Personality cults and the political dynasties that come in their wake have a way of entwining all politics into familial politics. Policy and political disputes get played out through familial and entourage factions and those family and entourage dynamics in turn shape the politics. These amount to court factions, many woven into Trump’s immediately family, each seemingly with their own MAGA-themed super PAC and associated money gravy trains. Politico’s Playbook newsletter this morning reports that Guilfoyle is on the outs with Trump, who finds her increasingly “annoying.” The tension is centered on the fact that Guilfoyle has signed on with disgraced former Governor Eric Greitens of Missouri in his comeback bid to run for the Senate seat left vacant by the retiring Roy Blunt.
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) warned his colleagues on Friday that their beloved August recess may be in flux if they are unable to tackle his ambitious agenda in time.
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We got two key announcements yesterday in the on-going story of mRNA vaccine efficacy and the Delta variant.
Pfizer announced that it plans to seek regulatory approval in August for a COVID vaccine booster shot. A very preliminary trial (a couple dozen people) provided such clear evidence of increased efficacy from a booster shot that the company said it’s highly confident of what a more extensive trial will show. Specifically the announcement reported “high neutralization titers against the wild type and the Beta variant, which are 5 to 10 times higher than after two primary doses.”
I’ve struggled a bit with the vocabulary here. “Analog” doesn’t quite capture it. But it’s close. A couple decades ago I might have used the word “meme”. But with the rise of the Internet that word has now taken on a very particular meaning which is distinct from what I’m talking about. For me, and I suspect for you, there are certain movies – perhaps also TV shows or novels – which contain certain iconic or resonant moments that not only stick with us but then provide analogs which shape our understanding of real life moments. They also allow us to communicate our perceptions of those moments to others through this visual or analogic shorthand.
There’s a lot going on in that sentence so let me provide an example. For me one of those movies is The Godfather (really the whole trilogy). There’s Michael telling Sen. Geary his offer is “nothing.” There’s Vito Corleone dressing down the undertaker Amerigo Bonasera and then accepting his offer of “friendship.” Particularly Godfather I and II have countless exchanges and plot twists like this. They are mostly about the economy of power and how it interacts with friendship and loyalty.
Good breakdown here of how the Ashli Babbitt martyr narrative migrated from neo-Nazi and white supremacist websites to far right members of Congress and finally to Trump’s mouth.
A new episode of The Josh Marshall Podcast is now live! This week, Josh and Kate discuss where things stand on the six-month anniversary of the January 6 insurrection.
Watch below and email us your theme song submissions and questions for next week’s episode.
You can listen to the new episode of The Josh Marshall Podcast here.
When did Lucy and Charlie Brown and the football become a staple of political speech and analogies? Kate Riga dug into the story.
They just don’t want to admit it.
It’s not as if you couldn’t speculate — we now know House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) blamed Trump for the insurrection the night it happened, only to crawl back to Trump’s side for the midterms. Several other prominent Republican leaders have taken similar about-face paths since January.
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We’ve been noting how not only the Big Lie but also the January 6th insurrection are likely to be at the center of the 2022 midterm election campaign, in large part because Donald Trump is insisting that it be so. As leader of the Republican party he can do that. Except for a two or three day period after the insurrection itself, Republicans have wanted to move on from, cover up or simply ignore what happened on January 6th. We’ve seen this in the almost unanimous resistance to impeaching and convicting the President over the event itself and resistance to any subsequent commissions or investigative committees. But as Trump moves back into public campaign mode, as I’ve noted, he’s pressing for much more: vindication and freedom for the insurrectionists and valorization of the purported ‘martyr’ Ashli Babbitt. We got a clear indication this morning of how some of the most eager candidates are falling into line.
I want to make sure you see this piece by Josh Kovensky on the precise details of the moments that led up to Ashli Babbitt’s death. We’ve discussed and most of us know the general story. But the details are key. One notable point is that Babbitt’s death was a turning point, not just in retrospect but in the moment as well. It basically took the wind out of many or most of the insurrectionists.