Nothing else matters Philip Bump takes on the age old question of whether Trump is pushing fascism because he believes it or if he’s just a sadistic narcissist who gravitates to it like a moth to flame without understanding any of it. I vote for the latter: There’s a forgotten moment from Donald Trump’s history that I think about with some regularity. About two decades ago, Trump got into a fight with the town of Rancho Palos Verdes, Calif., over a flagpole he installed at his golf course there. The pole was installed without a permit and the height violated local codes. This was not the fight he had centered on an oversized flag installed at Mar-a-Lago — a story that became part of the Trump-as-patriot lore of his followers, with details exaggerated in service to the idea that he put the display of the flag above all else.
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Dan Pfeiffer talks about the public’s view of Trump’s mental acuity in his newsletter today: The fact that Donald Trump is leading Joe Biden in news reports from The New York Times and other sources is puzzling for many of us. How could a chaotic criminal who spews conspiracy theories be on the cusp of returning to the White House? There’s not just one simple answer to how we ended up in this situation; it’s a combination of Biden’s low approval rating, divisions in the democratic coalition, dissatisfaction with the economy, a historic level of cynicism and institutional distrust, and radicalization of the Republican Party. The polarization and demographic makeup of the Electoral College mean that upcoming elections will continue to be closely contested. However, one specific finding in The New York Times/Siena College poll explains Trump’s strength and offers a particular strategy for defeating him again in 2024. There is no sugarcoating it: Joe Biden’s age is a significant political obstacle.
Yesterday, Trump referred to fellow Americans as vermin , evoking the Third Reich. Former President Donald J. Trump, on a day set aside to celebrate those who have defended the United States in uniform, promised to honor veterans in part by assailing what he portrayed as America’s greatest foe: the political left. Using incendiary and dehumanizing language to refer to his opponents, Mr. Trump vowed to “root out” what he called “the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country.” “The threat from outside forces is far less sinister, dangerous and grave than the threat from within,” Mr. Trump said Saturday in a nearly two-hour Veterans Day address in Claremont, N.H. As far as I can tell, only Kristen Welker on on Meet the Press mentioned it in passing to Ronna McDaniel and the only two mainstream newspapers to headline it are the NY Times (who only discussed it in the story, not in the headline above), in a small article and Forbes. CNN’s is here and coverage of the comment is 2/3rds of the way down the article.
All they lacks are railcars The headline on Masha Gessen’s New Yorker conversation with psychoanalyst, psychiatrist and author Robert Jay Lifton promises to reveal how one maintains hope in an age of catastrophe. It is a fascinating conversation with a man who has studied human depravity, literal fallout from it, and what differentiates “the helpless victim and the survivor as agent of change.” As for how one maintains hope today, the headline is a tease. “Lifton is fascinated by the range and plasticity of the human mind, its ability to contort to the demands of totalitarian control, to find justification for the unimaginable—the Holocaust, war crimes, the atomic bomb—and yet recover, and reconjure hope,” Gessen writes. Amidst the bickering over the war in Gaza, less tease and more how-to would have been nice. Given the obvious trajectory of the Trump cult, what’s needed is a way both to avoid being a victim and needing to be change agents after the fact of a period of “psychic numbing” and “malignant normality” that leads to unspeakable evil by banal men and women.
Elections are about choices It’s said that Republicans don’t build anything. Except detention camps. They’re hell at detention camps. Joe Biden is running for president of the United States again to invest in this country. Infrastructure week was not a joke on his watch (Mike Lux): Joe Biden and the Democratic trifecta got more than 80% of Americans immunized from COVID despite the worst public health disinformation campaign ever. They revived our economy from the depths of the COVID recession faster than any other major country, got Americans much needed money to keep them going in the hardest times, and saved state and local governments from having to make massive cuts in police, fire, and desperately needed public services. They delivered the first gun safety bill in over 30 years. They delivered the biggest infrastructure bill since the interstate highway system was built in the 1950s. They revitalized American manufacturing with Buy in America policies, the CHIPs Act, and the Inflation Reduction Act. They passed legislation to force Big Pharma to negotiate on drug prices and bring the cost of insulin down right away.
“We just want the government to function… we’re just tired of it” On the Sunday shows they’re still drooling over the polls showing that Biden is old and Trump is a vital young man with boundless energy sharp intelligence so they didn’t have much time to look at what happened on Tuesday. It’s too bad because there is a very interesting story that American who don’t follow the news closely but might tune in to Meet the Press would be interested to hear: Meghan Budden’s family was considering moving if their Pennsylvania school district didn’t change course. She normally isn’t politically active, she said, but felt compelled to volunteer when a slate of Democrats launched bids to take back their school board in Central Bucks School District, just north of Philadelphia.
Trump’s defense starts its case this week The Washington Post has an excellent write up today about where the Trump trial stands and what we can expect in the next couple of weeks: Former Trump Organization insider Michael Cohen testified in state court that his ex-boss Donald Trump instructed him to fudge numbers on annual financial statements so that they would show his desired net worth. Patrick Birney, a Trump Organization employee, said in court that a top executive told him Trump wanted a bigger bottom line on his annual statements, which were given to banks and insurance companies. An insurance underwriter, Claudia Mouradian, whose deposition was played at the trial, said she relied on the Trump Organization’s claim that a statement reporting roughly $6 billion in combined golf and real estate assets had beenverified by professional appraisers. These were among the assertionspresented during six weeks of trial and testimony in a lawsuit brought against Trump and his business by New York Attorney General Letitia James (D).
Of, by, and for the most power-hungry Ed Walker blogs at emptywheel. His message this Veterans Day: “Is it too much to ask Republicans to accept majority rule?” Apparently, yes. Ohio Republicans wasted no time in announcing their defiance of the constitutional amendment passed Tuesday that secured reproductive freedoms. The amendment passed 57-43: COLUMBUS, Ohio (AP) — Four Ohio Republican state lawmakers are seeking to strip judges of their power to interpret an abortion rights amendment after voters opted to enshrine those rights in the state’s constitution this week. Republican state Reps. Jennifer Gross, Bill Dean, Melanie Miller and Beth Lear said in a news release Thursday that they’ll push to have the Legislature, not the courts, make any decisions about the amendment passed Tuesday. “To prevent mischief by pro-abortion courts with Issue 1, Ohio legislators will consider removing jurisdiction from the judiciary over this ambiguous ballot initiative,” said the mix of fairly new and veteran lawmakers who are all vice-chairs of various House committees.
I don’t think the media’s focusing on the right candidate This is what his people are hearing from him: In case you were wondering, it’s all lies. I post this stuff here because I know most people don’t look at what he’s saying because they have lives and they already know that Trump is a narcissistic monster. But it’s easy to forget just how deranged he really is and I think it’s important to have this stuff out there from time to time to remind ourselves of it.
Rep. Stefanik does some more dirty work for Dear Leader. It must be exhausting. Trump’s lawyers in his NY Fraud trial said they planned to call for a mistrial based upon evidence they saw on Breitbart.com that the judge and his clerk are biased and have broken the campaign finance laws. I’m not kidding. MSNBC’s Lisa Rubin filled us in on what happened: Indeed, a Breitbart story published a day earlier aired new allegations about Engoron’s principal law clerk, who has been the subject of multiple attacks by Donald Trump and his legal team that led Engoron to impose a gag order on all of them. Specifically, Breitbart alleged, based on a review of New York State campaign finance data, that the law clerk has made contributions to individual candidates, local Democratic clubs, PACs and the New York County Democrats in amounts and at times that would appear to violate the rule Kise cited.