Very good points from TPM Reader RS …
Continue reading “Trump’s No Stranger to Felonies”I respect the cemetery employee’s unfortunately-at-this-point-entirely-reasonable decision not to “press charges” in light of the potential for retaliation. But let’s not sugarcoat it: assaulting a federal employee in the performance of her duties is a felony (18 USC 111), full stop.
The Army issued an extremely rare rebuke of the Trump campaign on Thursday, saying that it was warned not to turn a visit to Arlington National Cemetery into a political event.
Continue reading “Army: Thousands of Events Are Held at Arlington. Only Trump Caused an Incident.”A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM’s Morning Memo. Sign up for the email version.
The fascist overtones from the Arlington National Cemetery incident are unmistakeable: a presidential campaign run like a gang, with enforcers shoving aside a public servant enforcing the rules and a mob of millions of supporters with a track record of doxxing, harassing, intimidating, and threatening anyone who gets in their candidate’s way, all the while being egged on by the candidate himself.
You can’t blame the cemetery official for declining to press charges rather than put herself in the line of fire for continued and unending abuse. She didn’t sign up for that. She’s already been baselessly accused by the Trump campaign of having a “mental health episode,” being “despicable” and a “disgrace,” and not deserving to have her job. That all happened within the first 48 hours of the apparent confrontation at the national shrine to fallen service members.
But what about the Army? It oversees Arlington National Cemetery and is a victim of Trump’s bullying, too, so I hesitate to blame it for its predicament. But some of the reporting suggests the staffer on the ground was effectively if inadvertently set up by higher-ups who themselves wanted to avoid a confrontation with Trump. According to the WaPo:
Pentagon officials were deeply concerned about the former president turning the visit into a campaign stop, but they also didn’t want to block him from coming, according to Defense Department officials and internal messages reviewed by The Washington Post.
Officials said they wanted to respect the wishes of grieving family members who wanted Trump there, but at the same time were wary of Trump’s record of politicizing the military. So they laid out ground rules they hoped would wall off politics from the final resting place of those who paid the ultimate sacrifice for their nation.
Rather than mount a full-throated defense and take any kind of remedial action, the Army has closed the matter after the cemetery official declined to press charges. But the fecklessness doesn’t end there. This paragraph in the NYT is an all-timer for weak-kneed kowtowing to a bully:
Several Army officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss confidential aspects of the matter, on Wednesday sought to keep the politically charged issue from escalating. But at the same time, they defended the cemetery official and pushed back on attacks from the Trump campaign, with one official saying that the woman at the cemetery was just trying to do her job.
Officials purporting to defend their person on the ground by offering some “push back” on the Trump campaign attack, but doing so anonymously while trying to keep it from “escalating.” Escalating into what? You’ve already been run over, so that leaves the only obvious conclusion: The Army itself is trying to avoid being the target of MAGA attacks. This is untenable acquiescence to bullying.
Is that really going to be the end of the story? No consequences, no new measures to enjoin Trump from doing the same thing again at Arlington or another military cemetery, no price to pay for his thuggery. It’s a familiar pattern.
The erosion of any kind of strong, unified, national, countervailing force to Trump’s public bullying and nastiness only enables and emboldens the thuggery that is central to his appeal and that he has already notoriously used on Jan. 6 to try to retain power.
If you don’t think a Trump win in November will unleash a reign of thuggery against anyone who stands in his way – not just political foes but innocent bystanders and regular folks just doing their jobs – then I don’t know what else to tell you. He’s doing it right now, he’s promised to do it if he wins, and his minions are poised and eager to follow through.
He’s not a schoolyard bully. He’s a public menace, and if he wins back the White House, he will be a public menace with vast official powers and Supreme Court-sanctioned immunity.
The former president went on a social media bender Wednesday morning:
In total, Trump’s digital deluge contained 50 posts, including 19 written by the former president and a slew of retruths. Much of the content was explicitly conspiratorial and authoritarian.
It included reposting a sexually denigrating meme about Kamala Harris.
The Republican attorney general in Nebraska is stymying a new state law passed on a bipartisan basis to allow felons to resume voting as soon as their sentences are served. Attorney General Mike Hilgers has also called into question the constitutionality of the existing state law on the books since 2005 that allowed felons to vote two years after their sentences are completed.
The Supreme Court declined to remove a temporary pause on the latest Biden administration program to eliminate student loan debt.
AP: “A Democratic former Las Vegas-area politician is guilty of murder and has been sentenced to life in prison with parole eligibility at 20 years for the killing of a journalist who wrote articles critical of his conduct in office, a jury in Nevada ruled Wednesday.”
The U.S. Second Circuit Court of Appeals threw out a 2022 jury verdict in favor of the NYT and ordered a new trial on Sarah Palin’s defamation claims against the newspaper. Palin had sued the NYT over an editorial that falsely accused her campaign of inciting the 2011 shooting of then-Rep. Gabby Giffords (D-AZ).
Your occasional reminder that this toxic, racist, eliminationist propaganda is being aired nationally by a major corporation all the damn time:
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This story of the “incident” at Arlington National Cemetery has blown up pretty dramatically. In case you haven’t heard about it yet or aren’t up to date on the details, let me try to explain what we know.
Three days ago, the Trump campaign held a campaign event at Arlington National Cemetery. The idea was to lay a wreath honoring the 13 members of the U.S. military who were killed during the evacuation of Kabul in 2021 and film a political ad. They would distribute the video and attack Vice President Harris and President Biden for not “showing up” for their campaign event, which they sought to portray was an established memorial. As soon as the video circulated, military policy experts I know said right off the bat they were shocked that the campaign had been allowed to hold a campaign event on the grounds of the cemetery and circulate video of it. It isn’t just unseemly. It’s against the law. How were they allowed to do that?
That turned out to be a good and prescient question.
Continue reading “Trump’s Arlington Cemetery Campaign Event”Late summer 2024 has found Trump almost comically torn between two competing political demands. On one side, you have a conservative movement that has increasingly remade itself in his image, grafting radical, revanchist ideas for a new American “regime” onto Trump’s unique, very personal politics. This movement is given form by Project 2025, an initiative that is housed in the Heritage Foundation but which pulls in policy proposals and authors from across the ecosystem of right-wing think tanks. The Christian nationalists who hope for a national abortion ban and, in some cases, legislation that would put an end to many fertility treatments, also go in this bucket. JD Vance is a kind of spokesperson for this crowd.
Continue reading “Trump Does A Familiar Dance With His Promise Of A SCOTUS Nominee Shortlist”Can you handle his Truths?
After special counsel Jack Smith obtained a new, superseding indictment against Donald Trump for his efforts to undo his loss in the 2020 election, the former president spent much of Wednesday morning firing off a barrage of posts on his Truth Social platform, including extremist memes that were notable even by the standards of the former president’s previous online behavior.
Continue reading “Donald Trump Responds To New Indictment With QAnon-Filled Posting Spree”This article is part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis. It was originally published at The Conversation.
Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump has expressed his intention, if elected to a second term, to use the U.S. armed forces to suppress domestic protests. The New York Times reports that Trump’s allies are marshaling legal arguments to justify using National Guard or active-duty military troops for crowd control.
Moreover, as the Times notes, Trump has asserted that if he returns to the White House, he will dispatch such forces without waiting for state or local officials to request such assistance.
I am a historian who has written several books about the Vietnam War, one of the most divisive episodes in our nation’s past. My new book, “Kent State: An American Tragedy,” examines a historic clash on May 4, 1970, between anti-war protesters and National Guard troops at Kent State University in Ohio.
The confrontation escalated into violence: Troops opened fire on the demonstrators, killing four students and wounding nine others, including one who was paralyzed for life.
In my view, the prospect of dispatching troops in the way that Trump proposes chillingly echoes actions that led up to the Kent State shootings. Some active-duty units, as well as National Guard troops, are trained today to respond to riots and violent protests — but their primary mission is still to fight, kill, and win wars.
The National Guard is a force of state militias under the command of governors. It can be federalized by the president during times of national emergency or for deployment on combat missions overseas. Guardsmen train for one weekend per month and two weeks every summer.
Typically, the Guard has been deployed to deal with natural disasters and support local police responses to urban unrest, such as riots in Detroit in 1967, Washington in 1968, Los Angeles in 1965 and 1992, and Minneapolis and other cities in 2020 after the death of George Floyd.
The 1807 Insurrection Act grants presidents authority to use active-duty troops or National Guard forces to restore order within the United States. However, presidents rarely deploy Guard troops without state governors’ consent.
The main modern exceptions occurred during the Civil Rights Movement, when Southern governors resisted federal orders to desegregate schools in Arkansas, Mississippi and Alabama. In each case, the troops were sent to protect Black students from crowds of white protesters.
The war in Vietnam had grown increasingly unpopular by early 1970, but protests intensified on April 30 when President Richard Nixon authorized expanding the conflict into Cambodia. At Kent State, after a noontime anti-war rally on campus on May 1, alcohol-fueled students harassed passing motorists in town and smashed storefront windows that night. On May 2, anti-war protesters set fire to the building where military officers trained Kent State students enrolled in the armed forces’ Reserve Officer Training Corps program.
In response, Republican Gov. Jim Rhodes dispatched National Guard troops, against the advice of university and many local officials, who understood the mood in the town of Kent and on campus far better than Rhodes did. County prosecutor Ron Kane had vehemently warned Rhodes that deploying the National Guard could spark conflict and lead to fatalities.
Nonetheless, Rhodes — who was trailing in an impending Republican primary for a U.S. Senate seat — struck the pose of a take-charge leader who wasn’t going to be pushed around by a long-haired rabble. “We’re going to put a stop to this!” he shouted, pounding the table at a press conference in Kent on May 3.
Hundreds of National Guard troops were deployed across town and on campus. University officials announced that further rallies were banned. Nonetheless, on May 4, some 2,000 to 3,000 students gathered on the campus Commons for another anti-war rally. They were met by 96 National Guardsmen, led by eight officers.
There was an edge of confrontation in the air as student anger over Nixon’s expansion of the war blended with resentment over the Guard’s presence. Protesters chanted antiwar slogans, shouted epithets at the Guardsmen and made obscene gestures.
The Guardsmen sent to Kent State had no training in de-escalating tension or minimizing the use of force. Nonetheless, their commanding officer that day, Ohio Army National Guard Assistant Adjutant General Robert Canterbury, decided to use them to break up what the Department of Justice later deemed a legal assembly.
In my view, it was a reckless judgment that inflamed an already volatile situation. Students started showering the greatly outnumbered Guardsmen with rocks and other objects. In violation of Ohio Army National Guard regulations, Canterbury neglected to warn the students that the Guardsmens’ rifles were loaded with live ammunition.
As tension mounted, Canterbury failed to adequately supervise his increasingly fearful troops – a cardinal responsibility of the commanding officer on the scene. This fundamental failure of leadership increased confusion and resulted in a breakdown of fire control discipline – officers’ responsibility to maintain tight control over their troops’ discharge of weapons.
When protesters neared the Guardsmen, platoon sergeant Mathew McManus shouted “Fire in the air!” in a desperate attempt to prevent bloodshed. McManus intended for troops to shoot above the students’ heads to warn them off. But some Guardsmen, wearing gas masks that made it hard to hear amid the noise and confusion, only heard or reacted to the first word of McManus’ order, and fired at the students.
The troops had not been trained to fire warning shots, which was contrary to National Guard regulations. And McManus had no authority to issue an order to fire if officers were nearby, as they were.
Many National Guardsmen who were at Kent State on May 4 later questioned why they had been deployed there. “Loaded rifles and fixed bayonets are pretty harsh solutions for students exercising free speech on an American campus,” one of them told an oral history interviewer. Another plaintively asked me in a 2023 interview, “Why would you put soldiers trained to kill on a university campus to serve a police function?”
National Guard equipment and training have improved significantly in the decades since Kent State. But Guardsmen are still troops who are fundamentally trained to fight, not to control crowds. In 2020, then-National Guard Bureau Chief General Joseph Lengyel told reporters that “the civil unrest mission is one of the most difficult and dangerous missions … in our domestic portfolio.”
In my view, the tragedy of Kent State shows how critical it is for authorities to be thoughtful in responding to protests, and extremely cautious in deploying military troops to deal with them. Force is inherently unpredictable, often uncontrollable, and can lead to fatal mistakes and lasting human suffering. And while protests sometimes break rules, they may not be disruptive or harmful enough to merit responding with force.
Aggressive displays of force often heighten tensions and worsen situations. Conversely, research shows that if protesters perceive authorities are behaving with restraint and treating them with respect, they are more likely to remain nonviolent. The shooting at Kent State demonstrates why force should be an absolute last resort in dealing with protests – and one fraught with grave risks.
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
Something happened during the Democrats’ excitement-packed Chicago convention that has drawn relatively little notice. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said he was considering changing or open to changing or may change the filibuster rules next year to pass a federal Roe law, enshrining national abortion rights. Schumer said that he would pass two voting rights laws under a filibuster exception. On abortion he said, “I have to discuss that with my caucus. This is one of the issues we would have to debate and discuss and evolve.”
Continue reading “Schumer’s Message”A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM’s Morning Memo. Sign up for the email version.
In a case marked by Donald Trump’s determined efforts to delay it at any cost, it was a little perplexing when Special Counsel Jack Smith asked the judge in the Jan. 6 case to push back a deadline by a month to give him more time to evaluate the impact of the Supreme Court’s noxious decision on presidential immunity. Now we know why.
During the interregnum, Smith took the case back to a new federal grand jury in DC but stripped out evidence that the Supreme Court ruled would be inadmissible and pared down other elements of the case that the high court squarely immunized. The new grand jury, untainted by the now-inadmissible evidence, returned a superseding indictment against Trump that otherwise largely mirrors the original indictment.
The abundance of caution exhibited by Smith and DOJ is another indicator, if we needed any, of the stakes in this case. The new indictment is different in three fundamental respects:
Despite the Vice President’s expansive role of advising and assisting the President within the Executive Branch, the Vice President’s Article I responsibility of “presiding over the Senate” is “not an ‘executive branch’ function.” … So the Government may argue that consideration of the President’s communications with the Vice President concerning the certification proceeding does not pose “dangers of intrusion on the authority and functions of the Executive Branch.”
If I haven’t satisfied your nerd curiosity enough, here’s a red-lined version of the old indictment compared to the new one.
Politico has a good rundown of the previously unaired video footage of Nancy Pelosi during the evacuation of the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021:
Donald Trump’s effort to politicize the deaths of service members during the Afghanistan withdrawal by filming and photographing himself graveside at Arlington National Cemetery on Monday not only violated the shrine’s rules but allegedly included a physical altercation between Trump campaign staff and cemetery staff, NPR reports.
Prediction: This story is going to be around for a while.
Lingering in the background of JD Vance’s peculiar fixation on childless women is an anti-gay animus. The silver lining to another newly resurfaced Vance audio clip is that it much more clearly foregrounds the anti-LGBTQ spirit of his crusade because it targets a favorite right-wing foil: AFT President Randi Weingarten, an open lesbian in a same-sex marriage:
Most of the coverage of these Vance remark have framed it as an attack on teachers, but I think that’s sidesteps the real issue here. Admittedly, “childless” is a very blunt instrument and covers a lot more than gay people, which is partly why there’s been so much backlash to his remarks. But the fact that other people are ending up as collateral damage to his attack on LGBTQ folk doesn’t change who the intended target was.
For context, consider this excruciating exchange last year in a House hearing between Weingarten and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) in which Greene repeatedly asserts that Weingarten is not a mother. It led to this belabored headline in National Review: “Is Randi Weingarten a Mother? It’s Complicated”
Motherhood is the coin of the realm in this right-wing world view, a prerequisite to participation in the public square, and that conveniently excludes many LGBTQ people, especially if adoptive parents and stepparents are excluded from the definition, as they are.
The whale has now joined a baby bear, at least one emu and a worm that have been intimately associated with Mr. Kennedy, the independent presidential candidate — and environmental lawyer — who last week joined forces with former President Donald J. Trump’s campaign.
The New York Times
It still challenges the limits of my imagination that the fascism and the grift are so closely intertwined. It makes me want to go back and re-read everything about 1930s fascism through that prism, which I think was recognized by most close observer then and since, but it didn’t fully register with me until seeing it up close:
This a deep cut of Minnesota references, but the combination of authenticity and enough savvy to be in on the joke does set Tim Walz apart from most pols:
@subwaytakes Episode 172: The most neglected part of home ownership is THE GUTTERS 🏡 feat #TimWalz 🚋🚋🚋🚋🚋 Hosted by @KAREEM RAHMA Shot by @Anthony DiMieri @Willem Holzer Edited by Anthony DiMieri Associate producer @Ramy #podcast #subway #hottakes #subwaytakes #interview #nyc #newyorkcity #timwalz #homeimprovement #diy #homes #minnesota ♬ original sound – Subway Takes
And in case you missed our whimsical slideshow, behold: Tim Walz loves balloons … or should it be balloons love Tim Walz?
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We all know the story of Donald Trump’s endless fury for Georgia Republican Gov. Brian Kemp, who refused to allow the former president to use his state to further MAGA efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election.
It seems like Kemp now has the opportunity to serve as a roadblock for another Trumpian election subversion scheme. It remains to be seen if he will.
Continue reading “Brian Kemp Is In An Interesting Place. Again.”
