And I’m talking about stupid weird Monmouth poll: – Just under 1 in 5 Americans believe the singer Taylor Swift is part of a covert effort to help President Joe Biden win the 2024 election. At the same time, the Monmouth (“Mon-muth”) University Poll also finds that most Americans are supportive of efforts by Swift to encourage her fans to vote. Just under half (46%) of the American public has heard something about Swift being part of a supposed covert government effort to help Biden win the 2024 presidential election. Just under 1 in 5 Americans (18%) believe such a conspiracy involving Swift exists. Fully 71% of those who believe this identify with or lean toward the Republican Party and 83% indicate they are likely to support Donald Trump in the fall. Also, nearly three-quarters (73%) of those who believe the Swift conspiracy also believe the 2020 election outcome was fraudulent.
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Biden is to blame for the border bill failing??? Greg Sargent discusses one of the most disturbing poll results I’ve seen yet. It’s completely inexplicable: You’ve probably heard that Donald Trump has “tightened his grip on the Republican Party,” or that he’s “bent the party to his will.” Pundits repeat such formulations constantly, because, well, it’s true: Trump is exerting a level of influence over his party in a way that’s unprecedented in a former president. But what if voters aren’t aware of it? That’s one possible takeaway from a new ABC News-Ipsos survey, which has a maddening finding: Trump gets substantially less blame for killing the bipartisan border security deal last week than any other major actor in that drama: Biden strongly supported the deal, while Trump explicitly and repeatedly called on Republicans to kill it. He expressly asked for the blame for its death to be directed at him.
Donald Trump has so many pending criminal cases that he has to decide which ones offer him the greatest opportunity to grandstand on the courthouse steps on a given day. Yesterday, he attended the closed hearing on classified documents down in Florida and didn’t hold any press events afterwards which was odd since it was certainly not a hearing he needed to attend. I suspect he wanted to be there to hear about which witnesses were cooperating with the special counsel so he could find away to send his goons out to intimidate them. I would also guess he’s wanted to sink at his Trumpie judge and give her some sugar from across the room. And there were rumors that he would attend Fani Willis’ potential prosecution disqualification hearing in Georgia and/or the Manhattan case regarding his illegal payments to Stormy Daniels. He’s decided on the Manhattan case apparently. It’s a lot and there’s more: Each of Trump’s four criminal cases is set to reach a clarifying inflection point over the next few days as he barrels toward a rematch with President Joe Biden.
Except: They’re all liars because they know it doesn’t matter to their voters and that many people who don’t vote for them believe this is “true” even if it isn’t factual. And so it goes. Still, it’s important to document the record. Trump’s “border” was fucked up too. It has nothing to do with Biden and everything to do with conditions in their home countries and full employment in the US.
Could be… He’s still at it: Tony Bobulinski, the high-flying investor who is the House GOP’s star witness in the Oversight Committee’s ever-expanding probe into Hunter Biden, has become the one Biden business associate that Republicans would like voters to believe. “Of all of the guys that were involved in the Hunter Biden orbit, Tony Bobulinski appears to me to be the one solid guy that tried to do the right thing and was honest,” Oversight Chair James Comer (R-KY) told Lou Dobbs earlier this month. But as Republicans examine Hunter Biden’s questionable business ties, it turns out Bobulinski is connected to one particular character perhaps more unsavory than any other figure in the inquiry’s constellation: Russian billionaire Viktor Vekselberg. Vekselberg is a Ukrainian-born energy magnate who’s been a close ally of Vladimir Putin’s for decades.
I guess she hasn’t received her check recently Melania has been conspicuously absent from the campaign trail since Trump announced. Maybe that’s why. She used to get paid for it: A super PAC aligned with former President Donald Trump paid his wife, former first lady Melania Trump, $155,000 in 2021, according to new financial filings. The New York Times first reported that the group, Make America Great Again, Again — which has since been closed — made the unusual payment to the first lady in December 2021. The payment was not included on the group’s initial federal reports, which instead listed two transactions, for $125,000 and $30,000, last year for a client called the Designer’s Management Agency. Melania Trump is listed as a client of that agency. The payments were revealed Thursday after Trump filed new financial disclosure forms, which listed the $155,000 figure as the fee for a “speaking engagement.” The date of the payment coincides with a private fundraiser at the Trumps’ Mar-a-Lago club in Florida at the the time, which sold seats for $125,000 a pop. Former U.S.
Dems post another pair of special election wins Former congressman Tom Suozzi won the special election on Tuesday for the Long Island congressional seat recently held by “serial fabulist and expelled former GOP Rep. George Santos,” as CNN framed it. Santos won the seat by 8 points in 2022. Suozzi, a Democrat, defeated Nassau County GOP legislator Mazi Pilip by nearly 8, a 16-point swing in Democrats’ favor. The win shaves House Republicans’ majority thinner than it was on Monday (New York Times): The outcome flipped one of the five House seats Democrats need to retake the majority in November, giving the party a badly needed shot of optimism. But Mr. Suozzi’s campaign also provided something that may prove more valuable, a playbook for candidates across the country competing on turf where President Biden and his party remain deeply unpopular. The strategy went something like this: Challenge Republicans on issues that they usually monopolize, like crime, taxes and, above all, immigration. Flash an independent streak.
Can you smell the fear on the GOP? Molly Jong-Fast reflects on Robert Hur’s hit job. Democrats freaked out about the special counsel’s gratuitous comments about Joe Biden’s memory. The press obsessed over it. Republicans redistributed theories that Biden might drop out and Michelle Obama might step in. Biden himself has responded with jokes about his age. Jong-Fast writes (Vanity Fair): Now, I understand why everyone’s so anxious; another Trump presidency could be the end of American democracy. But there’s also a reason why Republicans are so obsessed with trying to get Biden to drop out. It’s not because they are concerned about Biden’s mental acuity; it’s because they know that incumbency is a huge advantage and the economy is picking up. (Meanwhile, Trump is trying to look like an incumbent president—while taking credit, somehow, for the stock market’s rise.) […] The media’s decision to seize on bad polls, especially around Biden’s age, has ratcheted up Democrats’ nerves for months. Yet polls have been wrong before. Remember the red wave of 2022?
People are worried about Biden’s mental acuity but this man is on the Armed Services Committee Steve Benen points out that this man has access to very important defense information. I think that’s a big mistake: Over the course of just three years, Sen. Tommy Tuberville has made quite a name for himself. The Alabama Republican is perhaps best known for launching an unprecedented, 10-month blockade, preventing confirmation of U.S. military leaders, but that’s not the right-wing senator’s only notable contribution. Tuberville has also made headlines for embracing Donald Trump’s “Big Lie,” for example, and voting against certification of the 2020 election results. He’s also disputed the racism of white nationalists and presented an unsubtle argument that “inner city” school teachers are lazy and possibly illiterate. He’s also struggled with basic details related to civics and modern American history. But let’s also not forget that Tuberville has shared a variety of curious thoughts about foreign policy in general and Russia’s attack on Ukraine in specific.
By the way, here’s Trump being “funny.” I’m sure the kids love this stuff.