Senator Brian Schatz tweeted this yesterday:
He made these remarks today:
People didn’t take Hitler seriously either. Once they realized he meant it, it was too late.
"what digby sez..."
Digby's Hullabaloo Posts
I thought I had heard it all but I’d never heard this before today. It’s from 2015:
As JV Last pointed out in the Bulwark a couple of days ago, this is what Trump means when he says he “negotiates.”
Trump simply demands what he wants, over and over, in different venues, and offers nothing in return except that if you give him what he wants, he’ll let you have peace. For a time.
It’s the tactic of a spoiled child. Which is what he is. And he has another spoiled bully-boy tactic that works for him very well: “I know you are but what am I.” It’s a maddening form of gas lighting that he’s deployed forever but uses pretty adroitly in his political life, mainly because the media just throws up its hands and retreats to “both sides” coverage because it’s easier.
But here’s Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan in the NY Times today actually talking about this tactic:
[A]dvisers say he believes the court appearances dramatize what is fast becoming a central theme of his campaign: that President Biden — who is describing the likely Republican nominee as a peril to the country — is the true threat to American democracy.
Mr. Trump’s claim is the most outlandish and baseless version of a tactic he has used throughout his life in business and politics. Whenever he is accused of something — no matter what that something is — he responds by accusing his opponent of that exact thing. The idea is less to argue that Mr. Trump is clean than to suggest that everyone else is dirty.
It is an impulse more than a strategy. But in Mr. Trump’s campaigns, that impulse has sometimes aligned with his political interests. By this way of thinking, the more cynical voters become, the more likely they are to throw their hands in the air, declare, “They’re all the same” and start comparing the two candidates on issues the campaign sees as favorable to Mr. Trump, like the economy and immigration.
His flattening moral relativism has undergirded his approach to nearly every facet of American public life, including democracy.
[…]
Now, Mr. Trump is repurposing his favored tool to neutralize what many see as his worst offense in public life and greatest political vulnerability in the 2024 campaign: his efforts, after he lost the 2020 election, to disrupt the peaceful transfer of power and remain in office.
Now he’s doing “I know you are but what am I” on Biden:
And his campaign apparatus has kicked into gear along with him, as he baselessly claims Mr. Biden is stage-managing the investigations and legal action against him. Mr. Trump’s advisers have coined a slogan: “Biden Against Democracy.” The acronym: BAD.
Steve Bannon, Mr. Trump’s former chief strategist, said he thought his onetime client was on to something. Mr. Trump is now fighting Mr. Biden over an issue that many Republican consultants and elected officials had hoped he would avoid. They had good reason, given that candidates promoting election denial and conspiracy theories about the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol cost their party winnable races in the 2022 midterm elections.
Mr. Bannon sees it differently.
“If you can fight Biden almost to a draw on this, which I think you can, it’s over,” Mr. Bannon said in an interview, referring to the imperiling of American democracy. “He’s got nothing else he can pitch. This is his main thing.”
Mr. Bannon added, “If Biden wants to fight there, about democracy and all this kind of ephemeral stuff, Trump will go there in a second.”
It does make some MAGA sense in that Trump has been saying the electoral system is rigged since 2016, even after he won. That’s just taken as a given by Republicans. In fact, “voter fraud” has been a rallying cry for decades, long before Trump came along. Just last night Nikki Haley fatuously proclaimed that all ballots should be counted and the election decided onj election night, which is one of the stupidest ideas Trump has ever had.
So now, he’s saying that it’s Biden who’s attacking democracy. But he’s emphasizing the alleged “weaponization” of the Justice Department against him, which is not something that most Americans are buying into. Unfortunately, the “democracy” thing has worked to some extent, at least up until now:
Voter attitudes related to Mr. Biden have shifted as Mr. Trump has tried to suggest that efforts to hold Mr. Trump accountable for his actions are a threat to democracy. In an October 2022 New York Times/Siena College poll, among voters who said democracy was under threat, 45 percent saw Mr. Trump as a major threat to democracy, compared with 38 percent who said the same about Mr. Biden. The gap was even wider among independent voters, who were 14 percentage points more likely to see Mr. Trump as such a threat.
But Mr. Trump’s rhetoric seems to have already altered public opinion, even before the campaign deployed his new slogan. In another more recent survey, 57 percent of Americans said Mr. Trump’s re-election would pose a threat to democracy, and 53 percent said the same of Mr. Biden, according to an August 2023 poll by the Public Religion Research Institute. Among independent voters, nearly identical shares thought either candidate would be a threat to democracy.
The repetition that Mr. Trump has used consistently in his public speeches is a core part of his approach.
“If people think he’s inconsistent on message, he ain’t inconsistent on this message,” Mr. Bannon said of Mr. Trump’s effort to brand Mr. Biden as the real threat to democracy. “Go back and just look at how he pounds it. Wash, rinse, repeat. Wash, rinse, repeat. It’s very powerful.”
Obama adviser David Axelrod told the Times that once the people see Trump in and out of courtrooms facing justice for his crimes, people will feel differently. I hope he’s right. I will say that unless the mainstream media stops this high minded refusal to allow their audience to see how nuts he is, I’m not sure anyone will really understand the depth of his depravity.
Chris Kise asks for permission to have Trump speak. Engoron, “Do you promise to just comment on the facts and the law?” Trump starts talking immediately without agreeing.
“This was a political witch hunt; we should receive damages for what they have taken our company through. They have no documents—they have nothing!” The only thing they have, Trump concedes, is the triplex, which was a mistake.
“I am not sure the dollar amount would have been that far off, if you want to know!” But Trump continues, “I am an innocent man. I have been politically persecuted. . . . This statute is vicious.”
“What has happened here is a fraud on ME. . . . The amount of taxes I have paid over this period is close to $300 million. They don’t want me here anymore. I have a problem; they want to make sure I don’t run again.”
Trump goes on — without any interruption from Engoron or her team — and attacks James, accusing her of election interference. “You have your own agenda,” Trump angrily says to Engoron. “You can’t listen for more than one minute!”
Engoron pleads with Kise, “Mr. Kise, please control your client.” Trump nonetheless accuses James of going after him for her political gain, including an allegedly “failed” run for Governor, at which point Engoron shuts it down.
But it’s too late. Everything Trump wanted to say was said. And now, having said it, he has left the courtroom after insisting James should pay him for the havoc she’s wreaked on his company.
He does what he wants. The man is a total degenerate who has been convinced by his lifetime of flagrantly flouting the law that there are no limits on his behavior. I honestly wouldn’t be surprised if he actually shot someone on 5th Avenue at this point.
It’s not just pandemic recovery. Job creation under Biden has outstripped Trump’s (and every president in the last 60 years) in every way. Unfortunately, Trump has convinced Americans that his economy was the best the world has ever seen by lying about it constantly and it’s permeated the minds of even those who can’t stand him.
I’m not going to recap that runner-up debate last night because it’s completely irrelevant and you missed nothing. (I did watch it and that’s two hours I’ll never get back.) The only thing of note that happened in this primary yesterday was Chris Christie’s speech dropping out of the race which is only worth mentioning because he said a lot of things that Republicans need to hear (not that Fox carried them, needless to say.)
But it is important to hear what Trump is saying because he is going to be the GOP nominee and he is a danger to all of us. He had a competing town hall last night. A few highlights:
Well, actually, he’s answered it many times:
Trump has said the town hall was wonderful and congratulated the Fox moderators for being very professional. In other words it was a love fest where he felt very safe and cozy. Nonetheless, he did say the quiet part out loud a number of times.
Or is that a Sears crisis?
Something Anand Giridharadas shares at The Ink is worth noting. He spoke with Daniel Ziblatt, the Eaton Professor of Government at Harvard University and director of the Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies about how world democracies respond to antidemocratic movements.
Giridharadas writes, “People speak of this as an existential moment for democracy, but it also feels like a business-as-usual moment in terms of how many citizens invest their time and energy.”
That’s the way it feels to me too, more like a Sears crisis. People want a movement. Few want to start one.
To preseve this republic, Democrats need to step it up a notch. Except here on the ground their idea of stepping it up a notch is typically doing the same thing, the same way, just more of it. Telling ourselves every freakin’ election is the most important of our lifetimes is counter-productive. Because what do we do in the face of an existential crisis? We play it safe. We stick with what we know. We don’t experiment. That’s a mistake.
Giridharadas interviews Ziblatt:
I see an imbalance between the professed level of outrage by very large numbers of people about Trump, about Trumpism, about democratic decay, about lies, and the lack of an actual movement. Can you talk about that imbalance?
There’s a book by Eitan Hersh called Politics is for Power. He makes this case about how to move beyond what he calls political hobbyism: people watching MSNBC and feeling like they’re engaged in politics. This is like the community I live in, a place where when you go take your dog for a walk at night, you see everybody’s TVs are on and they’re watching MSNBC, but voter turnout for local elections is 15 percent. And so that’s really a problem that afflicts both red states and blue states.
Institutional change is something that not everybody cares about. Or it’s like a bank shot to get to what you want; it’s an indirect route. If you’re not happy with your life, the idea that we need to introduce, say, proportional representation is an abstraction. So how do you get people to think in institutional terms?
The way to do that is to link institutional reform to the issues that people really care about in their daily lives. Whether that’s abortion rights or gun control; it could be economic policy.
I also think there’s something to be drawn from looking at America’s own great tradition of institutional reform. Up until about 1970, there was a tradition of reforming the Constitution and making our system more democratic. We’ve stopped doing that, and reimagining what’s possible is really important.
The mistake the left makes, Democrats make, and a Biden administration still working from a 20th-century political paradigm makes is to think what people care about most is kitchen table issues. It’s how they express their everyday anxieties, yes, but that’s because what’s eating them goes much deeper than economics. They don’t know how to put into words what they’re really anxious about, or else they have enough residual shame not to talk about it in public.
It seems like authoritarians perfectly understand the actual emotional landscape of the country and of people. And generally pro-democratic leaders don’t. Can you talk about that?
We say emotion, but what’s that mean? It means fear, it means hope, it means aspiration, anxiety. It’s this fear, fear of loss. This idea that if you have been at the top of the hierarchy, equalization feels like you’re now at the bottom of the hierarchy — that, I think, is a lot of what’s driving our politics, particularly on the Republican side of things.
I would say the hypothesis of the Biden presidency was that if you address people’s material concerns, this will take some of the steam and anger out of the populist movement — this rage that fuels Trump and continues to fuel MAGA. And I think there’s a lot to that. It’s a pretty good bet to make.
But if you look at the persistent low poll numbers and the perception of the economy — I think this is something that people haven’t really dealt with: why are people still not happy? — maybe there’s something else that’s going on. And I think it does have to do with these broader demographic and cultural changes that people are responding to, and not really understanding.
And so I don’t quite know what political leader out there is doing this. I think Biden tries to speak to it to some degree. I think he thinks of himself as being able to do that. He does it better than lots of politicians, but it’s still probably not sufficient.
I think that’s right. The truth lies just below the surface, underneath a scab perhaps, and many are not ready to dig deeper. Meantime, MAGA Republicans are fine with manipulating people’s anxieties about being left out to their advantage. Democrats keep playing to people’s pocketbook “best interests.” Their pitch is, “Democracy is under a threat, imperiled, this could be the last election ever…but I know you’re really concerned about the price of bananas,” as Giridharadas puts it.
Tapping people’s “guts,” as Stephen Colbert famously put it, feels beneath them. We’re forever trying to prove we’re the smartest kids in the room. We rely on political abstractions. Republicans play to raw emotions.
“What we need is to present a vision of what kind of democracy, what kind of society we want — something that can tap into people’s hopes and aspirations,” Ziblatt says.
Paint the beautiful tomorrow. Sell the brownie, not the recipe. Barack Obama did that and went from obscure freshman senator to president.
Ziblatt thinks Biden is on the right track, but to be most effective needs to present a more unifying tableau.
Instead of the campaign speech Biden just gave on Friday [President Biden’s speech in Blue Bell, Pennsylvania on January 5, 2024, which focused on Donald Trump’s threat to democracy], I’d like to have seen a speech given to commemorate January 6th, with Liz Cheney sitting right next to A.O.C., with Dick Cheney in the audience. This shouldn’t be a partisan event. This needs to be a moment of national recognition and consensus, like Spain in 1981.
Giridharadas laments the lack of visibility on TV of any pro-democracy movement. “Where is this movement? I want to be in it. Can you connect me to something?” people write him in emails.
I’m forwarding the emails to you.
First of all, you have to get involved with real organizations, where people are coming together face to face. This can mean volunteering at your local precinct office of the Democratic Party. It turns out it’s a really low bar to get involved. You could very quickly become the leader of the local precinct office. And then you notice that nobody can meet regularly because they all have kids. So you work to set up a thing where people are sharing childcare duties, and next everyone is thinking about who should be the candidate in the next election.
A dose of Hopium
Yeah, it’s actually work. But it’s work that makes a difference and grows the Democratic bench. People like Trump and George W. Bush were born on third base and think they hit a triple. Many progressives want to start on third base or it’s not worth their time. Get over yourselves.
Last question. Is there a case you’d make for hope? Is there anything in the United States that gives you hope that the authoritarian threat will be overcome?
There are overwhelming majorities of Americans who do value these institutions and value liberal principles, and value principles of racial equality. I was looking at some survey data on whether or not you think there should be rules, restrictions on where people can live on the basis of race. In the mid-1970s, very high percentages of Americans agreed that there should be. Today, overwhelming percentages of Americans think the opposite, conservative and liberal alike.
On a whole series of questions like this, there’s been a major transformation in people’s views about race and racial equality. And as much as we have this moment of Nazis in the streets and racists feeling like it’s possible to talk more vocally, if you look at the numbers, most Americans reject this stuff. If you think of Richard Nixon’s effort to inflame the silent majority in the late 60s and early 70s, it was incredibly successful. Donald Trump’s attempt to do that in 2020 just foundered. And I think it’s because there have been profound changes in most Americans’ basic attitudes.
There are serious ailments — guns, violence, etc. — but our society at some level has this vibrancy, this health, and our economy is pretty strong as well, though our institutions just don’t reflect that. And so that’s why I’m obsessed with the institutions. I feel like, if we could get our politics right, then it could reflect that more. That’s where I find hope and optimism.
For those who missed it
Wednesday’s Hunter Biden contempt hearing clown show in the House Oversight Committee made my head hurt. So I checked in now and then but could not stay in. But for those who missed it to preserve their mental health, I wanted to share a couple of clips that popped up later:
An ‘X’ user named Modern Man praised the “black girl magic” that Rep. Jasmine Crocket’s (D-Texas) brought to her takedown of Republicans on the committee. Oh, and did she. Right out of the gate.
“Let me tell you why no one wants to talk to y’all behind closed doors, because y’all lie.”
Enjoy.
Democrat’s ranking member, Rep. Jamie Raskin of Maryland brought more than his share.
While Raskin is from just south of the Mason-Dixon Line, he uses “you guys,” not “y’all.” Either one works. But in the clip above he was just getting warmed up.
Yes, it was a sideshow. But the Democrats came ready to perform, and with better material.
Chris Christie dropped out of the race today and gave quite a speech. He didn’t endorse anyone and I think we know why:
Christie’s speech was the best one I’ve ever seen him give. He didn’t mince words about Trump and chastised those who are giving him a pass. He talked honestly about the stakes for the country in this election.
A couple of highlights:
National Review says that Nikki Haley or Ron DeSantis “are far and away better on the merits, more likely to win in November, and, if elected, more likely to deliver — free from the wild drama of a second Trump term — conservative results.” I don’t know about Haley and DeSantis but we can certainly agree on the horror of another Trump term. But maybe they could have been consistently critical of the MAGA cult over the past 7 years? I dunno. But they were “Never Trump” in 2016 and they are again, so I guess that’s something.
Mediaite reports:
The editorial minced no words in prosecuting its case against Trump, bluntly stating that Trump “lost to Joe Biden in 2020″ and “did everything he could to overturn the result, including trying to bully his vice president into violating his oath and preventing and delaying the counting of the electoral vote.”
“When a mob, fervently believing Trump’s lies, fought its way into the U.S. Capitol to try to end the count, Trump did little or nothing to try to stop it,” it added.
The editors continued, assailing both Trump’s fitness for office and his effectiveness in it during his first term:
These were infamous presidential acts and represented serious offenses against our constitutional order. Nothing can justify them, and it’s wrong to simply pretend that they didn’t happen. It’s impossible to imagine Ron DeSantis or Nikki Haley, whatever their other flaws, engaging in such grotesquely selfish behavior injurious to our republic. On this basis alone, both are vastly preferable to Trump.
***
In his first term, Trump notched some important conservative wins and even forged some creative victories (think the Abraham Accords). He’d be an enormous improvement over Joe Biden on many policy questions. [Bullshit…]
But much energy would be wasted on his personal vendettas and fighting back against the Left’s sure-to-be-unhinged reaction to his return to the White House. He’d have trouble attracting talent to serve him. His bad instincts on trade and NATO, tendency to personalize everything including foreign relations, contempt for rules that get in his way, and erratic nature would risk real harm to the country. He’d be an easily distracted 78-year-old one-termer sure to get wiped out in the midterms, once again…
[…]
“It’s not too late to choose one of them, and forge a better path for the party and for the country,” concluded the editorial.
They obviously prefer DeSantis which means they are MAGA 2.0. Still, since DeSantis is a dud and has no chance of winning, this is better than nothing. All the Never Trump Republicans, even those who can’t bring themselves to endorse Joe Biden, are important for the popular front that’s necessary to save the country from another Trump term. So… welcome to the resistance once again, NR.