In the aftermath of 2020, election departments across the country experienced a massive wave of resignations from workers who had experienced threats and violence stirred up by baseless conspiracy theories.
Continue reading “Trump Supporters’ Election Delegitimization Cycle Is Playing Out In Real Time “RNC Makes It Official: Election Denialism Is Part Of Republicans’ 2024 Strategy
Just hours after Donald Trump made it clear on Truth Social that he intends to continue delegitimizing democracy in 2024 if he doesn’t win, The Washington Post published a story on the Republican National Committee’s alarming criterion for new hires.
Continue reading “RNC Makes It Official: Election Denialism Is Part Of Republicans’ 2024 Strategy”Big Normie Energy
We seem to have moved on, for the moment at least, from the Replace Biden!/Thunderdome Convention discourse. But a new poll out today reminds us of a key issue about Biden. Earlier this year a lot of people were operating on the assumption that the Democratic policy agenda is more popular with Americans and that President Biden is unpopular and old, both literally and metaphorically. So basically any other Democrat under 60 who’s got a little electoral success under their belt would be on course to defeating Trump, or at least doing substantially better than Biden.
Continue reading “Big Normie Energy”Trump Re-ups ‘Stop The Steal’ Disinfo Slogan To Delegitimize 2024
A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM’s Morning Memo. Sign up for the email version.
The Only Legit Elections Are The Ones Trump Wins
Mark yesterday as the day Donald Trump imported the notorious “Stop the Steal” slogan into the 2024 campaign.
The distillation of the Big Lie into a simple, easy to understand slogan that became the rallying cry for 2020 election deniers was a disinformation bonanza. It was also, for those who may have forgotten, the name of the Jan. 6 rally at the Ellipse on the National Mall where Trump spoke and dispatched the mob to the Capitol.
Trump invoked “Stop the Steal” in a Truth Social post in the context of his hush money criminal trial in New York, inveighing against President Biden, the Manhattan DA, witness Michael Cohen, and others. But the broader context for its use now is Trump’s false and self-serving claims that the four criminal prosecutions of him are a giant “election interference” scheme designed to defeat him in the 2024 election.
“Stop the Steal” is malleable and flexible. It’s the Big Lie of the 2020. It’s the Big Lie of 2024, too, with Trump already seeking to delegitimize any election he doesn’t win. It can mean the bogus “election interference” he is now claiming.
In trotting it out again in 2024, Trump is showing his defiance in the same way he does when praising the Jan. 6 defendants as hostages, continuing to insist he won in 2020, and wearing the Jan. 6 attack as a badge of honor.
This is what we’re up against.
Hush Money Judge Slaps Gag Order On Trump
After another Trump rhetorical attack on key witness Michael Cohen, the trial judge in the Stormy Daniel’s hush money case issued a gag order barring Trump from targeting juror, witnesses, and prosecutors, except Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg.
Trump also attacked the judge’s daughter in a social media post, but the judge’s order doesn’t bar Trump from attacks on the judge or his family.
Arizona AG’s Fake Elector Probe Continues
The fake elector probe by Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes has subpoenaed GOP operative Mike Roman and interviewed former Trump campaign lawyer Kenneth Chesebro, both of whom were originally indicted with Trump in the Georgia RICO case.
Jeff Clark Tries To Save DC Law License
The bar disciplinary proceeding against former Trump DOJ official Jeff Clark featured the testimony of former acting Deputy Attorney General Richard Donoghue and former deputy White House Counsel Pat Philbin.
A Giant Among Giants (A Rare Chance To See Me Fanboy)
U.S. Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar demonstrated again yesterday in the mifepristone oral arguments why she is one of the best advocates ever to practice before the Supreme Court. I’ve come out of every argument I’ve heard her make just astounded by her skills and sheer mental capacity.
Yesterday was peak Prelogar. You should give her a listen. Unlike the arguments in most major cases, the mifepristone arguments were tight, relatively short, and easy to follow. You won’t find a better and more accessible performance from Prelogar. Bonus content: Prelogar brightly dismisses the usual sneering from Justice Sam Alito.
Some of the reviews:
- Neal Katyal: “The Solicitor General, Elizabeth Prelogar, is just unreal, she’s so good. She’s answering hostile questions with poise and pitch perfect answers.”
- Eric Columbus: “To state the obvious: the Solicitor General of the United States, Elizabeth Prelogar, is extremely good at her job.”
- Mark Joseph Stern: “Solicitor General Elizabeth Pregolar is an astonishingly talented advocate whose turns at the lectern shine with brilliance, flair, eloquence, and wit. It is always a pleasure and a gift to hear her masterful arguments at the Supreme Court. She is one of the all-time greats. (I am here to say what straight men cannot without sounding creepy 🙂 )”
- Elie Mystal: “I try not to tweet too much about Elizabeth Prelogar because my appreciation of her work is borderline embarrassing creepy stalker Stan levels… but she really is, like, very very good at her job.”
- Joyce Vance: “The solicitor general is stan-worthy. She’s all substance & was completely on target today in the Mifepristone argument. Her decision to focus on the standing argument was solid.”
- Howard Forman: “Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar is brilliant. Her command of the law, the science, and other facts regarding mifepristone use and FDA law is without peer. She is a hero.”
Supreme Court advocacy operates at the peak of the legal profession, and Prelogar has mastered it in a way that puts her on a different level than those around her. Think: Steph Curry beyond the arc. Just doing things everyone else wishes they could do, and doing them so seemingly effortlessly that everyone else seems like a pretender.
NBC News Dumps Ronna McDaniel
NBC News rid itself of immediate past RNC chair Ronna McDaniel Tuesday, less than a week after announcing her hire as a $300,000/year contributor to its political coverage, prompting a revolt at sister network MSNBC and public outcry from the on-air talent.
McDaniel’s agent apparently dropped her, too, the WSJ reports:
Creative Artists Agency represented McDaniel in her negotiations with NBC News and shopped her to other networks for contributor roles, including CNN and ABC News, according to people familiar with the matter. NBC News made a three-year deal with her valued at nearly $1 million in total, a large figure for a contributor, another person said. The agency has since cut ties with McDaniel, a person familiar with the matter said.
Any hope that the McDaniel fiasco might finally bring down the two-headed monster of partisan talking head political coverage on TV quickly faded, with NBCUniversal News Group chairman Cesar Conde telling staff in a memo: “We continue to be committed to the principle that we must have diverse viewpoints on our programs, and to that end, we will redouble our efforts to seek voices that represent different parts of the political spectrum.”
But it’s not just TV news. The NYT found it necessary to hand-wring over the nonissue of how to give conservatives a voice: “The episode underscored the deeply partisan sphere in which news organizations are trying to operate — and the challenge of fairly representing conservative and pro-Trump viewpoints in their coverage, if major Republican Party figures like Ms. McDaniel are deemed unacceptable by viewers or colleagues.”
Bear with me here because this gets complicated: You can still … wait for it … interview conservatives and pro-Trump Republicans.
Journalism doesn’t require paying a deeply compromised pro-Trump-but-ousted-by-Trump figure six figures annually to spout talking points from inside your TV studio. That’s a coverage choice, not an insolvable journalistic dilemma.
Oh …
WaPo: Qatari royal invested about $50 million in pro-Trump network Newsmax
Matt Schlapp Vindicated?
This is not your usual lawsuit settlement.
The campaign staffer for Herschel Walker’s 2022 Senate campaign who sued American Conservative Union head Matt Schlapp for alleged sexual assault has dropped the lawsuit, saying his claims were a “complete misunderstanding.”
“I regret that the lawsuit caused pain to the Schlapp family,” Carlton Huffman said.
Huffman said neither Schlapp nor the ACU paid him to drop the lawsuit that claimed he was groped by Schlapp.
No financial settlement, no apology let alone admission from Schlapp, and a complete dropping of the case is an unusual resolution to the dispute and makes the initial allegations seem pretty fishy.
2024 Ephemera
- NYT: Obama, Fearing Biden Loss to Trump, Is on the Phone to Strategize
- NBC News’ Sahil Kapur: ‘Obamacare’ wars heat up in 2024 race as Biden and Trump clash over subsidies
Tragedy Brings Out The Far-Right Loons
With six people missing and presumed dead after a container ship toppled an interstate bridge and shut down Baltimore harbor, far-right grifters and opportunists seized on the accident to advance various racist, xenophobic, and conspiratorial agendas, as TPM’s Nicole Lafond notes.
The Wire creator David Simon was having none of it and came to the defense of Baltimore and basic decency:
Corrections
Two boneheaded errors in yesterday’s Morning Memo. I misidentified:
- Timothy Snyder’s academic posting: He is at Yale, not Princeton.
- The interstate highway on which Baltimore’s toppled Francis Scott Key Bridge sits: It is I-695, not I-895.
My apologies for the errors.
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Usual Cast Of Far-Right Characters Declare ‘WW3,’ ‘Black Swan Event’ Over Bridge Collapse
With searches still ongoing for the six people who are missing in the wake of the collapse of Baltimore’s Francis Scott Key Bridge, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) joined other far-right conspiracy theorists in questioning whether the disaster was “intentional” on Tuesday afternoon.
Continue reading “Usual Cast Of Far-Right Characters Declare ‘WW3,’ ‘Black Swan Event’ Over Bridge Collapse”Scenes from the Francis Scott Key Bridge Collapse In Baltimore
Baltiore’s iconic Francis Scott Key Bridge collapsed into the Patapsco River in the early hours of Tuesday, March 26, after it was hit by a giant container ship. The ship lost power and sent a mayday signal shortly before impact with a support beam. The death toll is still unclear; several vehicles and road workers are believed to have been on the bridge during the collapse. An extensive search and rescue operation is underway.
Container ship and collapsed bridge as the sun rises
Collapsed bridge hangs over container ship
Where the roadway ends
Sections of the bridge submerged in water
Search and rescue teams on the Patapsco River
Steel frame of the Francis Scott Key Bridge sits atop the container ship
Some sections of the bridge are almost completely submerged
Road closures leading up to the bridge
Part of the roadway remains upright
Parts of the bridge stuck on the bow of the container ship
Steel frame draped over the container ship
Mangled steel frame lies in the water
Sections of the bridge sticking out of the water
Container ship and collapsed bridge seen from a distance
Bridge closure will affect commuters
Sunrise on Baltimore’s shipping disaster
Container ship destroys Francis Scott Key Bridge
Right-Wing Justices Toss Scraps To Anti-Abortion Movement While Unable To Embrace Its Shoddy Argument
For this Supreme Court to reject abortion restrictions, the argument has to be pretty bad.
“That it?” Justice Amy Coney Barrett cut in tersely as anti-abortion group lawyer Erin Hawley (yes, that Hawley) enumerated the supposed harms to a group of doctors from the Food and Drug Administration lifting restrictions on abortion drug mifepristone.
Continue reading “Right-Wing Justices Toss Scraps To Anti-Abortion Movement While Unable To Embrace Its Shoddy Argument”Was Ronna X Trump Bait for a Scaredy-Cat-NBC?
In response to yesterday’s post on Ronna X TPM Reader JG said I may be missing the true elephant in the room, and by that he means something a number of others have suggested over the last 48 hours or so. That idea is that this doesn’t have anything to do with having Ronna on the air at all. She’s there to prepare for Trump’s possible return to power, an insurance policy, as it were. There’s an additional layer of this. NBC is a big corporation with a bunch of channels and entertainment brands. But it’s part of Comcast which is a huge media and telecom conglomerate with interests across various sectors of the economy. If you’re Comcast this isn’t just a matter of NBC News or NBC. You have to worry about whether Trump is going to go to war with Comcast itself, which is vulnerable on numerous business and regulatory fronts, if he gets mad at NBC News.
I guess I thought this was implicit in what I wrote yesterday. But it definitely wasn’t my emphasis. What I was focused on yesterday was how this works when you don’t have a lawless authoritarian in the White House. But when you do, well … yes, that introduces a whole new dimension to it.
Continue reading “Was Ronna X Trump Bait for a Scaredy-Cat-NBC?”Even Right-Wing Justices Don’t Bite On Anti-Abortion Effort To Restrict Mifepristone Nationwide
The anti-abortion side emerged from Tuesday’s oral arguments considerably worse for wear after even their ideological allies on the bench questioned their standing to bring the case and the sweeping scope of the restrictions they sought.
At times, it became a full Court pile-on, particularly in response to the anti-abortion group’s quest for nationwide restrictions on the drug due to a handful of doctors’ objection to maybe, perhaps, one day, having to complete an abortion for a woman suffering from mifepristone’s side effects.
While the legal underpinnings of the mifepristone challenge are widely considered to be shoddy, we’ve seen the work that judges’ political preferences can do in bridging the gap to the preferred result. In this case, both Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk and the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals were willing to make that leap. The Supreme Court, based on what we heard today, seems not to be.
Could Ronna McDaniel Kill Off The Partisan Talking Head Model Of News Coverage?
A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM’s Morning Memo. Sign up for the email version.
Way Past Time To Kill Off This Coverage Model
Ronna McDaniel is such a buffoonish and servile character that her presence on NBC News threatens to topple the partisan talking head model around which the news nets build their political coverage.
It’s been a long time coming.
McDaniel, because of her prior role as an enabler of Donald Trump and the Big Lie of 2020, is an order of magnitude worse than the parade of predecessors who took the revolving door from political operative to network news contributor. But they are not fundamentally different from her. Remember Rick Santorum?
The whole fetid paradigm for political coverage – which probably started with the original CNN Crossfire – should be tossed in the garbage. Along with it should go the dubious tradition of the news networks “sponsoring” political debates, which may look on the surface like a civic endeavor but in reality is a ratings and brand enhancer. Multiple reports suggest that the McDaniel fiasco originated in negotiations she conducted as RNC chair with a NBC News political unit desperate to land a GOP presidential primary debate.
The simplistic formula of talking heads from the right and from the left jousting on live TV as a form of “news” or “coverage” is cheap, easy to produce, and positions the news nets as having convening authority. But substantively? They’re vapid. They always have been. They got worse in the reality TV era, where the “jousting” became the entire point. The more provocative, in-your-face, and over-the-top the pundit, the better the spectacle.
The perverse set of institutional and commercial interests that gave rise to cable news’ surfeit of partisan talking heads hasn’t changed. I’m not under any illusion that the news nets will abandon the format anytime soon.
When even the opponents to McDaniel’s hiring concede that it’s “important to have conservative voices on air,” it suggests the format has continued staying power. Before you write in that I’m trying to silence conservatives, consider whether this format truly gives voice to any side in American politics or is merely its own spectacle serving as a poor proxy for genuine public debate.
MSNBC Blows Up Over Ronna McDaniel
The liberal-branded cable news net was left spluttering over the decision by its broadcast network sibling (parent?) to pay former RNC Chair Ronna McDaniel $300,000 a year to be political contributor.
The corporate and editorial structure between NBC News and MSNBC has always been a bit Byzantine, and there’s precedent for the two entities to alternatively embrace and distance themselves from each other. But nothing quite like this before.
In her long, 12-minute segment last night on the controversy, Rachel Maddow waded into the internal tensions. “Ronna McDaniel will not be on MSNBC,” Maddow told her audience. “And I say that and give you that level of detail because there has been an effort since by other parts of the company to muddy that up in the press and make it seem like that’s not what happened at MSNBC. I can assure you that is what happened at MSNBC.”
Here’s the full segment:
On A More Serious Note
The corporate interest in mollifying MAGA Republicans in order to maintain their steadfast neutrality is precisely the kind of quiet acquiescence that abets a wannabe strongman like Trump.
Princeton Yale historian Timothy Snyder eloquently spoke of this kind of placation … on MSNBC … yesterday:
SCOTUS Hears Abortion Pill Arguments
The Supreme Court hears oral arguments this morning in the mifepristone case out of Texas. TPM will have live coverage with Kate Riga.
To prep you for the arguments, the legal:
- Politico: Supreme Court hears its biggest abortion case since the fall of Roe
- NYT: Abortion Pill Dispute Centers on Central Question Of Who Can Sue?
- CNN: A timeline of how we got here
The lawyering:
- WSJ: She’s the Brilliant Mind Fighting the Abortion Pill in Court. Her Husband Is a Senator.
- NYT: Erin Hawley, The Woman Arguing Against the Abortion Pill
The practical:
- NYT: What’s at Stake and What’s Next
The political:
- Aaron Blake: Why the Supreme Court abortion pill case is so fraught for the right
Trump Gets A New Trial Date
The trial judge in the New York hush money case was unimpressed by the pre-trial dispute Trump attempted to gin up to force a substantial delay in his upcoming trial. He reset the trial for April 15, which means Trump did succeed in delaying it three weeks but failed to push it past the November election.
Trump Gets Some Relief From Mammoth Civil Judgment
A mixed bag for Trump in the civil case brought by New York Attorney General Letitia James when an appeals court gave him 10 extra days to come up with an appeal bond and dramatically reduced the size of the bond to $175 million. Not an inherently unreasonable decision, even though it adds to the general sense that Trump continues to skate. But $175 million ain’t nothing. It’s a lot to cough up and it’s there for James’ taking if Trump through other legal means ultimately loses on appeal, which is easier for her to do than seizing his property to pay the judgement.
I See …
Reuters: Billionaires sought to help fund Trump bond in civil fraud case, sources say
Sign Of The Times
The DOJ announced Monday at as press conference in Arizona that it is investigating dozens of threats against election workers and has charged 20 people so far. Arizona has been an epicenter of the threats.
Black Swan Event
The House GOP majority is now so narrow that the possibility of the lower chamber flipping to Democratic control before the November election can’t be ruled out. To be clear, the House has never changed power from one party to another between elections. But the current narrow GOP majority and disaffection within the House GOP conference are prime ingredients for a mid-Congress flip. Fox News’ Chad Pergram, a longtime Hill reporter, games it out.
2024 Ephemera
- Spoiler alert: Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is expected to announce today that his running mate will be Silicon Valley lawyer Nicole Shanahan, a 38-year-old with no prior political experience. Shanahan was married to Google co-founder Sergey Brin from 2018-23.
- ‘Too Big To Rig’: The goofy origins of Trump’s latest mantra
Bridge Collapse In Baltimore
Unbelievable video of a container ship knocking over the I-895 I-695 bridge overnight, severing a major East Coast transportation link (especially for truck traffic) and shutting down the busy Baltimore harbor to ship traffic:
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