This is an excellent explainer of Trump’s 2024 agenda and it’s on TikTok, which makes me happy to see. This stuff has to blanket every corner of social media, repeatedly, if it’s going to penetrate. This from the BBC might be more appropriate for your cynical/apathetic grown-ups: They see us… When I asked the European ambassador to talk to me about America’s deepening partisan divide, I expected a polite brushoff at best. Foreign diplomats are usually loath to discuss domestic U.S. politics. Instead, the ambassador unloaded for an hour, warning that America’s poisonous politics are hurting its security, its economy, its friends and its standing as a pillar of democracy and global stability. The U.S. is a “fat buffalo trying to take a nap” as hungry wolves approach, the envoy mused. “I can hear those Champagne bottle corks popping in Moscow — like it’s Christmas every fucking day.” As voters cast ballots in the Iowa caucuses Monday, many in the United States see this year’s presidential election as a test of American democracy.
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“The only thing we’re not doing is shooting people” “The only thing we’re not doing is shooting people who come across the border, because of course the Biden Administration would charge us with murder,” Texas Gov. Greg Abbott told Dana Loesch last week. But Texas will let them drown. We’ll come back to that. “The cruelty is the point,” Texas resident Adam Serwer famously wrote. Cruelty is also the policy. Don’t say you weren’t warned or missed the signals. There is already ash settling on your windowsills. First, this reminder: “The leading GOP presidential contender is using an admitted hit man and lifelong criminal as a character reference. Take a second to reflect on that.” — Luis Moreno, former U.S. Ambassador, retired Foreign Service Officer. In case you missed it on Saturday, Donald Trump jumped the loan shark. Trump is not flying solo either (CBS): A woman and two children drowned in the Rio Grande on Friday while trying to enter the U.S.
Your polls will blow Don’s mind Donald Trump will take this personally. NBC News: DES MOINES, Iowa — Most likely Republican Iowa caucusgoers say they’ll vote for former President Donald Trump in the general election if he’s the GOP nominee, regardless of the candidate they’re supporting on caucus night. That is, except supporters of former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley, with nearly half of them — 43% — saying they’d vote for Democratic President Joe Biden over Trump. These new findings from the latest NBC News/Des Moines Register/Mediacom poll of Iowa further illustrate the degree to which Haley is bringing in support from independents, Democrats and Republicans who have been uneasy with Trump’s takeover of the GOP. Fully half of her Iowa caucus supporters are independents or crossover Democrats, according to the survey results. Overall, Haley took 20% for second place in the survey, compared to 48% for Trump. The poll also shows three-quarters of caucusgoers believing Trump can defeat Biden despite the former president’s legal challenges.
Sanity? Will it last? Following up on Tom’s post below about the Haley-Biden voters, check this out from Greg Sargent who is now at the New Republic: Last month, Trump said of the hundreds of people charged or convicted in relation to January 6, “I don’t call them prisoners. I call them hostages.” Then on Meet the Press last Sunday, Stefanik brashly echoed his language: “I have concerns about the treatment of January 6 hostages.” The way vulnerable Republicans ran from this is telling. “They’re criminal defendants, not hostages,” said Representative Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania.
Take this little tidbit for example from the new NBC-Des Moines Register poll: In case you didn’t watch the whole thing, he reveals that a quarter of voters told the pollster that they would vote for Joe Biden over Donald Trump in the general election. Wow. Meanwhile, the new CBS poll shows this: Republican voters continue to believe Trump is their best bet to beat Joe Biden in November, even as Nikki Haley leads Joe Biden by a wider margin in a general election match-up than either Trump or Ron DeSantis. We show why in this analysis. They are wrong. Trump is less likely to beat Biden. There are other ideas and statements from the frontrunner that have brought criticism from Trump’s political opponents. On immigrants: One of those is his use of the phrase “poisoning the blood of the country” when describing immigrants who enter the U.S. illegally. While most voters overall disagree with this language, eight in 10 Republican primary voters say they agree with it — and that includes majorities of both MAGA voters (97%) and non-MAGA voters (65%) in the GOP electorate.
They lose even when they cheat The Prince William County Office of Elections in northern Virginia has confessed to an underreporting error in the 2020 presidential election results on Thursday, January 11. The error resulted in a margin of victory for President Joe Biden over Donald Trump that was 4,000 votes lower than reported. This admission comes after the discovery of discrepancies in vote counts as part of a criminal case in 2022. Eric Olsen, the current registrar of the county, has clarified that the errors did not significantly impact the outcome of any race, according to WTOP News. Although the counts were also off for the US Senate and US House of Representatives races, the discrepancies in these cases were less significant. Mistakes do happen and that’s probably all this was. But imagine if the discrepancy had favored Biden. It would be screaming headlines on right wing media. Trump would never shut up about it.
Trump keeps saying that trying to overturn a legal election and obstruct the peaceful transfer of power was part of his official duties as president. But that’s not what his lawyers said after the election as you can see by that Supreme Court filing above. Politico reports that he’s now saying that the election was “long over” and he was acting in his capacity as president: In the months after the 2020 election, Donald Trump leaned on his campaign to launch ad blitzes and legal challenges to the results, insisting to his supporters that the election was “ a long way from over.” He even told state and federal courts he was suing in his capacity as a political candidate. Now, in a bid to derail criminal charges, he’s saying the opposite. At least six times in the past two weeks, Trump has declared that the election was “ long over” by the time he began pushing state officials and then-Vice President Mike Pence to overturn his defeat.
Making it into an art form “When you want to take their books away, they’re children. When you want them to work, they’re adults,” said r/LateStageCapitalism (A One-Stop-Shop for Evidence of our Social, Moral and Ideological Rot) on reddit in reference to a proposed Florida bill. Actually, the two statements dovetail. Royalists want their lessers to serve the economy and not know enough to question it. In the name of freedom, they want to take yours. If you missed my post earlier this week on the nationwide Republican/corporate effort to roll back child labor laws, find it here.
In case you were wondering if there was anyone whose endorsement Trump would not eagerly embrace, think again
He would say he’s the first I posted that a while back. But apparently it isn’t actually landing well with some evangelicals. Imagine that … Since the video was posted, it has been widely shared, racked up millions of views and drawn a lot of attention. But much of that attention has been negative, particularly among Iowa’s pastors, some of whom said they were shocked and offended by the content. “It was very concerning,” said Pastor Joseph Brown of the Marion Avenue Baptist Church in Washington, Iowa, a town of 7,500 people about 40 minutes south of Iowa City. He took issue, he said, with how it used language plucked from the Bible — such as describing Mr. Trump’s arms as “strong” yet “gentle” — to compare Mr. Trump directly to God, rather than a servant of a higher power. “The original sin of Satan or Lucifer is not that he wanted to take over God’s position but that he wanted to be like God. There is only one god, and it’s not Trump or any other man,” said Mr. Brown, who voted for Mr. Trump in 2016 and 2020 but says he will not this year.