He’ll come for “the good ones” next At last night’s S. Carolina town hall, Trump was asked what the actual plan was for the rounding up of immigrants: Here’s one of his lackeys today: The Washington Post reports today: Faced with a surge of migrant families at the U.S.-Mexico border in 2018 and 2019, Donald Trump’s White House discussed ways to more aggressively deploy the resources and the might of the U.S. military. Aides and officials spoke privately about detaining migrants on military bases and flying them out of the country on military planes — ideas that the Pentagon headed off. Throughout his presidency, Trump himself would frequently demand to send troops to the border and catch people crossing. “He was obsessed with having the military involved,” said a former senior administration official, who, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private discussions. That approach and unfinished business have taken on renewed significance and urgency as the country confronts another migrant crisis on the U.S.-Mexico border, and as Trump closes in on the Republican presidential nomination.
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I agree with Josh Marshall on this. The brouhaha over Ezra Klein’s article agitating for Biden to drop out at this late date has been overwhelming and it’s not helpful. The idea of choosing a new candidate at the conventions is downright fanciful. Not gonna happen. I like Ezra. We are friendly acquaintances and he’s done a ton of good work so I’m not inclined to slag him. But he’s wrong about this and Josh Marshall has the best essay explaining why: A number of you have written in to ask about Ezra Klein’s audio essay “Democrats Have a Better Option Than Biden: It’s requires them to embrace an old-fashioned approach to winning a campaign.” Is it a good argument? Does it change the equation? What do I make of it? Just for the purposes of cutting to the chase: my answers are “not really,” “no” and “not much.” But Klein is a smart, articulate guy and sitting at the top of the Times op-ed page he has vast influence. So I wanted to break the argument down into its moving parts.
Biden is fine there and it’s nice to see him mingling with an average family and chatting about their lives. But what’s most interesting is the family itself — a dad raising two boys on his own, living a middle class life trying to build a future for his kids. He’s a school principal and the boys are average all-American teenagers. It just seems so … normal. I guess I need to be reminded of that sometimes. Anyway, here’s today’s Hopium from Scott Rosenberg. (There’s a lot more and you can subscribe here.) Trump is not winning the election, or favored, and analysts simply must stop claiming he is – They way our post-Dobbs electoral success and increasingly powerful grassroots is being overly discounted and Trump’s strength as a candidate is being exaggerated has begun to feel a lot like the false red wave media narrative of 2022. Take a look at these four independent polls of registered voters (not adults) released in the past week.
Will she succumb? I think we all suspect that Haley will end up endorsing Trump. But this doesn’t seem like a very smart way to make that happen. If it’s a close election, Haley’s endorsement might just be helpful. I guess they don’t think they need it.
I was hard on Stewart for his “both sides” opening show. I don’t think we need any more of that. But this? Oh yeah: Update: Here’s Mary Trump responding to Stewart’s thin skinned response to the criticism he received for last week. I think she’s got a point: I’ve been to some wonderful places in my life, but this weekend I found myself somewhere I never expected to be — living rent-free in comedian Jon Stewart’s head. Stewart was back for his second show on Comedy Central’s The Daily Show, and apparently felt the need to respond to my very real concerns over his dangerous both-sides-ism last week, when he equated President Biden and Donald. I criticized him for erroneously elevating my uncle by claiming, “We’re not suggesting neither man is vibrant, productive, or even capable.” Any honest, objective person knows this is completely false — Donald is neither productive nor capable, while, President Biden is both of those to an impressive degree.
Greed and its fallout “Where once We the People held capitalism’s leash, now we wear the collar.” It’s something I’ve repeated since taking the Hullabaloo morning shift ten years ago. “Working people know in their guts they work for the economy, not the other way around.” Joe Biden gets it. In July 2021, he spoke of ensuring “that our economy isn’t about people working for capitalism; it’s about capitalism working for people.” Unfair competition and monopolies the Roosevelts once worked to rein in have landed us in a second Gilded Age. “Forty years ago, we chose the wrong path, in my view,” Biden said, “following the misguided philosophy of people like Robert Bork, and pulled back on enforcing laws to promote competition.” People still know in their guts they are getting screwed, write Katherine J. Cramer and Jonathan D.
So much of the media seems determined to portray the Democrats as big huge losers with a constituency full of apathetic losers and it just ain’t true. Just because they aren’t staging freak show rallies with a bunch of nuts dressed like weirdos doesn’t mean people aren’t voting and voting in droves. The problem with this stuff is that they are setting up Trump to say the election was stolen next November. After all, the media has been saying that Biden is universally loathed because he’s old, that the polls have Trump winning in a landslide and that nobody in the country knows anything about what Biden has done as president because he’s … old. How can trump possibly lose? It’s impossible! This stuff might as well be an in-kind donation to fund his legal challenges in the next election.
The angry mob Atrios today: Not a member of the “David French liberal fan club” but I’ll give him credit for addressing an incredibly undercovered – and certainly ignored by political reporters – story. Of course, he has the obligatory THE LEFT IS VIOLENT TOO paragraph, so fuck that guy, forever and always, but still. Yep. I don’t think anyone should underestimate the power of the threat that Trump’s army of violent, brainwashed followers bring to the political system. Look what’s happened to James Lankford in the Senate for having the nerve to negotiate a hard right, draconian border bill that until five minutes ago would have been a Republican wet dream. Death threats, sanctions and probably a primary opponent.
Better unwoke than woke It’s one thing to watch a Terry Gilliam film. It’s another to live inside one. But the white, Christian-nationalist MAGA right wants to. And a child named Tucker will lead them. Friends circulated this Gerard Baker op-ed from Monday’s Wall Street Journal mocking Tucker Carlson’s fawning, America-hating profile of life in Russia: Why can’t we be more like Russia? The minute you see the welcoming smiles on the faces of the kindly immigration guards, all spiffy in their shiny jackboots, at Moscow’s Sheremetyevo Airport you realize that unlike our own morally louche, spiritually decrepit cesspit, run by a corrupt and brutal regime bent on destroying its opponents, Russia is a nation united around a vision of the historic greatness of its civilization. From state-of-the-art supermarket cart technology to a president who is youthful and vigorous, able to dilate on European history at length, the contrast couldn’t be greater with a technologically backward and collapsing U.S. in the grip of a geriatric autocrat who can’t remember what day it is. American capitalism is corrupt and exploitative.
As those of you who read my blog regularly know, I have long been critical of the rather self-righteous decision of the networks not to show Donald Trump in all his unhinged glory out of a misplaced sense that it somehow “costs” them to do it. No. It has resulted in way too many people forgetting just what a total nutcase he is. I know they don’t want to think about it but it’s a reality and they need to see it. This has obviously concerned the Biden campaign which has found through their own polling that people have forgotten what they hated about him and over time have come to see him as rather benign. After all, the Republicans are all still with him,how bad could he be? But they are wrong. He’s worse than he was before and they need to see that. So, that’s why the campaign has decided to highlight the crazy stuff and push it out there hard. It’s the only way to counter this insufferable obsession with Biden’s age and it’s entirely relevant. You choose: the decent, accomplished old guy or the crazy, corrupt old guy. That’s what’s on the menu.