Every time I get the grocery list together these days, I think about what I need to bulk order. It’s really hard to look at a finished consumer good and find all the value-added producers along with their various locations. I wonder how the distributors are going to sort this all out. I noticed prices creeping up in the usual items. I’m pretty sure my sister has hit Costco by now and filled up the pantry. I also watched the last of the Jazz Festers leave with relief. I bet this was their last jaunt of the year. You can see it in the numbers.
USA Today had this analysis by Betty Lin-Fisher. “How will Trump’s tariffs affect grocery store prices? We explain.”
While higher tariffs could still be coming after a 90-day-pause, the baseline 10% tariff on all goods, plus higher duties on Chinese products already in effect are a big increase in food costs for American’s budgets, said Thomas Gremillion, director of food policy at The Consumer Federation of America.
“The 10% ‘default’ tariffs alone represent a truly historic federal tax increase, maybe the largest in my lifetime, with a highly regressive impact,” Gremillion said.
The tariff only applies to the value of the product at the border, Ortega said. Then there are additional costs to the product, which are accrued domestically, like transporting the goods to the store, distribution, wholesale costs and retail markups. Those things are not subject to the tariff, Ortega said.
So that doesn’t mean that the price of a particular product will go up by 10% or whatever the tariff is, Ortega said.
Overall, 15% of the U.S. food supply is imported, including 32% of fresh vegetables, 55% of fresh fruit, and 94% of seafood, according to the Consumer Federation of America, citing the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. Some products, like coffee and bananas, are almost exclusively grown abroad.
Tariffs are causing uncertainty from families checking off their grocery lists to companies importing food, he said.
“For consumers, this can mean added difficulties in managing a food budget. For food companies, this means havoc on supply chains that could lead to more food waste and more food safety risk,” Gremillion said.
Did I mention the youngest son-in-law is a biomedical engineer who is in charge of designing medical, surgical, and prosthetic devices? Plus, the oldest daughter and son-in-law are doctors. It’s just me and my youngest daughter out here trying to figure out what the economy and financial markets are experiencing. The others are just trying to deal with that, and the usual helpful regulations are being replaced with crazy ones.
Since Trump took office in late January, multiple Food and Drug Administration webpages were removed (and then restored); employees were fired from the Center for Devices and Radiological Health (and some were asked back); and the Department of Health and Human Services unveiled a plan to lay off approximately 10,000 employees, including about 3,500 at the FDA.
Meanwhile, the economy has whipsawed due to an unpredictable and aggressive tariff strategy. Later, however, pieces were delayed or walked back.
The Trump administration has reshaped the medtech industry in significant ways, and potentially long-term, in just a few months. Now that Trump has settled into power, new questions have arisen about what the many changes will mean for companies and patients, and what’s coming next.
Tom Toles Editorial Cartoon
Also, lucky us, Medicare and Medicaid modernization with be the goal of TV snake oil salesman Dr. Mehmet Oz as he takes over both. This is also from the MEDTECHDIVE.
Dr. Mehmet Oz was sworn in as the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services administrator on April 18, cementing his role as head of the agency that provides insurance coverage to millions of Americans.
During a ceremony at the Oval Office, Oz, a physician and former TV personality, said he wanted to “save” the nation’s public health programs and focus on reducing chronic disease, “modernizing” Medicare and Medicaid, and targeting fraud, waste and abuse in government insurance offerings.
President Donald Trump reiterated that Republicans wouldn’t cut Medicare or Medicaid. “Just as I promised, there will be no cuts. We’re not going to have any cuts. We’re going to have only help,” he said during the ceremony.
As I’ve spent most of this year being poked, prodded, pricked, shocked, MRI’d, Ultrasound’d, and EMG’d, I sure don’t feel good about any of this. I fret about someone disappearing all of that, plus my Social Security.
Speaking of crazy policy, I happened on this last night. This is from NBC News. “Trump says he will reopen ‘enlarged and rebuilt’ Alcatraz prison. Alcatraz Island hasn’t been used as a federal penitentiary since 1963. It had a capacity of roughly 300 people.” I’m actually thinking this is another one of his threats to Judges since it’s way too small to hold many prisoners. I suppose that’s one way to destroy a national park and the US Constitution in one sweep.
Alcatraz Island, a former military fortress and prison in San Francisco Bay, was turned into a federal penitentiary in 1934 and over the course of 29 years housed more than 1,500 people “deemed difficult to incarcerate elsewhere in the federal prison system,” according to the National Park Service.
According to aNational Park Service study, it was initially deemed unfit to serve as a federal institution because of its small size, isolated location and lack of fresh water. However, Sanford Bates, the director of the Bureau of Prisons in 1933,later found it “an ideal place of confinement for about 200 of the most desperate or irredeemable types.” It was formally opened as a federal penitentiary the next year.
Trump suggested in his post that he’d like to restore the facility to that purpose.
This is from Ed Mazza writing for HuffPo. This sounds a lot like his real estate deals to me. “‘Clearly Unhinged’: Critics Sink Trump’s ‘Asinine’ Plan To Reopen Alcatraz Prison. The president wants to turn the site back into a penitentiary despite the fact that it would cost a fortune.”
Alcatraz is currently part of Golden Gate National Recreation Area and has about 1.2 million visitors per year. Those who tour the island in San Francisco Bay see facilities in various states of decay. The prison was crumbling even as it was still in operation, and the high cost of maintaining it was a key reason it was shuttered in 1963.
Given those realities, restoring Alcatraz and then expanding it, as Trump called for on his Truth Social platform, would likely cost a fortune ― and then another pile of cash would be needed to maintain it.
Reopening it as a prison would also mean the loss of the tourism revenue the island currently generates as well as a loss of habitat for its thriving bird population.
The president, however, said Alcatraz’s return to use as a prison would “serve as a symbol of Law, Order, and JUSTICE.”
His critics fired back that the idea would be an expensive boondoggle:
President Donald Trump is opening a new salvo in his tariff war, targeting films made outside the U.S.
In a post Sunday night on his Truth Social platform, Trump said he has authorized the Department of Commerce and the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative to slap a 100% tariff “on any and all Movies coming into our Country that are produced in Foreign Lands.”
“The Movie Industry in America is DYING a very fast death,” he wrote, complaining that other countries “are offering all sorts of incentives to draw” filmmakers and studios away from the U.S. “This is a concerted effort by other Nations and, therefore, a National Security threat. It is, in addition to everything else, messaging and propaganda!”
The White House said Monday that it was figuring out how to comply with the president’s wishes.
“Although no final decisions on foreign film tariffs have been made, the Administration is exploring all options to deliver on President Trump’s directive to safeguard our country’s national and economic security while Making Hollywood Great Again,” said spokesperson Kush Desai.
It’s common for both large and small films to include production in the U.S. and in other countries. Big-budget movies like the upcoming “Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning,” for instance, are shot around the world.
On Sunday, NBC News aired an interview with Trump in which he expressed ignorance of the black-letter standards of justice established in the country’s founding document.
“The Constitution says every person, citizens and noncitizens, deserve due process,” “Meet the Press” host Kristen Welker pointed out. So why not bring Abrego García back to the U.S. and use legal avenues to potentially remove him?
“Well,” Trump replied, “I’ll leave that to the lawyers, and I’ll leave that to the attorney general of the United States.”
Welker noted that Secretary of State Marco Rubio had admitted that even immigrants had due process rights. Trump again downplayed the idea, saying that holding hearings would mean “we’d have to have a million or 2 million or 3 million trials.” This isn’t as big a hurdle as it may sound. In fiscal 2024, there were more than 900,000 immigration hearings completed. So far in fiscal 2025, there have been more than 460,000. More could be cleared if Trump hadn’t moved to fire a number of immigration judges.
Finally, Welker noted that Trump didn’t really have a choice.
“Even given those numbers that you’re talking about,” she asked, “don’t you need to uphold the Constitution of the United States as president?”
“I don’t know,” Trump replied. “I have to respond by saying, again, I have brilliant lawyers that work for me, and they are going to obviously follow what the Supreme Court said.”
You may recall that, in January, Trump put his hand on a Bible and affirmed to Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. that he would “faithfully execute” his role as president and to the best of his “ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.” But this has never been an oath he has appeared to actually take to heart.
Trump’s dismissiveness of the Constitution has manifested itself in a lot of ways. You may recall his lack of interest in leaving office when he lost the 2020 presidential election. You may be aware that he has readily, if not giddily, accepted personal income from foreign governments while serving as president. He views the law as a cudgel, not a constraint, issuing pardons for variouspolitical allies ensnared in criminal activity while directing federal law enforcement to fish for potential criminal charges against those who work against his political power.
At its heart, Trump’s approach to his role is rooted in his parochial sense of patriotism. He didn’t come to the White House after having worked his way up through lower offices, building consensus and working to appeal to a broad range of constituents. He had no appreciation for how legislation is crafted or for the hard work of reaching compromise. Perhaps most importantly, he has never indicated any robust understanding of American history or of the debates and agreements that led to the country’s creation.
In 2011, for example, Trump was asked by Stephen Colbert if he knew what the 13 stripes on the American flag represent. He said he didn’t.
More recently, Trump was asked by ABC News journalist Terry Moran what the Declaration of Independence (a copy of which the president recently had installed in the Oval Office) means to him personally.
“It means exactly what it says. It’s a declaration,” Trump replied. “A declaration of unity and love and respect, and it means a lot. And it’s something very special to our country.”
It is special to the country, of course, but not because it is a declaration of “love,” much less “unity.” As the name would suggest, it is precisely the opposite.
Trump doesn’t have the Declaration of Independence in the Oval Office because he wants its message to serve as a guidepost for his administration. He doesn’t even appear to know its message. He has it there because it is A Famous American Thing, another decoration in the newly gilded room meant to send a message about his power, not the nation’s.
Dan Froomkin–writing for Press Watch–suggests we need to keep track of all Trump’s oddities. “We need a way to aggregate what Donald Trump is doing to this country.”
News organizations, along with good-government groups and other interested parties, are doing a commendable job of chronicling the damage the Trump regime is doing to the government, the country, and the world.
But none of them, individually, is in a position to give the public the full picture. It’s just too much.
This is a feature of Trump’s strategy of “flooding the zone.” No one entity can possibly keep up.
And as we go forward, how can any one organization keep tabs on all the fallout? It’s not possible.
What we need is a central repository of information so that the full extent of the damage can be found in one place and assessed by the public — and so that there’s a comprehensive record of what needs to be fixed and restored when the time comes to do so. (Sort of like a truth commission, but in real time.)
To aggregate all the existing information, organize it, and collect new data, we need a place, a process, and people.
It makes sense to me since Trump seems to want to undocument more than just people. Who knows how many things Doge has destroyed in the wake of having all-access to every government database and more. He’s disappearing people, children, scientific research, due process, and entire agencies and programs.
This is a site that I was just sent to by a Blue Sky Link. This DNYUZ link has an article by the NYT’s by Jack Goldsmith of Lawfare fame and Harvard Law School. This has been an issue for many people in modern times, with both parties playing the role of enablers. “It’s Not Just Trump. The Presidency Has Become Too Powerful.” So, I need to put this example of both siderisms into perspective. “Mr. Goldsmith, a former assistant attorney general under George W. Bush, is an author, with Bob Bauer, of a newsletter about presidential and executive power.”
Donald Trump’s wrecking-ball second term has revealed the full latent power of the presidency. His administration has done this most clearly in its comprehensive elimination of legal and norm-based checks inside the executive branch, its systematic disrespect of judicial process, its extortionate abuse of government power to crush foes and its destructive rhetoric and nastiness.
Yet it is important to recognize that many of Mr. Trump’s efforts to expand the powers of the office build substantially on the excesses of recent presidencies. The overall pattern of presidential action over the past few decades reveals an escalation of power grabs that put the country on a terrible course even before Mr. Trump took office again.
The presidency needs reform, and Americans must consider ways — however implausible they may seem in the context of today’s politics — to get there.
Expansionist presidential acts go all the way back to George Washington, who invited charges of monarchism with his use of the Constitution’s broad yet undefined “executive Power.” From there the presidency, with its loose design, grew and grew, with major surges during the Civil War and New Deal era. That trend continued through the 20th century, aided by the rise of mass communication, substantial delegations of power from Congress and an approving Supreme Court.
Mr. Trump’s radical second presidency is, to an underappreciated extent, operating from a playbook devised by his modern predecessors.
His use of emergency powers to impose broad tariffs is similar to a move made in 1971 by President Richard Nixon. His claims of untouchable national security authority echo arguments made after the Sept. 11 attacks by the George W. Bush administration, in which I served.
Presidents for decades have issued pardons as political or personal favors or to avoid personal legal jeopardy. Mr. Trump took this practice to newextremes in his first term, and then President Joe Biden pre-emptively pardoned his son and family as well as members of his administration and Congress, in a similar pattern. Mr. Trump in his second term has already issued many self-serving pardons.
Mr. Trump’s executive-order program is an heir of the strategy used by President Barack Obama for large-scale and sometimes legally dubious policy initiatives, including some (involving immigration) where Mr. Obama had earlier admitted he lacked authority to act. Mr. Biden also confessed a lack of power but then acted unilaterally in seeking to forgive student loans.
Mr. Trump has disregarded statutory restrictions to fire officials in independent agencies including the Federal Trade Commission, the National Labor Relations Board and the Merit Systems Protection Board. But in 2021, Mr. Biden extended the Supreme Court’s unitaryexecutive case law to fire the statutorily protected commissioner of the Social Security Administration. Mr. Biden was “the first unitary executive,” noted the legal writer Mark Joseph Stern in 2021.
Mr. Biden also purged the executive branch of Trump holdover officials who were not protected by statute, including members of arts and honorary institutions, the Administrative Conference of the United States and the Department of Homeland Security Advisory Council. The Biden administration’s defense of these firings resulted in judicialprecedents that Mr. Trump is now wielding to clean house on a broader scale.
The Trump administration has also built on past presidencies in not enforcing federal law — for example, in letting TikTok live on despite a congressional ban. This practice finds its modern roots in the Obama administration, which asserted broad nonenforcement discretion in high-profile cases involving immigration, marijuana and Obamacare, in effect changing the meaning of those laws.
Something similar has happened with spending. As one recent paper noted, “The past several presidents have all taken significant unilateral actions intruding on Congress’s control over federal spending.” The Trump 2.0 version greatly enlarges this unilateralist pattern.
There are a lot of examples here, and it’s worth thinking about. The Unitary Executive Theory has been around for a while, and since the Reagan years, it has picked up steam in the Supreme Court. Here is a recent article from Democracy Docket explaining the theory and relating to it to Yam Tits. The analysis is written by Jacob Knutsen. “What Is Unitary Executive Theory? How is Trump Using It to Push His Agenda?”
Since taking office, President Donald Trump has executed a whirlwind of dismissals across the federal government that violated federal statutes and decreed numerous executive orders, including one that blatantly defied the plain language of the Constitution.
Behind the seemingly scatter-shot opening acts of his second administration, legal analysts see a common goal: to test a once-fringe legal theory which asserts that the president has unlimited power to control the actions of the four million people who make up the executive branch.
If courts — specifically the Republican-appointed majority of the Supreme Court — uphold arguments based on the so-called “unitary executive theory,” it would give Trump and subsequent presidents unprecedented power to remove and replace any federal employee and impose their will on every decision in every agency.
Rulings in favor of the Trump administration would also further jeopardize the independence of key regulatory agencies that are susceptible to conflicts of interest and political interference, like the Federal Election Commission, which oversees federal elections and campaign finance laws.
Trump and his administration have furthered the theory by repeatedly invoking Article II of the Constitution, which vests executive power in the president, to justify the recent dismissals of federal officials. They have framed the article as allowing the president to use the whole of the executive branch for his political ends.
For example, the White House Feb. 18 invoked the article to rationalize an executive order signed that same day that asserted the president’s authority over almost all regulatory agencies that were created by Congress to act independently, or semi-independently, from the president.
Frank Bowman, a scholar of constitutional and criminal law at the University of Missouri School of Law, told Democracy Docket he believes the executive order is a step toward “an open declaration of dictatorship.”
“In essence, what he’s saying is, ‘I am the law. My will is the law. My view of what the law is the only view that can ever be expressed,’” Bowman said.
I think this take on executive power is one we should get more familiar with since it’s really taken a powerful rise. The Center for American Progress features an analysis in its series on Project 2025. This one was written back in October.”Project 2025 Would Destroy the U.S. System of Checks and Balances and Create an Imperial Presidency. Far-right extremists have a plan to shatter democracy’s guardrails, giving presidents almost unlimited power to implement policies that will hurt everyday Americans and strip them of fundamental rights.” It is an imperative read. Trump knows that he can be both pope and king.
Project 2025 takes an absolutist view of presidential authority
To wholly reshape government in ways that most Americans would think is impossible, the Project 2025 blueprint anchors itself in the “unitary executive theory.”22 This radical governing philosophy, which contravenes the traditional separation of powers, vests presidents with almost complete control over the federal bureaucracy, including congressionally designated independent agencies or the DOJ and the FBI. The unitary executive theory is designed to sharply diminish Congress’ imperative role to act as a check and balance on the executive branch with tools such as setting up independent agencies to make expert decisions and by limiting presidents’ ability to fire career civil servants for purely political purposes.
The road map to autocracy presented in Project 2025 extends far beyond the unitary executive theory first promoted by President Ronald Reagan, and later espoused by Vice President Dick Cheney, largely designed to implement a deregulatory, corporatist agenda.23 Instead, as discussed further below, Project 2025 presents a maximalist version that does not nibble around the edges but aims to thoroughly demolish the traditional guardrails that allow Congress an equal say in how democracy functions or what policies are implemented. One noted expert at the conservative think tank American Enterprise Institute, Philip Wallach, said, “Some of these visions … start to just bleed into some kind of authoritarian fantasies where the president won the election, so he’s in charge, so everyone has to do what he says—and that’s just not the system the [sic] government we live under.”24
If Congress is robbed of its imperative role as a check and balance on a president’s power, and the judicial branch is willing to bestow a president with almost unlimited authority, autocracy results. And presidents become strongman rulers—free to choose which laws to enforce, which long-standing norms to jettison, and how to impose their will on every executive branch department and agency.
Well, all these pithy reads should keep you busy for the day. I hope your week goes well. I’ve got 2 doctors’ appointments, but gladly no more procedures. And I’d like just to add if they come for professors, that I’d rather be in the gulag that holds the country’s political cartoonists. To think, I used to just use wonderful paintings.
Happy Cinco de Mayo to all the wonderful folks of Mexican descent and to those of us who just enjoy the holiday!
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The new theme in the media these days is how to do a political outreach to misunderstood young men. I’m not exactly sure why they think young men–and, of course, they tend to favor the vanilla flavor–are so disenfranchised and depressed about facing competition in markets for jobs, houses, and social relationships. The media is obsessed with the outreach campaign to get these downward-facing dudes to get out and vote for the guy who was handed everything. Perhaps they need a lesson that women have had it with toxic masculinity. But, everything in the DonOld world is wrong-side up. I feel like I’m just watching endless reruns of men with Daddy issues.
Welcome to another normal day in Magaland. The sun is shining, the leaves are falling, and the former Fox News host Tucker Carlson is fantasizing about “daddy” Donald Trump spanking teenage girls.
This fresh hell comes via Duluth, Georgia, where Carlson was warming up a Trump rally on Wednesday night. Which is notable in itself because Carlson hasn’t always been a big fan of the former president. Last year a bunch of Carlson’s private text messages were made public as part of the $1.6bn defamation lawsuit filed against Fox News by Dominion Voting Systems and they made his real feelings about Trump very clear.
“We are very, very close to being able to ignore Trump most nights,” Carlson texted an undisclosed recipient on 4 January 2021. “I truly can’t wait.” He added: “I hate him passionately.”
Rather than ignoring Trump, as he was once so excited to do, however, Carlson – who was booted from Fox News last year – seems to have become a confidant of the ex-president and is now making disturbing speeches on his behalf. During the rally Carlson, who has three adult daughters, compared the US under Trump to a naughty girl being disciplined by her father. “If you allow your hormone-addled 15-year-old daughter to slam the door and give you the finger, you’re going to get more of it,” Carlson said. “There has to be a point at which Dad comes home.” At this point the crowd erupted into raucous cheers.
Believe me, as someone who has taught middle school and high school kids as well as young college freshmen, there’s a lot more worrying to be done about hormone-addled boys than girls just slamming the door on their uncool parents. I also have two daughters, and I was relieved they were girls when they were born. I’m sure I can get some witnesses here. The Carlson rant, along with its response, shows this sick side of America’s misogyny,
“Dad comes home and he’s pissed,” Carlson continues. “He’s not vengeful, he loves his children. Disobedient as they may be, he loves them … And when Dad gets home, you know what he says? You’ve been a bad girl. You’ve been a bad little girl and you’re getting a vigorous spanking right now. And no, it’s not going to hurt me more than it hurts you. No, it’s not. I’m not going to lie. It’s going to hurt you a lot more than it hurts me. And you earned this. You’re getting a vigorous spanking because you’ve been a bad girl, and it has to be this way.”
Clearly this struck a chord with the crowd. Later, when Trump came on stage, they screamed “Daddy’s home” and “Daddy Don”. Sigmund Freud almost rose from his grave.
James Singer, a Harris campaign spokesman, declared the speech “fucking weird”. And for a lot of people, it certainly was. But for Trump’s cult-like supporters, Carlson’s spanking fantasy encapsulates everything they love about the presidential candidate: the paternalism, the toxic masculinity, the lust for violence and thirst for revenge.
Meanwhile, Daddy Don’s former employees continue to open up about how truly awful he would be if he got back in. General Kelly’s interview has created quite a stir, and other staff members are joining the chorus to out the fascist. Praising Hitler should be an automatic disqualification for anyone seeking office in this country. As I say always and forever, my Daddy, who was the sweetest man I’ve ever known, bombed NAZIs. My Dad enlisted. He was neither a sucker nor a loser and would talk about his service all the time in his golden years. I remain forever proud to be his daughter.
This is from NBC News. “13 former Trump administration officials sign open letter backing up John Kelly’s criticism of Trump. Kelly told the New York Times that Trump meets the definition of a fascist and also said he observed the former president on multiple occasions praising Adolf Hitler.”
Thirteen former Trump White House officials signed an open letter backing up former Trump chief of staff John Kelly, who told the New York Times that Trump fits the definition of a fascist.
“We applaud General Kelly for highlighting in stark details the danger of a second Trump term. Like General Kelly, we did not take the decision to come forward lightly,” the letter said. “We are all lifelong Republicans who served our country. However, there are moments in history where it becomes necessary to put country over party. This is one of those moments.”
The letter, released by the Harris campaign, is signed by former officials including former press secretary Stephanie Grisham, former chief of staff at the Department of Homeland Security Miles Taylor, and Olivia Troye, former national security adviser to Mike Pence. All three former Trump administration officials have become high-profile critics of his after his presidency ended.
Troye and Grisham spoke at the Democratic National Convention this year. Troye was also one of the signatories of a letter in August from over 200 Republican officials backing Vice President Kamala Harris for president.
In his interview with the Times, released Tuesday, Kelly also said he observed Trump on multiple occasions praising Adolf Hitler. His comments came on the same day the Atlantic reported that Trump said he wished he had generals like Hitler.
In their letter, the former Trump officials said Kelly’s claims were “disturbing and shocking.” They added that “because we know Trump and have worked for and alongside him, we were sadly not surprised by what General Kelly had to say. This is who Donald Trump is.”
He continually has shown us who he is when he insults service members and our fallen soldiers, when he talks gleefully about pussy grabby, when he shows preferences for ruthless dictators over our democratic allies who have repeatedly stood beside us in our fight for freedom, and when he is so addled he speaks gibberish. An ABC Poll shows that “Half of Americans see Donald Trump as a fascist: POLL. Nearly two-thirds also say Trump often departs from the truth, the poll found.” Why do we still have to deal with him? He should be in jail already!
Half the country sees former President Donald Trump as a fascist, amplifying concerns raised in recent days by Vice President Kamala Harris and past members of Trump’s own administration. Far fewer in a new ABC News/Ipsos poll level the same charge against Harris.
Nearly two-thirds also say Trump often departs from the truth, again more than say so about Harris. But Harris gets more criticism than Trump for pandering for votes by promoting policies she doesn’t intend to carry out — underscoring challenges for both candidates as the fur flies in their increasingly heated presidential race.
Responding to one of the more incendiary salvos, 49% of registered voters in the national survey say Trump is a fascist, defined as “a political extremist who seeks to act as a dictator, disregards individual rights and threatens or uses force against their opponents.” Fewer than half as many, 22%, see Harris as a fascist by this definition.
Harris on Wednesday said Trump is a fascist, a week after agreeing with an interviewer that his campaign is “about fascism.” A former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, a former chief of staff to Trump and a former defense secretary in his administration have been quoted recently also as describing Trump as a fascist, and the White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said Wednesday that President Joe Biden thinks so, too. Trump, for his part, repeatedly has called Harris a fascist, as well as a Marxist and a communist.
I completely agree with Eugene Robinson on this. Here’s his Op-Ed at the Washington Post. “The double standard for Harris and Trump has reached a breaking point. One candidate can rant about gibberish while the other has to be perfect.”
Something is wrong with this split-screen picture. On one side, former president Donald Trump rants about mass deportations and claims to have stopped “wars with France,” after being described by his longest-serving White House chief of staff as a literal fascist. On the other side, commentators debate whether Vice President Kamala Harris performed well enough at a CNN town hall to “close the deal.”
Seriously? Much of a double standard here?
Somehow, it is apparently baked into this campaign that Trump is allowed to talk and act like a complete lunatic while Harris has to be perfect in every way. I don’t know the answer to the chicken-or-egg question — whether media coverage is leading public perception or vice versa — but the disparate treatment is glaring.
…
Let’s review: First, Harris was criticized for not doing enough interviews — so she did multiple interviews, including with nontraditional media. She was criticized for not doing hostile interviews — so she went toe to toe with Bret Baier of Fox News. She was criticized as being comfortable only at scripted rallies — so she did unscripted events, such as the town hall on Wednesday. Along the way, she wiped the floor with Trump during their one televised debate.
Trump, meanwhile, stands before his MAGA crowds and spews nonstop lies, ominous threats, impossible promises and utter gibberish. His rhetoric is dismissed, or looked past, without first being interrogated.
Imagine if Harris were promising to end the war in Gaza on her first day in office but wouldn’t say how. Imagine if she were proposing a tariffs-based economic plan that economists say would destabilize the world economy and cost the average family $4,000 a year in higher prices. Imagine if she were promising a “bloody” campaign to uproot and deport millions of undocumented migrants who are gainfully employed and paying taxes. And imagine if Harris were vowing to use the military to go after her political opponents, as Trump repeatedly pledges
Even though the presidential race between former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris remains neck and neck, The Washington Post editorial page has decided not to make a presidential endorsement
That came over this news yesterday about the LA Times. This is from The Wrap. “2 More LA Times Editorial Writers Quit Over ‘Chickens–t’ Owner’s Block of Kamala Harris Endorsement | Exclusive. Karin Klein and Pulitzer Prize-winner Robert Greene follow editorial editor Mariel Garza, who resigned Wednesday.” It’s obvious that rich, old men own these papers and prefer tax cuts over anything else. I just hope every woman of voting age takes the amount of rage that I have to the voting booth, drags every one of her friends with her, and pulls the lever for Kamala and Tim.
The Los Angeles Times has lost two more longtime editorial writers, the latest in a growing exodus to protest owner Patrick Soon-Shiong’s interference with the paper’s planned endorsement of Kamala Harris, TheWrap can exclusively report.
On Thursday, editorial writer Karin Klein, and Pulitzer Prize-winner Robert Greene both quit; their exits come just one day after Editorial Editor Mariel Garza, who resigned in protest on Wednesday.
Greene has not yet spoken publicly about his exit, but in a statement posted to a private forum that was subsequently shared with TheWrap, Klein laid her reasons for quitting.
Channeling Harris’ campaign slogan “we’re not going back,” Klein called Soon-Shiong a “chickens—” who threw the editorial team “under the bus,” and argued, essentially, that the decision to stop the endorsement was itself an endorsement of sorts for Harris’ opponent, Donald Trump.
Soon-Shiong, Klein wrote, has as owner the “right to interfere with editorials; that is the one place where he can ethically do so.” But, by shooting down this particular editorial, she said he had actually created one of his own. “A wordless one, a make-believe-invisible one that unfairly implies that [Harris] has grievous faults that somehow put her on a level with Donald Trump.”
In fact, she argued, the timing itself can only be seen as a direct attack on the Democratic candidate “that hits just at the time when she cannot afford hits.”
Klein also specifically called out Soon-Shiong’s dissembling statement Wednesday night that attempted to blame the editorial board itself for the debacle, while at the same time effectively confirming he had indeed blocked the endorsement.
On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, Soon-Shiong wrote that “the editorial board was provided the opportunity to draft a factual analysis of all the positive and negative policies by each candidate during their tenures at the White House, and how these policies affected the nation.”
This is from the Commonwealth Timesof Virginia. “Black women, Kamala Harris face a double standard.”It is written by Julianna Brown.
Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris is known for her prominence in politics, not only as the country’s first Black female vice president, but also for her service as a California senator. Despite her years of experience, she still faces judgment based on aspects of her identity that do not correspond to her career.
Kamala identifies deeply with her Black heritage as half-Jamaican and still faces crude comments on her ethnicity.
“I didn’t know she was Black until a number of years ago when she happened to turn Black, and now she wants to be known as Black. So, I don’t know, is she Indian or is she Black?” said former President Donald Trump at the National Association of Black Journalists convention on July 31.
This comment essentially associates being Black as a title that she chose to elicit attraction, rather than the race she was born as. Trump further makes it seem as if Harris has no choice but to choose between two deeply rooted parts of herself because of her mixed background.
It is common knowledge that there is diversity within the Black community, so it is perfectly normal for Harris to be considered Black despite having Indian heritage.
What is odd is that her identity has become so much of an obsession that people have even investigated her birth certificate for proof of her Black background, and in some cases non-Black people have even accused Jamaican people of not being Black at all.
Black people should not have to prove their culture to be accepted by people who have no knowledge of the community. The truth is, if Harris were not in a position of power, her ethnicity would not be questioned to this degree.
Since some feel threatened by her status, her identity is completely picked apart to distract from her great accomplishments as both a politician and prosecutor.
Something that really sets the vice president apart is her lively personality. Rather than keeping a serious demeanor 24/7, Harris is often seen smiling or laughing. This may seem like an innocent expression of positivity, but she has received a number of judgments for her bubbly manner.
For example, a video in which she is happily dancing was regarded by many as “inappropriate” for someone of her title. Trump is a convicted felon running for president, yet it is Harris dancing to music she enjoys that is deemed unprofessional?
Yep — that sounds about right. Since Trump’s white identity does not hold him to the same standards, his inappropriate behavior is permissible in most instances. Harris, however, can never slip up because she represents so much more.
The double standard towards Black women is one that has been around for ages, and is why Harris can not make so much as one mistake without causing uproar.
I’m going to cover one more thing that should have the entire country on edge, and that is how cozy Musk is now with Trump and how they both are so cozy with Russia’s Vladamir Putin. Musk’s companies get billions of dollars from the U.S. government, and his contracts in dealing with Space are strategic. Both these guys have been communicating with the Russian dictator recently. This is from the AP. “Here’s a look at Musk’s contact with Putin and why it matters.” This analysis is provided by David Kleeper and Lisa Mascaro.
Elon Musk, the billionaire owner of major government contractor SpaceX and a key ally of Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump, has been in regular contact with Russian President Vladimir Putin for the last two years, The Wall Street Journal reported.
A person familiar with the situation, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive matter, confirmed to The Associated Press that Musk and Putin have had contact through calls. The person didn’t provide additional details about the frequency of the calls, when they occurred or their content.
Musk’s contacts with Putin raise national security questions, given his companies’ work for the government, and highlight concerns about Russian influence in American politics.
Here’s what to know:
Musk and Putin have spoken repeatedly about personal matters as well as business and geopolitics, The Journal reported Thursday, citing multiple current and former officials in the U.S., Europe and Russia.
During one talk, Putin asked Musk not to activate his Starlink satellite system over Taiwan as a favor for Chinese President Xi Jinping, whose ties to Putin have grown closer, the Journal reported. Putin and Xi have met more than 40 times since 2013.
Russia has denied the conversations took place. In 2022, Musk said he’d only spoken to Putin once, in a call 18 months earlier focused on space.
The Chinese Embassy in Washington said Friday that it was “not aware of the specifics” of any requests made by Putin on China’s behalf.
There was no immediate response to messages left with X and Tesla seeking Musk’s comment.
Trump also has vowed to give Musk a role in his administration if he wins next month.
The head of any large defense contractor would face similar questions if they held private talks with one of America’s greatest adversaries, said Bradley Bowman, a former West Point professor and Senate national security adviser who now serves as senior director of the Center on Military and Political Power at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a Washington-based defense think tank.
Bowman said the timing of the calls as reported by The Journal and Musk’s changing views on Ukraine was a “disturbing coincidence.”
“The policy of the U.S. government is to try to isolate Vladimir Putin, and Elon Musk is directly undercutting that,” Bowman said. “What is Putin doing with Musk? He’s trying to reduce his international isolation and impact American foreign policy.”
The request from Putin on Starlink as a favor to China is also likely to get attention, given U.S. support for Taiwan and concerns about the growing partnership between the Kremlin and Beijing.
NASA Administrator Bill Nelson on Friday called for an investigation into a Wall Street Journal report that SpaceX founder and Donald Trump ally Elon Musk and Russian President Vladimir Putin have been in “regular contact” since late 2022.
The report, which said the SpaceX founder has discussed “personal topics, business and geopolitical tensions” with the Russian leader, raises national security concerns as SpaceX’s relationships with NASA and the US military may have granted Musk access to sensitive government information and US intelligence.
“I don’t know that that story is true. I think it should be investigated,” Nelson told Semafor’s Burgess Everett. “If the story is true that there have been multiple conversations between Elon Musk and the president of Russia, then I think that would be concerning, particularly for NASA, for the Department of Defense, for some of the intelligence agencies.”
Musk, whose Tesla operates Gigafactory Shanghai, has developed a close relationship with China’s top leaders. His remarks about China have been friendly, and he has suggested Taiwan cede some control to Beijing by becoming a special administrative region.
On Ukraine, Musk’s views have shifted since he initially supported Kyiv following Russia’s invasion in 2022 and provided it with his Starlink system for communications.
Musk then refused to allow Ukraine in 2023 to use Starlink for a surprise attack on Russian soldiers in Crimea.
He also floated a proposal in 2022 to end the war that would have required Ukraine to drop its plans for NATO membership and given Russia permanent control of Crimea, which it seized in 2014. The plan infuriated Ukrainian leaders.
All I can say is, WTF is wrong with all these people who cannot see what a danger both Musk and Trump are to this country? Again, my hair is on fire. Call everyone you know and send them to the Polls for Kamala and Tim before we no longer have a democracy and a judicial system. As for me, I’m still standing at the moment, although extremely anxious. I hope y’all are hanging in there.
This is getting ridiculous. On August 27, Trump staged a campaign event at Arlington National Cemetery, supposedly to commemorate the deaths of 13 soldiers in a suicide bombing that took place during the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan. This was not an official event, even though Trump tried to pretend it was. He was apparently invited to the private ceremony by 2 of the deceased soldiers’ families.
As we all know by now, a woman representative of the cemetery tried to stop Trump’s people from filming and photographing in Arlington’s Section 60, because federal law forbids it. Two Trump staff members verbally abused the woman and roughly pushed her aside. Later they claimed that she was mentally ill.
A report was filed with police, but the woman declined to prosecute because she feared reprisals from Trump’s goons and thugs. There are still many questions about this incident, chief among them: why has no reporter or other witness revealed the names of the staffers who attacked the woman? And why has the army refused to provide any further information?
Arlington National Cemetery
Now, a week later, Trump himself is claiming the incident never happened. David Kurtz from TPM’s Morning Memo: Trump: ‘It Was A Made Up Story.’
Since we last touched base on Trump’s Arlington National Cemetery fiasco, none of the big six outstanding questions have been answered – but Trump may have given himself a new self-inflicted wound.
With the Army declaring the case “closed” after the cemetery staffer in fear of MAGA reprisals declined to press criminal charges over the alleged incident and with a holiday weekend allowing attention to drift away from the story, Trump took the curious step of reigniting the firestorm by publicly issuing a complete denial Tuesday that any kind of altercation took place.
Not only did it not happen but the story was “made up,” Trump claimed, by “Comrade Kamala and her misinformation squad.” It was, in Trump’s telling, just a “BEAUTIFUL DAY OF HONOR” with “no fights or problems.”
Former President Donald Trump denied Tuesday there was a conflict or “fighting,” during his visit to Arlington National Cemetery last week, calling it a “made up story,” though Army officials said one of their employees “was abruptly pushed aside” by Trump campaign officials.
“It was a made up story by Comrade Kamala and her misinformation squad,” Trump posted on his Truth Social website using the sobriquet he has coined for Vice President Harris, the Democratic presidential nominee. “She made it all up to make up for the fact that she and Sleepy Joe have BLOOD ON THEIR HANDS for the INCOMPETENT AFGHANISTAN Withdrawal – THE MOST EMBARRASSING DAY IN U.S. HISTORY!!!”
Back to David Kurtz at TPM:
So now we have a situation where the Trump campaign disparaged the cemetery staffer has having a “mental health episode,” said she shouldn’t be in her job, suggested she suffered from Trump Derangement Syndrome – and now Trump himself is claiming nothing even happened.
At the same time, the Army seems desperate to make this all go away.
The Army is currently sitting on the police report filed by the cemetery staffer recounting her version of the incident where she was reportedly verbally abused and shoved aside by two Trump campaign staffers when she tried to enforce cemetery rules against political activities.
As of late last week, Democratic staffers on the Senate Armed Services Committee “have been directly communicating with Army officials about the incident, and are in the process of seeking and receiving the information in the report and about what happened,” according to Greg Sargent.
At the at same time, House Democratic staffers attempting to looking into the matter are “frustrated” about resistance from the Army they’re running into, Sargent reports:
“Meanwhile, senior House Democrats are privately pushing Army officials to say more clearly what laws or regulations they think may have been broken and to reveal more details about what happened, another aide says, noting that Democratic staffers are encountering resistance, leaving them frustrated.”
With Trump issuing a blanket denial of any incident even occurring, is the Army going to release the police report and provide more details about the incident or leave the cemetery staffer twisting in the wind?
Apparently, even the U.S. Army is intimidated by Trump.
….[D]espite a week of headlines, there’s one critical aspect to this story I feel is being ignored, even though it is central to the very essence of Trump’s warped campaign.
The people closest to Trump allegedly shoved and verbally abused a woman — because that’s what they do.
And when the woman complained in a formal statement to the U.S. Army, Team Trump gaslit her by accusing her of being a psycho — seemingly part of an intimidation campaign which was meant to scare the accuser from pressing criminal charges.
Steven Cheung
This blatantly sexist bullying of the Arlington employee has worked — just as it’s worked so many times for Trump himself during his decades-long trail of sexual abuse and harassment allegations, and just as violence and gross mistreatment of women hasn’t thwarted the careers of Trump’s male-dominated inner circle.
We shouldn’t let the other unseemly aspects of Trump’s behavior at one of America’s most sacred places obscure the fact that rank misogyny is the lifeblood of this authoritarian crusade to retake the White House, and that contempt for women saturates everything they do. It runs the gamut from taking away reproductive rights and ridiculing any female who doesn’t become a “tradwife,” to the inner circle’s 100% tolerance policies toward sexual harassment, to the ultimate goal of creating doubts that any woman — first Hillary Clinton, now Kamala Harris — is fit to lead the United States.
In the Arlington affair, the circumstances and setting are different, but the Team Trump response carries powerful echoes of practically every time Trump or his subordinates have been accused of misconduct involving women. Consider the best-known case: that of Manhattan writer E. Jean Carroll, who accused Trump of sexually assaulting her in a department-store dressing room in 1996 and has won civil court judgments over both the assault — which the judge characterized as a rape — and the campaign of defamation surrounding it.
In both the Carroll case and the physical attack at Arlington, Trump insisted the woman was making it all up. And you can hear the echoes of what Trump and his lawyers falsely said about Carroll — that she was a lying political operative — in spokesman Steven Cheung’s outrageous claim about the cemetery employee that she was “clearly suffering from a mental health episode” and in campaign chair Chris LaCivita branding her as “despicable.”
These aggressive deny-and-defame tactics have enabled a billionaire-turned-president to brush off more than two dozen credible allegations of sexual harassment or assault over his career, and — in a demoralizing moment of clarity about the brute force of misogyny in America — defeat the first major-party woman nominee in 2016, even after he was caught on tape bragging about his propensity for grabbing female private parts.
Of course J.D. Vance fits in with this gang of woman-haters, as Bunch goes on to discuss.
Republican pollster Whit Ayres says “it’s going to be a challenge” for Trump to chip away at Vice President Harris’s big lead among women.
“The real challenge right now for Republicans is whether they can perform sufficiently well among men to overcome the deficit among women. Given the prominence of abortion in this year’s race and Trump’s past statements about women, the traditional gender gap could become a gender chasm,” he warned.
An ABC News/Ipsos poll published Sunday showed Harris with a huge lead over Trump among women, 54 percent to 41 percent, while Trump enjoyed a more modest 51 percent to 46 percent lead over Harris among men.
Especially concerning for Republicans, the ABC/Ipsos poll showed Harris’s standing among women had jumped significantly compared to before the Democratic convention in Chicago, when she led Trump by only 6 points among women.
A Reuters/Ipsos poll published Thursday also showed Harris with a 13-point lead among women, 49 percent to 36 percent, and Trump with a smaller lead among men voters.
Both polls showed Harris with a 4-percentage point overall lead nationwide.
Trump has tried to win over college-educated and suburban women by moderating his position on abortion and backing free in vitro fertilization (IVF) treatments.
But those proposals are meeting a backlash from anti-abortion conservatives, and GOP strategists are skeptical about how much they will influence women who have already moved away from Trump….
“We didn’t lose one person in 18 months. And then they took over that disaster.”
— Former president Donald Trump, in a video of him at Arlington National Cemetery speaking to the families of U.S. troops killed at Abbey Gate in Afghanistan, posted on TikTok, Aug. 28
This TikTok of Trump’s controversial visit to Arlington, where he marked the third anniversary of a suicide bombing that killed 13 U.S. troops during the chaotic evacuation of Afghanistan overseen by President Joe Biden,has been viewed more than 11 million times. Federal law prohibits election-related activities at military cemeteries, but Trump’s entourage pushed past a cemetery employee who tried to prevent Trump’s aides from bringing cameras, according to the Army.
Trump senior adviser Chris LaCivita
Those cameras appear to have recorded Trump saying these words to the Gold Star families. (The TikTok shows him talking to families as the words are spoken as a voice-over.) In his phrasing, it sounds as if no troops were killed in Afghanistan during the last 18 months of his presidency. That’s false, though as we will show, there was an 18-month gap with no fatalities across Trump’s and Biden’s combined presidencies.
The Facts
A Trump campaign spokesman did not respond to queries about why Trump says there were no fatalities over 18 months. Using the Defense Casualty Analysis System, we first reviewed every 18-month period in Trump’s four years as president, looking only at deaths in hostile action in Afghanistan during Operation Freedom’s Sentinel, not accidental deaths such as in a vehicle or helicopter crash. There was no such period.
Then we focused on the last 18 months of his presidency — July 20, 2019, to Jan. 20, 2021. That makes the most sense since Trump referenced Biden’s taking over. The Defense Department database showed 12 deaths from hostile action in that period. We double-checked with the news releases issued by the Pentagon in that period and confirmed the 12 names.
The last two deaths occurred on Feb. 8, 2020. Javier Jaguar Gutierrez of San Antonio and Antonio Rey Rodriguez of Las Cruces, New Mexico, both 28, werefatally ambushed by a rogue Afghan policeman. Trump, along with Vice President Mike Pence, flew to Dover Air Force Base when the bodies arrived in the United States.
Kessler also notes that Trump initially agreed with Biden’s withdrawal policy, and he (Trump) also bragged that he was the one who set up the process of withdrawal.
In March 2020, Trump approved an agreement with the Taliban (not the Afghan government at the time) for all U.S. forces to leave the country by May 1, 2021. He sealed the deal with a phone conversation with Abdul Ghani Baradar, a co-founder of the Taliban and head of its political office in Qatar. “We had a good long conversation today and, you know, they want to cease the violence,” Trump told reporters at the time. “They’d like to cease violence also.”
Despite abandoning many of Trump’s policies, Biden honored this one, just stretching out the departure by a few months in 2021.
Trump even celebrated Biden’s decision to stick with the withdrawal. “Getting out of Afghanistan is a wonderful and positive thing to do. I planned to withdraw on May 1st, and we should keep as close to that schedule as possible,” he said in a written statement after Biden announced he would continue the departure set in motion by Trump.
At a political rally on June 26 that year, weeks before the collapse of the Afghan government, Trump bragged that he had made it difficult for Biden to change course. “I started the process. All the troops are coming back home. They couldn’t stop the process,” he said. “Twenty-one years is enough, don’t we think? Twenty-one years. They [the Biden administration] couldn’t stop the process. They wanted to, but it was very tough to stop the process.”
A federal judge on Tuesday swiftly rejected Donald Trump’s request to intervene in his New York hush money criminal case, spurning the former president’s attempt at an end-run around the state court where he was convicted and is set to be sentenced in two weeks.
U.S. District Judge Alvin Hellerstein’s ruling — just hours after Trump’s lawyers asked him to weigh the move — upends the Republican presidential nominee’s plan to move the case to federal court so that he could seek to have his conviction overturned in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court’s presidential immunity ruling.
Trump’s lawyers challenged the decision, filing a notice of appeal late Tuesday in the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. Trump and his lawyers “will continue to fight to move this Hoax into federal court where it should be put out of its misery once and for all,” his campaign spokesperson, Steven Cheung, said in a statement.Hellerstein, echoing his denial of Trump’s pretrial bid to move the case, said the defense failed to meet the high burden of proof for changing jurisdiction and that Trump’s conviction for falsifying business records involved his personal life, not official actions that the Supreme Court ruled are immune from prosecution.
Trump has been doing everything he can to avoid his upcoming sentencing in New York, with his attorneys filing a last-ditch motion last week to get the hush money case transferred to federal court. Meanwhile, special counsel Jack Smith filed a new superseding indictment that adjusts for the Supreme Court’s landmark presidential-immunity decision.
Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg
A few days later, Trump’s attorneys responded by proposing a timeline for resolving the Jan. 6 federal case that extends well beyond the November election.Last week, the former president’s attorneys filed a removal notice that requested that his hush money case be transferred to federal court and out of New York Supreme Court Justice Juan Merchan’s hands, about two weeks before his scheduled sentencing on Sept. 18.
This is the second time Trump’s defense team has asked to transfer this case; a district-court judge denied its first attempt earlier this year. However, this time around, Trump’s team has the Supreme Court’s presidential-immunity decision to point to. In a 65-page notice, the lawyers argue that Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s case was “flawed” and that he used evidence that should not have been admissible because it’s related to “official acts” covered by presumptive immunity.
“Post-trial removal is necessary under these circumstances to afford President Trump an unbiased forum, free from local hostilities, where he can seek redress for these Constitutional violations,” write Trump’s attorneys.Just three weeks ago, his attorneys also requested that Merchan delay Trump’s Sept. 18 sentencing. Trump has repeatedly tried and failed to get the judge to recuse himself from the hush money trial as well. On Tuesday, Bragg’s office responded to Trump’s removal request, noting that proceedings in state court can continue even as the federal courts consider the request.
That case appears to be decided, but apparently Trump is trying to appeal once again. Back to the Slate article:
The Special Counsel Files a New Indictment
The Supreme Court’s presidential-immunity decision was considered a big win for Trump, but Jack Smith isn’t giving up yet. Last week, the special counsel filed a new superseding indictment in his federal election-interference case against the former president.
The indictment raises the same four counts against Trump as the original did, including for obstruction of an official proceeding, a charge that could be affected by the Supreme Court’s recent ruling in Fischer v. United States. That decision narrowed the scope of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act—it included a section that seemed to broadly outlaw any obstruction of an official proceeding, and the justices ruled that it should apply only to interference with official documents. Smith’s determination to keep the obstruction charges indicates he’s willing to risk litigating the issue further in court.
The superseding indictment also eliminated any mention of former Trump Department of Justice official Jeffrey Clark and cut back significantly on how much it discusses former Vice President Mike Pence’s role. (Trump’s conversations with former DOJ officials and advisers are now considered “official” acts that are covered by absolute immunity and thus cannot be used as evidence, while his conversations with Pence appear to be covered by presumptive immunity.) [….]
Judge Tanya Chutkan has scheduled a hearing Thursday to determine the next steps in this case. Her biggest priority will be to conclude what portions of Smith’s indictment fall under core official presidential acts and what do not. In order to make those decisions, she could find that evidentiary hearings are necessary and require that witnesses testify, though Smith has reportedly been hoping to avoid this kind of minitrial….
The special counsel and Trump’s attorneys filed a joint proposal late last week that laid out two very different timelines for Smith’s federal election-interference case. The former president also indicated that he plans to file a series of motions challenging Smith’s superseding indictment and his appointment to special counsel.
Trump’s attorneys suggested a timeline in which Chutkan considers a series of motions through the end of this year—stretching well past November’s presidential election. Their timeline would have Chutkan considering a motion to dismiss based on presidential immunity in mid-December and pretrial litigation continuing through spring and fall 2025. The defense also acknowledges Smith’s new superseding indictment, arguing that it “correspondingly requires time to review the new charging instrument as [Trump] determines what steps and procedures to undertake regarding, among other motions, his Presidential immunity defense.”
We are going to have to get Kamala Harris elected if we want any chance of Trump finally facing legal accountability.
Ginni Thomas, the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, privately heaped praise on a major religious-rights group for fighting efforts to reform the nation’s highest court — efforts sparked, in large part, by her husband’s ethical lapses.
Thomas expressed her appreciation in an email sent to Kelly Shackelford, an influential litigator whose clients have won cases at the Supreme Court. Shackelford runs the First Liberty Institute, a $25 million-a-year organization that describes itself as “the largest legal organization in the nation dedicated exclusively to defending religious liberty for all Americans.”
Shackelford read Thomas’ email aloud on a July 31 private call with his group’s top donors.
Thomas wrote that First Liberty’s opposition to court-reform proposals gave a boost to certain judges. According to Shackelford, Thomas wrote in all caps: “YOU GUYS HAVE FILLED THE SAILS OF MANY JUDGES. CAN I JUST TELL YOU, THANK YOU SO, SO, SO MUCH.”
Shackelford said he saw Thomas’ support as evidence that judges, who “can’t go out into the political sphere and fight,” were thankful for First Liberty’s work to block Supreme Court reform. “It’s neat that, you know, those of you on the call are a part of protecting the future of our court, and they really appreciate it,” he said.
After the call, First Liberty sent a recording of the 45-minute conversation to some of its supporters. ProPublica and Documented obtained that recording.
Have a nice Wednesday, everyone!!
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Trump’s Arlington National Cemetery scandal is still alive and kicking. This is unusual for Trump. The media generally works to normalize even his grossest violations of laws and norms. In fact, the major media have mostly ignored this episode too, but independent outlets and social media have kept it going. So I’m still reading, thinking, and writing about it.
Berlatsky’s argument is that we may not yet be at the point of being ruled by a dictator, but people are acting as if fascism is already here, because they are afraid of standing up to Trump. hey know he and his thugs will make their lives a living hell. Berlatsky writes that “Fascist vigilante harassment chills resistance.”
This week, Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump oozed orangely into Arlington National Cemetary to take a picture of himself standing over veteran’s graves with an oleaginous smile and a big thumb’s up.
You may think this is tasteless. And you’d be correct. It’s also illegal. It’s against federal law to campaign in Army National Military Cemeteries.
An Arlington official attempted to enforce the rules, and told Trump he couldn’t take his grotesque pictures there. Trump campaign thugs then verbally abused the official and pushed them. When the official filed an incident report, the Trump campaign issued a statement insulting them and claiming they were mentally ill.
The official decided not to press charges, because they were afraid that if they did, they would be targeted, harassed, and worse by Trump supporters, according to the New York Times.
Again, an Arlington official, doing their job, tried to enforce rules that are supposed to apply to all. They were roughed up and insulted. And they are afraid to stand up to Trump and his campaign because they know that if their opposition to Trump becomes public, their life will be destroyed.
This isn’t an idle fear. Trump has sicced his fascist dittohead minions on election workers whose only crime was refusing to throw the election for Donald Trump. They were doxed and harassed at their home, and one had to go into hiding. Trump also organized a violent coup, in which his supporters attacked the capital building, terrorizing representatives and workers, and five people died. News organization have found a list of incidents in which Trump supporters committed violence explicitly in his name.
Standing up to Trump is frightening. If he singles you out, his supporters will try to hurt you and your loved ones.
Trump and his campaign flaks are quite aware of this dynamic, and they use it to their advantage. The campaign said it could release video backing up its version of events. It hasn’t done so, probably because the video shows that the Arlington worker was in the right. But if the video shows the Arlington worker’s face, that worker will be tracked down by Trump supporters. “We have video” isn’t evidence; it’s a threat.
And Trump’s threats, implied and otherwise, worked. The official was scared to challenge the leader of a fascist movement for fear of fascist abuse.
Berlatsky argues that “the press is intimidated too.” Is that why the fact checkers have been bending over backwards to explain away Trump’s false claims? I hope you’ll read the rest at the Substack link above.
The section of Arlington National Cemetery that Donald Trump visited on Monday is both the liveliest and the most achingly sad part of the grand military graveyard, set aside for veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. In Section 60, young widows can be seen using clippers and scissors to groom the grass around their husbands’ tombstones as lots of children run about.
I like your hair, by Natalia Shaloshvili
Karen Meredith knows the saddest acre in America only too well. The California resident’s son, First Lieutenant Kenneth Ballard, was the fourth generation of her family to serve as an Army officer. He was killed in Najaf, Iraq, in 2004, and laid to rest in Section 60. She puts flowers on his gravesite every Memorial Day. “It’s not a number, not a headstone,” she told me. “He was my only child.”
The sections of Arlington holding Civil War and World War I dead have a lonely and austere beauty. Not Section 60, where the atmosphere is sanctified but not somber—too many kids, Meredith recalled from her visits to her son’s burial site. “We laugh, we pop champagne. I have met men who served under him, and they speak of him with such respect. And to think that this man”—she was referring to Trump—“came here and put his thumb up—”
She fell silent for a moment on the telephone, taking a gulp of air. “I’m trying not to cry.”
For Trump, defiling what is sacred in our civic culture borders on a pastime. Peacefully transferring power to the next president, treating political adversaries with at least rudimentary grace, honoring those soldiers wounded and disfigured in service of our country—Trump long ago walked roughshod over all these norms. Before he tried to overturn a national election, he mocked his opponents in the crudest terms and demeaned dead soldiers as “suckers.”
But the former president outdid himself this week, when he attended a wreath-laying ceremony honoring 13 American soldiers killed in a suicide bombing in Kabul during the final havoc-marked hours of the American withdrawal. Trump laid three wreaths and put hand over heart; that is a time-honored privilege of presidents. Trump, as is his wont, went further. He walked to a burial site in Section 60 and posed with the family of a fallen soldier, grinning broadly and giving a thumbs-up for his campaign photographer and videographer….
A cemetery employee politely attempted to stop the campaign staff from filming in Section 60. Taking campaign photos and videos at gravesites is expressly forbidden under federal law. The Trump entourage, according to a subsequent statement by the U.S. Army, which oversees the cemetery, “abruptly pushed” her aside.
Trump’s campaign soon posted a video on TikTok, overlaid with Trump’s narration: “We didn’t lose one person in 18 months. And then they”—the Biden administration—“took over, that disaster of leaving Afghanistan.”
Trump was unsurprisingly not telling the truth; 11 soldiers were killed in Afghanistan in his last year in office, and his administration had itself negotiated the withdrawal. But such fabrications are incidental sins compared with what came next. A top Trump adviser, Chris LaCivita, and campaign spokesperson Steven Cheung talked to reporters and savaged the employee who had tried to stop the entourage. Cheung referred to her as “an unnamed individual, clearly suffering a mental-health episode.” LaCivita declared her a “despicable individual” who ought to be fired.
Once again, I have to ask why anyone would vote for this repulsive creature for any office, much less president?
Of course, Trump has taken no responsibility whatever for his disgusting behavior. In fact, yesterday he even claimed that he had no idea who posted the video ad on his TicTac account. He suggested that the gold star families who invited him may have done it–or maybe it was Vice President Harris’ campaign!
By Rakhmet Redzhepov
Rep. Jamie Raskin is now demanding answers about the events in Arlington Cemetery.
Rep. Jamie Raskin, the top Democrat on the House Oversight and Accountability Committee, demanded Friday a “full account” of a reported incident between Donald Trump and his campaign and their collective appearance this week at Arlington National Cemetery.
Trump and his campaign faced intense backlash following a reported physical altercation with a cemetery official and faced questions over whether they may have violated federal law banning campaign materials from being photographed or filmed in certain sections of the cemetery.
A TikTok video showed Trump in Section 60, where the altercation purportedly occurred, smiling and giving a thumbs-up. Trump has said the family of a soldier laid to rest in the section invited him, and his campaign has said they were allowed to ring a photographer.
“The fact is that a private photographer was permitted on the premises and for whatever reason an unnamed individual, clearly suffering from a mental health episode, decided to physically block members of President Trump’s team during a very solemn ceremony,” spokesman Steven Cheung said in the statement.
laws were violated.
In a letter to Christine Wormuth, secretary of the Army, Raskin referenced reports of a “verbal and physical altercation” between members of the Trump campaign and cemetery staff.
“It appears that the Trump campaign refused to abide by Arlington National Cemetery’s absolute prohibition on ‘filming for partisan, political, or fundraising purposes’ and ‘abruptly pushed aside’ Cemetery staff trying to ‘ensure adherence’ to these rules,” he said in the letter obtained by Punchbowl News.
In doing so, he asked the Army secretary to hand the committee an incident report and deliver a briefing on what happened, “including whether Trump campaign staff violated federal law or Cemetery rules and whether the Trump campaign informed the families of servicemembers buried at the Cemetery that their gravestones would be used in Mr. Trump’s political campaign ads.”
Here’s an example of how Trump intimidates the media. At a rally in Pennsylvania yesterday a Trump supporter actually broke down the barriers to the press area.
JOHNSTOWN, Pa. (AP) — A man at Donald Trump’s rally in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, stormed into the press area as the former president spoke and was surrounded by police and sheriff’s deputies before eventually being subdued with a Taser.
The incident Friday came moments after Trump had criticized major media outlets for what he said was unfavorable coverage and dismissed CNN as fawning for its interview Thursday with his Democratic rival Kamala Harris and her running mate, Tim Walz….
The man made it over a bicycle rack ringing the media area and began climbing the back side of a riser where television reporters and cameras were stationed, according to a video of the incident posted to social media by a reporter for CBS News. People near him tried to pull him off the riser and were quickly joined by police officers.
The crowd cheered as a pack of police led the man away, prompting Trump to declare, “Is there anywhere that’s more fun to be than a Trump rally?”
Moments later police handcuffed another man in the crowd and led him out of the arena. It was not immediately clear whether that detention was related to the initial altercation.
At the time of the incident, Trump was criticizing the media for its coverage of his campaign and the election more broadly—and, in particular, attacking CNN’s recent interview with his opponent, Kamala Harris.
As the man was detained and removed from the rally, the former president quipped, “Is there anywhere that’s more fun to be than a Trump rally?” per the Associated Press.
Trump is right to be worried about the Harris-Walz interview on CNN. It got great ratings.
It was a strong night for CNN, which has struggled recently to reach the ratings of Fox News or MSNBC. Although it’s a much lower audience rating than Harris and Walz’s big DNC speeches, it’s still a promising stat for the Harris campaign, continuing a trend of her events receiving higher viewership than those of her opponent.
When Trump gave a town hall on CNN in May 2023, one of his first proper campaign events of the 2024 election cycle, only 3.3 million viewers tuned in. And more recently, when Trump did his first joint sit-down with running mate JD Vance in July, they drew an estimated 4 million viewers. All of those cable ratings, however, still trail the average audience for the network’s nightly news broadcasts, which tend to bring in around 7-8 million viewers.
The Harris-Walz campaign can also boast a more popular national convention this year; 20.1 million people tuned into the third day of the DNC where Walz gave his speech, for instance, while only 17.9 million viewers turned in for JD Vance’s big moment….
The ratings gap seemed particularly disappointing for Trump, considering how much pride he openly took in his RNC ratings. After his speech this year, he posted on Truth Social that his ratings were the “best and most successful in history,” even though viewership was trailing behind both his 2020 and 2016 performance.
Meanwhile, Harris’ convention ratings actually outdid Joe Biden’s in 2020. It’s a performance that gives credence to the idea that the Harris-Walz campaign has more energy and enthusiasm behind it, whereas that long-speculated Trump fatigue might have finally started to set in.
Trump fatigue set in for me long ago. If only he would just disappear.
There are a couple of interesting articles on J.D. Vance today. I got into the NYT even though I cancelled my subscription, apparently because I clicked the link at Memeorandum.
Donald J. Trump knew that JD Vance could take a punch. But during their first week together on the campaign trail, the former president wondered just how many hits his new running mate could absorb.
The volume and velocity of attacks from Democrats stunned even Mr. Trump. He was unaware of the most incendiary remarks that opponents were rapidly unearthing from Mr. Vance’s past, and the former president told allies that he was troubled by the idea that more comments would come to light as Democrats savaged his heir apparent as weird and anti-women.
A month later, polls show that the number of Americans who dislike Mr. Vance continues to grow — but Mr. Trump could not be happier.
The reason: Mr. Vance’s relentless pace of full-throttle performances as Mr. Trump’s well-trained attack dog has pleased the former president and instilled a sense of stability inside a campaign still shaken by President Biden’s sudden exit from the race.
Mr. Trump had instructed his young sidekick to fight forcefully through those initial attacks, and later said Mr. Vance’s execution exceeded his expectations, according to three allies who insisted on anonymity to discuss private conversations.
In a quintessentially Trumpian display of bravado, the former president has privately praised Mr. Vance by comparing himself to Vince Lombardi, telling people that his eye for political talent was now on par with the Hall of Fame football coach’s ability to find Super Bowl-caliber players.
But beyond Mar-a-Lago, early returns on Mr. Vance are less enthusiastic. Polls show that he effectively amplifies Mr. Trump’s political strengths but that he also magnifies his weaknesses. Mr. Vance’s approval rating improved by nearly double digits among the nation’s least educated and poorest voters since joining the Republican ticket — but plunged by even wider margins among college graduates and independent women, according to an NPR/PBS News/Marist poll.
How those conflicting opinions either resolve themselves or become further inflamed will help determine whether Mr. Trump ends the race in less than 10 weeks with a second presidential term or a second electoral defeat.
There’s more at the link, if you can get past the paywall.
Donald Trump’s running mate, JD Vance, said that professional women “choose a path to misery” when they prioritize careers over having children in a September 2021 podcast interview in which he also claimed men in America were “suppressed” in their masculinity.
The Ohio senator and vice-presidential candidate said of women like his classmates at Yale Law School that “pursuing racial or gender equity is like the value system that gives their life meaning … [but] they all find that that value system leads to misery”.
Vance also sideswiped the Minnesota congresswoman Ilhan Omar, a one-time Somali refugee, claiming she had shown “ingratitude” to America, and that she “would be living in a craphole” had she not moved to the US.
In an emailed response to the Guardian, Omar slammed what she called the “ignorant and xenophobic rhetoric spewed by Mr Vance” as “dangerous and un-American”.
Ever since he was picked by Trump, Vance has been hit by scandals over his past comments, especially those concerning women and his perception of their role in society.
Ever since he was picked by Trump, Vance has been hit by scandals over his past comments, especially those concerning women and his perception of their role in society.
Last week his campaign was rocked by previous comments blasting a teachers union president for not having “some of her own” children. His previous characterizations of Democratic leaders as “childless cat ladies” have also troubled the Trump campaign’s efforts to appeal to suburban women.
On the newly found interview:
In the 2021 interview Vance also claimed men and boys in the US were “suppressed” in their masculinity and made racially charged remarks about American cities and his political opponents.
By Sharyn Bursiic
Of Afghans who assisted US troops during the occupation of that country who were now seeking to come to America, Vance asked whether “certain groups of people can successfully become American citizens”, and said those hostile to Minneapolis’s Somali American community “don’t like people getting hatcheted in the street in [their] own community”.
At the same time, Vance claimed that “the left uses racism as a cudgel”, and that he had been a “little too worried” in the past about such accusations because they can be “career-ending” and “destroy a person’s life”.
Sophie Bjork-James, an assistant professor at Vanderbilt University who has written extensively on topics including US evangelicals and populist politics, said: “Vance represents a new articulation of rightwing politics that is bridging the Christian right and a tech-influenced hypermasculine conservatism.
“He appeals to evangelicals with the message that we find happiness by fulfilling traditional gender roles, which is a cornerstone of white evangelical Christianity. He also speaks to a misogynist trend emerging out of the tech world among people who would prefer not to talk about any kind of diversity at all.”
“What they share is the view that women shouldn’t be in paid work: they should be in the home and rearing children. But the public line isn’t ‘we hate women’, it’s ‘women will be happier if they stay at home’,” she added.
I can see why Trump likes Vance. They both hate women. There’s more at the link, and The Guardian doesn’t have a paywall.
Those are my recommended reads for today. What’s on your mind?
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A woman sewing blue denim pants, by “Master of the Blue Jeans.”
I’m going to begin today with a story that has nothing to do with politics or current events–just because I think it’s interesting. Did you know that people wore blue jeans way back in the 16th century? I didn’t. An art exhibit will soon open in Paris that will focus on a mysterious artist, known only as “Master of the Blue Jeans.”
An exhibition centered on the “Master of the Blue Jeans” is opening in Paris this month—and the work on display is not that of Levi Strauss, founder of the eponymous clothing company, but rather a 17th-century Italian painter.
The upcoming show at Galerie Canesso features two paintings by the mysterious artist, who was active in northern Italy in the 1600s and is known only by his “master” moniker. The painter’s oil canvases depict early iterations of the stiff blue fabric beloved today, as worn by Italian peasants. According to a statement, the pieces have proved to be important artifacts in garment history, “pushing back [blue jeans’] provenance by centuries.”
Speaking with Artnet’s Vittoria Benzine, Maurizio Canesso, an art collector and the gallery’s founder, says, “People are still not very familiar with the true history of blue jeans, as they confuse it with the material made by Levi Strauss.”
In truth, Canesso argues, when the American businessman behind Levi’s jeans started selling denim work pants in the late 1800s, he merely added metal rivets and structure to a fabric that already boasted a storied European past.
“Jeans come from Genoa, while denim comes from the French city of Nîmes,” says Canesso. Blue jeans were made with perpendicular stitches in northwest Italy, while denim was woven in chevron patterns in southern France. But the key component of the fabric’s history is its coloration.
“Until the 11th century, no one could wear blue fabric because they didn’t know how to make blue color adhere,” Canesso says. “Only in the year 1000 did this begin to happen using woad leaves, and at a very high cost. The genius of the Genoese was to find the indigo stone in India and make this an industrial and therefore low-cost process.”
The ten denim-themed paintings attributed to the master were previously thought to be the work of several different artists. But in 2004, curator Gerlinde Gruber reattributed the group of artworks to a single unnamed painter then dubbed the Master of the Blue Jeans. By 2010, Canesso had acquired all of the master’s works, and he presented them in an exhibition at his Paris gallery that same year.
“Unfortunately, we have no new theories about who the Master of the Blue Jeans was,” Véronique Damian, an art historian at Galerie Canesso, tells the Observer’s Vanessa Thorpe. Evidence indicates the artist spent the bulk of his career in Italy’s northern region of Lombardy, though he may trained elsewhere.
I’m including some of the artist’s work in this post, just because.
In the more painful world of politics, Trump had a bad day in New York yesterday, and he got some bad news in India; but he got some gifts from judges in Florida and Georgia.
As I’m sure you’re aware, Stormy Daniels testified in Trump’s hush money case yesterday.
Stormy Daniels, the adult-film actress at the center of Donald Trump’s hush money trial, testified Tuesday about a disturbing sexual encounter she says she had with him, leading to angry, profane muttering from the former president that alarmed the judge.
New York Supreme Court Justice Juan Merchan called Trump’s lawyer Todd Blancheto a sidebar during a midday break to say that Trumpwas “cursing audibly” and possibly intimidating Daniels, who had begun testifying, according to a trial transcript.
Beggar Boy with a Piece of Pie (wearing a denim jacket)
“I understand that your client is upset at this point,” Merchan said to the defense attorney,according to the transcript,“but he is cursing audibly and he is shaking his headvisually and that’s contemptuous. It has the potential to intimidate the witness and the jury can see that.”
Blanche assured the judge he would speak to Trump.
“I am speaking to you here at the bench because I don’t want to embarrass him,” Merchan said. “You need to speak to him. I won’t tolerate that.”
The exchange punctuated a day of rage — sometimes whispered from the defense table, sometimes declared loudly by Daniels from the witness stand.
It was one of several surreal moments on the 13th day of the first criminal trial of a former U.S. president, including descriptions by Daniels of their alleged sexual encounter in 2006 that were so detailed that defense attorneys demanded a mistrial.
While Merchan rejected their request, Daniels at times seemed to be describing nonconsensual sex that could be considered highly prejudicial for the jury, which in turn could give Trump — the presumptive Republican presidential nominee — solid grounds to appeal if he is found guilty.
It sounds like the sex actually was nonconsensual though. Daniels’ description of what happened sounds very much like a date rape situation in which she was taken advantage of by a much older and more powerful man. She was 27. He was 60. He was much taller and stronger. She was invited for dinner, but there was no dinner. When she was ready to leave, she went to the bathroom. When she came back, he was on the bed in boxers. She tried to leave, but he blocked the door. This description is from Harry Litman on Twitter:
thought time to go. when opened the bathroom door, Trump had come in and was on the bed, in boxer shirts and a t-shirt. she was startled. felt like room spun in full motion. blood leaves my hands and feet. “ohmygod — what did I miss to get here?” she laughed nervously
The next thing I knew I was on the bed. opposite side of bed. missionary position. objection – sustained
I blacked out. but I was not drugged in any way, no alcohol. didn’t feel threatened physically “There was an imbalance of power for sure. but I was not threatened verbally or physically”
Had sex with him on the bed. Merchan sustaining objections to details. Staring at ceiling didn’t know how I got there. sustained. stricken touch his skin? objection sustained. he wasn’t wearing a condom. concerning to her but didn’t say anything.
sex was brief. remembers getting dressed. sitting on edge of bed, noticed completely dark outside. hard to get shoes on, hands shaking so hard. DJT: “oh it’s great, let’s get together again honey bunch.” I just wanted to leave. DVD she signed was on nightstand.
DJT: “We have to get together again soon” “we were so fantastic together. talked about the show” I just left as fast as I could. Didn’t express any concern about Melania. or mention her. didn’t have dinner. took cab back to hotel.
I felt ashamed I didn’t stop the sex so I didn’t tell many people about it. Remembered some additional details later. Merchan very stern about level of detail — wants to keep it spare.
It’s pretty clear from Daniels’ description that she was traumatized. I doubt if the judge understands that, but maybe some jurors will. Just because she is a porn actress doesn’t mean she can’t be raped. Her description is also reminiscent of E. Jean Carroll’s experience–Trump lifted her up against the wall and grabbed her genitals before she realized what was happening. It’s also reminisce of his own description in the Access Hollywood tape–how he can grab women “by the pussy. If you’re a star they let you do it.”
Daniels matters for reasons outside of the courtroom and the specifics of this hush-money trial. Daniels’ story is yet another reminder of what may prove to be Trump’s electoral downfall: His bottomless misogyny.
On the witness stand, Daniels reportedly spoke quickly and was apparently quite nervous. Initially, her story of meeting Trump sounded funny. She painted him as a pathetic older man trying — and failing — to impress the younger woman. When he first asked her to dinner, she replied “no,” but with an expletive. Her publicist eventually talked her into it, hoping Daniels could leverage the connection into a spot on “The Apprentice.” In his hotel room, she described him wearing “silk or satin” pajamas and asked him to put on real clothes. He allegedly used the “don’t even sleep in the same room” line when she asked about his wife, Melania, who had recently had a baby. Daniels described Trump as “pompous” and “arrogant.” She recounted how she jokingly spanked him with a magazine, hoping to tease him into being less of a jerk.
Then the tone of her story changed, as she described how they came to have sex. Trump waited until she was in the bathroom, Daniels said, and then he stripped down to boxer shorts and a T-shirt. “The room spun in slow motion,” she recalled on the witness stand. When she made for the door, “he was bigger and blocking the way,” she said of Trump. She denied it was sexual assault, however, because “I was not threatened either verbally or physically.” [….]
Whether or not Trump’s sexual encounter with Daniels was consensual in the legal sense, she describes it as unwanted.
“I didn’t say anything at all,” she told the court repeatedly. Claiming that she “blacked out” during the encounter, afterward, Daniels said, “my hands were shaking so hard” and “I felt ashamed that I didn’t stop it and that I didn’t say ‘No.'”
Another painting by Master of the Blue Jeans
A person doesn’t have to be threatened in order for sex to be nonconsensual. Back to Marcotte’s piece:
Since the release of the “Access Hollywood” video in 2016, in which Trump can be heard bragging about sexual assault, the Beltway media has repeatedly tried to move on from the story of Trump’s legion of issues with women. Indeed, when Carroll’s accusations first came out in 2019, the press barely paid any mind. But the story of his rampant misogyny has never fully gone away. There was the Women’s March that overshadowed his 2017 inauguration. Then the over two dozen women who stepped forward with stories of being subject to the sexual harassment and assault Trump himself described so vividly. Trump, of course, is more responsible than any other person on the planet for the overturn of Roe v. Wade and the stampede of Republican state legislators banning abortion. He promised to stack the Supreme Court with anti-choice justices, and his three appointees provided the votes necessary in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health, which ended the legal right to abortion. While Trump has tried to make moderate-sounding noises on this issue, he keeps inadvertently revealing his anti-choice radicalism. In a recent Time interview, for instance, he indicated that he’s fine if states “monitor women’s pregnancies so they can know if they’ve gotten an abortion.”
On the stand, Daniels provided ugly details about how Trump treated her, and about how Trump treats, and views, women. These insights are notable, but they’re not new. In 2016, leaked audio of Trump making grotesque and sexist comments about women to Access Hollywood host Billy Bush almost derailed his presidential campaign. Last year, Trump was held liable for sexual assaulting and then repeatedly defaming advice columnist E. Jean Carroll.
But Daniels’s testimony is a reminder that contempt and mistreatment of women is a core theme of Trump’s life and politics. Both the press and Democratic opponents have struggled to make this issue central to 2024, even though abortion rights and women’s health care are the key issues of the campaign. It’s unclear whether the trial will spark more reporting and discussion of Trump’s treatment of and attitudes about women. But it should….
Daniels’s testimony is intended to establish the background facts of the payment. It also, though, paints Trump as a liar, a bully, and a sexual manipulator. Daniels said while she was in Trump’s hotel room, she went to the bathroom, and when he came out he was in his boxer shorts, a moment Daniels describes as “like a jump scare.” She said, “the room spun in slow motion” and she realized “I’ve put myself in this bad situation.”
Daniels is careful to emphasize that Trump did not physically coerce her. He did, however, according to Daniels, suggest that if she cooperated with him he could help her career through his connections and a possible appearance on the Celebrity Apprentice reality show, where Trump was the star. She eventually agreed to have sex even though Trump did not use a condom — she was adamant about using condoms in her adult film shoots.
By Master of the Blue Jeans.
She testified that during sex she stared at the ceiling and tried to think of something else, and afterwards she had trouble dressing because her hands were shaking. She said, “I felt ashamed that I didn’t stop it and that I didn’t say no.”
Daniels kept in touch with Trump for some time because he was still offering her the chance to appear on Celebrity Apprentice, which would have been a huge mainstream boost to her career. She met with Trump once more in Los Angeles, at which point “he kept trying to make sexual advances, putting his hand on my leg, scooting closer.” She rebuffed him, and in a later phone call he admitted he was not going to put her on his television show. At that point she ceased communicating with him.
Again, Daniels has not accused Trump of sexual harassment or violence, and she says their encounter was consensual. Her testimony makes clear, though, that Trump was pressuring her for sex in return for business opportunities — a variation on the ugly tradition of the Hollywood casting couch. We don’t know if Trump ever had any intention of keeping his promises or of helping Daniels. But whether he did or not, his actions as she describes them were sleazy at best, and she found the experience painful and traumatic enough to leave her literally shaking.
The encounter doesn’t sound consensual to me. As I said above, it sounds like date rape.
The judge presiding over Donald Trump’s criminal case in Florida — on charges that he hoarded classified secrets at his Mar-a-Lago estate after his presidency — has indefinitely postponed the trial, once scheduled for May 20.
The date had been widely expected to move amid a tangle of pretrial conflicts between special counsel Jack Smith and Trump’s attorneys. Smith had urged Judge Aileen Cannon to reschedule the trial to begin on July 8, but an order from the judge on Tuesday afternoon suggested that she is unlikely to even decide on a new trial date before late July.
Cannon, a Trump appointee who took the bench in late 2020, indicated in the order that, before setting a new trial date, she intends to resolve the backlog of other issues in the case that have piled up on her plate. Smith’s defenders have criticized Cannon for what they see as a plodding pace in resolving pretrial matters, and tensions between the special counsel and the judge have flared in recent months over a series of puzzling rulings that threatened to derail the case.
“[F]inalization of a trial date at this juncture — before resolution of the myriad and interconnected pre-trial and [classified evidence] issues … would be imprudent and inconsistent with the Court’s duty to fully and fairly consider the various pending pre-trial motions,” Cannon wrote in the five-page order.
That reshuffling further clouds the picture for Smith, who is also awaiting a Supreme Court ruling on presidential immunity that could determine whether his other case against Trump — charges in Washington D.C. for attempting to subvert the 2020 election — can move forward this year….
Trump has sought to delay all of his criminal cases until after this year’s election. If he wins, he could shut down the two federal cases brought by Smith, and the state cases in New York and Georgia also might have to be frozen.
The Georgia Court of Appeals on Wednesday decided to hear an appeal of a judge’s ruling allowing District Attorney Fani Willis to remain at the helm of Fulton County’s election interference case against former President Donald Trump.
The court’s decision almost certainly means a significant delay of a trial here for Trump and his 14 co-defendants and signals that Willis’ leadership role isn’t guaranteed. It is unclear how long the appeals court will take to decide the issue but they are not known for moving swiftly.
Farmers wearing jeans, 1930s
“There’s no way this case gets to trial this year,” said Atlanta defense attorney Andrew Fleischman, who is closing following the case. “I would expect the appeals court to issue its opinion some time next year.”
On March 29, Superior Court Judge Scott McAfee issued a “certificate of immediate review,” which allowed the defendants to appeal his ruling to the Georgia Court of Appeals before a trial begins.
Under Appeals Court rules, such a pretrial — or interlocutory — appeal is typically assigned to a three-judge screening panel. And all it takes is for one of those judges to decide whether the court accepts the appeal. The court’s order one-page order did not divulge which judge voted to grant the application.
In his order granting the pre-trial review, McAfee said he will continue working on the case, resolving pending motions, while the appeals court takes up the removal issue.
The bad news for Trump is that he is losing a significant percentage of Republican voters in the primaries, which are still going on. Niki Haley is still getting votes. Adam Wren and Madison Fernandez at Politico: Unexpected warning signs for Trump in busy Indiana primary.
In 2016, Indiana put Donald Trump on the doorstep of the GOP presidential nomination. But eight years later, the state he called “Importantville” delivered his campaign some flashing red warning signs as Nikki Haley cleaned up in the suburbs.
By virtue of its late-in-the-nominating-calendar primary, the Hoosier state has always occupied a unique and occasionally powerful perch to make or break candidacies: Sen. Ted Cruz and then-Ohio Gov. John Kasich dropped out immediately after Trump’s victory that year. But the barn-red state also often acts as a pace car for Republicans nationally.
And in a primary that saw a record-breaking $98 million splash across the state, according to AdImpact, Tuesday was no exception.
A zombie Haley candidacy continued to punch above its weight in the Trumpiest of states: The former South Carolina governor is on track to break 20 percent for the first time since she dropped out of the race two months ago.
Read more at the link.
I don’t know if you’ve been following the reporting about New York Times editor Joe Kahn and his pathetic explanations for why his paper seems to be rooting for another Trump presidency.
Joe Kahn, after two years in charge of the New York Times newsroom, has learned nothing.
He had an extraordinary opportunity, upon taking over from Dean Baquet, to right the ship: to recognize that the Times was not warning sufficiently of the threat to democracy presented by a second Trump presidency.
But to Kahn, democracy is a partisan issue and he’s not taking sides. He made that clear in an interview with obsequious former employee Ben Smith, now the editor of Semafor.
Kahn accused those of us asking the Times to do better of wanting it to be a house organ of the Democratic party:
To say that the threats of democracy are so great that the media is going to abandon its central role as a source of impartial information to help people vote — that’s essentially saying that the news media should become a propaganda arm for a single candidate, because we prefer that candidate’s agenda.
But critics like me aren’t asking the Times to abandon its independence. We’re asking the Times to recognize that it isn’t living up to its own standards of truth-telling and independence when it obfuscates the stakes of the 2024 election, covers up for Trump’s derangement, and goes out of its way to make Biden look weak.
And to the extent that Kahn has changed anything in the Times newsroom since Baquet left, it’s to double down on a form of objectivity that favors the comfortable-white-male perspective and considers anything else little more than hysteria.
Throwing Baquet under the bus, Kahn called the summer of the Black Lives Matter protests “an extreme moment” during which the Times lost its way.
“I think we’ve learned from it. I think we found our footing after that,” he said.
I translate that to mean that the old guard has reasserted total control over the rabble.
Read the rest at Press Watch.
I’ll wrap this up with a couple of creepy stories about Robert Kennedy Jr.
In 2010, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was experiencing memory loss and mental fogginess so severe that a friend grew concerned he might have a brain tumor. Mr. Kennedy said he consulted several of the country’s top neurologists, many of whom had either treated or spoken to his uncle, Senator Edward M. Kennedy, before his death the previous year of brain cancer.
Several doctors noticed a dark spot on the younger Mr. Kennedy’s brain scans and concluded that he had a tumor, he said in a 2012 deposition reviewed by The New York Times. Mr. Kennedy was immediately scheduled for a procedure at Duke University Medical Center by the same surgeon who had operated on his uncle, he said.
While packing for the trip, he said, he received a call from a doctor at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital who had a different opinion: Mr. Kennedy, he believed, had a dead parasite in his head.
The doctor believed that the abnormality seen on his scans “was caused by a worm that got into my brain and ate a portion of it and then died,” Mr. Kennedy said in the deposition.
Gross. Maybe that explains some of his weird ideas?
A right-wing social media influencer hired by Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s presidential campaign who previously said Jan. 6 was “Democrat misdirection” appears to have himself been on the restricted grounds of the U.S. Capitol during the attack.
Marilyn Monroe in blue jeans
NBC News first reported that Kennedy’s campaign hired Zach Henry’s firm, Total Virality, for “influencer engagement” in March. Henry had worked as deputy communications director for Republican Vivek Ramaswamy’s presidential campaign, as well as for Blake Masters during his Senate run in Arizona.
Henry, as NBC News reported, had posted that Jan. 6 was “no MAGA insurrection Just more Democrat misdirection” and appears to have embraced conspiracy theories about the Capitol attack, including posting that “antifa” was behind it, which is false.
But photos and videos uncovered by NBC News and online “sedition hunters,” who have aided the FBI in hundreds of cases against Capitol rioters, appear to show Henry among the mob outside the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, beyond the previously established police lines, although it is unclear whether any of the barricades and “restricted” signs remained by the time he arrived.
There is no indication that Henry entered the Capitol or that he engaged in assaults on police officers or in destruction of property. Federal prosecutors have almost entirely focused their resources on Jan. 6 participants who either went inside the building or committed violence or destruction outside it, so there is little chance that Henry would be charged; the few nonviolent Jan. 6 defendants who were charged solely for going on restricted Capitol grounds were generally charged with misdemeanors.
But Henry’s presence on Capitol grounds would be significant given his previous social media posts about Jan. 6 and his new position on Kennedy’s campaign as Kennedy runs for president as an independent against former President Donald Trump.
That’s it for me today. What stories have you been following?
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The Sky Dancing banner headline uses a snippet from a work by artist Tashi Mannox called 'Rainbow Study'. The work is described as a" study of typical Tibetan rainbow clouds, that feature in Thanka painting, temple decoration and silk brocades". dakinikat was immediately drawn to the image when trying to find stylized Tibetan Clouds to represent Sky Dancing. It is probably because Tashi's practice is similar to her own. His updated take on the clouds that fill the collection of traditional thankas is quite special.
You can find his work at his website by clicking on his logo below. He is also a calligraphy artist that uses important vajrayana syllables. We encourage you to visit his on line studio.
Yup. And the FDA will not be looking around for that food safety risk now. It’s also upending Health Care, but we can rest knowing that all those generic names for medicine and things will be
Speaking of crazy policy, I happened on this last night. This is from 
This is from Ed Mazza writing for HuffPo. This sounds a lot like his real estate deals to me. “‘Clearly Unhinged’: Critics Sink Trump’s ‘Asinine’ Plan To Reopen Alcatraz Prison. The president wants to turn the site back into a penitentiary despite the fact that it would cost a fortune.”
This just really sounds like how he’d run his business. Also, he now wants tariffs on all incoming films. This is about as insane as it gets. 
Philip Bump–writing at WAPO–has an interesting Op-Ed up today
Dan Froomkin–writing for
It makes sense to me since Trump seems to want to undocument more than just people. Who knows how many things Doge has destroyed in the wake of having all-access to every government database and more. He’s disappearing people, children, scientific research, due process, and entire agencies and programs.
There are a lot of examples here, and it’s worth thinking about. The Unitary Executive Theory has been around for a while, and since the Reagan years, it has picked up steam in the Supreme Court. Here is a recent article from 
I think this take on executive power is one we should get more familiar with since it’s really taken a powerful rise. The 
Believe me, as someone who has taught middle school and high school kids as well as young college freshmen, there’s a lot more worrying to be done about hormone-addled boys than girls just slamming the door on their uncool parents. I also have two daughters, and I was relieved they were girls when they were born. I’m sure I can get some witnesses here. The Carlson rant, along with its response, shows this sick side of America’s misogyny,
Meanwhile, Daddy Don’s former employees continue to open up about how truly awful he would be if he got back in. General Kelly’s interview has created quite a stir, and other staff members are joining the chorus to out the fascist. Praising Hitler should be an automatic disqualification for anyone seeking office in this country. As I say always and forever, my Daddy, who was the sweetest man I’ve ever known, bombed NAZIs. My Dad enlisted. He was neither a sucker nor a loser and would talk about his service all the time in his golden years. I remain forever proud to be his daughter.
He continually has shown us who he is when he insults service members and our fallen soldiers, when he talks gleefully about pussy grabby, when he shows preferences for ruthless dictators over our democratic allies who have repeatedly stood beside us in our fight for freedom, and when he is so addled he speaks gibberish. An ABC Poll shows that
I completely agree with Eugene Robinson on this. Here’s his Op-Ed at the 
T
This is from the
I’m going to cover one more thing that should have the entire country on edge, and that is how cozy Musk is now with Trump and how they both are so cozy with Russia’s Vladamir Putin. Musk’s companies get billions of dollars from the U.S. government, and his contracts in dealing with Space are strategic. Both these guys have been communicating with the Russian dictator recently. This is from the AP. 
Today, 
Here’s a bit 
A month later, 
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