This did not appear to be the case just days ago. On Wednesday, Trump joined Elon Musk in calling on House Republicans to scrap a bipartisan spending deal that would have kept the government funded through March, increased disaster relief, and funded pediatric cancer research, among many other things. Despite the fact that the GOP needs buy-in from the Senate’s Democratic majority in order to pass any legislation — and failure to pass a spending bill by Saturday would mean a government shutdown — House Republicans heeded Trump’s call to nix the carefully negotiated compromise.
Lazy Caturday Reads
Posted: December 21, 2024 Filed under: cat art, caturday, Corrupt and Political SCOTUS, just because, SCOTUS | Tags: AfD Germany, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, German terror, Joe Biden, news, politics, Social Security 5 CommentsHappy Winter Solstice!!
Lesley Ivory, Dandelion, Snowdrop and the Devon Christmas Market
The House and Senate passed the bill to fund the government for 3 more months, thanks to Democratic votes. After unelected President Musk sabotaged the original bipartisan bill, it was touch and go, but the House and Senate both passed a compromise spending bill at the very last minute last night. The Hill: House passes bill to avert government shutdown after whirlwind funding fight.
The House approved legislation to avert a government shutdown hours before the deadline Friday, sending the bill to the Senate for consideration after a whirlwind week on Capitol Hill.
The chamber voted 366-34-1 in support of the legislation, clearing the two-thirds threshold needed for passage since GOP leadership brought the bill to the floor under the fast-track suspension of the rules process. All Democrats except one — Rep. Jasmine Crockett (Texas), who voted present — joined 170 Republicans in voting yes….
Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.), after the vote, lauded the legislation as “‘America First’ legislation because it allows us to be set up to deliver for the American people.”
“In January, we will make a sea change in Washington. President Trump will return to D.C. and to the White House, and we will have Republican control of the Senate and the House. Things are going to be very different around here. This was a necessary step to bridge the gap, to put us into that, that moment where we can put our fingerprints on the final decisions on spending for 2025,” he said.
The package — which Johnson rolled out shortly before the vote — would fund the government at current levels through March 14, extend the farm bill for one year and appropriate billions of dollars in disaster relief and assistance for farmers.
The legislation does not, however, include language to increase the debt limit, an eleventh-hour demand from President-elect Trump that hurled a curveball into the sensitive government funding negotiations.
By Jamie Morath
Late last night, the Senate also passed the bill, averting a Christmas government shutdown. The New York Times: Transition Updates: Senate Approves Stopgap Funding Bill Just After Shutdown Deadline.
The Senate approved legislation to avert a federal government shutdown just after a midnight deadline, capping a chaotic week in which President-elect Donald J. Trump blew up a bipartisan spending deal, only to see his own preferred plan collapse as Republicans defied him.
President Biden is expected to sign the measure, which would extend funding into mid-March and approve disaster relief for parts of the nation still recovering from storms. The White House said early Saturday that it was not instituting a government shutdown, even though funding to run the government technically ran out at midnight.
Thanks to Musk and his puppet Trump, funding for pediatric cancer research was cut out of the House bill, but the Senate passed the legislation in a separate bill last night. Bloomberg: Senate OKs Childhood Cancer Bill After Leaving Off Stopgap Deal.
The Senate passed legislation late Friday that would reauthorize pared-back funding for childhood cancer research after the bipartisan program briefly became a political flash point.
The Senate’s version of the Gabriella Miller Kids First Research Act 2.0 was originally tacked on to a 1,547-page short-term stopgap government funding bill congressional leaders unveiled Tuesday. The program was dropped from the compromise measure after billionaire Elon Musk and President-elect Donald Trump claimed the deal contained unnecessary spending.
Democrats specifically highlighted the cut in cancer research to suggest the GOP favored tax cuts and the bottom line over sick children.
The Senate also passed a bill to broaden Social Security benefits. CBS News: Senate approves bill to expand Social Security to millions of Americans.
Legislation to expand Social Security benefits to millions of Americans passed the U.S. Senate early Saturday and is now headed to the desk of President Biden, who is expected to sign the measure into law.
Senators voted 76-20 for the Social Security Fairness Act, which would eliminate two federal policies that prevent nearly 3 million people, including police officers, firefighters, postal workers, teachers and others with a public pension, from collecting their full Social Security benefits. The legislation has been decades in the making, as the Senate held its first hearings into the policies in 2003.
“The Senate finally corrects a 50-year mistake,” proclaimed Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, a Democrat from New York, after senators approved the legislation at 12:15 a.m. Saturday.
The bill’s passage is “a monumental victory for millions of public service workers who have been denied the full benefits they’ve rightfully earned,” said Shannon Benton, executive director for the Senior Citizens League, which advocates for retirees and which has long pushed for the expansion of Social Security benefits. “This legislation finally restores fairness to the system and ensures the hard work of teachers, first responders and countless public employees is truly recognized.”
The vote came down to the wire, as the Senate looked to wrap up its current session. Senators rejected four amendments and a budgetary point of order late Friday night that would have derailed the measure, given the small window of time left to pass it.
Explanation of the Social Security Fairness Act:
The Social Security Fairness Act would repeal two federal policies — the Windfall Elimination Provision (WEP) and the Government Pension Offset (GPO) — that reduce Social Security payments to nearly 3 million retirees.
That includes those who also collect pensions from state and federal jobs that aren’t covered by Social Security, including teachers, police officers and U.S. postal workers. The bill would also end a second provision that reduces Social Security benefits for those workers’ surviving spouses and family members. The WEP impacts about 2 million Social Security beneficiaries and the GPO nearly 800,000 retirees.
The measure, which passed the House in November, had 62 cosponsors when it was introduced in the Senate last year. Yet the bill’s bipartisan support eroded in recent days, with some Republican lawmakers voicing doubts due to its cost. According to the Congressional Budget Office, the proposed legislation would add a projected $195 billion to federal deficits over a decade.
Musk and his puppet learned that they aren’t in charge of legislating, not that that will stop President Musk from trying to boss everyone around. Eric Levitz at Vox: House Republicans just exposed the limits of Trump’s power. That bodes poorly for his agenda next year.
This week’s installment of the long-running saga, “House Republicans cannot govern,” will soon be forgotten. Elon Musk’s decision to blow up a bipartisan agreement to keep the government funded through the sheer power of posting (and the latent threat posed by his immense wealth), Donald Trump suddenly calling for the abolition of the debt limit, House Republican Chip Roy telling his colleagues that they lack “an ounce of self-respect” — all these dramas will surely give way to even more ridiculous ones in the new year.
But this week’s government funding fight also revealed something that could have profound implications for the next four years of governance: Trump’s power over the congressional GOP is quite limited.
If Trump had little difficulty persuading his co-partisans to block one spending bill, however, he proved less adept at getting them to support a different one.
On Thursday, in coordination with Trump, the House GOP unveiled a new funding bill, one shorn of all Democratic priorities. Over social media, the president-elect instructed his party to “vote ‘YES’ for this Bill, TONIGHT!” Then, 38 House Republicans voted against the legislation, which was more than enough to sink it amid nearly unified Democratic opposition.
House conservatives’ defiance of Trump is partly attributable to ideological differences. The president-elect’s objections to Wednesday’s bipartisan agreement were distinct from those of his donor Elon Musk or the House GOP’s hardliners. The latter disdained the spending bill’s page count and fiscal cost. Trump, by contrast, appeared more preoccupied with the legislation’s failure to increase — or eliminate — the debt limit.
Trump wanted the debt limit raised for his first two years so he could give more tax cuts to billionaires, but Republicans refused to go along with that. Read the rest at Vox.
The latest shock posting from President Musk was a tweet supporting a neo-Nazi party in Germany. Then last night a man who is a fan of both AfD and Musk perpetrated a deadly terror attack. Dakinikat wrote about this yesterday.
The Washington Post on the attack in Germany: German Christmas market attack toll rises to five dead, over 200 injured.
At least five people were killed and more than 200 wounded after a man plowed a car into a Christmas market in the central German city of Magdeburg, German leaders said Saturday, hours after authorities identified the suspect as Taleb al-Abdulmohsen, a 50-year-old Saudi doctor who officials said had expressed anti-Islamic views.
Reiner Haseloff, the premier of the state of Saxony-Anhalt, confirmed the new toll during a visit to the scene of Friday’s incident. A child is among the dead.
German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, who appeared alongside Haseloff, said almost 40 of the casualties “are so seriously injured that we must be very worried about them.”
Getting Together, by Pat Scott
Scholz noted that the attack took place just days before Christmas, and that normally “there is no place more peaceful or cheerful than a Christmas market.”
“What a terrible act it is, to kill and injure so many people with such brutality,” Scholz said, adding that it is important that the country “stays together” and did “not allow those who wish to sow hate” to do so.
The suspect, Abdulmohsen, who arrived in Germany in 2006, had expressed anti-Islam views and described himself as a Saudi dissident, according to a German official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss an open investigation.
Interior Minister Nancy Faeser told reporters Saturday the investigation was ongoing, and “we can only say with certainty that the perpetrator was obviously Islamophobic,” according to Zeit newspaper and Reuters news agency.
CNN has more details about the attack in live updates: Saudi man arrested following German market attack.
I wonder how long Trump is going to put up with Musk stealing his spotlight? The guy shows up wherever Trump is and whomever he’s meeting with. Check this out from Jacob Bryant at The Wrap (via Yahoo News): Elon Musk Crashing Trump’s Jeff Bezos Dinner at Mar-a-Lago Mocked as ‘Deranged.’
The jealousy bone might appeared to have bitten Elon Musk Wednesday, as he reportedly crashed the widely publicized dinner between President-elect Donald Trump and Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos.
Trump’s Mar-a-Lago hosted the dinner dinner for the politician and billionaire, but the two didn’t have privacy for long before Musk appeared. According to the New York Times, the X CEO “was not initially expected to be part of the dinner but joined as it was underway.”
Reactions online to the apparent power move were swift and cutting, with late night hosts and social media commentators mocking Musk as “deranged” and “creepy,” among other unflattering conclusions. The tech mogul was dragged up and down, with many saying it seemed like he was worried about his ongoing “bromance” with the president-elect.
“This two-week bromance is going to fall apart more spectacularly than any in history,” journalist and author Seth Abramson wrote on Bluesky. “Elon Musk is so deranged and creepy — and such a clueless stalker — that he actually crashed a private dinner between Donald Trump and Musk rival Jeff Bezos. I can’t imagine how livid that made both Trump and Bezos.”
He continued his post: “What it also confirms is that Musk not only has no boundaries and believes himself Trump’s superior but has no intention of permitting any other plutocrat to squeeze more juice out of Trump than him. Showing up at that dinner uninvited is a power play intended to cow both other oligarchs and Trump.”
Musk’s choice to crash Trump and Bezos’ meal was a dinner bell to the various late night hosts out there, as well. Just about every single one of them had a joke or two to crack at Musk’s expense this week, with Seth Meyer’s warning Trump he got “‘Cable Guy’-ed” – a reference to the 1996 Jim Carrey stalker comedy.
“Oh my god, you let him do you a favor, and now you can’t get rid of him — you got ‘Cable Guy’-ed by Elon Musk,” Meyers said. “Every time you look out that little keyhole, he gonna be there.”
Jimmy Fallon pondered how these two rival billionaires could claim custody of the president-elect. The answer came from another ’90s classic: “Air Bud.”
“To settle who he loves more, Elon and Bezos are going to put Trump down in the middle of the room and see who he goes to first: ‘All right, here boy!’” Fallon joked.
Finally, Have you heard about the new information on Clarence Thomas’s corruption? The Guardian: New ethics inquiry details more trips by Clarence Thomas paid for by wealthy benefactors.
A nearly two-year investigation by Democratic senators of supreme court ethics details more luxury travel by Justice Clarence Thomas and urges Congress to establish a way to enforce a new code of conduct.
Any movement on the issue appears unlikely as Republicans prepare to take control of the Senate in January, underscoring the hurdles in imposing restrictions on a separate branch of government even as public confidence in the court has fallen to record lows.
The 93-page report released on Saturday by the Democratic majority of the Senate judiciary committee found additional travel taken in 2021 by Thomas but not reported on his annual financial disclosure form: a private jet flight to New York’s Adirondacks in July and a jet and yacht trip to New York City sponsored by billionaire Harlan Crow in October, one of more than two dozen times detailed in the report that Thomas took luxury travel and gifts from wealthy benefactors.
The court adopted its first code of ethics in 2023, but it leaves compliance to each of the nine justices.
“The highest court in the land can’t have the lowest ethical standards,” the committee’s chair, Senator Dick Durbin of Illinois, said in a statement. He has long called for an enforceable code of ethics.
Republicans have said the investigation is a way to undermine the conservative majority court, and all the Republicans on the committee protested against the subpoenas authorized for Crow and others as part of the investigation. No Republicans signed on to the final report, and no formal report from them was expected.
Thomas has said that he was not required to disclose the trips that he and his wife, Ginni, took with Crow because the big donor is a close friend of the family and disclosure of that type of travel was not previously required. The new ethics code does explicitly require it, and Thomas has since gone back and reported some travel. Crow has maintained that he has never spoken with his friend about pending matters before the court….
The investigation found that Thomas has accepted gifts and travel from wealthy benefactors worth more than $4.75m by some estimates since his 1991 confirmation and failed to disclose much of it. “The number, value and extravagance of the gifts accepted by Justice Thomas have no comparison in modern American history,” according to the report.
Read the rest at The Guardian.
Charlie Savage at The New York Times: Justice Thomas Did Not Disclose Additional Trips, Democrats Say.
Justice Clarence Thomas failed to disclose two additional trips from a billionaire patron than have previously come to light, Senate Democrats revealed on Saturday after conducting a 20-month investigation into ethics practices at the Supreme Court.
The findings were part of a 93-page report released by Democratic staff members of the Judiciary Committee along with about 800 pages of documents. It said the two trips, both of which had been previously unknown to the public, took place in 2021 and were provided by Harlan Crow, a real estate magnate in Texas and a frequent patron of Justice Thomas’s.
One trip took place that July by private jet from Nebraska to Saranac, N.Y., where Justice Thomas stayed at Mr. Crow’s upstate retreat for five days. The other came in October, when Mr. Crow hosted Justice Thomas overnight in New York on his yacht after flying him from the District of Columbia to New Jersey for the dedication of a statue.
The disclosures were one of the few new revelations in a report that otherwise largely summarized information about largess accepted by justices — and failures to disclose it — that had already become public. Justice Thomas had not disclosed the trips, even after refiling some of his past financial forms, and the committee learned about them through a subpoena to Mr. Crow, the report said.
Read more details about the investigation at the NYT link.
That’s all I have for you today; I’ll be back here on Wednesday, December 25, Christmas Day. Best wishes to all of you.
Wednesday Reads
Posted: November 27, 2024 Filed under: Donald Trump, just because | Tags: Donald Trump, Elon Musk, news, politics, regression to childhood, Trump, Vladimir Putin 3 CommentsGood Afternoon!!
By Christopher Denise
I’m still struggling to recover from the shock of the election results. At first I kept paying close attention to the news, but now I find that I just want to avoid the horror of current events. I wish there was some way I could regress to childhood and be blissfully free of the pain and anxiety that comes with greater knowledge of the outside world. Right now, I’m really having a great deal of resistance to reading the news, and watching it on TV is out of the question.
I forced myself to check current events today so I could write this post. Here are some stories that caught my attention. Trump is talking to foreign leaders on insecure phones. He is still naming stunningly inappropriate people to important government posts. He’s threatening neighboring countries with ridiculous tariffs. He’s threatening to end civil service protection for government employees. He has given Elon Musk free rein to create chaos. And he appears to have gotten away with all the crimes he was indicted for. Is it any wonder that I want to go back in time and escape real life?
Today’s reads:
Michael Collins at USA Today: ‘Dangerous territory’: Trump’s unsecured calls with world leaders concern foreign policy experts.
Donald Trump had been the president-elect for just two days when he reportedly spoke by phone with Russian President Vladimir Putin on Nov. 7.
On the call, Trump advised the Russian president not to escalate the war with Ukraine and reminded him of the U.S.’s military presence in Europe, according to an account first published by The Washington Post, which cited multiple sources familiar with the conversation.
The Kremlin, however, denied that meeting had ever taken place. “Pure fiction,” Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov insisted.
Normally, the U.S. would be able to document that the call had happened. But not this time.
That’s because the State Department, which traditionally helps coordinate phone calls between incoming presidents and world leaders, has been shut out of Trump’s calls with foreign dignitaries.
That means the conversations were not held over secure phone lines, no State Department staff were available to offer guidance on the nuances on foreign policy and no official interpreters were on hand to overcome language barriers that can sometimes lead to confusion or misunderstandings about exactly what was said.
For U.S. foreign policy analysts, Trump’s calls with Putin and other world leaders after his victory over Vice President Kamala Harris in the Nov. 5 election are cause for alarm.
“We’re entering a dangerous territory of telephone games, where Trump is going to have private chats with foreign leaders, and they’re going to tell their teams one thing, and Trump is going to tell our national security team another,” said Brett Bruen, a former diplomat who worked in the White House under President Barack Obama
Different interpretations of private conversations stemming from translation difficulties or misunderstandings could not only sow confusion, Bruen said, but also could trigger an international crisis.
Trump’s transition team did not respond to questions about why he has not involved the State Department in his calls with foreign leaders….
Historically, the State Department has helped coordinate phone calls between incoming presidents and foreign leaders because it’s important to ensure during the transition that the government is always speaking with one voice, particularly on matters of national security and foreign policy, according to the nonpartisan Center for Presidential Transition.
But since his first term as president, Trump has openly expressed suspicion and resentment of what he derisively calls “the Deep State,” the government bureaucrats who he argues worked secretly behind the scenes to sabotage his agenda.
By Kajsa Hallström
Read more details at the USA Today link. Trump is behaving like an enemy of the U.S., so why does he have the right to be president? This is so fucked up.
Trump has now partially agreed to some of the transition rules. The Washington Post: Trump signs transition agreement with Biden, but it lacks key guardrails.
The Trump transition team said Tuesday it had reached an agreement with the Biden White House to start coordinating the handoff of federal agencies to the new administration.
But the Trump team is still refusing to accept several typical trappings of the presidential transition process,including federal funding, equipment and office space — as well as official government background and security checks for his transition staff. The agreement does not include an ethics pledge for the president-elect, required by the Presidential Transition Act, stating that Trump will avoid conflicts of interest while in office.
An ethics plan covering the transition staff was signed by the Trump team and posted on the website of the General Services Administration, which coordinates the handover of hundreds of agencies.
The agreement clears the way for Trump-appointed “landing teams” to start entering government offices to receive briefings from career staff about the operations of hundreds of federal agencies, a ritual of presidential transitions. By turning down about $7 million in federal funding for the transition, Trump will be able to raise unlimited privatedonations for his transition.
The long delay in signing the transition deal — which was signed by Vice President Kamala Harris before the election in September — does not mean that Trump’s transition will now conform to those of his predecessors. The president-elect refused to abide by key requirements aimed at transparency and security.
The limited agreement also reflects a deep distrust the president-elect holds toward the federal governmentfor stymieing his first-term agenda or in some cases bolstering legal cases against him. Trump and his political alliespledged during the campaign to radically downsize and restructure the federal workforce of 2.2 million.
Trump’s transition team has not signed a memorandum of understanding with the Justice Department, for instance, that would allow the agency to conduct background checks and intensive reviews for the security clearances that many of Trump’s landing teams need for the Biden administration to legally share classified intelligence and national defense briefings. The briefings will only be given to Trump transition officials who have a proper security clearance and have signed a nondisclosure agreement, according to the White House.
Some ethics guardrails were put in place with the White House. Transition officials are prohibited, for instance, from using information they learn in their new roles for their personal benefit.
But the plan does not include language about the president-elect’s own ethical conduct during the transition, a new provision of the Presidential Transition Act added by Congress after ethical issues dogged the first Trump administration.
Again, why was this evil man even allowed to run for office? Read more excuses at the WaPo link.
The New York Times: Trump Picks Stanford Doctor Who Opposed Lockdowns to Head N.I.H.
President-elect Donald J. Trump said on Tuesday evening that he had selected Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, a Stanford physician and economist whose authorship of an anti-lockdown treatise during the coronavirus pandemic made him a central figure in a bitter public health debate, to be the director of the National Institutes of Health.
“Together, Jay and RFK Jr. will restore the NIH to a Gold Standard of Medical Research as they examine the underlying causes of, and solutions to, America’s biggest health challenges, including our Crisis of Chronic Illness and Disease,” Mr. Trump wrote on social media, referring to Robert F. Kennedy Jr., his choice to lead the N.I.H.’s parent agency, the Department of Health and Human Services.
If confirmed by the Senate, Dr. Bhattacharya would lead the world’s premier medical research agency, with a $48 billion budget and 27 separate institutes and centers, each with its own research agenda, focusing on different diseases like cancer and diabetes. Dr. Bhattacharya, who is not a practicing physician, has called for overhauling the N.I.H. and limiting the power of civil servants who, he believes, played too prominent a role in shaping federal policy during the pandemic.
He is the latest in a series of Trump health picks who came to prominence during the coronavirus pandemic and who hold views on medicine and public health that are at times outside the mainstream. The president-elect’s health choices, experts agree, suggest a shake-up is coming to the nation’s public health and biomedical establishment.
Dr. Bhattacharya is one of three lead authors of the Great Barrington Declaration, a manifesto issued in 2020 that contended that the virus should be allowed to spread among young healthy people who were “at minimal risk of death” and could thus develop natural immunity, while prevention efforts were targeted to older people and the vulnerable.
Through a connection with a Stanford colleague, Dr. Scott Atlas, who was advising Mr. Trump during his first term, Dr. Bhattacharya presented his views to Alex M. Azar II, Mr. Trump’s health secretary. The condemnation from the public health establishment was swift. Dr. Bhattacharya and his fellow authors were promptly dismissed as cranks whose “fringe” policy prescriptions would lead to millions of unnecessary deaths.
Read more about this awful person at the NYT link.
By Christopher “Denise
Politico: Trump taps financier and donor Phelan to be Navy secretary.
President-elect Donald Trump has selected businessman John Phelan as his nominee to lead the Navy, according to a statement released on Tuesday night.
“It is my great honor to announce John Phelan as our next United States Secretary of the Navy! John will be a tremendous force for our Naval Servicemembers, and a steadfast leader in advancing my America First vision,” Trump wrote. “He will put the business of the U.S. Navy above all else.”
Trump’s pick of Phelan, after choosing Army National Guard Veteran and former Fox News host Pete Hegseth to lead the Defense Department, is a sign that the incoming administration could prioritize disruptors coming into the agency instead of long-tenured bureaucrats. Trump is also eyeing businessman Steve Feinberg and defense investor Trae Stephens as the Pentagon’s No. 2, The Wall Street Journal reported.
Phelan, who leads the private investment firm Rugger Management and once handled Michael Dell’s investments, was a major donor to the Trump campaign and reportedly hosted the president-elect at his Aspen, Colorado, home this summer where Trump went on a profanity-laced tirade about immigration and warned that the election could be the last the United States ever had if Vice President Kamala Harris had won.
And get this: Phelan has no military experience. Trump also consider Ronny Jackson for the job!
Politico: Kash Patel and Cliff Sims are jostling for the deputy director gig at the CIA.
Two Trump transition insiders, Cliff Sims and Kash Patel, are angling to be deputy director of the CIA — and angering others who feel they’re using their roles on the transition to undermine any would-be contenders, according to three people familiar with the matter.
The No. 2 position at the powerful spy agency is one of the most sought-after national security posts that remains unfilled. It does not require Senate confirmation — a concern for other roles, like FBI director, Patel is said to be interested in — but wields enormous influence inside the U.S. intelligence community.
The frustration toward Sims, the former White House and ODNI communications strategist, and Patel, the firebrand former House Intelligence Committee staffer and Pentagon official, stems from the fact that both are helping the transition interview candidates for the CIA role, said the three people, all of whom were granted anonymity to share details on the transition.
“The issue that a lot of us have is that these people are involved in staffing national security jobs, and at the same time they’re also promoting themselves for the same roles,” said one of the people.
There is also a concern that Patel in particular is fighting dirty. A second person said there was suspicion Patel was leaking damaging stories on Sims, citing a recent story on a blow-up Trump had after being reminded Sims wrote a tell-all memoir in 2019 after leaving the White House.
Trump has also put Elon Musk in a prominent position in his transition, and now we are hearing from Musk’s mother, who seems even stupider than her son.
When President-elect Donald Trump said Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy would recommend major cuts to the federal government in his administration, many public employees knew that their jobs could be on the line.
Now they have a new fear: becoming the personal targets of the world’s richest man – and his legions of followers.
By Anna Matveeva
Last week, in the midst of the flurry of his daily missives, Musk reposted two X posts that revealed the names and titles of people holding four relatively obscure climate-related government positions. Each post has been viewed tens of millions of times, and the individuals named have been subjected to a barrage of negative attention. At least one of the four women named has deleted her social media accounts.
Although the information he posted on those government positions is available through public online databases, these posts target otherwise unknown government employees in roles that do not deal directly with the public.
Several current federal employees told CNN they’re afraid their lives will be forever changed – including physically threatened – as Musk makes behind-the-scenes bureaucrats into personal targets. Others told CNN that the threat of being in Musk’s crosshairs might even drive them from their jobs entirely – achieving Musk’s smaller government goals without so much as a proper review.
“These tactics are aimed at sowing terror and fear at federal employees,” said Everett Kelley, president of the American Federation of Government Employees, which represents more than 800,000 of the 2.3 million civilian federal employees. “It’s intended to make them fearful that they will become afraid to speak up.”
This isn’t new behavior for Musk, who has often singled out individuals who he claims have made mistakes or stand in his way. One former federal employee, previously targeted by Musk, said she experienced something very similar.
“It’s his way of intimidating people to either quit or also send a signal to all the other agencies that ‘you’re next’,” said Mary “Missy” Cummings, an engineering and computer science professor at George Mason University, who drew Musk’s ire because of her criticisms of Tesla when she was at the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.
Read the rest at the link.
The Independent: Elon Musk’s mom says it’s ‘degrading’ to call her son ‘wealthy’: He’s ‘the genius of the world.’
The mother of Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, stopped by Fox Business on Monday to scold those who call her son “wealthy,” claiming it was “degrading” and that she would prefer he be referred to as the “genius of the world.”
With her son now president-elect Donald Trump’s “First Buddy” and in charge of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), Maye Musk sat down with Fox Business anchor Stuart Varney to gush over her 53-year-old child’s accomplishments.
Besides talking about the younger Musk’s companies SpaceX, Tesla and X (formerly Twitter), she also dished on how well her son and Trump get along, especially since the election.
“I’ve seen them together, but very shortly. I live in New York, and they’re in Mar-a-Lago or at a SpaceX launch, and they just seem to be having fun. A lot of fun,” she declared, adding: “And it’s nice for both of them to have fun, and [Elon] really respects him a lot and is really happy that there’s a future for America now.”
She also claimed that it would be “very easy” for her son and DOGE co-chair Vivek Ramaswamy to slash the federal workforce and cut spending, citing Elon Musk’s severe and immediate layoffs when he purchased Twitter in 2022.
Seemingly parroting her son’s talking points, she absolutely trashed the press. “What they call mainstream media, but I call them dishonest Democrat media, they will be trying to break up the relationship. They will be hating everything,” she said. “And I told that to Elon, he said he expects that because they were dishonest before the election.”
Whatever.
Artist unknown
There’s just a tiny bit of possible good news from former federal prosecutor Barbara McQuade at MSNBC: How Jack Smith quietly ensured Trump’s Jan. 6 case isn’t actually going anywhere.
Special counsel Jack Smith filed a motion with the trial court in the District of Columbia to dismiss the Jan. 6 election interference case against President-elect Donald Trump on Monday, kicking up a flurry of questions — namely, why would the special counsel pull the plug? Smith later filed a motion with the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals to dismiss the appeal of the government documents case against Trump. While Trump has vowed to fire Smith, why would the special counsel do something to make it easy for Trump, by dismissing the cases himself before Trump is sworn in to office in January? Is this simply an example of what historian Timothy Snyder calls “obeying” an authoritarian in advance?
Not at all. In fact, this move could be an effort to keep the cases alive in the long term. An interesting tell in each motion is Smith’s request to dismiss the cases “without prejudice.” That means that the cases can be filed again. By dismissing the cases now on his own terms, Smith blocks Trump’s attorney general from dismissing the cases for all time.
In addition, by filing his motions pre-emptively, Smith was able to explain his reasons for dismissing the case, rather than allowing Trump’s future AG to mischaracterize them. According to Smith, he was dismissing the case not because of the merits or strength of the cases, but because he had to. As Smith explains, the DOJ’s Office of Legal Counsel, whose opinions are “binding” on the special counsel, has concluded that a sitting president may not be indicted or criminally prosecuted under the Constitution. OLC reasoned that criminal charges would make it impossible for a president to carry out his constitutional duties in light of the distraction of preparing a criminal defense, the public stigma that would hamper his leadership role and the obstacles prison would impose on his ability to perform his duties.
But Smith was careful to note that this relief from criminal prosecution is “temporary,” and ends when the president leaves office. Smith cites OLC as concluding that this form of immunity for a sitting president “would generally result in the delay, but not the forbearance, of any criminal trial” That is, Trump gets a reprieve, but only during his term in office.
Of course, as in most criminal cases, the statute of limitations here is five years from the date of the last act alleged in the indictments. In the Jan. 6 case, the last alleged conduct occurred in January 2021, so the deadline for filing new charges would typically be January 2026. In the documents case, in which the last act occurred in August 2022, the statute will expire in August 2027. Both dates will arrive well before Trump’s term ends. But Smith’s brief contains another tell when he writes that OLC has “noted the possibility that a court might equitably toll the statute of limitations to permit proceeding against the President once out of office.” That is, a court could call a timeout, pausing it on Trump’s inauguration day on Jan. 21, 2025, and then restarting the clock when Trump leaves office in 2029. That would give prosecutors plenty of time to refile charges. Certainly, the tolling issue would be litigated, but by dismissing the case now, Smith preserves this issue for future prosecutors to argue.
Read the rest at MSNBC.
That’s it for me today. I don’t know how I even got through those articles. I’m going back into hibernation now.
Wednesday Reads: And So It Begins . . .
Posted: November 13, 2024 Filed under: 2024 Elections, American Fascists, Donald Trump | Tags: Donald Trump, Elon Musk, John Thune, Lara Trump, Marco Rubio, news, politics, Senate Majority Leader, Trump, Vivek Ramaswamy 12 CommentsGood Afternoon!!
BREAKING NEWS– We dodged a bullet! Rick Scott will not be Senate Majority Leader.
John Thune, South Dakota Senator
The Hill: Thune elected Senate majority leader.
Sen. John Thune (R-S.D.) has been elected Senate majority leader, setting the stage for him to replace retiring Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), who has held the top Senate GOP leadership job for the past 18 years.
Thune has served as Senate Republican whip, the No. 2-ranking position in the Senate GOP leadership, since 2019, and largely managed operation of the Senate floor since McConnell suffered a concussion from a fall in 2023.
Thune beat Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) by a vote of 25 to 24, according to two sources familiar.
Thune led after the first ballot. He won 25 votes while Cornyn won 15 votes and Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.) collected 13 votes.
“I am extremely honored to have earned the support of my colleagues to lead the Senate in the 119th Congress, and I am beyond proud of the work we have done to secure our majority and the White House,” he said in a statement after the vote. “This Republican team is united behind President Trump’s agenda, and our work starts today.”
And So It Begins . . . Trump’s appoints all the best people:
This is like 2016 only so much worse. For the past couple of days, Trump has been announcing his picks for the Cabinet and other important government posts, and his choices are even worse than we could have imagined.
Trump announced his choice of Marco Rubio as Secretary of State, which I guess is sort of reasonable. But it’s likely that one reason for appointing Rubio would be to open up the Senate seat in Florida so that he can give it to Lara Trump. Eventually, Trump will likely fire Rubio in humiliating fashion.
NBC News: Trump’s Cabinet moves hand Ron DeSantis a gift — but possibly with strings attached.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis will have a chance to put another stamp on state politics with a big appointment if Sen. Marco Rubio becomes secretary of state. But one major question hangs over that opportunity: How badly does President-elect Donald Trump want his daughter-in-law, Lara, to become a U.S. senator?
Lara Trump, future Senator?
DeSantis, like any Florida governor, has the ability to unilaterally appoint the person who would fill a vacant Senate seat, which may come into play following Monday’s news of Trump’s expected nomination of Rubio to lead the State Department. Trump could still change his mind, cautioned three sources familiar with the selection process, who said the decision wouldn’t be final until the president-elect makes a formal announcement.
But if Rubio’s Senate seat becomes open, there is little doubt DeSantis will face at least some pressure from Trump’s team to appoint a candidate they want, which would almost certainly be Lara Trump, according to seven people tracking deliberations around the potential vacancy.
Perhaps the worst appointment so far came yesterday with the announcement that Fox News weekend host Pete Hegseth will serve as Secretary of Defense. Hegseth is the person who urged Trump to pardon war criminal Eddie Gallagher.
Dave Philipps at The New York Times, Dec. 27, 2029, wrote about the aftermath of the Trump pardon: Anguish and Anger From the Navy SEALs Who Turned In Edward Gallagher.
The Navy SEALs showed up one by one, wearing hoodies and T-shirts instead of uniforms, to tell investigators what they had seen. Visibly nervous, they shifted in their chairs, rubbed their palms and pressed their fists against their foreheads. At times they stopped in midsentence and broke into tears.
“Sorry about this,” Special Operator First Class Craig Miller, one of the most experienced SEALs in the group, said as he looked sideways toward a blank wall, trying to hide that he was weeping. “It’s the first time — I’m really broken up about this.”
Video recordings of the interviews obtained by The New York Times, which have not been shown publicly before, were part of a trove of Navy investigative materials about the prosecution of Special Operations Chief Edward Gallagher on war crimes charges including murder.
They offer the first opportunity outside the courtroom to hear directly from the men of Alpha platoon, SEAL Team 7, whose blistering testimony about their platoon chief was dismissed by President Trump when he upended the military code of justice to protect Chief Gallagher from the punishment.
Eddie Gallagher
“The guy is freaking evil,” Special Operator Miller told investigators. “The guy was toxic,” Special Operator First Class Joshua Vriens, a sniper, said in a separate interview. “You could tell he was perfectly O.K. with killing anybody that was moving,” Special Operator First Class Corey Scott, a medic in the platoon, told the investigators.
Such dire descriptions of Chief Gallagher, who had eight combat deployments and sometimes went by the nickname Blade, are in marked contrast to Mr. Trump’s portrayal of him at a recent political rally in Florida as one of “our great fighters.” [….]
Platoon members said they saw Chief Gallagher shoot civilians and fatally stab a wounded captive with a hunting knife. Chief Gallagher was acquitted by a military jury in July of all but a single relatively minor charge, and was cleared of all punishment in November by Mr. Trump.
Video from a SEAL’s helmet camera, included in the trove of materials, shows the barely conscious captive — a teenage Islamic State fighter so thin that his watch slid easily up and down his arm — being brought in to the platoon one day in May 2017. Then the helmet camera is shut off.
In the video interviews with investigators, three SEALs said they saw Chief Gallagher go on to stab the sedated captive for no reason, and then hold an impromptu re-enlistment ceremony over the body, as if it were a trophy.
“I was listening to it, and I was just thinking, like, this is the most disgraceful thing I’ve ever seen in my life,” Special Operator Miller, who has since been promoted to chief, told investigators.
Hegseth is famous at Fox News for announcing that for ten years he never washed his hands.
More on Hegseth from CNN: Trump picks Fox News host and Army veteran Pete Hegseth to serve as secretary of defense.
Hegseth’s selection was a surprise, as he was not among those considered as a likely pick by members of Trump’s team, sources familiar with the discussions told CNN.
Sources said that it came down to Trump having a longstanding relationship with Hegseth, noting that the president-elect always thought he was “smart” and was impressed by his career. Trump also likes that Hegseth is a military veteran and the account of his service in his book, the sources said.
While Hegseth’s name had not been on the initial shortlist, Trump was struggling to land on a choice for the job, and he liked Hegseth from Trump’s last term when he briefly considered him for leading the Department of Veterans Affairs before being warned that he may not get confirmed by the Senate, one source familiar said.
“Trump also thinks he has the look,” one source said….
Trump’s choice of Hegseth is a notable departure from his picks for defense secretary in his first term, when he selected a four-star general, James Mattis, and an Army secretary, Mark Esper, to lead the Pentagon. But Trump ultimately soured on both of those secretaries and was sharply critical of them after Mattis resigned and Esper was fired.
One defense official told CNN, “Everyone is simply shocked.” Another Pentagon official who was following the potential picks for defense secretary learned about the possibility of Hegseth only in the hours before the nomination and, like others who spoke on condition of anonymity with CNN, didn’t know how to react.
Even some former Trump officials who have remained close to former colleagues and have been in touch with the transition were caught off guard. One former Trump official also said they were “shocked” by the selection and expect there’s going to be an effort to “take him down.”
Indeed, in choosing Hegseth, Trump has likely set off what could be his first contentious confirmation fight for a Cabinet pick. While Senate Republicans newly in the majority are likely to be deferential to Trump’s selections, Trump’s nominees can only afford to lose a handful of Republicans to win confirmation.
The article notes that Hegseth opposes women serving in combat. A bit more info:
The Princeton and Harvard grad also served as CEO for veterans advocacy organization Concerned Veterans for America and holds two Bronze Stars, according to Simon & Schuster, the company that published his 2017 book “In the Arena.”
Hegseth says he was removed from inauguration duty in 2021 because of what he described as a religious tattoo.
In his book, Hegseth wrote that he had served under former Presidents George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Trump. His unit was tasked to work the inauguration of Joe Biden as well on January 20, 2021.
“Ultimately, members of my unit in leadership deemed that I was an extremist or a white nationalist because of a tattoo I have, which is a religious tattoo,” Hegseth told Fox News during an interview promoting his book in June. Hegseth said the tattoo is a Jerusalem cross.
Hegseth first job will probably be to lead a purge of generals who are not sufficiently loyal to Trump.
From The New Republic: Trump’s First Executive Order May Be a Military Purge. The order could place the military under the president’s total command, like never before.
Trump’s transition team has a “warrior board” executive order ready for the president-elect’s desk.
An executive order draft is floating around MAGA world that would establish a Trump-appointed “warrior board” with the power to purge any three- or four-star generals as it sees fit. The board would send its dismissal recommendations to Trump and they would be acted upon within 30 days.
The draft executive order, which was first reported on by The Wall Street Journal, makes it easy to quickly remove military officials “lacking in requisite leadership qualities” but leaves open the question of what those requisite qualities are. The executive order draws on General George C. Marshall’s 1940 creation of a “plucking board” led by retired general officers to “remove from line promotion any officer for reasons deemed good and sufficient.” But that plucking board was to uplift young officers with high potential, not to cull anyone not perfectly aligned with MAGA.
It’s not yet clear if Trump will sign the executive order, but Trump has held vitriol toward certain military leaders for some time now. He has vowed to weaponize them against the “enemy within,” to fire anyone involved in the 2021 U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, and to create a task force to weed out “woke generals.”
Pete Hegseth
Here is what Hegseth has promoted in the past. The Washington Post: Pete Hegseth has said exactly how he will shake up the Pentagon.
President-elect Donald Trump’s selection of Fox News host Pete Hegseth as his nominee for defense secretary would place atop the Pentagon a combat veteran and political ally who has assailed the military as ineffective and “woke,” mused about firing the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff,and blasted the top brass as having failed to safeguard American strength.
Hegseth’s nomination suggests a coming battle over social and personnel issues within the armed forces, historically one of the nation’s most diverse institutions. He has been among Trump’s most high-profile supporters to champion the cause of rolling back initiatives designed to promote diversity.
Throughout his campaign, Trump made a distinction between fighting generals and “woke” generals, vowing to fire the latter. Asked in a podcast interview with the “Shawn Ryan Show” published last week what he would do, Hegseth set a tone that looks ominous for senior Pentagon officials.
“First of all, you’ve got to fire the chairman of the Joint Chiefs,” Hegseth said, referring to Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr. “Any general, any admiral, whatever,” who was involved in diversity, equity and inclusion programs or “woke s—” has “got to go,” Hegseth said.
Now that Ivanka has stepped back from politics, it seems that Don Jr. has become an important adviser to Trump, according the WaPo article:
His [Hegseth’s] nomination represents a major victory for Donald Trump Jr., who has lobbied for the inclusion of more unorthodox candidates, such as Vice President-elect JD Vance and biotech entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy, against the wishes of establishment Republicans who favored filling key administration roles with those they see as more traditional choices, such as former secretary of state Mike Pompeo.
The breakneck speed of the Hegseth nomination also underscores the value Trump places on TV personalities who have used their platform to promote his agenda.
It’s difficult to believe that Senate Republicans would confirm this nomination, but Trump has demanded that the Senate stay in recess at the beginning of his term so he can put his corrupt choices in place though recess appointments.
Some more appointments that Trump announced yesterday: Mike Huckabee to be Ambassador to Israel; Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy to lead a government efficiency department.
Rolling Stone: Elon Musk, Vivek Ramaswamy to Lead Trump’s New ‘Department of Government Efficiency.’
A month ago, billionaire Elon Musk warned that if Donald Trump won a second presidential term and gave him a role in government, Americans would need to “reduce spending to live within our means” and suffer “temporary hardship” in order to address the national debt. On Tuesday, the Tesla CEO seemed closer to achieving that goal after the president-elect announced Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy will lead a new “Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE).
The two entrepreneurs will be tasked with paving the way for Trump’s administration “to dismantle Government Bureaucracy, slash excess regulations, cut wasteful expenditures, and restructure Federal Agencies,” Trump said in a statement.
Vivek Ramaswamy and Elon Musk
He added that DOGE could “become, potentially, ‘The Manhattan Project’ of our time. Republican politicians have dreamed about the objectives of ‘DOGE’ for a very long time” and that the department would partner with the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB). Exactly how DOGE would “provide advice and guidance from outside of government” was not clear.
In the statement shared by Trump, Musk declared that DOGE “will send shockwaves through the system and anyone involved in Government waste, which is a lot of people!”
“Importantly, we will drive out the massive waste and fraud which exists throughout our annual $6.5 Trillion Dollars of Government Spending. They will work together to liberate our Economy, and make the U.S. Government accountable to ‘WE THE PEOPLE,’” Trump continued. The president-elect ended by stating DOGE’s work will “conclude” no later than July 4, 2026, and that a “smaller government” will be the “perfect gift” to the American people, marking the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.
Presumably, the DOGE will not tamper with all the government contracts that Musk’s companies receive.
Apparently Musk is still in Trump’s good graces, but he’s wearing out his welcome with many staff members and other Mar-a-Lago denizens. He has been horning in on Trump’s meetings and phone calls. Musk even wanted to go along with Trump for his meeting with President Joe Biden today!
The New York Times: At Mar-a-Lago, ‘Uncle’ Elon Musk Puts His Imprint on the Trump Transition.
In nearly every meeting that President-elect Donald J. Trump holds at Mar-a-Lago, alongside him is someone who has been elected to nothing, nominated to nothing and, only a few months ago, had no meaningful relationship with him.
Elon Musk.
The world’s richest person has ascended to a position of extraordinary, unofficial influence in Mr. Trump’s transition process, playing a role that makes him indisputably America’s most powerful private citizen. He has sat in on nearly every job interview with the Trump team and bonded with the Trump family, and he is trying to install his Silicon Valley friends in plum positions in the next administration.
Elon Musk jumping around like a complete idiot
Mr. Trump announced on Tuesday that Mr. Musk would help lead what he called the Department of Government Efficiency, a new body to “dismantle government bureaucracy.” But Mr. Musk’s true influence on the Trump transition effort goes well beyond that posting.
Mr. Musk has assumed an almost mythical aura in Mr. Trump’s inner circle. At Mar-a-Lago one recent evening, he walked into the dining room about 30 minutes after the president-elect did and received a similar standing ovation, according to two people who saw him enter.
Mr. Musk, often with his 4-year-old son X on his lap, has spent most of the last week at Mar-a-Lago, joining not just interviews but almost every meeting and many meals that Mr. Trump has had. He briefly shuttled back to Austin, Texas, where he has a $35 million compound, before returning on Friday, where he ate in Mar-a-Lago’s dining room and on its patio, roamed the gift shop and spent time on the golf course — all alongside the president-elect.
“I’m happy to be the first buddy!” he replied to a social-media follower this weekend.
CNBC: Elon Musk attends Trump’s first post-election meeting with House Republicans in D.C.
Elon Musk on Wednesday joined President-elect Donald Trump for his first post-election meeting with the House Republican conference in Washington, D.C., an adviser to Trump told NBC News. Trump and Musk flew to the nation’s capital together from Florida aboard Trump’s plane.
The development is the latest example of how Musk, the world’s richest man and one of the top backers of Trump’s winning campaign, has grown his presence and influence in the future president’s orbit.
Here’s Politico Playbook’s take: Playbook: Elon wears out his welcome.
ELON BUTTS IN — Later this morning, Trump travels to Washington for the first time since his sweeping presidential victory last week, where he’ll make the customary visit to the White House and huddle with allies on Capitol Hill.
Earlier this week, however, Trump’s inner circle was abuzz that he might have a traveling companion for the trip: not wife MELANIA, who is remaining in Florida, but ELON MUSK — who privately expressed interest in joining Trump for his visit with President JOE BIDEN, to the vexation of some Trump insiders.
To be fair, there have been few boundaries on Musk’s involvement in Trump’s campaign and now in his transition. Last night, Trump announced that Musk would co-lead a “Department of Government Efficiency” — a sort of meme-ified Simpson-Bowles commission — alongside MAGA hype man VIVEK RAMASWAMY.
But the notion of allowing Musk to tag along to the White House, for a hallowed ritual in the peaceful transfer of power, prompted a bewildered reaction inside Trump world: Was that even allowed? What was the protocol for such a thing?
As of last night, it appears the plan might not materialize. After appearing earlier this week on a draft manifest for this morning’s flight to D.C., we couldn’t get a clear answer last night on whether Musk is coming or not.
The bigger picture, however, is how Musk is starting to wear out his welcome with some in Trump’s orbit. After initially making a huge splash with his endorsement, made just moments after the July attempt on Trump’s life, some insiders now say he’s become almost a comical distraction, hanging around Mar-a-Lago, sidling into high-level transition meetings and giving unsolicited feedback on Trump’s personnel decisions.
“Elon is getting a little big for his britches,” one insider tells Playbook.
Trump, for his part, doesn’t seem to mind, relishing the attention he’s getting from the richest man in the world. Over the weekend, our colleagues Meridith McGraw and Natalie Allison reported, Trump was zipping Musk around in his golf cart, introducing him to club members and showing him the resort’s gift shop.
That proximity has given Musk access to some of the most intimate details of the Trump transition. For example: While much was made about Musk joining Trump’s recent call with Ukrainian President VOLODYMYR ZELENSKYY, we’re told that the encounter was more or less a fluke: Musk happened to be in the room when Zelenskyy called, and Trump put him on the phone.
I could go on, but this post is already too long. I have no doubt there will be more horrors to deal with today. today.
Lazy Caturday Reads: It’s Over. Trump Won.
Posted: November 9, 2024 Filed under: 2024 presidential Campaign, cat art, caturday | Tags: Adolf Hitler, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, fascism, news, politics, Trump 10 Comments
By Katrina Pallon
Good Afternoon!!
Yesterday I posted a sarcastic comment on Dakinikat’s thread to the effect that I was surprised that she was looking forward to elections in 2026. She explained to me that there would be midterm elections in two years.
Am I the only one here who thinks it’s unlikely there will be any more elections? Trump himself has said that if he won there wouldn’t be any more need to vote. I think this is it. We are living in Germany 1933. It only took Hitler a couple of years to win full control of the German government.
The Guardian, July 30, 2024: Donald Trump repeats controversial ‘You won’t have to vote any more’ claim.
Donald Trump on Monday repeated his weekend remarks to Christian summit attendees that they would never need to vote again if he returns to the presidency in November.
But, after being asked repeatedly on Fox News to clarify what he meant, the Republican former president denied threatening to permanently stay in office beyond his second – and constitutionally mandated final – four-year term.
During the initial remarks made on Friday, which caused outrage and alarm among his critics, Trump told the crowd to “get out and vote, just this time”, adding that “you won’t have to do it any more. Four more years, you know what? It’ll be fixed, it’ll be fine, you won’t have to vote any more, my beautiful Christians.”
Democrats and other critics called the remarks “terrifying”, authoritarian and anti-democratic. And Monday, in a new interview with the Fox News host Laura Ingraham, the former president attempted to explain what he meant.
“That statement is very simple, I said, ‘Vote for me, you’re not gonna have to do it ever again,’” Trump told Ingraham. “It’s true, because we have to get the vote out. Christians are not known as a big voting group, they don’t vote. And I’m explaining that to them. You never vote. This time, vote. I’ll straighten out the country, you won’t have to vote any more, I won’t need your vote any more, you can go back to not voting.”
Okay, so maybe the statement was directed at Christians only. I don’t know. I only know that in 2021, Trump crazies like Michael Flynn urged Trump to invoke the insurrection act and take control of the voting machines, and Trump considered it. I expect him to do that this time so he can use the military to attack protesters and decide whether and when we can have elections.
Just before the 2024 election, Trump told followers that he should have just refused to leave office in 2020. Steve Benen at Maddow Blog: At the finish line, Trump says he ‘shouldn’t have left’ after 2020 loss.
On the last episode of “Fox News Sunday” before Election Day, Democratic Sen. Mark Kelly of Arizona raised an important criticism about Donald Trump: The former president, the Arizona senator said, is trying to “set up the conditions where he can do what he did in 2020.”
Host Shannon Bream quickly interrupted to say that Trump, at the end of his term, “did leave in 2020.” It fell to Kelly to remind the host and viewers that the Republican left office “after he sent a mob to Capitol Hill,” adding, “There are people who died that day because Donald Trump refused to accept the election.”
The exchange was notable for a variety of reasons, not the least of which was the familiarity of Bream’s argument. Indeed, it’s the line the former president’s defenders have peddled for nearly four years.
By Marina Aizen
Yes, Trump rejected legitimate election results because he disapproved of the voters’ verdict. Yes, he tried to overturn the outcome in ways federal prosecutors believe were blatantly illegal. Yes, he filled his radicalized followers with lies, incited a riot, and deployed an armed mob to attack the U.S. Capitol, as part of a plot to seize illegitimate power by force.
But when it was time for his successor’s inauguration, Republicans argue, at least Trump left the White House when he was supposed to.
It was against this backdrop that the GOP candidate, just hours after Bream’s observation, expressed regret for having left the White House when he was supposed to. NBC News reported:
At another point in the [Pennsylvania] rally, Trump said he should not have left the White House on Jan. 20, 2021, when Biden was sworn in. “The day that I left, I shouldn’t have left. I mean, honestly, because we did so, we did so well,” the former president told supporters.
He didn’t appear to be kidding.
In other words, with just two days remaining before Election Day, as undecided voters made up their minds, the Republican nominee for the nation’s highest office reminded the public about his increasingly overt hostility toward democracy.
Trump is a criminal, a gangster. He is once again going to be president of the United States. There will be nothing to hold him back this time–no “adults in the room.” Thanks to the Supreme Court he is now immune from prosecution as long as he or the Court can define his behavior as somehow part of his official duties. The crimes he has been indicted and prosecuted for are in the process of being erased. He will appoint his fellow criminals and thugs to his cabinet and other powerful positions. Why should I believe he will allow any limits on his powers? Why should he allow elections that might allow Democrats to win House and Senate seats in 2026? This time he isn’t going to fool around. Can anyone stop him? I hope so, but I’m skeptical.
I wrote on Wednesday that I think Putin will be a powerful voice in Trump’s government (as will China’s Xi and Hungary’s Orbán). Trump and Elon Musk have both been talking to Putin, and Russia has obviously helped by spreading on-line disinformation. And of course Musk and his South African buddies expect to have a hand in running the government. It remains to be seen if Trump will go along with that.
As I noted above, Elon Musk obviously thinks he’s the shadow president now. The New York Times: Elon Musk Helped Elect Trump. What Does He Expect in Return?
Even before Donald J. Trump was re-elected, his best-known backer, Elon Musk, had come to him with a request for his presidential transition.
He wanted Mr. Trump to hire some employees from Mr. Musk’s rocket company, SpaceX, as top government officials — including at the Defense Department, according to two people briefed on the calls.
That request, which would seed SpaceX employees into an agency that is one of its biggest customers, is a sign of the benefits that Mr. Musk may reap after investing more than $100 million in Mr. Trump’s campaign, pushing out a near-constant stream of pro-Trump material on his social media platform, X, and making public appearances on the candidate’s behalf across the hard-fought state of Pennsylvania.
By Lucy Almey Bird
The outreach regarding the SpaceX employees, which hasn’t been reported, shows the extent to which Mr. Musk wants to fill a potential Trump administration with his closest confidants even as his billions of dollars in government contracts pose a conflict to any government role.
The six companies that Mr. Musk oversees are deeply entangled with federal agencies. They make billions off contracts to launch rockets, build satellites and provide space-based communications services.
Tesla makes hundreds of millions more from emissions-trading credits created by federal law. And Mr. Musk’s companies are facing at least 20 recent investigations, including one targeting a self-driving car technology that Tesla considers key to its future.
Now, Mr. Musk will have the ear of the president, who oversees all of those agencies. Mr. Musk could even gain the power to oversee them himself, if Mr. Trump follows through on a promise to appoint him as head of a government efficiency commission. Mr. Trump has told Mr. Musk that he wants him to bring the same scalpel to the federal government that he brought to Twitter after he bought the company and rebranded it as X. Mr. Musk has spoken of cutting at least $2 trillion from the federal budget.
The effect could be to remove, or weaken, one of the biggest checks on Mr. Musk’s power: the federal government.
“All of the annoying enforcement stuff goes away,” said Stephen Myrow, managing partner at Beacon Policy Advisors, a firm that sells corporations daily updates on regulatory and legislative trends in Washington.
Hal Singer, an economist who has advised parties filing antitrust challenges against technology companies and also is a professor at the University of Utah, said that Tesla and SpaceX can expect less scrutiny from the Justice Department.
“They are unlikely to go after Elon — Trump’s D.O.J. won’t,” he said. “Abstain from investigating your friends, but bringing cases that investigate your enemies — that is what we saw during the first Trump administration.”
Trump stole hundreds of secret documents from the government, and the FBI believes he hasn’t returned all of them. He’ll never have to do that now, and he won’t be punished for these crimes or any future ones. I have no doubt that Trump shared secret information with Putin and other foreign leaders, and he will likely keep doing that as president. Prove me wrong.
Soon, Trump will begin getting intelligence briefings again. Time: Trump, Who Was Charged with Mishandling Secrets, Will Get Classified Briefings Again.
Two years ago, the FBI raided Donald Trump’s home to retrieve government records he had refused to return, including hundreds containing classified information. The indictment that followed alleged the former President had left classified information laying around next to a toilet and stacked on a ballroom stage.
Now Trump is poised to be briefed once again on the country’s secrets to prepare him to take the reins of government on Jan. 20. “They’re not going to restrict it,” says a Republican involved in the transition.
It’s an awkward dance. Biden previously called Trump’s handling of Top Secret documents “totally irresponsible.” And during his first term, Trump raised alarms in the intelligence community when he reportedly shared secrets of a close U.S. ally with senior Russian officials during an Oval Office meeting. In the interim, federal officials charged Trump with violating the Espionage Act for unauthorized retention of national defense information, a case that is now likely to be closed in the coming weeks.
By Catriona Millar
But Biden has directed his entire Administration to work with Trump’s team to ensure an “orderly” transition. That means looking past Trump’s previous history with classified information.
“He was indicted for mishandling classified information,” says Jeremy Bash, a former chief of staff for the CIA and the Department of Defense during the Obama Administration. “But given that he is about to assume the Presidency, the responsible thing to do would be to provide him the classified briefings and offer government resources to help him handle and store any classified material he needs to hold on to.”
For decades, President-elects have been allowed to receive sensitive national security briefings by the country’s intelligence services well before Inauguration Day. It’s a practice rooted in the idea that the voters have chosen the person to run the country, and there is no further vetting required beyond they are sworn into office.
We are all supposed to just pretend that Trump is a normal president-elect, even though he is obviously suffering from dementia and numerous psychological disorders.
At least some in the military leadership are trying to prepare for the worst. CNN: Pentagon officials discussing how to respond if Trump issues controversial orders.
Pentagon officials are holding informal discussions about how the Department of Defense would respond if Donald Trump issues orders to deploy active-duty troops domestically and fire large swaths of apolitical staffers, defense officials told CNN.
Trump has suggested he would be open to using active-duty forces for domestic law enforcement and mass deportations and has indicated he wants to stack the federal government with loyalists and “clean out corrupt actors” in the US national security establishment.
Trump in his last term had a fraught relationship with much of his senior military leadership, including now-retired Gen. Mark Milley who took steps to limit Trump’s ability to use nuclear weapons while he was chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The president-elect, meanwhile, has repeatedly called US military generals “woke,” “weak” and “ineffective leaders.”
Officials are now gaming out various scenarios as they prepare for an overhaul of the Pentagon.
“We are all preparing and planning for the worst-case scenario, but the reality is that we don’t know how this is going to play out yet,” one defense official said.
Trump’s election has also raised questions inside the Pentagon about what would happen if the president issued an unlawful order, particularly if his political appointees inside the department don’t push back.
“Troops are compelled by law to disobey unlawful orders,” said another defense official. “But the question is what happens then – do we see resignations from senior military leaders? Or would they view that as abandoning their people?” [….]
Defense officials are also scrambling to identify civilian employees who might be impacted if Trump reinstates Schedule F, an executive order he first issued in 2020 that, if enacted, would have reclassified huge swaths of nonpolitical, career federal employees across the US government to make them more easily fireable.
Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin said on Tuesday that “I totally believe that our leaders will continue to do the right thing no matter what. I also believe that our Congress will continue to do the right things to support our military.”
There’s much more discussion of these issues at the link.
By Gracie Litleman
Politico: Pentagon officials anxious Trump may fire the military’s top general.
Defense officials are getting anxious about the possibility of the incoming Trump administration firing Joint Chiefs Chair Gen. C.Q. Brown, due to perceptions that he is out of step with the president-elect on the Pentagon’s diversity and inclusion programs.
The Trump administration’s DOD transition team — led by former Veterans Affairs Secretary Robert Wilkie — has yet to officially set foot in the Pentagon since the election was called, owing to the transition team’s refusal so far to accept assistance from the federal government. But concern is beginning to bubble up that Brown, who spoke publicly about the challenges of rising through the military as a Black man as Donald Trump urged the Defense Department to crack down on the George Floyd protests in 2020, could be swept out by a president-elect who has promised to make the Pentagon less “woke.”
The chair’s four-year term normally is staggered so they serve the end of one administration and the beginning of another.
For Brown, that two-year mark arrives in September 2025, well into Trump’s first year back in office. There is no rule, however, prohibiting Trump from dismissing him sooner. Any such move would be extraordinary, though not unprecedented.
“There is some anxiety,” said one current DOD official, who like others was granted anonymity to discuss sensitive personnel matters. “I think they are immediately worried,” the official said of Brown’s team.
“He’s a DEI/woke champion,” a second DOD official said. “Can imagine he’ll be gone quite quickly.”
Two people close to the Trump transition team mentioned that Brown has long been a target of congressional Republicans who accused the Pentagon of conducting social experiments with diversity programs, to the detriment of traditional military tasks.
I feel sick to my stomach and sick at heart. This is no longer the country I was born and grew up in. Things were already bad after Trump’s last term. Now they are going to get so much worse. Elie Mystal writes at The Nation: There’s No Denying It Anymore: Trump Is Not a Fluke—He’s America.
America deserves everything it is about to get. We had a chance to stand united against fascism, authoritarianism, racism, and bigotry, but we did not. We had a chance to create a better world for not just ourselves but our sisters and brothers in at least some of the communities most vulnerable to unchecked white rule, but we did not. We had a chance to pass down a better, safer, and cleaner world to our children, but we did not. Instead, we chose Trump, JD Vance, and a few white South African billionaires who know a thing or two about instituting apartheid.
I could be more specific about the “we.” Roughly half of “us” didn’t vote for this travesty. I could be more specific about who did, and as people pore over exit polls, the only thing liberals will do liberally is dole out the blame. But the conversations about who is to blame, the hand-wringing about who showed up and who failed the moment are largely academic and pointless.
Morning Tea and Cat Stretch, by Uta Krogmann
America did this. America, through the process of a free and fair election, demanded this. America, as an idea, concept, and institution, wanted this. And America, as a collective, deserves to get what it wants.
To be clear, no individual person “deserves” what Trump will do to them… not even the people who voted for him to do the things he’s going to do. Nobody deserves to die for their vote, even if they voted for other people to die.
But we, as a country, absolutely deserve what’s about to happen to us. We, as a nation, have proven ourselves to be a fetid, violent people, and we deserve a leader who embodies the worst of us. We are not “better” than Trump. If anything, thinking that we are better than Trump, thinking there is some “silent majority” who opposes the unserious grotesqueries of the man, is the core conceit that has led the Democratic Party to such total ruin. America willed Trump into existence. He was created from our greed, our insecurities, and our selfishness. We have summoned him from the depths of our own bile and neediness, and he has answered.
And now that he is here, we deserve our fate, because the most fundamental truth about Trump’s reelection is that Trump was right about us. He will be president again because he, and perhaps he alone, saw us for how truly base, depraved, and uninformed we are as a country. Trump is not a root cause of our ills. He did not create the conditions that allowed him to rise. He is, and always has been, a mirror. He is how America sees itself.
If people would just look at him, they would see themselves as we’ve always been. He is rich, because we are rich or think we will be. He is crass because we are crass. He is self-interested because we are. He punks the media because the media are punks. He is unintelligent because we are uninformed. The president of the United States is the singular figure who is supposed to represent all Americans, and Trump reflects us more accurately than perhaps any president ever has.
That’s why the people who love him love him so passionately. He is them. And he tells them that being what they are is OK. He never for a second requires America to be better than it is. He never expects more of America than it is able to give. Trump tells America to be garbage. Garbage is easy.
And so on. Mystal is bitter, and so am I. This is the end of America. Trump and his thugs have won. Please, tell me I’m wrong. Tell me why I should believe there will be elections in 2026 and 2028. I’d like to believe it, but right now I can’t.
Wednesday Reads: Kamala for President
Posted: July 24, 2024 Filed under: 2024 presidential Campaign, Donald Trump, Joe Biden, Kamala Harris 2024 | Tags: age issue, Elon Musk, Hillary Clinton, polls 11 CommentsGood Morning!!
I feel like I’m pretty much over my cold, but I’m still very tired and keep dozing off in the daytime. Then I realized that my mother died a year ago yesterday, so maybe that partially explains why I’m feeling sad and tired. At least I’m no longer going through box after box of Kleenex. Despite everything, I’m very excited about Kamala Harris and I really believe we have a shot at beating Grandpa Trump.
Reuters: Exclusive: Harris leads Trump 44% to 42% in US presidential race, Reuters/Ipsos poll finds.
Vice President Kamala Harris opened up a marginal two-percentage-point lead over Republican Donald Trump after President Joe Biden ended his re-election campaign and passed the torch to her, a Reuters/Ipsos poll found.
That compares with a marginal two-point deficit Biden faced against Trump in last week’s poll before his Sunday exit from the race.
The new poll, conducted on Monday and Tuesday, followed both the Republican National Convention where Trump on Thursday formally accepted the nomination and Biden’s announcement on Sunday he was leaving the race and endorsing Harris.
Harris, whose campaign says she has secured the Democratic nomination, led Trump 44% to 42% in the national poll, a difference within the 3-percentage-point margin of error.
Harris and Trump were tied at 44% in a July 15-16 poll, and Trump led by one percentage point in a July 1-2 poll, both within the same margin of error.
Ali Vitali at NBC News: Democrats are cautiously optimistic that they finally have the first female president.
In Vice President Kamala Harris’ quick, if unorthodox, rise to the top of the Democratic ticket, elected officials, activists and operatives see in her a new chance to beat Donald Trump and make history in one swoop.
Eight years after Trump beat Hillary Clinton, Harris could be the first female president and the first Black woman to hold the nation’s top job, as well.
Democrats are somewhat optimistic, now set in a landscape they didn’t have in 2016: a messenger in Harris who is uniquely positioned to energize voters following the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn national abortion rights, more proof from the ballot box that women can win in battleground areas and the knowledge that Trump himself is beatable — if still politically dangerous.
“The lessons that still apply [from 2016] are that people need to take Trump and his supporters seriously,” Shaunna Thomas, who co-founded and runs the pro-women group Ultraviolet, told NBC News. “That’s even more of a top-line message than whether or not a woman can win the presidency.” [….]
Now, many of the party operatives and groups who pushed for Clinton to be the first female president are working, to borrow a phrase from President Joe Biden, to “finish the job.”
“‘Let’s finish the job’ is actually for us, too, from 2016,” said Mini Timmaraju, who leads the pro-abortion-rights group Reproductive Freedom for All and was the women’s vote director on Clinton’s 2016 campaign. “We ran and lost against Donald Trump and we suffered an incredible, horrific loss nationwide overturning Roe and so much damage to our country that this is sort of the ultimate fight back for us.”
A Harris victory in November would mean finishing the job that many of those operatives started with Clinton, one that extends further back to Shirley Chisholm, of New York, the first Black woman in Congress, who ran her own historic long-shot presidential bid in 1972.
“The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice,” Rep. Barbara Lee, D-Calif., who once worked to elect Chisholm and now backs Harris, told NBC News.
Hillary Clinton speaks for herself at The New York Times this morning: How Kamala Harris Can Win and Make History.
History has its eye on us. President Biden’s decision to end his campaign was as pure an act of patriotism as I have seen in my lifetime. It should also be a call to action to the rest of us to continue his fight for the soul of our nation. The next 15 weeks will be like nothing this country has ever experienced politically, but have no doubt: This is a race Democrats can and must win.
Mr. Biden has done a hard and rare thing. Serving as president was a lifelong dream. And when he finally got there, he was exceptionally good at it. To give that up, to accept that finishing the job meant passing the baton, took real moral clarity. The country mattered more. As one who shared that dream and has had to make peace with letting it go, I know this wasn’t easy. But it was the right thing to do.
Elections are about the future. That’s why I am excited about Vice President Kamala Harris. She represents a fresh start for American politics. She can offer a hopeful, unifying vision. She is talented, experienced and ready to be president. And I know she can defeat Donald Trump.
There is now an even sharper, clearer choice in this election. On one side is a convicted criminal who cares only about himself and is trying to turn back the clock on our rights and our country. On the other is a savvy former prosecutor and successful vice president who embodies our faith that America’s best days are still ahead. It’s old grievances versus new solutions.
On the attacks Harris will face:
Ms. Harris’s record and character will be distorted and disparaged by a flood of disinformation and the kind of ugly prejudice we’re already hearing from MAGA mouthpieces. She and the campaign will have to cut through the noise, and all of us as voters must be thoughtful about what we read, believe and share.
I know a thing or two about how hard it can be for strong women candidates to fight through the sexism and double standards of American politics. I’ve been called a witch, a “nasty woman” and much worse. I was even burned in effigy. As a candidate, I sometimes shied away from talking about making history. I wasn’t sure voters were ready for that. And I wasn’t running to break a barrier; I was running because I thought I was the most qualified to do the job. While it still pains me that I couldn’t break that highest, hardest glass ceiling, I’m proud that my two presidential campaigns made it seem normal to have a woman at the top of the ticket.
Ms. Harris will face unique additional challenges as the first Black and South Asian woman to be at the top of a major party’s ticket. That’s real, but we shouldn’t be afraid. It is a trap to believe that progress is impossible. After all, I won the national popular vote by nearly three million in 2016, and it’s not so long ago that Americans overwhelmingly elected our first Black president. As we saw in the 2022 midterms, abortion bans and attacks on democracy are galvanizing women voters like never before. With Ms. Harris at the top of the ticket leading the way, this movement may become an unstoppable wave.
Time is short to organize the campaign on her behalf, but the Labour Party in Britain and a broad left-wing coalition in France recently won big victories with even less time. Ms. Harris will have to reach out to voters who have been skeptical of Democrats and mobilize young voters who need convincing. But she can run on a strong record and ambitious plans to further reduce costs for families, enact common-sense gun safety laws and restore and protect our rights and freedoms.
Read more at the link. I got past the paywall by using the link at memorandum.com.
Noah Berlatsky at Public Notice: The Kamala Harris hype is real.
Just three days after President Joe Biden dropped out of the presidential race and endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris, Harris has already secured enough delegates to be the presumptive Democratic nominee. The speed with which the party came together around her is inspiring.
Harris has been endorsed by almost everyone who matters in Democratic politics — senators, governors, key organizations, unions. She’s also raised some $100 million and counting from more than 880,000 small donors, more than 60 percent of whom hadn’t contributed before this cycle. If anyone was on the fence about whether Biden stepping aside was the right move, they probably aren’t now.
The past three days have been a remarkable display of Democratic consensus and unity after a bitter intra-party argument over whether Biden should be the nominee. The rush to support Harris also indicates that the party believes she can beat the Republican candidate — giant orange fascist blight Donald Trump.
New Harris-Trump polling started trickling out yesterday, and it contained good news for Democrats. A Reuters/Ipsos poll taken entirely after Biden announced his decision to step aside showed Harris up two points nationally (and up four points when RFK Jr. is included). Another poll showed Harris and Trump tied.
Given that Harris just had her first rally as the presumptive candidate yesterday, we’ll need more time to figure out exactly how the race has changed. But there are already a number of reasons to be hopeful about her prospects of winning this November.
Of course there are risks.
Unifying looked easy. It’s not.
The first indication of Harris’s strength is … well, pretty much everything that’s happened since Sunday.
Harris has been pilloried over the last four years as a middling politician, largely on the grounds that she suspended her 2020 presidential campaign before Iowa. The reliably confused Pamela Paul at the New York Times, for example, argued this week that “Harris is a fundamentally weak candidate” who “fizzled out” in the presidential race.
As political scientist Jonathan Bernstein points out, though, Harris’s candidacy didn’t fizzle out. She had solid endorsements and decent polling — but she figured out that Biden was too far ahead to beat in a very crowded field and dropped out early. That allowed her to stay on good terms with party actors and put her in a position to get the vice presidency. That’s not losing. It’s winning.
We have even better recent evidence that Harris is a skillful politician, though. Namely, she just nailed down the presidential nomination in around 48 hours and raised $100 million.
The rush to endorse Harris and the flood of donations was so speedy and so uniform that it looked easy. But there was no guarantee it would go so well. AOC warned last week before Biden stepped down that many donors “do not want to see the VP be the nominee.” Some leading Democrats, including former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, were calling for an open process or some kind of mini primary.
Harris certainly benefited from the fact that Democrats are sick of division and eager to move on to uniting against Trump. But her strength also indicates that she has used her vice presidency to solidify her standing with most party actors and interest groups — not least with Joe Biden himself. Harris engineered an unprecedented victory immediately following an unprecedented moment of uncertainty for the party. That’s the work of a talented politician.
Read more specifics at Public Notice.
Jill Filipovic from her Substack: It’s Fun When Politics Are Fun.
Going with Harris also more or less splits the difference in risk aversion within the party. The core of the debate over whether Biden should drop out hinged on one’s perception of where the biggest risks sat: Were they primarily vested in the candidate himself? Or were they in the potential for chaos?
The Democrats who thought the risks sat with the candidate got their way when Biden dropped out. Those who feared chaos are getting their way now, as the party rallies around Harris and avoids an open primary. It’s not how I would have chosen to do things, but there’s nevertheless a lot to recommend it.
Also: This is fun, isn’t it?
The Biden-Trump debate and the attempted Trump assassination and the days after were very much not fun; they were dreadful, scary, and divisive, and I was ultimately feeling pretty resigned to four more years of a Trump presidency. It frankly didn’t seem like Republicans were having much fun either. And not that politics need to be entertainment or a party — I frankly wish more people would elect boring highly competent technocrats — but also, people like parties because parties are fun.
For the first time this cycle, the election feels fun. The memes are not dark. The soundtrack is good. Harris is inspiring people not because she promises to stick it to Trump, but because she promises something better. Republicans are mocking her laugh, but god, how good does it feel to have a candidate who really laughs? Her dorky mom-isms feel sweet and endearing. The girls and the gays love her, and the youngs are talking about her in ways I frankly don’t understand, and isn’t that great. Sure, we danced in the streets when Biden won in 2020 because it was such a relief to see four years of Trump come to an end and also we had been so cooped up inside thanks to Covid. But no one was dancing at a Biden rally. Harris, on the other hand, is the chief executive of Brat Summer.
No, fun alone doesn’t win elections. But it sure doesn’t hurt. And Trump knows this as well as anyone.
Max Burns at The Hill: It’s time to talk about Donald Trump’s age.
At 78, former President Donald Trump is now the oldest presidential nominee in American history. If he wins re-election in November, Trump will end his term just a few months shy of his 83rd birthday, making him two years older than President Joe Biden is now.
In short, Donald Trump has a serious age problem.
The media and Republican political leaders should treat concerns about Trump’s advanced age every bit as seriously as they did in Biden’s case. Trump can put those concerns to rest by making good on his promise to take a public cognitive test. Is he still willing to “do it for the good of the country,” as he said back on July 12?
After all, comparing footage from Trump’s 2015 presidential announcement to footage from earlier this year shows that Trump isn’t quite the man he used to be. The former president now routinely confuses names when speaking off the cuff — including the name of his own doctor — and struggled to finish his sentences during a Nashville rally earlier this year. How can the American people be sure Trump’s stumbles aren’t part of a sustained pattern of cognitive decline?
Trump has repeatedly said he believes all presidential candidates should be “mandated to take a cognitive test” regardless of age. There’s no time like the present, because the concerning evidence of Trump’s mental decline has been mounting for years.
His memory problems are well-documented; the former president doesn’t seem able to recall what he was doing or who he spoke to for most of the day on Jan. 6, 2021. He also regularly forgets who the sitting president is, often confusing Joe Biden and Barack Obama during unscripted remarks. That seems pretty important.
Concerns about how Trump’s age could weigh on the Republican ticket aren’t exclusive to Democrats like me. Sixty percent of voters now believe Trump is too old to serve, according to a post-debate ABC News/Washington Post/Ipsos poll. That’s up from 44 percent a little over a year ago. Of voters who watched Trump’s rambling debate performance last month, fully 50 percent believe the former president should withdraw from the race and focus on his mental health.
Hahaha! Trump looks really old compared to Kamala, who is extremely energetic and enthusiastic.
You probably heard about the Fortune scoop yesterday about Elon Musk donating to Trump. The story is behind a paywall, but here’s the gist from The Guardian: Elon Musk denies report he will donate $45m a month to Trump Super Pac.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk has denied reports that emerged last week that he was planning to donate $45m a month to a Super Pac focused on getting Trump elected.
On Tuesday, Musk appeared on Jordan Peterson’s show, where he said the claim was “simply not true”. “I am not donating $45m a month to Trump,” he said.
“Now what I have done is that I have created a Pac or Super Pac or whatever you want to call it,” he said. It is called the America Pac.”
Super Pacs, short for Political Action Committees, are independent political organisations to which donors can give unlimited amounts of money, while donations to individuals or non-Super Pacs are capped.
After the Peterson interview, Musk replied on X to a clip from the interview saying, “Yeah”, and to another tweet referencing the reports saying, “Yeah, it’s ridiculous. I am making some donations to America PAC, but at a much lower level and the key values of the Pac are supporting a meritocracy & individual freedom. Republicans are mostly, but not entirely, on the side of merit & freedom”.
The denial comes days after Joe Biden withdrew from the presidential race, endorsing his vice-president Kamala Harris, who now has enough delegates to claim the Democratic nomination in August.
Also on Tuesday, the New York Times reported that the Super Pac was being staffed by former aides to Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’s presidential campaign. “The Super Pac has acquired an air of mystery in the Trump orbit, with other outside groups largely in the dark about its plans,” the Times reported….
“The intent is to promote the principles that made America great in the first place,” Musk said on Peterson’s show. “I wouldn’t say that I’m for example Maga,” he added, referring to the Trump catchphrase. “I think America is great. I’m more M-A-G, make America greater.”
It sounds like Trump probably couldn’t use this money for legal expenses.
Amanda Marcotte at Salon: Kamala Harris makes Donald Trump do the one thing he fears most: Get up and get out.
The joyful reception that Vice President Kamala Harris received from Democrats when President Joe Biden dropped out of the race and endorsed her was rooted largely in the contrast between the relatively youthful 59-year-old woman and the increasingly frail 81-year-old president. She gives good speeches! She’s fun and energetic! And she can campaign aggressively, especially with Biden remaining president, allowing Harris to make campaigning her full-time job. People in focus groups frequently say they haven’t seen much of Harris these past four years. Well, that’s about to change, since she is well-positioned to give endless interviews, attend frequent events, and give oh-so-many speeches. The contrast with Biden, who struggled to find the energy to campaign on top of running a country, will be notable.
The contrast stands not only with her boss but with her new opponent. It isn’t just Biden who has to limit public appearances, lest he get tired and cranky. Donald Trump, at age 78, has also been mostly absent from the traditional campaign rigamarole. He goes to occasional rallies, where his fans swoon over him, but which get relatively little press. There’s no incentive to cover his usual incoherent stump speech because he doesn’t break any news. He gives interviews to right-wing outlets, which mostly ask him how he got to be so darn perfect while avoiding topics that might draw interest from the larger public. He unloads his far-right venom on Truth Social, but since most journalists ignore that, he might as well be blogging into the void. He golfs a lot and, of course, had to sit in the untelevised trial in May, which resulted in 34 felony convictions. But to average Americans, especially swing voters who will decide the race, Trump is mostly out of sight and out of mind.
This appears very much by design. While they are being graded on a steep curve, Trump’s campaign managers are, as reported, more professional and competent than his previous hires. They’re no doubt aware that the biggest obstacle to persuading skeptical voters to back Trump is the candidate himself. His overt racism, sociopathic impulsivity, and off-the-charts narcissism turn off everyone who isn’t deeply in the MAGA cult. Every time Trump talks, it confirms the Biden campaign’s narrative that the former president is a self-centered jerk who will sell out the country for his own interests.
Trump has so far been able to stay out of the spotlight because of Biden. The president had a lightweight campaign presence. He barely did any interviews or press conferences, which only fueled speculation that the Biden team was hiding their candidate’s condition from public view. This enabled Trump to hang back, as well. Trump’s campaign created the illusion that he was campaigning more vigorously than Biden, by putting him out there in situations noticed by the press but not by ordinary voters. The rallies looked campaign-like while keeping Trump out of the news. Trump gave a lengthy interview to Time, in which he hinted at election violence and supported abortion bans. These views hurt him with swing voters, but almost no one heard about it, because it was a print interview in a publication few people outside of the Beltway read.
I have to admit, I was wrong. I’m still sad that Biden was forced to step down in such a humiliating way. But he handled it very well by waiting until the Republican Convention was over. Now they have to complete retune their arguments and attacks. No more Hunter Biden to kick around, no more old age insults, no more “Let’s go, Brandon.” Back to Marcotte:
Astute readers will remember that the reason Biden wanted a June debate was to remind voters what a vile person Trump is since so many memories had faded. If Biden had been coherent, the plan would have worked. As Heather “Digby” Parton wrote, Trump “couldn’t control himself and behaved once again like the undisciplined, lying, vulgarian who half the country already hates.” He told laughable lies, such as denying sex with Stormy Daniels. The post-debate fact-checker spoke as fast as he could to debunk Trump’s lies and finally had to quit from exhaustion after three minutes.
But once again, Biden’s age worked to cover up Trump’s myriad deficiencies. It was too troubling, watching the president stumble, to even pay that much attention to Trump’s same old lie-and-hate routine. Not just for journalists, either. Voters who watched the debate were too worried about Biden to pay much mind to Trump.
With Harris as the Democratic nominee, however, Trump is caught in a no-win situation. If he continues to hang back from the campaign trail while she’s out there hustling, he’ll start inviting the questions about whether he’s too old and weak, the exact questions that plagued Biden. But if he starts doing more media and events that are outside the MAGA bubble, he will draw negative attention and remind voters why they hate him. In the face of this paradox, Trump’s first impulse was to keep pretending Biden is his opponent. As reality sets in, Trump’s freaking out.
There more at the Salon link.
That’s all I have for you today. I’m very anxious to see what happens next in this reinvigorated campaign.
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