Texans are fantacizing that Biden is about to wage war on Texas. Someone produced an audio clip purported to be the President caught on a “hot mic” saying “We’re going to make sure those cowboys don’t stop the surge of military-aged men from entering. If we have to send F-15s to Texas there and wage war against Texas, so be it.” This was, of course, fake. But it went viral anyway. Other rumors about Biden punishing Texas are flying fast.

This is about Texas taking over control of part of the border with Mexico and not allowing federal Border Patrol access to it. Greg Abbott should be happy that nice-guy President Joe Biden is in the White House now, and not Andrew Jackson. When South Carolina threatened to nullify a tariff it didn’t like, President Jackson considered it treason. “Tell … the Nullifiers from me that they can talk and write resolutions and print threats to their hearts’ content,” Jackson said. “But if one drop of blood be shed there in defiance of the Laws of the United States I will hang the first man of them I can get my hands on to the first tree I can find.”

South Carolina met in convention and voted to not collect the tariff. The state passed an Ordinance of Nullification that prohibited the collection of federal tariffs at South Carolina ports, to go into effect on February 1, 1833. The state also authorized raising an army and appropriated money to do so. Jackson let it be known he would have 50,000 troops ready to march on South Carolina in a little over a month. At the same time, he also asked Congress to lower the tariff a bit more to avoid violence.

Congress began to debate a modified tariff, but it also passed a Force Bill that authorized Jackson to do whatever it took to collect tariffs. Jackson let it be known he could have 200,000 troops in South Carolina by February 1. South Carolina appealed to neighbor states for support, but got no help. In the end Congress did modify the tariff, and South Carolina stopped the nullification before it went into effect.

Andrew Jackson did some dispicable things in his life, but one imagines that another president — I’m thinking Franklin Pierce or James Buchanan — would have flapped about helplessly and allowed South Carolina to nullify federal law. And by now the nation would have crumbled to pieces. But let’s get back to present-day Texas.

The latest:

The Biden administration has given Texas until the end of Wednesday to stop blocking the US Border Patrol’s access to 2.5 miles along the US-Mexico border that includes the area where a woman and two children drowned after state authorities last week barred federal agents from the zone, according to a Department of Homeland Security letter Sunday exclusively obtained by CNN.

The letter to Texas’ Republican Attorney General Ken Paxton says the state’s actions “have impeded operations” and are unconstitutional, and it cites the deaths – among the latest in the ongoing migrant crisis – near a city park abutting the Rio Grande in Eagle Pass where state authorities have erected fencing and kept out federal agents.

“Wednesday” was this past Wednesday, January 17. Texas did not comply. As I understand it, Abbott is using Texas National Guard as well as law enforcement officers in this mess.

CNN today:

Texas authorities arrested migrants at Shelby Park in Eagle Pass, Texas, late Wednesday evening and charged them with criminal trespassing, marking the first arrests of migrants since the state took control of the area at the US-Mexico border last week, an official said.

Mark Joseph Stern at Slate:

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott is inciting a conflict between Border Patrol and the state’s National Guard that is inching closer and closer toward a violent clash between armed agents of state and federal law enforcement. The governor, as commander in chief of the Texas Guard, has directed his soldiers to block Border Patrol’s access to migrants, physically preventing federal officers from performing the duties assigned to them by Congress and the president. Abbott has received key assistance from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5^th Circuit, which cleared the way for him to obstruct federal border enforcement.

Tensions on the ground are escalating by the hour, as the Texas Guard—emboldened by the 5^th Circuit—is wiring off an ever-greater portion of the border. The Guard is refusing entry to all federal law enforcement and to active duty service members. Even in an emergency, like the potential drowning of a migrant, the Texas Guard will not let federal officers or service members through to the border. If the Supreme Court does not reverse the 5^th Circuit very soon, there is a real possibility that Abbott’s partisan stunt will spiral into open battle between the state and federal governments.

The current dispute is yet another consequence of Operation Lone Star, Abbott’s cynical effort to usurp authority over immigration from the Biden administration. It’s also symptomatic of the failure of our judiciary and the Supreme Court’s inability, or lack of desire, to check radical Trump-placed judges below it that issue far-right rulings with devastating consequences for democracy and human rights. The multibillion-dollar “operation” in question here directs Texas Guardsmen and state troopers to police the southern border and arrest migrants who cross over without authorization. It has utterly failed to reduce unlawful border crossings, though it has produced egregious acts of cruelty toward migrants; guardsmen have tried to drown these individuals, deprived them of water, and left them to suffer heat exhaustion in the tangle of razor wire set up by the state.

Unlike Andrew Jackson, President Biden can’t count on help from Congress. The Senate has been working on a bill to provide funding for more border security as well as for Ukraine and Israel. This bill has bipartisan support. But of course the wackadoos in the House are already against it. They’ve all talked to “the President,” by which they mean Donald Trump. Trump doesn’t want them to pass a border bill that might make Joe Biden look good.

Trump has recently told confidants in influential conservative media and political circles that “stupid” Republicans, particularly “RINOs” in the Senate, seem eager to hand Biden a win as he’s sunk in 2024 polls, and that GOP lawmakers shouldn’t be doing Biden any favors right now, a source familiar with the matter and another person briefed on it tell Rolling Stone. In essence, Republicans are concerned that approving a border deal could potentially benefit Biden in an election year when he’s expected to face off against an ascendant Trump.

Late Wednesday night, Trump wrote on Truth Social that Republicans should reject a border deal “unless we get EVERYTHING needed to shut down the INVASION of Millions & Millions of people, many from parts unknown, into our once great, but soon to be great again, Country!” 

Some Republican politicians are echoing Trump’s sentiment that the party shouldn’t be doing anything to benefit Biden, all but openly saying that a bipartisan deal for harsher asylum and border restrictions is a bad idea because it would deliver a vulnerable president a political victory. 

Earlier this month, Rep. Troy Nehls (R-Texas) told CNN that he’s “not willing to do too damn much right now to help a Democrat and to help Joe Biden’s approval rating. …I will not help the Democrats try to improve this man’s dismal approval ratings. I’m not going to do it. Why would I?” Nehls also shouted “Trump 2024, baby!” when asked last month what he hoped to gain from impeaching President Joe Biden, in a video obtained by Rolling Stone last month. 

Senate Republicans have been trying to tell the House Republicans that even if Donald Trump gets back into the White House, they won’t get everything they want.

“To those who think that if President Trump wins, which I hope he does, that we can get a better deal — you won’t,” Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., told reporters Wednesday. “You got to get 60 votes in the United States Senate.” 

“To my Republican friends: To get this kind of border security without granting a pathway to citizenship is really unheard of. So if you think you’re going to get a better deal next time, in ’25, if President Trump’s president, Democrats will be expecting a pathway to citizenship for that,” he said. “So to my Republican colleagues, this is a historic moment to reform the border.”

Miz Lindsey: You might as well teach physics to a duck. I’m not sure Johnson-Greene-the rest of them have more than two brain cells to rub together. And here we are.

Commentary on Trump’s juvenile performance at the E. Jean Carroll trial yesterday has mostly focused on how much it’s going to cost him in damanges. But as Emptywheel points out, this performance was planned. He wasn’t behaving like a spoiled brat because he lacks self-control. It was part of a pre-arranged strategy. One suspects it is a colossaly stupid strategy, but it’s a strategy nonetheless.

Clue: On Monday Trump’s fast-talking lawyer Joe Tacopina abruptly withdrew from this case and from the the criminal “hush money” trial. Tacopina has not said why he did this. I suspected that Trump was demanding he do something in court that would shred the rest of his legal career. That appears to be the case.

Clue: Emptywheel noticed that “Truth Social” posts in Trump’s name were being posted while he was sitting in the courtroom. Without his phone. These were either pre-written and scheduled to post during the trial, or someone on his staff was authorized to write and post them. The “truths” all defamed Carroll some more and griped about Judge Kaplan.

One assumes that Trump thinks this is helping him in his presidential campaign, to persuade his groupies that he is being unfairly prosecuted/persecuted. They were alread persuaded, I suspect, but Trump thinks he needs to keep this scam going. He’s clearly not viewing his legal problems as legal problems but as campaign opportunities. He’s already burned any hope of being treated leniently in the E. Jean Carroll case.

With Tacopina gone, Trump was represented by the hopelessly bumbling Alina Habba. The judge rebuked her fourteen times yesterday. See also Alina Habba’s 5 Worst Horror Show Moments in Court. Some of this bumbling may be incompetence, but I’m betting some of it is her just following Trump’s orders. See, for example, Did Alina Habba Pay Attention in Law School? at The New Republic.

On Thursday, Habba got into another kerfuffle with Kaplan when she flubbed a line of questioning against Carroll, asking the columnist if she “makes a good amount of money” from her Substack.

“What’s ‘a good amount of money?’” interjected Kaplan, stopping Habba. “This is Evidence 101.”

While we’re waiting to see if anything interesting happens in Iowa tonight, I want to call your attention to something Josh Marshall wrote today.

Keep an eye on how the national press covers this. The White House, as you know, has been under immense pressure to offer concessions to address the continuing large number of migrants coming to the U.S.-Mexico border. Now there’s a bipartisan compromise bill in the Senate. Last night Majority Leader Steve Scalise said that bill is DOA in the House. But Speaker Johnson said something more specific and revealing. He refused to bring up the bill and according to Jake Sherman of Punchbowl said “Congress can’t solve border until Trump is elected or a republican is back in the White House.”

Two things to note here. First, Johnson isn’t saying they won’t consider this bill. He’s saying they won’t consider any bill until Trump is elected. Sherman  appears to have accepted the GOP wording — that “Congress can’t solve [the] border until Trump is elected.” But there’s more here. Johnson is saying openly that they won’t pass any bill until Trump is elected. In other words, however out of control they claim the border is they want to keep it that way through November to use it as a political issue. There’s a bipartisan deal but House Republicans are rejecting it out of hand. That’s not terribly surprising. But your political opponents seldom state it so openly. It’s an opening for the White House. Let’s see if they take it.

I’ve been saying for some time that if Republicans don’t like what’s happening at the border, there is absolutely nothing that’s stopping Republicans in Congress  from writing whatever laws and appropriating whatever money needed to create a better system for border security. I suspect if the plan isn’t too crazy a lot of Democrats would sign on. But nope. The House Republican plan is to impeach Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas. Yeah, that’ll fix it.

It appears a faction of House Republicans (and we know who they are) sincerely believe it is their duty to be sure the government doens’t do a dadblamed thing that requires negotiating with Democrats. Which means Congress is frozen. A tiny House majority by itself cannot pass anything. They are already grumbling about dumping Mike Johnson, I understand. See also Why The World Is Betting Against American Democracy at Politico.

Here’s a headline for our sick times.

The Supreme Court is hearing a challenge to a federal law, the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act, or EMTALA. This is the act passed in 1986 that requires hospitals that accept Medicare to screen and at least stabilize all emergency patients regardless of ability to pay. They can’t just ship uninsured people in unstable condition off to another hospital, in other words. The people who receive the treatment still get billed for it, but at least treatment is not denied.

“After Roe v. Wade was overruled in 2022, the Biden administration issued guidance clarifying that if a pregnant patient arrives at a hospital with an emergency condition that could only be stabilized with an abortion, the hospital is required to provide that care — regardless of state law,” Rolling Stone reports. But Idaho is challenging this, arguing that states — not the federal government or, heaven forbid, doctors — should decide what emergency treatment women are entitled to receive. The Idaho abortion ban does (in theory) allow for an abortion to save a woman’s life, but as with Texas the language is vague enough to leave doctors guessing as to how close to death a woman has to get before she can have an abortion. If they guess wrong as far as the state is concerned, doctors can face criminal charges, the end of their careers, and prision time.

A bunch of lower courts sided with the feds over Idaho, but on January 5 the Supreme Court lifted the lower court injunction, reinstating the ban until some vague future time when they hear arguments and issue a ruling, in which we assume the majority will still side with Idaho.

No rush, there, justices. It’s not like women are dying or anything. Oh, wait …  See also.

Earlier this week Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern wrote a piece for Slate headlined Republican Officials Openly Insult Women Nearly Killed by Abortion Bans. It begins,

For many years before S.B. 8 passed in Texas and was then swept into existence by the Supreme Court, and before Dobbs ushered in a more formal regime of forced childbirth six months later, the groups leading the charge against reproductive rights liked to claim that they loved pregnant women and only wanted them to be safe and cozy, stuffed chock-full of good advice and carted around through extra-wide hallways for safe, sterile procedures in operating rooms with only the best HVAC systems. Then Dobbs came down and within minutes it became manifestly clear that these advocates actually viewed pregnant people as the problem standing in the way of imaginary, healthy babies—and that states willing to privilege fetal life would go to any and all lengths to ensure that actual patients’ care, comfort, informed consent, and very survival would be subordinate.

As you probably know, one of the ways states were shutting down abortion clinics before Dobbs was to enact absurd “health and safety” building requirements for abortion clinics and only abortion clinics. Lithwick and Stern continue,

A recent filing by the office of Tennessee Attorney General Jonathan T. Skrmetti, a Republican, captures the dynamic all too well. Skrmetti has been fighting a lawsuit filed by a group of Tennessee women denied emergency abortions under the ultranarrow medical exception to that state’s ban. The women plaintiffs suffered an appalling range of trauma, including sepsis and hemorrhaging, because they could not terminate their pregnancies. The attorney general’s response to their complaint is a scathing, shockingly personal broadside against the victims of the ban. He accused them of attempting to draw “lines about which unborn lives are worth protecting” by imposing a medical exception “of their own liking.” He mocked them for asserting that ostensibly minor conditions like “sickle cell disease” might justify an abortion. And he insisted that the lead plaintiff, Nicole Blackmon, lacks standing, because she underwent sterilization after the state forced her to carry a nonviable pregnancy and deliver a stillborn baby. The attorney general viciously suggested that, if Blackmon really wanted to fight Tennessee’s ban, she could have tried for another doomed pregnancy.

Abortion bans are beloved by misogynists. The bans allow women-haters to pretend they ocupy a moral high ground as they abuse and belittle women on a grand scale. This is why there is no reasoning with, or compromising with, them. They will not rest until all abortions are banned, and if women suffer and die they don’t care. As Sarah Jones wrote in New York magazine, “Abortion bans aren’t meant to save lives but to empower the lawmakers who write them. They envision a world with themselves at the top, passing judgment on all those beneath them. A person is disposable because someone in power decides they are such.”

Back to Lithwick and Stern:

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton and his staff have evinced similar hostility toward plaintiffs in the Lone Star State who brought a nearly identical suit. The lead plaintiff in that case, Amanda Zurawski, was denied an abortion for three agonizing days after her water broke in the second trimester, leading her to develop sepsis; she nearly died in the ICU, and may never be able to get pregnant again. Paxton’s response? Because she might now be infertile—as a direct result of Texas law— Zurawski lacks standing to sue. When the case went to trial, Texas’ lawyers asked profoundly insulting questions of the plaintiffs. “Did Attorney General Ken Paxton tell you you couldn’t get an abortion?” they pressed each woman after pressing them for invasive details about their failed pregnancies. One plaintiff vomited on the stand after recounting her horror story.

These arguments are echoed by red-state attorneys general around the country, like Idaho’s Raúl Labrador, who proclaimed that women forced to carry dangerous, nonviable pregnancies merely “disagree with the legitimate policy choices made by the Idaho legislature.” (Should an Idaho resident suffering excruciating pain from a failing pregnancy drive to the statehouse rather than the emergency room? Labrador seems to think so.) Critically, these lawyers and politicians and activists are gaslighting their real victims. During a hearing over Zurawski’s case at the Texas Supreme Court, Beth Klusmann of the Texas attorney general’s office shifted the blame onto doctors: “If a woman is bleeding,” Klusmann said, “if she has amniotic fluid running down her legs—then the problem is not with the law. It is with the doctors.”

Elements of the abortion criminalization movement for years have claimed there is no actual medical reason ever to get an abortion, and I take it a lot of politicians are refusing to let go of this myth. And that’s because their contempt for women cannot be satiated if they have to show them some consideration and compassion.

Do read all of the Lithwick and Stern piece. Slate usually lets you read a few things for free before they put up the paywall, and if you hit the paywall open it in a private or incognito window. I don’t subscribe and I could read it. This is a powerfully written statement of the box these women-hating politicians have put women into. Women are nothing but incubators to them. The concludion:

If you have opted to move through the political landscape under the view that flawed persons are disposable and potential persons are flawless, the benefit of the doubt will always be afforded to the unblemished, someday rosy-cheeked soul that resides inside of the actual living human with the actual uterus. Indeed, the very instant that the hypothetical perfect babe becomes a real-life, in-the-world girl, a future pregnant woman is also birthed, and she will begin a long journey toward putative moral decay: potential miscarriage, poverty, health challenges, and other ostensible infirmities that will make her too flawed to be trusted to make judgments about her own future pregnancy. The tie will always go to the fetus, perfect in its secret unknown-ness. The mother will never be able to show that she wanted the pregnancy enough, took good enough care, made every correct predictive decision. And as such, the state will happily dismiss her interests as not only irrelevant, but self-serving, greedy, and dishonest. That it’s being said aloud in courtrooms, in pleadings, and in affidavits should not surprise anyone.

The pregnant woman has always been the fallen and the damned. Now, according to red states, it’s acceptable—necessary, even—to ensure that she knows this, from the very moment of conception until the moment she loses the power to make any choices about how she gives birth. Even if she dies, she was forever that which stood in the way of flawless, purest life.

And the Sarah Jones piece at New York magazine is worth reading also, although you have to be more persistent to get through the New York paywall sometimes. This looks at a Texas woman, Yeniifer Alvarez-Estrada Glick, who was murdered by the state of Texas. She suffered from serious health complications through most of her life that went untreated because Texas is one of the worst states in the nation about paying for health care for the poor. Texas still has, as it has had for many years, the highest rate of uninsured people in the nation. When Glick became pregnant her body simply couldn’t sustain the pregnancy. She sought medical help several times, and the Texas health care system pretty much just ignored her, until the day she died before the paramedics could revive her. Doctors reviewing her records have said that if she had received an abortion when she first presented with a clearly disasterous pregnancy, she probably would be alive now. Sarah Jones concludes,

Women, having sinned, cannot be sinned against. Perhaps they got pregnant when they shouldn’t have, or did something to make a pregnancy go south. Maybe Alvarez should’ve worked harder, and pulled herself out of poverty with nothing but personal grit at her disposal. The fault is hers, and hers alone, to these lawmakers. A fetus, though, has yet to fail and thus deserves salvation.

This makes for cruel policy. When it is put into practice, both woman and fetus can die. Alvarez is buried with her daughter Selene, who was delivered by emergency C-section but did not survive her mother’s demise. Abortion bans aren’t meant to save lives but to empower the lawmakers who write them. They envision a world with themselves at the top, passing judgment on all those beneath them. A person is disposable because someone in power decides they are such. Alvarez’s death was preventable, but in its own way, inevitable. There will be more like her as long as conservatives get their way.

I’ve been saying for years (see this post I wrote in 2006, for example) that the difference between the so-called “pro-life” and “pro-choice” opinions isn’t whether one perceives a fetus as a human being, but whether one perceives a woman as a human being.

Trump’s stupid, insulting rant at the judge who will be sentencing him in a few days may not have been the dumbest thing Trump said this week. Possibly even dumber was something he said at his Fox News “town hall” Wednesday night that is getting less attention. But you can read about it at The New Republic. Tori Otten writes,

Donald Trump says it’s OK that he got paid by foreign governments while he was president because he was “doing services” for them.

Trump participated in a Fox News town hall Wednesday night instead of the Republican primary debate. At one point, he was asked about a recent congressional report that found he made almost $8 million from nearly two dozen foreign governments during his first two years in office.

“You know, it sounds like a lot of money. That’s small,” he said.

He then said that it was fine he had received so much money because it was payment for accommodation at his various clubs and hotels.

“I was doing services for them,” Trump explained. “People were staying in these massive hotels, these beautiful hotels.”

“I don’t get $8 million for doing nothing.”

The Constitution, of course, says that presidents may receive nothing from foreign governments or monarchs for any reason, without the consent of Congress. Trump never asked for permission. And he clearly doesn’t grasp the principle behind the clause.

But back to yesterday’s courtroom outburst, which I’m sure you heard. This might have made sense if it were a jury trial, but it ain’t. This was real stupid. If I were Judge Engoron I’d be considering how much of a lesson Trump needs to be taught.

But of course the Stupid of the Week, possibly a Stupid for the Ages, was the immunity argument offered to a three-judge panel of the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals earlier this week. The lawyer in this case, D. John Sauer, is probably not stupid. He was a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford. He got his law degree from Harvard. This suggests he has a brain in his head, somewhere. But then he also served as Solicitor General of Missouri and Deputy Attorney General for Special Litigation in Missouri, I have long suspected there are microbes in the water in Jefferson City that eats people’s brains. I can’t say I remember Sauer from when I was living there, but the state is so infested with political wack-a-doos you need toads flying out of your ears to be noticable.

But assuming Sauer is not stupid, one suspects that the argument he offered to the D.C. Circuit was Trump’s idea, and Sauer by now has realized there is no arguing with Trump. Sauer must expect some serious money from this gig to so seriously fry his reputation as a lawyer. At least the episode has generated some amusing memes.

Earlier this week George Conway wrote for the Atlantic that Sauer had walked into a trap. I suspect Sauer knew the problems with the argument all along. His choices were to talk into the “trap” or resign as Trump’s lawyer. The only one who didn’t see the trap was Trump, and it appears he still doesn’t see it.

REPORTER: Do you agree with your lawyers that you could not be prosecuted if you ordered Seal Team 6 to kill a political opponent?

TRUMP: A president has to have immunity pic.twitter.com/ntLHSCDBF8

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) January 11, 2024

Of course, we’re talking about a grown man who thinks magnets don’t work if they get wet.

Trump wouldn’t be the first person who cannot understand the difference between “breaking the law” and “enacting policies I don’t like.” But he should have learned the theme song from the old Baretta teelevision show — don’t do the crime if you can’t do the time.

Trump’s claims for absolute immunity for anything he did as POTUS will be heard tomorrow by a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.  Live audio of the oral arguments will be streamed on YouTube. Even more fun, Trump plans to attend the hearings. We’ll see if he can behave himself.

Jumping the gun a tad, Trump’s lawyers filed a motion today asking that Fulton County Superior Court Judge Scott McAfee dismiss the charges pending against Trump in the Georgia election interference case, claiming he had immunity for all that stuff. Yes, badgering a Georgia secretary of state to “find” votes for him is part of his presidential duties, obviously.

In other news, Judge Tanya Chutkan appears to be a victim of “swatting.”

Yesterday ABC News reported that Jack Smith has a lot of previously unreported details about Trump’s refusal to stop the violence on January 6 (do read it all, if you haven’t). Dennis Aftergut writes for Slate,

We already knew about Trump resisting the entreaties of aides, family, and political allies who begged him, once violence began, to immediately call off the dogs of insurrection. He fiddled for 187 minutes while Rome burned.

So what’s new about the evidence that ABC reported Sunday?

Trump’s reported statements are loaded with cruelty, self-interest, and abandonment of allies. It becomes indisputable that he was using his most violent followers to try to override the voters’ will and keep himself in power.

There is also new evidence that ties the Trump campaign directly to the fake electors plot.

So let’s hope the courts get this stupid “immunity” issue out of the way quickly so we can get on with the trial.

Three years. Three years ago we didn’t know about the fake electors. Most of us didn’t realize that Mike Pence had been pushed to reject the electoral ballots and send the decision back to the states. It was a few days before we appreciated how violent the riot in the capitol had really been.

Ed Kilgore makes the point that, three years ago, the majority of Republian politicians were alarmed and disgusted about January 6. Now they’ve come to love it. It was just a demonstration. It was a demonstration that injured at least 140 law enforcement officers. It caused or contributed to the deaths of nine people. It was an attempt to use violence to keep Trump in power after he lost a fair election

Since then, MAGA has escalated. About a third of Republicans now believe the FBI was behind the “riot.” Trump still wants you to know he won the 2020 election. If anything, he has escalated the crazy. I haven’t seen the ad, but The Messenger reports that Trump has a new video ad in which the voiceover claims God made Trump to lead the nation.

The ad, which has a run-time of two minutes and 44 seconds and was shared on Trump’s social media network Truth Social, alleges that God created the former president for the purpose of leading the nation.

“God said, ‘I need somebody willing to get up before dawn, fix this country, work all day, fight the Marxists, eat supper, then go to the Oval Office, and stay past midnight at a meeting of the state, so God made Trump,” the narrator says.

You’d think God would have noticed that in his first term Trump liked to spend most of his days watching television. It was widely reported that his “workday” started at 11 a.m. and ended at 6 p.m. Messenger also points out that Ron DeSantis made a similar ad in 2022 to win re-election as governor. But it earned him some ridicule, too. This is the sort of ad that would turn off most people, I think.

I’ve been reading the Tim Alberta book The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism. Talk about escalation. Evangelical Christianity in the U.S. has long had its freak show elements — think snake handling — but they used to be tucked away in rural America. But now the freak show is televised, and getting freakier. Alberta went around the country reporting on churches large and small, and part of the story he tells is that evangelical church-goers are leaving “traditional” Christianity and flocking to churches that offer a heavily politicized Christianity that conflates Christianity with America and Jesus with Trump. Or else they want one with big entertainment value.

One very poignant story he tells is about a pracher who had built a hugely successful megachurch near Kansas City. And then at some point he “found Jesus” and realized what he was offering was spiritual junk food. He began to preach sermons that were based on actual Christian theology, and his parishoners deserted him. Now he gets a handful of people to show up for service in his huge, empty church, when he used to get thousands.

I believe I may have mentioned the reports of parishoners refjecting the Sermon on the Mount for being too “woke.”

Organizations that keep track of these things, like Pew, say there is significant movement away from Christianity in the U.S. In 1972, 90 percent of Americans identified as Christian, Now it’s about 64 percent. Evangelicalism claims to be growing, but what’s happening is that they’re getting a bigger share of the shrinking number of Christians. Alberta quotes Christians blaming “the Democrats” and “the Left” and demonic forces — all the same thing, apparently — for this decline. And to “fight back,” they are escalating the freak. They’re going all out on anti-LGBTQ, misogyny, and Trump.  And then they wonder why so many people don’t like them. Must be a plot!

At the junction of Trump’s plot to become President for Life and the Evangelical freak show is Mike Johnson.

As reporting from the fall showed, Johnson has deep ties to a movement called the New Apostolic Reformation—a network of politically ambitious church leaders, largely pulled from a kind of Christianity called Neo-Charismatic Pentecostalism. NAR leaders (typically known as “apostles”) have been credited with stoking the large and influential Christian nationalist contingent at the Jan. 6 insurrection. …

… The Neo-Charismatics are part of the Christian right, but it’s different from the old Christian right. The Christian right with the Moral Majority in the 1980s was about certain social conservative values. These people are not the same, because we’re in the world of spiritual warfare, where your adversaries are literally understood as being under the influence of demons.

This crew is part of the Christian Right, but they’re more dangerous than the old Jerry Falwell Sr. Christian Right. The New Charismatics think that they are obligated to fight physical war against their enemies, since their enemies are demons. It’s okay to kill gay people and liberals and what not. The New Charismatics aren’t being held back from mass homicide by religious scruples as much as by the criminal justice system.

It’s okay to bear false witness against Joe Biden and other Democrats because you’re serving a greater good, which is, um, power for Republicans and for Trump. Because they’ll stop abortions, see. That’s all that matters. And that’s why they support sleezebags like Trump and Herschel Walker, whose campaign Alberta analyzes. That Walker actually pushed girlfriends into getting abortions doesn’t register. All that matters is getting power.

This year we’re going to see if Trump can evade the criminal justice system and win another term. And if those things happen, I don’t see how the damage can be undone.

Here’s a hopeful note from Jamelle Bouie.

What’s been lost — or if not lost then obscured — in the constant attention to Trump’s voters, supporters and followers is that the overall American electorate is consistently anti-MAGA. Trump lost the popular vote in 2016. The MAGA-fied Republican Party lost the House of Representatives in 2018. Trump lost the White House and the Republican Party lost the Senate in 2020. In 2022, Trump-like or Trump-lite candidates lost competitive statewide elections in Georgia, Nevada, Arizona and Pennsylvania. Republicans vastly underperformed expectations in the House, winning back the chamber with a razor-thin margin, and Democrats secured governorships in Kansas, Michigan and Wisconsin, among other states. Democrats overperformed again the following year, in Kentucky and Virginia.

“Since 2016,” wrote Michael Podhorzer, a former political director for the A.F.L.-C.I.O., in a post for his newsletter last summer, “Republicans have lost 23 of the 27 elections in the five states everyone agrees Democratic hopes in the Electoral College and the Senate depend on.”

If that trend continues this year, then there’s hope we can restore something approximating sanity.

The New York Times is reporting that Trump Received Millions From Foreign Governments as President, Report Finds. Of course we kinda knew that, but it’s good to see it spelled out. No paywall.

Donald J. Trump’s businesses received at least $7.8 million from 20 foreign governments during his presidency, according to new documents released by House Democrats on Thursday that show how much he received from overseas transactions while he was in the White House, most of it from China.

The transactions, detailed in a 156-page report called “White House For Sale” that was produced by Democrats on the House Oversight Committee, offer concrete evidence that the former president engaged in the kind of conduct that House Republicans have labored, so far unsuccessfully, to prove that President Biden did as they work to build an impeachment case against him.

Using documents produced through a court fight, the report describes how foreign governments and their controlled entities, including a top U.S. adversary, interacted with Trump businesses while he was president. They paid millions to the Trump International Hotel in Washington, D.C.; Trump International Hotel in Las Vegas; Trump Tower on Fifth Avenue in New York; and Trump World Tower at 845 United Nations Plaza in New York.

The Constitution, of course, says that presidents may receive nothing from foreign governments or monarchs without the consent of Congress. Trump never asked for permission. And I like the bit about China.

Back when trump took office in 2017 there was a lot of grumbbling that he didn’t divest himself of his businesses, or at least put them into a blind trust. In this Reuters article from January 2017 a Trump spokesperson said that profits generated at Trump’s hotels by foreign governments would be donated to the U.S. Treasury. I guess that didn’t happen, either.  The Times article quotes Erick Trump saying that any profit the company earned on the hotel stays was returned to the federal government through a voluntary annual payment to the Treasury Department.. But the Chinese bank has a lease at Trump Tower (since 2008) that Eric didn’t think should count.

Typical:

House Republicans also dismissed the revelations, arguing that there was nothing wrong with Mr. Trump receiving revenue from foreign governments while he was president but that Mr. Biden’s family’s business was corrupt.

IOKIYAR. So far the House Republicans have failed to produce evidence that Joe Biden took any money from any corrupt “family business.” From Rolling Stone:

In December, House Republicans formally opened an impeachment inquiry into President Joe Biden, alleging after years of fruitless investigations that the current president — as well as his family — have enriched themselves through corrupt business dealings with countries like Ukraine and China. Republicans have struggled to justify the decision to plow forward with impeachment proceedings despite a lack of concrete evidence against President Biden. That irony is not lost on Oversight Democrats, who wrote that as Chairman of the committee Rep. James Comer intentionally halted the production of documents “relating to President Trump’s receipt of foreign payments—from China or any other country—and launched an investigation of President Joseph Biden’s son, which to date has produced no evidence of any constitutional or criminal wrongdoing by President Biden.”

For more laughs, see Aaron Blake at WaPo, Trump lawyers’ doozy of a filing on voter fraud. It begins,

Prosecutors have repeatedly described Donald Trump’s false claims of voter fraud in 2020 as effectively manufacturing a pretense for illegally overturning the election. Special counsel Jack Smith said in his indictment of the former president that fake electors were meant to “create a fake controversy” that could be used on Jan. 6, 2021.

In a new filing, Trump’s legal team appears bent on helping prosecutors make that case.

The article (no paywall) goes on to describe the arguments and “evidence” in Trump’s latest legal brief in his appeal for presidential immunity in his federal Jan. 6 case. It’s hysterical. It even quotes “reports” that may not exist.

In other news: I hadn’t seen anything in WaPo by Paul Waldman or Greg Sargent, two of my favorite writers, for a while. I have learned they’ve both left WaPo; I don’t know why.  Paul Waldman has a Substack — blog? thing? whatever.  If Greg Sargent is writing for anybody, I haven’t found it.

WaPo has an expose of the Gateway Pundit site, which is about time. GP is the source of a lot of the toxicity and misinformation that keeps MAGA alive. Why hasn’t Hoft been buried under lawsuits already?

Speaking of liars, Trump is now pushing a conspiracy theory that Liz Cheney destroyed evidence.

“Why did American Disaster Liz Cheney … ILLEGALLY DELETE & DESTROY most of the evidence, and related items, from the January 6th Committee of Political Thugs and Misfits. THIS ACT OF EXTREME SABOTAGE MAKES IT IMPOSSIBLE FOR MY LAWYERS TO PROPERLY PREPARE FOR, AND PRESENT, A PROPER DEFENSE OF THEIR CLIENT, ME. All of the information on Crazy Nancy Pelosi turning down 10,000 soldiers that I offered to to [sic] guard the Capitol Building, and beyond, is gone.”

Um, and of course this isn’t true.

Now, Trump has seized on House GOP claims that some records are missing from the archives of the House select committee that investigated Jan. 6, including Trump’s actions. The Democratic chair who headed the committee denies anything was lost; instead, he says some sensitive materials were withheld from the House archive to protect witnesses.

But here’s the kicker: The special counsel who is prosecuting Trump for his efforts to overturn the 2020 election — although not for the Capitol insurrection itself — says the withheld materials have already been provided to Trump as part of discovery in the case.

At TPM, see The New Argument That Might Save Trump’s March Trial Date. Interesting.

Washington Monthly reports on a piece of legislation signed by Trump, the VA MISSION Act, that privated a lot of veterans’ health benefits.

… the legislation set up a parallel private sector network—the Veterans Community Care Program or VCCP—which pays private sector providers to treat more than a third of the nine million veterans enrolled in the VHA.

The Veterans Community Care Program promised to give veterans speedier access to high-quality care if they couldn’t get a timely appointment at the VHA or had to drive too long to get to one. Instead, as many studies have documented, VCCP care is of lower quality than that provided by the VHA. It also takes longer, on average, to get an appointment with a VCCP provider than it does with one at the VHA, and perhaps most importantly, the cost of this private sector program is soaring. Between 2014 and 2024, expenses for veterans’ care in the community quadrupled from $8 billion to $31 billion, accounting for a third of the budget for veterans’ medical services.

So a lot of tax dollars go into a lot of pockets, but this isn’t doing veterans much good. Sounds like a Trump plan.

I’ve been writing at Patheos about attempts to turn the U.S. into a Christian theocracy. Oklahoma is planning to fund a virtual Catholic charter school. This would be, in effect, a religious public school, and it would have been clearly unconstituitional until recently. But what’s interesting is that Leonard Leo and a network of right-wing religious and legal nonprofits appear to be positioning this school as a test case for the Supreme Court. The legal crew that was behind the Dobbs case that ended Roe v. Wade is deeply involved. So are a lot of characters with connections to Supreme Court justices Sam Alito and Neil Gorsuch. See Christian Public Schools In The U.S. ?

SCOTUS has already eliminated the old prohibitions about using tax dollars to pay for sectarian religious instructions in Carson v. Makin, 2022, They might very well greenlight the Oklahoma charter school. This would theoretically open the door for other religions to open schools and get taxpayer funding. But there is language in the Carson decision about  ‘history and tradition’ that might be elaborated upon to argue that the tax privilege only applies to Christianity.

Let’s tiptoe into this new year very gently, and just gossip a bit. I take it Trump’s New Year’s Eve party at Mar-a-Lago was kind of a downer. Melania was absent (her mother is sick, but Melania hasn’t exactly been glued to Trump’s side for months). Second, according to magazine accounts the “A List” at this party consisted of Roger Stone, Judge Jeanine Pirro, Mike Lindell, and Rudy Giuliani. The entertainment was an Elvis impersonator, Vanilla Ice, and a guy in a ninja turtle costume.

I’M SORRY WHAT https://t.co/S4CU1pyuUe pic.twitter.com/uPf5PFesZq

— Tom Sauer (@thomasbsauer) January 1, 2024

That’s just sad. Now, aren’t you glad you weren’t there? Full disclosure, I had a glass of wine and went to bed about 10 o’clock. And I’m perfectly content with that.

Put this in the “some days you can’t catch a break” department. You remember Christian Ziegler, the Florida GOP chair married to a co-founder of Moms for Liberty who was accused of assault? by a woman with whom he and his wife had enjoyed threesomes? Ziegler gave the police a video of his visit to the woman, which he said shows consensual activity. Now the police are considering charging Ziegler with making the video without the woman’s consent.

Speaking of Moms for Liberty, Josh Marshall has been chronicling the adventures of Clarice Schillinger of Pennsylvania, who “runs two Moms for Liberty-esque SuperPACs, Keeping Kids in School PAC and Back to School Pac.”

She was also a candidate for lieutenant governor in 2022. Here she is hanging out with President Trump back in better times. She and Trump talked about “how the moms are upset and how we’re going to save America. And the grandmoms and the caregivers, all of us. When you touch our children, it’s about the future of democracy. This is what happens.”

Now Schillinger has been arrested touching children in the form of punching out a sixteen year old at a booze-drenched birthday party she threw for her seventeen year old daughter at the homestead in Doylestown, PA.

This is the Pennsylvania Inquirer — seriously, read this  —

Multiple teenagers were assaulted by intoxicated adults during the Sept. 29 party at Clarice Schillinger’s Doylestown home, according to a police affidavit. Police say that Schillinger’s intoxicated boyfriend punched one teen in the face and assaulted another. That teen also was punched in the eye by Schillinger’s intoxicated mother, who also chased that teen around the kitchen, the affidavit said.

As teenagers tried to leave the home on Liz Circle, Schillinger — who police said had supplied the more than 15 minors at the party with a basement bar stocked with vodka and rum, played beer pong with them and encouraged them to take shots with her — ordered them to stay.

She then punched one young man in the face three times, according to the affidavit, which said video footage showed Schillinger lunging toward a group of teenagers in the foyer and having to be restrained.

So now there’s two things to be grateful for. You weren’t at Mar-a-Lago on New Year’s Eve, and you aren’t related to Clarice Schillinger. The whole family sounds demented.

Josh Marshall has an update today on more of Schillinger’s political activity, which sounds about as hinky as that party.