One of the most compelling images that came out of the Jan. 6 House committee hearings was of former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows slumped on his couch on the afternoon in question, disconsolately scrolling through his phone while Donald Trump’s angry mob stormed the Capitol. As the New York Times reported: [White House aide Cassidy] Hutchinson said around 2 p.m. or 2:05 p.m. that day, she went to Meadows’ office because she saw rioters were getting closer to breaching the Capitol. Meadows was on his couch, scrolling through his phone, as he had been that morning. “I said, ‘Hey, are you watching the TV, chief? … The rioters are getting really close. Have you talked to the president?’ He said, ‘No, he wants to be alone right now,'” she recalled.”I remember Pat saying to [Meadows], something to the effect of, ‘The rioters have gotten to the Capitol, Mark, we need to go down and see the president now.’ And Mark looked up at him and said, ‘He doesn’t want to do anything, Pat,'” Hutchinson said.
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We haven’t heard much from His Anti-Wokeness for a bit so I thought I share a little schadenfreude from Ed Kilgore to make your day: Ron DeSantis remains the most formidable rival to Donald Trump for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination. But it’s been a long, long time since he’s gotten any particularly good news in the polls. A new Emerson College survey shows him dropping into single digits and third place in New Hampshire, behind Chris Christie. In the RealClearPolitics averages of national GOP polls, he’s dropped from 30.1 percent at the end of March to 14.8 percent now. He looks relatively strong in Iowa, where it appears he is making a desperate all-or-nothing stand, but mostly just by comparison. Trump only leads him by 27 points in the first-in-the-nation caucus state, though sparse Iowa polling may disguise a less positive environment for DeSantis. Polling aside, recent news emanating from the DeSantis campaign has been generally quite bad.
I just don’t know what to say to this utter bullshit the right spews. Trump spent his entire term in “executive time” doing nothing but tweeting, watching TV, flying around on government aircraft to his golf resorts for pay to play sessions on the links. The idea that he was out there working hard for the people is simply ludicrous. That officials like Byron Donalds spread this ludicrous propaganda is perhaps the most disturbing thing about it. Does he believe it? Maybe. There are plenty of true believers. But it’s almost worse if he doesn’t. How cynical can you get?
I don’t think so The NY Times: Early in the scrum of the 2016 presidential campaign, the political strategist Rick Wilson bumped into an old boss and strongly advised him not to cast his lot with Donald J. Trump. No good would come of it. “Even if he wins, he’s going to destroy you,” Mr. Wilson remembered telling Rudolph W. Giuliani. “This guy’s going to humiliate you.” Mr. Wilson recalled being dismissed as a provincial Floridian unable to understand the bond between two New Yorkers — outer-borough strivers who walked the Manhattan streets with proprietary airs and were now within grasp of once-unimaginable power. “He’s going to take care of me,” Mr. Wilson said Mr. Giuliani would tell those around him. A cabinet post, probably. Maybe secretary of state. Never happened. Instead, Mr. Giuliani became Mr. Trump’s secretary of aggression and blind allegiance: his attack dog, legal adviser, unindicted co-conspirator — and now, co-defendant in a criminal conspiracy case.
True the Vote finally gets cornered Texas vote suppression and bullshit artist organization True the Vote is in trouble down in Georgia. These guys have been around for quite a while (I wrote about them for years — here’s one from 2012) but they went mainstream when Trump and his “rigged” mantra came along. They teamed up with the convicted felon and propagandist Dinesh D’Souza for the movie “2,000 Mules” which Trump claims proves his 2020 fraud accusations. Anyway, it appears they messed with the wrong people. JV Last at the Bulwark has the story: There’s another 2020 election case percolating in Fulton County: The Georgia State Election Board is suing True the Vote—the group whose “data” makes up the lion’s share of Dinesh D’Souza’s 2000 Mules nonsense. It’s a pretty wild example of FAFO. The short version: True the Vote is a Texas-based group, which filed a complaint with Georgia’s State Election Board alleging fraud in the 2020 presidential campaign.
Just because he wrote it on twitter doesn’t mean it can’t be a crime: Trump is stupid and shameless so he often lied or gave unlawful orders on twitter or some other public forum. He believed that he was totally protected by the first amendment or executive privilege. Those rights are not absolute and if he gave it half a thought (or had half a brain) he would have realized that. Executive privilege (or Article II) does not allow a president to do anything he wants. And when speech is in furtherance of a crime like fraud it’s not protected. You’d think a snake oil fraudster like Trump would have been aware of that. Of course he’s gotten away with it his whole life so I suppose he assumed he always would.
The Georgia RICO indictment includes a couple of strange operators working the conspiracy in a specifically weird little side story I’ve always wondered about. This is the one about the woman who approached Ruby Freeman and told her that the feds were out to get her: Here is yet another story from the range of conspiracies and criminal plots that were afoot last winter to overthrow the government of the United States and keep Donald Trump in power after losing the 2020 presidential election. Georgia election worker Ruby Freeman was one of those innocent bystanders who became the target of death threats and harassment tied to a conspiracy theory that she had helped steal the presidential election in Georgia for Joe Biden. On January 4th 2021 – two days before the Capitol insurrection – a woman named Trevian Kutti knocked on Freeman’s door and told her she was in danger. If Freeman didn’t confess to the truth of Trump’s election rigging charges within 48 hours unidentified persons would come to her home and Freeman along with members of her family would be sent to jail. Kutti is a publicist and head of Trevian Worldwide, a PR firm.
Smith paints a portrait. Willis, a landscape. Special counsel Jack Smith and Fulton County DA Fani Willis issued complementary indictments in the Republican conspiracy to overturn the 2020 presidential election results. Dahlia Lithwick summarizes: There’s one other notable contrast between the two stories that will be unspooled regarding the very similar events that took place after Donald Trump learned he’d lost the election and decided he would win it through organized crime. Smith chose to tell the story of an abstraction, crimes against democracy and the peaceful transfer of power. Willis is telling a concrete and detailed story of crimes against voters and election workers; Black voters in particular, female Black election workers in specific. In effect, Trump is on trial in D.C. for trying to break democracy and, in Fulton County, Georgia, for trying to set aside Black votes. The two stories are deeply connected, but they are also two very distinct acts of violence against elections. Smith reminds us what the country nearly lost, and Willis recalls what Black voters have almost never won.
If it’s about news coverage, Biden’s buried Donald Trump’s multiple indictments and ongoing court cases have one upside for Republicans: keeping President Joe Biden off the front pages. I’m skimming the news for Biden and not finding much. The inferno on Maui offers Biden a chance at some column inches and camera time, but not until next week: President Joe Biden and first lady Jill Biden will travel to Maui on Monday in the aftermath of the Hawaii wildfires, White House press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre announced on Wednesday. On Aug. 21, they will meet with first responders, survivors and government officials, she said. “In Maui, the President and First Lady will be welcomed by state and local leaders to see firsthand the impacts of the wildfires and the devastating loss of life and land that has occurred on the island, as well as discuss the next steps in the recovery effort,” Jean-Pierre said. Biden today celebrates the one-year anniversary of the Inflation Reduction Act. But most of the coverage seems to be at The Guardian. NPR places Biden coverage far down the list of this morning’s stories.
It doesn’t work for the GOP It’s pretty clear that Trump’s obsession with 2020 has hurt the party over the past two and a half years. Candidates for other offices want nothing more than to move on from that unpopular and unpleasant topic. Trump’s legal problems make that impossible and now he’s making it even worse: Hours after being indicted for his attempts to overturn the election results in Georgia, Donald Trump signaled that he is going to re-litigate the matter once more. This time, it will be part of his campaign to win the presidency, not retain it. Trump announced on his social media site that he would be holding a “major news conference” on Monday where he’d present a detailed and “irrefutable report” on voter fraud from three years ago. The post had all the whiffs of a Four Seasons Total Landscaping moment. And it quickly transported the Republican Party right back to a conversation it studiously has tried to avoid for nearly three years.