wealthy and corporations expire at the end of 2025.
“The tax cuts all expire for wealthy and poor and middle-income and everything else, but they expire in another seven months and he’s not going to renew them, which means taxes are going to go up by four times,” Trump said, exaggerating the size of the cuts. “You’re going to have the biggest tax increase in history.”
Seconds after promising the tax cuts, Trump made his pitch explicit. “So whatever you guys can do, I appreciate it,” he said.
The remarks are just one example of a series of audacious requests by Trump for big-money contributions in recent months, according to 11 donors, advisers and others close to the former president, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe his fundraising. The pleas for millions in donations come as the presumptive Republican nominee seeks to close a cash gap with Biden and to pay for costly legal bills in his four criminal indictments.
Trump is completely corrupt. So what else is new? Read the whole thing at the WaPo.
That’s it for me today. I hope I’ve given you something worth reading while we wait for the verdict.
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“I thought the Libertarian logo looked familiar too, Mr. Trump.” John Buss, @repeat1968
Good Day, Sky Dancers!
This is the day we remember those who served and made the ultimate sacrifice for our country and its democracy.
Today is a good day to think about the possibility that everything we know may be forcibly taken away by a cult of white fascist Christians led by a dotard leading a family crime syndicate.
Republican Party of Texas delegates voted Saturday on a platform that called for new laws to require the Bible to be taught in public schools and a constitutional amendment that would require statewide elected leaders to win the popular vote in a majority of Texas counties.
Other proposed planks of the 50-page platform included proclamations that “abortion is not healthcare it is homicide”; that gender-transition treatment for children is “child abuse”; calls to reverse recent name changes to military bases and “publicly honor the southern heroes”; support for declaring gold and silver as legal tender; and demands that the U.S. government disclose “all pertinent information and knowledge” of UFOs.
Are you terrified of migrants squatting in your home or randomly punching you in the face while you walk down the street? Maybe you find yourself thinking a lot about Hunter Biden or gas prices and how they were lower four years ago? Then, dear reader, you probably have Fox News brain.
Juliet Jeske, author of the highly recommended Decoding Fox News newsletter, is one of the world’s foremost experts on that condition.
“Propaganda is a very difficult thing to erase from somebody’s brain,” she told me. “Some people just want to be in that Fox News rage spiral. They’re riding a rollercoaster of fear, paranoia, and hate. And people enjoy that. They enjoy sitting in their homes and being angry at the world. I don’t understand that mentality at all. But that’s what Fox provides them.”
Yet it seems that so many in America are treating this election as politics as usual. Primaries, caucuses and other events proceed, even as the Republican nominee refuses to commit to accepting lawful election results if he is not the victor. And most of the GOP still embraces the false reality that Trump won the 2020 election as well.
This surreal situation reflects both an information deficit and a disinformation surfeit. A March poll of swing-state voters revealed that most respondents were unaware of Trump’s criminal charges, dictator threats, use of fascist language (such as calling people “vermin”), and vows to pardon the “patriots” who attacked the Capitol on Jan. 6. More worryingly still, the poll excluded voters who believed Biden stole the 2020 election. Those surveyed, though they are not lost in the Trumpist alternate universe, lack the information to take the threats to our democracy seriously.
And many better-informed Americans don’t take Trump’s proclamations and actions seriously either. Instead, they accuse those who are sounding the alarm at his strongman actions and rhetoric of hyperbole and hysteria.
Certainly, Americans are prone to thinking “it can’t happen here.” Our country has lived on its reputation as a bastion of freedom and democracy, and since we have never had a national dictatorship at home (though the Jim Crow South was a regional authoritarianism), many people don’t recognize autocratic creep as it unfolds. But as Robert Kagan’s stirring essay for The Washington Postput it: “A Trump dictatorship is increasingly inevitable. We should stop pretending.”
Yet too many are still pretending. President Joe Biden’s age receives far more coverage than Trump’s declarations that if he returns to the White House he will detain and deport millions of people and allow Vladimir Putin’s Russia to “do whatever the hell they want.” Such is his affinity for Russia’s authoritarian that he’d let Moscow attack NATO member states if they pose obstacles to Putin’s imperialist ambitions — a situation that could trigger World War III.
The verdict in former President Donald J. Trump’s criminal trial remains a mystery, at least for a few more days. Less of a mystery is what Mr. Trump will say and do after it is announced — whatever the outcome might be.
If the past is any guide, even with a full acquittal, Mr. Trump will be angry and vengeful, and will direct attacks against everyone he perceives to be responsible for the Manhattan district attorney’s prosecution. He will continue to level the attacks publicly, at rallies and on Truth Social, and privately encourage his House Republican allies to subpoena his Democratic enemies.
The pattern is firmly established: After Mr. Trump escaped impeachment twice and survived a special counsel investigation led by Robert S. Mueller III into ties between his 2016 campaign and Russia, he immediately went into revenge mode — complaining about the injustices he was forced to endure and urging his allies to investigate the investigators.
“Regardless of the outcome, the playbook is the same,” said Alyssa Farah Griffin, Mr. Trump’s former White House communications director, who began working for him shortly after his first impeachment trial but has since become a sharp critic of her former boss.
Mr. Trump’s team is still determining his plans for the period after the trial’s conclusion, timing that remains at the mercy of the jury.
It is unclear how much the public cares about his trial over allegations that he falsified business records to conceal hush money payments to a porn star during the 2016 election. Mr. Trump’s advisers have been running a private poll tracking public opinion throughout the trial, according to a person briefed on the data, and have not seen a significant downturn in his support, even during some of the more bruising days of testimony. Public polling also suggests a relatively stable race.
Indeed, therein lies the point. Graham’s description of conservatism certainly sounded quite nice. The government is going to get out of my business and leave people alone? It’s the kind of pitch that’s likely to have broad appeal.
The trouble, of course, is that the description comes with fine print that the South Carolinian neglected to mention. For Republicans, the goal is to keep government out of your business and leave you alone, just so long as you don’t want to terminate a dangerous or unwanted pregnancy. Or provide medical care for a transgender minor. Or read the “wrong” library book. Or teach a class the right considers racially provocative. Or run a business with policies the GOP considers “woke.
For the Republican officials who still oppose marriage equality, conservatism is about ensuring the government leaves you alone, just so long as same-sex couples don’t expect equal treatment under the law.
Watching Graham, I also found myself thinking about Texas’ Kate Cox, who had to leave her home state for medical care because of a law approved by conservative legislators, enforced by a conservative state attorney general, and endorsed by conservative state Supreme Court justices.
Conservatives are committed to getting government “out of your business”? Try again, senator
My home state of Louisiana is going to hell in a handbasket. We even have an Aunt Lydia doing the Do’hvenor’s dirty work. This is a naked attempt to get a database made of whoever has ordered these so-called abortion drugs. A Shreveport legislator led the call for this silly bill. It’s already illegal to give anyone a drug without their consent. This was clearly a way to get names and information of anyone having or ordering the drugs. I’m on a list for having to order phenobarbital for my cat. That’s what having a scheduled drug means to you in terms of government monitoring.
Pressly’s bill would create the crime of coerced criminal abortion by means of fraud, which would carry a prison sentence of five to 10 years hard labor if committed in the first trimester and 10 to 20 years if committed after that. It would also carry the same penalties for an accomplice.
“It’s clear to me that six months in jail isn’t punishment enough for committing this crime,” Pressly said. “Our family doesn’t believe justice was served in my sister’s case.”
Abortion, including the oral medication to induce abortion, is illegal in Louisiana, but the abortion pills are easily obtained through the mail or out of state, Pressly said.
“It’s illegal in Texas, too, but that didn’t stop the crime against my sister,” Pressly said. “This is an important time to put this law in place.”
Last week, the Kentucky House passed a bill that would abolish the state’s child labor laws, in effect replacing them with looser federal standards. The bill would also increase the number of hours that 16- and 17-year-olds can work on school days from six to eight. They’d be able to work up to 30 hours per week during the school year, or even more if their parents approve and they maintain at least a 2.0 grade point average.
Several Republican lawmakers joined with Democrats in opposition, including GOP Whip Jason Nemes, but the bill passed easily. “Our current statutes and regulations unnecessarily restrict the number of hours needed to work, often preventing them from seeking an opportunity to help them pay for college, learn new skills and prepare for the future,” said bill sponsor Phillip Pratt, who owns a landscaping and lawn care company.
Kentucky is far from the only state to consider loosening restrictions for child labor in a variety of industries. Since 2021, legislators in 23 states have introduced at least 61 bills with the same goal: changing labor restrictions for minors, whether it’s working more hours or days, or allowing minors to serve alcohol.
Supporters of these measures describe them in terms of opportunity, offering children the chance not only to earn money but develop skills. “In Iowa, we understand there is dignity in work and we pride ourselves on our strong work ethic,” GOP Gov. Kim Reynolds said in signing a looser child labor law last year. “Instilling those values in the next generation and providing opportunities for young adults to earn and save to build a better life should be available.”
But it’s not just young people that proponents of looser child labor laws have in mind. The nation has faced a workforce shortage since the pandemic, with millions of workers leaving due to death, disability or retirement.
“Corporations have a long history of exploiting every tragedy in front of them for their gain, and to the detriment of many for the wealth of the few,” says Jessie Ulibarri, co-executive director of State Innovation Exchange (SiX), a progressive policy group. “It makes sense that corporations are using their significant financial and legislative power to put kids on the front lines of some of the most dangerous jobs. It will help their bottom line.”
A new South Dakota policy to stop the use of gender pronouns by public university faculty and staff in official correspondence is also keeping Native American employees from listing their tribal affiliations in a state with a long and violent history of conflict with tribes.
Two University of South Dakota faculty members, Megan Red Shirt-Shaw and her husband, John Little, have long included their gender pronouns and tribal affiliations in their work email signature blocks. But both received written warnings from the university in March that doing so violated a policy adopted in December by the South Dakota Board of Regents.
“I was told that I had 5 days to remove my tribal affiliation and pronouns,” Little said in an email to The Associated Press. “I believe the exact wording was that I had ‘5 days to correct the behavior.’ If my tribal affiliation and pronouns were not removed after the 5 days, then administrators would meet and make a decision whether I would be suspended (with or without pay) and/or immediately terminated.”
The policy is billed by the board as a simple branding and communications policy. It came only months after Republican Gov. Kristi Noem sent a letter to the regents that railed against “liberal ideologies” on college campuses and called for the board to ban drag shows on campus and “remove all references to preferred pronouns in school materials,” among other things.
All this is going relatively unnoticed by the public. Here’s one from the Washington Post, a fascism red alert from the Orange Snot Blob once again. “Trump told donors he will crush pro-Palestinian protests, deport demonstrators. Trump has waffled on whether the Israel-Gaza war should end. But speaking to wealthy donors behind closed doors, he said that he supports Israel’s right to continue “its war on terror.”
Former president Donald Trump promised to crush pro-Palestinian protests on college campuses, telling a roomful of donors — a group that he joked included “98 percent of my Jewish friends” — that he would expel student demonstrators from the United States, according to participants in the roundtable event with him in New York.
“One thing I do is, any student that protests, I throw them out of the country. You know, there are a lot of foreign students. As soon as they hear that, they’re going to behave,” Trump said on May 14, according to donors at the event.
When one of the donors complained that many of the students and professors protesting on campuses could one day hold positions of power in the United States, Trump called the demonstrators part of a “radical revolution” that he vowed to defeat. He praised the New York Police Department for clearing the campus at Columbia University and said other cities needed to follow suit, saying “it has to be stopped now.”
“Well, if you get me elected, and you should really be doing this, if you get me reelected, we’re going to set that movement back 25 or 30 years,” he said, according to the donors, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to detail a private event.
Keep an eye on what’s going on in your state and other states for these fascist red alarms. We must start our database and ensure our friends, family, and neighbors know what is what. Vote for democracy!
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There’s some big news in the stolen documents case today. Special prosecutor Jack Smith has asked Judge Aileen Cannon for a gag order to stop Trump from claiming that the FBI planned to assassinate him when they searched Mar-a-Lago for classified documents that he stole from the government. This is significant, because if Cannon refuses, Smith could appeal to the 11th Circuit court and request that she be removed from the case.
Special counsel’s office prosecutors on Friday asked a federal judge in Florida to place a gag order on Donald Trump that would limit his ability to comment about law enforcement that searched his Mar-a-Lago resort.
While Trump has told his supporters he could have been in danger because of the policy, the policy is standard protocol for FBI searches and limits how agents may use force in search operations. The same standard FBI policy was used in the searches of President Joe Biden’s homes and offices in a separate classified documents investigation.
Polanz is minimizing what Trump has said. He actually accused the FBI of trying to kill him and claimed President Biden ordered them to do it.
Prosecutors for special counsel Jack Smith wrote to Judge Aileen Cannon in a filing Friday night that the conditions that allow Trump not to be in jail awaiting trial should be updated.
The request will force Cannon into the center of an intensely charged and politicized battle, grappling with Trump’s ongoing presidential campaign and the First Amendment at the same time prosecutors are escalating their concerns to her about proceedings she oversees. The judge so far has moved slowly to resolve disputes in Trump’s criminal mishandling and obstruction of justice case before her, and no trial date is set.
“Trump‘s repeated mischaracterization as an attempt to kill him, his family, and Secret Service agents has endangered law enforcement officers involved in the investigation and prosecution of this case and threatened the integrity of these proceedings,” prosecutors wrote.
His recent comments, they added, “invite the sort of threats and harassment that have occurred when other participants in legal proceedings against Trump have been targeted by his invective.”
The use of deadly force policy is included among several pages of paperwork governing FBI search protocol and policies when they went to Mar-a-Lago, which was made public in Trump’s case in federal court this week. The paperwork also lays out that agents would wear unmarked, business casual attire, and specifies that if Trump were to arrive at Mar-a-Lago during the search, leadership on site would speak to him and his Secret Service detail.
Federal prosecutors on Friday night asked the judge overseeing former President Donald J. Trump’s classified documents case to bar him from making any statements that might endanger law enforcement agents involved in the proceedings.
Prosecutors tendered the request after Mr. Trump made what they described as “grossly misleading” assertions about the F.B.I.’s August 2022 search of Mar-a-Lago, his private club and residence in Florida. This week, the former president falsely suggested that the F.B.I. had been authorized to shoot him when agents discovered more than 100 classified documents while executing a court-approved search warrant there.
In a social media post on Tuesday, Mr. Trump falsely claimed that President Biden “authorized the FBI to use deadly (lethal) force” during the search.
“As Trump is well aware, the F.B.I. took extraordinary care to execute the search warrant unobtrusively and without needless confrontation,” prosecutors wrote in a motion to Judge Aileen M. Cannon, who is overseeing the classified documents case.
“They scheduled the search of Mar-a-Lago for a time when he and his family would be away,” the prosecutors added. “They planned to coordinate with Trump’s attorney, Secret Service agents and Mar-a-Lago staff before and during the execution of the warrant; and they planned for contingencies — which, in fact, never came to pass — about with whom to communicate if Trump were to arrive on the scene.” [….]
Prosecutors did not seek to impose a gag order on Mr. Trump in the classified documents case, but instead asked Judge Cannon to revise his conditions of release to forbid him to make any public comments “that pose a significant, imminent and foreseeable danger to law enforcement agents participating in the investigation.”
Still, if Judge Cannon agrees to the request, it would mean that Mr. Trump could be placed in custody were he to violate the revised conditions.
This is from Andrew Weissmann on Twitter (I refuse to use that other stupid name):
Smart move by Smith as Judge Cannon won’t be likely to grant the gag order, will show her patent bias, and Smith can then appeal to the 11th Circuit.
Asha Rangappa asked him:
Can she just avoid ruling on it, like she has everything else?
Weissmann:
in theory yes, but I don’t think if she tries that ploy that Smith won’t mandamus her, and her lack of action one way or the other will look really bad on appeal.
I’ll be waiting anxiously to see what Loose Cannon does or doesn’t do.
When Donald Trump insinuated this week that his successor and the FBI were out to kill him, he showed how central violence has become to his conception of political leadership. The former president declared Tuesday on Truth Social, his social-media platform, that he “was shown reports Crooked Joe Biden’s DOJ, in their illegal and UnConstitutional Raid of Mar-a-Lago, AUTHORIZED THE FBI TO USE DEADLY (LETHAL FORCE).” [….]
The genesis of the former president’s complaint is that, when the FBI searched Mar-a-Lago in August 2022 to obtain classified documents that were at the center of an investigation, agents were explicitly authorized to use force. This was not remotely unusual: FBI agents are routinely armed. The “reports” that Trump saw misinterpreted the parameters of the search, which—as the security analysts Asha Rangappa and Tom Joscelyn explained in Just Security—was guided by elaborate restrictions on when weapons could be used. The FBI subsequently said it followed a “standard policy statement limiting the use of force.” Attorney General Merrick Garland noted today that similar conditions were used in a search related to classified documents at Biden’s home in Delaware.
Victor Lukyanov, Summer Rain
The FBI had also carefully arranged to enter Trump’s property when he would be out of state—an odd way of carrying out an assassination. Still, the idea that Trump had been at physical risk rocketed across Truth Social. The X account of the House Judiciary Committee Republicans reposted—with the addition of siren emojis—a thread insinuating that FBI agents were acting like the “Gestapo” and had “risked the lives of Donald Trump, his family, his staff, and MAL guests.” Trump’s campaign upped the hysteria with a fundraising email declaring that “BIDEN’S DOJ WAS AUTHORIZED TO SHOOT ME!” and that “Joe Biden was locked & loaded ready to take me out & put my family in danger.” By evening, the longtime Trump ally Steve Bannon was asserting that “this was an attempted assassination attempt on Donald John Trump or people associated with him.” [….]
The claim that Biden and the FBI were looking to kill Trump is easy to dismiss as the typical hyperbolic ranting of the ex-president and his fans, and it competes in the news with other disturbing things he says and does. The assassination claim initially seemed to have come and gone in the news cycle. But the story was still out there, to be absorbed by Trump’s audience.
Since the January 6 insurrection at the Capitol, Trump has become more and more apocalyptic in his language. This week, he sent another dangerous signal to his supporters: FBI agents are an armed enemy, ready to assassinate the former president. Unless, of course, Trump and his mob get to them first.
Trump’s Bronx Rally
On Thursday, Trump held a rally in the Bronx, and, as usual, created some controversy that the mainstream media pretty much ignored.
Trumpworld is once again splintering from reality. This time, the diversion relates to counting—specifically, how many people attended Donald Trump’s rally in the Bronx on Thursday.
Trump, who has long obsessed over the size of crowds at his events, shared an article from Right Side Broadcasting Network to his Truth Social account that quoted the Trump campaign as saying 25,000 people attended the “electrifying” event. The New York Times reported that Trump’s team had acquired a permit for an event for 3,500 people.
“The sheer numbers show the great enthusiasm that President Trump has gained among voters in even the bluest areas of the United States,” the Right-Side Broadcasting Network article crowed.
That number later appeared on Fox News, was shared across various MAGA social media accounts, and also popped up on the official X account of the Republican Party.
But aerial footage of the event, and The Daily Beast’s reporter on the ground, told a different story. ABC7’s coverage of the event showed a much smaller crowd located in an amphitheater at Crotona Park.
While law enforcement told the New York Post that the crowd was between 8,000 and 10,000 people, The Daily Beast had a reporter in attendance, who estimated about 1,000 people were there.
Criminals of a feather flocked together on Thursday as Trump hosted two Brooklyn rappers out on bail for murder conspiracy during a campaign rally in the Bronx.
Rappers Sheff G and Sleepy Hallow were indicted in 2023, alongside some 30 other people, as part of a massive investigation into two rival Brooklyn gangs. Sheff G—real name Michael Williams—allegedly used his accomplishments to help fund widespread violence. According to the New York Daily News, Williams was released on a $150,000 cash or $1 million bond in April after being charged with conspiracy, multiple murder counts, criminal possession of a weapon, assault with a weapon, and 12 shootings. Williams’s lackey Sleepy Hallow—real name Tegan Chambers—was released with a $200,000 cash or $150,000 bond bail for conspiracy charges.
Trump proudly brought the rappers on stage with him to give remarks to the red behatted crowd on Thursday. Williams told the crowd, “They’re always going to whisper the accomplishments and shout your failures. Trump gonna shout the wins for all of us.”
Chambers kept it even more brief and simply shouted, “Make America Great Again.”
The wife of Supreme Court Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. told a Washington Post reporter in January 2021 that an upside-down American flag recently flown on their flagpole was “an international signal of distress” and indicated that it had been raised in response to a neighborhood dispute.
Martha-Ann Alito made the comments when the reporter went to the couple’s Fairfax County, Va., home to follow up on a tip about the flag, which was no longer flying when he arrived.
The incident documented by reporter Robert Barnes, who covered the Supreme Court for The Post for 17 years and retired last year, offers fresh details about the raising of the flag and the first account of comments about it by the justice’s wife.
So why didn’t we hear about this in 2021??
The Post decided not to report on the episode at the time because the flag-raising appeared to be the work of Martha-Ann Alito, rather than the justice, and connected to a dispute with her neighbors, a Post spokeswoman said. It was not clear then that the argument was rooted in politics, the spokeswoman said.
Maria Karalyos, Black cat in the window
Oh really? Does the Post really think Martha-Ann would or could do this without him noticing?
The upside-down flag has long been a sign of distress for the military and protest by various political factions. In the fraught weeks before andafter the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, it had also been adopted by supporters of the “Stop the Steal” movement,which embraced Donald Trump’s false claims thatJoe Biden stole the election from him. Some of the rioters who participated in the attack had carried upside-down American flags with them.
The display of the politically charged symbol outside the Alitos’ home became a public controversy last week after the New York Times reported on it, raising new ethics questions for the Supreme Court as it prepares to issue pivotal rulings in two cases related to efforts by Trump and his supporters to block Biden’s 2020 election victory.
So if the NYT hadn’t reported on this, the WaPo would have stayed silent?
The Post subsequently reported on May 17 that residents said the flag was raised following a heated confrontation between Martha-Ann Alito and a neighbor over political yard signs, one of which carried a profane anti-Trump message and another that carried a message along the lines of “you are complicit.” One resident, who like the others spoke on the condition of anonymity to protect their privacy in a sensitive situation, said the flag flew for between two and five days.
Samuel Alito told Fox News last week that the signs attacked his wife directly. Martha-Ann Alito has not publicly commented on the recent reports.
Now the Post tells us what really happened in 2021:
On Jan. 20, 2021 — the day of Biden’s inauguration, which the Alitos did not attend — Barnes went to their home to follow up on the tip about the flag. He encountered the couple coming out of the house. Martha-Ann Alito was visibly upset by his presence, demanding that he “get off my property.”
As he described the information he was seeking, she yelled, “It’s an international signal of distress!”
Alito intervened and directed his wife into a car parked in their driveway, where they had been headed on their way out of the neighborhood. The justice denied the flag was hung upside down as a political protest, saying it stemmed from a neighborhood dispute and indicating that his wife had raised it.
Martha-Ann Alito then got out of the car and shouted in apparent reference to the neighbors: “Ask them what they did!” She said yard signs about the couple had been placed in the neighborhood. After getting back in the car, she exited again and then brought out from their residence a novelty flag, the type that would typically decorate a garden. She hoisted it up the flagpole. “There! Is that better?” she yelled.
Some days, after Justice Sonia Sotomayor listens to the Supreme Court announce its decisions, she goes into her chambers, shuts the door and weeps.
“There are days that I’ve come to my office after an announcement of a case and closed my door and cried,” Justice Sotomayor told a crowd on Friday at the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard University, where she was being honored. “There have been those days. And there are likely to be more.”
The comments about the challenges of being a liberal on a court dominated by conservatives came at the tail end of a public conversation with her friend and law school classmate, Martha Minow, a former dean of Harvard Law School and human rights scholar.
Kyohei Inukai, Cat resting on a window sill
The justice set a tone of optimism even as she voiced frustration with some of the court’s rulings, a possible signal that the end of the term, when the most high-profile decisions typically land, could bring more conservative victories. She urged a long-term view of pushing for the values she views as guiding principles — equality, diversity and justice.
“There are moments when I’m deeply, deeply sad,” she said, without citing any specific cases. “There are moments when, yes, even I feel desperation. We all do. But you have to own it, you have to accept it, you have to shed the tears and then you have to wipe them and get up.”
Decisions in dozens of cases are still pending, including on abortion, guns, the free speech rights of social media companies, the regulatory power of government agencies and whether former President Donald J. Trump is immune from prosecution on charges of plotting to overturn the 2020 election.
Libertarians in Disarray
Today Trump will speak at the Libertarian Convention and it may not go well for him.
Trump is set to deliver a speech Saturday at the 2024 Libertarian National Convention, and if Friday night’s program is any indication, he could be facing a hostile crowd.
Former GOP presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, who quickly endorsed Trump after dropping out, was booed during his convention remarks Friday night when he mentioned Trump.
“I’m speaking to you as a libertarian at my own core. I have gotten to know Donald Trump over the course of the last several years and the last several months,” Ramaswamy said as many in the crowd booed in response.
Ramaswamy continued, urging the audience of about 100 to ask themselves if they wanted to influence the next administration.
Separately, as Libertarian party members reviewed procedures and motions, a person at a microphone proposed that “we go tell Donald Trump to go f— himself.”
The audience cheered and roared with applause.
“That was my motion too!” another man yelled. “We are a Libertarian convention looking to nominate Libertarians. We do not need to give that time to non-Libertarians.”
Behind the two men, a third chanted, “F— Donald Trump.”
Donald Trump won’t be speaking to his usual self-selected crowd of adoring red-hatted MAGA fans when he addresses the Libertarian National Convention on Saturday.
As delegates gathered at the Washington Hilton on the eve of his speech, the party’s decision to host the former president, which had split the organization, erupted Friday into open revolt. Fuming delegates at the convention said they plan to protest Trump’s speech, and one group sought unsuccessfully to remove the former president along with Robert F. Kennedy Jr., from the agenda — a move that resulted in thrown punches and obscenities between supporters and opponents of the move.
“I would like to propose that we go tell Donald Trump to go fuck himself!” Kaelan Dreyer, a Libertarian from New Mexico, yelled into a microphone, winning cheers from the crowd. After shouting vulgarities at the convention’s chair and fending off punches, he was led out of the convention hall.
Ralph Hedley, Blinking in the sun
The raucous opening to the convention reflects the pockets of hostility that Trump faces as he appeals to the Libertarians to help him box out a growing, third-party threat from Kennedy’s independent presidential campaign.
“The vast majority of Libertarian Party members are not happy with this invitation,” said Bill Redpath, a 40-year veteran of the Libertarian Party and a former national party chair who’s helped organize their presidential ballot access for decades. “There are some people who call Trump the most Libertarian president of our lifetimes. That’s utterly ridiculous.”
Suburban Philadelphia options trader Jeff Yass, a libertarian and one of the GOP’s biggest donors, who was not in attendance at the convention, said it was “unclear” whether Trump could make inroads with libertarian voters. Yass, who bankrolled an effort to stop Trump from winning the Republican nomination and financed several of his primary opponents, has said he doesn’t plan to contribute to Trump, but will vote for him.
“He has some libertarian instincts for sure. Anti-war is big,” said Yass, who has also praised Trump for his support for education reform policies, which the two have spoken about. “But anti-immigrant, anti-free trade are not good.”
I guess he’s not bothered by Trump’s fascist tendencies.
The polls have shown Donald Trump with an edge for eight straight months, but there’s a sign his advantage might not be quite as stable as it looks: His lead is built on gains among voters who aren’t paying close attention to politics, who don’t follow traditional news and who don’t regularly vote.
Disengaged voters on the periphery of the electorate are driving the polling results — and the story line — about the election.
President Biden has actually led the last three New York Times/Siena national polls among those who voted in the 2020 election, even as he has trailed among registered voters overall. And looking back over the last few years, almost all of Trump’s gains came from these less engaged voters.
Importantly, these low-turnout voters are often from Democratic constituencies. Many back Democratic candidates for U.S. Senate. But in our polling, Biden wins just three-quarters of Democratic-leaning voters who didn’t vote in the last cycle, even as almost all high-turnout Democratic-leaners continue to support him.
This trend illustrates the disconnect between Trump’s lead in the polls and Democratic victories in lower-turnout special elections. And it helps explain Trump’s gains among young and nonwhite voters, who tend to be among the least engaged.
Trump’s dependence on these voters could make the race more volatile soon. As voters tune in over the next six months, there’s a chance that disengaged but traditionally Democratic voters could revert to their usual partisan leanings. Alternately, they might stay home, which could also help Biden.
Read more at the NYT.
I guess that’s enough politics news for today. Have a nice Memorial Day weekend.
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When President Donald Trump canceled a visit to the Aisne-Marne American Cemetery, near Paris, in 2018, he blamed rain for the last-minute decision, saying that “the helicopter couldn’t fly” and that the Secret Service wouldn’t drive him there. Neither claim was true.
Trump rejected the idea of the visit because he feared his hair would become disheveled in the rain, and because he did not believe it important to honor American war dead, according to four people with firsthand knowledge of the discussion that day. In a conversation with senior staff members on the morning of the scheduled visit, Trump said, “Why should I go to that cemetery? It’s filled with losers.” In a separate conversation on the same trip, Trump referred to the more than 1,800 marines who lost their lives at Belleau Wood as “suckers” for getting killed.
Fifty years ago, I was graduating from high school. I was worried about my cousin John, who served in-country during the Vietnam War. He didn’t die in battle, but the drug habit he brought back with him took him early in his life. I was horrified by the entire Watergate Scandal and the resignation of Spiro Agnew, which by this time was winding down after extensive hearings and heading toward Nixon’s resignation on August 8, 1974. You know where we stand today, I don’t stop being horrified for a minute. The media were all over Nixon. Where are they now?
This is from The Daily Beastabout three weeks ago. “Irked Nancy Pelosi Suggests MSNBC Anchor Katy Tur Is a Trump ‘Apologist.’ “That may be your role, but it ain’t mine,” the former House Speaker said. ” We probably missed it because none of us around here watch her.
Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) appeared to criticize MSNBC anchor Katy Tur during a discussion Monday about job losses during the Trump administration by suggesting she was an “apologist” for the former president for mentioning the COVID-19 pandemic—a charge which Tur promptly denied.
On Katy Tur Reports, the former House Speaker began by stating that Trump hasn’t shown that he “ever valued or did anything to support a democracy.”
“I have sympathy and respect for everybody who votes. I’m just glad people vote. I know some of them will always reject those of us who might look different to them in leadership or the rest, and that’s that,” Pelosi then said.
“But there are those who have real legitimate concerns about immigration, globalization, innovation, and what that means for their job and their family’s future, and we have to address those concerns, and Joe Biden is doing that. [He] created 9 million jobs in his term in office,” Pelosi went on.
It wasn’t immediately clear where Pelosi obtained that number, but according to FactCheck.org 14 million jobs were added from when Biden took office through last December.
Pelosi then claimed that Trump “has the worst record job loss of any president.” Moments later, Tur interjected: “There was a global pandemic.”
Pelosi, who appeared surprised by the comment, took a moment before continuing on. “He had the worst record of any president. We’ve had other concerns in our country. If you want to be an apologist for Donald Trump, that may be your role, but it ain’t mine.”
Tur rejected that depiction.
I’ve been thinking about this a lot since I read BB’s Wednesday post about the absolute ignorance of the economy and other things shown by 3/5 of likely voters in a Harris poll. The Guardian article she cited showed these same people think the “U.S. economy is in a recession, and the majority blame the Biden Administration.” I’d like to ask them if the country is in such bad shape, why this? “Nearly 44 million Americans to travel for Memorial Day weekend. AAA forecasts a near-record travel weekend over the Memorial Day holiday period that is above pre-pandemic numbers.” This is from Fox Weather who appears to not get their news from Fox News. This would not happen if prices were too high, people were out of work, gas prices were outrageous, and everyone squeezed every penny just to get by. You can trust me on this; I’m an economist with a terminal degree and a bad case of teaching students to recognize what’s happening in the economy.
How can people be so stupid, and why aren’t they hearing about reality from somewhere? Could it be someone like Katy Tur? Could it be Fox News? Could it be Russian Trolls on X? I doubt it’s the New York Times because these folks can’t be actually reading newspapers, even those with a bad case of both-siderisms.
Months after edgelord billionaire Elon Musk launched a “thermonuclear lawsuit” against Media Matters for America, the liberal media watchdog announced that it was laying off a dozen staffers on Thursday to remain “sustainable” amid a “legal assault on multiple fronts.”
Besides Musk’s defamation complaint, which was launched by the X owner in November after Media Matters reported his social media site placed ads next to pro-Nazi content, the outlet has also been hit with lawsuits and probes from Republican attorneys general.
“We’re confronting a legal assault on multiple fronts and given how rapidly the media landscape is shifting, we need to be extremely intentional about how we allocate resources in order to stay effective,” Media Matters president Angelo Carusone said in a statement.
“Nobody does what Media Matters does,” he added. “So, we’re taking this action now to ensure that we are sustainable, sturdy and successful for whatever lies ahead.”
Laid-off staffers, some of whom have been at the left-leaning nonprofit for years, took to social media on Thursday morning to announce they were let go. Some even pointed the finger directly at Musk for causing them to lose their jobs.
“Bad News: I’ve been laid off from @mmfa, along with a dozen colleagues,” Kat Abughazaleh, who was recently featured in The New Republic’s list of political influencers to watch in 2024, tweeted. “There’s a reason far-right billionaires attack Media Matters with armies of lawyers: They know how effective our work is, and it terrifies them (him).”
Other researchers and writers who were laid off on Thursday included Brendan Karet, Bobby Lewis, Alex Paterson, Ethan Collier and Carly Evans, among others. “[J]ournalism milestone achieved (got laid off,” Lewis snarked online after he was let go.
Meanwhile… at the Manhattan Criminal Court building. Birdbrain Nikki Haley makes the pilgrimage.” John Buss, @repeat1968
The Pew Research Centeris reporting these new findings. “Americans have mixed views about how the news media cover Biden’s, Trump’s ages.”
It’s no surprise, then, that the ages of the candidates have been a major topic of conversation in news coverage of the 2024 presidential election. A new Pew Research Center survey finds that Americans have mixed feelings about the way news organizations are handling the issue for each candidate, with views sharply divided by political party.
Overall, similar shares of U.S. adults believe news organizations are giving toomuch attention (32%) or toolittle attention (29%) to Biden’s age. An additional 38% think the media cover Biden’s age about the right amount.
By comparison, Americans are less likely to say the news media are overemphasizing Trump’s age (19%) and more likely to think that news organizations give it about the right amount of attention (49%).
Americans’ opinions on news coverage are split along party lines. Each party’s supporters tend to say that the opposing candidate’s age is getting too little attention.
So, should their ages be getting this much focus? What about both physical and mental fitness? How does the media decide what to cover on these two candidates? This is a fascinating article fromAlJazeera from last month. This Opinion article is by Waleed Salem. “Trump and the US media’s conflict of interest. “This election year, each story about Donald Trump must first pass the Lonely Planet test.”
On the last day of the Republican National Convention in July 2016, which nominated Donald Trump as the GOP’s candidate for the presidential election, CNN’s Anderson Cooper led a panel of pundits commenting on the event. Among them was cotton-haired Jeffrey Lord, who was eager to report on a call he had had with Trump.
“He has a message for you, Anderson, that he is not pleased. He feels we are not accurately representing this convention,” Lord said on air. “He [asked] me to say that your ratings, our ratings at CNN, are up here because of his presence in the convention,” he added.
“There is no doubt about Donald Trump’s impact on ratings,” Cooper responded, amiably.
Trump’s assertion was not inaccurate. The year he first ran for election was the most profitable in CNN’s history. Interest in the new, unorthodox candidate – whether it was fascination, alarm, or glee – boosted profits for media outlets left and right. Online subscriptions soared for The New York Times and The Washington Post. Fox News’s ratings reached new highs.
The boost continued throughout the Trump presidency but wore off as soon as he left office.
The real estate mogul has now returned to the centre of American politics as the presumptive nominee for the Republican Party after Nikki Hailey dropped out of the race.
The possibility of another Trump term has led to a bout of public acknowledgements among media professionals that while the former president threatens democracy with his incessant falsehoods and norm-busting practices, he is actually good for business.
“In crude material terms,” The New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg wrote in January, “Donald Trump’s presidency benefited the media, with subscriptions, ratings and clicks all soaring.”
Acknowledgement is important, but stopping at that without changing conduct seems like a shrug of resignation, a self-serving free pass for coverage and business as usual to continue. Instead of soul-searching, we are getting disclaimers.
The words that even the thoughtful voices seem reluctant to use are “conflict of interest”. It is clear that media outlets stand to benefit from their coverage of Trump. That is bad for journalism and, by extension, for democracy.
‘SleepyDon’ trial presents US with unprecedented problems – China
By Tom Lam, BBC Monitoring China specialist
Chinese media have covered Mr Trump’s trial but it hasn’t featured as prominently on the news agenda as one might expect. Still, it offered the media another opportunity to show what’s seen as the chaos and polarisation of US politics.
English-language reporting focused on facts of the case. State news agency Xinhua’s English-language edition highlighted that Donald Trump was the first former president to stand a criminal trial. It also quoted the accused as describing the trial as “political persecution” and saying the country was “failing”. China Daily, the state-run English-language newspaper, focused on jury selection, during which more than 50 of the 96 first potential jurors were excused after saying that they could not be fair.
Domestic-facing state-affiliated outlet The Paper provided infographics and timelines of the trial, and cited US surveys as showing polarised views on it among US voters. It also zoomed in on conflicting reports about the possible impact on the general election in November.
State-owned China News Service (CNS) talked about “unprecedented problems” facing the US judicial system if Mr Trump were to win in November but also be convicted.
Nationalist daily Global Times cited high interest rates, inflation and the crisis in the Middle East as showcasing Mr Trump’s notion that the world had spun out of control under the Biden administration.
But the state-run tabloid did not spare the Republican either. It provided a colourful report on 16 April focusing on reports that he had fallen asleep in court, posting a meme ridiculing him as “#SleepyDon”.
It seems Congressional Republicans are also spouting Chinese Propaganda. Here’s from the monitor of Latin America.
‘Mesmerised and alarmed’ – Latin America
By Pascal Fletcher, BBC Monitoring Latin America specialist, Miami
From Mexico and Cuba to Argentina, media coverage reflected the keen interest with which political events in the US are followed south of the border. Multiple stories on the Trump trial emphasised its “historical” nature.
Most of the reports made a point of publishing striking photos of a stern-looking Trump seated in what outlets highlighted was the “accused’s bench” – this was likely to be viewed as righteous justice by many of his critics in Latin America.
The mere possibility of another Trump presidency is both mesmerising and potentially alarming for many Latin American leaders, governments and societies that vividly recall his scathing anti-migrant comments and what they saw as barely-concealed scorn for struggling developing countries during his previous term in the White House.
Argentina-based Latin American news website Infobae published an extensive story on the “Colombian judge that will have the last word in the trial against Donald Trump”, noting that Judge Juan Merchan had “not flinched in decreeing a gag order against Trump”.
Some of the Latin American reports did slip into commentary, such as Mexican left-wing daily La Jornada which said that Mr Trump was “accused not of being a saviour and defender of his country as he says, but of trying to cover up payments to a porn star which sought to silence an illicit sexual encounter”.
Top Brazilian daily Folha de S. Paulo adopted a clearly anti-Trump position in a 16 April editorial entitled “Trump and the unthinkable” which posed questions about a scenario in which he was jailed and then pardoned himself as president. It urged American voters to avert that scenario at the ballot box.
You can also read the monitors’ findings from Russia and various European countries.
So, my best intentions were to write about the severe issues in the last Supreme Court-issued Decision where we found out that the 6 Republican appointees are not even serious about hiding their political agenda or abusing their positions, but you know me and my tight relationship with rabbit-holes.
I hope you all have a peaceful long weekend. But after that, fight like our democracy depends on it! Respect and Remember those who died doing just that.
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The Sky Dancing banner headline uses a snippet from a work by artist Tashi Mannox called 'Rainbow Study'. The work is described as a" study of typical Tibetan rainbow clouds, that feature in Thanka painting, temple decoration and silk brocades". dakinikat was immediately drawn to the image when trying to find stylized Tibetan Clouds to represent Sky Dancing. It is probably because Tashi's practice is similar to her own. His updated take on the clouds that fill the collection of traditional thankas is quite special.
You can find his work at his website by clicking on his logo below. He is also a calligraphy artist that uses important vajrayana syllables. We encourage you to visit his on line studio.
At the link, there’s another set of voter comments from the state of Georgia. Both of these will be key states in November. All I can continue to say is that I’ve never met a smart Trump voter. They’re either choking on racist bile, blissfully unaware of reality, or both. The big discussion last night after the verdict was how much Trump’s involvement with his defense tanked his chances of getting at least one holdout. This is from Politico. “Trump Bungled the Trial. A conviction wasn’t inevitable.” This analysis is provided by Ankush Khardori.
I think also Trump and his lawyer/slaves underestimated how much they could undermine Cohen. Cohen and his lawyer made a long appearance on MSNBC. The funniest part was Cohen’s characterization of Blanche, Trump’s lawyer, as SLOAT, which is an acronym for ‘Stupidest Lawyer Of All Time.’ Cohen argued that Blanche listened to Trump’s trial strategy and that, like everything Trump touches, it died. The most behind-the-scenes lawyer who deserves kudos is Cohen’s lawyer, Danya Perry. She revealed that Blanche was her paralegal when he 1st started working at the same office. When Cohen was describing his prep for testimony, it was obvious that Perry’s influence had helped him greatly. She told him to lay off the social media, make the facts surrounding him a given, and move on. You can watch the interview with Rachel and the rest of the MSNBC night team with Cohen and Perry at the link. He admitted to his lies and errors and just moved on. She argued it was part of why the jury wound up trusting him.
Trump’s sentencing hearing will occur on July 11. Catherine Christian, Former Asst. The District Attorney for the Manhattan DA also had a lot of good information on what’s to follow for both the sentencing hearing and the appeal. The interesting thing I learned was that Trump does not have to attend the Appeal Court proceedings. Her interview with Rachel is at the link.
An interview with Jeske follows this introduction. I cannot listen to Donald Alcolytes or Donald himself these days without my stomach churning. How can people not take any of the blatant displays seriously? This is from Ruth Ben-Ghiat at MSNBC. “Denial about Donald Trump is deeper than ever.”
Today, the New York Times published this. “Trump’s Post-Verdict Playbook: Anger and Retribution, Regardless of the Outcome. Former President Donald J. Trump has a history of attacking investigators, blaming President Biden, and seeking vengeance on those who cross him.” This is written by Jonathan Swan and Maggie Haberman. Think about that.
But yet, all Republicans persist in the Trump Agenda no matter what level of government. Lindsey Graham said this on Fox News near the end of last year. He was upset that New York might force Chick-fil-A chains to open on Sundays. “”The bottom line is – Conservatives are tolerant, we are kind of get out of your business, you leave me alone, I’ll leave you alone.” Is this the most ridiculous thing he’s ever said? Steven Benen had this to say at the time.
My home state of Louisiana is going to hell in a handbasket. We even have an Aunt Lydia doing the Do’hvenor’s dirty work. This is a naked attempt to get a database made of whoever has ordered these so-called abortion drugs. A Shreveport legislator led the call for this silly bill. It’s already illegal to give anyone a drug without their consent. This was clearly a way to get names and information of anyone having or ordering the drugs. I’m on a list for having to order phenobarbital for my cat. That’s what having a scheduled drug means to you in terms of government monitoring.
Lousiana must be pleased now that children can work and the employer doesn’t have to give them a lunch break. Several red states are doing this. Why? “What’s Driving the Changes to Child Labor Laws? Several red states are moving to weaken child labor laws. Sponsors say they just want kids to be able to work, but critics complain companies are already exploiting vulnerable populations.”
Crazy South Dakota Governor Kristin Noems has issued this command from the Gravel Pit. “Pronouns and tribal affiliations are now forbidden in South Dakota public university employee emails.”
All this is going relatively unnoticed by the public. Here’s one from the Washington Post, a fascism red alert from the Orange Snot Blob once again. “Trump told donors he will crush pro-Palestinian protests, deport demonstrators. Trump has waffled on whether the Israel-Gaza war should end. But speaking to wealthy donors behind closed doors, he said that he supports Israel’s right to continue “its war on terror.”
Fifty years ago, I was graduating from high school. I was worried about my cousin John, who served in-country during the Vietnam War. He didn’t die in battle, but the drug habit he brought back with him took him early in his life. I was horrified by the entire Watergate Scandal and the resignation of Spiro Agnew, which by this time was winding down after extensive hearings and heading toward Nixon’s resignation on August 8, 1974. You know where we stand today, I don’t stop being horrified for a minute. The media were all over Nixon. Where are they now?
I’ve been thinking about this a lot since I read BB’s Wednesday post about the absolute ignorance of the economy and other things shown by 3/5 of likely voters in a Harris poll. The Guardian article she cited showed these same people think the “U.S. economy is in a recession, and the majority blame the Biden Administration.” I’d like to ask them if the country is in such bad shape, why this? “Nearly 44 million Americans to travel for Memorial Day weekend. AAA forecasts a near-record travel weekend over the Memorial Day holiday period that is above pre-pandemic numbers.” This is from Fox Weather who appears to not get their news from Fox News. This would not happen if prices were too high, people were out of work, gas prices were outrageous, and everyone squeezed every penny just to get by. You can trust me on this; I’m an economist with a terminal degree and a bad case of teaching students to recognize what’s happening in the economy.
So, should their ages be getting this much focus? What about both physical and mental fitness? How does the media decide what to cover on these two candidates? This is a fascinating article from AlJazeera from last month. This Opinion article is by Waleed Salem. “Trump and the US media’s conflict of interest. “This election year, each story about Donald Trump must first pass the Lonely Planet test.”
It’s interesting to read how the world’s media has been covering the Trump Trials and think about what we see and read in ours. This is from the BBC. “What the world’s media make of Trump going on trial.” BBC is basically monitoring the coverage worldwide. Here are a few examples.
It seems Congressional Republicans are also spouting Chinese Propaganda. Here’s from the monitor of Latin America.
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