What a week for Donald Trump. House Democrats finally got their hands on his tax returns. Judge Aileen Cannon has been ordered by the 11th Circuit to dismiss the documents case in her court and put an end to the “special master” delay tactic. The two top Oath Keeper guys were found guilty of seditious conspiracy. It looks like testimony in the tax fraud trial in Manhattan is about to wrap up. The dinner with Ye and Nick Fuentes is still making headlines because they are all walking freak shows who won’t shut up. And there’s this, which has been under-covered —
A federal judge has ordered former top Trump White House lawyers to provide additional grand jury testimony, rejecting former President Donald Trump’s privilege claims in the Justice Department’s criminal investigation of his effort to overturn the 2020 election, people briefed on the matter said.
Pat Cipollone, the Trump White House counsel, and his deputy, Patrick Philbin, appeared in September before the grand jury in Washington, DC, as part of the Justice Department probe, which is now being overseen by newly appointed special counsel Jack Smith.
Cipollone and Philbin declined to answer some questions at that time, citing Trump’s claims of executive and attorney-client privilege.
And to state the obvious, DOJ’s decision to fight Cipollone & Philbin’s executive privilege claims shows they are moving like a freight train directly at Donald Trump.
— Harry Litman (@harrylitman) December 2, 2022
The Republican Party probably hasn’t hit bottom yet, but it’s getting closer. The Ye – Alex Jones interview, in which Ye revealed himself to be a Hitler fanboy, ought to be a huge embarrassment for the entire right-wing media-political infrastructure. Tucker Carlson made Ye a right-wing hero. The GOP had turned Ye into some kind of poster boy for Black People Who Support Trump. (The sub-context being see? we aren’t racists!) That’s all blowing up in their faces now. Jewish groups are demanding that the GOP cut all ties with Ye, which I assume they will do. They need Jewish votes more than they need the 6.2 Black Voters who might have changed parties because they are Ye fans.
Ye himself is, obviously, a massively screwed up person who needs to be under psychiatric supervision a lot more than he needs to be in a media spotlight. I hope he gets the help he needs now that he’s probably about to become persona non grata in right-wing media. But unless he is psychotic being screwed up mentally is no excuse for anti-Semitism or Holocaust denial.
At The Atlantic, Ron Brownstein says the Republican party may be at a cross roads regarding its extremist supporters. Many GOP politicians were slow to respond to the Ye-Fuentes-Trump debacle. Now some of them seem to want to re-erect old barriers between the far-right fringe and the party mainstream, but others are reluctant. Without the White and Christian nationalists, who else is going to vote for them?
Elizabeth Neumann, a former assistant secretary at the Department of Homeland Security under Trump who focused on domestic extremism, told me she believes the backlash—however belated—combined with the GOP’s disappointing performance in last month’s midterm elections, could mark a turning point. “I think we are going to be playing footsie with fascism and authoritarianism and extremism for a while,” because it helped Trump win the presidency in 2016 and sustain his support thereafter, she said. But, she added, after several years of feeling “very pessimistic” about the prospect of weakening those movements, “this is the first time I’ve felt there might be some light at the end of the tunnel.”
Yet others remain unconvinced that the GOP is ready to fundamentally break with Trump or ostracize the coalition’s overtly racist, homophobic, and anti-Semitic white supremacists and Christian nationalists. “I think what we are looking at is the entrenchment of extremism, and that’s what is so worrisome,” Jonathan Greenblatt, the CEO of the Anti-Defamation League, told me.
If anything, extremist groups could gain momentum in the coming months. Musk’s proposed mass amnesty for banned Twitter accounts would provide “a tremendous amount of oxygen to extremists on the radical right” and allow those groups to push back much harder against any Republican elected officials resisting their presence in the party, Michael Edison Hayden of the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Intelligence Project told me. If Musk opens the door to extremist organizing on Twitter, Hayden said, the white-nationalist presence in the GOP coalition will become “potentially irreversible in the short term.”
I suspect Greenblatt and Hayden are calling this right. The next couple of years are going to be interesting.
Jennifer Rubin also has a good column, The MAGA cult should face facts: America will never be theirs ‘again.’
Right-wing media commentators and MAGA politicians have one thing right: The cultural tide of pluralism, secularism and feminism has washed away their imagined reactionary paradise of a White Christian America. Unfortunately, they fail to realize this trend is irreversible.
Republicans have been invested in the “culture war” for decades now. And they’re losing. They’re stuck with defending many positions that were winners for them in the past but aren’t any more — opposition to legal abortion, opposition to same-sex marriage, opposition to “virtually anything that smacks of racial justice,” Rubin says. As a result, they are at odds with the overwhelming majority of Americans on most social issues. And that’s not going to change.
But they are stuck in dependency with the White Christian Nationalists and the various other fringe crazies who like to pretend they are freedom fighters and warriors for the revolution.
(Their real problem is that they are leading meaningless lives and are not nearly as privileged and admired as they think they ought to be. One of the best things I’ve read this week is “Why Did the Oath Keepers Do It?” by Tom Nichols at The Atlantic, which I can’t get to today without starting up another subscription. Which I don’t want to do. But give it a try and see if they’ll let you read it.)
In the meantime, what might really shake up the political landscape is if Trump finally is tried and convicted of something, and that’s looking more possible all the time.
Maha, in case you missed it: https://radleybalko.substack.com/p/a-big-honking-mea-culpa
I was able to read the Atlantic article. Lots of quotes of right wing journalists mixed into calling Oath Keepers (Oaf Kreepers?) pitiful little men and downplaying the significance of the Oath Keepers.
There is much to be ridiculed about the Oath Keepers. The next set of Sedious Conspiracy trials are of Proud Boys – the ones who attacked the Capitol Building in well trained military/police formations.
The White Christian Nationalism problem is intransigent.
You entirely missed the point. What was brilliant was the social-psychological analysis of why the Oath Keepers were drawn into a fantasy of being big bad revolutionaries. It even quoted Eric Hoffer's "The True Believer."
Yeah, maha: When I heard the news earlier about Pat Say-bologna having to testify AGAIN at the grand jury hearing, I could swear I heard that Tang-colored Michelin Man's gutteral scream a nanosecond before his head exploded in a horrendous – but joyous – "BOOM!", all the way from Merde-duh-Lardass, 1,500+ miles away, in Florida!
But apparently, I was having a "Temptations" moment: "Just My Imagination."
"But unless he is psychotic being screwed up mentally is no excuse for anti-Semitism or Holocaust denial."
Excellent point. Holocaust denial puts one's contact with reality in serious question. The question I pose to those who might consider that a valid reality, that the holocaust never happened, is to just think of the quantity and quality of evidence which one would need to overturn all the exiting evidence that the holocaust was real. From Nazi documents to eye-witness testimony to the film footage and accounts of the liberating troops to the gas chambers, mass graves, and crematoriums. For a person to discount the mountains of evidence and dare to try to persuade others of the non-existence of the holocaust or even hold that as a personal truth defies imagination without suspecting a psychotic mind and severe lack of reality contact.
The only reason I can imagine, to doubt the existence of the holocaust, is how a society could allow this level of inhumanity to happen. We know that it did, but all explanations seem lacking. We do know that smaller scale genocides or ethnic cleansing continue to this day without much of a clue as to how this horror develops in a society. That societies have not advanced beyond this dysfunction is itself hard to believe but undeniable.
Think back to 2016, the only election Trump won. His pitch to swing voters was, "What can it hurt for you to vote for me instead of a career politician." The line "Lock her up" worked for the base but the line that put Trump over the top was a vague promise to "Drain the swamp." Made him sound like a reformer but he's a grifter and voters (myself included) are tired of Congress representing big money That includes a lot of Democrats.
In 2020, voters knew what kind of harm an idiot like Trump could do. Voters who were not impressed with Clinton in 2016 were horrified by Trump in 2020. Sponsoring an insurrection in 2017 didn't improve Trump's popularity with voters. I don't think Trump can win the general election in 2024. The problem for the GOP is that Trump probably can win the primary and will be their candidate.
What about DeSantis? This part is beautiful – he will run. I'm sure. Fox wants him. Other big donors want a pro-business winner and Trump is not only a bad bet, he's gonna endorse bad candidates who will follow Trump down the drain in 2024. So the House is at risk again because of Trump and moronic candidates with the sole 'virtue' of being Trump toadies.
When DeSantis declares (possibly before) Trump is gonna have a clear picture that Fox and big money and a big chunk of the party establishment has it in for him. If Trump's neck wasn't in a noose with federal charges filed, he'd quit to save face. Trump can destroy the GOP at this moment because he can form a radical, racist, antisemitic party and a lot of Republican voters would follow. (He very recently sang the praises of the poor J6 rioters being sent to prison. Trump has STILL not renounced Fuentes' political philosophy.) That's the benefit of being a cult leader. So the threat Trump will make – BEFORE DeSantis has established dominance – is that the party must exclude DeSantis from the primaries or Trump will form his own party.
My hope is that the GOP will fracture along Trumpian lines with a radical party emerging – marginalized by the Democrats and the New GOP. Forced into a weak minority but rid of the racists, homophobes, and antiSemites the New GOP will have to re-form with a new platform that can draw from Independents. How? They become advocates of the ERA, Dreamers, and balanced gun control – all popular positions. That will shift the Overton window for Democrats about three rooms down. If the GOP embraces what was previously Democratic reforms, the progressive becomes the mainstream Democrat.
What becomes of Trumpism? They will hate the New GOP more than they hate Democrats. I don't see any chance of an alliance after the divorce. They will occasionally win a House seat until Ranked-choice voting becomes the standard. Then they will almost never win.
In 2016 Trump got the "what the hell" vote. Hillary Clinton was Mrs. Washington Establishment. Trump maybe would shake things up. He's not going to get the "what the hell" vote again.
My sense of it is that the fever is breaking, especially once it's clear Trump is snared; all this great news, like Harry Litman said, is like a freight train headed directly toward Trump.
The GOP will become a little less crazy, but never fully sane as long as 1) RW media keeps broadcasting hate, 2) The rabid, foaming at mouth hyenas in the House will put on the biggest two year long circus anyone's seen in a long time, 3) gerrymandering and first-past-the-post voting deliberately guatantees the most extremist partisans. Instant runoff voting – one fix – would solve so much of what's wrong with this country.
(I posted this before reading Doug’s comment where he also mentions ranked choice voting)
And so getting rid of Trump is a requirement, but we're still a long way from a sane country given the structural impediments.
While I share the cautious optimism expressed about the grinding gears of justice closing in… I don't want to undercut the positive aspects of all of that. However, I'd like to take this opportunity to say that I think we are far from out of the woods. I can celebrate the survival so far (and to the degree we've seen) of the political processes and institutions and the rule-of-law processes and institutions (the judicial branch and the rule-of-law principles, prosecutorial and defensive). These are important tools that we must continue to optimize in the defense against autocracy. But I believe we need to broaden our vision.
Voting alone will not save us. The way that autocratic systems develop, in my opinion, is built upon a system of corruption. To understand how GOP elected officials can get away with doing things that are unpopular with the majority of citizens, you have to view the GOP not as a political party, but rather as a corrupt organization. A corrupt organization is a systemic phenomenon. In general it is a time-honored pattern of behaviors that is specifically top-down, autocratic, secretive, and brutal. It cares not a whit about serving the people; it's organizing principle is accumulating wealth and power at the top. Working down the pyramid, ever decreasing amounts of wealth and power are doled out, but under the condition that an endless upward stream of wealth and power is guaranteed. The structure is maintained through corrupt rewards and brutal punishments. The support of a majority or plurality of voters is irrelevant.
I am not puzzled as to why the former R party has struggled to rid its party of the rot. It's because TFG is one of the top corrupters in the country, possibly in the world. He may be incompetent at nearly everything we expect of normal political leaders, but that is just a smoke screen. Observers have repeatedly shared a sense of confusion and wonder at how he has gotten away with such incompetence. I am only guessing, but I have a plausible thesis: He is an absolute master of corrupting people. What else do you need to know?
The way forward for those of us who value our country MUST include heavy emphasis on anti-corruption, anti-monopoly, anti-oligarchy measures. We need to find a way to undo the oligarchic/corporate capture of our government.
When TFG goes to prison, the corrupt structure will still be in place.
tRump is exactly the sum of the comments here. Glenn Kirschner is starting to get optimistic that justice is coming. I don't "follow him" on youtube, prefer to check it on my terms daily.
Kirschner's YouTube
More food for thought on corruption as the problem: In a society in which the economy is meritocratic, people who do not have the favored skills/talent/abilities to succeed will tend to favor a corrupt system. "I know a guy…"
"Hey, I know a guy from across town who owes me a favor. Maybe he will give my incompetent 24 year old high school dropout son a job." That's not textbook corruption (no bribes), but there's an underlying tribalism and a transactional worldview there.
The modern economy has gotten so complex that citizens with lower levels of education/skills/competence are not needed in massive numbers. So society doesn't place as much value on those people as it did long ago. They become easy marks for the hard right extremists who can get their votes by simply spouting anti-elite tropes. And what better figurehead could you want for your political program to capture the votes of those left behind than an obviously course, incompetent social outcast who managed to get elected president anyway?
I think Biden's success in 2020 was due to his genuine goal of "bringing back the middle class & working class". He got enough votes from people who are somewhat left behind but who haven't fallen down the rabbit-hole. And his accomplishments in 2 years played a whole lot better for the D's in 2022 than the "movement" that produced the orange FG who talked a good game but didn't deliver anything but tax cuts for the rich and for corporations.
I would like to see a current presidential favorability poll where there are two questions: 1) Do you approve of President Biden? and 2) Do you think President Biden has been progressive enough?
I suspect a lot of the negative favorability is from progressives who would never vote R. Maybe I'm wrong.