For those of you who don’t want to sit through 45 minutes of this lunatic rambling, here are some morning-after highlights. Many people testify in their own defense. A normal man running for president at the same time he is being tried for 34 felonies would almost certainly want to do it in order to prove his innocence. No, that’s not required in a court of law but you’d think someone in his situation would have felt it necessary to do that if nothing else to appear fearless and strong. But he knows his people and they apparently prefer a sniveling whiner.
Uncategorized
One of DC’s most important conveyors of conventional wisdom, John Harris of Politico, says something unexpected: Yes, it’s obviously true that a 34-count felony conviction would be enough to demolish the career of any normal politician. Yes, it’s obviously true that former president Donald Trump is not a normal politician. His most devoted partisans will only become more so following Thursday’s guilty verdict. Just as they did after the Access Hollywood tape, the impeachments, the Jan. 6 riot and other examples too abundant to recount or, for many people, even to recall. But these two obvious truths tend to obscure another one. Trump simply cannot beat President Joe Biden relying solely on the votes of people who think his legal travails are a politically motivated scam, and who cheer Trump not in spite of his transgressions but because of them. Or, more specifically, because they thrill to the outrage and indignation Trump inspires among his adversaries. There are plenty of such people — enough to power this generation’s most important political movement — but still not enough to win the election.
Nate Cohn of the NY Times wrote a little piece for a NY Times newsletter today explaining that all isn’t actually lost for Joe Biden since the race is close in the northern swing states. Here’s the headline: Lol. That’s nice. He also mentions this down in the piece: Why is Mr. Biden competitive in the Northern battlegrounds? White voters and older voters. In Times/Siena polling this year, Mr. Biden is running only about a point behind how he fared among white voters in 2020. For good measure, he’s also faring a bit better than he did among voters over 65. Other polls tell a similar story. Mr. Biden’s resilience among white voters and older voters hasn’t gotten a lot of attention, but it’s very important. White voters will make up around 70 percent of the electorate in November, and their share will be even higher in the Northern battleground states that Mr. Biden will be counting on. And voters over 65 will outnumber those under 30. The piece is full of caveats and warnings so don’t expect the mainstream media to change their Biden Is Doomed narrative any time soon.
Media Matters looked at the media coverage of the Hillary Clinton “basket of deplorables” comment back in 2016 and Trump’s “vermin” comment this year. It shows that they only learned that they shouldn’t treat Trump as badly as they treated Clinton. Great. Trump benefits from the fact that he says so many disgusting, reprehensible things that the media no longer sees it as newsworthy. That is perverse.
Newsmax host Todd Starnes wants Trump to make a run for the border: Here’s Trump sputtering today: Maybe his lawyers didn’t tell him that they had he ability to call witnesses too? The jury asked for Pecker testimony to be read back to them today. The consensus among the legal beagles is that the prosecution is likely happy about that since it means they are looking at corroboration of Cohen’s testimony. We don’t know but it’s likely that Trump isn’t going to sleep well tonight.
Or too much Kool-Aid? Seeing Trump cultists break down in tears over their authoritarian master facing justice was as disconcerting as it was disheartening. While some may feel the need to mock them for their Trumpish idolatry, I feel sorry for them. Pity may indeed smite them worse than mockery. Mockery feels like oppression, and oppression reinforces faith. It is best to remember, as Jenny Cohn and even Tony Perkins pointed out, that the Trump cult attracts the fringiest of the fringe, the sort of people who in another decade might relocate to Jonestown or opt for phenobarbital mixed with apple sauce or pudding. They are loud. They get press. But they are not many. Until America’s Most Corrupted, those MAGA Republicans who’ve latched onto Trump in pursuit of personal power, succeed in burying our democracy to replace it with Gilead, we will still count votes on Election Day. Remember that. While reminding Black voters in Philadelphia what he’s done for them, President Biden reminded them what Trump would have done to them had Black Americans stormed the U.S. Capitol. Your vote still counts. Use it.
A cure for Turnout Terror On Wednesday, I pointed to a posting at The Ink calling for Democrats to tell a better story. Facts without context aren’t as “sticky” as a good story. Facts matter. College graduates, children of the Enlightenment, built their educations and their livelihoods around them. But like your SAT or GRE scores, nobody gives a damn about them later in life. What does your job experience say about you? What story does it tell? The play’s the thing that will catch the conscience of disaffected voters, writes Michael Podhorzer at Weekend Reading. A key point in Part I of his analysis: Disaffected voters cast ballots when they believe that if the other party wins, they will lose the freedoms they now take for granted – whether it’s the freedom to own an AR-15 or to have access to reproductive health services. Podhorzer addresses presidential polling showing “young voters and voters of color” moving away from Biden: That has led to what I’ll call “turnout terror,” the idea that high turnout levels in November will spell doom for Biden.
Trump’s campaign thinks he wins whether he’s found guilty or not: Donald Trump’s pollsters have been tracking the impact of his indictments throughout his first trial and, moving to get ahead of events, are arguing that regardless of the verdict in the New York hush-money case, they can spin it in his favor. In the campaign’s internal polling, two-thirds of respondents say politics played a role in his criminal indictments.That is at odds with public polling, which has found that somewhere between a plurality and a majority of Americans believe the case has been handled fairly, with a sharp partisan split. Some 60 percent of voters have said they think the charges are very or somewhat serious. Even 6 percent of Trump voters say they would be less likely to back him if convicted. But the Trump campaign’s interpretation of its own polling suggests what its strategy might be for dealing with a guilty verdict. Trump’s advisers and allies say the public, which has largely tuned out the trial, may have already factored the possibility of a conviction into how it sees Trump.
I’ve been belatedly listening to the Rachel Maddow podcast “Ultra” which is about a far right, Nazi-sympathizing, authoritarian plot to overthrow the FDR administration during the late 30s and early 40s. I knew about the German Bund, of course, and I’ve written about the big Nazi rally at Madison Square Garden. But I confess I was not aware of the massive investigation and trial to put Nazi spies and collaborators on trial. The echoes of today are overwhelming which is why Maddow dug into the story, I assume. (She never mentions it in the podcast, though, which is very effective.) Being in that mindset, I guess it’s not surprising that I love the lede of this piece in The New Republic: In his book In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler’s Berlin, Erik Larson cites a cable sent to the State Department in June 1933 by a U.S. diplomat posted in Germany that provided a far more candid assessment of the Nazi leadership than the one that President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s administration was then conveying to the public.
One of the most popular and entertaining feeds on twitter is one called “NY Times Pitchbot” which has even been name checked by President Biden. It mocks the NY Times, obviously, usually for its “both sides” tendencies. But it’s getting harder and harder to mock them. Here’s Kevin Drum on one recent egregiously misleading headline: This is one of the more cowardly headlines I’ve read in a while: Emerging Portrait of Judge in Trump Documents Case: Prepared, Prickly and Slow If you read the actual piece, it contains one (1) example of judge Aileen Cannon being prepared—set against half a dozen where she was confused or mistaken. But the main thing the story makes clear is that practically everything Cannon does is to Donald Trump’s benefit. The headline says nothing about this. A more accurate hed would have been, “Inexperienced, Slow, and Always On Trump’s Side.” Why run the article at all if you’re going to bury it under an innocuous and misleading headline? That’s just one example. I’ve highlighted quite a few in the last few weeks as well.