Why was this man ever a celebrity anything? Donald “91 Counts” Trump has always been high-wealth and low-rent. He has spent his entire life complaining that the world (“they”) are laughing at us (“him”). Go figure. Ron Filipkowski reminds Americans that if you pick your president late at night while watching the Home Shopping Network (HSN), you get what you pay for. Business Insider from 2018: From deodorant to bottled water and, at one point, a personalized vitamin kit that was determined by urine test, Trump has put his name on almost anything shoppers would buy. He also had a menswear line from Phillips-Van Heusen that was sold at Macy’s, as well as a collection of Trump-branded home decor. The Washington Post found in 2016 Trump-branded manufactured in 12 countries. In 2018, Quartz estimated only 15 percent of Mr. America First’s items for sale were made in the U.S. It’s not clear where his $399 Trump “Never Surrender” high-tops are made, but those are the odds. SneakerCon in Philadelphia on Saturday loudly booed when Trump introduced them.
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It’s not just swing voters who will decide our fate. It’s nonvoters. Those of us who simply couldn’t believe Americans were crazy enough to elect Donald Trump in 2016 got a rude awakening. The MAGA types are loud, but not that numerous. Michael Tomasky this Presidents’ Day considers the other voters we didn’t see coming then who will again decide this year’s presidential election. He invites the Biden campaign and us to step outside our political bubble and get inside their heads: Last week, NBC produced a poll showing that respondents were remembering the Trump years comparatively fondly. No, don’t roll your eyes and tongue-cluck these people. It’s vital that we ponder this. Respondents were asked of Biden and Trump whether each man had done about the kind of job they expected, a better job, or a worse job. For Biden, the numbers were 14 percent better, 44 percent as expected, and 42 percent worse. For Trump? Prepare yourself. It was 40 percent better, 31 percent as expected, and 29 percent worse. We can rationalize that away or deal with it. But the numbers are the numbers, Tomasky advises.
At least the presidential experts haven’t lost their minds, even if most of the rest of us have. Biden makes his debut in our rankings at No. 14, putting him in the top third of American presidents. Trump, meanwhile, maintains the position he held six years ago: dead last, trailing such historically calamitous chief executives as James Buchanan and Andrew Johnson. In that and other respects, Trump’s radical departure from political, institutional and legal norms has affected knowledgeable assessments not just of him but also of Biden and several other presidents. […] Biden’s most important achievements may be that he rescued the presidency from Trump, resumed a more traditional style of presidential leadership and is gearing up to keep the office out of his predecessor’s hands this fall. Trump’s position at the bottom of our rankings, meanwhile, puts him behind not only Buchanan and Johnson but also such lowlights as Franklin Pierce, Warren Harding and William Henry Harrison, who died a mere 31 days after taking office. Trump’s impact goes well beyond his own ranking and Biden’s.
Marcy Wheeler takes a look at Robert Hur today and it’s very good. She is generally less critical of Merrick Garland than some but in this case she is unsparing. She points out that Garland tends to have a naive belief that all career DOJ employees are apolitical even as in the case of Hur who was appointed by Trump as a US Attorney and was involved in some of the most partisan actions of the Trump Justice Department. He clerked for Rehnquist, fergawdsakes! The details of Hur’s tenure are not well known and they are damning: The problem is, with Hur, Garland should have known better, and not just because Hur was obviously a senior member of Trump’s DOJ. At the end of last week’s Jack podcast (YouTube; Simplecast), Allison Gill and Andrew McCabe discussed the role Hur played in Trump’s DOJ. Gill replayed McCabe’s warnings, a year ago when Hur was appointed, about the former PADAG’s willingness to engage in politics.
That ad should appeal to the remaining normie swing voters but you never know. Still, this Pew Survey from a couple of weeks ago seems relevant: That’s a lot of Republicans who say that the war in Ukraine is important to them. It’s true they don’t care as much about it as Democrats but when 75% of the entire country believes something is in the national interest you would think the Republicans would at least be a teensy bit worried that they’re on the wrong side of this one. There is no sign of that as yet. The younger members of the Senate all walked away from the national security bill and are strutting around like they’re Matt Gaetz, proud as peacocks. And I don’t think I have to say anything about the House. They’re on vacation. I always hesitate to post things by Bill Kristol, particularly on foreign policy, but I’ll do it today because this is a case in which I think there’s common ground between people like me and people like him.
Rough clay or day clay? Trump could shoot them in the middle of Fifth Avenue and they’d vote for him with their dying breaths. “My kids need you! You’re a Christian! You’re honest! Look at his family! All good kids!” David Neiwert nails it: Susie too: Okay, neither of these eligible voters are salvageable. They’re too far gone. But there are others “on the fence” surely embarrassed by these displays of lunacy. Paul Rosenberg interviewed Rachel Bitecofer about her new book, “Hit ‘Em Where It Hurts: How to Save Democracy by Beating Republicans at Their Own Game.” Bitecofer seems to be covering ground seeded in the past by George Lakoff, Drew Westen, and Anat Shenker-Osorio about appealing more to emotion than intellect. Republicans now campaign on negative partisanship, she says, while many Democrats cannot let go of their “old strategy” of campaigning on policy: “find things people like, tell them you’re going to give them that — and then appeal on your character, your biography, your qualifications for office.” Republicans dumped that approach long ago.
Tennessee State Capitol yesterday WZTV Nashville: The group of more than a dozen masked individuals marched wearing red shirts and black pants, waving flags with swastikas on them. It is not clear at this time who the group is or affiliated with, though many of the shirts said “Blood Tribe.” Your future, if you choose to accept it. Your mission, if you choose to accept it, is to put a stop to it. ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● For The Win, 5th Edition is ready for download. Request a copy of my free countywide GOTV planning guide at ForTheWin.us.
Offered with no comment. This is MAGA.
Why would anyone want to live in a place with the name of a fascist moron emblazoned on the front? Would you buy a condo in Hitler Tower? “My client is worth hundreds and hundreds of millions,” said one of Mr. Trump’s lawyers, Alina Habba, during closing arguments at the trial, adding, “let alone the brand, which is worth billions.” But up and down the spine of Manhattan, condominiums in high-rise buildings emblazoned with Mr. Trump’s name have underperformed, according to sales data from two real estate tracking firms, and an analysis of the data by the Columbia University economist Stijn Van Nieuwerburgh. The line in the sand is the year 2016, when Mr. Trump was elected president. In 2016, condominiums in Trump’s buildings in New York began to decline, underperforming compared to the Manhattan condominium market. In a one-year window, condos in buildings that had the Trump logo went from selling at a 1 percent premium compared with similar units, to selling for 4 percent less, meaning that Trump condos became a “bargain” among the city’s luxury units, said Mr. Van Nieuwerburgh, a professor of real estate.
I doubt it Charlie Kirk is a major influencer on the right and his Turning Point organization is the MAGA CPAC. I doubt very seriously that Trump will dump him because he’s a racist. That’s a feature not a bug. But this story does show more of the fault lines in the GOP and that’s always good news: For more than a year, Charlie Kirk, the conservative activist and MAGA influencer, was aimed like a heat-seeking missile toward one goal — ousting Republican National Committee Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel. It’s a battle he won. Just this week, former President Donald Trump endorsed a new slate of leaders to head the party apparatus and signaled that McDaniel’s four terms would soon come to an end. Few Republican groups have had as meteoric a rise as Kirk’s Turning Point USA, which launched in 2012. It sought to activate young conservatives and saw its fortunes grow as it attached itself to the Trump movement in 2016. The organization has raised roughly a quarter-billion dollars since, as The Associated Press reported last fall, with its fundraising exploding during the Covid pandemic.