No, it’s not about the cat…. Late yesterday afternoon, Donald Trump published an item to his social media platform, declaring that he’s been “totally exonerated” in the classified documents scandal that led to his federal indictment. Of course, the former president has long struggled with the meaning of the word “exonerated,” so the missive wasn’t too surprising. But as part of the same all-caps message — which included Trump suggesting the authorities should give him back the documents he stole from the White House — the Republican said he should now be in the clear thanks to “the Clinton Socks case.” He made the same point during his weird speech on Tuesday night in New Jersey: When Trump references this in writing, as he often does, he invariably capitalizes “Socks.” This, of course, has led to questions about whether he’s confused about the grammatical rules — the former president tends to capitalize random words he finds important — or whether he thinks the story relates to the former Clinton family cat.
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Abortion, Jan. 6, and your freedom are on the line Here in our fortress of progressivism, it sometimes seems as if the rest of the country — the left-leaning part, anyway — is oblivious to broader trends at work behind current events. News junkies know, but that’s because we are news junkies. Forward scouts, I tell legislators engaged in trench warfare with authoritarians in the capitol. Movement conservatism propelled the American right from the 1970s through the Reagan years to George W. Bush’s two terms. We might call what followed movement authoritarianism. Anat Shenker-Osorio, host of the podcast Words to Win By and messaging authority, found signs in a recent survey that the public has caught on (Slate): In May, the Research Collaborative, a group that I advise, fielded a 1,400-person survey with Lake Research Partners on the Supreme Court.
2012? Bring back 1220, bro! If you follow The Daily Wire, you may know this guy. I don’t, but David Simon of The Wire does. This clown below would like to see western civilization return to the customs and mores of 1220. Because only RINOs want to return to the 1950s. Only fauxnies like Grover Norquist (he married a Muslim!) want to return to the McKinley era. Real men, ball-tanning men, men who embody manly virtues (Tucker Carlson? Josh Hawley?) want to “get medieval on your ass,” America. So much of the reactionary right is fueled by performative, over-the-top, in-your-face rejection of what the rest of us in Well-Adjusted America™ consider normal. MAGAs and incels tune in to shows like this for the rhetorical equivalent of WWE, monster trucks, and nitro-powered funny cars. Anything to get a rise (pun intended). The problem is, as with professional wrestling and Trump rallies, some of the fans take the kayfabe seriously.
Donald Trump gave them an opening It stands to reason that once the Republicans succeeded in corrupting the Supreme Court confirmation process to pack it with far right justices they would turn their attention to the Justice Department. What good is having a partisan High Court if the Justice Department is going to refuse to do the bidding of whatever Republican is in the White House? If you want to corrupt a democracy you need to do it holistically to ensure that all the levers of power are working together. It’s been a long time coming but it looks like they believe they’ve finally found their moment. They’re openly announcing their intention to discard all the rules and norms that have governed the arms length relationship between the president and the DOJ for the past 50 years. Donald Trump made that clear in his speech at his Bedminster Golf Club on Tuesday night: Donald Trump has always said he intended to do this, of course.
If you ever wondered how it came to be that people loathed and despised Hillary Clinton on such a visceral level, this is how. They did this over and over and over again for eight years screeching about “the rule o’ law!” and calling them the Clinton Crime Family. It’s very effective. It makes people who don’t have strong feelings about the person or knowledge of the facts figure there just must be something to it. In the face of Trump’s obvious criminality, it also has the effect of feeding into the cynical “they all do it” attitude which leads to apathy. The Republicans spent decades degrading Clinton and it was only by a fluke that she lost the election in 2016. And, yes, misogyny played a part. But the constant drumbeat that she was a criminal going all the way back to the 90s took its toll and Donald Trump, the instinctive asshole that he is, took advantage of it. And too many Democrats and independents bought into it. Luckily Biden is an incumbent president and Trump is going to be on the ballot so those dynamics are not going to be very strong. But never think it’s just a reflexive reaction to the charges against Trump.
A tale of two blowhards The Brits show that a political party doesn’t have to blindly back its leader even when he’s popular: An angry, aggrieved former leader attacks the institutions he once led for accusing him of flouting the rules and lying about it. His allies whip up supporters against what they call a witch hunt. A country watches nervously, worried that this flamboyant, norm-busting figure could cause lasting damage. There are obvious parallels in the political tempests convulsing Britain and the United States, but also stark differences: Former President Donald J. Trump faces federal criminal charges while Boris Johnson was judged to be deceitful about attending parties. And yet, Britain’s Conservative Party has regularly stood up to Mr. Johnson while the Republican Party is still mostly in thrall to Mr. Trump. Conservative lawmakers in Britain form the majority on a committee that found Mr. Johnson, a former prime minister, had deliberately misled Parliament over lockdown-breaking parties in Downing Street during the coronavirus pandemic. Mr.
Either way, L’état c’est lui More on the subject of my earlier post. William Saletan at the Bulwark catalogues all the ways in which the right endorses his status as an autocrat: Once again, Trump is testing America’s tolerance for autocracy. And once again, his allies on the right are backing him up with extreme and dangerous theories of vast presidential power. Here are some of their arguments. 1. A former president is entitled to obstruct investigators if he doesn’t trust them. John Yoo, a former deputy assistant attorney general, says Trump’s lawyers can argue that “he didn’t initially cooperate with DOJ or the FBI because of the way he’d been mistreated by them.” Alan Dershowitz, who represented Trump at his second impeachment trial, goes further. According to Dershowitz, it doesn’t matter whether Trump was truly mistreated; his subjective perception is enough. In defense of Trump’s defiance of the FBI, Dershowitz asserts: “A president doesn’t have to cooperate with people he believes are trying to get him.” 2.
This piece by Paul Waldman takes up one of my longest standing pet peeves, this notion that somehow rural and small town America is not only more authentically American, its values are far superior to those who live in urban America (where most of the people are.) This is taken as a given and is so accepted that they are allowed to bash cities mercilessly while screaming like wounded harpies if anyone criticizes their “way of life.” I’m sick of it. North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum did not announce his bid for the GOP presidential nomination by grabbing a guitar and crooning out the chorus to John Mellencamp’s “Small Town,” but he came awfully close. “I grew up in a tiny town in North Dakota,” he says at the opening of the video meant to introduce him to voters. After touting his business success, he concludes, “A kid from small town North Dakota: That’s America.” Burgum is practicing a version of small-town identity politics. “Small-town values have guided me my entire life; small-town values are at the core of America,” he says.
They have Anheuser-Busch bowing and scraping Via Axios: In a new bid to steady his rattled company, Anheuser-Busch U.S. CEO Brendan Whitworth vowed to protect the jobs of employees and those of independent wholesalers. Why it matters: With conservatives in revolt over Bud Light’s courting of a transgender influencer, Whitworth’s statement is an effort to fight back and regain market share. Axios has learned that Whitworth plans to go on the road around the U.S. this summer to listen to consumers, in connection with Budweiser’s MLB sponsorship. The company’s summer ad campaign, which begins next week, will portray Bud Light as “easy to drink and easy to enjoy,” he added in the statement Thursday. By the numbers: Sales of Bud Light, a new top target in the culture wars, are off as much as 25%. After the right savaged Bud Light for its relationship with transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney, sales dropped so sharply that data out this week shows Mexican lager Modelo replacing Bud Light as America’s best-selling beer.
Baby wolves! A zoo in South Dakota has welcomed a litter of critically endangered red wolf pups — a litter vital to the existence of the species with only an estimated two dozen left existing in the wild. The Great Plains Zoo in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, said that they were “thrilled to announce the births of six critically endangered red wolves” on Thursday in a statement on the zoo’s website. The six pups — two females and four males — were born to first-time parents Camelia and Uyosi, who only arrived at the Great Plains Zoo in October of last year from facilities in Washington and Texas, respectively. These six pups are vital to the existence of the species with an estimated 23 to 25 red wolves remaining in the wild and only an estimated 278 alive in captivity, according to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s Red Wolf Recovery Program. “Camelia and Uyosi are amazing parents, I wouldn’t expect anything less from them,” said Joel Locke, the Animal Care Director of the Great Plains Zoo. “We are fortunate to have vet staff and animal care staff that have worked with red wolves for more than 15 years.