So Nikki Haley suspended her campaign in spite of winning Vermont. She might have felt it best to suspend the campaign with at least a few electors in her pocket. She’s still in a position to claim the nomination in case Trump implodes. Although of course who knows what the RNC might do if Trump implodes.
Dean Phillips — remember him?– finally took the hint and is dropping out also. I understand Marianne Williamson is still running. No one cares.
The nominees for president in 2024 are now pretty much set in stone, as if they weren’t already. I personally think a long general election campaign helps Biden. Trump needs to be more visible. He needs to be in all the television news every bleeping day. Let everyone see him screaming his word salad speeches about retribution and people who don’t speak languages. He’ll gut his own general election chances the same way he screwed himself in the second E. Jean Carroll trial by being a flaming asshole in the courtroom.
And I understand from exit polling a substantial portion of Haley voters say they weren’t voting for Haley as much as they were voting against Trump. The question is, will these voters be inclined to hold their noses and vote for Trump in November, anyway? Or will they be alarmed enough by his erratic speech and behavior to maybe just not vote, if they can’t bring themselves to vote for Biden? And I still think that a substantial part of the electorate hasn’t been focusing on Trump or Biden or the news in general. Things will change when/if they ever do. Current polling means very little.
I understand that MAGAs tended to win out over moderates in down-ballot Republican races yesterday. These tend to be the same sort of people who mostly lost in 2020 and 2022, so let’s hope that trend continues.
Adam Schiff will almost certainly be elected to Dianne Feinstein’s Senate seat. I’m okay with this, but it’s sad that Katie Porter and Barbara Lee won’t be in Congress next term. Maybe they can come back in 2026.
Regarding the meeting between Trump and Elon Musk — the New York Post is reporting that Musk declared he won’t be contributing to any presidential campaigns. Fine, but that doesn’t necessarily mean he won’t help Trump out with his appeal bonds. There’s also some nonsense going on with Musk and Tesla and OpenAI that I haven’t been following closely, but apparently it makes Musk look bad.
Appeal Bond Watch: There’s been no apparent movement from Trump on paying the appeal bond in the E. Jean Carroll judgment, which now totals over $91 million and is due on Saturday.
Soon we won’t have Kysten Sinema around to make fun of any more. But here’s a nice retrospective of her political demise — Kyrsten Sinema Drove Herself Out Of Politics by Kate Riga at TPM.
Melania and Ivanka no shows in last night's celebration. Just not in the mood to party we might guess.
Melania is probably home praying that there will be something left to inherit when the old man kicks off. Right now it may look like marrying him was a bad bet.
If you think Melania's in a bad mood now, wait til the evidence piles up in the trial that starts later this month. There's no pictures (fortunately) but there's testimony scheduled regarding the cover-ups of two different affairs Trump engaged in.
I doubt if she ever believed him, but she might have been convinced that Trump would make it go away. It will be headline news for weeks. It's a lot more lurid than speculating about Biden's age. For once, it may help that the media (and media consumer) obsesses about who is doing it with who and how. That's April and probably into May. Then in May, the USSC will hear the "absolute immunity" case.
I want Trump to stay in the news in a bad way – to keep bouncing from scandal to disaster over and over.
There's a chance Loose Cannon will stand by a bad decision that Jack Smith explained is dead wrong. She does not seem to approve of being questioned and if she doubles down, Smith might have grounds to appeal to the 11th Circuit and ask for a judge familiar with the law.
I'm not seeing any reporting that Trump asked Musk for $100 million. Frankly, I wish that was the case because it would mean Trump has not secured the money. He's such a drama queen I'm halfway expecting he'll wait til the last minute.
For once, it may help that the media (and media consumer) obsesses about who is doing it with who and how.
I hope the media and the prosecutor both have a field day with Trump's sexual indiscretions. His little roll in the hay with Stormy Daniels could be viewed as an infidelity of oppurtunity, wham bam, thank you, mam type of thing. But his affair with Karen McDougal was a whole different animal. He woo'd for months leading her down the garden path by decieving her into believing that he had a pure emotional attachment( love) for her. She was nothing to him but an object to release his sexual desires. He set her up as a mistress and cast her aside when she was no longer convenient to his purpose.
I'm sure Melania isn't looking forward to having the details of the McDougal peccadilo dragged out into the spotlight. To some people infidelity isn't measured by degree. Cheating is cheating, which is true, but a sexual involvement on a repeated and long term basis kind of makes it difficult for Melania to accept the idea that he just fell to temptation in a moment of weakness.
I'm hoping that Trump's upcoming trial puts a big spotlight on the fact that Trump is a fraud, a liar, and a cheat…just to name a few of his character flaws. Did I mention he's also a big bag of shit?
"Did I mention he's also a big bag of shit?"
I believe you have mentioned that a time or two – that he's a big bag of shit. But I do think its worth repeating in case anyone might forget, or is somehow not aware – that he's a big bag of shit. The bottom of the bag is pretty well soaked at this point and is about to burst open – talking about that big bag of shit that he is.
It looks like a really rocky road ahead for the soon to be republican nominee. Liz Cheney, at her word, seems poised to act in strong ways to thwart the Donald's run. It gets hard to schedule political parades when every day looks like you're really going to get rained on. Trump might decide he could be safer declaring himself the interim president of Hati.
I got an email a few weeks ago from Marianne Williamson. She dropped out, although the rest of the world hasn't apparently noticed. Whatever else you might think of her, she left the 2024 race in much the same way she left 2020 – blaming everybody but herself for her poor showing. After her campaign folded in 2020, she wrote a sour grapes editorial in the WaPo – one of the biggest news platforms in the country – that was a real faceplant for me. Let's just say she didn't help her cause. Sometimes a person fails so spectacularly, and everyone in the world knows it, except herself.
Thrilled that Adam Schiff won in CA, the Dem vote was split between Schiff, Porter, and a couple others. If you summed these totals, they easily blow past the Republican. Schiff will really have to screw up for the Republican to win the senate seat in CA.
Wonder what Katie Porter will do next. She had an incredible run of luck in Orange County, the Republican ATM, where, as Ronald Reagan put it, "good Republicans go to die". She needs to take care of her weight, I can imagine her blood pressure is danger territory, we don't need to lose somebody so brilliantly good.
Correction: Because of CA's "jungle primary" I knew Democratic voters who voted for both Schiff and Porter. In essence, party lines don't exist. And so my genius tabulation of the results isn't right. Nonetheless, my money's still on Schiff for November.
My sister has a decades-long involvement with D politics in AZ, to the point of once having been a D candidate for statewide office. So she has seen some of Sinema from relatively close up.
I recently texted her asking
And the answer I got back started with "True." Followed by a description of how, when she did start listening to people, she picked the wrong ones.
I've gotten over hating her and Manchin over the filibuster. Probably if they had changed their minds, it would turn out that there would be 2-3 other naysayers who were content to hide in the dark. I figure it will take 54-56 D Senators to be rid of that. She really did have promise, to be a departure from the generic D Senator in a way that would be very good for the Party, and it is a tragedy how things turned out.