The (no longer) much too early 2024 election thread

[Voronwë the Faithful]

For what it is worth,

[Voronwë the Faithful]

Edited to add: what the hell?

"Brooklyn rappers accused of murder conspiracy join Donald Trump at Bronx rally."

It goes back to Trump's comment that his indictments will help him with Black voters.

Meanwhile, Trump's rally in the Bronx was not quite as well attended as the media had reported.

[N.E. Brigand]

"Women Have Gotten 'Too Mouthy,' Says This Republican Senate Candidate."

The candidate, Royce White of Minnesota, has had a strange and meandering career in the twelve years since he was drafted as a professional basketball player in the NBA. He quickly rose to fame for championing mental health issues, struggled as a player, led protests in Minneapolis following George Floyd's murder in 2020, ran for Congress as a Republican in 2022 -- in the district held by Rep. Ilhan Omar -- but lost in the primary, and now is vying to the Republican candidate to challenge incumbent Sen. Amy Klobuchar. The primary will be held on August 13th. Last week, delegates at the state's Republican convention overwhelmingly endorsed him, despite or because of his crazy and awful positions, which include homophobic and anti-Semitic statements. He's gone from the far left to the far right in just a few years. Tulsi Gabbard seems to have been one conduit for his transformation -- he voted for her in 2020 -- and now he's a big fan of Steve Bannon and Alex Jones.

He bristled when I asked about Jones, whose photograph is on his campaign website. “Why is it that white liberal women in this country are so hellbent on telling Black men in America what we should and shouldn’t think?” he said. At other times he spoke with a sort of pitying condescension about my naïveté. “You may not know as a writer, but I guarantee you that your higher-ups, they know exactly how dangerous I am intellectually,” he said. “They know exactly how dangerous I am politically.” He continued, invoking Malcolm X, “Any time a Black man steps up who is competent on the issues philosophically, politically, spiritually, socially, economically, they start to plan how they’re going to kill him.”

He'll probably be the Republican nominee and then lose to Klobuchar in the fall, but "while the mainstreaming of figures like White may be useful to Democrats in the short term, in the long term it’s a sign of a collapsed consensus about the nature of reality that bodes ill for liberal democracy."

[N.E. Brigand]

Matt Schlapp, on whose behalf an insurance company paid $480,000 to a man who alleged (as others have) that Schlapp groped him, has a message for America:



No, wait, here it is:

[Frelga]

I'm not sure where this belongs but this is definitely a headline.

Trump Dinner Guest Nick Fuentes Blames Israel For Gay Porn Playing During His Live Stream

Fuentes, a virulent anti-Semite and Trump's dinner guest, is now being mocked by George Santos, among many others.

[N.E. Brigand]

Further on this point:

Let me explain at more length why Donald Trump is at least pretending to be committing a very serious crime. Donald Trump is publicly saying that he and Vladimir Putin have an understanding that Putin will hold an American citizen hostage until an agreed-upon time. Just think about how this would work if it were not an international case featuring a former president.

Suppose there's an Amber Alert issued in Pennsylvania. A 10-year-old girl has disappeared, apparently abducted, and the alleged kidnapper's identity is known but he's missing. A description of them and the kidnapper's car has been texted to all our phones, aired on television and shared on electronic highway billboards. Then I, an Ohio resident who is not the kidnapper but who is known to have been in communication with the kidnapper in the past, make a public announcement that the little girl will be released as soon as $10 million is deposited in my bank account, because the kidnapper "will do that for me." Maybe I'm only bluffing. But do you think the FBI isn't going to come knocking at my door? (And you can be sure that the presidency is worth more than $10 million to Trump.)

I meant to write this morning that Trump was "at least" engaged in an apparent kidnapping conspiracy. The international angle actually makes his crime worse not better. I know that Keith Olbermann is an erratic figure, but he gets it in some commentary later today: not only is Trump claiming that "he's been in direct or indirect contact with Putin and has convinced him to continue to hold an American hostage in Russia" (how else would Trump know that Putin will or won't release his hostage if Trump gets what he wants?), but this also is an attempt to "interfere with our sovereign elections."

On top of all that, I think we all know that there's a quid pro quo here, just as there was in 2016. The quo has changed. Eight years ago what Trump wanted Putin to do was to hack and release Democrats' emails -- "Russia, if you're listening" -- while this time Trump wants Putin to continue to hold Gershowitz prisoner. But the quid is the same: in exchange, Trump will give Ukraine to Putin. (I repeat: we know this. Admittedly proving it in court, as Robert Mueller found, is harder. But that doesn't mean Mueller was wrong to try. Or that we should shy from stating the obvious.)

[N.E. Brigand]

Often there are no good overhead pictures of these events, which lets Trump's people inflate the numbers. (It's also true that there are seldom shots from above of Biden's events, but Biden doesn't make a thing of boasting about attedance.)

Trump's rally in the Bronx was not quite as well attended as the media had reported.

I said 4,000 yesterday, and I appreciate the effort here with graphics and some basic math to show why even that is a generous count.

[Frelga]

Also, does this mean that when he was President, Trump had the means to bring home Paul Whelan, who's been held by Russians since 2018, and just chosen not to? Or Trevor Reed, the Marine who was imprisoned in Russia in 2019 and whose released was secured by Biden in 2022. He just chose not to?

[N.E. Brigand]

Donald Trump spoke at the Libertarian Party convention today. It was contentious: many Libertarians don't care for him. But he may have won some of them to his side by promising to pardon Ross Ulbricht, who is serving two life sentences plus 40 years after being convicted by a jury in 2015 of multiple charges including "engaging in a continuing criminal enterprise, narcotics conspiracy, conspiracy to commit money laundering, and conspiracy to commit computer hacking" for his activity running the underground Silk Road market. The judge in the case also found by a preponderance of the evidence standard that Ulbricht had "paid $730,000 in murder-for-hire deals targeting at least five people [who] threatened to reveal the Silk Road enterprise," although those murders weren't carried out and Ulbricht was not charged with those crimes.

Ulbricht's conviction and sentence were upheld by an appeals court, and the Supreme Court declined to take up his case.

I don't think Ulbricht deserves to go free, but the Libertarians who do should be skeptical: they already asked Trump to pardon Ulbricht in 2018, and he didn't.

Trump also told the delegates that being indicted 91 times made him appreciate the Libertarian position.

[N.E. Brigand]

As I was saying...

Donald Trump spoke at the Libertarian Party convention today. It was contentious: many Libertarians don't care for him.

[Voronwë the Faithful]

More on Trump's speech to the Libertarians.

[N.E. Brigand]

Trump still might have gained a few votes, but I wonder if video of the boos will offset that.

Meanwhile, President Biden spoke at the graduation of U.S. Military Academy in West Point, New York, and his speech got much less coverage.



To be fair, when Trump was president, he also spoke at such commencement events -- infamously needing help walking down a ramp at one of them -- and on one such occasion, he also shook the hand of each graduate. We know this because he later complained about how exhausting it was.

[N.E. Brigand]

Strictly speaking, Trump slurs ("it's time to be [unintelligble]") before he glitches on the word that starts with "liber-" in this clip:



And is it a glitch or just a misstatement? This time he doesn't do the accordion-hands move. I think he means to say, "So I'm asking for the Libertarian..." but he starts to say "liberation" instead, though he only gets as far as the third syllable and then the rest is a gurgle. Most speakers upon realizing they were saying the wrong word would just go to the right word, or perhaps add a brief apology, e.g., "So I'm asking for the liberation--pardon me, Libertarian..." and keep delivering the prepared remarks. Trump instead chokes on the last syllables and cuts away entirely from the speech, turning his body from the teleprompter to the audience, spreading his hands, and saying, "Well, think of it." I think this this is part of his inability to admit error.

[Frelga]

Meryl Kornfield of wapo

Libertarian presidential candidate Michael Rectenwald confirmed to me he ate an edible pre-presser, saying “This was not some sort of a major political scandal, okay. I wasn't found in bed with Stormy Daniels. I’m at a Libertarian Party convention. Somebody offered me something.”

[N.E. Brigand]

The Libertarian Party ballot is now on its fifth round. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. also spoke to the convention, albeit remotely, and he submitted his name for consideration -- but he was eliminated in the first round with just 19 votes -- about 2% of the 900+ total. Despite speaking to booing Libertarians in person last night and asking them to vote for him, Donald Trump never submitted his name for consideration. Someone else did submit his name for consideration today, and he got 6 write-in votes in the first round (amusingly, someone wrote in Stormy Daniels's name in that round), and has gotten 1 or 2 votes in subsequent rounds. I repeat: that's out of more than 900 cast each time.

Trump says that Republican National Committee rules forbid him, as their candidate, from submitting his name for nomination with another party, but that if he had, he "absolutely would have gotten" the Libertarian Party's nomination. The actual results strongly suggest otherwise.

- - - - - - - - - -
Meanwhile, RFK's running mate, Nicole Shanahan, took time today to meet with the former Congressman and crank racist conspiracy theorist Ron Paul.

[N.E. Brigand]

The May issue of Vanity Fair features a new story by Gabriel Sherman titled "Running for His Life." The subject is Donald Trump. The message is that a second Trump term would be much more dangerous for the country that the first term was -- and that was plenty bad. The online version has a different title: "Inside the Terrifyingly Competent Trump 2024 Campaign." How do we know it's more competent? Because after Trump's endorsed candidates mostly lost in November 2022 and polls showed Florida governor Ron DeSantis leading him by twenty points, Trump fought back to become not only the presumptive Republican nominee but even to lead the sitting president who beat him in 2020. What makes it more competent this time? Sherman cites two causes. First, there are fewer people in the campaign with "huge egos" than in 2016. (Sherman lists these examples from Trump's 2016 campaign: Roger Stone, Jared Kushner, Ivanka Trump, Steve Bannon, Kellyanne Conway, Corey Lewandowski, and Brad Parscale. I'm not sure that Trump would have won without the work of Conway, Bannon, and Stone. Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner, despicable as they are, strike me as reasonably competent villains who rarely made public appearances. I don't think we even heard Kushner speak until more than a year into Trump's presidency. And they hired the best lawyers and paid attention to them.) One of Trump's new and apparently more competent election aides is Chris LaCivita, who led the Swift Boat campaign against John Kerry in 2004. Second, because Trump is busy with his legal challenges, he's interfering less in the ruthless work of his campaign team, and he's more motivated to win, because he's very afraid of going to prison and needs the legal protection the presidency affords.

Much of what is in the piece is familiar but bears repeating:

• the charges against him helped him win back Republicans;
• he capitalizes on his legal peril and raised $7 million from selling images of his mug shot in two days last August;
• he is "running as a would-be dictator out for revenge" and has suggested that retired general Mark Milley should be killed for treason;
• he plans to conduct "mass roundups of undocumented immigrants and detain them in deportation camps";
• he has promised to have the Justice Department (possibly with Kash Patel as Attorney General) prosecute Joe Biden;
• he would let Russia attack those NATO allies he deems to be insufficiently supportive;
• his aide Jason Miller wants it known that the "backstabbers who were around in 2016 won’t be in this next White House" stop him;
• two years ago, he had neo-Nazi Nick Fuentes and notorious anti-Semite Kanye West to dinner (Fuentes: "Total Aryan victory, that's what I want"; West meanwhie promised to go "death con 3 on JEWISH PEOPLE");
• at about the same time, Trump said he hoped to "terminate" the Constitution;
• he plans to replace 50,000 federal employees in what would be "the most fundamental change to the civil service system since its inception in 1883";
• his former spokesman Anthony Scaramucci refers to Trump as "the domestic terrorist of the 21st century"
• hIs former attorney general Bill Barr says Trump is "detached from reality";
• his longest serving chief of staff, John Kelly, warns of a second Trump presidency:"God help us".

The piece It includes one story I haven't heard before:

This sort of deep-seated impulse to demolish boundaries long predates even Trump’s first run for the presidency. While reporting this article, I heard a story Chris Christie has told people about Trump’s inherent lawlessness. In the summer of 2009, Trump told people how furious he was that his daughter Ivanka got engaged to Jared Kushner and agreed to convert to Judaism. “You’re not going to believe this, my daughter is going to be a…Jew,” Trump said, according to a person who heard the remarks. According to a source, Trump told Christie, who was the former US attorney in New Jersey, to help him stop the marriage.

Trump invited Christie to dinner at 21 Club in Manhattan and asked for FBI dirt on Kushner’s father, Charles. (Five years earlier, Christie had negotiated a guilty plea from Charles, a billionaire real estate developer, for 16 counts of assisting in the filing of false tax returns, one count of retaliating against a cooperating witness, and one count of making false statements to the Federal Election Commission.) Trump told Christie he wanted to show the dirt to Ivanka to convince her to break up with Kushner. “She can’t marry this kid! He’s a twerp!” Trump said. Christie told Trump that sharing confidential grand jury evidence is a crime and didn’t do it. (The Trump campaign did not reply to a request for comment. Christie declined to comment.)

[N.E. Brigand]

Even before this story, there were already serious questions about Royce White, the Republican candidate for Senate from Minnesota:

"Women Have Gotten 'Too Mouthy,' Says This Republican Senate Candidate."

He seems to have misused funds in his previous campaign, spending them for travel after he lost the election and also at a strip club.

[Voronwë the Faithful]

[N.E. Brigand]

Hillary Clinton's 2016 comment that half of Donald Trump's supporters were "deplorable" was covered twenty times as much on network news, eight times as much on cable news, and nearly 30 times as much in the nation's top newspapers as Donald Trump's 2023 comment that his political opponents were "vermin."

More evidence that the mainstream media is biased in favor of Republicans.

[N.E. Brigand]

On Sunday, Donald Trump shared a video of a foul-mouthed supporter saying that if Trump wins the election, "He'll get rid of all you fucking liberals. You liberals are gone when he fucking wins. You fucking blowjob liberals are done."

If he regains the White House, Donald Trump plans to kill anyone who opposes him.

When I say the worst will come to pass if Trump becomes president again, this is what I mean.