What is he, three? Philip Bump did a nice rundown of the “tortured” right wing rationalizations over Trumps criminal behavior. (gift link)If you don’t watch Fox you will be surprised at just how stupid it really is: If last week is any guide, somewhere north of 2 million people tuned in to Jesse Watters’s prime-time show on Fox News on Monday night to hear him moan that Donald Trump was being tortured. That the treatment the former president was experiencing during his criminal trial in New York was equivalent to — or perhaps worse than? — that experienced by at Guantánamo Bay. “Donald Trump, been on the move his whole life,” Watters told viewers after describing the purported leniency Democrats had offered those detainees. “Golf. Rallies. Movement. Action. Sunlight. Fresh air. Freedom. This isn’t lawfare. It’s torture.” He played a clip of a podcast hosted by Trump’s former attorney Michael Cohen — expected to testify against Trump in the Manhattan hush money case — and whimpered about how unfair it was.
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Not bloody likely… Walter Shapiro in TNR runs down all the consequences we’ve seen so far from the Supreme Court decision to reverse Roe vs Wade and the political problem it’s caused for Republicans: Even a huckster with Trump’s disdain for the truth cannot spin away the fact that Republicans are on the unpopular side of the abortion debate. Fifty-nine percent of voters in a Fox News poll in late March said that abortion should be legal in all or most cases. And a Wall Street Journal poll in mid-March found that a stunning 39 percent of suburban women in swing states consider abortion to be their most important voting issue in 2024. It wasn’t supposed to be like this for Republicans. In the spring and early summer of 2022, as the Alito draft became the official opinion of the Supreme Court in the Dobbs case, the prevailing GOP view of the political aftereffects of the decision was, in effect, “It will all blow over.” No Republican predicted that abortion would still be a powerful weapon for the Democrats in 2024 and beyond.
Tennessee public education advocates chalk up a win Efforts to defund Tennessee’s public schools crashed and burned on Monday after weekend negotiations failed to advance Gov. Bill Lee’s universal voucher bill. The bill will be dead (for now) once the legislature adjourns for the year. Lee plans to bring it back next session. The Tennessean: “I am extremely disappointed for the families who will have to wait yet another year for the freedom to choose the right education for their child, especially when there is broad agreement that now is the time to bring universal school choice to Tennessee,” Lee said in an early Monday statement. “While we made tremendous progress, unfortunately it has become clear that there is not a pathway for the bill during this legislative session.” “Freedom to choose”? Remember when conservatives pitched vouchers as a way to help poor, minority kids escape “decaying” inner-city public schools, lives of poverty, drugs, etc. ? Nowadays they’ve dropped the facade.
For those who celebrate Four years ago today. How could I forget? The Biden-Harris campaign makes sure no one will forget Dr. Trump’s Magic Elixir. Matthew Yglesias: Happy Disinfectant Injection Day to those who celebrate. Raw Story’s Sarah Burris: Happy Stick a Light Up Your Ass Day and Bleach Injection Day to all who celebrate. Brian Beutler: Happy bleach injection day to all who celebrate. Be sure to re-Tweet, re-Thread, etc., and generally pile on every chance you get today. Also four years ago today: Donald Trump, “extraordinarily resilient” Man of Action, is unable to celebrate today. He is stuck in a courtroom having his brain and his body drained. Of bleach? Who? This reincarnation of rough-riding Teddy Roosevelt? This manly man with the constitution of a rhinoceros? This Adonis, this Übermensch with a Rocky Balboa physique of who can’t stand the sight of blood or walk 18 holes? What have “they” done to you? ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● For The Win, 5th Edition is ready for download. Request a copy of my free countywide GOTV planning guide at ForTheWin.us.
If Trump wasn’t acting like an asshole every single day, it might not be this way. Maintaining some dignity in this situation would go a long way. Instead, look at what he did today after the gag order hearing — right in the courthouse: That was after this happened: He’s making a fool out of his lawyer and degrading the justice system like a juvenile delinquent. And it’s a wonder that people who are watching all this think it might not be a good idea to put him back in the White House?
According to MSNBC’s Lisa Rubin: During a sidebar about the relevance of Steve Bannon’s requests of Pecker, Steinglass admitted that New York Election Law 17-152, which prohibits conspiracies to promote a candidate’s election through unlawful means, is their “primary” predicate. It appears that this is the theory the Manhattan DA has settled on. Of course it was a conspiracy. It was composed of three people and two of the members of the conspiracy have either pleaded guilty or have immunity and are testifying against the third: Donald Trump. The question all comes down to whether or not the jury believes them — and the mountain of paperwork that backs them up.
I’m not so sure Robert Kutner thinks JD Vance is the only guy who can keep the MAGA/corporate coalition going after Trump. He writes: WITH THE PUBLICATION IN 2016 of his best-selling book Hillbilly Elegy, Vance marketed himself as a self-made man who had risen above his troubled origins. For Vance, poverty was all about self-defeating values. In my review of his book in the Prospect, I described Vance as Charles Murray with a shit-eating grin. As I wrote: Hillbilly Elegy turns out to be a very sly piece of work that professes to express great nostalgia and compassion for the hillbilly way of life. (“Americans call them hillbillies, rednecks, or white trash. I call them neighbors, friends, and family.”) But Vance is on the trail of a bait and switch. Despite the down-home charm, he ends up sounding condescending to his neighbors and kin. Vance not only excelled at Yale Law; he is now at a Silicon Valley hedge fund. And, according to Vance, you could be, too—if you weren’t so gol-durned lazy. If you weren’t selling your food stamps, blowing off jobs, deserting your kids, and getting stoned on Oxycontin.
The defense will try to say that Trump was just trying to keep these allegedly false accusations about his womanizing from Melania. Please. She knew who she was married to. He’s on record saying he’d be dating Ivanka if she wasn’t his daughter. He once said when asked if he would stay with Melania if she was disfigured in a car crash: “How do the breasts look?” He very famously once said: “You know, it doesn’t really matter what [the media] writes as long as you’ve got a young and beautiful piece of ass.” She herself went on Howard Stern and said that she and Donald “have incredible sex once a day, sometimes even more.” She had no trouble defending his grotesque Access Hollywood comments: So no, Trump wasn’t worried about Melania. She had a pre-nup.
He wasn’t the only one, although he appears to have been the only one who was directly conspiring with Trump. Rick Perlstein wrote about the tabloid support for Trump at the time. So did I, writing about the Drudge effect: Some years back, Washington Post reporters Mark Halperin (currently of Bloomberg News and MSNBC) and John Harris (now editor in chief of Politico) wrote a book about political journalism called “The Way to Win: Clinton, Bush, Rove and How to Take the White House in 2008.” In it, they made a famous admission about how Beltway journalism works in the digital age: Matt Drudge rules our world … With the exception of the Associated Press, there is no outlet other than the Drudge Report whose dispatches instantly can command the attention and energies of the most established newspapers and television newscasts. So many media elites check the Drudge Report consistently that a reporter is aware his bosses, his competitors, his sources, his friends on Wall Street, lobbyists, White House officials, congressional aides, cousins, and everyone who is anyone has seen it, too.
I’m not sure why this would be but it’s interesting: The latest national NBC News poll shows the third-party vote — and especially independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. — cutting deeper into former President Donald Trump’s support than President Joe Biden’s, though the movement the other candidates create is within the poll’s margin of error. Trump leads Biden by 2 percentage points in a head-to-head matchup, 46% to 44%, in the new NBC News poll Yet when the ballot is expanded to five named candidates, Biden is the one with a 2-point advantage: Biden 39%, Trump 37%, Kennedy 13%, Jill Stein 3% and Cornel West 2%. I’ve wondered how many former Trumpers are anti-vaxers who think he betrayed them with the COVID vaccine and maybe there are more than we think? It seems hard to believe. I’d think more of the Kennedy voters would be lefty anti-vaxers, and there are quite a few. But who knows? The polling right now generally is imprecise. It’s possible that Kennedy’s sabotage campaign could end up being the greater threat to Trump or maybe just a wash like Ross Perot’s was.