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This is ridiculous. Even Napoleon didn’t go this far. But then, consider this by Jonathan Martin, one of the foremost purveyors of Village 2.0 conventional wisdom in which he reveals that up until now, just everybody has assumed that Trump has a lock on the White House. It has long appeared to me that the beltway press has felt that way and it’s nice to know that my perceptions weren’t wrong. But I honestly did know about the rest of this: It has been close to an open secret in the diplomatic corps that America’s allies and adversaries are anticipating a Trump restoration. Discussing who will fill his second-term Cabinet and White House isn’t just the stuff of parlor games in embassies and overseas capitals — it has taken on a what-will-we-do urgency since Trump sealed the GOP nomination last month. It is one thing for Hungarian President Viktor Orban, the contrarian and would-be authoritarian troll of the continent, to descend on Mar-a-Lago for an ersatz state visit.

Trump is under a gag order which says that he’s not allowed to publicly attack witnesses in his upcoming trial. Mark Pomerantz and Michael Cohen are both witnesses. Will anything come of it? Probably not. He seems to have achieved immunity from judge’s orders. He’s still letting fly. This article by Politico’s legal editorJames Romoser discusses just how unusual that is: A firebrand politician named Donald is about to stand trial. Just a few days before jury selection, he goes on TV to slam the charges as baseless and biased. “The FBI and the Justice Department,” he insists, have “targeted” their political opponents in a burst of partisan persecution. The rhetoric sounds familiar, but this is not a story about Donald Trump. It’s about a man named Don Hill, a former Dallas City Council member who was facing bribery charges 15 years ago. The telltale clue that this isn’t about Trump is what happened next: The judge, upset by the attempt to taint the jury pool, slapped the politician-turned-defendant with criminal contempt and ultimately sentenced him to 30 days in jail for violating a gag order.

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V.P. Kamala Harris goes on the attack “Overturning Roe was just the opening act of a larger strategy to take womens’ rights and freddoms,” Vice President Kamala Harris told supporters in Arizona on Friday. Arizona is challenging other swing states for the designation of “Ground Zero” in the 2024 presidential race. The Arizona Supreme Court’s reanimating the territory’s 1864 abortion ban this week drew Vice President Kamala Harris to the state on Friday. She brought the heat and she named names. Well, just one (CNN): Vice President Kamala Harris on Friday placed the blame squarely on Donald Trump as she went on the offensive over abortion rights in Arizona and across the country. In the wake of an Arizona Supreme Court ruling this week banning abortions in almost all cases, Harris headed to Arizona to mobilize voters who see November’s election as a referendum on women’s rights, one of the Biden campaign’s key issues in the upcoming election. The vice president has become a go-to voice for the campaign on abortion rights and quickly announced a trip to Tucson after Tuesday’s ruling.

We finally got the latest all-important NY Times poll which shows that Biden has gained 4 points in the last 6 weeks or so and is now virtually tied with Trump. This follows most of the other polling over the past few weeks showing that Biden’s numbers have moved up. The article accompanying is predictably dour, suggesting that everyone hates him anyway and that underneath it all Trump is really much more popular (which is untrue) but that’s how the NY Times polling rolls these days. The fact is that Biden is steadily turning the ship around and Democrats are coming back on board. If the race were held today it would be a a nail biter and it very likely will be the same in November because half the country is in a cult-like trance and believes that Donald Trump is either Jesus Christ or a business genius who will make them all rich and the rest of us are terrified that this fascist cult leader will edge out another win. I don’t know if there’s any way to change that.

A real man of the people If you enjoyed the 2008 financial system crash you’re going to love a second Trump term: A second Trump White House would seek to sharply reduce the power of U.S. financial regulators, according to a review of public documents and interviews with people allied with the former president. In the wake of the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, Congress dramatically expanded the U.S. government’s oversight of the financial industry to prevent a repeat of the 2008 global banking meltdown. Donald Trump would likely renew his efforts to scale back those reforms, if elected, as well as pare protections for small-scale investors and borrowers, and allow companies to raise money with less scrutiny, according to the interviews and proposals from groups positioned to influence a new conservative administration. Reuters spoke with, among others, about a dozen people who have provided advice or been consulted by Trump or his allies.

Polling shows that people are taking his crimes seriously His middle of the night tantrums are getting worse and I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s because his campaign has polled this too: A majority of U.S. voters consider the criminal charges in New York related to a hush money payment against former President Trump to be serious, per new polling. Trump is days away from the start of the first trial out of the four criminal cases against him, while electioneering for the presidency. The New York trial, set to start on April 15 with jury selection, concerns a 2016 payment allegedly made to adult film actress Stormy Daniels. About 4 in 10 Republican respondents considered the hush money charges to be serious. Two-thirds of independents also deemed the charges serious.  64% of registered voters described the charges as at least “somewhat serious,” according to Reuters/Ipsos poll data published Wednesday. 34% said the charges lacked seriousness. The rest were unsure or didn’t answer.

Same old, same old ain’t working “If you smell what the Rock is cooking,” so to speak, it’s long been clear that MAGAstan is more about posturing than policy. It’s about Trumpish attitude aided and abetted by his fans’ poor short-term memory. Donald Trump can say one thing on Monday and the opposite on Friday and fans couldn’t care less. Just as long as whatever he says is delivered loudly and proudly with the same shameless, in-your-face insincerity. Wrestling fans eat that shit up. They pay good money for it week after week. It’s not Sondheim or Shakespeare, but it’s theater. Digby yesterday mentioned the “stale sameness” of the Trump rally and “the weird hypnotic nature of his speeches.” But it’s that sameness that mesmerizes, like endless Grateful Dead improvs, like the old Latin mass and Gregorian chants. People can lose themselves for a while in the rhythms and harmonies before returning to the real world. The attraction of sameness, of pithy catchphrases, of the anticipation of the all-too-familiar you know is coming, is something the left, with its demand for novelty, has never appreciated.

Boo-hoo-hoo There has been something of a brouhaha this past week over a new book by Paul Waldman and Thomas Schaller called White Rural Rage. Evidently some political science scholars in the field felt that it was unfair to the rural voters by characterizing them as feeling rage instead of righteous anger. We urban types are mean as always and need to be more understanding of some people’s racism, xenophobia, misogyny and fetishistic Trump worship because well … they’re unhappy. Waldman and Schaller responded. Here are some extended excerpts. You can read the whole thing here and you should. When we wrote White Rural Rage, we knew that our provocative argument and book title would arouse ire on the far right. We were not disappointed. But we have been surprised by the ferocity of the criticism we have received from scholars of rural politics. Their response has made clear that there are unspoken rules about criticizing certain Americans—rules that get to the heart of the very case we have tried to make about the deep geographic divisions in our politics at this fragile moment in our nation’s history. Pillorying Donald Trump is fine.