Ed Kilgore takes a look at the inconceivable result in the Times/Sienna poll showing that huge numbers of people remember the Donald Trump years as glory days for America. [W]hen the New York Times–Siena polling outfit asked voters “to describe the one thing they remembered most from Donald J. Trump’s presidency, only 5 percent of respondents referred to Jan. 6, and only 4 percent to COVID.” 39 percent cited “Trump’s behavior” as most memorable, and another 24 percent named “the economy.” Aside from the radical shrinkage of COVID and January 6 in the rearview mirror, what’s remarkable about this reaction is that it had little to do with what we normally think of as specific events, much less issue positions.
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Those are responses to what Trump has been saying about the judge in his NY criminal trial: On a recent Tuesday morning, a visibly frustrated Donald Trump sat through a tense hearing in the first-ever criminal trial of a former American president. During a break, he let rip on his social media platform. New York Justice Juan Merchan, Trump declared on Truth Social, is a “highly conflicted” overseer of a “kangaroo court.” Trump supporters swiftly replied to his post with a blitz of attacks on Merchan. The comments soon turned ugly. Some called for Merchan and other judges hearing cases against Trump to be killed. […] The April 23 post by Trump and the menacing responses from his followers illustrate the incendiary impact of his angry and incessant broadsides against the judges handling the criminal and civil suits against him. As his presidential campaign intensifies, Trump has baselessly cast the judges and prosecutors in his trials as corrupt puppets of the Biden administration, bent on torpedoing his White House bid. […] The rhetoric is inspiring widespread calls for violence.
His parochial obsessions are going to get us all killed There has been some serious push back on social media to the belief that MAGA peacenik Donald Trump could start WWIII from both the right and the left. Apparently, Joe Biden is a violent warmonger for providing material support to America’s traditional allies while Donald Trump is a dove because he only oversaw a war with American troops on the ground in Afghanistan and ramped up the drone war to unprecedented heights throughout the world. But whatever. Facts aren’t really relevant at the moment. We’re all about feelings and vibes and because Trump has indoctrinated massive numbers of Americans with the lie that the whole world respected and feared him so much that they all bowed down to him and we have world peace for the first time in history. And yes, a number of lefties are similarly deluded about Trump because they haven’t closely observed what he is or what he has planned. Here’s one little example: If Donald Trump wins a second term in the White House in November, NATO may fall apart, a recent wargame found.
Resisting the right’s fit of pique I’m trying not to repeat the mistakes of 2016. I really am. There was no way the country was crazy enough to elect Donald Trump president, I told myself. “He’s mentally unstable,” I told my parents one night while visiting for dinner. One well-heeled Bernie Sanders supporter, unnerved by Trump signs sprouting like weeds out in the county, printed and fabricated his own quarter-sized Clinton signs by the thousands in response. They went like the proverbial hotcakes. Then I spent the afternoon of Election Day 2016 greeting voters outside a nearby polling station standing a few feet away from Talks To The Sky. You know what happened later. This fall, she might be proudly wearing adult diapers outside her pants in solidarity with her king. Sadly, Americans are crazy enough to elect Donald “88 Counts,”professional huckster. They proved that once already. They left him in charge ahead of a global pandemic and got American carnage and the sacking of the U.S. Capitol.
You are one-fifth of a person to Donald Trump Donald Trump “fixer” Michael Cohen is trestifying this morning in Trump’s Manhattan criminal trial. He’s begun by explaining how Trump would would instruct him to pay creditors twenty cents on the dollar. Take it or get nothing. Even for struggling small, family businesses. Screw you. Anna Bower (Lawfare correspondent) tweets (thread): Before Cohen moved over to Trump Org, Cohen presented Trump with a bill for 100K, which Trump owed for work Cohen’s firm did on a real estate transaction. Trump told Cohen to come work for Trump Org, and Cohen agreed. Later, when Cohen mentioned the bill owed to his law firm, Trump said “Do you want to get fired on your first day?” The bill never got paid, Cohen says. Cohen said that he always reported directly to Trump. There were times when he asked Cohen to negotiate payments or bills. He provides an example: Trump University ran into trouble, and there were vendors who were unpaid. Cohen contacted the vendors, negotiated a reduction in what was owed. Mens rea on two legs Trump did not use email.
It’s not going to be pretty The mainstream press has finally turned its focus to what a second Donald Trump administration will look like should he win the White House in 2024. Salon has been covering this since Trump first flew off to Mar-a-Lago in 2021 and it was obvious that unless something happened to his health, Trump would be the 2024 nominee and the rest of the GOP would be developing a multi-faceted program to grant themselves unlimited power. None of this was anything but predictable once we saw what they were capable of during the post election period of 2020 and the events of January 6th. The mainstream media has caught up and over the past few months has produced in-depth features and front page articles on the new MAGAfied Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, Schedule F, Agenda 47 and the details within all of those and other plans which reveal an authoritarian, anti-democratic crackdown on Americans’ rights and a full rollback of safety regulations and vital programs. The proposals for foreign policy and national security are even more horrifying.
This obviously coordinated “mental anguish” and “torture” line seems like a double edged sword to me. Plenty of Americans have been involved with the legal system and those who haven’t have seen trials, both real and fictional, portrayed on television for years. They’ve even been exposed to the Manhattan courts in the “Law and Order” series for decades. They know what this process looks like. Saying Trump, the alleged alpha male, is being tortured by having to endure it isn’t exactly a compliment. If it’s true then someone needs to tell Trump to man up. His surrogates are making him sound like a wimp. But if the shoe fits… Oh, and by the way, Tuberville going after the jury is really something. That guy is brain damaged — and evil.
Nothing can shake them Here was Trump’s economy in 2020. Massive unemployment, food lines, tens of thousands of deaths with no end in sight. He only cares about himself. And they love him for it. They love him so, so much Michael Tomasky took a look at this issue today and it’s mind-boggling: Politico and Morning Consult asked respondents a series of questions about all the major economic legislation Biden has signed. Majorities know little or nothing at all about the infrastructure bill, the CHIPS act, the American Rescue Plan, and the Inflation Reduction Act. And get this: While 40 percent said Biden has done more than Trump on infrastructure, 37 percent said Trump had done more. In January, NBC found that Trump has a 22-point advantage over Biden on the question of whom voters trust more with the economy—up 15 points from the same poll in 2020. How can this possibly be? Fine, we know that most people pay scant attention to politics. But even scant attention should produce some knowledge.
A love story? That’s doubtful In court today, Michael Cohen testified: He also said that it was Melania who came up with the “it was locker room talk” talking point after the Access Hollywood tape. Yeah, it’s a real love story. Get a load of this bs from the NY Times: Donald Trump sat silent, stone-faced and staring straight ahead as he listened to the intimate details in Stormy Daniels’s testimony on Tuesday, closing his eyes at times in an apparent attempt to maintain his composure. But there was one moment when he lost it — when Ms. Daniels recounted asking Mr. Trump about his wife, Melania Trump, and recalled that he told her they didn’t “even sleep in the same room.” From the defense table Mr. Trump shook his head in disgust and muttered “bullshit” loud enough that he drew a rebuke from the judge, who called his actions “contemptuous.” Mr. Trump has a great deal of experience sending a specific message to his intended audience — whether on television, at rallies, through social media or in the Oval Office. His intended audience, on Tuesday and throughout the trial, is the jury.
The new NY Times’Sienna poll (gift link) has the entire political world besides themselves with excitement because it shows Trump winning in Arizona, Nevada and Georgia. (The other swing states are essentially tied.) Maybe it’s right and Biden is fucked in the sunbelt and the south. Other polls aren’t showing this but as we all know the only poll that seems to matter to the cognoscenti is this one and it therefore influences the narrative that Biden is toast. In reality, almost all the polls are showing the race tightening with Biden gaining ground. Simon Rosenberg also keeps pointing out that their poll and some of the others continue to poll registered voters rather than likely voters (people who have voted in the past) which are showing, in these current snapshots, Biden winning narrowly. Maybe all these new voters are champing at the bit to come out and vote but I have to say I’d find that surprising. 2020 had a gigantic turnout, mostly because everyone was still in the throes of the pandemic and paying attention to politics. I’m not sure that’s true today.