First, you need to see this headline from Vanity Fair.

Let it not be forgot that Jared was the guy who killed a plan for the federal government to direct pandemic supplies like PPE to where they were needed. This was while covid was slamming New York City especially hard. Jared decided this was a good thing. From the Vanity Fair article:

Yes, in a February interview at Harvard that was posted online this month and uncovered by the Guardian on Tuesday, Kushner opined that the Gaza Strip could be “very valuable” from a real estate perspective, if Israel could forcibly remove everyone currently living there to develop “waterfront property.” Speaking to Harvard professor Tarek Masoud, Kushner said: “It’s a little bit of an unfortunate situation there, but from Israel’s perspective, I would do my best to move the people out and then clean it up.” Where does Kushner suggest these people go? Ivanka Trump’s husband explained that if he were in charge of Israel, his top priority would be removing the people living in Rafah—a Palestinian city in southern Gaza—and moving them into Egypt “with diplomacy.” And that wasn’t his only piece of advice: “In addition to that,” he said, “I would just bulldoze something in the Negev, I would try to move people in there…. I think that’s a better option, so you can go in and finish the job.”

Such a mensch. Come to think of it, we never did hear what Jared was doing with all the supplies he was confiscating from states during covid. Somebody should really follow up on that.

So it’s Thursday and Trump still hasn’t coughed up a bond. Bloomberg is reporting that Attorney General James may be planning to go after Trump’s Westchester properties first.

New York state’s $454 million judgment against Donald Trump in a civil fraud lawsuit was formally registered in Westchester County just outside Manhattan, a sign that his properties in the area may be at risk of being seized if the former president fails to post an appeal bond.

New York Attorney General Letitia James registered the judgment on March 6, according to the Westchester County Clerk’s online database. The filing didn’t give a reason for the registration or identify any Trump assets, but it will allow James to more easily secure liens, should she decide to do so, on two of the real estate mogul’s most valuable properties: Trump National Golf Club Westchester and the mostly undeveloped 212-acre Seven Springs estate.

The Golf Club is maybe a couple of miles from where I’m living now, which is why I think it would be fun if it became public property. But I guess that wouldn’t happen right away.

Seven Springs featured heavily in the trial, and Engoron ruled the property had been wildly overvalued for years. Trump purchased the estate in 1995 for $7.5 million. It consists of two large homes, undeveloped land and a few other buildings. Trump valued the property at more than five times the appraised values in some years — as high as $291 million — often by including the value of mansions that didn’t exist.

This afternoon Judge Arthur Engoron ordered Trump to inform his court-appointed financial watchdog about any future efforts to obtain an appeal bond.

In his order Thursday, Engoron told the Trump Organization it must tell its financial overseer, Barbara Jones, “in advance, of any efforts to secure surety bonds.”

The company must tell Jones about any claims the Trump Organization makes to obtain the bonds, any personal guarantees by Trump or other defendants, and any condition imposed on the company.

That level of disclosure would well exceed what Trump has disclosed about a $91.6 million appeal bond he recently received from a Chubb insurance subsidiary to secure a civil defamation judgment in favor of the writer E. Jean Carroll.

Jones, who is a retired federal judge, was appointed by Engoron as the financial monitor for the Trump Organization. The company has chafed under her oversight, complaining about her in filings with Engoron.

Memo to Trump: Nobody trusts you. But the Wall Street Journal is reporting (from what I read elsewhere; it’s behind a firewall) that Trump will soon enjoy a a $3.5 billion windfall for taking Truth Social public, or something This makes no sense to me; does anyone other than Trump post on Truth Social? But we’ll see.

In other weird criminal justice news, the Mar-a-Lago documents case seems to be going south on a freight train. See ‘Very, very troubling’: Judges, lawyers flummoxed by Judge Cannon at WaPo.

This just in from the New York Times:

Donald J. Trump’s lawyers disclosed on Monday that he had failed to secure a roughly half-billion dollar bond in his civil fraud case in New York, arguing that doing so was “a practical impossibility.”

The filing, coming one week before the bond is due, raised the prospect that the former president might face a financial crisis unless an appeals court comes to his rescue. Mr. Trump has asked the appeals court to pause the $454 million judgment that a New York judge imposed on Mr. Trump last month, or accept a bond of only $100 million.

The former president has been unable to secure the full bond, his lawyers said in the court filing on Monday, despite “diligent efforts.” Those efforts included approaching about 30 companies, and yet, they said, he has encountered “insurmountable difficulties.”

So about thirty companies consider him too bad a credit risk to lend him that much money. The deadline — after which Letitia James can start seizing Trump’s assets — is March 25.

Axios is reporting that “Trump’s lawyers have asked an appeals court to delay the bond posting until his appeal of the case has run its court.” No way is Letitia James going to agree to that. We’ll see if someone gives him more time to come up with the money. I understand he’s got big mortgages on some of his signature properties, so clearing that much cash may be a reach.

In other news:

The “Plan” seems to be to destroy the November general election and declare Trump the winner. To illlustrate, this happened recently in Arizona:

As the board of supervisors for Arizona’s largest county abruptly ended a meeting late last month, a swarm of people rushed toward the dais, shouting that the members were illegitimate.

The Maricopa County leaders made a beeline for a side door and were swiftly escorted out of the chamber by security guards, who called for backup from the sheriff’s office. After the meeting’s live-feed went dead, a member of the crowd yelled that a “revolution” was underway.

“I’m here today to put you on public notice and to inform you that you are not our elected officials,” said Michelle Klann, co-founder of a pro-Trump group, from a podium she had commandeered. “This is an act of insurrection. Due to all the voter fraud, you have never been formally voted in.” …

…“This was an organized, coordinated attack,” said one top county official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive security matters. “It was a dress rehearsal for the election.”

And, of course, later in the article it said,

In the case of last month’s meeting, the action taken ended peacefully.Outnumbered, the county’s security staff waited for sheriff’s deputies as they calmly ushered out the approximately 20-person crowd. No arrests were made.

They’ve got to start arresting these brownshirts and introducing them to the criminal justice system. This is ridiculous.

Kari Lake and Mike Lindell have petitioned the Supreme Court to declare electronic voting unconstitutional. This is an old suit filled by Lake that has been slapped down vigorously by lower courts, so Lake, joined by Lindell, are taking it to the top. “The MyPillow CEO spent much of last week hyping the lawsuit, making multiple appearances on Steve Bannon’s War Room podcast—in between plugs for his percale sheets—to tease ‘the most explosive evidence ever’ that is ‘going to save this country’ and ‘shock the world,’ The Arizona Republic reported.”

And now that the Trump family is running the RNC, the RNC is opposing early and mail-in voting. Instead of trying to win more Republican voters, the strategy is to suppress Democratic votes.

Last month True the Vote had to admit to a court that it had no evidence for its election fraud claims. But they’re going forward with the program anyway.

What to do when the rules don’t matter

This Monday we’ll discuss recent examples of lawlessness and talk through strategies to stand your ground. From free speech to personal security, US Elections to Agenda 2030, let’s plan now for what may be coming soon.@onwardsocial… pic.twitter.com/crNqOkVPt6

— True the Vote (@TrueTheVote) March 17, 2024

Meanwhile, Trump’s rhetoric continues to be unethered to reality.

Trump, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, confused the crowd at an appearance in Vandalia by insisting that Biden had beaten “Barack Hussein Obama” in elections nationally that never took place.

Freewheeling during a speech in which his teleprompters were seemingly disabled by high winds, Trump – a frequent critic of the 81-year-old Biden’s age and mental acuity – struggled to pronounce the words “bite” and “largest”. And he left the crowd scratching their heads over the reference to Obama, whom Biden served as vice-president from 2009 to 2017 before taking the Oval Office from Trump in 2020.

“You know what’s interesting? Joe Biden won against Barack Hussein Obama. Has anyone ever heard of him? Every swing state, Biden beat Obama but in every other state, he got killed,” Trump said.

It’s one thing to mix up a name or a place, but imagining elections that never happened is not a “normal” senior moment thing.

Back in 2015 I was furious with my senator, Chuck Schumer, for opposing the Obama Administration’s nuclear deal with Iran. According to several sources, Schumer opposed the deal because Bibi Netanyahu asked him to. I sent Chuck a sternly worded email about it, as I recall, vowing to never vote for him again. (And I didn’t, although I was living in Missouri the next time he ran.) Eventually Chuck and the mostly Republicans who opposed the deal were defeated. (Of course a certain Great Orange Idiot canceled the agreement some time later, promising he could negotiate something better, which he never even attempted to do. But that’s another rant.)

I take it Chuck’s speech of last week calling for new elections in Israel landed like a bomb in Israel. See, for example,  Schumer’s anti-Netanyahu speech stuns Israel at Axios.

In addition to being the most senior Jewish elected official in the country, Schumer has had one of the longest and closest relationships with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of any U.S. politician.

Schumer’s speech stunned officials and observers in both Washington and Jerusalem because he has been — and still is — the Democratic Party’s most avid supporter of Israel in decades.

His harsh remarks about Netanyahu create more political space for other Democratic members of Congress to publicly voice their criticism of the Israeli government amid the ongoing war in Gaza.

Pro-Palestinian protesters are giving themselves credit for Schumer’s shift in position, but I suspect what really happened is that he started hearing from Jewish constituents saying they were opposed to the Netanyahu government’s wholesale destruction of Gaza. See From her lips to Chuck’s ears: Schumer’s rabbi weighs in on his Israel speech.

“In this speech, he said what most of us think,” Timoner, senior rabbi of Congregation Beth Elohim, said in an interview with POLITICO. “There’s been a real fear in the American Jewish community of criticizing Israel. … He did something so great in breaking that silence.”

Schumer has attended Timoner’s synagogue near his home in Park Slope, Brooklyn for at least a decade. Timoner officiated his daughter’s wedding, blessed his three grandchildren and buried his father.

I’m reading that no one expects Netanyahu to change his course because of Schumer’s speech. The U.S. Right is outgaged about it, and Netanyahu probably figures if Trump wins re-election he can count on infinite support from the U.S. going forward. It does give President Biden more room to maneuver, though. For so long criticism of Israel has been something of a third rail here, and that has to change.

In other news: The Washington Post is running an opinion piece by Kathleen Parker headlined “For the country’s sake, Vice President Harris should step aside.” I’m not going to link to it because it’s garbage, but it’s easily found on their editorial page today.

Parker’s opening sentence is “The Democratic Party’s indulgence of identity politics has proved successful in building a diverse organization, but its strategy of courting (and pandering to) minority voters is the road to ruin.” OMG.

And then Parker goes on to trash Harris for … what, exactly? It’s not clear. Parker calls Harris’s speeches “rambling,” which is not something I’ve ever noticed. And she accuses Harris of having a bad laugh. A representative paragraph:

Whatever the reasons, it has seemed that Harris’s role was to be quiet, lest she embarrass her boss with her sometimes inane, rambling remarks and a laugh that erupts from nowhere about nothing obvious to others. I do, however, relish the thought of her face-to-face with Vladimir Putin and suddenly cackling at a linchpin moment during nuclear arms discussions.

I am old enough to remember Dwight Eisenhower being president, and in all those years I’ve noticed that the role of vice president is a mostly thankless one that doesn’t let anyone shine too brightly. But if Parker thinks that it would be good for Joe Biden’s election chances to switch veeps now — to another white guy, I assume — she’s a flaming idiot. The erupting controversy would drown out anything else the Biden Administration is trying to present. (Does the name “Thomas Eagleton” ring any bells?) Whatever “safe” candidate is chosen will still be ripped to shreds in right-wing media.

I’m absolutely disgusted with Kathleen Parker, and if any of you want to complain to WaPo about her, please don’t let me discourage you.

Update: See Your Regular Reminder That We Knew About Kathleen Parker’s Bigotry Years Ago at No More Mister Nice Blog.

This just in — Judge Says Fani Willis Can Stay on Trump Case, but Only if Former Romantic Partner Leaves No paywall.

“An Atlanta judge on Friday ruled that Fani T. Willis, the Fulton Country district attorney, could continue leading the prosecution of former President Donald J. Trump and his allies in Georgia, but only if her former romantic partner, Nathan J. Wade, withdraws as the lead prosecutor of the case.” Some other news outlets are reporting that the Judge said either Willis or Wade have to leave. But I assume that means bye bye, Wade.

Update: Wade has resigned, so as of now Fani Willis is free to prepare for trial.

I want to go back to something Josh Marshall wrote a couple of days ago, Has Ol’ Man Trump Lost His Touch? No paywall. Here’s the meat of it:

There is a key difference here that is important to understand. Trump’s 2016 campaign’s success stemmed in large part from channeling the cultural and social grievance of middle aged white American men. His 2024 agenda is heavily focused on his personal grievances and doing away with all the restraints on the presidency that hobbled him and led to ego injuries in during his first term — Trump Unbound, as it were. 

A big chunk of the voters probably still are not all that focused on the November election and haven’t seen much of Trump recently. He really isn’t the same now.

One of Trump’s 2015/2016 super powers was that he’d come out of American popular culture — the core of it, which is to say, reality TV. These days he sits around Mar-a-Lago, talks to sycophants and prepares for new court dates. You can see a lot of the degeneration in his social media communication on Truth Social. As you know, I considered myself something of an aficionadoof rhythmic ferality of Trump’s 2015–2020 Twitter presence (see “Trump Attack Haiku“). The stuff today on Truth Social is entirely different, a kind of digital equivalent of pressured speech, packing a mix of All-Caps yelling and Trumpian buzzwords into one unstructured blob or loaf of bloated menace. He’s not the same.

Trump went into 2016 with a con man’s instincts for telling people what they wanted to hear. And he lucked out with a Democratic opponent who ran a massively tone deaf campaign. Unlike in 2016, he’s now surrounded with a “cast of ideologues who have created a program for him.” And a lot of that is massively unpopular stuff, like raising the retirement age or cutting Medicare. Plus he’s in a real box on abortion, which he wasn’t in 2016 or 2020.

I’m guessing that about a third of the voters would jump off a 90-foot cliff if Trump told them to, but I do believe there’s a big chunk of people who will find him a much less palatable candidate than he was before, once they start to focus. The challenge, though, is to get them comfortable with voting for Biden. And I think that’s do-able if enough Biden surrogates get out there and get to work. See also Philip Bump, Trump goes on a weird riff about acid — again about Trump’s increasingly hallucinatory rhetoric.

But let’s also step back and look at what Trump is doing to the Republican Party. I read today that Trump’s RNC officially killed the GOP’s mail-in voter effort. Trump still tells the story that fraudulent mail-in votes cost him the 2020 election, which is a crock, and there is data that shows mail-in voting may favor Republican candidates more than Democrats. But Trump and his people seem more interested in throwing legal challenges at voting itself.

This appears to be a realization of the far right’s goal of focusing the Republican Party on election-related “lawfare,” that is legal challenges designed to restrict ballot access and undercut election systems in ways that make it harder to vote. Back in 2022, I reported that this vision was behind right-wing lawyer Harmeet Dhillon’s long-shot bid to become RNC chair. Dhillon insisted that the RNC needed to hire an army of lawyers to lob legal challenges ahead of the 2024 elections.

Nothing screams “We can’t win a majority of voters fairly” like prioritizing legal attacks on voting rights. But that’s precisely what the Trump-branded RNC is preparing to do. Lara Trump, the former president’s daughter-in-law and the current RNC co-chair, claimed “massive resources” will go to its so-called election integrity division.

So, head’s up. And of course the Trump family/campaign has taken complete control of the RNC, including the financial part, so Trump will be tapping that money for his own purposes and letting the down-ballot candidates fend for themselves. And see Bess Levin, Over 100 House Republicans Will Skip GOP Retreat Because They Hate Each Other So Much: Report.

CNN reports that “many Republicans plan to skip the [upcoming] House GOP retreat as they grumble about both the location and the idea of spending time with one another.” According to the outlet, fewer than 100 Republicans have said they will attend, meaning more than 119 either have previous engagements or would rather do literally anything else than breathe the same air as their fellow representatives. While some cited reelection races as the reason for their absence, and others have “complained about the venue choice” selected by Speaker Mike Johnson, a number of GOP lawmakers and aides “told CNN they were simply not enthusiastic about the idea of having to huddle with the rest of their party at a time when Republican infighting has prevented them from even passing procedural votes.”

The days when Republicans speak and move as one hive mind are over, I guess.

The rest of the year until November could go a lot of different ways. But one of the ways it could go — not predicting it will, mind you — is that the party itself implodes at some point.

In other news: I’m not always happy with my senator, Chuck Schumer, but he stood up in the Senate today and sent a message to Israel about Bibi Netanyahu. This is better.

Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) called for the Israeli government to hold a new election in a speech warning that Israel risks becoming an international “pariah” under the leadership of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his right-wing cabinet.

Schumer, the highest-ranking Jewish official in the United States and a staunch ally of Israel, said he thinks Israelis understand “better than anybody that Israel cannot hope to succeed as a pariah opposed by the rest of the world” and would choose better leaders if elections were held.

Robert Hur, the special counsel who investigated President Biden’s retention of classified documents and portrayed him as a senile old man in his report, is testifying to Gym Jordan’s Fishing Expedition Committee today. Note that as of yesterday Hur is no longer an employee of the Justice Department and is testifying as a private citizen. And he’s got an attorney with a history of defending right-wingers. I have no sense of how that’s been going.

But this morning the DoJ released a slightly redacted transcript of the interview between Biden and Hur, and news outlets are discovering that Hur mischaracterized Biden’s statements rather badly. See Matt Gertz T Media Matters, News outlets that trumpeted Hur’s story now discover “context” and “nuance” in transcript. It seems the full transcript shows that the President sometimes stumbled on names and dates but otherwise knew what he was talking about. So the New York Times and Wshington Post and other news outlets are walking back the truckload of stories they ran questioing Biden’s mental fitness.

I have no doubt that Gym and other MAGAs will latch on to something Hur says today so they can continue to flog their claim that Joe Biden is too senile to put on his own socks. But both sides can play that game.

In other news: GOP Rep. Ken Buck of Colorado has announced he’ll be leaving the House at the end of next week. He’s not going to bother to finish his term. I’m reading that House seats can’t be filled with an appointed replacement, so there would have to be a special election to replace Buck. And the Republican majority in the House keeps shrinking.

In more other news: You probably won’t be surprised to learn that there is no migrant-fueled crime wave going on.

Republican politicians and sympathetic media outlets are claiming that America is in the midst of a violent “crime wave,” driven in part by undocumented immigrants. New data, however, demonstrates that there was not a spike in violent crime in 2023. Instead, across America, rates of violent crime are dropping precipitously — and the decline is especially pronounced in border states. …

… Notably, the two border states that have completed their Uniform Crime Reports saw particularly sharp declines in murder in 2023, with 15% drop in Texas and 8.8% drop in Arizona. Both states also saw significant declines in violent crime overall. If undocumented immigrants were driving a violent crime surge, as Republicans and some media outlets suggest, you would expect to see it show up in the data from Texas and Arizona. 

See the linked article from Popular Information for data and sources. Basically this is preliminary data from fifteen states that eventually will go into the FBI’s annual Uniform Crime Report. But there are studies and data going back years showing that migrants are less likely to commit violent crimes than native-born good ol’ boys.

You’ll remember last week that MTG was using the murder of Laken Riley, a nursing student who was killed while out on an exercise run, to make some point about migrants. Being murdered while running appears to be a whole sub-genre of violent crime. Most of the victims are women, but not always — remember Ahmaud Arbery? Of course you do. (Ahmaud Arbery was from Georgia, too, but I don’t remember MTG getting worked up about him the way she’s worked up about Riley Laken. Odd.)  A lot of these murders are unsolved. When they are solved, the perpetrator (when the victim is a woman) tends to have a history of violence against women. See, for example, the Eliza Fletcher murder.

Now see Will Leitch, The Murder on My Running Trail, at New York Magazine. The author lives in the same community as Riley Laken and runs on the same trail she took on the day she was murdered. And his wife is a runner, too. “She has told me how often she feels watched on her runs,” Leitch writes. “How she has been followed. How she has been spit at. How she was even once swung at. I have never had any of those fears, not once. Because I am a man.”

The murder of Riley Laken shook the Athens, Georgia, running community hard.

Riley’s murder, the first homicide on campus in more than 30 years, sent a wave of terror through Athens, but it hit the running community particularly hard. Fear was palpable among women runners in the first 24 hours after her death, and their stories made it clear that what I — along with many of my fellow male runners — had thoughtlessly considered a safe, solitary activity has always been far more fraught for half the population. Women spoke of the precautions they constantly have to take, from going out with running buddies to avoiding isolated areas to carrying alert systems, weapons, or even Tasers with them anytime they leave the house. (My primary concern when I set out is whether I remembered my headphones.) Riley’s assault and murder — one of several involving women runners in recent years — was a reminder that every time women go for a run, they have to be conscious of the possibility of male violence. Or, more accurately: They have to be as conscious of the possibility of male violence as they always are. My wife reminded me of the Margaret Atwood quote: “Men are afraid that women will laugh at them. Women are afraid that men will kill them.”

That was the conversation until an undocumented immigrant was charged with the murder. Suddenly everyone stopped talking about male violence. And every Republican politician in Georgia blamed Joe Biden for Riley Laken’s death.

It’s like violent crime doesn’t count until a migrant is the perpetrator. But here’s something else I found today about homicides in the U.S.

In 2020, there were 2,059 females murdered by males in single victim/single offender incidents that were submitted to the FBI for its Supplementary Homicide Report. 12 The key findings of this study, expanded upon in the following sections, dispel many of the myths regarding the nature of lethal violence against females.

• • For homicides in which the victim to offender relationship could be identified, 89 percent of female victims (1,604 out of 1,801) were murdered by a male they knew.
  • Eight times as many females were murdered by a male they knew (1,604 victims) than were killed by male strangers (197 victims).
  • For victims who knew their offenders, 60 percent (967) of female homicide victims were wives or intimate acquaintances of their killers.13
  • There were 298 women shot and killed by either their husband or intimate acquaintance during the course of an argument.

Odds are that at least some of those women are killed in Georgia. But in MTG’s world their deaths don’t count.

In other misdirected violent crime news, by now you’ve heard that Sen. Katie Britt, in her State of the Union rebuttal for the ages, told a graphic story about sex trafficking in Texas and blamed it on President Biden. Turns out this happened 20 years ago, during the George W. Bush administration, and in Mexico. As far as I know, Britt has yet to apologize for telling a lie.

Update: Aaron Blake at WaPo provides an account of what went on in the hearing today.

I’ve been looking for any information on the appeal bond posted by Trump yesterday. And we don’t know much.This is from Alternet —

The ex-president’s bond was guaranteed by the Federal Insurance Company — a New York-based subsidiary of the company Chubb Group LLC, which is headquartered in Switzerland. In 2018, Chubb CEO Evan Greenberg served on a trade advisory committee in the Trump White House. The Washington Post reported that “it was not clear from court records what collateral Trump presented to obtain the bond from Chubb.”

We don’t know what was put up for collateral, we don’t know if it was co-signed, we don’t know what fee Trump is being required to pay. Seems a tad hinky. Some commenters are breathlessly noting that Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán was at Mar-a-Lago yesterday and wondering if Orbán was involved in securing the loan. That’s pure speculation, note. Orbán came to the U.S. to meet with Trump but is not meeting with President Biden, which is definately hinky.

Trump has now officially taken over the RNC, so watch the RNC budget get drained on behalf of Trump. You down-ballot candidates are on your own.

In other Mar-a-Lago news, this is from Joyce Vance yesterday —

In the Mar-a-Lago case, two additional prosecutors filed their notices of appearance, the formal way a lawyer advises a judge they will be participating in a case. One of those lawyers handled Trump’s appeal on presidential immunity to the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, leading to widespread speculation Jack Smith is gearing up to appeal Judge Aileen Cannon to the Eleventh Circuit.

Cannon will have to issue an appealable order before that can happen. But that moment may well come when she rules on pending classified discovery issues or Trump’s request to make the names of witnesses public.

We can hope.

The fallout from Thursday night continues, including the trashing of Sen. Katie Britt. I get the impression that Republicans are projecting all their frustrations at having been owned at the SOTU onto her. She may or may not have a career after this. But here’s a fun read about her — Is Katie Britt for Real?

(Before getting to the SOTU — Trump just posted the $91 million appeal bond in the E. Jean Carroll case. Now let’s see him come up with the bigger one.)

I have to say I’m feeling a LOT better about the November election after last night. There will be many bumps ahead, of course. But even as I keyboard a lot of Republicans probably are wondering if they overdid the “Joe is old and senile” claim a tad.

Best headline so far: GOP Stunned To Discover It’s Not Running Against A Cadaver In 2024

Republicans who have turned Joseph R. Biden into a caricature of falling-down dementia and drooling incontinence have set the bar so low that anything above a flatline EKG from the president knocks them back on their heels.

They were left spluttering that Biden’s State of the Union was too loud and too campaign-y. They couldn’t maintain a basic level of decorum in the chamber, giving Biden the chance to knock them around with ad libs and direct call outs, directly facing the GOP side of the chamber. He turned the call and response of the Black church into whack-a-MTG.

Brian Tyler Cohen at MSNBC wrote,

Unfortunately for Donald Trump and his campaign, Biden didn’t sound like a man in the throes of cognitive decline. The GOP may have gaslighted itself into selling one version of Joe Biden to its loyal sycophants — but that version exists only in their fever dreams. And the president proved as much tonight.

It says something about the Republian mood, I think, that the GOP response from Alabama Senator Katie Britt got the harshest blowbacks from other Republicans. I didn’t watch it, but I take it that after President Biden’s near-virtuoso performance, her response was just weird. A number of commenters predicted it will be replicated on SNL tomorrow night. See ‘What the Hell Am I Watching’: Republicans Torch Their Own SOTU Rebuttal at Rolling Stone. And this is from Daily Beast, Official GOP Response to SOTU Has Republicans ‘Losing It’

The freshman senator is considered a rising star in the party. But her speech’s intense tone—with an over-the-top dramatic cadence that was delivered in a kitchen—left political operatives and observers struggling to make sense of it.

The performance was so bad that some Republicans watched the high-profile speech with a grimace.

A GOP strategist told The Daily Beast that Britt’s delivery quickly became a gossip item Thursday night among operatives connected to Donald Trump—something that could have potential implications for her consideration as a vice presidential pick on the 2024 ticket.

“Everyone’s fucking losing it,” this Republican said, requesting anonymity to discuss private conversations. “It’s one of our biggest disasters ever.”

It may be they weren’t reacting to Britt as much as to the realization they’d just been owned by Joe Biden, and Britt’s speech didn’t help. And to add insult to injury, Trump’s toy social media platform went down during the speech, leaving his fans unable to enjoy Trump’s witty retorts (/sarcasm). I understand a handful of House Republicans actually left the room during the speech. Whether that was in protest or because the whole event was too painful for them, I cannot say.

If you didn’t watch the speech, you’ll want to watch it. It wsn’t just the words, but the energy in the room (or lack of it on the GOP side), that made it an event. This is not to say there weren’t spots that could have been better, but on the whole it made a lot of Democrats very happy.

If you’re watching and want to comment, feel free.

Meanwhile, this happened today.

A federal judge on Thursday denied Donald Trump’s last-minute plea for extra time to front a massive sum of money to appeal his rape defamation trial, forcing the tycoon to suddenly come up with $91 million.

On Thursday afternoon, U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan told the former president that he was in a mess of his own making—after losing a trial that found him directly responsible for lying about sexually abusing the journalist E. Jean Carroll, ordered to pay an $83 million verdict, and waiting until the very last second to come up with a backup plan. …

… The judge then noted that Trump had essentially run out the clock all on his own, burning through nearly all of the 30 days he had until the $83 million judgment came due—and not even lining up the higher sum he’d need to pay to appeal the judgment. Instead, Trump defense lawyer Alina Habba waited until last weekend to propose an unorthodox alternative: a lowball offer to front a quarter of the money  instead.

Just today he had another judgment that went against him.

Former U.S. President Donald Trump has been ordered to pay a six-figure legal bill to a company founded by a former British spy that he unsuccessfully sued for making what his lawyer called “shocking and scandalous” false claims that harmed his reputation.

A London judge, who threw out the case against Orbis Business Intelligence last month saying it was “bound to fail,” ordered Trump to pay legal fees of 300,000 pounds ($382,000), according to court documents released Thursday.

Orbis was founded by Christopher Steele, who once ran the Russia desk for Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service, also known as MI6.

Also, too: Trump to Seize Control of GOP Machine After Clinching Nomination

Update: This is an energized speech. Ukraine and Putin right out of the box.

Oh, he’s being feisty. The January 6 insurrectionists were not patriots! They failed! Eat it, Republicans.

Speaker Johnson looks constipated.

Kate Cox who had to leave Texas to have an abortion is there.Directly addressing the justices about Roe v. Wade. Sam Alito isn’t there.

He’s taunting the Republicans.

Jobs! Labor! Unions built the middle class! This is a classic Democratic speech.

Speaker Johnson looks like he wants to be somewhere else.

This is like a Dem Party pep rally.

Speaker Johnson looks like he’s waiting to get root canal.

The Republicans are looking down at their shoes.

He’s yanking their chains over the border bill they tanked. They don’t like it.

MTG is having a tantrum.

“We can fight about the border, or we can fix it. I’m ready to fix it.”

Speaker Johnson stood for John Lewis of blessed memory. I bet MTG didn’t.

Overall a good speech.

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.