Editors’ Blog

We have another pretty sobering general election poll out. This one is from the Journal. Toplines are 46% to 46% horse race number, widespread misgivings about Biden’s age. In general, as you’d expect, Trump’s supporters and potential supporters are basically 100% united behind him whereas Biden’s are far less so. Among the poll respondents actually interviewed for the article are two independents who voted for Biden in 2020 to get Trump out of office. One is considering writing someone else’s name in; another is considering voting for Cornell West.

Where to start? Dan Friedman and David Corn have a piece up this morning at Mother Jones detailing a whistleblower complaint from an FBI agent, Johnathan Buma, who says he was stopped from investigating whether Giuliani was “compromised” by Russian intelligence when he was on his various “dirt” safaris marching through Ukraine and other post-Soviet states trying to drum up dirt on the Bidens to sabotage the 2020 presidential election. Friedman and Corn say other stymied agents may soon be coming forward as well.

A new episode of The Josh Marshall Podcast is live! This week, Josh and Kate discuss the latest in the Jan. 6 and Georgia indictments, along with Republicans’ eleventh-hour gambit to sink an abortion amendment in Ohio.

You can listen to the new episode of The Josh Marshall Podcast here.

This is an interesting development. In a press conference today, Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp shot down pretty much all the talk in the state legislature about punishing Fulton County DA Fani Willis for indicting ex-President Trump and his various associates. I think some publications have been overplaying the odds of something like this happening. But far right members of the state legislature have been pushing hard for either removing Willis from office or defunding her office or in other ways punishing her. Rabble rousing Sen. Colton Moore, an antic, Trump-fluffing weirdo basically threatened violence if his demands aren’t heeded. And the AJC reports at least five state senators have told the paper they have received threats from Trump supporters for not heeding Moore’s demands.

Kemp basically shot it all down. No impeaching, no defunding, nothing.

“The bottom line is that in the state of Georgia as long as I’m governor, we’re going to follow the law and the Constitution, regardless of who it helps and harms politically. Over the last few years, some inside and outside of this building may have forgotten that. But I can assure you that I have not.”

This morning Axios leads with an “Exclusive”: “Donors fret over Scott’s single status.” As they look for the best challenger to the supremacy of Donald Trump, top GOP donors have been skittish about ponying up big money for South Carolina Senator Tim Scott because the 57 year old South Carolina Senator is unmarried. Back in May Scott told an on-stage interviewer he had a girlfriend but didn’t name her. The story says that the Scott campaign’s discussion of the issue has been “vague” while making clear that, at least according to one source, even if many donors have concerns it’s definitely not a majority of them.

This is simply an odd story on many levels. It feels a tad archaic to put it mildly. As Scott himself put during that May interview with Axios, “it sounds like we’re living in 1963 and not 2023.”

The Scott campaign says it will be addressing the issue in the coming weeks.

This morning while reading your emails I got this question from TPM Reader EG: “How has your experience of politics in this country over the last six years changed your understanding of this country?  Do you sense a secular before and after that we are transitioning to?”

That’s a very big question and I don’t know what my answer is. But I do have a few observations to share, which maybe are part of an evolving answer.

First a few preliminaries.

Implicit in this question, I think, is one of national decline. Basically, are we moving into a new reality in which things are getting worse, in which the American democratic order is under permanent threat or even on the way out. I don’t think everyone’s a pessimist. But it’s hard for me to imagine many people asking this particular question in the present national context and meaning, “Don’t we seem to be entering a new age in which everything or most things will be more awesome than they were previously?”

In a political world where florid and manic are the emotional baselines it’s hard to imagine anything more boring than whether former Rep. Mike Rogers (R) is running for Senate in Michigan. But a lot turns on these fairly prosaic questions. Rogers is expected to announce shortly that he’s running for the seat opened up by the retirement of Sen. Debbie Stabenow. His likely opponent is Rep. Elissa Slotkin (D). Since leaving office on the cusp of the Trump era in 2015, Rogers been a CNN commentator. He was the House Intelligence Committee Chair before it was taken over by the notorious Devin Nunes.

Reminder: You can still find Where Things Stand on TPM’s homepage every week night, it’s just moved out of the editors blog and into the feature well. Here’s tonight’s edition.

This morning we’re covering a key hearing in the prosecution of Donald Trump, an important moment for the future of the country as well as the 2024 election. I also try to devote time to making sense of or simply identifying the big trends driving global history today. One which has fascinated me for years is the relative eclipse of state power in the favor of private corporations and individuals who in various ways act with the power we associate with states or become so powerful that they put themselves significantly beyond the power of states to control.

By landing on March 4, 2024, Judge Chutkan set Trump’s trial date two YEARS earlier than Donald Trump wanted.