NO, THAT'S NOT A SILVER LINING (updated)

Donald Trump won the Iowa caucuses with 51% of the vote. Ron DeSantis was second at 21.2%. Nikki Haley finished third with 19.1%. Illinois governor J.B. Pritzker sees a silver lining:

Pritzker: Almost half of the base of the Republican party showing up for this caucus voted against Trump… So, I think that is telling. It tells you the weakness of Donald Trump. pic.twitter.com/vETZEoHKIW

— Acyn (@Acyn) January 16, 2024

But that's not a reason for optimism. More than 70% of Iowa caucusgoers voted for a proud authoritarian -- Trump or DeSantis. We all fear Trump, but DeSantis is the one who said more than once on the campaign trail that he'd "slit throats" as president, a reference to his promise to fire career federal employees. As governor of Florida, DeSantis terrorizes people who are pregnant or LGBTQ, professors, teachers, librarians, and non-white voters -- and one in five Iowans said, "Yup, that sounds good to me."

A week ago, I predicted that DeSantis would beat Haley, the mainstream media darling:

Nationally, as FiveThirtyEight notes, Republicans like DeSantis much more than they like Haley -- DeSantis's approval rating among Republicans is 62.1%, while Haley's is only 47.1%. The mainstream media ignores DeSantis's enduring popularity among Republicans because mainstream journalists' ideal president is a moderate-seeming Republican like Haley, whose ascent (which we now know won't happen) would prove that the GOP is just fine and doesn't need to be covered like the threat to America it really is.

According to the AP/NORC entrance poll of Iowa, 12% 11% of caucusgoers voted for Joe Biden in 2020, and of those, 68% chose Haley. By my calculation, approximately 8% 7.5% of caucus voters were Biden-Haley voters, and more than nearly 40% of her voters fell into that category. Haley has a constituency, but it's not Republicans.

She'll do okay in New Hampshire and decently in her home state of South Carolina, but she'll lose both, drop out, and endorse Trump. DeSantis will drop out after New Hampshire and endorse Trump. (DeSantis's withdrawal will probably push Trump past 60% in South Carolina.)

The AP/NORC poll says that the economy wasn't the top issue for Iowa caucus voters -- when asked to choose, 33% said the economy was the top issue, but 41% said immigration. The caucusgoers were voting on "blood poisoning," not the price of eggs. So, no, I don't see much to cheer about in last night's results.

*****

UPDATE. From Threads:

I believe it, but only because, as I explain above, the entrance polls say that nearly 40% of Haley's voters voted for Biden the last time. So assuming a magin of error, this would be no net gain.

THE NUMBER OF GOP ELECTED OFFICIALS WHO WILL WITHDRAW THEIR SUPPORT FOR TRUMP IF HE'S CONVICTED OF A FELONY WILL BE ZERO

CNN's Kaitlan Collins reports:

You're thinking, "So what? Sununu is a Republican. Of course he says he'll keep backing Trump if Trump is the nominee." But Sununu (who endorsed Nikki Haley last month) is a Republican in a state that voted Democratic in the last five presidential elections, and seven of the last eight. He's the governor of the one state where Trump's lead in some primary polls is in the single digits. You'd think if any Republican could get away with saying "Not if he's convicted" -- or even dodging the question by saying, "Let's wait and see how this plays out" -- it would be Sununu.

But even Sununu doesn't have the backbone to condition his support for Trump on Trump remaining felony-free. Which is why I believe that no Republican officeholder will reconsider support for Trump after one or more felony convictions.

You may think that doesn't matter, but here's why it does.

Trump won't win in November if his vote is limited to MAGA zealots and Republican diehards. He needs some swing voters. The polls -- yes, yes, I know you don't believe them -- suggest that he has quite a few swing voters now.

We know that the Republican Party is full of feral extremists and conspiratorial headcases. Marjorie Taylor Greene. Lauren Boebert. Matt Gaetz. Paul Gosar. Jim Jordan. But when swing voters think of the Republican Party, many of them think of the sober, moderate-seeming Republicans who appear on political talk shows and appear to be sincerely interested in governing. Americans generally don't believe that the Republican Party is extreme, and those people are the reason why.

If (when?) Trump is convicted, of course Marjorie Taylor Greene and Jim Jordan will say that he was the victim of a corrupt and out-of-control justice system and the conviction will absolutely be overturned on appeal. That doesn't matter. They're preaching to the choir. The people who admire them are Trump diehards.

But when people like Sununu, Lindsey Graham, Tim Scott, and Marco Rubio say exactly the same thing -- and they all will -- that will tell swing voters that Trump's conviction is not the last word on the subject, and that the real danger to democracy is the prosecution, not the guilty defendant.

All they need to do is create doubts about the process. And they will -- all of them. No one will say, "I was prepared to support Donald Trump in the November election, but I can no longer do so in good conscience."

Will a conviction hurt Trump in the polls? Sure -- but it will probably hurt him a lot less than you expect, for this reason.

TRUMP NEEDED A FOIL, AND LIBERAL LAWYERS VOLUNTEERED

Think back to the Donald Trump of November 2022. A "red wave" was widely expected in the midterms, but it never happened, largely because Trumpist candidates went down in flames. Trump's loyal soldiers were comic-book villains like Blake Masters and Kari Lake; the victors were likable Democrats such as Gretchen Whitmer, Mark Kelly, and the down-but-not-out wounded warrior John Fetterman. Trump seemed like a spent force; he was neck-and-neck with Ron DeSantis in early polls of the Republican presidential field.

Then he was indicted, and indicted again and again and again, and after that he was tossed off the ballot in two states. Trump needed an unlikable enemy to make himself look good in the eyes of Republican voters, and we gave him one: a phalanx of lawyers operating in Democratic cities.

Republicans want him to smite those lawyers. From a new CBS poll:

Instead of dragging him down, the criminal indictments of Trump are actually a net positive for his voters. For those backing him in the general election, more are voting to show support for him in the face of those indictments than voting for him despite concern about what he might have done.

That is true of both the Republicans and independents voting for Trump, and for even more of those supporting him who identify as MAGA.

The New York Times notes that college-educated Republicans came back to Trump after the 2022 midterms, and his legal fights are a major reason.

... voters with a college degree ... have quietly powered his remarkable political recovery inside the party — a turnaround over the past year that has notably coincided with a cascade of 91 felony charges in four criminal cases.

Their surge toward the former president appears to stem largely from a reaction to the current political climate ... according to interviews with nearly two dozen college-educated Republican voters.

Many were incredulous over what they described as excessive and unfair legal investigations targeting the former president....

In a Suffolk University/USA Today poll [in December 2022], 61 percent of the party’s voters said they still supported Mr. Trump’s policies but wanted “a different Republican nominee for president.” A stunning 76 percent of college-educated Republicans agreed.

This month, the same pollster showed Mr. Trump with support from 62 percent of Republican voters, including 60 percent of those with a college degree....

Mr. Trump’s backing from white, college-educated Republicans doubled to 60 percent over the course of last year, according to Fox News polling....

Yolanda Gutierrez, 94, ... who studied education in college, said she had voted twice for Mr. Trump but had been leaning toward Mr. DeSantis....

“But now I prefer Trump because Democrats are trying to find any way they can to jail him,” she said....

Lisa Keathly, 54, who owns two flooring businesses near Dallas, said she still wanted to support Mr. DeSantis, whom she views as more polished and less rude. But she added that she was increasingly likely to back Mr. Trump in her state’s Super Tuesday primary.

She pointed to a ruling last month from Colorado’s top court to block the former president from the primary ballot, which the U.S. Supreme Court is now considering, as a moment that may have sealed her support for Mr. Trump.

“It’s a little bit like a teenager who’s rebelling — a part of me is like, Maybe I should go for Trump because everyone is telling me not to,” Ms. Keathly said. “Part of my thing is: Why are they so scared?”

She added, “Because they can’t control him.”

It's possible to believe that the legal pursuit of Trump is absolutely necessary and also that it has been a near-term bonanza for Trump.

The good news in the CBS poll is that Trump appears to be a weaker general-election candidate than Ron DeSantis or Nikki Haley. The bad news is that all three are leading Biden (Trump by 2, 50%-48%; DeSantis by 3, 51%-48%; Haley by 8, 53%-45%). Trump's obvious criminality isn't hurting him very much with general-election voters, and Republicans who defend him aren't suffering for it either.

Many people fear lawyers. Maybe college-educated people fear them more than most. They're Trump's foil now, and for now, at least, this is working out well for him.

IS FOX NEWS THE MICROSOFT (OR META) OF RIGHT-WING MEDIA?

Jonathan Chait notes that Ron DeSantis is griping about the right-wing media:

“He’s got basically a Praetorian Guard of the conservative media — Fox News, the web sites, all the stuff — they just don’t hold him accountable because they’re worried about losing viewers,” [DeSantis] said of Donald Trump. “And they don’t want to have their ratings go down.”

... One unmentioned irony is that a large chunk of this very same conservative-media apparatus used to work for DeSantis. After January 6, when Republicans assumed Trump was radioactive, conservative media set out to wean the base off Trump and get them hooked on DeSantis. “We want to make Trump a nonperson,” Rupert Murdoch wrote to a colleague. “We see [DeSantis] as the future of the party,” a Fox News producer wrote in an email obtained by the Tampa Bay Times. For a period of time from after the insurrection to the middle of last year, conservative media promoted DeSantis infomercial-style.

The flaw in the formula was that the dogs weren’t eating the dog food....

And so last summer, Fox News and the rest of the conservative media gave up on DeSantis and resumed promoting Trump. The reason is exactly as DeSantis said: They didn’t want to alienate their audience and lose market share by telling the audience anything bad about its hero.

Rupert Murdoch has called Trump "a fucking idiot." He dispatched Megyn Kelly to destroy Trump's candidacy in a 2015 debate; her attack on Trump backfired. On Election Night 2020, Murdoch personally approved Fox's early call of Arizona for Joe Biden, reportedly adding, in reference to Trump, "Fuck him." And then in 2022 and 2023 there was DeSantis-mania.

None of this worked for Fox. And yet Fox is still the dominant force in the right-wing media, and in cable news in general.

Fox is starting to seem like Microsoft or Facebook/Meta. Fox makes terrible business decisions (think of DeSantis as the Clippy of Fox News), but it can pivot quickly, stealing the ideas of people who have a better sense of the marketplace and reselling them. Microsoft gradually made its operating system more and more like Apple's. Facebook bought Instagram and launched a fake Twitter called Threads. Fox reluctantly got on the Trump train in 2016, staying with him for four years. When Trump wouldn't go quietly after the 2020 election, Fox pushed election denial; this cost Fox quite a bit of money, but it probably preserved Fox's credibility among its base viewers. Between elections, Fox picked up on the "critical race theory" bashing of Christopher Rufo and the transphobia of Libs of TikTok. (This is also reminiscent of how Madonna picked up on existing subcultures -- vogueing, S&M -- and resold them as her own in the 1980s and 1990s.) And now it's back to Trumpism.

Fox's dominant position in the marketplace allows it to miss the trends and then catch up later. It probably won't see the first post-Trump GOP presidential nominee coming either (assuming we still have elections then). But it'll quickly get on board.

THEY JUST MAKE UP RULES ON THE SPOT

I keep thinking about an AP story that ran a few days ago. It was about a Nikki Haley attack on President Biden. I'm pleased to say that Haley didn't get most of the media to take this phony attack seriously, but she did get some response from mainstream journalists:

Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley took aim Monday night at the Democrat she’d like to face in the November election, calling it “offensive” that President Joe Biden gave “a political speech” at the South Carolina church where nine Black parishioners were slain in a 2015 racist attack.

“For Biden to show up there and give a political speech, it’s offensive in itself,” the former United Nations ambassador and South Carolina governor said during a town hall on Fox News in Des Moines, Iowa.

I agree that if we took separation of chuch and state as seriously as we should, this wouldn't happen. In reality, we tolerate political speeches in churches as long as the preacher or the church doesn't overtly endorse the candidate. Democrats make speeches at (mostly Black) churches. Republicans make speeches at (mostly white evangelical) churches. Haley knows this. She knows that this is a long-standing tradition in America, for better or worse. But on Monday she hoped her audience didn't.

That's a typical Republican trick: make up a rule and then accuse Democrats of violating it. Mitch McConnell did that in 2016 when he said Supreme Court nominees aren't supposed to get hearings or a vote in the final year of a president's term. Politically engaged Americans knew he was just making this up. But the rest of the country didn't, and he got away with it.

One A-list mainstream journalist rose to the bait:

This is not the purpose of the church.

This is not what a sanctuary is "set apart" for.

This is wrong—no matter the tradition, no matter the denomination, no matter the partisan flavor.

My standard will remain the same: Stop using the bride of Christ as a political prop. https://t.co/vvNSKWCobP

— Tim Alberta (@TimAlberta) January 8, 2024

Yes, Tim, you're right -- but do you complain this way every time a politician makes a campaign speech in a church?

We know Haley doesn't. Here's an October 2023 speech that didn't inspire outrage on her part:

Sen. Tim Scott (R-S.C.) in a Monday speech from Chicago warned that the radical left is spreading a “sinister” agenda meant to deny the progress the nation has made in addressing racism.

Scott, who is running for the Republican presidential nomination and is the only Black GOP senator, spoke from New Beginnings Church on the South Side of Chicago. In a lengthy address that touched on unemployment and crime, Scott blamed a progressive movement for exploiting race and class as a way to benefit their leaders.

Here's another one, from earlier in the year, that didn't upset Haley:

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis ended his first trip to South Carolina in the Upstate, a conservative, evangelical proving ground....

Appearing at the First North Baptist Church on Apr. 19, DeSantis spoke little of religion as he focused on his “Florida Blueprint” and largely rallied the crowd around hot-button social issues.

DeSantis ... was introduced by the church’s senior pastor Mike Hamlet, who led the congregation in a prayer before DeSantis took the dais and focused on what he touted as his success governing Florida.

DeSantis spent the last ten minutes of his 30-minute speech railing against the woke “mind virus,” diversity, education and inclusion programs in universities, critical race theory and gender education in public schools.

And here's another from October:

In a speech that could have passed for a sermon on unity, former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie addressed Sunday worshipers at Tabernacle Baptist Church in Beaufort [South Carolina].

“If you’re looking for the perfect candidate, stop looking,” the Republican presidential candidate said from the front of the historic church, established in 1867. “If you are looking for the perfect person to be your president, you can move on from me.”

But does Haley herself mix politics and religion? Maybe not in church, but yes, she does. Remember this?

A rally kicking off former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley’s 2024 presidential campaign opened Wednesday with an invocation from a Christian pastor – a practice not unusual for a GOP political event.

What was notable, however, was Haley’s choice of pastor: John Hagee, a high-profile televangelist and founder of a Christian Zionist group, and a political activist who has made headlines for a number of controversial remarks, including those considered anti-Semitic and anti-Catholic....

Hagee’s appearance at the rally is the latest in a long history of political involvement, stretching back to his endorsement of segregationist George Wallace in 1968.

Hagee endorsed Sen. John McCain in the 2008 presidential election, but McCain publicly renounced the endorsement after a previous sermon of Hagee’s came to light in which Hagee appeared to assert that Adolf Hitler was half-Jewish and was sent by God to drive Jews to Israel. Hagee suggested that it was Jews’ “disobedience” of God that “gave rise” to their persecution.

Hagee has also suggested that Hilter’s Catholic background contributed to his anti-Seminitism and appeared to refer to the Roman Catholic Church as the "apostate church" and the "great whore,” among other anti-Catholic remarks....

He has also been criticized for anti-Islam remarks.

In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, ... Hagee sparked controversy again by asserting that the storm was “the judgment of God against the city of New Orleans” for its sins, including a gay pride parade planned for the time the storm hit....

Hagee has also suggested that the antichrist will be gay and created the “blood moon prophecy” suggesting that a series of lunar events beginning in 2014 were the start of the end times as described in the Bible.

Haley is apparently fine with all this.

In 2018, when Haley was the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, Haley spoke to Hagee’s group, Christians United for Israel, at its annual summit, and Hagee presented her with an award. In 2021, they visited Israel in the same group.

In that Fox News town hall, Haley -- who recently refused to say that the cause of the Civil War was slavery, until she was forced to acknowledge this fact under public pressure -- also attacked President Biden from the left on race:

“I don’t need someone who palled around with segregationists in the ‘70s and has said racist comments all the way through his career lecturing me or anyone in South Carolina about what it means to have racism, slavery, or anything related to the Civil War.”

Biden has openly acknowledged that in his early days in the Senate he befriended a number of segregationists; he's also said that he believes these men softened their views over time. One of those segregationists Biden cites is Strom Thurmond, who, like Haley, once served as governor of South Carolina. Haley is Clemson University's best-known living alum -- so why has she never criticized her alma mater for being the site of the Strom Thurmond Institute, where one of the segregationist senators she finds so distasteful left his papers? Why did she tease a presidential run in a 2022 appearance at a Turning Point USA forum held in the Strom Thurmond Institute's auditorium?

Haley isn't a monster like Donald Trump, so she's widely regarded as a good person. She isn't a good person. She's just another Republican attack dog and hypocrite.

ALL ANTI-TRUMPERS ASK OF YOU IS ONE THING THAT YOU'LL NEVER DO

If Chris Christie really wants to prevent Donald Trump from becoming president again, he should, obviously, endorse the other major-party candidate, President Joe Biden.

I understand why he didn't do that in the speech he delivered yesterday announcing his withdrawal from the Republican primaries -- it's still possible, at least theoretically, for someone other than Trump to win the nomination, and Christie, being a Republican, would understandably prefer Nikki Haley or Ron DeSantis to Biden. People who claim to be savvy think Haley really has a shot now -- if most of Christie's vote in New Hampshire goes to Haley, and if the polls showing Haley within single digits of Trump in New Hampshire are accurate (rather than the ones showing Trump up by 15 points or so), she might beat him there and gain momentum going into the primary in her home state of South Carolina, and so on and so on. But Trump isn't Jeb Bush in mid-2015, a candidate who's the front-runner because poll respondents kinda-sorta think he's okay, even though they haven't really focused on him or the race. Large percentages of Republican voters love Trump more than they love their own mothers. Also, there are probably quite a few people who absolutely will vote for Trump in the primaries but won't respond to a CNN or USA Today poll because they think responding will put them on a George Soros target list and subject them to a SWAT arrest by the FBI. So even polls that show Trump with a massive lead are probably underestimating his strength.

Nevertheless, a guy can dream (although Christie's decision to do a solid for Haley is undercut by his hot-mic prediction, leaked just prior to his speech, that she's about to "get smoked").

Christie's Biden endorsement can wait -- except that it probably will never happen. Many people blame Trump for everything that's extreme or polarizing in the Republican Party, but the pre-Trump party in which Christie was once a rising star believes that one must never speak a positive word about a Democrat in good standing. So it would go against Christie's Republican principles to praise Biden, ever. It's fine, however, to praise a Democrat who regularly fights with other Democrats, and so this happened last week:

At the end of tonight’s town hall, Chris Christie raised the possibility of voting for a third-party candidate in the general election if it’s Trump vs. Biden. He said he was intrigued by the No Labels movement: “Let me tell you, Joe Manchin would be a really good president.”

— Neil Vigdor (@gettinviggy) January 6, 2024

The full quote:

“Let me tell you, Joe Manchin would be a really good president. And, you know, I liked him a lot. And first of all, I don’t agree with him on everything. And he wouldn’t be my first choice. But if it were between those three to vote for it would be a lot easier,” Christie said last week, per NBC’s Emma Barnett.

Smart people think Christie won't actually endorse the No Labels presidential nominee, whether it's Manchin or someone else. Christie was critical of No Labels in July:

Christie on "This Week" also explained why he has said he won't get involved in the group No Labels' push for a "unity" campaign in the 2024 race that would include Republicans and Democrats.

"It's a fool's errand. ... I'm not in this for show time. I'm not in this, you know, for making a point," Christie said.

"There are only two people who will get elected president of the United States in November of '24: the Republican nominee for president and the Democratic nominee for president," he said, "and I don't want to participate in something, which by the way, is also a scattergun approach to this."

"They want to hurt Donald Trump if he's the nominee," Christie continued. "But you know, when you get into a third-party campaign ... you never quite know who you're going to hurt in that process."

And again in September:

Former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie told Hugh Hewitt that he’s not a fan of No Labels, even though Hewitt said the group would likely help elect a Republican president in 2024.

Said Christie: “I think it’s a fool’s errand. I really do. And I think that they shoot with a shotgun. They don’t know who they’re going to hurt, and depending on who they nominate, and not something that I would ever care to be involved in.”

Yet he did speak at the 2015 No Labels convention, and subsequently participated in a No Labels video chat.

Christie during a No Labels talk. pic.twitter.com/qgi6WyfeQY

— Andrew Rudick (@andrew_rudick) September 7, 2023

Puck's Tara Palmeri now reports:

I’ve heard that Christie’s political advisers and top donors have spoken to No Labels leadership, although Christie, himself, has not spoken to the third-party group.

So I don't think the endorsement door is closed. Palmeri says it would be difficult for Christie to run on the No Labels ticket himself:

“Sore loser” laws might prevent him from coming back and running under a different banner, anyway.

A paper published last spring in the Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy Per Curiam concluded that "sore-loser laws in 28 states do indeed apply to presidential candidates and that if a candidate fails to win the Republican nomination, sore-loser laws will prevent access to the general election ballot in those states." It's not clear how many of those laws apply to someone who filed as a candidate but dropped out before the state primary or caucuses, but it's likely that some do. Also, some states have "disaffiliation" laws that block ballot access to recent party-switchers.

Palmieri, incidentally, suggests that Manchin won't be the No Labels nominee:

The 501(c)4 is still divided over whether a Democrat or a Republican should lead their unity ticket, but they seem to believe they need a Republican to stop Trump. (The names Jon Huntsman, Larry Hogan, and Mitt Romney have been floated for the top of the ticket; before that, there was an open infatuation with Joe Manchin.)

Endorsing one of those disaffected Republicans would be easy for Christie -- or it's possible that he'll return to his former gig as a TV pundit and feel he can't endorse anyone. But I'm predicting that he won't endorse Biden, even though it's the most effective thing he could do in order to accomplish his stated goal of defeating Trump.

And no, I don't think he'll endorse Trump -- he's spent too much time building his Last Principled Republican brand to do that.

THIS WON'T SCARE THE VOTERS BIDEN NEEDS

Greg Sargent, who's now at The New Republic, worries about what will happen to America if the courts conclude that Donald Trump really does have broad immunity for his actions as president:

... a favorable decision could ... unshackle Trump in a big way.... If [courts] accept Trump’s broad version of immunity or something like it, he might argue that future potentially criminal acts also fall within that perimeter.

Sounds scary. But then Sargent explains precisely how scary it might be:

For instance, could a victorious President Trump urge the FBI to investigate Georgia prosecutor Fani Willis, who has also criminally charged Trump, and order the seizure of documents related to those charges to sabotage her effort?

... Or in the 2026 battle over the Senate, could President Trump threaten elections officials with prosecution while pressuring them to “find” votes in a decisive contest?

Unlike Sargent, I'm not worried that a grant of immunity will embolden Trump to prosecute his prosecutors in a second term. Trump is going to do that anyway, even if the courts grant him no new powers. He absolutely will politicize the Justice Department and use it to gain revenge on his enemies. That's an argument for not letting Trump anywhere near the Oval Office ever again, not an argument against immunity specifically.

What about pressuring state and local election officials to "find" Republican votes in the 2026 election? I don't think that will happen, for one reason: Trump is the most narcissistic human being who ever lived, and he won't be on the ballot in 2026. Why would he cheat on behalf on behalf of candidates who aren't him? That's just not his nature.

Sargent quotes Kristy Parker, a lawyer at Protect Democracy:

“Trump has threatened to use the presidency to punish enemies, reward friends, and protect himself,” Parker told me. “If the courts recognize immunity for the broad array of official acts of the presidency, that will incentivize Trump to abuse those powers further.”

Sargent hopes this prospect alarms voters. I worry that it alarms only voters who've already made up their minds to oppose Trump. For fence-sitters, the vast majority of whom aren't very political, this isn't very worrisome. They're not Trump's enemies, and they already assume that ordinary politicians routinely reward their friends and protect themselves. They don't care what happens to Fani Willis, for instance, as long as gas prices are low.

Swing voters will need more compelling reasons than this to vote against Biden. This won't scare them, even if Trump does get his immunity.

WILL BIDEN ONLY GET GOOD MEDIA COVERAGE WHEN HE TALKS ABOUT TRUMP AND DEMOCRACY?

At The Bulwark, Jonathan Last quotes Mark Halperin, of all people, on President Biden's Trump-bashing Valley Forge speech:

... perhaps the most telling way to view the time between now Election Day is this: Can Biden win enough news cycles to overcome Trump’s current lead?

The answer is that he definitely can, as Friday’s events, and the coverage of them, built around the 1/6 anniversary, demonstrate.

... the Dominant Media (definitely and decisively) and the general election electorate (unambiguously if not necessarily dispositively) are more with Joe Biden on this matter over Donald Trump than most anything else (besides abortion).

... talking about 1/6 and democracy gives Biden a chance to win a news cycle even when he is behind in the polls.

When Halperin refers to "the Dominant Media," he's talking about the mainstream press, which he's always regarded as having a liberal and pro-Democratic Party bias, though he struggles to square that view with the obvious evidence that the mainstream press given Biden very little positive coverage. Halperin writes, "It is VERY hard to win a news cycle when trailing," but Biden was losing news cycles long before the 2024 campaign began. Last writes:

... Halperin is directionally correct: Because Biden is trailing Trump, the media slant is always something like, “Unemployment is 3.9%; Here’s Why That’s Bad for Biden.”

But Biden's headlines have been like that for nearly two years, ever since the withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021. Halperin ties himself in knots, arguing that the press is blatantly biased in Biden's favor but gives him negative coverage anyway:

Until and unless the incumbent goes ahead, even the Dominant Media, which will root hard for him to win until the very end, slants its coverage away from him.

That's preposterous.

Nevertheless, Halperin is on to something when he suggests that talking about Trump's threat to democracy will help Biden win some news cycles.

The mainstream press loathes Biden, for many reasons. He's low-drama and doesn't give good quote, which makes it hard to write zingy, eyeball-grabbing stories about him. Also, he's not a young, charismatic, mancrush-worthy neoliberal bro like Barack Obama or fall 1992 Bill Clinton (though their press coverage worsened as soon as they actually tried to do something for the non-rich, namely healthcare reform; Biden's surprising New Deal/Great Society/Bernie tendencies are even more offputting to the press).

But mainstream journalists pride themselves on loathing Donald Trump, too -- which is convenient, because negative coverage of Trump increased the media's revenues during Trump's presidential term. That's an excellent reason for Biden to keep hammering Trump: the press sees it as good copy.

The press likes having Trump to kick around, obviously, but journalists don't want him to win again. That doesn't mean the press prefers Biden. The press largely shares the viewpoint of mainstream plutocrats: that the ideal outcome this year would be a victory by Nikki Haley or whoever tops the No Labels ticket. But since Haley will drop out after losing the South Carolina primary and the No Labels ticket will likely be topped by Joe Manchin or someone even less inclined to attack Trump, Biden has a clear field as the only genuinely anti-Trump candidate in the race. So he probably should pound Trump as often as possible. He can win a lot of news cycles that way.

IT'S NOT THE MEDIA'S JOB TO CREATE AN AUDITION REEL FOR A WANNABE TRUMP RUNNING MATE

There's a case to be made that Elise Stefanik is a suitable guest for Sunday morning talk shows at this moment because she just scored two kills: the presidents of Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania have now lost their jobs in large part because she targeted them at a House hearing.

But that wasn't the main reason Stefanik was asked to appear on Meet the Press yesterday. She was invited primarily because she's a Donald Trump surrogate. The House show trial at which the college presidents were targeted wasn't mentioned in the first eight minutes of the seventeen-minute interview; other House business -- specifically, negotiations seeking to avoid a government shutdown -- weren't mentioned until more than fourteen minutes into the interview, even though she's the #4 House Republican.

Stefanik was on TV for one principal reason: She wanted to audition for the job of Donald Trump's running mate, and NBC effectively said to her, "Sure, we'll let you do that on our airwaves." The final questions make this obvious:

KRISTEN WELKER:

Before I let you go, I have to talk to you about your future. Former President Trump, in his interview with me, said he, quote, "likes the concept of picking a woman as his vice president." If called upon, would you serve as his vice president?

REP. ELISE STEFANIK:

Well, I, of course, would be honored to serve in any capacity in a Trump administration. I'm proud to be the first member of Congress to endorse his reelection. I'm proud to be a strong supporter of President Trump, and he's going to win this November.

KRISTEN WELKER:

Have you spoken to the former president about the possibility of running as his VP pick?

REP. ELISE STEFANIK:

I'm not going to get into the content of my conversation with President Trump. I talk to him frequently. We've been focused on winning. There's so much work to do as the House Republican Conference chair, as the reproductive for New York's 21st congressional district. And we need to make sure that President Trump is in the strongest position to win in the general election. That's what I've been focused on, and that's what I'm going to remain focused on –

KRISTEN WELKER:

Just to put a very fine point on it, it sounds like you're saying if he were to ask you, the answer would be yes?

REP. ELISE STEFANIK:

Well, I've said for a year now I'd be honored to serve in the next Trump administration. But I'm focused on doing my job right now, which is a really important role as the conference chair and as, most importantly, the representative for the people of New York 21.

Oksy, I'll do some theater criticism now: Stefanik has skills. Her speech is articulate and crisp. She talks in complete sentences and rarely stumbles over a word. She's astonishingly good at pointing her chin forward and Gish-galloping her way through half a dozen incendiary Fox News/MAGA talking points in a 45-second answer. She knows the rhythm of these shows: hosts regard it as rude to interrupt an interviewee's mini-monologues, even when they're obviously dishonest, so she knows she can squeeze off a few slanders without being challenged, and if her interviewer circles back to something that's obviously a lie or a distortion, she can repeat the process and fire off six new slanders in the next extended, uninterrupted answer.

So between this and the recent House hearings, I think she's got the job. I think the books that will be published in 2025 and 2026 recounting the "inside story" of the 2024 campaign will tell us that Trump watched this interview closely and came away thinking Stefanik has the right stuff to be his #2.

But giving a platform to a VP wannabe so she can audition for a presidential candidate shouldn't be the mainstream media's job. Maybe it's Fox's job -- Fox, after all, is an organ of the Republican Party. But NBC and other ostensibly non-Republican media outlets should do better.

WOULD TRUMPISM HAVE HAPPENED EVEN WITHOUT TRUMP?

I know you all groan whenever I take Ross Douthat seriously, but I think he's asking an interesting question today about American politics since 2015:

Was there a more normal, conventional, stable-seeming timeline for 21st century American politics that Trump, with his unique blend of tabloid celebrity, reality-TV charisma, personal shamelessness and demagogic intuition, somehow wrenched us off?

Or is Trump just an American expression of the trends that have revived nationalism all over the world ... ? In which case, are attempts to find some elite removal mechanism likely to just heighten the contradictions that yielded Trumpism in the first place, widening the gyre and bringing the rough beast slouching in much faster?

I'm not sure about nationalism specifically, but I think America was already trending toward right-wing populist extremism, largely thanks to Fox News, and we might have elected a populist extremist even if Trump hadn't run.

We all know who won the 2016 Republican primaries, but do you remember who finished second? It was Ted Cruz. He won 11 states, got nearly 8 million total votes (Trump's total was just over 14 million), and won 551 delegates (Trump won 1441). If Trump had decided not to run, I think Cruz would have won the nomination, rather than one of the early favorites (Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio). It's possible that Jeb (the polling leader until Trump entered the race) would have survived because Trump wouldn't have been around to attack and humiliate him, but it's also possible that polling starting in the fall of 2015 reflected the real mood of the Republican base -- angry, radical, and looking for someone who seemed to hate the Establishment.

And don't forget who was the only candidate able to challenge Trump for the lead in the polls, if only briefly (in November 2015): Ben Carson. He'd built his reputation on the right with a rude speech at the 2013 National Prayer Breakfast that attacked "political correctness," Obamacare, and progressive taxation; he later went on to call Obamacare "the worst thing that has happened in this nation since slavery," and he called then-President Obama a "psychopath."

So, yes, I believe that Republican voters in 2016 wanted for a candidate who stirred up anger the way their beloved Fox News does, and would have gone with Cruz if Trump hadn't been an option. And given the media's hatred of Hillary Clinton, and the fact that Americans rarely elect the same party to three consecutive White House terms, I think even Ted Cruz could have won the general election.

As for the future: I see Nikki Haley rising in the polls now, but despite all the obituaries for Ron DeSantis's candidacy, he's still beating Haley in Iowa and is tied with her in national polls; it seems likely that if the Supreme Court somehow allows Trump to be removed from primary ballots, DeSantis, Trump's fellow authoritarian, will pick up more votes than Haley. (According to FiveThirtyEight, DeSantis's favorability among Republicans is 61.1%; Haley's is only 46.8%.)

If we have a presidential election in 2028 (and Trump doesn't declare himself eligible to run again), I think elite pundits will tell us Haley and Glenn Youngkin are the early favorites, but the winner will probably be Donald Trump Jr., Mike Flynn, Mike Lindell, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Kari Lake, or Tucker Carlson. I don't see any reason to believe that "the fever" will "break" between now and then.

I think I know why right-wing populism is thriving. It's fairly simple: Moneyed interests worldwide don't want to cede any more of their ill-gotten gains than they do now, and they have power -- especially in America -- to prevent any additional wealth transfers to the have-nots. That means liberalism always disappoints voters, whose material circumstances are never allowed to improve. Right-wing politicians don't even bother trying to improve the lives of ordinary people, but right-wing populists at least know how to create liberal and left-wing scapegoats for the public to hate. For many voters, watching a right-wing populist treat, say, immigrant asylum seekers or LGBTQ people cruelly feels like at least some kind of victory. It's more than liberals can offer as long as the plutocracy always has the final say.

We'll be in this right-wing populist moment until the left realizes that it has to confront the superwealthy directly. I'm afraid that battle might have to be violent, like the labor movement a century ago, in order to be effective, but I hope that's not the case. In any event, right-wing populism will thrive until there's a mass left/liberal movement that takes the battle directly to greedy billionaires.

I HAVE NO IDEA IF BIDEN'S DEMOCRACY TALK WILL WORK IN 2024

Old pundit hotness: Joe Biden is a washed-up loser. New pundit hotness: Maybe Joe Biden is smarter than we think.

From Politico Playbook just prior to Biden's Valley Forge speech:

... Democratic strategists ... are in the middle of the same electoral debate they had in 2022: Should the party emphasize Jan. 6 and the threat to democratic norms, or should it focus on traditional policy issues?

There was a cottage industry of pundits ahead of the midterms who argued Biden was making a mistake by emphasizing the former, which was allegedly not as important to voters, at the expense of the latter.

But post-election analysis suggested that Democrats prevailed in places where they convinced voters to take “the MAGA threat” seriously, and suffered in places where that message didn’t break through.

After the speech was delivered, New York magazine's Gabriel Debenedetti wrote essentially the same thing:

One moment, from about a year ago, still plays on a loop in the minds of many people close to Joe Biden. It was the final days before a midterm election that nearly everyone assumed would hobble his presidency. The president was putting the finishing touches on a speech he wanted to give about the imperiled state of American democracy, and the cacophonous second-guessing was coming not just from media critics and Republicans but even from fellow Democrats — including the former top political advisors to both Barack Obama and Bernie Sanders. To this crowd, it was obvious that Biden was missing a chance to talk to undecided or unmotivated voters by not focusing on topics like the economy or crime; to Biden, whose aides still sometimes reminisce about that week’s MSNBC segments and tweets, it was clear the political class was simply missing the moment. In the aftermath of that speech and that election — in which Democrats outperformed expectations, beating dozens of election deniers — the president made no secret of his sense of vindication.

So does this mean Biden has the winning strategy for 2024?

Maybe, maybe not. First, we can't be sure Biden's emphasis on Trump and MAGA was the deciding factor in 2022 -- undoubtedly it was one factor, but the MAGA candidates who lost also tended to be dogmatically anti-abortion, despite the fact that it was clear many voters were outraged at the Dobbs decision.

Beyond that is the question of who needed to be motivated in 2022 and who needs to be motivated in 2024. Midterms tend to be low-turnout, but wealthier voters usually show up to vote. The Dobbs decision motivated financially comfortable suburbanites to vote Democratic. It's likely that a wish to vote against Trumpism also motivated these voters.

But the presidential election will have a higher turnout. Democrats will need their occasional voters as well as their frequent voters. I don't think we know whether those occasional voters care about democracy.

Those occasional voters probably care about abortion rights -- but they also care about gas and grocery prices, and probably about crime and immigration and other issues on which many of them fault Joe Biden. My fear for 2024 is that a significant percentage of voters like Democrats but don't like Biden. The fact that talk about the dangers of MAGA helped turn them out in 2022 doesn't necessarily mean that the same talk will persuade them to vote for Biden. Polls suggest that many voters have soured on Biden, even though they liked Mark Kelly and John Fetterman and Josh Shapiro and other midterm Democratic candidates.

So Biden needs to talk about the positive things he's done (and acknowledge areas where he's still trying to make things better) -- and he also needs to warn voters that Trump will change course on issues they care about. Under Trump, there'll be more restrictions on abortion. There'll be more book banning. The rich will get more tax cuts. We'll reverse progress on climate change.

Or maybe I'm wrong and stressing the threat to democracy will be a magic bullet for Biden. I have no idea.

THERE ARE NO MAINSTREAM REPUBLICANS

The Nikki Haley campaign just snagged a major endorsement:

I PROUDLY support @NikkiHaley because we need a leader who can unite this country and WIN!

It’s time to leave the chaos and drama of the past behind. 🇺🇸🇺🇸 #FITN #TeamHaley

WATCH MY OFFICIAL ENDORSEMENT VIDEO ⬇️⬇️⬇️https://t.co/ftyQVTC5oY

— Don Bolduc (@GenDonBolduc) January 5, 2024

You rember Don Bolduc:

Donald C. Bolduc ... is a retired brigadier general of the United States Army. The Republican nominee in the 2022 U.S. Senate election in New Hampshire, he lost to incumbent Democrat Maggie Hassan....

Bolduc has called for the repeal of the Seventeenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, ending direct popular election of U.S. senators.... He opposed the provision in the Democrats' Inflation Reduction Act allowing Medicare to negotiate lower prices for prescription drugs, saying, "Anything the government’s involved in, it's not good, it doesn't work." ...

In May 2021, Bolduc was one of 124 retired generals and admirals who signed an open letter promoting the lie that the presidential election was "rigged" in Biden's favor.... Throughout his campaign for the Republican nomination for U.S. Senate, Bolduc continued to promote the false claim that the election was stolen and that Trump actually won; in an August 2022 primary debate, he said of his signing the May 2021 letter: "damn it, I stand by [it]"....

Bolduc ... has falsely claimed that COVID-19 vaccines are really "Bill Gates saying we should put [micro]chips inside people" and asserted that the use of face masks to control the spread of the virus "cause[s] more problems than they solve"....

And here's my favorite Bolduc fun fact:

Speaking to an audience in North Hampton, New Hampshire, on October 27, 2022, Bolduc repeated the debunked hoax ... that children are being told they can identify as cats and use litter boxes in schools.

Until Haley finally drops out of the race and endorses Donald Trump, we'll be told that she's a "mainstream" Republican, not like those icky MAGA Republicans. (We'll probably be told that even after her inevitable Trump endorsement, and possibly after she joins the Trump ticket as his running mate.) But there simply are no mainstream Republicans now. Every Republican is either a conspiratorial extremist or willing to join hands with conspiratorial extremists for the greater glory of the GOP. (You might argue that northeastern Republicans like New Hampshire governor Chris Sununu have genuinely separated themselves from the party's extremism, but Sununu endorsed Bolduc in the 2022 general election.)

Democrats need to say that the GOP is beyond the pale. Even its anti-extremists are extremist.

DON'T BE AFRAID TO INSULT THE REPUBLICAN PARTY, DEMOCRATS

At Threads, Brian Paterson notes the results of a new Virginia poll:

Oliver Willis's response is absolutely right:

I think Democrats are afraid to say that you get abortion bans if you vote Republican, or a gun free-for-all if you vote Republican, or more tax cuts for the rich if you vote Republican, because they don't want to offend Republicans or independents who generally vote Republican. But Republicans have been insulting Democrats and liberals tirelessly since the days of Nixon, and many people who used to be Democrats, or who grew up in Democratic households, have responded to the insults by ... turning Republican. They don't seem to be offended -- and by "they" I mean the entire white South as well as much of the middle of the country. (I'm so old I remember when Missouri and Ohio were swing states.) These voters aren't upset when Republicans insult their former party (or parents' party). They respond well to sayings like "I didn't leave the Democratic Party, the Democratic Party left me."

President Biden talks about the way "MAGA" has taken over the Republican Party, but he continues to suggest that it's just a temporary infection that will clear up if Donald Trump loses again, and he insists that there are plenty of good, decent Republicans out there. By contrast, Republicans tell voters that the Democratic Party is irreparably broken -- maybe it was fine in the days of JFK, but it's been awful since then. And many boomers who grew up worshipping JFK respond by voting GOP.

So remind voters that bad right-wing policies are Republican. Many people don't follow politics closely, so they just don't know.

REPUBLICAN VOTERS NEVER THINK THAT A REPUBLICAN IS "THE MAN"

You probably know about this:

Lara Trump has lashed out at Green Day frontman Billie Joe Armstrong over a recent performance in which he changed the lyrics of one of his songs to criticise the Maga movement.

The former television producer and amateur singer, who is married to Eric Trump – third child of the former president – said the US rocker “couldn’t help himself” and “had to get woke”. During the band’s televised performance on Ryan Seacrest’s New Year’s Rockin’ Eve, Armstrong altered the words of the band’s famous tune American Idiot, singing: “I’m not a part of the Maga agenda.”

Here's the full clip:

Recording artist Lara Trump says Green Day are not true punk rockers, they are just corporate establishment shills like Neil Young. pic.twitter.com/BiBwo7AwIS

— Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) January 3, 2024

She said:

... he was singing the song "American Idiot," couldn’t help himself, had to get woke, had to get anti-Trump. He changed the lyrics from 'I’m not a part of the redneck agenda' to 'I’m not part of the MAGA agenda.' This is not punk rock. These people are so controlled by the mainstream, they are so controlled by the corporate political agenda, and this just is another example of -- do you guys remember when, I think it was Neil Young, "keep on rockin' in the free world," remember when Neil Young, it was like two years ago, got all upset because Joe Rogan, who was hosted on Spotify as one of his platforms, was talking about the COVID vaccine, and he gave his opinion of things, and gave his thoughts on things, and Neil Young decided, "I am so against his freedom of speech, I'm gonna pull my music from Spotify"? It is so funny to me, though, Libby [addressing Libby Emmons, one of her guests], because these are the people who are supposed to be anti-Establishment. These are the people who are supposed to be, like, the rockers that we look to to, like, fight back against The Man. They're in lockstep with The Man. It is amazing to see.

Let's ignore the fact that Green Day has been political for decades -- anti-religious right, pro-LGBTQ, pro-reproductive rights (Armstrong half-seriously renounced his American citizenship after the Dobbs decision was announced), and generally pissed off at ordinary life in America. What you should notice here is how Lara Trump talks about opposition to the right-wing ideology, because it's how Republican voters have seen politics for decades.

In her view, denouncing Trump isn't merely bad -- it's Establishmentarian. It's part of "the corporate political agenda." Her father-in-law was the president of the United States, and may be president again. Even if he's not as rich as he claims, Forbes says he's a billionaire, and he certainly lives higher on the hog than the vast majority of Americans. Republicans see your next-door neighbor who has a middle-class job and a "Hate Has No Home Here" sign on her lawn as part of the elite, along with Green Day and Neil Young (who, to be fair, are well off now, though they're not billionaires). Donald Trump? He's a freedom-loving rebel fighting The Man from a secret location in the underground.

This isn't just the MAGA worldview. Whenever you're told that Fox News is designed to counteract "the mainstream media," remember that Fox has been the most-watched cable news channel in America for years, and is run by a billionaire -- it is the mainstream media.

Ronald Reagan used to talk the way Lara Trump talks. Newt Gingrich and George W. Bush used to talk the way Lara Trump talks. The message from Republicans, at all times, is: Liberals control everything. This is true even when Republicans control the House, the Senate, the White House, and the Supreme Court. Vote GOP and we'll Fight The Power.

This message is very appealing to voters. It's a message Democrats could try to send, given the fact that even when we're in charge we don't seem to have the power to tighten federal gun laws, reestablish reproductive rights, effectively tax rich people, provide truly universal health care coverage, combat institutional racism, rein in abusive cops, or move the country to a post-fossil fuel energy future. Bernie Sanders won a lot of votes saying, in effect, that he was fighting The Man, but most mainstream Democrats don't want to say it. Why not? It works for Republicans.

*****

UPDATE: Go here to watch Fox's Tammy Bruce complain that Green Day is "raging for the machine," an echo of a January 1 tweet from that notorious battler against Establishment power Elon Musk (net worth: $220 billion, most of it from government handouts).

UNELECTED, UNAPPOINTED SUPERVILLAINS WHO KNOW HOW TO USE POWER

I'm an old guy, and one of my political frustrations throughout my life is that there have been so many right-wingers who seem to have massive amounts of power even though no one elected them to any office and no elected official ever appointed them -- it seems that they just hang out a shingle and then the next thing you know, they're remaking the country.

In my youth it was Phyllis Schlafly, who stopped the Equal Rights Amendment in its tracks. Later it was Grover Norquist, who swore nearly every Republican member of Congress and congressional candidate to a no-tax-increase pledge, and then Leonard Leo, who remade the federal bench in his own right-wing Opus Dei image. And now we have Chris Rufo, who gave us the "critical race theory" moral panic, has been a leading demonizer of trans people, and now has led the successful movement to depose Harvard president Claudine Gay.

I know that Leo gets right-wing billionaire cash not because the billionaires necessarily care about restricting abortion or expanding gun rights, but because the judges Leo picks are invariably pro-plutocrat. I know that Rufo gets right-wing billionaire cash because getting conservative and right-centrist voters worked up about cultural issues is a surefire way of getting them to vote for Republicans, who will then reliably vote to cut the taxes and regulations the billionaires hate. I get it, but it's frustrating. Conservative supervillains don't just stir the pot -- they actually change Americans' lives. Right-wingers use the power they have, even when they don't hold the White House or have congressional majorities. Democrats are much more timid about using power, even when they've won it from voters.

Who on the left might be considered an unelected, unappointed, highly successful change agent/gadfly/scourge of the opposition? George Soros? The right demonizes him. But when you do this from the right, the "liberal media" will embrace you, not demonize you.

In 2021, Rufo tweeted:

As Jamison Foser notes, the Times responded not by saying, "How dare you try to manipulate us this way!," but by giving Rufo op-ed space:

Foser wrote this in July:

The most perverse thing about all of this is that describing himself as a propagandist and announcing his intent to deceive didn’t hurt Christopher Rufo at all — to the contrary, news companies like The New York Times take him more seriously because of it. Describing himself as untrustworthy was a marketing ploy, and it worked on his intended audience: The nation’s leading journalists and editors. If Rufo was just some run-of-the-mill right-winger, the Times (probably) wouldn’t have published him. But because Rufo announced a grand strategy behind his lies, the Times views him as an important voice and hands him the world’s most valuable op-ed space.

Now Rufo always announces his intent to manipulate in advance, like a comic-book villain whose signature is leaving a characteristic note that declares his intentions before he commits a shocking crime, as a way to demonstrate that the authorities can't stop him. In the case of Claudine Gay, Rufo tweeted:

The response at the Times? Wall-to-wall coverage of the Gay story.

Foser writes:

Christopher Rufo and [Representative] Elise Stefanik understand that the New York Times wants to behave this way. They want to inflate academic jaywalking by Harvard’s president into a massive scandal worthy of weeks of wall-to-wall coverage. But it obviously isn’t, and so they need an excuse, both for their readers and for themselves. Rufo and Stefanik provide that excuse: Influential conservatives are talking about this, so we have to cover it. And that’s where Rufo’s public announcements of his dishonest propaganda campaigns helps. If he kept his mouth shut about his plans, nobody would ever have heard of him. By announcing himself a successful propagandist, he gave the news media an excuse to make him one.

I don't think this is exactly right -- I think the Times is obsessed with both the Ivy League and the (futile) hope of demonstrating to right-wing readers that it's not liberal, so the paper might have tried to sink Gay on its own if its reporters had been the first to find the passages in her writings that she's been charged with plagiarizing. But getting right-wing buy-in made the pursuit of Gay seem so much more necessary to the Times. (Also, the righties did all the digging, then spoon-fed the results to the non-conservative media, which made the work of the Times much easier.)

The Times accepts right-wing framing on many issues -- trans youth, COVID school closures, the notion that being opposed to Israel's treatment of Gaza is anti-Semitic by definition. But even when it doesn't embrace right-wing frames, it takes them -- and their purveyors -- very, very seriously, as long as the purveyors act like semi-serious people and not like Marjorie Taylor Greene. Rufo is seen as serious, as are Leo and Norquist, so they and their ideas are treated respectfully -- and are often treated as correct. By contrast, the right-wing media demonizes liberals and leftists precisely when they seem serious, effective, and potentially dangerous to the right. That's one big reason our politics has a supervillain gap.

IN A DISINFORMATION WORLD, LEGAL DECISIONS ARE A TERRIBLE WAY TO COMMUNICATE THE TRUTH

The Washington Post tells us that public perceptions of the 2020 election and the January 6 insurrection are headed in the wrong direction:

Three years after the Jan. 6 attack, Republicans are more sympathetic to those who stormed the U.S. Capitol ... than they were in 2021, according to a Washington Post-University of Maryland poll....

When The Post and UMD asked in December 2021 whether Biden was legitimately elected, 69 percent of Americans said he was. Now, that’s down to 62 percent.... fewer Republicans today (31 percent) say Biden’s election was legitimate compared with 2021 (39 percent).

This paragraph in the Post story is particularly disheartening:

Several voters interviewed by The Post cited what they said was evidence of voter fraud, in particular the long-debunked claim that Georgia election workers were caught on video putting fake ballots into tallies. The two women in that video recently won a $148 million judgment against former Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani for spreading those defamatory claims.

How can Republicans continue to believe that there was electoral fraud in Georgia when a court recently said that Giuliani's claims of fraud in Georgia were defamatory to the election workers he accused? But that's the problem: the determination that Giuliani was wrong about this took place in a court of law.

Americans absorb information visually, through video clips on social media and television. They absorb words, but the words have to be direct and to the point. The Giuliani trial was not televised. Neither were dozens of cases Donald Trump filed in the aftermath of the 2020 election, all of which he lost. Obviously Trump's hardcore base has confirmation bias, and would ignore even verbally and visually compelling rejections of Trump's election-fraud arguments. But for people in the middle, there was nothing compelling to watch or read either. When there were legal rulings by judges, they were inevitably written in heavily annotated, incomprehensible, turgid prose.

It's true that, back in August, Giuliani was found to have defamed two Georgia election workers; the trial that recently concluded was intended only to determine how much money Giuliani has to pay those workers. It would be nice if some of the language of Judge Beryl Markham's August ruling could go viral. But legal writing doesn't work that way. Here's the first paragraph of Judge Markham's ruling, in its entirety:

The Federal Rules of Civil Procedure authorize “[l]iberal discovery” for the “sole purpose of assisting in the preparation and trial, or the settlement, of litigated disputes,” Seattle Times Co. v. Rhinehart, 467 U.S. 20, 34 (1984), with “the only express limitations [ ] that the information sought is not privileged, and is relevant to the subject matter of the pending action[,]” but without “differentiat[ing] between information that is private or intimate and that to which no privacy interests attach,” id. at 30. As such, “the Rules often allow extensive intrusion into the affairs of both litigants and third parties.” Id. Crucial to fulfilling this central purpose of civil discovery is that parties “comply fully and timely with their discovery obligations ... to supply relevant testimony and documents for a fair appraisal of the facts and a ‘just’ determination.” Freeman v. Giuliani, No. CV 21-3354 (BAH), 2023 WL 4750552, at *1 (D.D.C. July 13, 2023) (quoting FED. R. CIV. P. 1). Obviously, only extant documents and data are producible, so parties must also take reasonable efforts to preserve potentially relevant evidence, including electronically stored information (“ESI”), when litigation is “reasonably foreseeable.” Gerlich v. U.S. Dep’t of Just., 711 F.3d 161, 170–71 (D.C. Cir. 2013). To incentivize and enforce compliance with these procedural rules, sanctions may be imposed when ESI should have been preserved “in the anticipation or conduct of litigation” but “is lost because a party failed to take reasonable steps to preserve it[.]” FED. R. CIV. P. 37(e)

The ruling goes on like this for 57 pages.

I'm not saying that legal language ought to be thoroughly dumbed down to match the comprehension levels of the social media era. I'm saying we need to understand that the key points of legal decisions frequently don't penetrate the public consciousness.

It would be good if we routinely televised trials on issues of great public interest. People today are more likely to absorb the news visually than verbally. It would also be beneficial if legal decisions included more plain English -- the legalese can stay, but it would be helpful if key points were presented intelligently but directly.

I'd be curious to know whether most Americans even realize that Trump took his fraud case to court dozens of times, and repeatedly lost. It's clearly not a compelling part of the national memory.

NIKKI HALEY'S SLAVERY ANSWER WASN'T THE SAME OLD WAFFLING -- IT WAS A MOVE TO THE RIGHT

Happy New Year -- and I hope it's happier than the future I've been seeing in my recent gloomy predictions. There's not much fresh news right now, but I've just read Sidney Blumenthal's Guardian column about the response Nikki Haley recently gave to a campaign-trail question on the Civil War, and I just want to note something that might be obvious, but wasn't obvious to me when she spoke.

Blumenthal characterizes Haley's response as the same old waffling Haley has done since she was governor of South Carolina:

Though it was a stumble, it was not a mistake, but a message she has delivered for years and that has served her well until now. Her carefully crafted and closely memorized garble was a deracinated version of an old lie, which she had used before to attempt to mollify hostile camps in order to skid by.

But Haley didn't say what she said in the past. She didn't try to mollify hostile camps. She came down solidly on the side of her fellow right-wingers.

Here's how she used to talk about the Civil War and slavery:

The Wall Street Journal editorially praised her in 2010 for an interview she gave to a neo-Confederate group, the Palmetto Patriots. “‘You had one side of the Civil War that was fighting for tradition, and I think you had another side of the Civil War that was fighting for change,’ she said. She did not use the word ‘slavery’ but hinted at it, saying that ‘everyone is supposed to be free.’”

... On 17 June, 2015, Dylann Roof, a 21-year-old white supremacist and neo-Nazi, murdered nine Black members of the Bible study group of the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal church, intending to ignite a race war....

“For many people in our state, the flag stands for traditions that are noble – traditions of history, of heritage and of ancestry,” [Haley] stated as governor. “The hate-filled murderer who massacred our brothers and sisters in Charleston has a sick and twisted view of the flag. In no way does he reflect the people in our state who respect and, in many ways, revere it. At the same time, for many others in South Carolina, the flag is a deeply offensive symbol of a brutally oppressive past. As a state, we can survive, as we have done, while still being home to both of those viewpoints. We do not need to declare a winner and loser.”

In a Washington Post op-ed, she wrote that the flag was “a symbol of slavery, discrimination, and hate for many people”. But, she added: “Today’s outrage culture insists that everyone who holds a view that’s different from our own is not just mistaken. They must be evil and shunned. That’s wrong. I know too many good people in South Carolina who think differently about the flag but who are not the least bit racist. The tragedy of all of this is that it makes compromise far less possible.”

On the one hand ... on the other hand.... Haley's old rhetoric on this subject was really terrible -- but in her recent campaign appearance, there wasn't even an "other hand." When asked what caused the Civil War, Haley came down solidly on the side of the right.

“I think the cause of the civil war was basically how government was going to run, the freedoms and what people could and couldn’t do,” Haley began haltingly. Then she stopped.

“What do you think the cause of the civil war was?” she asked her questioner. He replied that he was not running for president and wished to hear her thoughts. “I think it always comes down to the role of government and what the rights of the people are,” Haley continued, and continued, and continued. “And I will always stand by the fact that I think government was intended to secure the rights and freedoms of the people. It was never meant to be all things to all people. Government doesn’t need to tell you how to live your life. They don’t need to tell you what you can and can’t do. They don’t need to be a part of your life.”

She wasn't advocating slavery, but she was arguing that there was one side telling the other side how to conduct its affairs. She was mapping a contemporary right-wing framing of American politics -- "big government" vs. "freedom" -- onto the 1860s, and she was clearly coming down on the side opposed to "big government." She all but said that the correct side was the side that was pro-"freedom" -- i.e., pro-freedom to own slaves.

Haley's response was not Good people on both sides can disagree. It was that one side believed in freedom and one side was using the heavy hand of government to deny that side its freedom. How else are we supposed to interpret that than pro-Confederacy?

So Haley's rhetoric has moved to the right. In this campaign appearance, she couldn't even remember the part about the "brutally oppressive past." I don't think Haley would be as awful a president as Donald Trump or Ron DeSantis, but she wouldn't be much better. I take no comfort in the possibility that she might pull off a miracle in the primaries, or rise to the presidency as Trump's vice president. She's bad.

IF THIS IS THE FIRST TIME YOU'RE HEARING ABOUT THE TENNESSEE NAZI FIGHT CLUB, ASK YOURSELF WHY

Did you know about this gas station in Tennessee that hosted a Nazi fight club? Until now, I didn't.

The Nashville gas station whose "actual literal Nazi" owner hosted a far-right hand-to-hand combat facility upstairs will now join a local chain of convenience marts, The Tennessean reported.

The Lewis Country Store, the restaurant and fill-'er-up where the Southern Poverty Law Center discovered a white supremacist fighting gym in June, will become part of Tennessee's Tri Star Energy's holdings. Tri Star told the local paper that the sale will likely go through the day after New Year's, and the facility will be "company-owned and -operated" going forward.

“Anytime we acquire a store, we fold them into our culture and run them as our stores,” an executive told The Tennessean.

That likely means the end not just of the white supremacist mixed martial arts ring, but also its notorious LED exhortations to motorists that they "Never Forget Benghazi," "#Trump That Bitch," and bring comedienne Kathy Griffin's head in exchange for a $50,000 reward.

... The store continued to provoke with its defiance of local COVID-19 regulations in 2020, and its owner's proud declaration that he is an "actual literal Nazi" after the SPLC report came out this year.

I can see why the 2016 news stories about the Lewis Country Store didn't go national -- they were published shortly before Election Day 2016, and the owner seemed like just a normal Trump voter, not a Nazi.

Two weeks ago, the [Nashville] Scene reported on a scrolling digital sign at a gas station, Lewis Country Store. The sign had apparently been scrolling pro-Trump and anti-Clinton messages for months, but its latest iteration had been brought to our attention by someone concerned about children seeing the language used: "Trump Just Said It. Bill Clinton Did It! The Only P*$$y Trump Ever Grabbed Was Paul Ryan! #TrumpThatB*tch."

Lewis Country Store is a Shell gas station, and we asked the oil company what they thought about their brand being associated a particularly nasty piece of political rhetoric.

... Shell's investigation has apparently led the company to decide being associated with Lewis Country Store is not a good look.

Shell withdrew its branding from the Lewis Country Store, but business went on as usual otherwise. Then in early June of this year, the Southern Poverty Law Center reported on the Nazi fight club that was using a gym above the Lewis Country Store:

White nationalist groups are using a private gym above a store in Nashville, Tennessee, to network and train for hand-to-hand combat....

Sean Kauffmann is the leader of the Tennessee Active Club, which is part of a national network of white power hate groups....

On May 21, an administrator of the group’s Telegram channel forwarded a message from Lewis Country Store that mocked the reactions of community members to the store’s bigoted signage. About an hour later, a message on the channel asserted that the group has a working relationship with the store’s owner.

“This dudes cool as fuck,” [sic] the message states, “he lets us train at his private gym upstairs! Fuck this commie government!”

... According to video and photographs the Tennessee Active Club posted online, the gym above Lewis Country Store was used at least three times in 2023.

After the SPLC report was published, a local NPR station reported that

the owner of the store, Brad Lewis, went on a white supremacist podcast, where the host asked him about the report published by “the commie scumbags from the SPLC.” Lewis responded by confirming that he allows people to train in the space above his store.

“I’ve got some guys that are ex-MMA pros that have been training with me for, gosh, 15 years now. We’re getting some younger, younger white men in there,” he said.

... The day after the report was published, Lewis posted on Telegram: “I’m not a cuckservative, I’m an actual literal Nazi.”

Also:

... the Lewis Country Store posted a photograph of the [Tennessee Active Club] giving the Hitler salute outside Lewis Country Store with “Fuck the SPLC!!!” as the caption.

That was in June. Did you know about it?

I didn't. But imagine if the situation were reversed. Imagine if a popular store that posted anti-Trump messages were found to be associated with a hate group that embraces a murderous racist ideology. It would be all over Fox News for weeks. There'd be dozens of stories. The owner would be famous.

But there's no media outlet that will really pound a story like this the way Fox does. No media outlet trusted by liberals makes a habit of highlighting right-wing evildoers, unless those evildoers are part of the political, business, or media elite and the stories can be used to make high-minded points about governance, democracy, foreign policy, or high-level corruption.

This matters because identifying an endless series of low-level enemies is one of the key ways the right-wing media keeps viewers angry at liberals and Democrats, and thus loyal to the Republican Party. Our side's preferred media sources are much too high-minded to do this. And so even when a proudly public Trump supporter identifies himself as a Nazi, it won't become big news, even for a moment. I'm all for serious journalism, but this outrage gap is helping the GOP.