Trump keeps saying he’ll be a dictator for one day so that he can close the border and “drill, drill, drill” which, as Philip Bump points out in the Washington Post, he came up with on the fly during a Sean Hannity interview. Apparently the cult just loves it: On Wednesday, UMass Amherst released the results of a poll conducted by YouGov in which respondents were asked about the concept. The framing of the comment was stark, excluding Trump’s specific plans for using his theoretical dictatorial power. It was just, “Trump recently said that if elected, he would be a dictator only on the first day of his second term. Do you think that this is a good or bad idea for the country?” A plurality of respondents said this was “definitely bad” with 6 in 10 saying it was “definitely” or “probably” bad. Among Republicans, though, a third said it was “definitely good” with three-quarters saying it was at least “probably” good.
Uncategorized
I know you recall that time he was at the CDC and said that he could have been a scientist because he “really understands that stuff” and “they all said so.” Get a load of this one from a few years back: He also aced the cognitive test you know. Better than anyone. All the doctors say so.
Republicans want their new weapon With the 2022 Dobbs decision abolishing womens’s federal right to an abortion, Republicans lost a campaign issue they’d campaigned on reliably for decades. It was like the Pentagon’s identity crisis after the Cold War ended. The Pentagon spent the 1990s not knowing who it should be planning to fight. Republicans have failed again and again since 2022 to block abortion protection amendments in the states, even as fringe right legislators all but lock women with doomed pregnancies into iron maidens as they bleed out. Abortion is on its way to being a third rail in Republican politics. The issue is now a political loser. To replace abortion, the GOP settled on Great Replacement theory, an isotopic variant of the Southern Strategy. Republicans stoke fears of brown-skinned hordes of immigrants pouring across the U.S. southern border to knock white Americans off the top of the social ladder. It’s not about race as much as power and status. Race is just the icing. Speaking with Sen.
If you want analysis of today’s Supreme Court arguments in the Colorado Ballot case, just turn on any cable news show and you’ll get a snoot-full. They all pretty much come to the same conclusion: Trump will win this one, the only question is whether it will be unanimous or near unanimous. The justices were all “skeptical” apparently. Here’s Ian Millhiser at Vox which I think represents the overall view. But he makes the case that Trump’s lawyer was absolutely terrible and it won’t make any difference: Two things were obvious Thursday morning in the Supreme Court, where the justices pondered whether former President Donald Trump is disqualified from seeking the presidency because of his role in inciting the January 6 insurrection at the US Capitol. One is that Jonathan Mitchell, the lawyer representing Trump, was in way over his head. During Mitchell’s time at the podium, the justices took turns ripping apart his arguments — or even criticizing him for abandoning stronger legal arguments in favor of weaker ones.
You won’t regret it
Where were you when? It’s tiresome by now, these “where were you when” events. The JFK assassination (or MLK’s or RFK’s) or the first moon landing or the Challenger disaster or September 11 were days you never forgot. Nowadays it’s U.S. Supreme Court decisions like Dobbs. If you are reading this between 10 a.m. and noonish EST, you may be missing today’s “where were you when” event at the U.S. Supreme Court (Washington Post): The Supreme Court on Thursday will confront the critical question of Donald Trump’s eligibility to return to the White House, hearing arguments in an unprecedented case that gives the justices a central role in charting the course of a presidential election for the first time in nearly a quarter-century. The justices will decide whetherColorado’s top court was correctto apply a post-Civil War provisionof the Constitution to order Trump off the ballot after concluding his actions around the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol amounted to insurrection.Primary voting is already underway in some states.
Some psycho busy-body might decide she needs to have her genitals checked. This makes me see red. And it’s all in the name of “protecting” girls: A Utah high school student needs police protection after a state school board member publicly singled out and suggested the student was transgender — without evidence — inciting threats from her followers on social media. Natalie Cline later apologized — but not before many commenters personally attacked the player, the student’s school district had to provide extra security for her,and the lawmaker who wrote the state’s anti-transgender athlete bill weighed in sharing private information possibly in violation of her own measure. The latest post from Cline, who has repeatedly come under fire for her controversial posts, came late Tuesday, setting off 16 hours of hateful speculation that continued even after she deleted it Wednesday afternoon. It also prompted a strong statement from Utah Gov. Spencer Cox and Lt. Gov. Deidre Henderson condemning Cline’s “unconscionable behavior” and calling for the school board to take action against her.
The WaPo’s Jeff Stein: Due largely to an unexpected surge in immigration, the U.S. economy will be about $7 trillion larger – & federal revenues about $1T bigger – the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office said Wednesday That impact is over 10 years, to be clear. It does not take into account any legislation that Congress may or may not approve Here’s the CBO statement cbo.gov/publication/59… CBO Director Phillip Swagel: “More workers means more output, and that in turn leads to additional tax revenue” Who knew that immigrants during full employment would be so good for the country? Why, these people are paying taxes and everything! I’m sure you have noticed that none of the objections to “the invasion” include the usual lament of “they’re stealing out jobs!” because even they know how fatuous that is in this situation. They have exposed their true reason: they aren’t white. The anti-immigrant fervor is all about allowing people who don’t look like them to come into the country and put taco trucks on every corner. This is what they hate. And it’s obvious.
Trump must destabilize the electoral system wherever possible in order to keep his fragile psyche from breaking. Trump pretty much has the nomination all wrapped up but he is still obsessing over Nikki Haley and he’s busily trying to rig an irrelevant primary even though he really doesn’t have to: Donald Trump has spent much of the past week fixated, of all places, on Indiana, accusing elections officials here of conspiring against him to help his rival, Nikki Haley, in a Republican presidential primary that won’t take place until May. The complaints are baseless, elections officials say. Worse, they and Trump’s opponents warn, with the former president raising alarms even in a state like deep-red Indiana, they look like a test run by Trump and his allies to undermine confidence in the election in November. “Trump is reinforcing a narrative where the only acceptable outcome is his victory, thus preemptively delegitimizing any electoral defeat,” said Joshua Claybourn, a Republican attorney from Evansville and former GOP delegate from the state.
On Tuesday night, after a long day of very important legal developments for Donald Trump, the former president posted on his Truth Social feed ” ALL A PRESIDENT HAS TO DO IS SAY, “CLOSE THE BORDER” AND THE BORDER WILL BE CLOSED. A COSTLY NEW BILL IS NOT NECESSARY!” This was in response to the total collapse of the Senate border bill which had been painstakingly negotiated of over the last couple of months to meet the demands of the GOP which said they would not advance any funding for Ukraine, Israel or Gaza humanitarian aid unless immigration laws were changed to their specification. President Biden and the Democrats called their bluff. They agreed to a set of cruel changes to the law and massive new funding for the border and the Republicans blinked, saying they now want to wait until the election to fix what they previously characterized as an existential crisis. All Trump and his MAGA sycophants are left with is this bizarre refrain that a president has magical powers to close the border and refuses to use it. It never had much of a chance to begin with.