Trump vs. Cohen today Donald John Trump won’t be armed and he won’t be standing in the middle of Fifth Avenue when he and his former fixer Michael Cohen meet today at the former president’s state fraud trial in Manhattan. Trump plans to be there, mug-shot glare at the ready (The Guardian): “I look forward to the reunion,” Cohen, once Trump’s lawyer, said. “I hope Donald does as well.” Now in its fourth week, Trump, his adult sons and their family business have been found liable for inflating the value of Trump’s assets to routinely and repeatedly deceive banks, insurers and others. Judge Arthur Engoron is using the hearings to decide on punishment, which could include a huge fine and probably means the dissolution of the Trump’s New York property empire. Over a dozen witnesses, many former Trump Organization employees, have testified in the trial so far. But Cohen’s testimony is seen as crucial to the case. Trump has a schedule full of court cases, indictments, and a lengthy list of complaints about how unfairly he’s being treated.
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It’s only straight talk when the press doesn’t do it Sen. John McCain dubbed his campaign bus the “Straight Talk Express” during his 2000 presidential run. Voters claim to prefer straight talk to mealy-mouthed answers from their politicians. Donald Trump, the MAGA cult claims, “tells it like it is.” “He’s outspoken. Other candidates wouldn’t tell you how it is, but he does.” – Betty Tully, August 2015 But straight talk is in the eye of the beholder. Straight talk from popular Fox News celebrities consists of xenophobia, homophobia, transphobia, and branding anyone to the left of Germany’s WWII dictator as hating America. Shy about being branded the enemy of the people, the straight press often shuns straight talk. Maybe that’s one of the many reasons the news business is in such a slump. The press danced around calling Trump’s lies lies for years. When finally they began, of course, and whenever he didn’t like his coverage, Trump declared them the enemy of the people and invited his cult to hurl invective at reporters. Voters are fickle about what they consider straight talk.
Political Scientist Rachel Bitecover: The first time I posted about the harsh reality of America’s collapsing democracy, it seemed like many folks were genuinely surprised to see that America is not actually the Greatest Democracy on Earth. According to the democracy index compiled by the EIU and published annually by The Economist, America is actually a “flawed” democracy. The United States was downgraded from “full” to “flawed” democracy after half of America handed the keys to the White House to a wannabe dictator-con man who immediately began to roll back civil liberties and ignore the rule of law. That’s why the very second I saw the topic Steve Levitsky’s and Daniel Ziblatt’s latest book, Tyranny of the Minority I knew I had to get them onto the show.
Greg Sargent observes this tiresome dynamic in which the media expects the Democrats to vote for a far right Speaker of the House because the wingnuts won’t take yes for an answer. He notes that it didn’t work this time. There’s a lesson in that: When Democrats refused to save Kevin McCarthy from the hard-right faction of House members who ousted the California Republican as speaker earlier this month, the pundit recriminations were thunderous and damning: Democrats had “burned” future possibilities of bipartisanship. They’d squandered a chance to own “the adult brand.” They should have “saved the country” but betrayed it instead. But now, with Republicans still struggling to elect a speaker, Democrats’ strategy — largely charted by Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries — is plainly working. The New York Democrat’s approach to navigating the GOP’s disaster isn’t just proving to be good politics for his party; it’s likely to produce a better result for the country as well.
Elle Hardy author of Beyond Belief: How Pentecostal Christianity Is Taking Over the World (yikes!!!) wrote this for TNR about a new war on the poor by Evangelical Christians: A God who does his best work in the dark hours is integral to the story of American evangelical Christianity. The stuff of country music songs and conversions in roadside motels, Jesus tends to come to people at their lowest and loneliest. The only problem is that some of God’s most pernicious modern apostles understand this all too well. At a time when fewer and fewer believers are going to church, it is consumption, in these dark times, that illuminates a deeply antisocial shift in evangelical Christian beliefs. Chief among the new doctrines is the idea that God rewards “seeding”—that is, the “sowing” of financial donations to churches, or favored online preachers—with a material harvest in return.
Yesterday he said he was trying to stay out of it: Reporter: Will you endorse Emmer? He hasn’t always been your biggest fan… Trump: He’s my biggest fan now because he called me yesterday and told me he’s my biggest fan so… I’m trying to stay out of that as much as possible pic.twitter.com/F8zwX8fVSk — Acyn (@Acyn) October 23, 2023 He is demanding a MAGA true believer and so are the MAGA true believers in the House. This is the crux of the problem. They will settle for nothing less than a Trump cultist for speaker and the rest of the caucus knows that spells disaster for the House. And yet, it’s highly likely that at least 90% of House Republicans will vote for Donald Trump in November of 2024. Update: Welp, Emmer just dropped out. Trump just derailed the speakership of the US House while sitting in a courtroom for the civil fraud trial of his business epire and listening to the testimony of Michael Cohen. — Kyle Cheney (@kyledcheney) October 24, 2023
They all say they love Trump’s policies. What policies? Romney: “On the Trump wing of the party, I haven't heard policy other than saying build a wall and he was president for four years and he built 50 miles. And he had a health care plan. Remember that?” @Acyn pic.twitter.com/0ItAAQIlK5 — The Intellectualist (@highbrow_nobrow) October 23, 2023 Most “moderates” rationalize their support for Trump by saying that while they don’t like his personality so much they really support his policies. And nobody ever asks them to be specific about what politics they liked? His only policies were to reverse anything Obama did, cut taxes and stack the Supreme Court with wingnuts (which would have been done by any Republican) a Muslim ban, a tariff war that cost the country billions, a wall that never got built and that’s about it. His “policies” were just a bunch of half-baked notions from the 1980s and whatever he thought of in the moment. The “policies” most Republicans support is the “policy” of having their team in power and that’s about it. It doesn’t matter who facilitates it.
We knew he said something but we didn’t know how much. And it turns out that his book is a pack of lies: Former President Donald Trump’s final chief of staff in the White House, Mark Meadows, has spoken with special counsel Jack Smith’s team at least three times this year, including once before a federal grand jury, which came only after Smith granted Meadows immunity to testify under oath, according to sources familiar with the matter. The sources said Meadows informed Smith’s team that he repeatedly told Trump in the weeks after the 2020 presidential election that the allegations of significant voting fraud coming to them were baseless, a striking break from Trump’s prolific rhetoric regarding the election. According to the sources, Meadows also told the federal investigators Trump was being “dishonest” with the public when he first claimed to have won the election only hours after polls closed on Nov. 3, 2020, before final results were in. “Obviously we didn’t win,” a source quoted Meadows as telling Smith’s team in hindsight.
America under siege The last few weeks have been more stressful than the some during the Trump administration, even during the height of the pandemic. It is easy to grow weary and lose faith that after nearly a quarter of a millennium, this country will self-correct once again. That sense is spreading (Associated Press): For many Americans, the Republican dysfunction that has ground business in the U.S. House to a halt as two wars rage abroad and a budget crisis looms at home is feeding into a longer-term pessimism about the country’s core institutions. The lack of faith extends beyond Congress, with recent polling conducted both before and after the leadership meltdown finding a mistrust in everything from the courts to organized religion. The GOP internal bickering that for nearly three weeks has left open the speaker’s position — second in line to the presidency — is widely seen as the latest indication of deep problems with the nation’s bedrock institutions.
While the House clown show fulminates over Joe Biden’s brother, get a load of what Trump was raking in from just one guy while he was president The media has been so overwhelmed with news of the war in Israel and the trainwreck happening in slow motion in the House of Representatives that a lot of stories that would have normally received front page treatment have been relegated to the back burner. When the news is emanating from the right wing media, that’s actually a good thing since it’s almost never truly newsworthy and almost always a form of MAGA propaganda. A case in point is a breathless report released last Friday from the Chairman of the House Oversight Committee announcing that they’ve found evidence that President Joe Biden’s brother paid him $200,000 in 2017, which is supposed to prove that Joe Biden was part of some kind of criminal scheme. Upon examination, one can see that the check was marked as a repayment of a loan Joe Biden made to his brother a couple of months before, not a payoff of some sort.