Posts

To Pay Off His Election Debts, Trump Seems Prepared to Destroy the United States

/33 Comments/in , /by

Kimberly Strassel is struggling with cognitive dissonance. She’s trying to convince Republicans to reject the nomination of RJK Jr, whom she believes Trump named to head Health and Human Services only as electoral payback.

Welcome to the Robert F. Kennedy Jr. nomination, one of the more counterproductive Washington charades in recent history. Donald Trump has, in payback for late-stage election support, nominated a man for the vital cabinet position (health and human services) whom he once labeled a “Democrat Plant” and a bigger threat to the country than Joe Biden. Now meet the Republican senators, activists and influencers who are so clueless—and so blindly eager to salute the leader—that they can’t see the opportunity to save Mr. Trump from a deal he would never have made in other circumstances.

[snip]

It seems not to have occurred to Senate Republicans—who ought to have learned a little bit about Mr. Trump by now—that he needs a rescue here. No insider believes this is a heartfelt pick. Even political naïfs understand what happened: This agreement was entirely transactional. Mr. Trump saw an opportunity to gain RFK’s endorsement. The price was a promise of a big post. The president-elect is holding true to that deal as a businessman, so he won’t dare whisper misgivings for fear of leaks.

Instead Senate Republicans are playing monkey-see-monkey-do to an extent that even Mr. Trump must be exasperated. Nearly every GOP senator looks at Mr. Kennedy with wincing concern—knowing the havoc the anticapitalist big-government regulator can and will wreak on a Trump agenda. Yet no one steps up to save the president. If Joe Biden chose Hulk Hogan to be Treasury secretary, does anyone think Democrats would have let him step into that trap? But so desperate right now are Republicans to nod along that they are abdicating the real job of advice and consent—and protection.

Murdoch’s top columnist believes Trump needs to be saved from himself.

It comes with no small discomfort to admit that my approach to Trump’s nominations is not much different than [gulp] Strassel’s. I think Democrats, rather than fostering polarization by attacking Trump’s nominees as the partisan hacks they are, should instead frame the question in terms of the damage they’ll do to the US, the damage Republican Senators will own if they confirm them.

How hard can it be, after all, to convince Republicans that they don’t want to be responsible for letting Bobby Kennedy get rid of childhood vaccinations, revoking approval for the polio vaccine entirely, with the resultant death and destruction that’ll directly cause in their own states (as it did already in Samoa)?

How hard can it be, after all, to convince Republicans that the same billionaires who bankrupted Silicon Valley Bank then promptly begged for and got bailed out, shouldn’t be recommending the elimination of the FDIC?

That is, I think Democrats would be best served by laying out that if the Republicans approve these charlatans, they cannot claim they were not warned. They own the destruction Trump is embracing. If Trump gets his way on all these picks, it will be more destructive to the United States than dropping a nuke on NYC. And Republican Senators have a choice to sanction that … or try to prevent it.

All that said, in her valiant struggle to make sense of why the man she has blindly defended for years might take steps that will foreseeably do grave damage to harm the US, Strassel may simplify things somewhat when she imagines this is just about electoral payback.

For starters, much of the criticism Trump launched against RFK during the campaign was kayfabe, an attempt to appear to be on opposite sides as him, in a ploy to harm the Democratic ticket. That “charade,” as Strassel calls this, was about stealing Democratic votes, not feigned approval for RFK now.

Plus, Donald Trump is famous for reneging on his debts, whether personal or financial, and he would happily do so with RFK if he saw an advantage in it. Hell he has already reneged on the offer to Bill McGinley to be White House Counsel and given the job instead to David Warrington. While Elon Musk likely has a great deal of leverage over Trump for the foreseeable future, it’s hard to see how RFK could enforce any deal they made, if indeed they had one.

On the contrary, at least according to Trump whisperer Marc Caputo (citing Roger Stone, who has long been a professional Kennedy conspirator), Trump has affirmative reasons he wants RFK and … Tulsi Gabbard.

But the most critical fights for the president-elect, at least in regard to his immediate political legacy, center around Tulsi Gabbard and Robert Kennedy Jr., former Democrats tapped to head the nation’s sprawling intelligence and health bureaucracies, respectively.

Gabbard’s and Kennedy’s nominations, like Hegseth’s and Patel’s, have met resistance in pockets of the Senate. But Trump allies view the stakes differently. Confirming Gabbard and Kennedy is seen as an opportunity for the president-elect to cement his legacy of broadening the Republican coalition to include disaffected Democrats and independents. They note that the two are considered Blue MAGA rock stars among the Trump faithful. They’re both loved by the new influential podcasters whom Trump courted this election and give Trump the chance to burnish his anti-establishment bona fides.

“The appointments of RFK and Tulsi Gabbard represent a realignment in American politics that you saw in the election,” said Roger Stone, a longtime Trump friend and adviser. “He understands the historical significance of that realignment.”

For that reason, there is an expectation in Trump world that the president-elect will expend more of his political capital on Gabbard and Kennedy than on any of the other nominees. And that he could go apoplectic if their prospects begin to dim.

“Frankly, Pete [Hegseth] might not make it,” said one Trump adviser. “We’ll see. I’m not sure if the boss is willing to fight for that because there are people in our own camp who aren’t sure it’s worth it. But Kash [Patel] should get confirmed. And if they try to touch Tulsi and Kennedy, then it’s war.”

Added a second adviser: “If Tulsi or Bobby face real trouble, that’s when Trump will really start to fight. They represent the challenging of the status quo of the bureaucracy. That’s what MAGA is about.”

Now, Caputo is incredibly well-sourced in the vicinity of people like Stone, but he can be credulous.

And I’m not sure I believe that his sources believe what Bobby and Tulsi give you is some magical realignment among actual Democrats, who long ago dissociated from these nuts.

But I don’t doubt that the rat-fucker wing of Trump’s advisory team believes that Bobby and Tulsi do accomplish something. The question is whether some really smart politicos believe it’ll be a good thing to kill children and give dictators America’s secrets and let the richest men in the world destroy America’s banking system and the dollar exchange — whether they believe this will win lasting approval from America’s great disaffected masses. It might well! It certainly will expand the pool of disaffected Americans, and with it, increase the market for a strong man to respond to it all.

Or whether there’s some reason Trump is tempting Republican Senators to defy his plans to do great damage to the United States. Perhaps he intends to dare them to start defying him in bulk.

Or perhaps the rat-fucker wing of Trump’s entourage simply has an unknown reason they want to destroy America. Maybe Trump has other election debts — debts he’d get in more trouble for ignoring — that make him amenable to dropping policy bomb after policy bomb on America’s children.

But that’s sort of the point. You’ve got Kimberly Strassel up in arms because Trump is going to the mat for a conspiracist with a Democratic name who’ll get children killed. But it’s more likely to do with the policy bombs that RFK will help Trump drop than the specific conversations that led Bobby Jr to drop out of the race.

There Are No Backsies on Dobbs

/114 Comments/in , /by

Since the day after the debate in June, I have conceived of the shift from a Joe Biden to a Kamala Harris campaign in three ways: The Vice President would more vigorously explain the wildly successful policies of the Biden-Harris Administration. She might (and indeed, has started to) chip away at the Double Hater logjam that has embodied presidential elections since 2016. And she would speak about choice far better than Biden ever could.

At the time, I maintained that Gretchen Whitmer was the only Democrat nationally who speaks better to choice than Harris does. In assuming the presidential ticket, Kamala’s team has made abortion something far more. They have made reproductive rights a cornerstone of a revamped democracy agenda.

That has happened in a curious way. Dobbs only happened because the Supreme Court has become a supercharged, wildly undemocratic wing of right wing policy. The fight to get abortion referenda on state ballots has repeatedly, perhaps most notably in Ohio, had to first defeat anti-democratic efforts to disempower referenda generally. In Wisconsin, voters first had to put Janet Protasiewicz on the Supreme Court before they could turn to protecting reproductive choice, but organizing to do that has laid the groundwork for renewed Democratic vitality. To restore reproductive rights, in state after state, democracy must be renewed.

But all that’s in the background. Kamala’s team has succeeded in making abortion something more: the most obvious item on a laundry list of the ways the far right has tried to take rights (and books) away, a fight for Freedom, one that has enthused millions of younger voters, especially women of child-bearing age.

And so, as I thought it might, Kamala’s focus on choice is one of the things that has remade the race.

It didn’t take rocket science to offer that prediction (though surprisingly few pundits did so, and most people pushing for a Thunderdome primary, who were overwhelmingly men, missed it). Democrats have successfully run on choice since Dobbs;  it has played a central role in Democratic campaigns even in places like Andy Beshear’s Kentucky. Yet Kamala’s clarion voice on the issue largely got ignored as people plotted for ways to bypass the first woman Vice President to replace Biden.

Thus far in this campaign, a focus on abortion has also provided a way to make visible the patriarchy presumed in most threads of the right wing coalition backing Trump, especially but by no means exclusively Christian nationalism. Lest voters ever forget, Kamala’s campaign keeps rolling out one after another video in which JD Vance demands women get back to the role his Church dictates for them: breeding children.

A number of things — the successful convention, a surge in registration among those women of child-bearing age, polls showing that abortion is the most important issue for a larger number of voters — have led horserace journalists to finally cop on.

Or perhaps they’re just noting Trump’s response to Kamala’s focus on choice. I think choice (and the way it harms Trump with women voters) is one reason Trump’s team made Tulsi Gabbard a more formal surrogate; in their appearance together in LaCrosse, billed a Town Hall, Tulsi told the story of her own attempt to conceive using IVF, effectively adopting Tim Walz’ story and focus. Certainly, it’s the reason why, over the course of one day, Trump said wildly contradictory things about choice.

Yesterday, both NYT and WaPo had stories describing the background to that. Trump whisperers Jonathan Swan and Maggie Haberman, who in July first seeded the false narrative that a GOP platform that enshrines fetal personhood reflects a “softened” stance on abortion, treat it as primarily a matter of messaging.

Back in 2022, the former president had told allies — as the Supreme Court was preparing to overturn Roe v. Wade — that the move would hurt his party. Since that year, when Republicans underperformed expectations in the midterm elections, Mr. Trump has been privately emphatic with advisers that in his view the abortion issue alone could kill their chances of victory in November. And he is willing to make as many rhetorical and policy contortions as he deems necessary to win.

It is through that narrow political lens that Mr. Trump has been weighing the subject, despite his role in reshaping the Supreme Court that overturned the landmark 1973 abortion decision.

The results have been confusing and fluid, a contradictory mess of policy statements as he has once again tried to rebrand himself on an issue that many of his supporters view in strict moral terms, and had come to believe that he did, too.

[snip]

Still, even by Mr. Trump’s standards, the past few weeks have been head-spinning for people trying to keep track of his slippery social conservatism.

Twice divorced serial philanderer Donald Trump doesn’t have social conservatism. He has a politically expedient con. Trump has convinced Christian nationalists he was anti-choice in public while attempting to limit the political damage of anti-choice policies behind the scenes. And that con is running headlong into the consequences of the actions he took to sustain the con.

WaPo states this more clearly; this is not about messaging (though WaPo cites Republicans mocking how bad Trump’s messaging on it is). It’s about Trump’s record. Trump had wanted to run on other policies, immigration and Trump’s distorted claims about the economy, but now he’s having to answer for his anti-choice policies.

Many Republicans are hoping that other topics, like the economy and the border, will take precedence for voters, and they cite polls showing broader voter interest in those issues than in abortion.

Trump campaign spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt said in a statement that women voters will compare the Trump and Biden-Harris administrations, and that under Trump, “the economy was better, groceries and gas cost less, our neighborhoods were safer, and young women like Laken Riley were still alive” — a reference to a Georgia student allegedly killed by someone who entered the country illegally in 2022.

But, as noted, in the month since she has entered the race, Kamala has made abortion the primary issue for more voters than immigration is, and it rivals the economy as the most important election issue among women voters.

Swan and Maggie describe how Trump became what they describe as “agitated” after watching the way the DNC made abortion a primary focus.

In private, Mr. Trump was agitated by the speeches at the Democratic National Convention, according to a person close to him, many of which tied him to Project 2025, an effort by people supportive of Mr. Trump to develop policy proposals for him if he wins that include restrictive ideas for reproductive measures. He was especially bothered by Ms. Harris’s assertions that a second Trump term would further imperil abortion rights.

This is more than agitation.

It is flailing.

Panic.

A recognition that he is losing because of actions he took as President, he is losing because of what the payoff he owed to social conservatives who put him in the White House, a far right SCOTUS, did to women. What NYT journalists with another book contract describe as “head-spinning” is not about branding, it’s about panic because Kamala threatens to hold him accountable for his actions.

No matter how many contradictory statements Trump makes about what a second Trump term would do, there’s no escaping what his first term did do. There are no backsies on Dobbs. There are no backsies on Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett. There aren’t even any backsies on that platform granting fetuses protection under the 14th Amendment, even if NYT’s Trump whisperers continue to pretend that didn’t happen.

I mean, come on! If not for the three people Trump added to SCOTUS and those, like Clarence Thomas and Sam Alito, paid for by the same far right Christian nationalists that pushed Vance as a candidate, Trump would be sitting in trial for his attack on January 6 as we speak. Trump is only here, in the race, because of those ideologues who were willing to alter the Constitution to serve a far right agenda. Trump has survived thanks to that Court; he is panicking as he considers the possibility it’ll sink him as well.

And even as Kamala already has Trump panicking, it could get worse for Trump and his party.

There’s something about the WaPo version of this story that I can’t get out of my head; it’s actually one of the reasons I went through the trouble of writing this post. Its subhead (presumably not written by the journalists) suggests Trump’s wild gyrations on choice come during the “final stretch” of the campaign. “Heading into the campaign’s final stretch, Republicans careen between their base and swing voters on the powerful issue of reproductive rights.” The temporal observation, that we’re in the last stretch, is undoubtedly true viewed through the lens of the traditional interminable US presidential campaign. Labor Day kicks off the last, most intense period of a campaign, though importantly, the period when low-information voters first start to tune in. Given Trump’s attempt to stave off criminal charges by announcing his run early, in November 2022, it’s far more true of Trump, who is 91% of the way through his run to regain the presidency.

Not so Kamala Harris.

As I calculated Wednesday, Kamala is just starting the second third of her campaign, what we might call her second trimester if it were three times as long. As of today, she has 60% of her campaign, 64 days of 107, left to go.

And so, even as Kamala has already made Trump an equivocating wreck, nine-tenths of the way through his campaign and just in time for low-information voters to witness it, she has only just laid a foundation to build on. Even as the press described Trump’s flopsweat as abortion threatens to ruin his bid, Kamala’s campaign rolled out a bus tour to focus on reproductive rights.

They are, quite literally, taking it to Trump, to Palm Beach, for the kickoff.

Today, Team Harris-Walz is announcing the launch of its “Fighting for Reproductive Freedom” bus tour with a kickoff event in Donald Trump’s backyard in Palm Beach, Florida, on Tuesday, September 3. Senator Amy Klobuchar, Harris-Walz campaign manager Julie Chavez Rodriguez, Republican TV personality Ana Navarro, and reproductive rights storyteller Anya Cook will hold Trump directly accountable for the devastating impacts of overturning Roe v. Wade, including threatening access to IVF.

This fall, the bus will make at least 50 stops in key states, touching blue communities and red ones, with support for reproductive rights transcending party lines. Each stop will emphasize the stark contrast between Vice President Harris and Governor Walz, who will restore the protections of Roe when Congress passes a bill to do so, and Donald Trump and JD Vance, who will enact their dangerous Project 2025 agenda to ban abortion nationwide, restrict access to birth control, create a national anti-abortion coordinator, force states to report on women’s miscarriages and abortions, and jeopardize access to IVF.

This is a bus tour of diverse surrogates, not Harris or Walz themselves. The grand-daughter of César Chávez, Julie Chávez Rodriguez, is the only royalty on this bus. But the bus provides the campaign a low-effort way to build on the foundation established at the DNC, to try to yoke state referenda more closely to partisan races, to try to make races like that of Florida Senate candidate Debbie Mucarsel-Powell (or that of Angela Alsobrooks or Dan Osborn) more competitive. If that works, who knows how close Kamala might make the Florida race itself? Even assuming Kamala won’t beat Trump in his own state, it will serve to reinvigorate a state party that had been struggling, but which also just recently delivered embarrassing defeats to Moms for Liberty, the book-burners who serve as both Ron DeSantis and Trump’s surrogates to reach women.

Thus far, horserace journalists have been absolutely loathe to hold Trump accountable for the bad things that happened when he was President: his failures on COVID as well as jobs lost for reasons other than pandemic, the spike in crime, his corruption of rule of law.

But Kamala has finally made Trump own something, his role in stripping women of their bodily autonomy.

And in response, Trump has started to panic.

Update: This Public Notice piece on the press’ willingness to let Trump flip flop on choice with impunity him on it names several other policies he should not have backsies on either.

There’s no earthly reason to give Trump the benefit of the doubt here. Besides dismantling the Affordable Care Act’s contraceptive mandate, the Trump administration also tried to undermine private insurance coverage for abortions, prohibited clinics from receiving federal funds under Title X if they even referred people elsewhere for abortion services, and slashed grants for teen pregnancy prevention programs. A second Trump administration will be comprehensively terrible for reproductive rights generally, not just abortion, and no amount of uninformed flip-flopping will change that.

As Maggie Haberman Unabashedly Joins the Kayfabe, Tim Walz Sings the Menards Jingle

/80 Comments/in /by

Sunday marked the 1/3 mark for Kamala Harris’ presidential campaign (36 of 107 days). Yesterday, she announced her first sit-down interview (with Dana Bash, whom I consider a poor choice); the media hounds are already wailing that, like interviews Barack Obama did with Joe Biden, Mitt Romney did with Paul Ryan, and Trump did with Mike Pence, the Vice President will do the interview with her own VP nominee.

By comparison, Sunday marked the 9/10 mark for Trump’s presidential campaign (650 of 720 days).

Meanwhile, there are a slew of question to which media hounds have not bothered to demand answers from Trump:

  • Will he hire his failspawn to work in White House again?
  • What is Trump’s business relationship with Emiratis and Saudis?
  • Where are his tax returns?
  • Did Trump get $10 million from Egypt to stay in 2016 race?
  • Where are the missing classified documents?
  • What did Putin say in Helsinki?
  • Did Trump have an overt quid pro quo on the Stone, Bannon, and Manafort pardons?
  • How much of his campaign donations has he spent on legal defense?
  • How and (why?!?!) does Trump plan to implement his plan of mass deportation?

In the wake of the DNC, there have been some really good critiques of the media’s failure. Asawin Suebsaeng mocked at the “mollycoddled hogs” who bitched about their own access while bemoaning that of influencers, the bloggers of 2024.

Much of what I witnessed and heard about during my time in Chicago reinforced my preexisting beliefs that far too many so-called elite members of my profession — national political media scribes who fancy themselves as speaking truth to power, but more often just speak words to financially destructive Google algorithms — are mollycoddled hogs who are doing everything they can to fail to meet the enormity of this moment.

Like Suebsaeng, Will Bunch grieved the way journalists were blowing this most important election. He cited three examples:

  • Axios’ Alex Thompson laundering a right wing smears about a typo Tim Walz’ campaign made in 2006 just like he laundered right wing smears about Hunter Biden with little notice from Democrats
  • Rich Lowry’s argument that if Trump repeats a lie over and over — like his 2016 claim that he would build a wall and Mexico would pay for it — that would amount to “character” that might launch him to victory
  • Various “fact checks” that discount direct quotations of Trump’s comments because he later reneged on those quotes

Citing Mark Jacobs, Bunch also flipped Suebsaeng’s focus on mainstream gripes about influencer access. Bunch laid out how, in significant part because of declining trust in mainstream media, those influencers are actually the best route for Kamala Harris to reach voters, particularly the ones who can make the difference in the election.

Jacob has harsh words for how reporters have covered the race, writing that “too many political journalists are marinating in the Washington cocktail culture, writing for each other and for their sources — in service to the political industry, not the public.” But he also notes that traditional media can’t figure out how to compete for young eyeballs against sites like edgy and fast-paced TikTok. Jacob pointed out that public faith in mass media has plunged from 72% in 1976, after Watergate, to just 32% today.

You know who gets the new landscape better than anyone else? Kamala Harris.

The vice president and Democratic nominee is running to be America’s first post-media president. In Chicago, much was made of the fact that Team Harris and the Democrats invited 200 sometimes fawning internet “content creators” who got VIP treatment while mainstream journalists fought over nosebleed-level seats and refrained from eating or going to the bathroom for fear of losing them.

I would add several comments about the real tensions between mainstream reporters and influencers.

First, these discussions of tensions between influencers and journalists have ignored what has happened among right wing media in the last decade– during which time people who would have formerly been called “influencers” (or, more accurately, trolls) have become mainstream, including even former shitty blogger JD Vance. What Harris has done by welcoming these influencers was to foster a progressive media infrastructure akin to the one Barack Obama largely let collapse after his win. If Democrats are lucky, in a matter of years, influencers will be able to feed lazy hacks like Alex Thompson stories that he’ll package up and DC insiders will imagine that amounts to journalism. Until then, they may be able to magnify genuine right wing scandals that the media otherwise ignores. One source of the double standard with which mainstream media has always treated Trump, for example, is this pressure from the right, which really does dictate a lot of press coverage (and which, the Douglass Mackey exhibits showed, those trolls explicitly set out to do as early as 2015).

Second, one thing few people have — still! — accounted for is the degree to which Trump has never been asked to explain policy, allowing him to instead coast on the goodwill and trust accrued over decades of appearing in people’s living room as a TV star. The imagined authenticity that Trump — still! — wields from that gives him an enormous advantage.

To counter that, there’s real value in Tim Walz doing appearances with influencers like this one.

Not only will Walz appear to be an authentic Midwesterner because he shops at Eau Claire based big box store Menards (I, a snooty outsider when I lived in the Midwest and someone who had other people do my gutters, tended to shop at the pricier Lowes instead).

 

 

And there’s no quicker way to convey that he understands how middle class people budget than his comment about sending in receipts to get an 11% rebate.

Most of those that Suebsaeng called mollycoddled hogs would be hard-pressed to understand, much less explain, the thick cultural connotations of this video. Instead, Walz just performs it, with his off-tune Menards jingle rendition to boot.

In other words, it’s not just that Harris has chosen to prioritize those who have trust with the voters she needs to mobilize. Influencers do several other things — things that are absolutely crucial for competing against Trump — that were encouraged on the right but are deemed a slight to journalism now.

Meanwhile, journalists treated with respect are increasingly pumping out Trump-scripted propaganda. Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan have been releasing increasingly supine coverage for months. They falsely reported that a platform that enshrines fetal personhood presented a “softened” GOP face on abortion. After a year of reporting on policies that directly parallel those in Project 2025, Maggie floated Trump’s complaints that Democrats were calling him on it. When that team reported on Trump’s Mar-a-Lago “press conference,” the only lies they called out were Trump’s claim to have left office peacefully — but not his lies about the Biden-Harris hand-off, Kamala’s record, Biden and Pelosi’s demeanor, prosecutions of him, Willie Brown and a near-crash in a helicopter, the price of bacon, polling, or even crowd size.

But with yesterday’s coverage of the RFK Jr and Tulsi Gabbard news, this team really stepped over into joining Trump’s faked conflict. Both the subhead and the story presented the two as “progressive Democrats,” adopting Trump’s apparent goal in countering the increasing number of Republicans who are endorsing Kamala Harris.

Both Mr. Kennedy and Ms. Gabbard spent most of their public life as progressive Democrats. Only four months ago, Mr. Trump was calling Mr. Kennedy a “Radical Left Lunatic” who was “far more LIBERAL than anyone running as a Democrat.” Trump allies pushed stories about Mr. Kennedy’s record of supporting abortion rights and far-left environmentalism as they tried to make his independent candidacy less appealing to Trump voters.

The basis for treating RFK as such was a citation from comments Trump made earlier this year, when he was lying about Kennedy in order to improve RFK’s value as a spoiler to Joe Biden. It was all a show, the kind of drama any wrestling promoter uses to enhance the character of his conflicts. And yet Maggie and Swan just quoted it as if they’re too stupid to know Trump’s comments were all a show.

When Maggie and Swan “broke” the “news” that Tulsi was helping Trump with debate prep just weeks earlier, they included details also appearing in yesterday’s piece (such as about Tulsi’s long friendship with Trump, which totally undermines the claim that this association is news), but also repeated something else that is, at best, Trump’s interpretation of how well Tulsi did in the 2019 debate against Kamala.

Ms. Gabbard, who left the Democratic Party after her 2020 presidential run and has rebranded herself as a celebrity among Trump’s base of support, has long been friendly with Mr. Trump and was briefly considered to be his running mate. But her involvement in Mr. Trump’s debate preparation, which has not previously been reported, was partly because of her own performance in a 2019 Democratic presidential primary debate, when Ms. Gabbard eviscerated Ms. Harris in a memorable onstage encounter. [my emphasis]

The unmarked repetition of this opinion is particularly relevant given that others argue Kamala eviscerated Tulsi, precisely because the then-Senator called out all the ways Tulsi was already simply posing as a Democrat so as to platform her attacks on the party.

 

And Democrats have long been repulsed by Tulsi’s apologies for dictators, starting with Bashar al-Assad, but including Vladimir Putin.

You don’t have to decide which woman eviscerated the other. Indeed, avoiding such comment would invite a better explanation for Tulsi’s role in Trump’s orbit, one that these two Trump-whispers don’t claim to know.

Do they — two Trump whisperers who have covered Trump for years — not know that Trump is just a carnival barker, setting up conflict to distract people performing a role called journalism? Have they unwittingly come to merge their own consciousness with his? Or are they just wittingly part of the kayfabe now themselves?

Whichever it is, as actual journalists continue to treat Trump’s obvious con without comment, it flips the complaints about influencers back on its head.

The coverage Trump has enjoyed has long worked to pressure straight journalists into covering things with a right wing spin. And these days, it’s not clear whether the straight journalists need any help.

Rudy Giuliani Attacks Biden as SDNY Sifts Through His Comms for Ukraine Foreign Agent Investigation

/62 Comments/in /by

Among the many Trump allies suggesting that the former President was better on Russian issues than the current, Rudy Giuliani attempted to attack President Joe Biden with a Tweet dripping with projection.

Just over four weeks ago, the Special Master Barbara Jones delivered the latest tranche of records seized from Giuliani’s phones to prosecutors in SDNY, the US Attorney’s Office that Rudy once led.

While the scope of the review exceeds the scope of the known warrants, those known warrants target Rudy’s role in getting Maria Yovanovich fired in 2019 as part of an effort to get campaign dirt on Joe Biden.

Indeed, for six of Rudy’s devices, the latest review focused on the period from December 1, 2018 through May 31, 2018, which would cover the following events.

Late 2018: Rudy Giuliani participates in a Skype call with the former top Ukrainian prosecutor, Viktor Shokin, who was ousted from office after multiple Western leaders, including former Vice President Joe Biden, pressed for his removal. Leaders complain Shokin was failing to tackle corruption. It’s around this time that Giuliani says he first learned of a possible Biden-Ukraine connection.

January 2019: Giuliani meets in New York with the top Ukrainian prosecutor at the time, Yuriy Lutsenko. This is when, Giuliani says, his investigation into the Bidens began.

A man named Lev Parnas has said he attended the meeting with Lutsenko and arranged the call with Shokin. Parnas told NPR he attended at least two meetings Giuliani had with Lutsenko. Parnas and an associate, who also worked with Giuliani, are later arrested and charged with violating campaign finance law in a separate matter.

March 31: The first round of presidential elections take place in Ukraine. Zelenskiy, a comedian who once played a president on television, comes out ahead of incumbent President Petro Poroshenko. The race goes to a runoff.

April 7: In an interview on Fox News, Giuliani, unprompted, brings up a Biden-Ukraine connection. He says that while investigating the origin of the Russia investigation, “some people” told him “the story about [gas company] Burisma and Biden’s son.” Giuliani suggests that as vice president, Biden pressed to remove Shokin because he was investigating Burisma, a Ukrainian gas company that had Biden’s son Hunter on its board for several years. There is no evidence to support this claim.

April 21: Zelenskiy is elected president of Ukraine and Trump calls to congratulate him. A White House readout of the call says Trump “expressed his commitment to work together with President-elect Zelenskyy and the Ukrainian people to implement reforms that strengthen democracy, increase prosperity, and root out corruption.”

April 25: Trump calls in to Sean Hannity’s TV show and says he has heard rumors about Ukrainian “collusion.” He tells the Fox News host he expects Attorney General Bill Barr to look into it. “I would imagine he would want to see this,” Trump says.

May 6: Marie Yovanovitch, the U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine and an Obama appointee, ends her assignment in Kyiv. According to the whistleblower complaint filed against Trump, she had been “suddenly recalled” to the U.S. by senior State Department officials a week earlier.

Giuliani later says in an interview that she was removed “because she was part of the efforts against the President.” Yovanovitch tells Congress that she learned from the deputy secretary of state “there had been a concerted campaign against me, and that the Department had been under pressure from the President to remove me since the Summer of 2018,” according to prepared remarks reported by multiple outlets.

May 9: Giuliani tells The New York Times he will travel to Ukraine “in the coming days” to push for investigations that could help Trump. Giuliani says he hopes to meet with President-elect Zelenskiy to push for inquiries into the origins of the Russia investigation and the Bidens’ involvement with Burisma.

“We’re not meddling in an election, we’re meddling in an investigation, which we have a right to do,” Giuliani tells the Times.

“There’s nothing illegal about it,” he says. “Somebody could say it’s improper. And this isn’t foreign policy — I’m asking them to do an investigation that they’re doing already and that other people are telling them to stop. And I’m going to give them reasons why they shouldn’t stop it because that information will be very, very helpful to my client and may turn out to be helpful to my government.”

Among the members of Congress criticizing Biden, Tulsi Gabbard voted present to impeach Trump on his related extortion attempt; virtually all Republicans voted not to impeach Trump, including Biden critics Paul Gosar and Scott Perry. Of Republican Senators, just Mitt Romney voted to convict the President.

Trump was not serious about Ukraine. He viewed it as nothing more than a political football. Almost his entire party backed him in that effort.

And his former attorney, wailing on Twitter about the ‘CLEAR AND PRESENT DANGER” posed by “mentally deteriorating [men], who [were] of limited intelligence even before [] dementia” remains under criminal investigation as an unregistered agent of Russian-backed Ukrainians for his role in politicizing Ukraine.

Transpartisan Arguments the Government Won’t Want to Succeed

/7 Comments/in , /by

Justin Amash, Paul Broun, Tulsi Gabbard, Morgan Griffith, Rush Holt, Walter Jones, Barbara Lee, Zoe Lofgren, Thomas Massie, Tom McClintock, Eleanor Holmes Norton, Beto O’Rourke, Steve Pearce, Matt Salmon, Mark Sanford, Ted Yoho.

Well, that’s got to be a group of people the Powers That Be don’t want to see joining together?

Captain Tulsi Gabbard, Physics PhD Rush Holt, Appalachian Trail Hiker Mark Sanford, and Paleocon Walter Jones. With my libertarian Congressman, Justin Amash apparently leading the bunch.

All on a court motion together, calling for the court to release the FISC opinion explaining why the government’s Section 702 collection was unconstitutional because without it they can’t do their job. Which includes, in part, informing the American people.

As important, whatever information Members of Congress learn about secret FISC opinions and orders, they are unable publicly to discuss or debate them because any disclosure is still subject to secrecy requirements.

[snip]

In light of recent disclosures regarding the existence of a “classified intelligence program,” related to the “business records” section of FISA, the Director of National Intelligence has acknowledged that “it is important for the American people to understand” the limits of the program and the principles behind it.

[snip]

Notwithstanding the compelling public interest in an open debate about the scope and propriety of government surveillance programs authorized under FISA, even the amici — Members of the U.S. Congress — cannot meaningfully participate in that public debate so long as this Court’s relevant decisions and interpretations of law remain secret. They cannot engage in public discussion on the floor of the Senate and the House about the government’s surveillance programs. And they cannot engage in dialogue with their constituents on these pressing matters of public importance.

[snip]

Informed, public debate is central to Congress’s role as a coequal branch of the federal government. The Constitution acknowledges the unique importance of open debate to Congress’s role in the Speech or Debate Clause. Debate in Congress serves no only the institution’s internal goal of creating sound public policy. Courts have recognized a second crucial purpose of informed, public debate in Congress: to inform the American people about the issues affecting their government.

Now, I think they may overestimate the degree to which this opinion pertains to the Section 215 collection (indeed, if it pertains to Internet metadata collection, it pertains to Section 214 of PATRIOT instead). [Update, 9/13/13: I’m mistaken here–it was exclusively Section 215.]

And I think their Speech or Debate argument has confused people about whether these members of Congress have seen what’s in the opinion. Holt used to be on the House Intelligence Committee, but no longer is, so I assume none of the Members on this brief know what the opinion is. In any case, the House has much more restrictive rules about who can access intelligence secrets than the Senate.

But I am rather fond of the argument that Congress can’t do its job with all the secrecy the Executive is operating under.