How Much Damage Will Trump Do Between Today And January 20? He Badly Wants To Make A Deal For A Blanket Pardon

 

Who's still left?

Being better than Trump is the lowest imaginable bar but that doesn't mean that Biden isn't going to immediately make things better in a real way-- and for all of us. Reporting for the Washington Post yesterday, Laura Meckler, Danielle Douglas-Gabriel and Valerie Strauss wrote that "Trump tried to bully schools into opening their buildings, a hard-edge pandemic tactic that succeeded in places and backfired elsewhere. President-elect Joe Biden is hoping to pry them open with money for increased coronavirus expenses and clear guidance on how to do so safely, a shift that signals a new era for education policy in America. Under Trump, the Education Department has been led by Secretary Betsy DeVos, who alienated many by casting public schools as failures and promoting alternatives to them. Through executive action and negotiations with Congress, Biden wants to bolster public schools. Biden has promised hundreds of billions of dollars in new education spending, from preschool through college. He has proposed college debt forgiveness.

Many of Biden’s promises require new spending, and that will require support from Congress, a heavy lift, particularly if the Senate remains under Republican control.

Biden has promised to triple spending for the $15 billion Title 1 program, which targets high-poverty schools. He has said he would double the number of psychologists, counselors, nurses and social workers in schools. He has vowed new money for school infrastructure. And he has said he would dramatically increase federal spending for special education.

He also wants to fund universal prekindergarten for all 3- and 4-year-old children; make community college debt-free; and double Pell grants to help low-income students pay for college.

First up will be coronavirus-related spending, particularly if Congress has not passed a relief package before Inauguration Day. Some emergency funding for schools was approved in the spring, but the Trump administration has been unable to cut a legislative deal for additional money.

Biden has endorsed at least $88 billion to stabilize state education funding and help pay for protective equipment, ventilation systems, reduced class sizes and other expenses associated with operating school during the pandemic.

...[T]he new administration is likely undo many of the things that DeVos did, and redo some of the Obama administration policies that DeVos undid.

DeVos rescinded Education Department guidance meant to reduce racial disparities in school discipline, for instance, something the incoming administration can reinstate. The administration also spiked Obama-era guidance that offered protections for transgender students, including the right to use bathrooms corresponding with their gender identity. And it killed guidance on use of affirmative action in college admissions.

Other likely reversals: a Justice Department lawsuit alleging discrimination against White and Asian students at Yale University; a ban on federal grant recipients from holding diversity training, and an investigation into Princeton University, launched after the university’s president spoke of institutional racism on campus.

“It’s a new day around this national conversation about race and equity ... making sure communities are not intentionally or unintentionally left out opportunities will be key,” said Tiffany Jones, senior director of higher-education policy at the nonprofit Education Trust.

...Some observers expect the incoming administration to be even tougher on for-profit colleges than Obama was. Vice President-elect Kamala D. Harris was instrumental in bringing down Corinthian Colleges, a for-profit giant, when she was California state attorney general and as a senator supported efforts to hold predatory for-profit colleges to account.

“Policies will be designed to protect students and taxpayers first,” predicted Dan Zibel, who worked at the agency under Obama and is now chief counsel at the National Student Legal Defense Network, a nonprofit he co-founded. He said that would likely include “taking harder stances against schools and companies using financial aid system to scam students.”

And that's one department. Biden's team is going to have to do that in every facet of government-- and start doing it even while we are still living through a disruptive, vengeful lame-duck presidency, a lame duck Congress, an hostile and obstructive Senate and two Senate races (in Georgia) that are "life-or-death" struggles for each very antagonistic "side." Congress is back in DC today, "confronting," as Erica Werner, Paul Kane and Yasmeen Abutaleb reported last night, "a number of major problems but lacking clear signals from President Trump-- even as President-elect Joe Biden and his team are poised to begin engaging with congressional Democrats on their priorities. Congress faces a government shutdown deadline and crucial economic relief negotiations at a moment of extraordinary national uncertainty, with Trump refusing to concede the presidential election and with coronavirus cases spiking nationwide. Even before Biden takes office on Jan. 20, Congress must contend with a Dec. 11 government funding deadline. Failure to reach a deal would result in a government shutdown, and Trump has not signaled whether he would sign a new spending bill. At the same time, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) have both expressed the desire to pass new economic and health-care relief measures to address the surging coronavirus pandemic-- something Congress has not been able to do since the spring. But it is uncertain whether they will be able to find common ground in the weeks ahead: McConnell is pushing for a narrow and targeted bill, while Pelosi continues to insist on a broader and bolder relief package."

A handful of Trump’s staunchest allies insisted Sunday that the election is far from over. Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-SC), who chairs the Senate Judiciary Committee, claimed in an interview on Fox News’s “Sunday Morning Futures” that there have been suspect voting incidents in Pennsylvania, Michigan and elsewhere.

“And I’m hellbent on looking at it,” Graham said. “Do not accept the media’s declaration of Biden. Fight back.”

Disorganized Crime by Nancy Ohanian

There is no evidence of any widespread fraud in the election. But the divisions among congressional Republicans over whether to acknowledge Biden as the president-elect mean that negotiations over a new spending package or coronavirus relief bill will proceed under something of a cloud.

Yesterday, on Fox, Lindsey Graham hissed that "If Republicans don't challenge and change the U.S. election system, there will never be another Republican president elected again. President Trump should not concede. We're down to less-- 10,000 votes in Georgia. He's going to win North Carolina. We have gone from 93,000 votes to less than 20,000 votes in Arizona, where more-- more votes to be counted." Meanwhile, Axios reported last night that apart from a few die-hards, most people close to President Trump know the race is over-- but no one wants to be the sacrificial lamb who tells him to concede, people familiar with their thinking tell me... Top Trump advisers sat the president down at the White House on Saturday and walked him through the 'options for success'... [T]hey made clear to Trump the likely outcome of waging these legal battles, but he was firm that he wants to forge ahead anyway... [E]ven Trump has discussed the possibility of not winning. He has accepted that losing may be an outcome but insists on pursuing what he claims is mass fraud. Several of his close advisers, including social media guru Dan Scavino and personnel director Johnny McEntee, are egging him on. But people one rung out have privately accepted reality. They know the court cases are dead ends, and some are already putting out job feelers."

Jordan Fabian reported for Bloomberg that Trump's legal advisers say his legal challenges are futile

Have You Ever Felt Embarrassed To Be A White Man?

 

In her exhaustive essay for the NY Times this week, Win or Lose, It’s Donald Trump’s Republican Party, Elaina Plott writes a lot about how down-ballot Republicans in red districts are abandoning most of what their party has traditionally stood for to send one over-arching message: "I stand for Trump-- a vote for me is a vote for Señor T." These candidates say they think that what makes Trump different from other Republicans is that he's willing "to go to extremes" to pursue and defend what he believes in. One candidate for commissioner in Manatee County, Florida used this image on his Facebook page, adding "2020 IS NO LONGER REPUBLICAN VS. DEMOCRAT. IT’S FREEDOM VERSUS TYRANNY." He doesn't even have an opponent. (Ironically, many Democrats agree with his assessment of what the 2020 election is all about.)

"The panic and excitement attending Donald Trump," wrote Plott, "have always shared an assumption: that his election marked a profound break with the American politics that came before it. During his inaugural address, as he surveyed the national landscape of 'American carnage,' Trump himself invoked the advent of 'a historic movement the likes of which the world has never seen before.' In the years and events that followed-- the endless soap opera of the White House, the forceful separation of children from their families at the border, the pandemic, Trump’s refusal to permit even a passing interest in a peaceful transfer of power-- it seemed increasingly clear that the world never had.

But for all the attention paid to what Trump represents in American politics, the most salient feature of his ascent within the Republican Party might be what he doesn’t represent... Trump’s takeover... has been as one-dimensional as it has been total. In the space of one term, the president has co-opted virtually every power center in the Republican Party, from its congressional caucuses to its state parties, its think tanks to its political action committees. But though he has disassembled much of the old order, he has built very little in its place. 'You end up with this weird paradox where he stands to haunt the G.O.P. for many years to come, but on the substance it’s like he was never even there,' said Liam Donovan, a Republican strategist."

A self-absorbed Trump has brought the crazies and proud racists and sociopaths out into the open. He has made it ok to be an open bigot and hate-monger.

During Trump’s presidency, his party has become host to new species of fringe figures. Laura Loomer, a self-identified #ProudIslamophobe and erstwhile Infowars contributor who has been banned from Twitter and Facebook, earned presidential praise-- and a campaign-trail cameo from Trump’s daughter-in-law, Lara Trump-- for winning her Florida congressional district’s Republican primary in August. There is also Marjorie Taylor Greene, the party’s current nominee in the race for Georgia’s 14th district, whose embrace of the QAnon conspiracy theory and litany of racist, Islamophobic and anti-Semitic statements didn’t dissuade Trump from calling her a “future Republican star,” or Representative Kevin McCarthy, the Republicans’ leader in the House, from pledging to give her committee assignments should she win in November.

But Trump’s influence is also reflected, in a more pedestrian but equally revealing way... [transposing] Trumplike signifiers onto otherwise utterly conventional suburban Republican platforms. Republican voters are essentially the same people who voted Republican before Trump; the party’s politicians are still mostly the same people, hiring mostly the same strategists. But their relationships to the party now flow through a single man, one who has never offered a clear vision for his political program beyond his immediate aggrandizement. Whether Trump wins or loses in November, no one else in the party’s official ranks seems to have one, either.

...As it turned out, Trump wasn’t especially interested in running on Ryan’s “bold conservative policy agenda.” “Put a Stop to Executive Overreach” may have been a Better Way, but Trump believed the people-- his people-- would be more galvanized by a ban on all Muslim travel to the United States, which he first proposed the month before. (“Offensive and unconstitutional,” Mike Pence, then the governor of Indiana, tweeted of the ban at the time.) “It’s the party’s party,” Reince Priebus, the Republican National Committee chairman, nevertheless repeatedly insisted through the summer of 2016. “The party defines the party.”

It was as though Priebus and others believed the G.O.P. to be some cosmic body animated by a logic undisclosed to humankind, rather than a collection of overgrown college politicos who worked in a building opposite a restaurant called Tortilla Coast and who had lost the popular vote in five of the last six presidential elections-- in other words, an institution ripe for hijacking. Paul Ryan announced his retirement 15 months into Trump’s presidency (“We are with you Paul!” Trump tweeted shortly thereafter). Kevin McCarthy, then the House majority leader, told reporters about how his wife gave him an autographed copy of “The Art of the Deal” in the late 1980s while they were dating. Priebus went to the White House with Trump as the new president’s chief of staff, only to learn via Twitter six months into the job that he had been replaced. (“We accomplished a lot together and I am proud of him!” Trump said.) The R.N.C. is now run by Ronna Romney McDaniel, Mitt Romney’s niece, who dropped the “Romney” from her name in apparent deference to Trump. As the newly inaugurated vice president, Mike Pence applauded Trump’s early executive order banning half the world’s Shiite Muslims from entering the country.

This June, as Trump prepared for his second convention as the Republican presidential nominee, the party’s leaders decided to dispense with the fuss of a new platform altogether and simply readopted the 2016 platform. Never mind that the document contained some three dozen condemnations of the “current president” and “current administration” and “current occupant” of the White House; and never mind that it expressed full support for Puerto Rico’s statehood, which Trump had called an “absolute no.” Officials did, however, manage to draft a new preface: “The Republican Party,” it proclaimed, “has and will continue to enthusiastically support the president’s America-first agenda.” In Priebus’s parlance, the party had defined the party.

[Note: the Democratic Party establishment takes the exact same position-- it's their party-- and has sued to uphold the concept when grassroots Democrats have challenged at the ballot box.]

That this is no longer Paul Ryan’s party is clear. What Trump has turned it into, though, is less so. Republican lawmakers and officials now reflexively tout their proximity to Trump-- like the “100 percent Trump voting record” that Senator Kelly Loeffler of Georgia claims in a recent ad. They reference “Trumpism” casually and constantly and accede that it will in some way dictate the future of the party. But they can’t seem to agree on what it actually is. “The party right now is just Trump, right?” said one senior Senate G.O.P. aide. “So when you take him out of it, what do we have left?”

...“It’s national populism and identity-politics Republicanism,” Representative Justin Amash told me, and “it’s here to stay for a while.” It was early October, and Amash, who has represented Michigan in Congress since 2011, was sitting-- maskless, but across the room-- in his Capitol Hill office. Amash was a founding member of the House Freedom Caucus, a group of conservative Republican hard-liners, most of whom identified with the Tea Party movement, who came together out of frustration with the party’s congressional leadership boxing out the rank-and-file during the legislative process. The caucus became a right-wing media darling after one of its members, a backbencher from North Carolina named Mark Meadows, filed a motion to oust Boehner from the speakership in the summer of 2015. The vote on that motion never happened; Boehner announced his retirement that fall. But by then, the group had built out its ranks enough to thwart any piece of legislation in the Republican-led House.

“The main purpose of the Freedom Caucus was to open up the process and ensure all voices could be heard,” Amash told me. But its members were best known as trenchant conservative ideologues, preaching austerity and refusing to cede ground on social issues. During the 2016 presidential primary, its members were broadly, if obliquely, critical of Trump: “We need someone who will restore greatness to America, not as a talking point or a punchline, but someone who wants to restore constitutional values,” Representative Andy Harris of Maryland said after he endorsed Ben Carson. Others blamed the G.O.P. establishment for not doing more to stop Trump’s rise.

While the establishment transitioned with relative ease to the onset of Trump’s presidency, the Freedom Caucus, for a time, seemed to represent a potential thorn in its side. Many of the new administration’s policy ambitions-- trade protectionism, a trillion-dollar infrastructure bill-- were direct affronts to the stated values of the Tea Party crowd. “The conservatives are going to go crazy,” Stephen K. Bannon, chief executive of Trump’s campaign and an incoming White House adviser, crowed in a postelection interview.

It was common in the Freedom Caucus’s weekly meetings for members to mock Trump; “I can’t believe he’s only been bankrupt that many times,” one of its members quipped, according to Amash. In March 2017, the group’s unwillingness to fall behind Ryan’s first stab at an Obamacare replacement-- which they rejected both for its substance and the closed-door process by which it was written-- prompted Trump to excoriate its members on Twitter. “The Freedom Caucus will hurt the entire Republican agenda if they don’t get on the team, & fast,” the president raged. “We must fight them, & Dems, in 2018!”

Mo Brooks, a Freedom Caucus member from Alabama, was among Trump’s harshest critics during the primary, castigating Trump as a “notorious flip-flopper” with “huge character flaws” whose presidency would ultimately make his base regret voting for him. Brooks had cast his own ballot for Trump grudgingly: “You have to decide who is the lesser of the two evils,” he told a group of Duke University students at the time,“and then vote accordingly.”

There was still plenty to be unhappy about in Trump’s first year, like the health care debacle and Trump’s publicly excoriating-- “waterboarding,” in Brooks’s words-- Brooks’s fellow Alabamian Jeff Sessions, then Trump’s attorney general, for his recusal from the investigation into Russia’s meddling in the 2016 election. But Brooks found there was a lot more to like. “On border security, the president has been spot on,” he told me. He went on: “The president showed he would take the public-policy stances that, by and large, are supported by conservatives, and those who believe in the foundational principles that have combined to make America the greatest nation in world history.”

Brooks’s transformation is instructive insofar as he doesn’t see it as a transformation at all. The true conservatives hadn’t changed, Brooks insisted; Trump just surprised everyone by governing a lot like one. By 2018, Bannon was out, and by November the party’s leaders had major tax cuts and a slew of new conservative judges to show for their acquiescence. On the “moral value side of the coin,” Brooks said, “President Trump has been strongly pro-life.” On the economy, Trump “has fought hard for free enterprise, which is premised on freedom and liberty, and against socialism.” And after years of railing against the constitutional abomination of Barack Obama’s governing by pen, the Freedom Caucus members found that executive orders weren’t so bad when you liked what was in them, such as regulatory relief for companies in defiance of Obamacare’s contraception mandate. “I am fine with executive orders that do the right thing,” Brooks told me.

“I wish we had done better with deficit and debt,” Brooks allowed. But when pressed on this and other ways Trump had fallen short on either his own promises or longstanding conservative priorities in general, he invoked the same villains he might have in the Freedom Caucus’s heyday: special-interest groups and irresponsible party leaders. He’d been in meetings, he said, where he heard the president “expressing dissatisfaction with these huge deficits,” which, under Trump, have achieved record proportions. (And in any event, the former Freedom Caucus chairman Jim Jordan insisted to me recently, Trump is “going to focus on that in his second term.”) As for health care, Trump backed “Paul Ryan’s proposal to expand socialized medicine” only because he received “bad advice” from the “liberal wing” of the party (by which he meant Ryan and McCarthy). “Fortunately, Donald Trump, after listening to our conservative arguments, was persuaded that we were right, and our liberal wing was wrong,” he said. “That’s the mark of leadership. As you get information, you should change as that information requires. And President Trump did.”

Trump’s resolve to confirm Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court in October 2018, Amash says, dulled the remaining criticisms of the president in the Freedom Caucus-- and the midterm elections a month later all but extinguished them. The Democrats’ rout of the Republicans in the 2018 House races was unequivocally tied to Trump’s unpopularity-- according to exit polls, 90 percent of voters who disapproved of him voted for the other party in their local House race. But that fate fell upon pro- and anti-Trump Republicans alike.

At the same time, Republican primary voters’ devotion to Trump was such that even in the Senate, candidates who had criticized or otherwise distanced themselves from the president, like Dean Heller of Nevada, struggled to make it to the general election, backpedaling their criticisms and holding their breath until Trump’s blessing finally came via Twitter. Raúl Labrador, a founder of the Freedom Caucus, had all but nabbed Trump’s endorsement in the Republican primary for governor of Idaho when supporters of his main opponent, Brad Little, packaged together clips of Labrador bashing Trump in 2016 and delivered them to the West Wing. Today Labrador is back in the private sector. Little is now governor of Idaho.

All told, 26 congressional Republicans-- some moderates, others facing stiff odds in the general election-- decided to retire from politics in 2018, the party’s second-highest number in more than 40 years. “Republicans tried to steer clear of Donald Trump a little bit in that election,” Amash said. “They tried to avoid him as a topic. And they weren’t successful. And Donald Trump came back after that and said, ‘I told you so.’”

Some caucus members, meanwhile, seemed entranced by the proximity to power that loyalty afforded them. Mark Meadows, who became the Freedom Caucus chairman in January 2017, liked making a show of his ever-more-frequent phone calls with the president and liked ensconcing himself on weeknights in the lobby of the Trump International Hotel, the favored Washington haunt of Trump’s coterie of advisers and hangers-on. And as Trump proved ever more willing to attack his colleagues in the Freedom Caucus, Meadows seemed ever more willing to let him.

In 2018, Representative Mark Sanford, a Freedom Caucus member from South Carolina and a vocal Trump critic, lost a primary in which Trump endorsed his opponent. Later, Trump visited a House Republican conference meeting and proceeded to ridicule Sanford. Meadows did not come to his colleague’s defense. “It was a betrayal and an abandonment of someone who is part of our family,” Amash said. It was the only moment during our interview that he betrayed a sense of anger over the past four years. (Meadows declined to comment for this article.)

It was shortly after that that Amash gave his final speech to the group he helped start. “At some point, I didn’t feel like the Freedom Caucus was really producing what we had founded it for-- precisely to push back on things like Donald Trump taking full control of government, you know, using the executive branch as a legislative branch, or Congress not doing its job as an oversight body,” he said. The caucus’s about face, he argues, is a useful way to grasp the extent of Trump’s takeover of the party. Such a takeover was not inevitable, he insists; the Freedom Caucus’s early willingness to stand up to Trump seemed to offer the hope of maintaining healthy debate and disagreement among Republicans under his presidency. “I was not even the fiercest critic, compared to some of the others,” he recalled of those early days.

In 2019, Amash left the G.O.P. to become an Independent. Earlier this year, he switched his party affiliation again to become the first Libertarian member of Congress, and after briefly considering and rejecting a third-party presidential candidacy this spring, he decided not to run for re-election. “Everything is about personalities now,” he told me. Trump didn’t start that trend, he pointed out, but he certainly accelerated it. “You can see changes in some of the senators, too-- the way they are now trolling people on Twitter. This sort of disparaging of the left is different; it’s materially different from what we saw before Donald Trump."





Congressional Republicans who have left the fold in the Trump years invariably attest to the private discomfort of their friends and former colleagues on Capitol Hill who remain in good standing with the president. “A healthy percentage of them want Trump to lose,” Jeff Flake, the former senator and congressman from Arizona and one of the 2018 cycle’s many Republican retirees, told me. “There are no illusions about where the party is going under Trumpism. This is a dead end. This is a demographic cul-de-sac. My colleagues know it. And they had higher aspirations, nearly all of them, than to approve the president’s executive calendar.” The fact that these private expressions of despair have stayed private cannot be pinned on rabid primary voters alone. Ultimately, a great many in the party have quite enjoyed their time on the Trump train-- as Mark Meadows, who is now Trump’s chief of staff, could attest. Yet for all the attention paid to loyalty as an ordering principle in today’s Republican Party, it’s not entirely clear what dividends it will pay in Trump’s absence.

...The idea that conventional Republicans like Pence and Haley can repackage themselves through Trump loyalty fails to reckon with the desire of many Trump voters to genuinely overturn the party’s status quo.

...On an evening in October, I drove to Johnstown, Pa., for one of the final rallies of Trump’s re-election campaign. On the edge of a parking lot outside a fire station a mile or so from the rally venue, I found dozens of people, huddled under blankets and Gap hoodies, holding their phones aloft. They were almost all white, many of them men and women in their 50s and 60s, others young families with children. A minute or two later, Air Force One sliced through the black sky. Its drone muffled the whoops and hollers that followed. These weren’t rallygoers, it turned out: They just wanted to see the plane.

“He has his base so energized,” Jeff Link, 65, told me, his cheeks flushed from the cold. “Look, we came just to get a mile away from him!”

Link and three friends had driven from a couple of towns over for this moment. What did Trumpism mean to them? I asked. “It means for the people,” Susan Datsko said. “We are for the people.”

“America first, absolutely,” Charlotte McFadden echoed. A retired nurse and lifelong Republican, she went on to describe the us-versus-them posture that Trump, to her, so revolutionarily embodied: “We have got to stop trying to save everybody in the world. Americans are very, very generous people. But we’re getting crushed. We just want people to come the right way; we welcome them just like our ancestors were welcomed. And we can’t help anybody if we can’t even help our own people. You have to help yourself before you can help others.”

Maybe others in the party before believed this, too; what made Trump special to them was his willingness to say it. “Not to be rude,” Rick Datsko said, “but the past Republicans never had any balls. They never stood up for Republicans. Look at Romney: Obama chewed him up.”

“We all understand he’s a little crude,” Link said.

“But crude is OK!” Datsko interjected.

Link went on: “We knew that he had no halo on his head,” he said. “We’re all like that a little bit. So we kind of identified with that. We understood.”

They struggled to articulate precisely what they wanted from the party whenever the post-Trump era commenced. Just more of this. “The same thing,” Datsko said.

“To continue along the same lines,” McFadden agreed. To perpetuate the euphoria coursing through still more parking lots nearby, the merchandise truck catering to “THE SILENT MAJORITY,” the expletive-laden T-shirts, the dozens of Trump flags whipping in the wind.

Still, an inchoate anxiety lurked behind the mania, a fleeting cognizance that for all their demands of more, nothing could ever match this. Even the thought of four more years brought its own strange layer of distress. Because if Trump wins, as Mark Matney explained to me, he can never run for president again. What happens, then, when it’s all over?

“My scary thought,” Matney said, “is where do we find another one like him?”

In his NY Times column Monday, Trump’s army of angry white men, Charles Blow boiled down this election to a simple question: "How did this country elect Donald Trump and does it have the collective constitution to admit the error and reverse it?" He wrote about an ugly truth most people would rather not focus on: "Trump is the president of the United States because a majority of white people in this country wanted him to be. Perhaps some supported him despite his obvious flaws, but others undoubtedly saw those flaws as laudable attributes. For the latter, Trump’s racism was welcome in the coven... [W]hite men prefer Trump over Biden 57% to 36%. Most white women support Biden, which is a reversal from the last election, when a plurality voted for Trump. The white racist, sexist, xenophobic patriarchy and all those who benefit from or aspire to it are in a battle with the rest of us, for not only the present in this country but also the future of it. The Republican Party, which is now without question the Party of Trump, has become a structural reflection of him. They see their majorities slipping and the country turning brown with a quickness, and they are becoming more tribal, more rash, more devious, just like him."

Trump’s base of mostly white men, mostly without a college degree, see him as the ambassador of their anger, one who ministers to their fear, consoles their losses and champions their victimhood. Trump is the angry white man leading the battle charge for angry white men.

The most optimistic among us see the Trump era as some sort of momentary insanity, half of the nation under the spell of a conjurer. They believe that the country can be reunited and this period forgotten.

I am not one of those people. I believe what political scientist Thomas Schaller told Bloomberg columnist Francis Wilkinson in 2018: “I think we’re at the beginning of a soft civil war.” If 2018 was the beginning of it, it is now well underway.

Trump is building an army of the aggrieved in plain sight.

It is an army with its own mercenaries, people Trump doesn’t have to personally direct, but ones he has absolutely refused to condemn.

When it comes to the former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke, the young neo-Nazis who marched in Charlottesville and the far-right fight club the Proud Boys, Trump finds a way to avoid a full-throated condemnation, often feigning ignorance.

“I don’t know anything about David Duke,” Trump said when he ran in 2016. That of course was a lie. In fact, Trump is heir to Duke’s legacy.

In 1991, when Duke ran unsuccessfully to be governor of Louisiana but received a majority of the white vote in the state, Trump told CNN’s Larry King, “I hate seeing what it represents, but I guess it just shows there’s a lot of hostility in this country. There’s a tremendous amount of hostility in the United States.”

King responded, “Anger?”

Then Trump explained: “It’s anger. I mean, that’s an anger vote. People are angry about what’s happened. People are angry about the jobs.”

It is that very anger that Trump harnessed to win the presidency: anger over racial displacement disguised as economic anxiety.

Trump has bottled defiance and sold the serum to his acolytes and henchmen. He is fighting for white power and white heritage-- he mourns the loss of “beautiful” monuments to racists while attacking racial sensitivity training. He is fighting to keep out foreigners, unless they are from countries like Norway, an overwhelmingly white country. He is fighting for people to be foolish, like not wearing a mask in the middle of a global pandemic caused by an airborne virus.

Trump is fighting for these people and they will continue to fight for him. Trump knows that. And he keeps them angry because he needs them angry. There is a strong chance that Trump won’t win the coming election, but there is also a strong chance that he will win a majority of white men.

The question then is how an angry Trump and those angry men will react to defeat and humiliation.

Midnight Meme Of The Day!

by Noah

What Republicans have said in the past about confirming a Supreme Court justice in a presidential election year will not haunt them. For that you need a conscience. You need a sense of responsibility. You need a sense of guilt. You also need enough loyalty to put the country first, before devotion to a lunatic and your bank accounts. What Republicans have said in the past about the subject means nothing to them. Why would it? When has any Republican in recent times exhibited any evidence that he or she has an ounce of character, honor or even a soul? I've gathered this list of quotes not because I would be foolish enough to think any of these slaves of Trump and Putin would have the integrity to honor their words. That's hard enough for anyone of the political persuasion, but a Republican? Hell will freeze over down to absolute zero before that. I just thought it would be good to gather these quotes all in one place for easy reference and possible use. The politicians who uttered these words are either true believers or they will claim they have no choice but to be cowards and do the filthy utilitarian work of their totalitarian emperor. Sad. Caesar's Senators had more honor and the gladiators of the time fought with honor and dignity to the last; and Trump is no Caesar no matter what he thinks in his severely damaged mind. Instead he is well on his way to being a modern day Caligula with no one in Washington or in the korporate media having the political courage to stop him.

These days we are all being reminded of what the maximum assclowns of the United States Senate said when, in February 2016, President Obama nominated Judge Merrick Garland, a centrist at best, who had been approved of by numerous republicans on previous occasions. Moscow Mitch says his proudest moment in his life is when he got in Obama's face and told him he will never get to fill the vacancy back then. This time we're in September, only six weeks away, not nine months, from election day as in 2016 and people have already started to vote. Herr Trump will also nominate a conservative judge approved of by Republicans and, most likely, by the Heritage Society. The only difference that really matterered to Republicans was Obama's heritage.

Much is at stake, including workers rights, a woman's right to choose, health care, civil rights and voting rights issues, and environmental legislation.

The quotes below are all from 2016 when Justice Antonin Scalia's death created the vacancy that President Obama nominated Judge Merrick Garland to fill. The quotes add up to even more political hot air of the reeking stench variety than ususal and, they must have stampeded each other to get to the microphone. It's what politicians of all stripes do but not all of them wish to be so destructive in the service of a madman and his master.

Let's start with $enator Lindsey Graham, the Chairman Of The $enate Judiciary Committee, man who has worked overtime in recent years to brand himself the queen of talking out of both sides of his ass. Don't forget his conflicting statements about his golf partner and master Herr Donald Trump being a "race-baiting xenophobic religious bigot."

1. $enator Lindsey Graham, 2016- "I want you to use my words against me. If there's a Republican president in 2016 and a vacancy occurs in the last year of the first term, you can say Lindsey Graham said let's let the next president, whoever it might be, make that nomination."

2. $enator Ted Cruz- "It has been 80 years since a Supreme Court vacancy was nominated and confirmed in an election year, There is a long tradition that you don't do this in an election year."

3. $enator Cory Gardner- "I think we're too close to the election. The president who is elected in November should be the one who makes this decision." (Hey, Cory, if February was too close to the election...)

4. $enator Marco Rubio- "I don't think we should be moving on a nominee in the last year of this president's term. I would say that if it was a Republican president."

5. $enator Rob Portman- "I believe the best thing for the country is to trust the American people to weigh in on who should make a lifetime appointment that could reshape the Supreme Court for generations. That wouldn't be unusual. It's common practice for the $enate to stop acting on lifetime appointments during the last year of a presidential term, and it's been nearly 80 years since any president was permitted to fill a vacancy that arose in a presidential election year." (Yo, Rob! It's 84 years now!)

6. $enator John Cornyn- "At this critical juncture in our nation's history, Texans and the American people deserve to have a say in the selection of the next lifetime appointment to the Supreme Court." (Notice that $en. Cornball makes a distinction between Texans and Americans. Also, just to split hairs, it would be more honest of everyone in Washington to admit that the only say we have is limited to which list we get to approve from. Don't expect that to change.)

7. $enator Deb Fischer- "It is crucial for Nebraskans and all Americans to have a voice in the selection of the next person to serve a lifetime appointment on the Supreme Court, and there is precedent to do so. Therefore, I believe this position should not be filled until the election of a new president."

8. $enator Richard Shelby- "This critical decision should be made after the upcoming presidential election so that the American people have a voice."

9. $enator Roger Wicker- "The American people should have the opportunity to make their voices heard before filling a lifetime appointment to the nation's highest court."

10. $enator John Thune- "Since the next presidential election is already underway, the next president should make this lifetime appointment to the Supreme Court." (It's even more underway this time, Johnboy.)

11. $enator Mike Rounds- "I believe that Justice Scalia's replacement should be nominated by the next president of the United States." (Mikey, you'll be happy to know that that can actually be arranged through a process of impeachment, four years later, but it's doable. Whadaya say?)

12. $enator David Perdue- "The very balance of our nation's highest court is in serious jeopardy. As a member of the $enate Judiciary Committee, I will do everything in my power to encourage the president and $enate leadership not to start this process until we hear from the American people."

13. $enator Thom Tillis- "The campaign is already underway. It is essential to the institution of the $enate and to the very health of our republic to not launch our nation into a partisan, divisive confirmation battle during the very same time the American people are casting their ballots to elect our next president." (The hypocritical bullshit is particularly high with you Thom. Kudos!

14. $enator Richard Burr- "In this election year, the American people will have an opportunity to have their say in the future direction of our country. For this reason, I believe the vacancy left open by Justice Antonin Scalia should not be filled until there is a new president."

15. $enator Roy Blunt- "The $enate should not confirm a new Supreme Court justice until we have a new president."

16. $enator Cory Gardner- "I think we're too close to the election. The president who is elected in November should be the one who makes this decision."

17. $enator Joni Ernst- "We will see what the people say this fall, and our next president, regardless of party, will be making that nomination." (Here's a fine example of the rampant hypocrisy and insincerity of this list of goons. If they truly meant that the American people should have the decision... well several million more of them voted for Hillary Clinton and not Herr Trump.)

18. $enator Ron Johnson- "I strongly agree that the American people should be allowed to decide the future direction of the Supreme Court by their votes for president and the majority party in the U.S. $enate."

19. $enator John Barrasso- "The American people will soon decide our next president. That person should get to choose the next Supreme Court nominee."

20. Senator Pat Roberts- "It is not in the Constitution that the $enate must vote."

21. $enator Dan Sullivan- "The decision to withhold advancement of Mr. Garland's nomination isn't about the individual, it's about the principle. Alsaskans, like all Americans, are in the midst of an important national election. The next Supreme Court justice could fundamentally change the direction of the court for years to come." (Yeesh! This assclown can't even begin to hide his contempt for the American people. And, he can't even bring himself to refer to Judge Garland by his title.)

22. $enator Pat Toomey- "With the U.S. Supreme Court's balance at stake, and with a presidential election fewer than eight months away, it is wise to give the American people a more direct voice in the selection and confirmation of the next justice." (I see. 8 months is a no-go. Less than 2 months is a full speed ahead. That's pretty good Pat. You're headed to the top regions of the $enate Asshole list. Congrats! You've worked hard. You deserve it!)

23. $enator Steve Daines- "The American people have already begun voting on who the next president will be, and their voice should continue to be reflected in a process that will have lasting implications on our nation." (That's right $enator, the American people, this time 4 years later, have already begun voting, so...)

24. $enator John Boozman- "Our country is very split and we are in the midst of a highly contested presidential election. My colleagues and I are committed to giving the American people a voice in the direction the court will take for generations to come."

25. $enator Lamar Alexander- "This debate is not about Judge Garland. It's about whether to give the American people a voice in the selection of the next Supreme Court justice."

Here's a couple of real winners, from Oklahoma. It took 2 of them to come up with an 18 word sentence. Congratulations guys.

26. $enator Jim Inhofe and $enator James Lankford- "A presidential election year is not the right time to start a nomination process for the Supreme Court."

And, more recently this past May:

27. $enator Chuck Grasshole- "You can't have one rule for Democratic presidents and another rule for Republican presidents." (Yeah Chucky, sure, whatever you say but you and your colleagues think your president is above the law even to the point of treason so...)

And, just this past weekend:

28. $enator Lisa Murkowski- "I would not vote to confirm a Supreme Court nominee. We are 50 some days away from an election."

And, no list of completely insincere, duplicitous senatorial a-holes commenting on the confirmation of a Supreme Court justice right before an election could be complete without hearing from Lindsey Graham's number one competitor in Congress's daily talking out of both sides of the ass competition. Ladies and Gentlemen, the rape endorsing pride of Maine:

29. $enator Susan Collins- "I think that's too close, I really do."

And special bonus quote of significance from this past weekend on FOX "News":

30. $enator Tom Cotton- "Democrats are threatening to riot in the streets." (Tom, baby, hundreds of people spontaneously appearing in front of the Supreme Court building as the news of RBG's death broke on Friday night, is not a riot, but, it was a message that you and your repug brethren are too thick to understand.)

Imagine if they had walk-thru lie detectors at the entrances of the Capitol Building. None of these slimy little fetid worms would ever get in. Majority Leader Moscow Mitch has already gleefully contradicted his words from 2016 (See the meme above.) He didn't even wait until RBG's body was cold. Moscow Mitch is that far gone into goonland. He just had to get on his knees and please the freaky orange object of his affections. Expect the others to also do the wrong thing in the service of the wrong president. Donald Trump has been the most obvious symptom of the Republican disease. The people above and those who vote for them are the disease itself. Those who tolerate this disease are guilty in a separate but equally deadly way.

An additional point to consider: As shown above, both Collins and Murkowski are on record the last few days as saying that they are of the opinion that there should be no voting on a new court nominee until after the election. The media hacks have parroted their words. Big fucking deal. As usual, too many people are buying the bullshit and rolling around in it. They look at $enators Collins and Murkowski and naively think that's two republican no votes of the four that would be needed to stop whatever nazi nutbag Herr Trump nominates and cheers along with his crass "Fill That Seat" slogan. That's assuming a lot. Who would be the other two? $enatorCollins' male counterpart $enator Mittens Romney? He's already said he's on board the Trump train to Hell. And what of fake Democrats such as $enators Joe Manchin and Doug Jones? The two special elections, Georgia and Arizona? The winners of each could theoretically be sitting in the $enate immediately after the election but will either Democratic candidate even be elected. Mark Kelly in Arizona, possibly. Rev. Raphael Warnock in Georgia? Georgia? That's a big maybe. So where's the four no votes? Spin the wheel.

Even if Biden manages to win, there are nearly 3 months called November, December and January where the $enators who are currently in place or something very close to that could and would vote the exact same way as they can before the election. As a practical matter, there seems to be no difference. Only after the inauguration are there likely possible meaningful differences that could alter the end result and few people in Washington, Rep. Ilhan Omar being one very rare exception, or the media are pointing that out. After the inauguration is what people should be calling for and outright demanding. Once again, the korporate media has eagerly bought into political obfuscation. It's ridiculous. It's Washington. It's what the idiot voting public falls for every time. Suckers! And definitely, losers!

A Man Is Only As Good As His Word? So How Do Closet Cases, Like Lindsey Graham Survive In Electoral Politics?

 

I'm gay. When I realized it, I was living in Amsterdam. I went to a psychologist and told him. He looked at me oddly and said, basically, "So? You need me to give you the addresses of gay bars?" Then I flew to the U.S., for my first visit back home in 4 years, to tell my mother. Her response was to tell me I couldn't borrow her wigs. Years later my first corporate job was working for a gay man. My sexuality never held back my career and I rose to be president of the parent company. I'm glad I never went down the closet road. People in closets live a life reflexively and usually increasingly dishonest. They lie about who they are, what they are and, eventually, about everything and start living a life where serial dishonestly becomes the essence of being, more so than any semblance of honesty. It's the slipperiest of slopes to start down and so, so tragic for so many people.

It's the slope poor Lindsey Graham felt he had to go down if he was going to be a successful politician in South Carolina. And, his life has been one gigantic lie, both professionally and personally. "Everyone knows" and even colleagues and acquaintances who find him likable, simpatico and amusing, all tend to pity him. And now it may be catching up with him politically, as an unlikely Democratic opponent has him locked in a what should be an easy reelection campaign but is basically tied and too close to call.

On Saturday, Washington Post reporters Sean Sullivan and Seung Min Kim wrote that 4 and a half years ago Lindsey "sat across a conference table from his colleagues and issued them a dare. 'I want you to use my words against me,' said Graham, a South Carolina Republican with a flair for drama. Pointing with his index finger, Graham continued: 'If there’s a Republican president in 2016 and a vacancy occurs in the last year of the first term, you can say Lindsey Graham said let’s let the next president, whoever it might be, make that nomination.' On Saturday, Graham was singing a different tune, pledging support for President Trump in 'any effort to move forward regarding the recent vacancy created by the passing of Justice Ginsburg.' The stark turnabout from 2016 marked the latest chapter in Graham’s dramatic reinvention of himself during the Trump presidency, morphing from an old-school Senate institutionalist and bipartisan dealmaker into a stalwart soldier for the president’s agenda."

Democrats and other opponents of The Donald very much would like to take Graham up on his offer-- to hold his words against him. I don't know how effective this Lincoln Project ad will be with South Carolina voters, but I suspect someone will figure out exactly how to hold his words against him in a way that will cause him no end of political pain. After all, no one likes a liar... well, except for Republicans who apparently love liars:





"Graham," our Post duo reminded us, "is chairman of the powerful Senate Judiciary Committee charged with processing Supreme Court nominees, and he is in the midst of a competitive reelection campaign that could factor closely into the fight for control of the upper chamber. His comments Saturday, coming after less-decisive statements in the hours after Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s death Friday, amounted to the latest indication of how Republican leaders are rallying quickly around a strategy of seeking to fill her seat this year. That prospect has stoked widespread outrage among Senate Democrats, who are calling Republicans hypocrites for the move after blocking President Barack Obama’s Supreme Court nominee in 2016 because they said the president chosen by voters that fall should make the pick.

“There’s no doubt everything will be sort of on the table if we’re thrown into a world where you can’t trust somebody’s word and precedents get changed at will to fit your priorities of the moment,” Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT) said in response to Graham’s decision to align behind Trump and go back on what he said in 2016.

During Saturday’s call, Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-NY) used similar language, saying that if Senate Republicans move forward with whoever Trump nominates, “nothing is off the table for next year” should Democrats win control of the chamber. That appeared to be a reference to structural changes to the court proposed by liberal activists such as expanding the number of justices-- a proposal that has sparked some disagreements among Democrats.

Republican leaders appeared determined to press ahead swiftly to fill the court vacancy with a conservative jurist. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) promised Trump during a Friday phone call that his nominee would get a vote in the Senate, according to people familiar with their conversation who, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the private conversation.

Trump told McConnell he liked Judge Amy Coney Barrett of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit and Barbara Lagoa of the 11th Circuit, according to two people briefed on the discussion.

“We were put in this position of power and importance to make decisions for the people who so proudly elected us, the most important of which has long been considered to be the selection of United States Supreme Court Justices,” Trump wrote on Twitter Saturday. “We have this obligation, without delay!”

...Less clear is how rank-and-file Republican senators will respond, with many in tough reelection races in states where Trump is not popular. Republicans hold a 53-to-47 majority in the Senate, meaning they can afford to lose no more than three members in a confirmation vote, should the entire Democratic caucus unite against Trump's nominee.

They have already lost one.

“I do not believe that the Senate should vote on the nominee prior to the election,” Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine), who is in a tough reelection fight, said in a statement. “In fairness to the American people, who will either be re-electing the President or selecting a new one, the decision on a lifetime appointment to the Supreme Court should be made by the President who is elected on November 3rd.”

Collins’s reservations contrasted sharply with the comments from Graham, who is seeking a fourth term in the Senate. The contest has been tougher than many expected in a ruby-red state Trump won easily in 2016, with recent polls showing Democrat Jaime Harrison in close competition with Graham.

Now Graham will be at the center of what will likely be one of the most contentious confirmation battles in history, affording him an opportunity to demonstrate his loyalty to Trump. But some Democrats say his position could help amplify the arguments against his reelection.

“A lot of folks miss the Lindsey of old-- and that’s why this race is so competitive,” said Steve Benjamin, the Democratic mayor of Columbia, S.C. “When it comes time to do what’s right and maybe not popular,” Benjamin said, “it can be difficult for some.”

Harrison, one of his party's fast-rising African American stars, sounded similar notes. “My grandpa always said that a man is only as good as his word. Senator Graham, you have proven your word is worthless,” he wrote on Twitter.

Writing for The Atlantic, Edward-Isaac Dovere offered a glimpse into what Republican senators are saying in private and off the record. "Whispering Republicans," as he termed them, talk about how they hate The Donald and then back him in public-- to the media and, of course, with their votes. The GOP is absolutely one of the country's two spineless, jellyfish parties. "The secretly apostate Republican senators," wrote Dovere, "have two choices: They can support a president they think is a threat to American democracy while also violating Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s invented 2016 rule about not confirming justices in an election year, or they can oppose Trump, enraging both him and their progressively cultish base while giving up what might be their last chance to secure a conservative majority for a generation."

Notice The Donald's Chamber of Commerce retweet from Sunday morning, signally he's ready for war with Alaska senior Senator Lisa Murkowski, who is not up for reelection in November and is not up for giving Trump a third Supreme Court pick.

For McConnell, this is principle versus power, and the golden rule is “Whoever has the gold makes the rules.” And it’s happening as the next generation of ambitious Republicans looks to a future in which Trumpism remains a dominant force within the party no matter what happens in November.

Don’t expect many Republicans-- even those who want to stick it to Trump-- to be direct with their commitments. “If they try to shove something through, I think you’re going to see some of these Republicans who hate Trump fall on the horrible sword of ‘This country is dangerously divided right now; the hypocrisy is horrible; if we do something like this, it will tear the country apart,’” says Joe Walsh, the former Republican representative from Illinois, who briefly ran a primary campaign against Trump that went nowhere earlier this year. Based on conversations he’s had, Walsh estimates that, of the current Republican senators, “if you put a gun to their head privately, I would say more than 40 of the 53 would like to see him lose.”

Walsh insists that Republicans didn’t want this vacancy-- not now. “This is political death for the Republicans,” he told me.

This is not the time for Republicans to insist that they haven’t “seen the latest tweet.” This is where they either will or will not give Trump the boost that he needs weeks before the election. Now, more than ever, they are either with him or against him. “This,” Senator Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, a Democrat, said on CNN last night, “is my colleagues’ moment of reckoning.”

...Senator Joni Ernst, in a tight reelection race in Iowa, said in July that she would support a nomination process if an opening occurred. But that puts her at odds with her fellow Iowa senator, Chuck Grassley, who said in August that he couldn’t support a confirmation in an election year if he was going to be consistent with the position he took in 2016. He stood then with McConnell’s adamant refusal to give Merrick Garland a hearing after Antonin Scalia’s sudden death in 2016, though Garland was nominated nine months before Election Day. Of course, the question becomes whether Grassley will hold to his position now that the question is no longer theoretical.

...Late yesterday, I asked a former Republican House member what an anti-Trump Republican senator would do when facing a choice that sounds more out of a novel than anything Goethe might have come up with if he’d ever wandered around Capitol Hill.

“The Republican senator,” said the person, who requested anonymity to speak directly about old colleagues, “will do what they must in the name of self-preservation.”

“Guess what?” the former House member said of Graham. “He’s going to do it. You know he is. He’s up for reelection in South Carolina. He needs his base. He’ll flip on this.”

McConnell, in his Rube Goldberg–machine statement explaining why Trump’s nominee will get a vote on the floor of the Senate but Obama’s didn’t, left the door open to having a vote in a potential lame-duck session after the election.

Maybe it’ll all come down to Senator Mitt Romney, who is publicly offended by pretty much everything Trump stands for but whose spokesperson shot down rumors last night that he would oppose a confirmation before the election. Or maybe, if Mark Kelly wins his Senate race in Arizona, it will all hinge on a legal dispute over whether he would get to immediately be sworn into the seat because his opponent was appointed to it. Or maybe by then we’ll be in a country where the November 3 votes are taking weeks to count, rioters and militias are out on the streets, and, as in 2000, the election will head to the Supreme Court, which now is without a tiebreaker vote.

In 2016, from the minute he learned of Scalia’s death, Obama knew that Republicans would try to prevent him from appointing a justice and flipping the balance to a 5–4 liberal majority. He nominated Garland anyway and threw himself into the fight, daring the GOP senators to oppose a middle-of-the-road, accomplished judge whom so many had voted for in his confirmation to a lower court. Working the phones for a few senators he dreamed might buck McConnell, he pleaded with them: Don’t do this.

I remember speaking with one of the Republican senators struggling with breaking the process then. The senator, though torn, ultimately did not say anything publicly, and didn’t invite Garland in for a meeting.

Last night, Obama closed his statement mourning Ginsburg with, “As votes are already being cast in this election, Republican senators are now called to apply that standard.” Don’t hold a confirmation hearing, he said. Always an institutionalist with his eye toward history, Obama was admitting that the process breakers had won.

Now the question is, what else will Trump, the ultimate process breaker, win?

David Frum offered up 4 reasons to doubt McConnell’s power. He asked himself 4 questions:

• Does McConnell really command a Senate majority?

The polls do not favor Susan Collins, Cory Gardner, or Thom Tillis--senators from Maine, Colorado, and North Carolina up for reelection this cycle. Yet these competitors may not be ready to attend their own funerals. They may regard voting against McConnell's Court grab as a heaven-sent chance to prove their independence from an unpopular president-- and to thereby save their own seats... (Martha McSally of Arizona, however, is likely a safe vote for McConnell. The deadest of the Senate's dead ducks surely must be focused on retaining national Republican support for her post-Senate career. Mitt Romney of Utah is a more open question: His strong sense of fairness will push him against confirmation; his consistent support for conservative judges will pull him in favor.)

• Does McConnell really have a nominee to advance?

Any last-minute Trump nominee will face a gantlet of opposition in the Senate, a firestorm of opposition in the country, and probably a lifetime of suspicion from the majority of the country.

Can McConnell and Trump find an appointee willing to risk all that for the chance-- but not the guarantee-- of a Supreme Court seat? Specifically, can they find a woman willing to do it? The optics of replacing Ginsburg with a man may be too ugly even for the Trump administration. And if they can find a woman, can they find a woman sufficiently moderate-seeming to provide cover to anxious senators? The task may prove harder than immediately assumed.

• Will Trump balk?

Until now, judicial-nomination fights have mobilized Republicans and conservatives more than Democrats and liberals. The fight McConnell proposes may upset that pattern. Trump's hopes for reelection depend on suppressing votes and discouraging participation. The last thing he needs is a highly dramatic battle that could mobilize Democrats in states including Arizona and North Carolina-- even Georgia and Texas.

The smart play for Trump is to postpone the nomination to reduce the risk of Democratic mobilization, and to warn Republicans of the risks should he lose. Trump’s people do not usually execute the smart play. They are often the victims of the hyper-ideological media they consume, which deceive them about what actually is the smart play. This time, though, they may just be desperate enough to break long-standing pattern and try something different.

• Will the conservative legal establishment play ball?

The judicial status quo enormously favors conservatives. Even should Democrats win big in November, it will take many years for them to catch up to the huge Republican lead in judicial appointments. By then, who knows, the GOP may have retaken the Senate, and of course it may well find a way to hold on in 2020.

But a last-minute overreach by McConnell could seem so illegitimate to Democrats as to justify radical countermoves should they win in November: increasing the number of appellate judges and Supreme Court justices; conceivably even opening impeachment hearings against Justice Brett Kavanaugh.

McConnell may want the win badly enough to dismiss those risks. But many conservative-leaning lawyers in the country may be more cautious. And their voices will get a hearing in a contentious nomination fight-- not only by the national media, but by some of the less Trump-y Republican senators. This could be enough to slow down a process that has no time to spare.

Mitch McConnell has gotten his way so often that it’s hard to imagine he might ever lose. But the political balance of power is shifting this fall, and for once, McConnell may be on the wrong side of a power dynamic.

You Know How Biden Is Better Than Trump? That's Pretty Much How Jaime Harrison Is Better Than Lindsey Graham

In 2016 Trump carried South Carolina 1,143,611 (54.9%) to 849,469 (40.8%). He won all but 15 of the state's 46 counties. One of the ones Trump lost was Charleston County, the second biggest in the state. Two years later Charlestown elected, albeit narrowly (50.7- 49.3%), a quasi-Democrat, Blue Dog, Joe Cunningham, to Congress. Is South Carolina changing-- enough to elect a Democrat-- a Black Democrat-- to the Senate? Earlier this year, no one thought so. Now-- despite the heavily-populated northwest part of the state, around Greenville, being a fascist-oriented hellhole-- it's looking like there's a slight possibility that Jaime Harrison could replace Lindsey Graham in the Senate. Imagine that!

I noticed that in the CIVIQS poll a few days ago, Trump job approval was barely positive. 49% of South Carolina voters approve of the job he's doing and 48% disapprove. More telling, the new poll of South Carolina voters has Harrison tied with Graham 44-44%. Harrison is leading among self-identified independents 47-37%.

Journalist Lisa Rab took a deep dive into the race for Politico yesterday. She wrote that "College-educated moderates and self-described independents have turned on Trump and their anger is threatening the reelection prospects of one of the president’s most prominent surrogates. 'I’m not gonna vote for any Republican who doesn’t disassociate himself or herself from the Trump political school,' said Andy Savage, a prominent Charleston attorney and moderate who has donated to Graham’s campaigns since at least 2004. Normally, this anger might not be particularly worrisome for Graham. He won reelection in 2014 by a margin of more than 15 percentage points, and he hasn’t had a credible Democratic challenger since he was first elected 18 years ago. But that is not the case this year. The anger at Trump comes at a moment when Graham is facing his most serious opponent yet: an exceptionally well-funded, politically connected, centrist Democrat who is forcing election observers to wonder if South Carolina might, improbably, be in play."

As of their last reports, Graham had raised $29,941,512 and Harrison had raised $28,641,476. Maybe a more important number is 102,130-- the number of South Carolinians who have been confirmed to have COVID-19, which is a staggering 19,836 cases per South Carolinian. Their were 971 more cases announced yesterday-- and well as 49 new deaths, bringing the total deaths to 2,098. Greenville, the heart of Trump country, has had the most deaths-- 198 and rising. South Carolinians who are not part of the GOP death cult are starting to blame Trump and his puppet governor, Henry McMaster.





Harrison has a nice resumé-- at least if you choose to view it positively. He's the first African American chair of the South Carolina Democratic Party and now associate chair of the Democratic National Committee. He worked as a lobbyist for the Podesta Group, one of the top lobbying firms in DC. His clients included a roster of some of America's best-known companies-- Bank of America, Wells Fargo, Berkshire Hathaway and Avenue Capital Management, pharmaceutical companies Merck, gambling giants Caesars and Harrah's, the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity, Walmart, General Motors, Google, and Lockheed Martin. In the past, he has defended his choice of careers and clients by saying "It's how I pay back the $160,000 of student loan debt." It's better than other career options, I guess. Yesterday, I asked someone close with him how he defends himself from Graham attacks along those lines now-- a lobbyist being the most hated category of professions year after year in Gallup polling? The best I could get was "After 25 years in Washington, Lindsey Graham has changed so much he'll attack a South Carolinian who has lived the American Dream. Graham puts himself first, playing Washington political games, spending special interest dollars on luxury travel overseas, and voting to keep lobbyist funded perks for himself." Sounds like it was focus group-tested.

I also asked the same person what Harrison's campaign says when Graham accuses him of being Chuck Schumer's handpicked candidate. "Jaime Harrison," he told me, "chose to run to put South Carolina first. He grew up poor in Orangeburg and knows what it's like to struggle and the pitfalls of the current system.Jaime is running to fight for opportunity for all South Carolinians, and he’s willing to work with anyone to do it." I guess that works-- as long as there's no follow-up question. Besides, the GOP line this year is that every Democrat is a socialist and best friends with Pelosi and AOC and Bernie. Normal people laugh that off-- and nothing is going to persuade brainwashed Fox viewers otherwise.

Ran wrote that "Donors and political experts agree Harrison’s path to victory is a narrow one. 'If Graham’s fortunes are closely tied to Trump’s ... then, for Graham to lose, you either have to predict a Trump loss in South Carolina (which would precipitate a Graham loss) or a situation in which Trump wins in South Carolina and many Trump supporters either vote against Graham, or don’t vote in the Senate race,' Scott Huffmon, political science professor and executive director of the Center for Public Opinion & Policy Research at Winthrop University, said in an email. FiveThirtyEight’s average of polls now puts Trump ahead of Joe Biden by 6.4 percent in South Carolina-- half the lead the president held in February before the coronavirus pandemic tanked the nation’s economy. Yet even if Graham’s popularity continues to decline with Trump’s, Harrison still has to convince some crucial constituencies, including wary Black voters conditioned to believe that Democrats have no real chance in South Carolina, that he is the exception. Add to that the challenges of campaigning during a pandemic and Harrison’s path seems especially daunting. But his sizable war chest-- including $10.2 million cash on hand at the end of June-- has the potential to alter the race with a barrage of advertisements that few Democrats have ever been able to afford."

A memo released by Harrison’s campaign in early February laid out a clear, if ambitious, path to victory. He planned to register a quarter of eligible African Americans, mobilize “new and inconsistent” voters of color and “persuade white suburban voters who are already moving away from Republicans.” Harrison was also counting on some Republicans to abandon Graham for more conservative candidates. About 6.6 percent of voters chose Libertarian or independent candidates over Graham six years ago, and there are similar candidates on the ballot this year who could help Harrison’s cause.

...The question remains whether Harrison can turn the anger at Graham into votes for him. That will mean flipping independents and moderates who have historically had no trouble voting for a Main Street conservative who worked across the aisle on issues like immigration and climate change.

Andy Savage, who leans Democrat but has donated to candidates in both parties, said he supported Graham from his first election because “I just thought he was a really good person. I still think the world of him, I just don’t understand what’s happened to him.”

His disillusionment began with Graham’s “disgraceful” treatment of John McCain. As McCain was dying, Graham went golfing with Trump, whom McCain hated and later forbade from attending his funeral. Trump continued to attack McCain after his death, and Graham, who had once called Trump a “kook” and a “bigot,” was criticized for not defending his friend forcefully enough. “I’m not into this idea the only way you can help honor John McCain is to trash out Trump,” Graham told CNN in March 2019.

Savage didn’t see it that way. “[Graham] promoted that friendship politically, and then to really just turn his back on him after he died-- that didn’t go well with me,” he said. Then he watched Graham explode in anger at the Kavanaugh hearings and take a “strong right-hand turn that’s hard to explain.” It would be one thing if Graham’s allegiance to Trump had translated into some kind of benefit for South Carolina, Savage said, but “I don’t see that. All I see is something for him.”

“It’s sort of an insult to all of us who supported him,” Savage said. “We thought that he was such a good, moderate leader of the country.” Now Savage has donated $2,200 to Harrison, whom he calls a “cheerleader for those who have been left out.”

Johnny Hagins, a Greenville attorney and former state legislator, served on Graham’s finance committee when he ran for president in 2016. He’s a moderate Republican who finds Trump “repugnant” but is not sure whether he’ll vote for Graham this year. “What bothers me about him is his support of Trump,” Hagins said. “On the other hand, if we want our way about something, it’s good to have him.”

...Hagins is certain the women in his family won’t vote for Graham. Like a lot of women, Republicans included, they were turned off by his behavior at the Kavanaugh hearings. Hagins’ wife, Priscilla, has already donated $200 to Harrison’s campaign.

The State newspaper in Columbia has identified at least 24 South Carolina donors who have defected from Graham to Harrison. The most prominent among them is [Richard] Wilkerson, the former Michelin North America CEO who met Harrison during his lobbying days. In an op-ed in the Greenville News, Wilkerson explained that he supported Graham until 2017 because he saw him as “a moderate Republican who could work across the aisle to get positive change made.” But Graham’s perceived failure to defend McCain angered Wilkerson, as did his support for Trump’s 2017 tax bill, which “disproportionately favored those who are financially well off.” Finally, he disagreed with Graham’s attempts to delay the March coronavirus relief package because he felt the unemployment benefits were too generous. “Apparently, he feels that it is OK to share government dollars with those who don’t truly need the money but deny any small windfall to working people who have lost their jobs,” Wilkerson wrote.

In recent months, Harrison has picked up on this theme, emphasizing the impact Covid-19 has had on his state’s most vulnerable citizens. He often cites a Washington Post analysis, which found that South Carolina’s businesses received the smallest Paycheck Protection Program loans per worker of any state in the nation. He points out that most Black businesses haven’t received those loans, and, as of late June, 160,000 households with school-age children didn’t have access to the internet, according to the South Carolina Department of Education. In late July, Harrison held a news conference calling for virtual schooling to be an option for all students and for the Republican governor, Henry McMaster, to issue a mask mandate. He also criticized Graham for opposing the extension of unemployment benefits under the CARES Act, the $2.2 trillion economic stimulus bill passed in March to address the impact of coronavirus on the economy. “We're gonna constantly remind people that he hasn’t done anything,” Harrison told me. “I have never seen such a dereliction of duty in my life.”

...Harrison’s policy stances generally avoid the far left. He has not advocated to defund the police or apologized for his work as a lobbyist. His platform on health care—in favor of expanding Medicaid and protecting rural hospitals, but against a completely government-run health care system—is in line with the national party and Biden. Harrison tweeted his support for "Medicare for All" in February 2019, but later explained he supports a public option, alongside government insurance. Still, he’s too liberal for Graham’s taste. Arrighi calls the closure of rural hospitals “one of the many negative legacies of Obamacare,” and says Medicaid expansion is a decision made by state leaders, not senators. Arrighi also pointed out that Harrison has accepted campaign donations from MoveOn.org, which has petitions on its website advocating to defund the police. “Sen. Graham has made it crystal-clear that defunding the police is insane,” Arrighi said.

As protests over the killing of George Floyd convulsed the nation, Harrison published an op-ed in The Root that cast the struggle for racial justice as deeply personal rather than political. He talked about his grandmother watching the KKK march through her neighborhood, and the murder of his friend, state Senator Clementa Pinckney, during a racist church massacre five years ago. Above all, he worried about his young sons. The thought of having “the talk” about police brutality with them “rips my heart out,” he told me later. Yet the policy proposals in his op-ed were hardly revolutionary: “toughen hate crime legislation, end private prisons and cash bail, and train law enforcement officials on implicit bias.”

This middle-of-the-road platform helps Harrison court moderate voters. Quattlebaum said he appreciates Harrison’s humble roots, his support for the military and his emphasis on improving infrastructure in South Carolina. “I don't think he’s so left wing,” he said. “There’s not anything from a policy perspective that makes me think there’s no way I can support that.”

And nowhere in the Politico story-- let alone in Harrison's campaign-- is there a hint that Lindsey Graham is a deceitful and severely conflicted closet case, something that is universally known in DC and fairly well-known in South Carolina. I can't imagine Harrison's ultra-generic, campaign-in-a-box would get anywhere near it. It would be smart of them, though to drive a wedge between Graham and Republican voters in other ways. This kind of thing would be helpful for them to emphasize:

"What's Not To Like?" Lindsey Graham And I Agree On Something-- But Not The Crazy Way He Interprets It

Yesterday Lindsey Graham told an NBC News reporter, Frank Thorp, that "Biden has had a lot of personal tragedy, so I will never say a bad word about Joe Biden as a person, I just don’t think he’s the right guy to be president. He’s, in my view, a figurehead of the most radical movement in American history that’s coming from AOC and that crowd. And so my differences with Joe Biden are political, and they’re real, they’re wide and they’re deep, but he’s a fine man."

OK, I agree that Biden isn't "the right guy to be president." But compared to Trump? Ole Lindsey-- at least publicly-- and I would part company there. But the part that Graham got right-- partially right-- was this:

He’s, in my view, a figurehead of the most radical movement in American history that’s coming from AOC and that crowd.

The part that was right was this:

He’s, in my view, a figurehead

The rest of it was absurd. Biden is a figurehead for the Democratic half of the status quo establishment, from Obama right on down. "AOC and that crowd?" Not even close. In fact, Biden is closer to establishment conservative Republicans, like Lindsey Graham, than he is to "AOC and that crowd."

Maybe I'm wrong? Well, maybe. We'll know I'm wrong if he picks Elizabeth Warren as a running mate, in my mind a virtual impossibility. She's a progressive; he's a conservative. She wants to do big bold structural reforms. He wants "President of the United States" on his tomb stone. He's-- and what I mean is the group he fronts for-- will probably pick a conservative candidate more like himself. He trapped himself into picking a woman so he's on somewhat uncomfortable ground, but Susan Rice would work just fine for him. The worst possible candidate-- actually putrid-- that he's considering is Wall Street troll Gina Raimondo, governor of Rhode Island but I don't think even Biden, Inc is that stupid. Tammy Duckworth would work fine for him and maybe Kamala Harris.

I bet Lindsey Graham would much rather see Biden win than Trump. And I bet he'll vote for him too. Meanwhile, his state is spiking like mad and the pandemic is totally out of control there. Today little South Carolina was in the top 10 of states with the most new cases-- 1,856, which brought their total to 62,245-- 12,089 per million South Carolinians... which is considerably worse than California (8,910), Texas (10,183) and North Carolina (8,702).