That’s what it’s come to. He’s just spreading disinformation for fun now. He’s not going to win anything in New Hampshire. I thought this was an interesting look at what happened to his once vaunted campaign from Marc Caputo. An excerpt: There’s dispute about whether Trump was ever beatable in a GOP primary. But there’s little disagreement among connected political pros about the multiple problems with the campaign of DeSantis, an aloof not-ready-for-primetime candidate who didn’t know what he didn’t know and was arrogant about it, according to more than a dozen insiders who shared their insight to The Messenger since March. They spoke on condition of anonymity, many out of fear of retribution from DeSantis or his aggressive army of social media followers on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter. DeSantis’s prickly personality estranged one-time allies, donors and political pros. His likability problems turned off many voters. The $47 million spent against him by the super PACs of Trump and Nikki Haley damaged him. And the spring and summer criminal indictments of Trump changed the trajectory of the race.
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Has only read paper four times in recent months First, if you didn’t know already, Sinclair Broadcasting is based in Baltimore, David Folkenflik reminds Threads readers: Post by @davidfolkenflik View on Threads About David D. Smith, Judd Legum adds: Smith is the son of Sinclair founder Julian Sinclair Smith and, along with his brothers, controls the company. Sinclair, a publicly traded company, owns or operates 185 local television stations across 86 markets. A 2018 study published in the American Political Science Review found that stations purchased by Sinclair “coverage of national politics at the expense of local politics” and undergo “a significant rightward shift in the ideological slant of coverage.” Smith is the executive chairman of Sinclair Inc., reports the startup Baltimore Banner. [Smith] told New York Magazine in 2018 he considered print media “so left-wing as to be meaningless dribble.” Asked Tuesday during the meeting whether he stood by those comments now that he owns one of the most storied titles in American journalism, Smith said yes.
Really? He’s got a lot of nerve… I carry no brief for Nikki Haley. She would be an awful president but not because she’s not “tough” enough. This is reminiscent of his fatuous claims against Hillary Clinton that she didn’t have the “strength and the stamina” to be president. He thinks all women are weak. But as he proved when he was president nobody is a bigger patsy than he is. By the way, he’s also going after her for her ethnicity: In case you were wondering: Former President Donald Trump on Tuesday went after Nikki Haley while referring to her by her first name, Nimarata, in the latest example of Trump using racist dog whistles to attack his GOP presidential rival. Haley is the daughter of Indian immigrants and was born Nimarata Nikki Randhawa. She took her husband Michael Haley’s last name after they married. Trump misspelled Nimarata as “Nimrada” as he attacked her in a new post on his social media platform Truth Social. The MAGA crowd has been calling her “Nimroda” (nimrod, get it?) for months. naturally he’s doing it now too. Most Republicans don’t care.
From Scott Rosenberg’s Hopium Chronicles (to which you should subscribe for a little bit of political positivity.) As we often discuss here the central dynamic in American politics since Dobbs in the spring of 2022 has been Dem overperformance, Republican struggle in race after race, all across the country. We saw it in the battlegrounds in 2022, as we improved our standing over 2020 in AZ, CO, GA, MI, MN, NH, PA; and got all the way up to 59% in CO, 57& in PA, 55% in MI, 54% in NH. We saw it all throughout 2023 as we took away Colorado Springs and Jacksonville, two of the largest GOP held cities; the Supreme Court seat and rancid gerrymandering in WI; the six week abortion ban in OH; the Virginia Assembly and the fantasy that the 15 week abortion ban would be a safe haven for Republicans; and so much more, all across the country. When I started Hopium in early 2023 I wondered whether this dynamic that we saw in 2022 would continue in 2023, and it did. 2023 was really a blue wave year across the US. And here in early 2024 we’ve been wondering would this same dynamic carry over to this year?
Axios’s “Vibe Survey” found that people are feeling quite good about the economy. Imagine that: Americans overall have a surprising degree of satisfaction with their economic situation, according to findings from the Axios Vibes survey by The Harris Poll. That’s in spite of dour views among certain subsets of the country — and in contrast to consumer sentiment polls that remain stubbornly weak, partly because of the lingering effects of 2022’s inflation. The Axios Vibes poll has found that when asked about their own financial condition, or that of their local community, Americans are characteristically optimistic. It’s broadly understood that economic well-being influences electoral outcomes. By the same token, however, political affiliation influences the responses that Republicans, in particular, give when they’re asked about the economy. So asking about personal finances rather than the broader economy can reveal optimism not seen in consumer-sentiment polls.
As the judges at The Hague deliberate on South Africa’s indictment of Israel, a lawsuit against senior U.S. officials for supporting genocide is set to begin in federal court.
The post The Legal Case Against Joe Biden for Enabling Israel’s Genocide Against Gaza appeared first on The Intercept.
For the royalists always ye have with you At Saturday’s Martin Luther King prayer breakfast here I spotted a local Republican, a former elected, who sometimes commented back in the day at Scrutiny Hooligans (my Asheville group blog, RIP). When in 2011 I posted a piece titled “Colonist or Royalist” likening corporate Republicans and T-partiers to those who backed King George III, the British East India Company, and other elites who “don’t care about your jobs or your economy, and they don’t care about you,” it really got under his skin. Too close to the bone? He stopped coming. I kept using royalists. Iowa Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley (speaking of Iowa) said this in 2017 about eliminating the estate tax (Des Moines Register): “I think not having the estate tax recognizes the people that are investing,” Grassley said, “as opposed to those that are just spending every darn penny they have, whether it’s on booze or women or movies.” My 2017 post on this continued: In Iowa and in other Republican primary states to come, cosplaying patriots are lining up to crown a king. Or a dictator. Whatever. Because freedom.
The first irrelevant primary is over. More to come, unfortunately. 14% of Republicans came out to caucus last night. It was one of the lowest turnouts in history. Sure, it was cold, but this was low even taking that into account. Enthusiasm? Yeah, sure. Also: I’m looking forward to when this little superfluous pageant is over. Lol:
There is so much talk about the Trump economy being the best the world has ever seen and it’s mainly because Trump just keeps saying it over and over again. It was good but it wasn’t great and on many metrics Biden’s is better. But, of course, we’ve been hearing nothing but gloom and doom about the economy for the past three years so people aren’t hearing that. Here’s some reality from Krugman: Now that Donald Trump is the Republican nominee — I know, it’s not official, but let’s get real — we can expect to hear a lot about how great the economy was on his watch. Which is strange, because he was the first president since Herbert Hoover to leave office with fewer jobs than when he came in. What’s happening here is that Trump has been given a mulligan for 2020. And to be fair, the huge job losses that took place that year were caused by Covid-19, not Trump’s policies. What’s really odd, however, is that this mulligan appears to be highly selective.
Zeynap Tufekci studies authoritarian movements around the world. She took a look at the MAGA movement for the NY Times and it’s quite interesting. (Gift link, here.) An excerpt: Cheryl Sharp, a 47-year-old sales associate who was among the many Iowans turned away from a filled-to-capacity Trump rally last month, sounded pretty confident she knew why Donald Trump was so appealing to many voters. For her and many others, she said, his most important quality was strength: He had the fortitude to keep the country safe, avoid new wars and ensure the economy hummed along. “You want someone strong, globally, so that it creates mutual respect with other countries, and maybe a little bit of fear,” she told me. “Yes, it’s true, not everyone likes him. It’s good not to be liked. Being strong is better.” Sharp readily conceded that not everything Trump said was great, but she saw that as part of the right personality to be president. “You gotta be a little crazy, maybe, to make sure other countries respect and fear us,” she said.