Expect More, Not Less, Of Trump's Race-Baiting Madness As The 2020 Campaign Heats Up

Louisiana's junior senator, Jon Kennedy, was first elected to statewide office as a Democrat but jumped the fence most of the way through his second term. Now he takes every opportunity he can to remind Louisiana Republicans that he's exactly as racist and bigoted as they are. On Fox yesterday he defended Señor Trumpanzee's racism and attacked AOC, Ilhan, Rashida and Ayanna as the "four horsewomen of the Apocalypse." Echoing Trump, he told an appreciative and deluded Fox audience that "The simple fact of the matter is, the four congresswomen think that America was wicked in its origins. They think that America and its people are even more wicked now, that we are all racist and misogynistic and evil... They’re entitled to their opinion. They’re Americans. But I’m entitled to my opinion, and I just think they’re left-wing cracks, and they’re the reason there are directions on a shampoo bottle. I think we should ignore them." He also thinks MSNBC viewers should ignore Trump's racist tweets. They caught up with him in a hallway and he told them Trump's tweets we're racist, "but a poor choice of words." Oh.

And speaking of Fox and delusional thinking, Eric Trumpanzee was on Fox & Fiends yesterday: "I'm telling you, 95% of this country is behind him in this message." I don't think so, but it was shocking Tuesday evening hearing to comments from Republican NPR listeners who completely agreed with Trump. I guess that accounts for the spike in his approval ratings among self-identified Republicans this week-- as it sunk even lower among normal Americans. Approval is now 41% and disapproval is 55%. Among Republicans its 95%. Sad.

When asked if he thought Mark Sanford could beat Trump, Tim Scott (R-SC), the GOP's only African-American senator, laughed and said, "No. I think President Trump is unbeatable in a Republican primary." Maybe that has something to do with the media mentality demonstrated by Keith Woods, NPR's VP for newsroom training and diversity, who says that journalists should not be using the term "racist" to describe Trump's tweets. "Leave the moral labeling to the people affected," he said... cluelessly.

Monday night, the Washington Post published a piece by Seung Min Kim about the Trump anti-immigration legislative agenda. It details "the type of immigrants the administration wants to admit to the United States." But there are already problems. "Senior Republicans in the Senate," she wrote, "on Tuesday immediately began downplaying the prospects of the White House’s proposal-- an effort led primarily by senior adviser Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law-- even before they had been briefed on its details. Said Senate Majority Whip John Thune (R-SD): 'To get it to the floor, you have to have some bipartisan buy-in. There would have to be a lot of work that would get done, and I don’t sense that they’re anywhere close to having done that work with Republicans, let alone with Democrats.'"

MAGA poster by Chip Prosser

What's it really all about, as Thune well knows, is Trump's 2020 strategy, well-laid out yesterday by Jim VanderHei and Mike Allen for Axios readers: Trump's premeditated racism is central to his 2020 strategy. "It might seem," they wrote, "like improvisational madness when President Trump tells American citizens in Congress to 'go back' where they came from, but those close to Trump say there's a lot of calculation behind his race-baiting. It’s central to his 2020 strategy, they say. Trump's associates predict more, not less, of the race-baiting madness. The rough calculation goes like this: 

1- Trump knows that in 2016, he won the white vote by 20+ points.
2- He hopes he can crank their turnout even higher, especially among older, white evangelicals. He knows most of those voters are unlikely to ditch him, no matter how offensive his comments.
3- He watches Fox News and knows AOC, in particular, is catnip to old, white voters, especially men. She is young, Hispanic, female and a democratic socialist-- a 4-for-4 grievance magnet. Last week, AOC got nearly as much online attention as all 2020 Democrats combined.
4- Trump believes he did better than Mitt Romney among Hispanic voters because many who came here and went through the legal process agree with his views.
5- Axios sat in on a focus group in Michigan where white swing voters agreed with Trump on immigration. Carlos Algara, a political scientist at UC Davis, told the NY Times that a forthcoming analysis of the 2018 midterms found that even without Trump on the ballot, "white Democrats with high levels of racial resentment were likely to vote ... Republican."
6- Facebook is often his incubator. He has spent three times more than all Democratic contenders combined on Facebook, with a mix of message-testing immigration lines to appealing to Hispanics who seem susceptible to his worldview.
7- So Trump calculates that (white voters + some Hispanic voters) (tough immigration rhetoric + race-baiting language) = narrow 2020 win.

Even The Mooch! An old crony of Trump's-- and his former White House Communications director (for 10 days after Sean Spicer's 49 days but before Hope Hicks' 225 days)-- says he's appalled by Trump's racism and xenophobic and dishonest vitriol against AOC, Ayanna, Ilhan and Rashida. He told CNN's Alisyn Camerota this morning that Trump's unhinged statements of the last few days have been "racist and unacceptable" and that he's not going to vote for him if they continue (although he didn't say for how long). "And so what ends up happening is it's such a turnoff to a large group of people that you are running a risk that 15% of the people that you want to get you through that electoral map and back into the presidency say, 'You know what? I love the policies, but I don't like the send her back rhetoric. I don't like the racist rhetoric of sending people back to the homes that they came from.'" As a result, the Palm Beach County Republicans disinvited The Mooch from a fundraiser at Mar-a-Lago.

We're About To Have An Actual Rapist On The Supreme Court-- And Louisiana Senator John Kennedy Knows

John Neely Kennedy, the junior senator from Louisiana, sounded like an imbecile yesterday when, as part of the Kavanaugh brouhaha, he referred to his Democratic colleagues by saying that "These are people-- I’m not gonna name names-- but I’m not sure they have a soul. I don’t think their mother breast-fed them. I think they went right to raw meat."

Kennedy graduated from Vanderbilt magna cum laude in 1973, got a law degree from the University of Virginia and then another law degree with honors from Oxford. So he was certainly no dummy. Of course, back then he was a Democrat. In 1988 he became special counsel to then-Democratic Gov.Buddy Roemer and 1991 and he ran for Attorney General, unsuccessfully, as a Democrat that year. In 2004 he ran for an open U.S. Senator, seat, again as a Democrat. By that time he was flipping back and forth between parties anti was clear than he was basically an opportinist. He was elected state Treasurer in 1999-- as a Democrat-- was reelected as a Republican, then ran as a Democrat for the U.S. Senate and then ran for the U.S. Senate again. In 2007 he officially joined the GOP. He lost another Senate bid that year and finally won a Senate seat on his third try-- this time as a Republican-- in 2016, with the support of Trump and Pence (who he had endorsed in their election). Got that? Here's his early electoral history:

After reading the sham FBI report, he told reporters that that some revelations in it "really make me angry... I really wish you could see this. I really wish you could read this report." Tuesday was when he told Tucker Carlson that he doubted some Senate Democrats "have souls." He told his hometown paper that "She didn't convince me-- nor does the record-- that Brett Kavanaugh was involved."

Wednesday Amy Wang reported in the Washington Post that most Senate Democrats aren't "searching for the truth. It's about winning. Just win, baby, win." I don't know if Kennedy drinks as much as Kavanaugh but...

By Wednesday afternoon, Kennedy was back in the Senate halls, hammering the Democrats on Fox News. “I’m not prejudging the FBI report, but it’s time for the senators to be senators, for women to women up, for men to man up, and let’s vote,” Kennedy said.

So what was it that Kennedy read that caused him to tell reporters that some revelations in it "really make me angry... I really wish you could see this. I really wish you could read this report?" Perhaps this report from PoliticusUSA by Leo Vidal explains something that made its way into the report that flipped out Kennedy: Senate Transcript Accuses Kavanaugh of Rape in the Back of a Car. No one seems to be talking about it either, but, wrote Vidal, "According to a 23-page transcript of an interview with Brett Kavanaugh conducted by a staffer with the Senate Judiciary Committee, the nominee allegedly raped a woman in the back of a car. This, along with several other sexual assault allegations, had not been reported in the media until yesterday. In all there were six sexual assault allegations against Kavanaugh that are discussed in the interview transcript. This is the woman who Kavanaugh raped in a letter to Kamala Harris:

Kavanaugh and a friend offered me a ride home. I don’t know the other boy’s name. I was in his car to go home. His friend was behind me in the backseat. Kavanaugh kissed me forcefully. I told him I only wanted a ride home. Kavanaugh continued to grope me over my clothes, forcing his kisses on me and putting his hand under my sweater. ‘No,’ I yelled at him.

The boy in the backseat reached around, putting his hand over my mouth and holding my arm to keep me in the car. I screamed into his hand. Kavanaugh continued his forcing himself on me. He pulled up my sweater and bra exposing my breasts, and reached into my panties, inserting his fingers into my vagina. My screams were silenced by the boy in the backseat covering my mouth and groping me as well.

Kavanaugh slapped me and told me to be quiet and forced me to perform oral sex on him. He climaxed in my mouth. They forced me to go into the backseat and took turns raping me several times each. They dropped me off two blocks from my home. ‘No one will believe if you tell. Be a good girl,’ he told me.

According to the official transcript from the Senate staff, after hearing the above passage read to him, Kavanaugh responded by saying:

“Nothing-- the whole thing is ridiculous. Nothing ever-- anything like that, nothing. I mean, that’s-- the whole thing is just a crock, farce, wrong, didn’t happen, not anything close.”

Not upsetting to Susan Collins? Apparently not. She voted to shut down debate this morning-- as did Joe Manchin (D-WV) and Jeff Flake (R-AZ). Heidi Heitkamp (D-ND) and Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) voted against cloture. Tomorrow afternoon, everybody could change their final votes when the actual confirmation roll call is scheduled.