I've Thought About It A Lot And I've Concluded Gillibrand Would Be A Better President Than Trump. Will Fox Viewers Agree Tonight?

One of the reasons Kirsten Gillibrand almost never gets beyond 1% in any national or early-state polling is because Democratic primary voters know her mostly as an opportunist who stabbed Al Franken in the bank to advance her own mediocre career. That factor isn't likely to matter much to TV viewers tonight who tune in to see her Dubuque Iowa town fall on Fox. Fox viewers were never Franken fans. And, in fact, many years ago-- when she was still a right-wing anti-immigrant/pro-NRA congresswoman from upstate New York-- Gillibrand was a frequent and popular Fox News guest, always willing to be the Democrat going on air to oppose Democratic initiatives and back conservative ones. But then she did a 180 in return for a Senate appointment she would never have won, and is now far more likely to be on with Rachel Maddow than with Sean Hannity. Chris Wallace hosts her town hall tonight. Will theFox fans like her-- or be turned off by her views on abortion? Unlike any of the other women in the race, she tends to come off as a bitter man hater. Even progressive men pick up on it and get turned off to her. Imagine if Fox viewers detect that in her tonight!

"I think it's a great opportunity for me," the me-me-me-me-me candidate told Fox. "I want to talk to voters where they are. I want to be able to go into every living room and make sure voters know who I am, why I feel the call to run, and why I believe I'm the best candidate to run this country and to bring this country back together again." It drives her crazy to see McKensey Pete, Marianne Williamson and Andrew Yang-- let alone a gaggle of mere congressmen-- pull ahead of her in the polls. On Friday, Tim Alberta did a Politico Magazine cover story on her: Kirsten Gillibrand's Failure To Launch. Insiders all thought she would have been a top tier candidate and are scratching their heads today about why she hasn't made any headway among Democratic primary voters. Many people Fox News viewers will like her more. Alberta reported that she raised less money than any of the 6 senators running for the comination-- even less than a conservative nothing-burger like Michael Bennet. "Given her anemic polling since entering the race," he wrote, "Gillibrand’s feeble fundraising performance fanned skepticism about her viability to earn a nomination that Democrats believe will require close to $100 million in hard money raised. But at this point, Gillibrand isn’t focused on winning the primary. She’s worried about surviving the next few months." She's near the bottom of the national averages. There are only half a dozen candidates who are averaging less than half a percent according to Real Clear Politics:

• Gillibrand- 0.3%
• Bill de Blasio- 0.3%
• Frackenlooper- 0.3%
• Seth Moulton- 0.2%
• Steve Bullock- 0.2%
• Mike Bennet- 0.2%

Everyone else running is polling better than Gillibrand, including John Delaney, Andrew Yang, Julián Castro, Amy Klobuchar, Marianne Williamson, Tim Ryan and Tulsi Gabbard. In the newest Monmouth poll of New Hampshire primary voters, she's polling less than 1%. She's spent more time in New Hampshire than in New York-- and she's wasted millions of dollars on TV advertising in the state. "Gillibrand," wrote Alberta, has failed to achieve liftoff as a presidential prospect. She has not broken 2 percent in a single national poll since officially declaring her candidacy in mid-March, and her 0.4 percent average in the RealClearPolitics aggregate of surveys places her behind the likes of Julián Castro, Tulsi Gabbard and even geeky long shot Andrew Yang."

In a conversation for Politico’s Off Message podcast, the New York senator vacillated between insinuating that she is being treated differently because of her gender and arguing that Americans are ready for a female president.

“Hillary won the election. She won the popular vote by 3 million votes, and you have to remember, she was definitely the most qualified candidate we’d ever had running for president,” Gillibrand says. “And, but for Russia, but for Comey, but for misogyny, but for a lot of things, she would have won. So, I believe that of course this country is ready to elect a woman president, but they need to know what we’re running on and what we’re for, and why we’re running and why we think we’re the best candidate.”

Yet Gillibrand has struggled to communicate this to voters. Things have gotten so grim for her that recently, a high-ranking campaign aide to Cory Booker-- Gillibrand’s opponent for the Democratic nomination-- tweeted that she had donated to the New York senator’s campaign and encouraged others to follow suit. This was done, the aide noted, to ensure that Gillibrand’s “important perspective is on the debate stage.” To other Democrats, this looked less like an act of short-term benevolence than one of long-term strategy: The historically large field will soon begin to be winnowed, and when it does, some of the surprising early exits will make for valuable endorsements. No name has surfaced in those conversations of late more frequently than Gillibrand.

How did it come to this? How did one of America’s best-financed senators come to rely on charity and presidential pan-handling, begging for a dollar at a time just to stay alive? How did one of Washington’s most recognizable women find herself buried in the polls beneath a number of less prominent men? And how does she breathe life into her campaign before it’s too late?

...Gillibrand claims, like all candidates do, that she’s having the time of her life campaigning for the highest office in the land. And yet her cheerful demeanor cannot mask the annoyance she is feeling-- with the media, with the gender dynamics central to the race, and with the Democratic Party itself.

Gillibrand clearly doesn’t think much of the DNC’s rules governing the debates. Even before the national party announced the stricter criteria candidates would need to meet to qualify for the third and fourth debates this fall-- effectively putting an expiration date on more than half of the Democratic candidacies-- Gillibrand took issue with the emphasis on early polling to shape a process that has commenced far earlier that it once did.

“The last couple of presidential candidates who were Democrats who won, or even are nominees, you had to look at where they were at this early stage. I think somebody looked up where Bill Clinton was at this stage. He had 1 percent in the polls and had 30 percent name recognition in Iowa. So, like, it takes time,” Gillibrand said. “And with 20 candidates, it might actually take longer … because for each one of us to have a chance to be heard it’s going to take time. I mean, even the debates alone, if we get more than five minutes each on that stage, that’ll be surprising. So, you’re really even not even going to have more than a few minutes to talk about what you’re for and why you’re running and what your views are for the country.”

Gillibrand argues that both of the debate thresholds, polling and unique contributions, “are related to name recognition.” But she certainly is better known than the likes of Yang, or Williamson, or Gabbard, or Washington Gov. Jay Inslee, the latest 2020 candidate to “double qualify” by reaching both qualification milestones. Working the referees this early isn’t a sign of strategic savvy; it’s a sign of desperation.

Asked about the pressure she’s feeling, Gillibrand said it’s “created because of the DNC’s framework that they’ve put the candidates under,” which she suggests isn’t the “natural” or “normal” role for a national party. Asked whether she disagrees with the DNC’s rules, she replied, “I’m not sure. I don’t know that they’re serving the public well.”

Meanwhile, compounding Gillibrand’s frustration is her fraught relationship with the political issue that has defined her ascent: gender.

When I asked whether it was problematic to have so many white men-- Beto O’Rourke, Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders, Pete Buttigieg-- soaking up the media spotlight, she replied, “Yeah, I think it’s problematic. …. We have amazing women candidates, amazing candidates of color, and hopefully through this process we will lift our voices up and be heard.”

The look on her face when I mentioned O’Rourke’s appearance on the cover of Vanity Fair was beyond description. “Unusual,” she finally mustered, biting her lip and her tongue at once, a litany of curse words no doubt suppressed underneath her smirk. “Never seen it before.”

And when I asked Gillibrand to name the worst part of running for president, she replied, “I don’t want to tell you.” She added that “it’s not an appropriate thing for me to say,” then promised to tell me later, off the record.

After hearing the off-the-record answer, I pressed for a sanitized version, which she offered in the most measured of tones. “The one thing that’s annoying to me is how many times reporters ask you about our male colleagues. Who cares? I’m running for president. I want to tell you what my vision is, why I’m running, and why I’m going to win,” she said. “I think reporters like yourself, who are super smart and super careful, will always ask me what I think about the male colleagues. Are you asking the male colleagues what they think about us? Probably not.”

This is the hang-up of Gillibrand’s campaign. Never has the Democratic electorate been more exercised by issues of identity, and never has gender been more central to the national conversation-- politically, culturally, socioeconomically and otherwise. And yet Gillibrand, despite having very little to lose at this point, remains cautious in interviews and on the stump-- aiming for broad appeal instead of a niche brand, trying to draw in support from every cell of the party rather than cultivating a base and building out.

At every stop in New Hampshire, the senator was careful to modulate her answers and her tone in ways that would render her universally acceptable. She talks of how she dominated the blue boroughs of New York City-- but also how she carried the state’s red, rural counties. She believes Trump is a “coward”-- but she wants to calm the vitriolic nature of our politics. Gillibrand didn’t shy away from a single proposal-- whether it was expanding the Supreme Court, increasing funding for indigenous groups or signing a breast cancer-related pledge-- that voters asked her about.

Yet when it came to addressing the gender bias she believes is inherent to politics-- a belief shared by many younger progressive women, a sizable chunk of the Democratic coalition-- Gillibrand held back. Had her off-the-record answer been published, it would have gone viral overnight, racking up hundreds of thousands of clicks and instantly erasing any concerns about her small-donor disparity. But Gillibrand chose to be careful. Having won in a red district, having persuaded older, whiter, Republican audiences to support her in the past, she believes she can do so again.

The problem for Gillibrand is, the polls and the fundraising numbers show that this cautious approach isn't getting her anywhere. The over-50 male demographic in Iowa and New Hampshire is likely to lean toward candidates such as Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders, or perhaps even Elizabeth Warren, whose paeans to economic populism resonate with the dwindling remnant of blue-collar Democrats. The market Gillibrand was poised to corner-- after becoming Washington’s leading voice on women’s rights issues and embracing the risk of calling for Al Franken’s resignation from the Senate-- was that of the young, female voters who have mobilized the backlash to Donald Trump’s presidency.

Instead, in an overflowing field with more than 20 candidates slicing and dicing the electorate every which way, Gillibrand seems to believe that she can’t afford to alienate any one bloc of voters.

If the recent controversies surrounding new state-based abortion laws are any indication, it’s a tactical misreading of the race. Gillibrand’s forceful denunciations, on social media and cable news programs, earned her more free media coverage than anything else since the launch of her campaign. It was a reminder that she is more comfortable than any of the other Democrats in speaking to women’s issues, having not only mastered the messaging but worked extensively on the policies regarding everything from pay equality to workplace discrimination.

In that instance, Gillibrand seized the opportunity to gain headlines and eyeballs-- and most likely, campaign donations-- by owning an issue of visceral importance to what should be her core base of supporters.

Still, she seems conscious of doing so infrequently, wary of being typecast as a single-issue candidate. In a vacuum, for a generic Democratic woman candidate hoping to defeat Trump in a November election, it’s not necessarily a bad idea to downplay the talk of glass ceilings. And yet, for a female Democratic candidate like Gillibrand, whose image is heavily colored by her fights for gender equality, winning the party’s nomination—and the right to challenge Trump-- might require a greater reliance on her identity.

This is the paradox of Gillibrand’s candidacy. She believes, as do many of her Democratic rivals, that voters want “electability” in a nominee-- someone who above all else will defeat Trump in 2020. And she does have a case to make in that regard: As a former upstate congresswoman, she does have a feel for the nonideological challenges facing rural and poor America. And at her core, layers beneath the questions about her political evolution, she is inherently relatable, someone who quotes Scripture as easily as she sips a beer or rocks a baby.

But Gillibrand’s emphasis on long-term electability may be coming at the expense of her short-term viability. She has chosen not to pursue with reckless abandon the demographic that should be her core constituency in the primary-- women-- believing it would limit her appeal to other portions of the electorate. And she has ignored suggestions that she change course and act with more urgency in this regard, telling me, “I need to be patient, and know that it’s going to take time and hard work… Your poll numbers are irrelevant today. What matters is where you are a year from now.”

The problem facing Gillibrand is, poll numbers at this stage of a presidential primary have never been more relevant to the outcome-- and if she doesn’t do something drastic to improve hers, she won’t be around a year from now.

It's tough on a Uriah Heep-type personality like Gillibrand to be so resoundingly rejected when she isn't really offering anything except herself. It isn't her ideas that are being rejected-- she has none-- it's Kirsten Gillibrand herself that is being rejected-- her record, her integrity, her vibe, her essence... She should drop out and spent the time she's spending in New Hampshire and Iowa seeing a top psychoanalyst. Other than Trump, there's never been a politician who needed one more.

Would You Want To Elect Cersei President?

This morning's Boston Globe carried a review of last night's Game of Throne that might make someone in a Trumpian world mindset think Pakistan and India were at war again or that China just finally got even with Japan for World War II. "Dany had a hissy fit," wrote Matthew Gilbert, "and it turned King’s Landing into a charred and dead-main-character-filled mess. She even managed to make Cersei cry real tears-- no easy feat-- as the pregnant monarch saw her dreams come down to smoke and ash before her very eyes. Girl, you lost it-- your temper, your dignity, and your humanity. Put a messianic wannabe on the back of a presumably grieving dragon, and the result was an episode that doubled as a kind of apocalyptic battle of the queens, as Daenerys and Cersei faced off-- one atop her only winged child, the other atop her tower-- without ever facing each other, a pair of fierce rulers who’ve chosen fear over love." I hope you enjoyed the second-to-last episode. If you did, you might also enjoy reading Chris Cillizza's CNN piece comparing the 2020 candidates with GOT characters. Perhaps, though, you'd be offended that he casts Status Quo Joe as Cersei Lannister. "Both," wrote Cillizza, "are the de facto incumbents, relying on their inherent knowledge of the system and an air of inevitability to stay on top. But both know their enemies are coming for them-- and that doubts remain as to whether they can hang onto power." Sounds about right... But why not Trump? That's just another thing he and Biden have in common.

Last week Biden actually was in Hollywood, collecting money from the rich and brainless-- raked in close to a million dollars at his big Jeffrey Katzenberg/Peter Chernin/Rob Reiner fundraiser at the home of Michael Smith and James Costo last Wednesday.

On Friday, The Nation published a piece by Bob Borosage, Joe Biden Is a Bad Bet, making the point that "far from being the safest choice, Biden lacks the economic vision necessary to counter Trump." As Courtenay Brown wrote for Axios yesterday America's booming economy is Trump’s 2020 tailwind. "Every incumbent president since FDR who has avoided a recession in the lead-up to an election year was re-elected. More Americans are saying they approve of President Trump's handling of the economy, even though they disapprove overall. 51% of people disapprove of Trump's job performance in a Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll out last week, but 51% approve of him on the economy. If he loses, it would be a big break with recent history." Lobbyist Bruce Mehlman remarked that "Many voters are willing to forgive the noise (political incorrectness, tweets, Mueller) as long as the signal (economy) stays strong."

With the Republicans claiming credit for the economy, Borosage wrote that "the Democrats lining up to support former vice president Joe Biden as the most electable opponent to Trump have got it wrong."

Trump can’t resist exaggerating the economic news, but there is much to boast about. Unemployment is at its lowest level since 1969, with job openings exceeding the numbers looking for work. Hispanic and African-American unemployment rates, while still dramatically higher than the white rate, have hit record lows during Trump’s tenure.

Trump, of course, is a bit like a drunk jumping on a street car headed downhill who thinks he’s driving with his foot on the gas. He claims that his deregulation, his tax cuts, and his trade policies have made the difference. With the China trade deficit reaching a new height last year, the tax benefits going overwhelmingly to the already rich, and the deregulation blitz only beginning to take effect, his claims are a reach. But whether from good fortune or good policy, he can and will take credit from voters.

As Trump barrels forward, Democrats are engaged in a furious argument over how to stop him. Many Democratic primary voters indicate they are ready to support the candidate most likely to defeat Trump, even over their personal favorite. Joe Biden has become the early front-runner because of a widespread sense that he is the “safest bet” to defeat Trump. Experienced and moderate, “Scranton Joe” is credited with having a special appeal to the white working-class voters that went to Trump, particularly in the key swing Midwestern states.

Making the case for Biden, Andrew Sullivan dismisses arguments that he is too white, too old, too “handsy,” and too compromised to win. Sullivan maintains that Trump will turn out the Democratic base for any candidate, while Biden can appeal to moderate voters, notably non-college-educated white men. Biden enjoys the imprimatur, if not the endorsement, of one of the most popular Democrats, Barack Obama. A good portion of the party’s institutional centers-- the money, the operatives, the union and establishment leaders-- are rallying to his banner.

In fact, rather than the “safest bet,” Biden is more likely to end up the worst of all worlds-- unable either to excite the emerging Democratic coalition of young people, minorities, and women or to win back the Obama-Trump working-class voters. He could easily become the Democratic equivalent of Bob Dole, the hapless Republican Senate leader who lost badly to Bill Clinton’s reelection bid.

If the growing economy is Trump’s calling card, it is also his greatest vulnerability. This economy is about as good as it gets, and it still doesn’t work for most Americans. Wages have begun to stir but aren’t close to making up for the stagnation of the past decades. The costs of basics-- health care, prescription drugs, housing, child care, college-- are all rising faster than wages. College debt now totals over $1.6 trillion, with more and more families simply unable to afford to send their kids to school. Nearly 30 million lack health coverage, an increase of at least 7 million since Trump’s election. Tens of millions more can’t afford the care they need. Nearly one in five black families and one in seven Latino families are in debt or have zero net wealth. Trump chose to pass top-end tax cuts instead of rebuilding our decrepit and increasingly dangerous infrastructure. For all of his posturing, his 2016 jibe-- that now we build cars in Mexico and you can’t drink the water in Flint-- is still true.

Beneath the populist packaging, Trump’s basic policies-- top-end tax cuts, deregulation driven by corporate lobbyists, and a government open for business-- are standard Republican fare, feeding inequality and corporate plunder. The central task of the Democratic standard-bearer in 2020 will be to expose Trump’s con by showing that even in the best of times, the economy is still rigged against most Americans-- and Trump is adding to the fix-- while offering a compelling agenda for change.

The essence of the Biden candidacy, however, is restoration-- a promise of a return to the “normalcy” of the Obama years. That appeals to centrist Democrats, but it also makes Biden the perfect foil for Trump to run against. To counter Biden, Trump could position himself once more as the insurgent, the agent of change against a failed establishment.

On the stump, Trump brandishes his aggressive trade policies as proof of his populist credibility. “The era of economic surrender is over,” he claimed at his recent rally in Panama City, Florida, indicting the Obama administration and its predecessor for “decades of calamitous trade policies that enrich Wall Street at the expense of Main Street.”

In contrast to Trump’s isolationist rhetoric, Biden is an avowed “free trader” and has supported NAFTA, the TPP, and China in the WTO. Given his record, he has little choice but to try to defend the indefensible. This won’t go well. Already at a stop in Iowa, Biden lamely dismissed the Chinese challenge, arguing that it was implausible that Beijing would “eat our lunch” and that China was “not competition for us.”

Trump offers a populist explanation about why this economy is rigged against what he calls “the invisible people.” Echoing Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, he rails against the entrenched “elite” who rigged the rules and allowed other countries-- China, NATO allies, NAFTA partners Mexico and Canada-- to “rip off the US.”

In his first public rally at a Teamsters hall in Pittsburgh, Biden tried out his populist voice, scorning Trump for the tax cuts, indicting CEOs for their greed, voicing his solidarity with unions, and pledging to rebuild the middle class. “How did we get to this place,” he asked, where so many people across America “don’t think we see them?”

He never answered the question. Instead, he reiterated that “we’re tearing America apart instead of lifting it up” and suffering from a “broken political system that’s deliberately being undermined by our president to continue to abuse the power of the office.” But Trump is a symptom, not the source of America’s political and economic problems-- and surely those who chose to vote for Trump after voting for Obama know it.

Worse, Biden really doesn’t have much to say about how to make the economy work for working people. It’s still early, but Biden isn’t a big policy maven and isn’t likely to lay out a bold agenda for the future. He’s already suggested that all Democrats “agree on basically everything, all of us running-- all 400 of us.” He embraces the $15 minimum wage from Bernie’s agenda, calls for reversing Trump’s tax cuts, touts a public option for health insurance over Medicare for All, and waves vaguely at making college and training affordable. His agenda will fill out over time, but his appeal is less about the future than about ending the Trump “aberration” and returning to the status quo.

But elections, in the end, are always about the future. Democrats won’t beat Trump simply because of his personal corruptions, nor can they count on demography to carry their cause. They would be ill-advised to pick a candidate who champions a restoration to the past. Democrats need a leader who can puncture Trump’s populist con and lay out a bold vision and agenda for change. Joe Biden has many strengths, but that isn’t among them.

Is Someone Getting Howard Schultz To Give Up His Destructive Role In The 2020 Cycle By Giving Him A Role As A Targanian In The Long Night?

George Clooney is staying out of the primaries but plans to back whoever the candidate is against Trumpanzee. He feels confident Trump will be a one-termer, although he worries that the Starbucks guy could screw up everything. "The narrow edge he took to get there in 2016 has all gone so yes, I do [think he can be beaten]. We just have to not have third party candidates like [former Starbucks CEO] Howard Schultz... I’m not a fan at all. If [Schultz] wants to run as a Democrat as he says he is then you should run as a Democrat, not try and lead the process before you even got started."

My guess is that Schultz would like a graceful way too get out of this whole mess he created. The problem is that he's hired all these high-priced hookers consultants who are not letting their meal ticket vanish so quickly. Take Bill Burton for example. He worked at the DCCC and parleyed that, eventually, into a big gig as under Deputy White House Press Secretary Obama and an even bigger gig with the Priorities USA SuperPAC. More recently he ran the California operation of a sleazoid Democratic consulting firm, SKDKnickerbocker (owned Mark Penn). Burtion was getting a mega-paycheck at SKDKnickerbocker when Schultz wooed him away with promises of God-knows-how-much loot.

And Burton is just one example of consultants who have attached themselves to Schultz's billions. One of them, not Burton, told me that none of them think Schultz is going anywhere but that the money is great and that there's not much they have to do. And especially now, while Schultz is laying low and "waiting for Biden to self-combust," as that same top Schultz consultant told me.

Yesterday, the Daily Beast reported that Schultz's campaign is basically dormant, if not dead. Burton claims that Schultz is still considering running and that he'll announce his decision "in the late spring or early summer." (My contact in the campaign operation told me they figure Biden will screw up by then, leaving Schultz with a path to victory. I asked him if they were all drunk over there and he laughed, well aware that Schultz issuing strung along by people dependent on him for a paycheck.)

Erin McPike says he's recovering from back surgery and that that's why there's no campaign. Oh.

"But Schultz has also dialed down the elements of his campaign prep that don’t actually require public appearances," wrote Sam Stein. "He has not posted to Facebook or Instagram since April 30. His last missive was on how leaders make decisions 'through the lens of personal beliefs' which included a photo of a chess board, a French press, a cup of coffee and a diary with the phrase 'success is best when it's shared' written in black sharpie marker."

According to Facebook's ad archives, Schultz has not run an ad on the platform since April 23, when his account posted a spot that declared "It's Time To Un-Partisan.” Since Easter, Schultz has tweeted just twice. The first was to promote an op-ed he wrote on his trip to Arizona. That was on April 29. The second, and last, tweet came on Monday, when he tweeted a winky emoji at someone wondering if he was a character in Game of Thrones, after a cup of Starbucks was mistakenly included in a scene of the popular HBO show.

And it’s not just Schultz. Neither Steve Schmidt, his top adviser, nor Burton have tweeted since late January.

“The next president is not going to be decided on Twitter,” Burton said. “I would think if you looked at what he is doing publicly it stacks up with a lot of people engaged in the national conversation.”

That was once true. In the beginning of April, the Schultz media team was sending out statements on various relevant issues and informing reporters about upcoming events like his Fox News town hall in Kansas City, Missouri. After that, Schultz initiated a “Heart of America” tour that took him to Kansas. That same week, his team sent out a statement about Sen. Bernie Sanders’ (I-VT) Medicare for All proposal and sent a dispatch about his travels including information about Kansas farmers’ lives being impacted by Trump trade policies. The tour then headed to Arizona where it appears stopped—at least for now—because of his surgery.

There has been one major development that happened in the 2020 election since Schultz’s trip to Arizona: the formal entrance of former Vice President Joe Biden into the Democratic primary. Biden is an establishment figure with a lengthy record that places him a fair distance away from his party’s ideological left. In short, he’s the very type of candidate that Schultz has said would convince him to ultimately not enter the presidential race. But Burton stressed that the former VP’s presence was not a factor-- at least yet-- in Schultz’s thinking.

It isn't likely that anyone has written Schultz into the final episodes of Game of Thrones but he may have been offered a role in the prequel (set 5,000-10,000 years before the one we're watching now), possibly titled The Long Night. Jane Goldman, Carly Wray, Max Borenstein, and Brian Helgeland are writing it now and one of them could have offered Schultz a role, along with Dixie Egerickx, Denise Gough, George Henley, John Simm, Naomi Ackie, Jamie Campbell Bower, Ivanno Jeremiah, Alex Sharp, Toby Regbo and Richard McCabe. Coffee-drinker and A Song of Ice and Fire author George R.R. Martin said, "Speaking of television, don’t believe everything you read. Internet reports are notoriously unreliable... We have had five different Game of Thrones successor shows in development (I mislike the term 'spinoffs') at HBO, and three of them are still moving forward nicely... The one I am not supposed to call The Long Night will be shooting later this year." The hope, of course, is that Schultz will accept a role as some minor Targaryen, who can be cut out of the film later, after he doesn't run and doesn't help Trump win a second term.

Howard Schultz Targaryen (of the Night's Watch)

I Don't Care If The GOP Chokes On Its Racism-- But They're Wrecking Our Country

Yesterday, Arizona psychopath Kelli Ward told Maria Bartiromo on Fox's Sunday Morning Futures that she thinks "Trump and his leadership is what the country wanted-- that's why he's in the White House-- and I think he's got lofty goals that we should accomplish that will put America first" and that a primary challenge against him "would be a big mistake for the establishment wing of the Republican Party to attempt." Kelli Ward is a right-wing sociopath from West Virginia serving in the Arizona state Senate and running against Jeff Flake for a U.S. Senate seat with Trump's encouragement. Here's a video Mitch McConnell's Senate Leadership Fund SuperPAC just ran against her:



"She's not conservative," they assert, "she's just crazy." She's also pretty typical of the Trump Arizona fans interviewed by The Guardian at his Phoenix hate rally last week-- deranged, delusional... crazy.

Last week Jeremy McCarter took a stroll down The Atlantic's memory lane... to 1916. He told the story of Randolph Bourne. "In his time, as in ours," wrote McCarter, "America was undergoing rapid demographic change. Immigration levels in the first decades of the twentieth century neared all-time highs, thanks to the millions who arrived from Italy, Poland, and other countries in Southern and Eastern Europe. A hit play of 1908 supplied a metaphor for what was supposed to happen next: 'America is God’s Crucible, the great Melting-Pot where all the races of Europe are melting and re-forming!'"

In real life, though, this melting didn’t happen as predicted. Immigrant groups kept their languages, styles of dress, preference for certain dumplings. Many Americans feared that newly arrived aliens would import hostilities from their homelands. The year Bourne wrote his essay was the third year of the Great War. Were unmelted Germans going to fight unmelted Russians on the streets of Chicago? If President Woodrow Wilson decided to join the conflict, where would these aliens’ loyalties lie? Many American leaders called for the melting pot to get hotter, to burn away the “hyphens” that made Hungarian-Americans or Greek-Americans a group apart. The former President Theodore Roosevelt painted a dark vision of the dangers facing the country if its inhabitants failed to achieve “100 percent Americanism,” which he defined as speaking only English and feeling total and exclusive loyalty to the interests of the United States. “The one absolutely certain way of bringing this nation to ruin, of preventing all possibility of it continuing to be a nation at all, would be to permit it to become a tangle of squabbling nationalities.” A hyphenated American, he said, was no American at all.

Bourne’s essay, titled Trans-National America, is a bracing seven-thousand-word challenge to the morality, logic, and wisdom of that view, in his time and ours. The record of ethnic groups trying to live together in this country hadn’t been perfect, Bourne acknowledged, but considering the abysmal results of such attempts everywhere else it had been tried, he thought they coexisted here with “almost dramatic harmlessness.” What the ethnonationalists view with dread and suspicion, Bourne saw as grounds for pride and joy. “For the first time in history has been achieved that miracle of hope, the peaceful living side by side, with character substantially preserved, of the most heterogeneous peoples under the sun,” he wrote.

The fundamental error of those who insisted on a narrow definition of Americanism, as Bourne saw it, was believing that Americanism had any fixed definition at all. He made an impish reversal of our history, arguing that American identity consisted not of timeless truths handed down from all-knowing founders but from the accumulated prejudices of the ethnic group that managed to get here first. “English snobberies, English religion, English literary styles, English literary reverences and canons, English ethics, English superiorities, have been the cultural food that we have drunk in from our mothers’ breasts,” he wrote.

Bourne spoke of English snobberies from personal experience. He grew up in the stifling, Waspy town of Bloomfield, New Jersey, raised by a single mother who was somewhat awed by his precocious intelligence. (A botched use of forceps had left Bourne’s face deformed at birth, and a childhood illness had caused his back to hunch. He speculated that these disabilities might explain his radical outlook, the sympathy he instinctively felt for outcasts and failures. If so, he wrote, “the price has not been a heavy one to pay.”) Only his arrival at Columbia University let him escape his narrow upbringing and begin “to breathe a larger air.” In his Atlantic essay, when he suggested that friendships with people from diverse backgrounds-- Austrian, Scandinavian, Italian, Jewish-- could give young men and women a cosmopolitan view, he was describing his own experience. By coming together in a spirit of “intellectual sympathy,” by talking and arguing and dreaming, he and his college friends made their differences “creative.”

Those late-night conversations suggested to Bourne a new way of thinking about the immigrant’s place in America. Freedom for people newly arrived in this country isn’t the absence of coercion; it’s not the result of benign neglect. Freedom means active participation in self-government, “a democratic cooperation in determining the ideals and purposes and industrial and social institutions of a country.” Bourne’s travels for a book on progressive education, and his phenomenally wide reading, showed him that this participation was good for established communities as well as for new immigrants. He compared the brisk, progressive cities of the Upper Midwest, where German and Scandinavian immigrants played leadership roles, with the South, which clung more tightly than any other region to Anglo-American ways-- and, in Bourne’s view, had paid a price.

To Bourne, America wasn’t some citadel in need of defending: it was a project, one that continually enfolded new participants, dynamically renewed its character. The ethnonationalist looks backward for familiarity, security, a sense of control. Bourne, the child of a hopeful century, looked ahead with ecstatic optimism: “America is a unique sociological fabric, and it bespeaks poverty of imagination not to be thrilled at the incalculable potentialities of so novel a union of men.” Other cosmopolitans, such as the philosopher Horace Kallen, had articulated the shortcomings of the melting pot, but Bourne was rare in his ability to glimpse the shining ideal that could replace it: the “Beloved Community,” a new kind of society in which citizens are bound together by the loyalty of each to all, regardless of race or creed. Bourne was the first American to extract that concept from the work of the philosopher Josiah Royce and hold it up as the ultimate fulfillment of our national project; the second to do so, forty years later, would be Martin Luther King, Jr.

Donald Trump’s call to “Make America Great Again” would outrage Bourne: How is it, he would want to know, that, in the second decade of the twenty-first century, we are still indulging in the kind of “tight and jealous nationalism” that had sent the European powers into a suicidal war and wreaked so much havoc on America itself? How have we learned nothing from the disasters of Bourne’s own generation? Less than a year after he wrote his essay, the United States joined the war on the Allied side, unleashing a wave of “100 percent Americanism” more virulent than he had dreamed possible. Nativist attacks, vigilantism, race riots, and censorship were inflicted on a terrorized citizenry, native-born and immigrant alike. People who spoke German were menaced by mobs, and sometimes killed in the streets; the Socialist press was all but shut down, leading to a full-fledged Red Scare. As Bourne took bolder and bolder stands against the war-- even denouncing his mentor, John Dewey, who thought the war would promote democratic ideals-- he found it more difficult to get published. Old friends fell away; prewar hopes went to pieces. He died in the influenza pandemic of 1918, at the age of thirty-two.

Bourne wouldn’t be surprised that Americans still feel the tug of nationalist sentiment. He knew that people need to feel that they belong to a group. The unique challenge of America, a teeming “nation of nations,” is to define itself in terms broad enough to suit its transnational population, not to mimic other countries’ exclusive, backward-looking pride. “We must perpetrate the paradox that our American cultural tradition lies in the future,” he wrote. In other words, it’s false to our history, and disastrous for our prospects, to think that we can return to a mythic greater past. Those us who are here now have the chance to make something better than our forebears made, and the obligation to try.

Who Still Supports Trump? The Same People Who Backed The High Sparrow In Game Of Thrones

Last night we took a quick look at Tuesday's legislative special election in which a Democrat beat his GOP rival handily in a swing district that had gone heavily for Trump last year. Trump's reverse coattails have been acting as an anchor in state legislative district special elections all over the country, as independent voters growing increasingly disgusted with him and his Regime and the way congressional Republicans enable him. Vice News' report yesterday that he has instructed his team to provide him with 2 folders daily-- one at 9:30 a.m. and one at 4:40 a.m.-- is further persuading people that Trump is an ineffective buffoon and a fake president-- and the Korea crisis is emphasizing in the minds of many why that is dangerous. By the way, the silly propaganda folders are 20-25 pages of... wait for it-- "screenshots of positive cable news chyrons (those lower-third headlines and crawls), admiring tweets, transcripts of fawning TV interviews, praise-filled news stories, and sometimes just pictures of Trump on TV looking powerful."

I'm sure you've seen the dismal, sinking poll numbers-- now heading towards impeachment territory if you ascribe to the theory that once Trump's job approval is below one-third (it's now 32% in one brand new poll), significant numbers of Republicans in districts where independent voters are the key to reelection, will want to be seen opposing Trump... bigly. Yesterday Steven Shepard at Politico made the point that Trump's base has been shrinking since election day-- a direct contradiction to another couple of tweeted lies from Señor Trumpanzee that his base is "bigger and stronger than ever before." Stevens' point is that the obsessive Trumpanzee claims are "contradicted by a steady stream of recent polling showing that the share of Americans who approve of Trump’s job performance is shrinking, along with the share of Americans most enthusiastic about his presidency." Most Americans now recognize that he's a compulsive liar and that it doesn't make sense to assume anything he ever says is true.

However you measure the president’s base, it has diminished, not increased, in the seven months he’s been in office. It’s a slide he’ll need to reverse to avoid dragging down the GOP in the midterms-- and to have a more credible shot at reelection.

A new Politico/Morning Consult poll shows Trump’s approval rating slipping to the lowest point of his young presidency. While he’s confounded the polls before, it’s the trendline that should be most worrisome to the White House.

Only 40 percent of registered voters approve of the job Trump is doing as president, the new Politico/Morning Consult poll shows, down from a high-water mark of 52 percent in March. And the percentage who approve strongly-- one way to measure the size of Trump’s most fervent supporters-- is also at a new low: just 18 percent.

That fits with other surveys conducted over the past few weeks, all of which show Trump at or near the low-water marks for each pollster. And there is evidence Trump’s backslide has eroded some of his electoral base: The president has lost ground with Republicans and the independent voters that propelled him to victory.

Trump’s approval rating among self-identified Trump voters is at 81 percent, down from 86 percent last week. And among Republican voters in the new Politico/Morning Consult poll, the president is at 76 percent, down slightly from 79 percent last week.

..."Unabated by the turbulence of the last six months, there remains a core base of ardent Trump supporters," said Morning Consult co-founder and Chief Research Officer Kyle Dropp. "However, that base has unquestionably declined since the president took office. In late January, 56 percent of Trump voters strongly approved of the president, and just 1 percent disapproved. Today, 41 percent strongly approve, and 17 percent disapprove."

Trump isn’t bringing converts into his base, either, the poll shows. Among voters who say they backed Hillary Clinton last year, more than 3 in 4, 78 percent, strongly disapprove of Trump. Only 8 percent of Clinton voters even somewhat approve of Trump... The ongoing contraction of Trump’s base has accelerated over the past month. Those trends show Trump’s approval rating has fallen because certain segments of Republicans and independents have soured on him.

So who still backs him? People so filled with fear and hatred and whose lives are so dismal that they want to die-- in other words, typical cultists who are, generally-speaking, severely mentally ill. As Andy Kopsa wrote for Rewire these people believe Señor Trumpanzee is their ticket to paradise and that he will "pave the way for the second coming of Jesus Christ." Kopsa writes about a cult called POTUS Shield, whose leader claims God told him to start it "in the middle of the night and told him to gather to POTUS Shield prayer warriors and prophets, in order to cast a protective shield to surround Donald Trump... The president, it turns out, was chosen by none other than God himself."

Along with [High Sparrow Frank] Amedia, POTUS Shield is populated by right-wing religionists like Alveda King, Lou Engle, and Jerry Boykin. Its followers believe a Trump presidency has a holy mission: to pave the way for the second coming of Jesus Christ.

POTUS Shield is a unique gathering of key players in anti-choice, anti-LGBTQ, and “religious freedom” politicking of the last two decades. Groups like Engle’s “The Call Ministries” and the Family Research Council (FRC), where Boykin sits as executive vice president, have influenced national, local, and international political policies from a strictly Christian worldview-- including abstinence-only “education,” virulently anti-choice protests, and the deadly anti-homosexuality bill in Uganda. As the director of the anti-choice group Civil Rights for the Unborn, meanwhile, King uses her Uncle Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s civil rights legacy to flog anti-choice rhetoric that abortion providers are specifically targeting Black communities.

The POTUS Shield website has a “donate” button where the faithful can give to the cause. Although POTUS Shield is registered in Ohio as a nonprofit organization, it does not appear to have a record of federal tax filings as such, which makes it difficult to track where its funding is coming from. Inquiries to POTUS Shield representatives about the group’s nonprofit status were not answered.

Some individuals in the group adhere to a religious doctrine of “Seven Mountains,” a term popularized by member Lance Wallnau, who was one of a few evangelicals to predict Trump’s election. Seven Mountains’ strategic goal is for Christians to seize control of all aspects of civil and political society by whatever means necessary. This includes the media, arts, education, government, religion, business, and family. Once these believers secure all of these “seven mountains,” Christ will return. And for POTUS Shield, Donald Trump is the guy to do it.

...Trump’s arguably un-Christian history of alleged sexual assault and harassment, questionable business dealings, multiple marriages, and general vulgarity are of little apparent consequence to POTUS Shield, since God put his favor on him. Recently, however, it seems POTUS Shield and other conservative Christians found a way to make Trump palatable to those less zealous among them-- Trump is just a means to an end. Trump as president, right-wing evangelicals suggest, is akin to a latter-day Constantine. Constantine was the initially non-believing Roman Emperor who nevertheless converted the Roman Empire to Christianity. Viewed through this lens, Trump is still a tool of God and washed clean of his obvious “sins.”

Fortunately for the people of POTUS Shield, there is always true believer Mike Pence. Members of POTUS Shield (and other evangelicals) refer to Pence as a “covenant man.” This designation places the right-wing former Indiana governor in league with Bible heavyweights Moses, Jacob, and Noah. Lengthy videos by POTUS Shield and adherents explain a covenant man is obedient to God despite a corrupt and sinful culture.