On Tuesday morning, former President Donald Trump used his “Truth Social” platform to reveal that he had received a target letter from Special Counsel Jack Smith as part of the federal investigation into the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol and attempts to overturn the 2020 election. In the hour before he broke that news, Trump went on a posting spree and shared six messages from the pseudonymous right-wing influencer “Catturd2” including some that suggested the Republican Party should work to remove Attorney General Merrick Garland for his efforts to investigate Trump.
“The Republican Party must fight fire with fire, and right now, or it will be extinguished!!!” Trump wrote as he shared a lengthy post in which “Catturd2” blasted the GOP for being “too chicken shit to impeach” and described the FBI as “the secret police for the Dem party.”
“The Republican Party = spineless, worthless, good-for-nothing cowards,” Catturd2 declared in the message shared by the former president.
In another pair of Truth Social posts, the former president called Smith’s investigation “VERY UNFAIR!” and a “WITCH HUNT” that is “ALL ABOUT ELECTION INTERFERENCE.” Trump, who is running for re-election against President Joe Biden and a slate of Republican primary opponents, is currently embroiled in extensive legal drama related to his past attempts to win power, to maintain it, and to his handling of classified materials. In April, Trump was indicted by the Manhattan district attorney for charges related to alleged hush money payments made to adult entertainer Stormy Daniels during the 2016 campaign. Last month, Trump was indicted in Florida for the way in which he allegedly stored, and refused to hand over, secret documents after leaving the White House. Trump has pleaded not guilty in both of those cases.
A target letter like the one Smith sent Trump typically indicates an imminent indictment. Spokespeople for the special counsel and Trump did not respond to questions about the potential charges detailed in the target letter. Along with the potential of charges from the special counsel, Trump is widely expected to be indicted by Fani Willis, the district attorney of Fulton County, Georgia, as part of her office’s own investigation into the extensive efforts to overturn his 2020 loss in that state.
The growing pile of indictments against Trump is utterly unprecedented. He is the first president — former or current — to be charged with criminal activity.
Trump has made a habit of responding to developments in these various cases with a slew of posts on Truth, which he helped launch after he and other right-wing figures were banned from mainstream social media platforms in the wake of the January 6 attack. “Catturd2” is a vocal defender of Trump who has amassed over a million followers on the site and more than 1.8 million followers on Twitter with a blend of folksy hyperpartisanship, conspiracy theories, and crude scatological humor. The account, which Rolling Stone identified as being administered by a Florida man, has been turned into something of a mini MAGA media empire with a store selling merch and even “a Catturd novel” with a “sci-fi” plot featuring a protagonist who has committed what they believe to be a righteous terror attack. Despite some of the extremism and, frankly, utter weirdness coming from the account, it has managed to interact with major right-wing figures including Trump, Tucker Carlson, and Elon Musk.
Five minutes after his Truth post sharing Catturd’s message calling for Garland’s impeachment, Trump amplified it a second time.
“The Republican Party must get tough, now. This is the strong sentiment that’s flowing through the veins of Patriots. DO SOMETHING!!!” Trump wrote.
Trump evidently hung out on Catturd’s page after twice sharing the post calling for Garland’s impeachment. Within the next forty minutes, Trump amplified four more of Catturd’s posts without adding comment. One of the posts was a collage that showed the White House among what Catturd described as “pictures of crack houses” in an apparent reference to the Hunter Biden scandal and the cocaine recently found in the West Wing.
The former president then shared three posts from Catturd that alluded to Trump’s overwhelming frontrunner status in the 2024 Republican presidential primary. Those messages made clear why Trump might enjoy the account so much. In Catturd’s world, the power Trump has been accused of illegally refusing to relinquish is never, ever called into question.
“Let’s face it, the primary is over,” Catturd wrote in one of the posts shared by the former president, adding, “Trump 2024.”
“Turd 2? Please hold for Turd 1.”
I’d like more extensive reporting on No Labels and their insidious funding and big name advocates.
Might be scraping the bottom of the litter tray there.
In case anyone is interested, below is an article about the weather.
After officially beginning his presidential campaign, Ron DeSantis was asked about climate change. He brushed the issue aside: “I’ve always rejected the politicization of the weather.”
But we absolutely should politicize the weather. In practice, environmental policy probably won’t be a central issue in the 2024 campaign, which will mainly turn on the economy and social issues. Still, we’re living in a time of accelerating climate-related disasters, and the environmental extremism of the Republican Party — it is more hostile to climate action than any other major political party in the advanced world — would, in a more rational political debate, be the biggest election issue of them all.
First, the environmental background: We’re only halfway through 2023, yet we’ve already seen multiple weather events that would have been shocking not long ago. Globally, last month was the hottest June on record. Unprecedented heat waves have been striking one region of the world after another: South Asia and the Middle East experienced a life-threatening heat wave in May; Europe is now going through its second catastrophic heat wave in a short period of time; China is experiencing its highest temperatures on record; and much of the southern United States has been suffering from dangerous levels of heat for weeks, with no end in sight.
Residents of Florida might be tempted to take a cooling dip in the ocean — but ocean temperatures off South Florida have come close to 100 degrees, not much below the temperature in a hot tub.
And while the rest of America hasn’t gotten that hot, everyone in the Northeast remembers the way smoke from Canadian wildfires led to days of dangerously bad air quality and orange skies.
But extreme weather events have always been with us. Can we prove that climate change caused any particular disaster? Not exactly. But the burgeoning field of “extreme event attribution” comes close. Climate models say that certain kinds of extreme weather events become more likely on a warming planet — for example, what used to be a heat wave we’d experience on average only once every few decades becomes an almost annual occurrence. Event attribution compares the odds of experiencing an extreme event given global warming with the odds that the same event would have happened without climate change.
Incidentally, I’d argue that extreme event attribution gains credibility from the fact that it doesn’t always tell the same story, that sometimes it says that climate change wasn’t the culprit. For example, preliminary analyses suggest that climate change played a limited role in the extreme flooding that recently struck northeastern Italy.
That was, however, the exception that proves the rule. In general, attribution analysis shows that global warming made the disasters of recent years much more likely. We don’t yet have estimates for the latest, still ongoing series of disasters, but it seems safe to say that this global concatenation of extreme weather events would have been virtually impossible without climate change. And this is almost surely just the leading edge of the crisis, a small foretaste of the many disasters to come.
Which brings me back to the “politicization of the weather.” Worrying about the climate crisis shouldn’t be a partisan issue. But it is, at least in this country. As of last year, only 22 percent of Americans who considered themselves to be on the political right considered climate change a major threat; the left-right gap here was far larger than it was in other countries. And only in America do you see things like Texas Republicans actively trying to undermine their own state’s booming renewable energy sector.
The remarkable thing about climate denial is that the arguments haven’t changed at all over the years: Climate change isn’t happening; OK, it’s happening, but it’s not such a bad thing; besides, doing anything about it would be an economic disaster.
And none of these arguments are ever abandoned in the face of evidence. The next time there’s a cold spell somewhere in America, the usual suspects will once again assert that climate change is a hoax. Spectacular technological progress in renewable energy, which now makes the path to greatly reduced emissions look easier than even optimists imagined, hasn’t stopped claims that the costs of the Biden administration’s climate policy will be unsupportable.
So we shouldn’t expect record heat waves around the globe to end assertions that climate change, even if it’s happening, is no big deal. Nor should we expect Republicans to soften their opposition to climate action, no matter what is happening in the world.
What this means is that if the G.O.P. wins control of the White House and Congress next year, it will almost surely try to dismantle the array of green energy subsidies enacted by the Biden administration that experts believe will lead to a major reduction in emissions.
Like it or not, then, the weather is a political issue. And Americans should be aware that it’s one of the most important issues they’ll be voting on next November.