His Big Lie is the gift to the Democrats Donald Trump was all over the place in his big TIME Magazine interview this week but there is one issue on which he’s never wavered. When asked if he thought there would be violence around the election this fall he said, “if we don’t win, you know, it depends. It always depends on the fairness of an election.” On Wednesday he went even further, telling the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, “if everything’s honest, I’ll gladly accept the results. I don’t change on that. If it’s not, you have to fight for the right of the country.” It’s pretty clear that in his mind and the minds of his followers there is no such thing as an honest and fair election that doesn’t result in a Donald Trump victory so there’s little doubt about what to expect if they don’t get their way in November. Over the past three years Trump’s Big Lie has become the main organizing principle of the Republican Party. There had been a festering sense of grievance and resentment among the GOP base for decades which Trump skillfully tapped into.
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Yesterday, the Democratic leadership announced that they would vote to save Mike Johnson if Marjorie Taylor Greene went ahead with her threatened motion to vacate the chair. Marge is having a temper tantrum over it: Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene announced Wednesday she will move ahead with her attempt to oust Speaker Mike Johnson from the House’s top job — though her plan seems doomed to fail. The Georgia Republican, who first introduced a motion to vacate the speaker’s chair in March, held a high-energy news conference outside the U.S. Capitol to say she will trigger a vote on the House floor next week. “Mike Johnson is not capable of that job,” she said. “He has proven that over and over again.” Greene, joined by Republican Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky, aired a litany of grievances she has with Johnson, who she described as a Democratic speaker working against former President Donald Trump’s agenda.
Tucker Carlson is just going for it these days. Chased off of mainstream media he’s now operating in the subterranean, alt-right propaganda world: A far-right Russian philosopher who’s called for Russia to expand its borders and rise up against the West says his interview with Tucker Carlson shows Americans are ready to accept his fascist ideas. Alexander Dugin, dubbed “Putin’s brain” for supposedly influencing the Russian leader’s geopolitical crusades, took to Telegram in the wake of his interview with the former Fox News host to note that he’d made it into the “American mainstream” by sitting down with Carlson, and that the “American public is a little ready for my ideas.” He claimed there’d been a “defamation” campaign against him hatched by “globalists” and “left-wing liberals” who portrayed him as “Dr.
And we’re not yet over the PTSD from COVID-19 As if America needed another reason not to hand the White House again to Donald “88 Counts” Trump. Do we really want Dr. Bleach-and-Light Enemas recommending quack remedies and maskless Everydays should we face another deadly pandemic? NPR: Officially, there is only one documented case of bird flu spilling over from cows into humans during the current U.S. outbreak. But epidemiologist Gregory Gray suspects the true number is higher, based on what he heard from veterinarians, farm owners and the workers themselves as the virus hit their herds in his state. “We know that some of the workers sought medical care for influenza-like illness and conjunctivitis at the same time the H5N1 was ravaging the dairy farms,” says Gray, an infectious disease epidemiologist at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston. “I don’t have a way to measure that, but it seems biologically quite plausible that they too, are suffering from the virus,” he says. Dr. Irwin Redlener (remember him from 2020?) is concerned: NBC News: The U.S.
Greg Sargent at TNR: Because Donald Trump must always be seen as wielding absolute mastery over his hapless, flailing opponents, he and his propagandists want you to believe his hush-money trial in Manhattan has proven nothing but a smashing political success for him. On Monday night, Trump posted a video on social media featuring Fox personality Jesse Watters gushing that his trial may win him the White House. Trump also promoted a video of Fox’s Jeanine Pirro insisting that it showcases his ability to “withstand pressure.” Other Fox figures have spun Trump’s buffoonish outbreaks of narcolepsy in court as proof he’s Owning the Libs: Certain of acquittal, he can do some power-napping while showing the trial the contempt it deserves. Greg points out that Trump doesn’t seem quite as sanguine. According to the NY Times he’s been talking trash about Todd Blanche, his previously favorite attorney, because he isn’t being aggressive enough. (He’s also not happy with attorney’s fees…) Apparently, he’s venting that he doesn’t have “a Roy Cohn” again.
Antifa-da is comin’ ta git ya At Dartmouth College Wednesday night, students holding a peaceful pro-Palestine protest on the college green were quickly met with …. well, let Prof. Jeff Sharlett (“The Undertow“) tell it: It wasn’t as dramatic as the police breach of Columbia University carried live from New York. Meanwhile, Brown University administrators reached a negotiated settlement with student protesters: Northwestern did as well. Which do you think will get more press? Which do you think will fuel the right-wing culture war? Okay, likely all of it. Charlie Sykes recalls being a kid at the 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago when Mayor Daily unleashed his police against Vietnam War protesters. Those clashes helped Richard Nixon win the presidency. “[T]hey hastened the realignment of much of the American electorate. Republicans would hold the White House for 16 of the next 20 years.
A smattering of commentary from the Trump right today: Cool, totally cool.
As everyone wrings their hands over campus protests let’s take a look at the leader of the Republican youth movement’s top leader: Yeah. I think we can all afford to take a deep breath and remember that campus protests are among America’s foremost liberal traditions and calm down about it. (I say that to myself as much as anyone.)
Here’s one: Thanks to a provision in the Secure 2.0 Act, legislation aimed at improving retirement benefits nationwide, in 2024 employers will be able to start counting student loan payments as qualifying contributions toward retirement matching programs. That means if your employer offers to match your 401(k) contributions, you could get that matched money without ever depositing funds in your retirement account. Instead, your monthly student loan payments would count as your “contribution.” The benefit could be especially significant for recent graduates, who often have moderate incomes ($58,000 to start, on average) and high levels of debt (an average of $33,000 for federal borrowers aged 25 to 35). Does anyone know about this? I hope so. The Biden administration has created an unprecedented number of programs to help average people, increase manufacturing and jobs and generally expand the economy from the bottom up. And yet, most people are either unaware of it or frankly, don’t care. And yet all the polling says they do care about it and think Donald Trump is the guy who will give them the things that Biden has already done.
Paul Krugman with a trip down memory lane: You probably remember [the 1990s] as a time of prosperity — low unemployment and rapid economic growth combined with low inflation — marred by irrational exuberance in the stock market. Pets.com anyone? What you might not realize is how closely the economy of early 2024 resembles that of the late Clinton years. People might not be feeling the prosperity — or at least they say they aren’t feeling it, because there’s a huge gap between Americans’ positive assessment of their personal financial situation and their negative assessments of the economy. But by the numbers, things look pretty good. Notably, unemployment is actually a bit lower now than it was at the end of the roaring ’90s. He notes that inflation spiked in 2021-22 but that according to one good measure it’s actually come down to a level that’s barely above the Fed’s target rate. What about interest rates? Well, people have forgotten that interest rates were higher during the 90s and mortgage rates were even higher than they are now: Needless to say, the stock market was soaring as it is today.