OFF FOR A WEEK

I have travel plans for this week, so I won't be posting. I hope there'll be some guests posts while I'm away, but I'll be back on Sunday. See you then....

THE REPUBLICAN PARTY IS A TOXIC PARTISANSHIP MACHINE

Mainstream journalists and pundits decry "toxic partisanship" in America without ever recognizing the fact that the Republican Party and its agents treat the generation of toxic partisanship as a primary goal. They wake up every morning, sip their coffee, open their laptops, and think, How can I make my audience hate Democrats and liberals today? Every news story must be recast so that their politcal enemies are the villains, while they are either victims or heroes.

So we had the neo-fascist Patriot Front marching through Washington yesterday, their faces covered by gaiters. Some of them carried Confederate flags. This was embarrassing to Republican commentators, so they agreed on the message that these marchers couldn't possibly be people from their side. Their only disagreement was over which hated group was responsible.

I call fake. Looks more like Antifa in costume. No one should be allowed to cover their faces pic.twitter.com/2NoBWHpkKT

— Laura Ingraham (@IngrahamAngle) July 4, 2026

Feds https://t.co/sOwAPseYPg

— Kylie Jane Kremer (@KylieJaneKremer) July 4, 2026

Ingraham, of course, is a long-time Fox News host. Kremer is the executive director of Women for America First, a group co-founded by her mother, Amy Kremer, the former chair of Tea Party Express. On behalf of Women for America First, the Kremers organized the January 6, 2021, "Stop the Steal" rally that preceded the Trumpist invasion of the Capitol.

Kremer also has some thoughts about the recent bad weather in D.C.:

I’m telling y’all that someone with an extreme case of TDS geoengineered this weather in DC.

Same way they geoengineered Trump’s inauguration to be one of the coldest in U.S. history.

People with TDS hate Trump more than they love America. https://t.co/5zcC9i7exN

— Kylie Jane Kremer (@KylieJaneKremer) July 3, 2026

Ordinary Republicans might not believe this literally, but Kremeresque conspiratorialism combined with the daily Democrat- and liberal-bashing from Republican politicians and the right-wing media leads the rank-and-file to believe that someone they hate is to blame for everything that doesn't go their way:

Democratic Establishment politicans and mainstream journalists have no idea that the primary daily goal of Republicans and Republican propagandists is to sow hatred and division, to send the message that Democrats and liberals do nothing but commit evil acts, while Republicans in good standing are never in error and are always heroic, or at least innocent and virtuous.

It's easy to blame Donald Trump for this, but Republican conspiracy theories long predate Trump's entry into politics. Kitty Dukakis burned an American flag! Bill Clinton had dozens of people killed and ran drugs out of Mena Airport! John Kerry lied about his service record in Vietnam!

Partisan smears aren't just a feature of Republican rhetoric -- they're the party's central message. Republicans have learned that they can't sell their agenda (more tax breaks for billionaires, fewer services for ordinary Americans, second-class status if you're not straight, white, and male), so this is what they lead with, every damn day. If we have a crisis of toxic partisanship in America, it's because Republicans are leading the way.

TRUMP'S BASE DOESN'T THINK HE WANTS TO CHEAT, AND TRUMP MIGHT BE SIMILARLY DELUSIONAL

In his speech at Mount Rushmore last night, President Trump said:

We can only lose the midterms if we allow ourselves to lose the midterms, if we are foolish, stupid, and unwise. But if we terminate the filibuster as we should do and immediately vote for the SAVE America Act, then we will not lose an election for 100 years.

You probably hear that as a Trump promise that Republicans will rig elections in their favor for a century. Trump's base hears it differently. Trump's base hears it as a Trump promise to un-rig elections for a century.

Trump's base lives in an information bubble, and a large percentage of Trump voters live in geographic bubbles, surrounded by people who look like them and think like them (and vote like them). They can see that America is full of people who aren't like them, but they believe these people either aren't Americans or shouldn't be Americans -- if you're not a Republican voter, you probably shouldn't be allowed to vote. Or they believe that there are large numbers of non-Republican voters, but not enough to win elections without fake ballots, rigged vote-counting processes, and the votes of non-citizens.

I don't know of anyone on our side who thinks this way. I know there are many people who believe Elon Musk rigged the 2024 election (I don't believe it was rigged), or who believe that Trump would have lost if non-voters had been persuaded to vote -- but I don't know anyone who believes that Democrats should be victorious nationwide in every fair election for the foreseeable future. This is what Republicans believe about their party. We know better. We know that Republicans are real, and that they vote legitimately. We know they win some elections legitimately. Republicans can't accept the same fact about Democrats.

Trump is a cynic and a crook, but I think, on some level, he believes that the SAVE America Act would merely rid the country of illegitimate votes, and that America has an overwhelming GOP majority that would legitimately give every subsequent election victory to the Republicans. Trump needs to believe this because of the gaping wound his soul suffered when he lost in 2020, not to mention the lesser but still painful wound he suffered in 2016 when he won the presidency but lost the popular vote.

In addition to winning the Electoral College in a landslide, I won the popular vote if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 27, 2016

Maybe he knows better. Maybe he merely believes that he needs to con the world into thinking that he scored resounding victories in three straight elections, so that no one will ever again claim that he was a loser at any moment of his life. It's certain that he wants to rig future elections less out of loyalty to the GOP than because he wants to set up an electoral system that he can claim would have given him a victory if it had been in place in 2020 (and 2016).

I suspect that Trump doesn't believe that there's any such thing as objective truth -- truth is whatever people can be persuaded to believe, and he can make something true by first persuading himself that it's true and then persuading the country. So maybe he doesn't even have an opinion on whether the SAVE America Act produced clean elections or rigged elections -- he thinks it will produce elections won by Republicans, which is what he wants, and therefore the results must be legitimate. And his base has a different delusion -- that Democratic voters aren't real -- so they want what he wants.

"WE WANT CANDIDATES WHO AREN'T WOKE! ... NO, NOT LIKE THAT"

According to two new polls, Graham Platner is struggling in his race against Senate Susan Collins. Greg Sargent writes:

Two major polls of the Maine Senate race dropped this week, and they told the same story: The race is incredibly close, and Democrat Graham Platner has real work to do among the working class....

The [New York] Times survey has Platner up two among likely voters overall, 49–47, and the Fox poll has Collins up three, 50–47. It’s a dead heat—it’s winnable, but he should probably be leading by more given the state’s Democratic lean, which is being outweighed by the brutal press he’s sustained over his Nazi-like tattoo and alleged violence against women.

You might think the Fox poll has an anti-Democratic bias, but as I've said many times over the ycears, Fox surveys are surprisingly unskewed. A survey released the same day shows Democrat Jon Ossoff leading the Georgia Senate race by double digits.

Sargent focuses on Platner's apparent failure so far to win blue-collar Mainers over with economic populism:

But note this: In the Times poll, Platner trails among voters without a college degree, a proxy for the working class, by 37–58. In the Fox poll, that’s 41–56.

... [Platner] speaks in a left-populist idiom that seeks to connect with working people’s struggles. So his numbers among them are concerning.

But Sargent also notes this:

The Times poll has working-class voters saying Platner has “good character” by 37–57 and “the right kind of moral values” by 36–57.

Many Democrats thought that the way to appeal to voters who work with their hands is to run a candidate who works with his hands. That's not working in Maine. But we were also told that rough-hewn voters with dirt under their fingernails are turned off by the prissy moral scolding of ordinary Democrats, and that in 2024 they responded well to Donald Trump's frequent appearances on podcasts hosted by bros who aren't feminist and use a lot of slurs.

At one time, I thought the unsavory stories about Platner's past might actually be helping him. In early June, I wrote:

Do you remember the moment, about a year ago, when Democrats were talking about the need to find a "liberal Joe Rogan"? Many Democrats felt that the party lost the 2024 election because Donald Trump and other Republicans were eager to sit down with podcast bros who aren't "woke" and don't self-censor.... Personally, I never wanted Democrats to cozy up to podcasters who demean women or gleefully use slurs, but many very smart people thought the party should embrace them....

Well, now there's a candidate who, in the past, demeaned women, Blacks, and others on Reddit, and who thought it was badass to get (and keep) a Nazi symbol tattooed on his body -- and polls say the voters of his state are embracing him....

Platner has not been well behaved for much of his life -- but not being well behaved is what a lot of Democrats seemed to like about the podcast bros, or at least what they thought their fans liked about them. Now there's a badly behaved candidate in a statewide race, and he's leading in the polls.

But now he's struggling, and making no inroads with blue-collar voters -- which tells me that these mostly right-leaning voters decide whether to forgive politicians' transgressions by first looking at the transgressors' party affiliation.

We knew that, obviously. For years, blue-collar whites eagerly recited the latest Fox talking points on the mid-level corruption of Hunter Biden -- but now Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr. are engaged in corrupt activities on a massive scale, and they don't care. We knew that Trump voters were upset about the Epstein files when they thought only their political enemies were implicated, and now that that's clearly not true, they're a lot less interested.

So they think Platner has bad moral character, but apparently they don't believe that people they like who have spoken or behaved the way Platner has, and have expressed much less remorse for it, have bad moral character. Many of them will reject Platner while casting a House vote for Paul LePage, the Trump-like former governor with a long history of offensive and racist remarks, because they like his politics. They'll condemn Platner's reported rough treatment of former girlfriends while shrugging off Donald Trump's sexual assaults; they'll believe Trump's denials, but not Platner's.

So economic populism doesn't appeal to the people who'd most benefit from it if the economic populist is a lefty, and having poor values (now or in the past) is only relatable to right-leaning voters if the current or former bad boy is right-coded. Which we probably should have guessed.

THE NEXT TRUMP MIGHT JUST BE A COLLECTION OF GRIEVANCES

Quick -- who was the leader of the Tea Party?

You probably don't remember any particular person being a leader of the movement that effectively took over and rebranded the Republican Party in the years after George W. Bush left office. Maybe you remember Jenny Beth Martin, the co-founder and president of the Tea Party Patriots, but she never became a household name, and the group she led was just one of many Tea Party organizations.

In fact, there was no well-known, charismatic leader of the Tea Party. There was no single Republican in Congress who was regarded as the movement's leader, the way Newt Gingrich was clearly the leader of the Republicans who seized Congress in the 1994 midterms.

The Tea Party -- and the Republican Party -- didn't have an obvious leader in the Obama years. Yet that didn't prevent Republicans from having a fairly successful eight years. Sure, Barack Obama won two presidential elections. But Republicans did just fine downballot, as this report noted during Obama's last few weeks in office:

... the Democratic Party has lost a net total of 13 Governorships and 816 state legislative seats since President Obama entered office, the most of any president since Dwight Eisenhower....

President Obama entered the White House with his party touting a 60 seat majority in the Senate and 257 seat majority in the House. Democrats now hold a 48 seat minority in the Senate and 194 seat minority in the House — a net loss of 12 and 64 seats respectively....

The midterm elections delivered significant blows to Congressional Democrats. In 2010, Democrats lost 6 seats in the Senate and 63 seats in the House, costing them the chamber. In 2014, Democrats lost another 13 seats in the House and a staggering 9 seats in the Senate; this time losing them the Senate and completing a Republican takeover of Congress.

We're told that Republicans will be adrift once Donald Trump leaves office or dies, because the GOP is nothing more than a personality cult focused on a charismatic leader. The Obama years tell me that Republicans don't necessarily need a charismatic leader. Without such a leader, they can reorganize themselves around a collection of grievances.

(What were their grievances in the Obama years? Um ... they didn't like Obamacare? And ... um ... the president was Black? Also ... oh, yeah! Benghazi! ACORN! The Ground Zero mosque!)

As Donald Trump's first term was ending, you could see the GOP attempting to reorganize around a collection of grievances. Notice when Chris Rufo first appeared on Tucker Carlson's Fox News show to talk about DEI: September 2, 2020. At that time, Joe Biden had been leading Trump in the polls all year, and led by 7.2 points in the Real Clear Politics average. The election looked like a blowout -- time to get the Fox audience worked up about something other than the issues being discussed on the camapign trail!

The Fox war on Drag Queen Story Hours started in 2019; over the next few years, this evolved into a war on trans youth that, along with the war on DEI, helped elect a Republican governor in seemingly blue Virginia a year after Biden defeated Trump.

At a time when it appeared that Trump was a spent force in American politics, GOP propagandists made sure that the party (and the conservative movement) still seemed to be on offense. That's what they'll do when Trump is gone.

They're already hard at work ginning up anger. I told you yesterday about the campaign to make the continued existence of birthright citizenship into a major right-wing grievance. Right-wing cartoonists and memers are really working this angle:

And, of course, it's all part of the Elon Musk-driven global campaign to purge America and Europe of non-white people:

Pretty much. It’s not promoted in any other countries …

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) June 28, 2026

The right is working all kinds of angles these days. The New York Times has recently reported on campaigns to make same-sex marriage illegal again and prosecute women who have abortions. Those will probably alienate swing voters, but Republicans might get a more positive response to their renewed Muslim-bashing -- Texas Republicans in particular seem to believe that the most important issue in their state is a nonexistent push for "sharia law" -- and to denunciations of "communism" in the Democratic Party, which will probably resonate with some of the Hispanic voters Trump has alienated with his anti-immigrant extremism. And there's always sexism, which I suspect wins over more swing voters than you'd think:

The worst Supreme Court Justices of all time have all been women. That’s just a fact. Republican presidents should take the hint. https://t.co/hMHwMBVx5J

— Matt Walsh (@MattWalshBlog) June 30, 2026

None of this is a substitute for a real party leader, but it will all sustain GOP solidarity in the post-Trump era until that leader comes along.

RIGHT-WINGERS HAVEN'T BUILT A POPULAR MOVEMENT TO ELIMINATE BIRTHRIGHT CITIZENSHIP, BUT THEY SEEM TO BE WORKING ON THAT NOW

Three Supreme Court justices have concluded that birthright citizenship isn't a right granted by the 14th Amendment. A fourth justice is on the fence. It's clear now that the Court could take birthright citizenship away in the not-too-distant future. The pseudonymous Bluesky poster who uses the name Richard M. Nixon is right:

Barring changes to the Court you will see another go at birthright citizenship within 10 years.

— Richard M. Nixon (@dicknixon.bsky.social) June 30, 2026 at 10:41 AM

Dave Weigel responds:

If Rs win in 2028 and replace Sotomayor, it's gone.

In a video essay, Jamelle Bouie agrees, saying, "A 5-4 decision means that this isn't over, that this is only the beginning." But in the following posts, he questions whether the right has laid all the necessary groundwork to make this happen:

i will say that although this is the beginning of the right’s assault on birthright citizenship, one difference with roe v. wade is that the latter was fueled by a mass movement with a broad, institutionalized base in the nation’s evangelical and catholic churches. the question, i think…

[image or embed]

— jamelle (@jamellebouie.net) June 30, 2026 at 6:34 PM

…is if there is a similar mass base to organize and sustain a campaign against birthright citizenship and, on the other side, is there a mass base to organize and sustain a campaign in its defense?

— jamelle (@jamellebouie.net) June 30, 2026 at 6:34 PM

I'm not sure the right needs a popular movement analogous to the anti-abortion movement in order to win on this issue. The current Supreme Court does a lot of radical-right things for which there's no popular groundswell.

But it appears that right-wing propagandists are trying to inspire the formation of an anti-birthright citizenship mass movement right now. Here's Matt Walsh (original tweet here):

"Use whatever force is necessary."

[image or embed]

— Justin Baragona (@justinbaragona.bsky.social) June 30, 2026 at 12:29 PM

And here's Sean Davis, co-founder of The Federalist (original tweet here):

Quite the meltdown on the postliberal right today....

[image or embed]

— Paul Graf (@paulginva.bsky.social) June 30, 2026 at 3:56 PM

These people are telling their followers that drastic action is needed, immediately, to effectively reverse this decision.

And please note they're talking about the ruling as if the Court changed citizenship law in America yesterday, rather than merely preserving the status quo. Here's Matt Walsh again:

I at least got to live for 40 years in a country that looks and functions something like America. The fact that my children are having that opportunity stolen from them fills me with rage so deep I can’t describe it. I truly hate the people who have done this to us.

— Matt Walsh (@MattWalshBlog) June 30, 2026

But Matt, you didn't get to "live for 40 years" in a country without birthright citizenship. You got to live in a country with the same birthright citizenship provisions we have now.

I think Walsh and Davis know this, but they know that most of their followers don't. They know that Look what they took from you is one of the most potent messages on the right. So Walsh pretends that he "got to live for 40 years in a country that looks and functions something like America," and Davis pretends that John Roberts and Amy Coney Barrett joined with the Court's liberals "to nullify the 14th Amendment and extra-constitutionally replace it with their own language."

A cynic would say that this is all part of the long game for the Court's Republicans, and for Republicans in general:

* Trump issues an executive order eliminating birthright citizenship.

* The Supreme Court preserves it but points the way to its elimination.

* The entire process puts the subject on the national agenda and turns it into an issue that drives Republican voters to the polls.

* Until the Court finally overturns birthright citizenship, support for it is now painted as one of those weird, elitist ideas they have in the Democrat Party, rather than the law of the land since the nineteenth century.

Even if Democrats score a trifecta in 2028 and expand the Supreme Court so it's no longer an unelected far-right legislature, this can be a lingering grievance for Republican and right-centrist voters. Abolishing birthright citizenship will now be down-the-middle mainstream Republicanism, a demand that will be a huge applause line in the convention acceptance speech of the party's 2028 presidential nominee.

IS IT POSSIBLE THAT SAM ALITO ISN'T RETIRING?

Okay, this is weird:

NPR on Tuesday retracted an article that said that Samuel Alito, an associate justice of the United States Supreme Court, had retired.

The article, written by the veteran Supreme Court reporter Nina Totenberg, said that Justice Alito had announced his retirement. He has made no such announcement about his role, and a Supreme Court spokesman on Tuesday called NPR’s article “inaccurate.”

By midmorning Tuesday, the article had been replaced with a taciturn editor’s note: “Earlier today we erroneously published a story saying that Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito was retiring. He has not announced his retirement and we have retracted the story.”

The retraction is here. The original story is here.

In February, Elie Mystal concluded that Alito is planning to retire, based on the fact that the publication date of Alito's forthcoming book would place his publicity tour in the opening week's of the Supreme Court's upcoming term. Alito probably won't want to delay publication of the book and he'll certainly want to publicize it, so I assume the retirement is going ahead, and he simply didn't want the news to break just yet. He knows that we might have a Democratic Senate next year, which means that a replacement as ideologically extreme as he is might not be confirmable for two years. And he knows that a Democrat might win the White House in 2028.

But is it possible he's not retiring after all?

Maybe he's not certain that President Trump will appoint an ideologically compatible replacement. Trump denounced the Federalist Society last month, after the Supreme Court ruled against his tariffs. The FedSoc is an ideological-conformity clearinghouse for right-wing judicial appointees, and Alito might be afraid that Trump will bypass it when he chooses the next High Court justice.

On the other hand, as The Hill has noted, "All but one of Trump’s confirmed circuit court nominees have appeared at a Federalist Society event.... The only exception is Emil Bove, one of Trump’s former personal lawyers whom he nominated to a seat on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit." Does Alito fear that Trump will pick one of his own mob lawyers for the Court?

Or does Alito fear that the increasingly erratic Trump might mismanage the process of getting a successor approved this year? Republicans presumably want the successor confirmed with the brutal efficiency they displayed when they rammed through Amy Coney Barrett's nomination in 2020. Or maybe they want to allow a little more time, in the hope that the pick will be controversial, and Democrats will overreact. Some Republicans think they benefited electorally from the Democratic reaction to Brett Kavanaugh in 2018. Here's a NBC story from October of that year:

Republicans got everything they wanted from Brett Kavanaugh's hotly contested confirmation — a fired-up GOP base and a conservative Supreme Court justice for life....

Republicans celebrated the reaction to Kavanaugh's testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee after limited polling suggested their voters had closed the enthusiasm gap with Democrats.

Republicans were trounced in House races that year, but they picked up two Senate seats. I've seen it argued that angry demonstrations against Kavanaugh in the halls of the Senate and allegations of sexual misconduct led to a backlash that helped GOP Senate candidates. I'm not sure it's true, but Republicans might think it is.

Maybe Alito doesn't trust that second-term Trump can manage a nomination fight well, or keep the Senate calendar clear for a confirmation process.

More likely, Alito and his fellow Republicans wants to keep non-Republicans guessing for as long as possible while the GOP gets its ducks lined up in a row. I assume we'll get the official announcement later this summer, unless the people running the GOP judicial machine conclude that Trump is too erratic and really can't be trusted.