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Precious few, but not no principled conservatives Only a fool would predict a new Donald Trump scandal will finally collapse his support. The Trump shock troops who cover their lawns and trucks and boats and bodies in loud professions of their MAGA faith are too far gone. Trump has spent his life flouting the law using his daddy’s money, his own notoriety, and a bevy of attorneys to keep himself out of the hoosegow. It’s the habit of a lifetime of crime. Laws that apply to ordinary people are but annoying flies Trump swats away. He believes his shit doesn’t stink (contrary to reports) despite attracting swarms of prosecutorial flies. If anything does end Trump, it won’t be a bullet or another criminal indictment or an investigation into his illegally accepting $10 million in 2016 from an account tied to the Egyptian General Intelligence Service. It might be a personal insult to ordinary Americans. Like the families of fallen soldiers he’s already described as losers and suckers. Only this time, he did not issue the insult on foreign soil but at Arlington National Cemetery.

They’re banning what’s already banned As closely as I monitor these things, this one slipped by me (Center for Media and Democracy): Eight states will vote to amend their state constitutions in November to ban noncitizens from voting in elections. If these amendments pass in Idaho, Iowa, Kentucky, Missouri, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina, and Wisconsin, it will bring the total number of states with constitutions specifying only citizens are allowed to vote to 20. The little known dark money group Americans for Citizens Voting (ACV) is backing and tracking the effort. Since 2018, voters in six states have added the amendment to their state constitutions. ACV has its eyes locked on another 11 states in 2025: Arkansas, Georgia, Indiana, Kansas, Mississippi, Nebraska, New Hampshire, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, and West Virginia, according to its website. ACV has enlisted the help of the pay-to-play American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) to move a model state constitution amendment in these states and others to ban noncitizens from voting in elections.

Musk’s new “commission” looks like a go He plans to cut taxes and regulations to make life easier for his vastly wealthy friends to raze the government to the ground: Donald Trump plans to outline a suite of economic proposals in a speech here Thursday, including introducing a government efficiency commission recommended by Elon Musk, taking an even more aggressive swipe at regulations than during his first White House term and pledging to rescind certain unspent funds appropriated during the Biden administration. The commission would conduct “a complete financial and performance audit of the entire federal government” and make “recommendations for drastic reform,” the Republican former president plans to say in an appearance before the Economic Club of New York. The goal would be to identify ways to eliminate fraud and improper payments, according to portions of the speech viewed by The Wall Street Journal. An “audit” and “performance review” by the guy who just destroyed twitter for his personal entertainment. Whatever.

We wonder how it can be that Donald Trump is running even with Kamala Harris even after all we know about him and his demented performance on the stump? There are tens of millions of people who are just like him. Like Senator Ron Johnson who is a multi-millionaire. This still disorients me even after all this time. I thought it was just a fringe.

Mike Barnicle had a viral clip on Morning Joe today about the media refusing to report on Trump as he really is: Greg Sargent went deeper on this subject today, referencing Barnicle and pointing out that we are simply not seeing the kind of coverage of Trump’s obvious unfitness that we saw about Joe Biden just a couple of months ago. It’s not that nobody ever says anything about this. But it’s almost in passing, as if it’s not the central story of the campaign. We have a man who is manifestly incapable of being president and we know it. And it’s much worse than it was in 2016 because nobody was sure at the time whether it was an act. It’s not an act. The media failure this time is completely inexcusable. Sargent writes:  I’ve taken 10 prominent headlines on stand-alone stories that ran about Biden’s age before he dropped out. I’ve rewritten them (links to the originals are included) around Trump’s mental unfitness.

This is kind of depressing but it’s important. Dan Pfeiffer took a look at the gender gap and it’s a large as ever. But the younger men of Gen Z are far more likely to vote for Trump this year than they were in 2020. And it’s a problem. If the current numbers hold, Trump will win the election: In the NBC News Stay Tuned poll of Gen Z: The sample of men under 30 is too small to get a real picture of why. In focus groups of young men who previously supported Democrats but are open to voting for Trump in 2024 many cite dissatisfaction with the economy, tremendous cynicism with politics, distrust of institutions, and a sense of being left behind or undervalued by our current culture. Young men are Trump’s top target in this race. That’s why his convention featured a wife beating MMA fighter introducing him and he entered the stage to the tune of “it’s a man’s world.” Trump’s campaign advisers explicitly target young men — of all races.

Maaaybe…. The indictment of Russian agents bankrolling a bunch of very heavy hitting right wing “influencers” says those influencer had no idea what was going on and they all insist they were “victims” (who were being paid as much as 400k a month to make some videos.) The Daily Beast story summarizes it as well as anyone: Several right-wing American influencers described themselves as “victims” after the Justice Department accused a company they worked with of being a front for a covert Russian influence campaign. Tim Pool, Benny Johnson, and Dave Rubin all released statements Wednesday after prosecutors claimed a Tennessee-based firm—identified in multiple media reports as Tenet Media—was secretly funded and directed by Russian state media employees. The company, which lists Pool, Johnson, Rubin, and others as its “talent,” published English-language videos online with content that is “often consistent” with the Kremlin’s aim of “amplifying U.S. domestic divisions” to undermine American opposition to Russian interests like its war in Ukraine, prosecutors say.

The stock price of Trump’s media company Truth Social continues its plunge. It’s downright spectacular: Shares of former President Donald J. Trump’s social media company have fallen so much that his onetime $6 billion stake is now worth about $2 billion. The stock price of Trump Media & Technology Group, closed Wednesday at $16.98, and is down more than 74 percent from the high-water mark it hit after Trump Media’s merger in March with a publicly traded shell company. Mr. Trump is the single largest shareholder of Trump Media, the parent company of Truth Social, owning 115 million shares — a roughly 60 percent stake. The slide in the share price has accelerated over the past few weeks as the presidential campaign has heated up and Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic nominee, has narrowly overtaken Mr. Trump in most national polls. Shares of Trump Media often have risen and fallen in tandem with investor perception of how Mr. Trump is doing in the presidential race. The stock is also falling in advance of a pivotal date — the expiration of a contractual lockup that has precluded Mr.

He paid his taxes late. They threw the book at him. I fully expect that they are going to throw him in jail for doing something that millions of Americans do every year and simply pay fines and interest. But this is Hunter Biden not an ordinary American and they were planning to expose every sordid detail of his descent into addiction hell in order to embarrass him and his family, especially his father. Meanwhile, Donald Trump walks free and will likely never see the inside of a jail cell. If you think that makes sense you must be a member of the Trump cult.