IF TRUMP PICKS J.D. VANCE AS HIS RUNNING MATE, HE'LL PROBABLY REGRET IT

This happened over the weekend:

Sen. J.D. Vance cemented his status as frontrunner to become Donald Trump's running mate on Sunday, coming top in a poll of attendees at Turning Point Action's People's Convention in Detroit....

When 1,986 people at the Detroit event were asked who they favored out of Vance, North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum and Sens. Marco Rubio and Tim Scott, some 43 percent said they favored senator from Ohio.

Scott was a distant second on 15.4 percent, Rubio took third with 7.7 percent, and Burgum, who in particular has been talked up by Trump in recent weeks, took seven percent.

Does that mean Trump should pick Vance? According to the conventional rules of politics, it probably means he shouldn't. Just about everyone at the Turning Point gathering is a committed Trumper. Why would Trump want a running mate who's the favorite of people who are already certain to vote for him? The way he'd gain from a running mate pick is by selecting someone who primarily appeals to voters other than his base. That would suggest someone like Scott or Rubio -- someone who's seen as a "mainstream" Republican, whatever that means these days.

(If I had to guess, I'd say that Trump will pick Burgum, just because he looks like a vice president out of "central casting," as Trump likes to say, and because he's the least likely to upstage Trump. Notice that we speculated for months about a female running mate, and now the top contenders all seem to be men. I assume that non-whites will drop out of contention in the same way, so it probably won't be Scott or Ben Carson, and possibly not Rubio, either. But who knows?)

But conventional political fundamentals aren't the main reason Trump would regret picking Vance. I think he'd regret picking Vance because Vance is far too ambitious to be a meek helpmeet like pre-January 6 Mike Pence. Trump wants a vice president who's a potted plant. I read Ross Douthat's Vance interview, which makes clear that Vance wouldn't be what Trump wants.

That's not because Vance said mean things about Trump on social media years ago. Trump likes it when people attack him and then capitulate to him -- examples include Lindsey Graham and Marco Rubio. What the Douthat interview makes clear is that Vance may not be ambitious in a flamboyant, spotlight-seeking way -- he's no Marjorie Taylor Greene or Vivek Ramaswamy -- but he still greatly admires himself and thinks he has all the answers. The subtext of nearly everything Vance says to Douthat is: Why yes, I have a very large brain and many highly developed ideas about politics. He comes off as a less showoffy Steve Bannon -- and remember what happened when Bannon worked in the White House. Vance is a Trump loyalist now, but I think his ultimate loyalty would be to himself.

Vance came from poverty, but he quickly figured out the point of an elite education: to seek mentors and social circles that can advance your career, then cling to them until you find someone new who can help you more. Vance has passed through one career-advancing milieu after another -- the Amy Chua/Jed Rubenfeld crowd at Yale Law, Peter Thiel's demimonde, and now the world of Trump. Before Vance became a Trumper, he was an anti-Trumper because that seemed like the path to success. Vance isn't Lindsey Graham, a lifelong sidekick who latched on to Trump only because the man for whom he'd been a sidekick, John McCain, was dead. Vance wants power of his own.

Vance, as VP, would probably be an inveterate leaker -- for career advancement, he might think it's a good idea to butter up influential journalists. Vance will probably disagree with Trump on some issues. To Douthat, Vance comes off as a hater of the elites, someone who agrees with Bernie Sanders supporters more than mainstream Republicans:

The people on the left, I would say, whose politics I’m open to — it’s the Bernie Bros. But generally, center-left liberals who are doing very well, and center-right conservatives who are doing very well, have an incredible blind spot about how much their success is built on a system that is not serving people who they should be serving.

In the interview, Vance talks about raising the minimum wage to $20 an hour. Does he really believe all this? I think he thinks he does. Trump, however, loves the economic elites and doesn't want to help working people. If Trump struggles in a second term for any reason, Vance might try to subvert his boss, even if he doesn't openly challenge Trump the way Bannon did in an interview with, of all publications, the liberal American Prospect, just before Trump fired him.

That didn't work out for Bannon, of course -- he's now a Trump lapdog again. But if Vance sees Trump struggling -- possibly after a strong 2026 midterm performance by the Democrats -- he really might go rogue. The Douthat interview makes clear that he has too much regard for his own ideas to be Trump's beta male for very long -- nd remember, he's only 39 years old.

Vance sees a bright future for himself. Trump shouldn't assume that Vance thinks that future will be as a lifelong MAGA loyalist.

DOES TRUMP EVEN WANT TO BE PRESIDENT?

June 18 will be the publication date for a new book about Donald Trump and his years on The Apprentice. In The Washington Post, Ron Charles recently reviewed the book, Apprentice in Wonderland: How Donald Trump and Mark Burnett Took America Through the Looking Glass by Ramin Setoodeh. The review suggests that while Trump may have run for president twice since his first victory, he didn't particularly enjoy his time in office.

Any other former president would surely be eager to wax eloquent about his tenure as leader of the free world. But Setoodeh says that Trump “just wants me to understand how he made great TV.” Every time they meet, he asks, “Do you think I would have been president without ‘The Apprentice’?” ...

“In our days together,” he writes, “Trump is happiest when he talks about ‘The Apprentice’ and crankiest when he relives his years as the commander in chief.” ...

Trump’s memory of what happened in the Oval Office is muddled, but he can recall the details of every battle on “The Apprentice.” His face flushed with excitement, “he sounds like a retired high school football coach, lounging in a diner.”

Among the book’s most pathetic scenes — and there are many — is one that shows Trump standing before “his wall of egotism,” gazing upon a framed page of his Nielsen ratings from “The Apprentice.” ... the former resident of the White House says, “This is my whole life.”

“He doesn’t dare touch this valuable document, something that seems to carry as much value to him as the U.S. Constitution, if not more.” And yet, even as they’re both looking directly at the Nielsen stats, Trump exaggerates the number of viewers as reflexively as he lies about his vote counts.

It's obvious why Trump is running again: He wants to use the powers of the presidency to get himself out of legal trouble, and he wants to go out a winner rather than a loser. But in some ways, he seems to be running for president because it offers the possibility of feeling like the king of the world again -- the way he felt when The Apprentice was a ratings hit (and apparently didn't feel when he was the Leader of the Free World).

So he wants to be president, but it's clear he doesn't want to do the job of president. He has happy memories of The Apprentice, but he doesn't seem to have happy memories of his presidential term.

I've been arguing lately that what might save us if there's a second Trump presidency is Trump's lack of interest in much of what his advisers want to do, i.e., the mad schemes of Project 2025. The counterargument is that these advisers will set their sinister plans in motion and merely ask Trump to sign off on them. He doesn't need to do any of the work.

That might be what happens. On the other hand, Trump likes to feel as if he's in charge. He wants his underlings to focus on his priorities. He might look at their plans to, say, use the Comstock Act to ban the abortion pill and say: Wait -- what's in this for me? It might really piss him off if his people are prioritizing policy goals that, in his opinion, don't make him look good.

On The Apprentice, by contrast, everything was designed to make him look good. That's what he wants. He'll pick a lot of fights with his subordinates if he feels he's not getting that. In some policy areas, at least, this could be what saves us.

DID THESE CEOs ONLY NOTICE TRUMP'S IGNORANCE AND INCOHERENCE NOW?

Breaking news: Donald Trump is not the sharpest knife in the drawer.

Former President Donald Trump failed to impress everyone in a room full of top CEOs Thursday at the Business Roundtable’s quarterly meeting, multiple attendees told CNBC.

“Trump doesn’t know what he’s talking about,” said one CEO who was in the room, according to a person who heard the executive speaking. The CEO also said Trump did not explain how he planned to accomplish any of his policy proposals, that person said.

Several CEOs “said that [Trump] was remarkably meandering, could not keep a straight thought [and] was all over the map,” CNBC’s Andrew Ross Sorkin reported Friday on CNBC’s “Squawk Box.”

... “At one point, he discussed his plan to bring the corporate tax rate down from 21% to 20% ... and was asked about why he had chosen 20%,” Sorkin said Friday on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.” “And he said, ‘Well, it’s a round number.’”

I'm happy that this is being reported, but, um ... have these CEOs been living in caves? Trump has been like this for years.

"Meandering"? That's nothing new for Trump. A Canadian reporter called his 2015 Trump Tower campaign kickoff announcement "an epic, meandering, bizarre speech." Chris Cillizza used to publish pieces at CNN with headlines like "The 45 Most Incoherent Lines from Donald Trump’s Rambling Rose Garden Speech." And here's an account of Trump "meandering" remarks at a 2019 White House social media summit:

Rambling from one topic to the next, Trump ... discussed the stock markets, the census, his pardon of Scooter Libby, his hair, and hit on a number of other issues....

The President, who described himself as “technologically OK,” spent an inordinate amount of time suggesting – without evidence – that there was a conspiracy to keep his following count and engagement low on Twitter.

“I used to watch it,” Trump told attendees, referring to his followers. “It’d be like a rocket ship when I put out a beauty.”

Trump, then added, “When I put out something, a good one that people like, right? A good tweet. It goes up. It used to go up, it would say: 7,000, 7,008, 7,017, 7,024, 7,032, 7,044. Right? Now it goes: 7,000, 7,008, 6,998. Then they go: 7,009, 6,074. I said, what’s going on? It never did that before. It goes up, and then they take it down. Then it goes up. I never had it. Does anyone know what I’m talking about with this?”

It was not clear if the President was talking about his follower count or his retweet count.

And when it comes to governing, has Trump ever known what he was talking about? Even before he was sworn into office in 2017, Vox reported that Trump "seems to be stunningly ignorant about what a president actually does." Vox cited a Wall Street Journal that reported on Trump's cluelessness:

In the meeting with Obama, the Journal reports, Trump seemed surprised by how much the president has to do: “Mr. Obama walked his successor through the duties of running the country, and Mr. Trump seemed surprised by the scope.”

... Nor did Trump realize he had to hire a staff. The Wall Street Journal wrote that Trump aides “were … as unaware that the entire presidential staff working in the West Wing had to be replaced at the end of Mr. Obama’s term.”

Obnce he'd been president for a few months, U.S. News wrote of his "jaw-dropping obliviousness." As he approaches a possible second term, he has vague ideas about how to get revenge on his enemies and absolution from the legal system, and his advisers have detailed plans for remaking the federal government, but he still doesn't know how anything in government really works.

And he's always been fond of tossing out any number he thinks will sound good, especially if it's "round." In 2018, when it was reported that Trump's Commerce Department wanted a 24 percent maximum tariff on imported steel, Jonathan Swan, then at Axios, wrote:

I’m told that’s accurate, but with one small tweak: Sources tell me the president has told confidants he actually wants a *25* percent global tariff on steel because it's a round number and sounds better.

And this past February, The New York Times reported that Trump was taking a similar approach to reproductive rights:

One thing Mr. Trump likes about a 16-week federal ban on abortions is that it’s a round number. “Know what I like about 16?” Mr. Trump told one of these people, who was given anonymity to describe a private conversation. “It’s even. It’s four months.”

If CEOs who planned to support Trump are having second thoughts, that's great (though I bet they'll give him money anyway). But if they're surprised by his ignorance and lack of focus, all I can say is: Where have you been all these years?

THERE'S AN OBVIOUS REASON WHY BIDEN SEEMS TO BE DOING BETTER AMONG OLDER VOTERS

Axios reports that President Biden seems to be doing surprisingly well among older voters.

The most recent New York Times/Siena poll shows that Biden has a 9-point lead in a head-to-head matchup against Trump among likely voters aged 65 or older.

In a Quinnipiac University poll released last month, Biden is beating Trump by 12 points with the 65+ set.

This is unusual.

Republicans have — with the exception of 1992, 1996 and 2000 — won the senior vote in every presidential race for the last half-century, according to exit polls.

Why is it happening? Here's a possible reason:

Preserving democracy has emerged as one of the clearest dividing lines between younger and older voters.

When asked by Quinnipiac to identify "the most urgent issue facing the country today," 10% of registered voters aged 18-34 said democracy.

For those 65 and up, that number rose to 35% — higher than any other single issue including the economy and immigration.

Also:

Biden campaign pollster Geoff Garin pointed to two key factors going for the president with older voters:

"First, older voters strongly support what Biden has done to lower drug costs for seniors on Medicare," he told Axios.

"Second, older voters pay much more attention to the news than any other group, so they are the most aware of any group of how unhinged and extreme Donald Trump has become."

I think there's more to it than this. Older voters who succeeded at attaining middle-class or upper-middle-class status are doing okay financially now. They may have been too young to participate in the remarkable economy of the 1950s and 1960s, with its broad middle class (at least for white people), but their parents did, and some of that wealth was passed on. The economy of the Reagan and post-Reagan eras wasn't quite as good for the middle class, but inflation was low and housing prices weren't as awful as they are now. If you're in this age group and you were able to put a decent amount of money away for retirement, things probably look pretty good for you now. You have the money to do the things you want to do, and you can afford to pay higher prices for groceries and other items.

I'm not saying that this is a generation of "greedy geezers" who are backing Biden because they like their privileged status and don't want anyone to take it away. I think many older voters want the sense of prosperity to be extended to younger Americans, who, after all, include their own children and grandchildren. But these are the voters for whom the economy actually feels strong. That must be helping Biden with voters of this age group.

By contrast, polls suggest that young Americans might vote for the authoritarian-populist candidate, Donald Trump. Albena Azmanova, who teaches political and social theory at the University of Kent, writes in The Guardian that similar things are happening all over Europe, though not, she argues, because young people embrace the ideas of authoritarian populism:

In both European and national elections, voters under 30 have given their support to far-right parties such as Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) in Germany, Rassemblement National (National Rally) in France, Vox in Spain, the Brothers of Italy, Chega (Enough) in Portugal, Vlaams Belang (Flemish Interest) in Belgium and the Finns party in Finland.

... In Germany, the ultra-right AfD enjoys unrivalled popularity among the young, gaining the support of 17% of 16- to 24-year-olds who voted.... 32% of the French youth, irrespective of gender, supported National Rally....

Rising support for the far right is all the stranger because surveys indicate that the left’s trademark themes of social and economic justice are now more important for voters than the far-right’s flagship issue: immigration....

What ails the young is ... economic uncertainty, or rather “livelihood insecurity”. If older people are living in fear of job loss, younger generations fear they will never land a job, no matter how many master’s degrees they might invest money, effort and hope in. Authors of the 2024 study Jugend in Deutschland (Youth in Germany) established that fears about future prosperity (rather than cultural chauvinism) were driving a shift to the right....

For now, all we can glean from the populist revolt of the young is that the political mainstream is not providing satisfying answers to their grievances.

I don't know about Europe, but America's authoritarian party won't be able to lower prices, make housing more affordable, or create more good-paying jobs for young people. Unlike the Democratic Party, the GOP doesn't even want to do any of those things. And the GOP will be godawful on every other issue young people care about -- the climate, racism, LGBTQ rights, abortion rights, Israel and Palestine, you name it.

But I'm afraid the only way young people will learn how awful Republicans are is by helping to elect them. Let's hope it doesn't come to that.

IF TRUMP WINS, LET'S HOPE WE HAVE A SHARK-ANECDOTE PRESIDENCY AND NOT A PROJECT 2025 PRESIDENCY

As you probably know, Donald Trump said some bizarre things about boat batteries and sharks at his Las Vegas rally over the weekend:

Sharks, Donald Trump claimed, were attacking more frequently than usual (not true) and posed a newfound risk because boats were being required to use batteries (not true), which would cause them to sink because they were too heavy (really, really not true...)

... Trump, undeterred by truth or science, invoked his intellectual credentials by mentioning his “relationship to MIT.” (Trump’s uncle was a professor at the university, pioneering rotational radiation therapy, which seems a somewhat tenuous connection for conferring shark- or battery-related expertise to his nephew.)

This is pure Dunning-Kruger-ism -- Trump doesn't have any expertise on these subjects, but he thinks he does. He's been like this for years. Plus he thinks this is tremendously entertaining.

I don't see this as a sign of dementia. I see it as a sign that Trump's happy place is being an amateur observational comic, the wittiest guy at the dinner after the country club's senior golf tournament.

Trump's happy place is not policy. It wouldn't have been policy if he'd been a serious candidate for president thirty years ago. Tom Nichols writes:

... Trump’s staff tries to put just enough policy fiber into Trump’s nutty verbal soufflés that they can always sell a talking point later, as if his off-ramps from reality are merely tiny bumps in otherwise sensible speeches. Trump himself occasionally seems surprised when these policy nuggets pop up in a speech; when reading the teleprompter, he sometimes adds comments such as “so true, so true,” perhaps because he’s encountering someone else’s words for the first time and agreeing with them.

I fear that Trump will be elected in November, but this is what gives me a small glimmer of hope.

We know that one of the things that rankled Trump during his presidency was the fact that aides and underlings sometimes wouldn't do exactly what he wanted them to do. J.D. Vance talks about this in his new interview with Ross Douthat:

I first met Trump in 2021. One of the stories he told me was about how some of our generals were changing the timings of troop redeployments in the Middle East so that they could tell him that the troop levels were coming down when in reality they were just changing the way in which troop levels jump up and down in the short term.

... The media has this view of Trump as motivated entirely by personal grievance, and the thing he talked the most about — this was not long after Jan. 6 — was “I’m the president, and I told the generals to do something, and they didn’t do it.”

We've been told that he's solved this problem -- everyone in his second administration will be a Trump loyalist. However, we're also told that the underlings will be ideologues committed to the mad schemes of Project 2025.

We think it will be a sign of loyalty to Trump if his aides and underlings relentlessly pursue the Project 2025 goals. But what if Project 2025 isn't what Trump wants? Remember, his people have a boilerplate answer whenever someone in the press writes a story based on the assumption that he shares his advisers' and allies' goals:

Campaign managers Susie Wiles and Chris LaCivita said in a statement, “Unless a message is coming directly from President Trump or an authorized member of his campaign team, no aspect of future presidential staffing or policy announcements should be deemed official.”

What if, this time, he decides that being a religious-right policy zealot is what constitutes disloyalty to him, because the zealots' priorities aren't his priorities? What if he just wants freedom from legal troubles, a little racism (mass deportations, a Muslim ban), and money flowing into his bank accounts? What if he doesn't care about advancing the cause of Christian nationalism or dismantling the administrative state? What if all that bores him, because he just wants to be America's emcee, telling shark jokes while taking bribes and getting revenge against an enemy or two, with a Get Out of Jail Free card thrown in?

If Trump wins, I think that's the best-case scenario.

SADLY, AFTER THE HUNTER BIDEN VERDICT, THE GOP'S JUSTICE-SYSTEM PARANOIA IS STILL ALIVE AND WELL

Hunter Biden has been found guilty on all charges, and now journalists and headline writers are trying to outdo one another in describing the damage they say this verdict has done to GOP theories about a justice system rigged against Republicans. Politico says, "Hunter Biden Verdict Throws ‘Sand in the Gears’ of GOP’s Attacks on Legal System." Jonathan Chait of New York magazine asserts that the "Hunter Biden Conviction Blows Up Republican Conspiracy Theories." According to The New York Times, the "Hunter Biden Conviction Undercuts a Trump Narrative, and a Fund-Raising Pitch." Raw Story cites "critics" who say, "Hunter Biden Verdict Puts a Nail in Coffin of Trump's Weaponized DOJ Claim."

The Hunter Biden conviction does none of these things.

Once a conspiracy theory is accepted by a segment of the population -- something that seems to happen on the right a couple of times a week -- it can't be dislodged by contrary facts. Remember the 1990s, when conspiracy theorists concluded that mercury (thimerosal) in childhood vaccines was responsible for a rise in autism? And then the Food and Drug Administration ordered thimerosal to be removed from vaccines -- and the conspiracy theory persisted anyway, even after scientists ruled out mercury as an autism trigger? And now conspiracy theorists don't talk about mercury all that much, but they still insist that something in vaccines must be bad for kids (and adults as well), and now a vaccine conspiracy theorist might have enough support in the polls to qualify for the upcoming presidential debates?

That's how much good facts do when you're fighting a conspiracy theory.

You'll say, "But this makes it impossible for Trump to tell swing voters he's being legally persecuted by Democrats." Trump is saying that, but the message isn't intended for swing voters. The swing voters who are leaning toward Trump are doing so because they think he'll magically lower grocery prices, and because they think he's more vigorous and sharp-witted than President Biden (a perception that derives as much from their Apprentice memories as from anything he's actually said or done recently). The "Trump is a victim of lawfare" conspiracy theory is meant strictly for the superfans, and it's not going away.

You probably already know the Trumpists' message since the verdict:

Incredibly, they are declaring that this guilty verdict slapped on Biden’s son also proves that the system is rigged against Trump. Which reveals something essential about how dependent the MAGA worldview is on elaborate fantasies about the movement’s alleged persecution.

“Hunter Biden guilty. Yawn,” tweeted MAGA thought leader Charlie Kirk. “The true crimes of the Biden Crime Family remain untouched. This is a fake trial trying to make the Justice system appear ‘balanced.’ Don’t fall for it.”

“The gun charges are a giant misdirection,” added Stephen Miller. He added that the verdict is an easy opportunity for the Justice Department to hoodwink “a pliant media that is all too willing to be duped. Don’t be gaslit. This is all about protecting Joe Biden and only Joe Biden.”

Trump's reaction was this:

This trial has been nothing more than a distraction from the real crimes of the Biden Crime Family, which has raked in tens of millions of dollars from China, Russia and Ukraine. Crooked Joe Biden’s reign over the Biden Family Criminal Empire is all coming to an end on November 5th, and never again will a Biden sell government access for personal profit.

The message of every conspiracy theory is that the "official" story is wrong. That's why you can't debunk a conspiracy theory with new information -- that information is also "official," so it also has to be wrong. In fact, efforts to argue that new information definitively disproves the conspiracy theory just prove that the conspirators are trying even harder to lie to you.

This verdict would damage Trump if Democrats could persuade more swing voters that no matter what the price of eggs may have been under Trump, he's a crazy conspiratorialist and so are his fellow Republicans. The Democratic base is fully on board with that idea, but I don't think middle-of-the-road voters are. If Democrats can sell that idea, maybe Trump's "weaponized justice system" complaints will backfire. In the meantime, we have sentencing decisions to look forward to -- Trump's and Hunter Biden's. If Hunter gets a lighter sentence, Trump gets grievance points -- and even "mainstream" Republicans will say he's being subject to "lawfare." So this aspect of the campaign will be with us for some time to come.

I GUESS WE KNOW NOW THAT ALITO PLANS TO RESIGN AND LET LEONARD LEO PICK HIS REPLACEMENT

I can't really get excited about the mask-off conversations Samuel and Martha-Ann Alito had with documentarian Lauren Windsor -- obviously the Alitos have acknowledged that they're right-wing partisans, but Senate Judiciary Committee chair Dick Durbin is too conflict-averse to hold hearings on Alito or Clarence Thomas, and no other elected Democrat will even make noise about them.

In the midst of what should be a massive judicial legitimacy crisis, the front page of Durbin's Senate website makes clear what he regards as the real burning issue of the day:

Dick Durbin -- fighting for you!

But there's a small newsbreak in the story about Windsor's conversation with Justice Alito's wife:

Referencing her husband, Mrs. Alito says, “He’s like, ‘Oh, please don’t put up a flag.’ I said, ‘I won’t do it because I am deferring to you. But when you are free of this nonsense, I’m putting it up and I’m gonna send them a message every day, maybe every week, I’ll be changing the flags.’ They’ll be all kinds...."

When would Samuel Alito be "free of this nonsense," i.e., public scrutiny of what he and his wife say and do? Unless Martha-Ann thinks the day is coming when journalists, documentarians, and people on social media will be afraid to subject them to public scrutiny because of the likely legal (or extralegal) risks, she's undoubtedly referring to the years of Alito's retirement. Which means that he doesn't intend to stay on the court until death, like Ruth Bader Ginsburg.


And when would he resign? Maybe in the last year of Donald Trump's second term, when he'll be 78 and Trump can outsource the job of picking his forty-something replacement to Leonard Leo. Or he might wait until some other Republican president can outsource the job of picking his forty-something replacement to Leonard Leo. It's unimaginable that he would risk allowing a Democratic president and Senate to choose his replacement.

I think Alito and Thomas (who'll be 79 at the end of the next presidential term) might step down in Trump's second term if he's elected. That would mean a majority of the Court would be Trump appointees. In a better world, the thought of that might give one-issue pro-Palestine voters pause, but I'm sure it won't. And while you might argue that it will be a tall order for Leo to find two jurists as vile as Alito and Thomas, I'll just point to Matthew Kacsmaryk and Aileen Cannon and say that I'm sure he'll manage it.

I HOPE YOU'RE SITTING DOWN FOR THE SHOCKING NEWS THAT RICH PEOPLE WANT TRUMP TO WIN

He made them love him. According to Politico, they didn't want to do it:

Never mind: Wall Street titans shake off qualms and embrace Trump

Wall Street executives spent three years doing everything they could to distance themselves from former President Donald Trump. Now they’re busy coming up with reasons to vote for the guy.

Many high-dollar donors at banks, hedge funds and other financial firms had turned their backs on Trump as he spun unfounded claims that the 2020 election had been stolen and savaged the judicial system with attacks. Today, they’re setting aside those concerns....

Did Wall Street executives really spend "three years doing everything they could to distance themselves from former President Donald Trump"? Let's take a look at Politico's three examnples:

Blackstone Group CEO Stephen Schwarzman — who once labeled the U.S. Capitol insurrection that followed a Trump speech on Jan. 6, 2021, “an affront to the democratic values” of the country — is once again one of the former president’s most important allies on Wall Street.

Yes, Schwarzman issued a three-sentence press release on January 6, 2021, that included those words. But as a New York Times story noted less than two weeks later, Schwarzman "stuck with President Trump ... and stopped short of criticizing him even after the Capitol attack." The January 6 statement never mentions Trump, and its insistence that "there must be a peaceful transition of power" seems like nothing more than the typical Wall Streeter's usual call for "stability."

Top financiers like hedge fund billionaire Bill Ackman, who called on the then-president to resign over the riot, and Citadel’s Ken Griffin, who dubbed Trump a “three-time loser” in elections, are considering offering their support.

Griffin backed Ron DeSantis for a while, then considered shifting his support to Nikki Haley. He's a Republican. Is it a surprise that he's backing the Republican nominee? And there's been friction between Ackman and President Biden since 2017, when they had words at an investor conference. Ackman set a million dollars on fire by giving it to Biden's hapless primary challenger Dean Phillips. That was after he called on JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon to run for president, and also after he gave money to Robert Kennedy Jr.'s campaign. Is it safe to say that Ackman doesn't want Biden to win again? These guys may have kept their distance from Trump when he didn't seem like the best candidate to beat Biden, but now that it seems he actually could beat Biden, they're on board.

The Politico story makes clear that rich guys' support for Biden is for the most obvious reasons:

... Wall Street firms and Silicon Valley venture capitalists have grown increasingly antagonistic toward Biden as appointees like Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan and Securities and Exchange Commission Chair Gary Gensler move to tighten rules around markets and mergers.

This, by the way, is why we can't have nice things: For the first time in this century -- perhaps for the first time since the 1960s -- we have a president who wants to stanch the flow of money upward to the superrich. He hasn't made a lot of progress, largely because he's been blocked by Republicans and also by the pro-plutocrat (ex-)Democrats Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema. Yet even though he'll never be a Roosevelt, it's still too much for the Masters of the Universe. They won't tolerate a threat to even a tiny fraction of their current or future wealth.

Does the potential for fascism scare them? Nahhh.

Kathy Wylde, president and CEO of the Partnership for New York City, a nonprofit organization that represents the city’s top business leaders, said Republicans have told her that “the threat to capitalism from the Democrats is more concerning than the threat to democracy from Trump.”

I'm pretty sure we had capitalism in post-World War II America, even though tax rates on the wealthy and corporations were much higher than they are now. But the plutocrat class thinks otherwise. Meanwhile, as long as fascism doesn't threaten them, I'm sure they're fine with it.

And here's another reason why these guys might be embracing Trump:

... many Republican donors ... claim Trump’s conviction in New York, along with the cases brought by special counsel Jack Smith and Georgia prosecutors, were politically motivated and damaged the rule of law.

Eric Levine, a longtime GOP fundraiser and former Treasury official who had said he would never vote for Trump after the Jan. 6 riot, told POLITICO that the criminal cases brought against the former president were a factor in why he changed his mind.

Shaun Maguire, a partner at Sequoia Capital and former Hillary Clinton supporter, pledged $300,000 to pro-Trump efforts minutes after the verdict. His examination of the charges Trump faced had been a “radicalizing experience,” he wrote on X, formerly known as Twitter.

Trump and his supporters have argued that his indictments and recent conviction should make him more appealing to Black people. Maybe that's true -- not of Black people, but of plutocrats. After all, plutocrats regularly engage in skeezy behavior and use a lot of non-disclosure agreements. They generally think they should be above the law, and in this country they usually are. While Balzac didn't exactly say, "Behind every great fortune there is a crime," there's quite a bit of truth in that aphorism.

I think rich people feel for Trump because the sight of a rich guy in a suit actually being held accountable for his misdeeds horrifies them. Didn't The Wall Street Journal recently run an editorial arguing that, in effect, everybody has committed a crime that Alvin Bragg or someone like him could prosecute?

Actually, most of us don't commit crimes. But it may be accurate to say that our elites -- i.e., the Journal's target audience -- constitute a criminal class. Maybe, in addition to greed, that's why they're flocking to Trump again.

A SECOND-TERM TRUMP WILL HELP MURDER MEDICARE AND SOCIAL SECURITY -- EVEN IF HE NEVER CUTS THEM

Here's what "the party of the working class" intends to do to the tax system:

Republicans in Congress are preparing to not just extend former president Donald Trump’s 2017 tax cuts if they win control of Washington in November’s elections, but also lower rates even more for corporations....

The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) lowered rates for individuals of nearly all income levels, though it cut taxes most for the highest earners, and slashed the maximum corporate tax rate from 35 percent to 21 percent. The individual portions of that law expire in 2025, but Republicans who wrote the law made the business tax cuts permanent.

Now GOP lawmakers and some of Trump’s economic advisers are considering more corporate tax breaks — which could expand the national debt by roughly $1 trillion over the next decade, according to researchers at Stanford University and MIT....

That $1 trillion is in addition to the cost of extending the 2017 tax cuts. Brookings says:

An important effect of extending the 2017 tax cuts is that it’s estimated to cost an extra $3.8 trillion over the next decade. Without significantly cutting services, the federal debt would balloon to 211% of GDP by 2054, compared to about 100% of GDP right now.

But don't worry, fellow elderly people! We're told that the programs you rely on are safe:

... the Trump campaign has ruled out cuts to the Defense Department, as well as to Social Security and Medicare, programs for the elderly that are the main drivers of the nation’s rising spending. The debt grew by more than $7 trillion during Trump’s administration.

I genuinely believe that Trump intends to reject Social Security and Medicare cuts in a second term -- it's a popular promise, it's easy for him to understand, people have probably told him that he succeeded in the 2016 election where folks like Mitt Romney and John McCain failed because he made the promise -- and, of course, he's a guy who loves getting personal benefits from borrowed money.

Republicans want to push America into a debt crisis -- a real one, not the phony one they declare every time there's a Democratic president -- so they can achieve their decades-old dream of gutting Social Security and Medicare. Trump might be our president the next four years, and he might do so much damage to the system that he's allowed to be president after that, possibly for life, but he has to die someday. When he does, Medicare and Social Security are in the crosshairs.

They might be in the crosshairs very soon, if Trump wins and then dies in office, and President Burgum or President Rubio or whichever Koch errand boy Trump chooses as his running mate ascends to the presidency. Or maybe the GOP will wait until a Democrat is in the White House again, assuming that ever happens, so they can yell and scream and blame the Democrat for risking the fiscal solvency of America by refusing to slash these programs. (Tax increases on well-off people will, of course, be off the table.) It's going to get ugly. Trump could someday be known as one of the murderers of these programs, even if he never cuts a dime from them.

DO VOTERS WHO AREN'T COMMITTED PARTISANS REALLY CARE ABOUT TRUMP'S REVENGE PLANS?

Greg Sargent is appalled by the way Donald Trump's revenge plans are being presented in the media:

During just this week, two of Donald Trump’s friendliest interviewers handed him big prime-time opportunities to unequivocally renounce any intention to retaliate against Democrats for his criminal conviction by a jury of his peers in Manhattan. Both times, Trump demurred.

“Sometimes revenge can be justified,” Trump told Dr. Phil McGraw, after he suggested that seeking retribution for Trump’s criminal charges would harm the country. Though Trump graciously said he was “open” to showing forbearance toward Democrats, he suggested revenge would be tempting, given “what I’ve been through.”

Trump voiced similar sentiments to Sean Hannity after the Fox News host practically begged him to deny he’d pursue his opponents. “I would have every right to go after them,” Trump said. Though Trump nodded along with Hannity’s suggestion that “weaponizing” law enforcement is bad, Trump added, “I don’t want to look naïve” ...

Sargent doesn't like the framing:

Whereas Trump is being prosecuted on the basis of evidence that law enforcement gathered before asking grand juries to indict him, he is expressly declaring that he will prosecute President Biden and Democrats solely because this is what he endured, meaning explicitly that evidence will not be the initiating impulse.

You might think this distinction is obvious—one most voters will grasp instinctually. But why would they grasp this? It’s not uncommon to encounter news stories about Trump’s threats—see here, here, or here—that don’t explain those basic contours of the situation. Such stories often don’t take the elementary step of explaining the fundamental difference between bringing prosecutions in keeping with what evidence and the rule of law dictate and bringing them as purported “retaliation.” Why would casual readers simply infer that prosecutions against Trump are legally predicated while those he is threatening are not?

But do persuadable voters care why Trump wants to get revenge on his political enemies? Those of us who loathe Trump find this alarming, and his base thinks it's wonderful -- but I'm not sure other voters care. I've made the argument in the past that many voters think Trump's presidency, at least for the first three years, was fairly normal, for the simple reason that while Trump said and did terrible things, they mostly didn't affect average voters. A suburbanite in Iowa wasn't being subjected to family separation, and wasn't under attack in Charlottesville. COVID happened, but voters don't blame Trump for that. These voters remember lower prices and less war, so the rest of it was just noise.

If I'm right about this, these voters won't care about Trump's efforts to prosecute his political enemies, whether or not there's any evidence -- they're not being prosecuted, so why should they care what happens to Joe Biden or Alvin Bragg?

It would be nice if swing voters concluded that Trump's priorities are skewed -- he should prioritize lowering grocery prices, not getting vengeance on his politcal enemies! (Of course, he doesn't have a plan for lowering prices, and some of his policies -- deporting immigrant workers, imposing huge tariffs -- could very well raise prices.) And maybe that will happen. Maybe on-the-fence voters will conclude that he's unhealthily obsessed with vengeance. Let's hope so, but let's not be surprised if stories about his vengeance plans are shrugged off by voters.

THE REPUBLICAN CULT OF WHATEVER YOU CAN GET AWAY WITH

In The Atlantic, Ronald Brownstein writes:

The sweeping attacks from Republican elected officials against former President Donald Trump’s conviction on 34 felony counts last week send a clear signal that if he wins a second term, he will face even less internal resistance from the GOP than he did during his first four years in the White House.

Well, yeah, obviously.

Republican pushback was rare enough in his first term, against even Trump’s most extreme ideas and actions, but it did exist in pockets of Congress and among appointees inside his own administration with roots in the party’s prior traditions. The willingness now of so many House and Senate Republicans, across the GOP’s ideological spectrum, to unreservedly echo Trump’s denunciation of his conviction shows that the flickers of independence that flashed during his first term have been virtually extinguished as he approaches a possible second term.

Brownstein, like most observers, believes this is happening because Trump is a strongman who's intimidated the rest of his party:

The strong message of the near-universal Republican condemnation of the verdict is that “Donald Trump owns the Republican Party,” the political scientist Susan Stokes, who directs the Chicago Center on Democracy at the University of Chicago, told me. “That means he can pretty much force the rest of the party leadership, if they see their future in the party, to toe the line, no matter what.”

I don't see it that way. I don't think Republicans feel forced into accepting and endorsing Trumpist behavior -- not anymore.

In Trump's first presidential run and his term, Republicans weren't sure the system would tolerate his constant attacks on rules and norms. But he won the Electoral College in 2016 and came within approximately 40,000 votes of doing the same in 2020. He encouraged insurrection on January 6, 2021, yet he's leading in the polls now.

Republicans don't care about democracy or the rule of law. What they care about is being in control of the government all the time. They didn't think you could stress-test the system the way Trump has and get away with it, but now that they know you can, they're all for Trump's approach. They want permanent, irreversible control of the entire system, the way they have permanent control of the federal courts and permanent control of many red-state and purple-state legislatures. They want to be able to nullify Democratic rule everywhere, the way Ron DeSantis's handpicked Florida Supreme Court justices have allowed him to nullify the election of a Democratic state attorney in Orange and Osceola counties.

They're not Trump cultists. They want all the power, and they think the force of Trump's personality -- along with hundreds of Trump judges on the federal bench, with hundreds more potentially to come -- can help them get it. So of course they're on board with everything Trump is doing.

If Democrats can find a way to scare politically disengaged swing voters with the details of Trump's plans, this embrace of Trump might not work. But that's going to be difficult when most voters care about nothing other than their own economic struggles. In any case, the GOP isn't ride-or-die with Trump reluctantly. He seems as if he might get away with it, and they're cool with that.

MAYBE DEMOCRATS NEED TO TREAT CONGRESSIONAL REPUBLICANS AS SCARIER THAN TRUMP

President Biden regularly warns voters of the dangers of "MAGA Republicans." His point is that Donald Trump is really awful, and the specific way that other Republicans are awful is that they embrace the ethos of Trump. But regrettably, many voters don't seem to believe Trump is all that scary, even now that he's a convicted felon:

A new Emerson College Polling national survey of U.S. voters finds 46% of voters support former President Donald Trump and 45% support President Biden in the 2024 presidential election. Nine percent are undecided. Since last month, Trump’s support has stayed the same, while Biden’s support has increased one point....

Forty percent of voters say Trump’s criminal conviction of 34 felonies makes no impact on their vote this November — 33% say it makes them less likely to support the former president this November, and 27% more likely.

“Trump’s support in our polling remained the same before and after his conviction,” Spencer Kimball, executive director of Emerson College Polling, said.

We've been told that voters will eventually focus on the election, realize that Trump is running, and recoil in horror. But what if they don't? What if fourteen years of The Apprentice and three years of relative prosperity prior to the COVID pandemic left a plurality of voters believing that Trump is basically harmless, and actually pretty good at presidenting? What if he simply doesn't scare enough voters to give Biden a win?

Maybe congressional Republicans (and judicial Republicans) can be made to seem scarier than Trump now:

On Wednesday, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., held a vote on the Right to Contraception Act, which guarantees the right of an individual "to obtain contraceptives and to voluntarily engage in contraception." The legislation also protects the right of licensed health care providers "to provide contraceptives, contraception, and information, referrals, and services related to contraception." Despite loudly insisting they have no desire to take away birth control, all but two Republicans voted against the bill....

The misnamed Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), one of the groups behind the Supreme Court's 2022 decision that ended abortion rights, claims they are "not working to ban contraception and has never done so." This is untrue ... because ADF has "labeled birth-control methods as abortifacients in various lawsuits." The reason to do that is to create a pretext to ban birth control under existing abortion laws. The pill, the injection, the implant, IUDs, and emergency contraception are all reimagined, falsely as "abortion," which would make it illegal in many states.

The current strategy -- saying Trump is scary, and Republicans will follow his lead if he's elected -- isn't working. Maybe Democrats need to tell voters that Trump will follow the rest of the GOP's lead if he's elected. He'll appoint judges and Supreme Court justices who'll ban many forms of contraception -- in fact, he may already have done so. He'll sign radical bills put forward by extremists in Congress. The message: Even if you don't think he's scary, they are.

Democrats have probably scared as many voters as they're going to scare with warnings about Trump. But they haven't really issued enough warnings about the rest of Trump's party. That might be what's necessary to make voters understand the stakes in this election.

ONCE AGAIN, DEMOCRATS PLAY BY NONEXISTENT RULES

Democratic leaders in the House and Senate recently joined Republicans in inviting Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu to deliver a speech to a joint session of Congress. As a Politico Playbook story makes clear, this is another example of Democrats playing by rules that aren't really rules.

The most consistent thing we heard in our calls last night was puzzlement to flat-out exasperation at why the two Democratic leaders would have signed on Johnson’s invite in the first place.

[Leah] Greenberg of the progressive group Indivisible] noted that [Senate majority leader Chuck] Schumer has already called for new elections in Israel: “Why we would then be undermining the clarity of that message by behaving as if Netanyahu has something important to share with Congress ... we’re baffled.”

Said one lawmaker in [House minority leader Hakeem] Jeffries’ leadership circle: “We’re already divided — we don’t need this guy who’s killing people coming to speak.”

But we're told that Schumer and Jeffries had no choice.

As early as March, Schumer had publicly backed a Netanyahu visit — seemingly afraid of further rupturing the U.S.-Israel relationship a week after making his comments about new elections: “Israel has no stronger ally than the United States, and our relationship transcends any one president or any one prime minister,” he said.

He left himself no room to retreat, even as news of humanitarian disaster in Gaza mounted and Netanyahu seemingly thumbed his nose at JOE BIDEN’s Rafah invasion warnings.

What does "He left himself no room to retreat" mean here? What rulebook is Schumer following? He could have retreated by retreating. There was no law or Senate rule preventing him from changing his mind.

And as for Jeffries...

Jeffries, meanwhile, has explained publicly and privately that this essentially wasn’t his decision — the majority leaders typically make decisions on joint meeting invitations and that it’s customary for minority leaders to sign on. “That’s the process that unfolded in this particular instance,” he told reporters yesterday.

"Customary"! You're killing me here, congressman. There is no obligation for you to do anything simply because it's "customary." Republicans refuse to do things that are "customary" all the time. They do whatever they think they can get away with, customs be damned. And it usuually works for them.

Also there's this:

A longtime Democratic aide close to the issue argued that once Schumer agreed to sign on, Jeffries “didn’t really have a lot of choice” but to stand with him, especially considering his own close ties with his considerable Jewish constituency in Brooklyn.

Both Schumer and Jeffries are from New York and need to worry about the opinion of constituents who vote Democratic but are highly supportive of Israel. On the other hand, here in Manhattan, Congressman Jerry Nadler led the fight against the politicized and cynical move by the House GOP to pass the so-called Antisemitism Awareness Act. This undoubtedly displeases some of Nadler's constituents. But he knows that many voters, including liberal and leftist Jewish voters who distrust Netanyahu and his Likud Party, back him on this. So he took a stand.

Playbook also tells us:

... people close to both leaders noted that [House peaker Mike] Johnson technically didn’t need Jeffries and Schumer's] buy-in: He could have unilaterally invited Netanyahu to address the House and given senators an open invitation to join — a scenario that would have heightened tensions even further, they note.

Tensions are already heightened. Why not lean in to them? Tell the truth about the speech: This will be a campaign speech. It will be a campaign speech for Netanyahu and Likud, and a campaign speech for the Republican Party. I'm not going to endorse a campaign rally against my own party. Why should I? If it's anti-Semitic to be wary of Netanyahu, are the many Israelis who regularly take to the streets to denounce him anti-Semites? Are the hostage families who blame him for their relatives' continued captivity anti-Semites?

I assume that elderly Democratic leaders don't fight Republicans because losing three straight presidential elections in the 1980s left them with a bad case of Stockholm syndrome. But why is Hakeem Jeffries acting this way? He's only 53. Is the torch being passed to a new generation of nebbishes?

If so, I hope Democrats who are less supine challenge them in the future. Democrats have to fight back someday, or this country is doomed to permanent one-party rule.

REPUBLICANS ARE RALLYING AROUND TRUMP BECAUSE RALLYING AROUND TRUMP USUALLY SEEMS TO WORK

Marcy Wheeler approvingly quotes a Chris Hayes monologue about (in her words) "a mob style pressure campaign" to enforce "totalitarian unanimity" in the GOP with regard to Donald Trump. I don't see it this way:

This enforcement action is happening because the Trump people and the Fox people and most of the people in the upper echelons of the party understand: the only way to bring Trump down, to end his political career, is if Republicans turn against him.

As long as they stay unified, no matter what he does, no matter how abhorrent, or how dangerous, or how criminal, or how vile, no matter how much of a threat he is to the nation, if they all band together, then in a polarized landscape, they can basically keep him afloat and make it essentially a coin toss.

That is why they dressed up like him during the trial and rushed to debase themselves in cringe-inducing fashion on any live TV camera they can find.

[snip]

There have only been two times in Trump’s political career where that dynamic of Republican unanimity has broken, where Trump was near political death.

One was in the aftermath of January 6, the violent assault on the Capitol that he stirred up, when everyone was criticizing him, when the blood was still on the floor of the Capitol including Lindsey Graham and Kevin McCarthy. Remember that? Trump’s approval rating dropped below 40%, about the lowest level it reached. Mitch McConnell was testing the waters for a vote for an impeachment conviction.

If it had not been for that man, Mitch McConnell’s abject, enduringly pathetic cowardice and McCarthy’s relentless quest to have the third shortest speakership in history — not to mention the legitimate fear Republican senators had for their families about violence — we wouldn’t have this issue now. They could have just voted to convict him and bar him from future office. Done.

Ironically enough, the other time — the other sort of near political death experience — was in the wake of the Access Hollywood tape. And just about every elected Republican tried to distance themselves and criticize him. Republican National Committee Chair Reince Priebus was even considering how to get him off of the ticket.

But Trump managed to hold it together, due in no small part to the fact that right at that moment, he got a guy named Michael Cohen, his lawyer, to pay to keep the porn star from talking. And so the Republicans never heard about that story, nor did the public, which could have been the political death blow.

The lesson he learned is if you enforce this totalitarian unanimity, you can keep chugging along.

Hayes and Wheeler seem to be in agreement with a false idea spread by many establishment journalists and Democratic politicians: that the Republican Party is full of men and women of fine character who could be a responsible part of American governance if it weren't for that awful Trump fellow, a monster most Republicans secretly hate and would love to be rid of. Regrettably, these fine citizens are also cowards: They want to do the right thing, but they don't have the backbone. If they'd summoned up some courage in the past, they could have ended Trumpism swiftly -- and they could do it right now if they had sufficiently stiff spines.

But they don't want to do the right thing. They want to do whatever will win them elections. They considered dumping Trump after the Access Hollywood tape was released, but only because they thought he might lose in a landslide and drag other Republicans down with him. But because millions of Americans had watched Trump on TV for years and though he was a good guy, he was never "near political death" in this scandal. Also, Wikileaks immediately published the stolen John Podesta emails and Trump apologized. End of crisis. (It was never a moral crisis for Republicans.)

They could have voted to convict in Trump's second impeachment trial, which would have resulted in "disqualification to hold and enjoy any Office of honor, Trust or Profit under the United States" for Trump. But that would have ended the career of every Republican senator who voted to convict, with maybe one or two exceptions. More important, it would have destroyed the Republican Party. While it's true that not every Trump-voting Republican is a MAGA zealot, MAGA zealots are a massive voter bloc, and they would have either defected to a new Trumpist party or fought a civil war against the Trump-purging GOP mainstream. If a conviction in his impeachment trial really barred Trump from running again, a Trump surrogate promising vengeance -- Don Junior, Mike Flynn, Matt Gaetz -- would have swiftly won the loyalty of these voters, either within the GOP or outside it. This post-Trump Trumpist party or movement would have done serious damage to the GOP.

This is what Mitch McConnell was afraid of -- that he could use the Constitution to end the political career of Trump, but Trumpism would survive. So of course most Senate Republicans voted to acquit.

It should have been more costly for Republicans to stick with Trump than to dump him. But Democrats didn't say, as often as possible, that January 6 revealed a shocking level of rot that infested the entire Republican Party. Instead, Democrats celebrated state-level Republicans who merely did their jobs by certifying honest election results. They praised Mike Pence just for doing what he was constitutionally mandated to do on January 6. And when they held hearings, they gave most of the spotlight to a Republican, Liz Cheney -- do you even remember which Democrat actually chaired that committee? Do you remember anything he said or did during the hearings? So you can't blame the rest of the Republican Party for thinking that they weren't to get any of the stench of January 6 on themselves, and thus it wasn't necessary for them to distance themselves from Trump.

And Trump himself always bounces back, because millions of Americans think the system doesn't work for them and Trump is a bomb-thrower who wants to challenge the system on their behalf. That's where we are now. Trump is leading in the swing states and is likely to win in November unless something significant changes in the presidential race. If it seemed as if he might drag down the rest of the GOP, he'd be vulnerable within his party. But that's not the case, so Republicans are happy to let him lead. There's nothing totalitarian or mob-like about it -- they've calculated the odds, and their electoral prospects look fairly good with Trump as their leader. That's all they care about. Why would they start a civil war within their party five months before an election when victory -- the only thing they care about -- is within reach if they don't? What's "totalitarian" about mutually agreeing that they're holding a pretty good hand?

SADLY, TRUMP'S BRAIN IS STILL FINE (BY TRUMP STANDARDS)

Are we really doing this again?

Donald Trump could have lied to Fox News in an interview released Sunday, but it's also possible he's actually suffering from memory issues associated with cognitive decline, an attorney and show host argued.

Trump told a Fox panel over the weekend that he didn't say "Lock her up" referring to his 2016 presidential opponent, Hillary Clinton. Instead, he asserted, it was others, including his supporters at his rallies, who chanted the phrase about imprisoning his political opponent that election.

The internet called Trump out on the lie immediately, sharing videos of instances in which Trump himself recited the phrase at rallies....

Dean Obeidallah, a lawyer and host of The Dean Obeidallah Show on Sirius XM, appeared on MSNBC Sunday....

The host said Trump acted "as if he has no idea that his previous comments have been recorded" ...

"Does Trump truly not remember saying that?" he asked. He added that "there is a lot of signs about him and what he says and I am not a doctor, but some cognitive issues going on there."

Please stop.

Trump is partly right: During the 2016 campaign, he regularly accused Clinton of criminal behavior, but at first it was only Trump's audiences who said, "Lock her up." So he's remembering the script, though he's conveniently forgetting the times he deviated from the script, as enumerated by CNN fact checker Daniel Dale:

During campaign rallies in 2016, Trump sometimes paused his remarks as his supporters engaged in chants of “lock her up,” giving the chants time to continue. On other occasions, he explicitly repeated those words himself.

“For what she’s done, they should lock her up,” Trump said after the crowd chanted “lock her up” at an October 2016 rally in North Carolina.

“‘Lock her up’ is right,” he said at an October 2016 rally in Pennsylvania....

“You should lock her up, I’ll tell you,” he said at a January 2020 rally in Ohio. At an October 2020 rally in Georgia, after the crowd chanted “lock them up” in relation to the Biden family, Trump said, “You should lock them up. Lock up the Bidens. Lock up Hillary.”

Lying about inconvenient truths to make himself look like the soul of innocence isn't a sign that Trump's brain has stopped working properly. Self-serving lies are a sign that his brain is working exactly the way it's worked all his life. When Trump lies, that's evidence that his brain doing exactly what it was built to do.

Jennifer Rubin has similar thoughts about Trump's airing of grievances at Trump Tower last week:

Trump, during his Trump Tower temper tantrum on Friday, ... went on to unfurl an unhinged, incoherent, rambling and desperate 40-minute diatribe, spewing a “gusher” of falsehoods. Rolling Stone summarized the “train wreck post-conviction speech” as “a stream-of-consciousness laundry list of grievances ranging from the trial itself, to his issues with the Jan. 6 Committee, to the border.”

She concludes:

The mainstream media’s refusal even to question Trump’s mental and emotional health after displays like this is evidence of massive journalistic malpractice.

But Trump has sounded like this since 2015 -- unhinged, overwrought, full of grievances articulated in a language full of obscure right-wing codes and allusions -- but that just makes him like every other Fox-binging septuagenarian in America. I'll acknowledge that the presentation is a little more ragged than it was eight years ago, but it's the same act, and largely the same energy. Here, watch (if you can stand it):



He's wrong about many things, and he probably knows that. He also knows that, in his world, truth is whatever you can get away with saying.

Trump will be in a state of mental decline when his speeches and monologues don't rally the base and don't infuriate liberals, when he can't remember his lies and exaggerations, when he's unable to sustain this level of vitriol because he can't remember why he's angry. He might get there someday soon, but he's not there yet.

JOE BIDEN, THE WORLD'S WORST SYSTEM RIGGER

Every rank-and-file Republican in America agrees with Will Scharf:

Will Scharf, an attorney for former President Donald Trump, insisted Sunday that the Biden administration was firmly behind Trump’s prosecution even as ABC’s George Stephanopoulos pushed back on that idea.

Speaking on “This Week,” Scharf responded to Stephanopoulos saying, “Of course, the attorney general of Manhattan has nothing to do with the Department of Justice,” by arguing in response: “I vehemently disagree that the district attorney in New York was not politically motivated here, and I vehemently disagree that President Biden and his political allies aren’t up to their necks in this prosecution.”

... “I completely disagree that this has nothing to do with President Biden,” Scharf said.

Here's my question: If Biden has the legal system rigged, why couldn't he rig the system to prevent this?

Hunter Biden, 54, is scheduled to stand trial this week in a federal court in Delaware on charges that he failed to disclose his drug addiction on a form when buying a gun in 2018.

... the trial is the most serious legal problem facing him since Mr. Biden was elected to the presidency.

If you were an all-powerful president -- so powerful that you could order up a political opponent's indictment and conviction on all charges in a county court you don't control -- wouldn't you also order a federal court in your home state to drop charges against your beloved fuckup son, or at least delay his trial until after the November election? (Actually, wouldn't you have seen to it that the plea deal he made last year went through?)

But, of course, a skilled system rigger wouldn't have allowed the three most serious Trump trials, two of which are federal, to be delayed until after the election. And this is why right-wing conspiracy theories infuriate me: because they're stupid. People who think they're the savvy ones believe in conspiracies that don't stand up to the slightest scrutiny.

And the same goes for the core conspiracy of Trump Republicans: the alleged rigging of the 2020 presidential election. While Democrats won back the White House, they lost Senate races they hoped to win in North Carolina (by less than 2 points), Maine (despite an easy Biden victory), South Carolina (where a well-funded challenger was tied in some polls with incumbent Lindsey Graham), and Texas (where many polls showed a tight race). If the Democratic Party could have rigged a couple of those elections, why were they left unrigged? This meant that Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema had disproportionate power in the first two years of the Biden presidency.

Also, Democrats lost 13 seats in the House in 2020. And they failed to take control of legislatures in states such as Pennsylvania and Texas, where they hoped for big wins. They're really incompetent riggers.

Unless -- I know this sounds crazy, but hear me out -- the elections were free and fair, and only some of them went the Democrats' way because that's how voters legitimately voted. But to Republicans, that sounds like a conspiracy theory.

IF DEMOCRATS WON'T POLITICIZE TRUMP'S CONVICTION, THEY SHOULD AT LEAST POLITICIZE HIS FOLLOWERS' REACTIONS

Adam Serwer is right:

Remember when the most important issue was civility in politics because restaurant workers politely decline to serve Sarah Sanders and now everyone targeted by Trump or his cronies needs private security and we don’t talk about civility much anymore www.nbcnews.com/politics/don...

[image or embed]

— Adam Serwer (@adamserwer.bsky.social) May 31, 2024 at 6:40 PM

This should be a huge story. Democrats right now should be explicitly blaming the Republican Party for creating a climate of fear.

After Trump became the first U.S. president to be convicted of a crime, his supporters responded with dozens of violent online posts, according to a Reuters review of comments on three Trump-aligned websites: the former president's own Truth Social platform, Patriots.Win and the Gateway Pundit....

“Someone in NY with nothing to lose needs to take care of Merchan,” wrote one commentator on Patriots.Win. “Hopefully he gets met with illegals with a machete,” the post said in reference to illegal immigrants.

On Gateway Pundit, one poster suggested shooting liberals after the verdict. “Time to start capping some leftys,” said the post. “This cannot be fixed by voting."

More:

“Dox the Jurors. Dox them now,” one user wrote after Trump’s conviction on a website [Patriots.Win] formerly known as “The Donald,” which was popular among participants in the Capitol attack. (That post appears to have been quickly removed by moderators.)

“We need to identify each juror. Then make them miserable. Maybe even suicidal,” wrote another user on the same forum. “1,000,000 men (armed) need to go to washington and hang everyone. That’s the only solution,” wrote another user. “This s--- is out of control.”

... One Jan. 6 defendant who already served time in prison for his role in the Capitol attack also weighed in on X, posting a photo of Bragg and a photo of a noose. “January 20, 2025 traitors Get The Rope,” he wrote, referring to the date of the next presidential inauguration.

President Biden has been cautious about appearing to take a side in this case -- understably, I guess, given the fact that Trump is falsely accusing him of being responsible for the New York prosecution. Yesterday, Biden made an anodyne statement asking Americans to respect the process:

"The American principle that no one is above the law was reaffirmed," Biden said at the outset of a speech about the war in Gaza and ongoing hostage negotiations.

"Donald Trump was given every opportunity to defend himself, it was a state case, not a federal case, and it was heard by a jury of 12 citizens," he continued, noting that the jury ruled unanimously after hearing evidence for five weeks.

"Now, he'll be given the opportunity, as he should, to appeal that decision, just like everyone else has that opportunity. That's how the American system of justice works."

A subsequent Axios headline says that Biden has now gone "all-in on calling Trump a 'convicted felon.'" But he hasn't. His campaign tweeted out a cheeky annotated list of excerpts from Trump's angry monologue at Trump Tower yesterday morning; the headline refers to "Convicted Felon Donald Trump," but Biden himself hasn't uttered the phrase.

34 Lowlights from Convicted Felon Donald Trump’s "Press Conference" pic.twitter.com/STHrmoT4Dj

— Biden-Harris HQ (@BidenHQ) June 1, 2024

And red-state Democrats are afraid to go even as far as Biden has:

On Capitol Hill, Democratic Sens. Jon Tester (Montana) and Sherrod Brown (Ohio) took a wait-and-see approach. They're seeking re-election in states Trump won in 2020.

A Tester spokesperson told local media that the senator "respects the judicial process and believes everyone should be treated fairly before the courts, and voters will have the opportunity to make their voices heard at the ballot box in November." The spokesperson notably did not say whether Tester believes Trump's trial was fair — a focus of GOP attacks.

Brown has not commented on Trump's conviction.

But even Tester and Brown should be able to denounce Trump supporters who are calling for violence. Biden should be talking about these people on repeat, as should every other Democrat.

I understand the reason for Democratic meekness. In the 1980s, Democrats lost three straight presidential elections. They won the White House back with Bill Clinton, who often coopted GOP messaging. That was a long, long time ago, but the graybeards who still lead the Democratic Party believe that they have to say nothing but nice things about most Republicans, because otherwise they'll alienate people who've voted Republican in the past.

Meanwhile, Republicans have relentlessly demonized Democrats since the Reagan era, which somehow hasn't prevented wavering Democrats from switching their allegiance to the GOP. Remember when Florida, Ohio, Iowa, and Missouri were purple states? Republicans saying mean things about Democrats didn't offend enough voters to prevent the reddening of these states. Yet veteran Democrats still believe they have to say that Donald Trump is an exception to the rule and Republicans have unimpeachable character otherwise. They won't say the party is rotten to the core, which is what Republicans say about the Democratic Party. And then they wonder why every election is a struggle.

Democrats would have the stronger case, given how batshit crazy the GOP is now. But Democrats won't even try to hang GOP gubernatorial nominee Mark “pull the shekels out of your Schvartze pockets” Robinson of North Carolina around other Republicans' necks, or try to make Royce "women have become too mouthy" White, the Senate candidate endorsed by the Minnesota Republican Party, into a poster child for the GOP, even though these people are now the Republican mainstream, along with the rage monsters who want to doxx every Trump juror.

Alas, the message from the gray eminences of the Democratic Party is that, apart from Trump and a few certified crazies (Marjorie Taylor Greene, Lauren Boebert), the GOP is full of nice people who'd all be moderate and temperate like that nice Liz Cheney if Donald Trump would just go away. They back Trump to the hilt only because they're afraid of him, you see. Deep down, they're just like us!

They aren't. Remember how we deluded ourselves into thinking that Republicans won't approve of action on gun violence because they're afraid of the NRA? And then the NRA went bankrupt and Republicans didn't alter their position on guns at all? This is who they are. Democrats need to say so -- as often as possible, though even once would be nice.