Earlier this year, Mark Coakley, director of elections for Henrico County, Virginia, received an email from a concerned voter.
Continue reading “Election Officials Get Pointers On How To Appear More Human To Extremists”The Uniquely Catastrophic National Security Risk Of A Trump II Presidency
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Would You Buy A Used Car From This Guy?
Donald Trump is a walking, talking, breathing national security risk. He can’t pass a background check. He can’t get a security clearance. He’s a risky borrower. This is a man who you wouldn’t buy a used car from.
You could scarcely invent the constellation of national security risks that Trump poses: deep financial and emotional insecurity, ongoing criminal liability, susceptible to flattery, a pathological personality. But beyond the risky personal traits, he presents an unrivaled track record of proven misconduct in the national security realm: swiping the nation’s most closely guarded secrets, casual disregard for the handling of classified information, a willing target of foreign interference and influence, an inability to distinguish the self from the state.
In any other era of American politics, the 2024 election would come down to trust. No one trusts Trump, not even many his own supporters. That’s not his appeal, for them, nor the point. But Trump is not without any precedent in our history; he is of a type.
The American myth has always been two-fold: the pastoral democracy in a New World Eden and the land of the huckster, the flimflam artist, the speculator, the boom-chaser, the booster. We have glorified both in our national story.
Trump is the latter tradition incarnate, the fast-talking, fly-by-night, always-be-closing snake oil salesman constantly reinventing himself to spring a new trap on the next easy mark.
His presidential candidacy itself is a long con. He’s running because it’s his best legal defense to the criminal liabilities he faces and a surefire way to subsidize his legal bills on the backs of contributors.
What’s different about the current era is that until now we’d largely managed to keep the worst of the hustlers out of the Oval Office.
Trump Goes All In On Immunity Argument
Donald Trump filed his brief with the Supreme Court in the Jan. 6 case, arguing for absolute immunity for the president for official acts. You know the argument well by now. Next up: Special Counsel Jack Smith’s brief.
Please Consider Becoming A TPM Member
If you’re a regular reader of Morning Memo, the single best way to keep it going is to sign up to become a TPM member. We just launched our annual membership drive, so now is a great time to show your support. Our goal is 1,000 new members. Please, do what you can to help us get there! Thanks in advance.
Inside Trump’s Full Embrace Of Jan. 6
- Semafor: How Donald Trump learned to love the January 6 prisoner movement
- AP: Trump is making the Jan. 6 attack a cornerstone of his bid for the White House
- USA Today: Donald Trump puts Jan. 6 ‘hostages’ at center in his campaign
Quote Of The Day
When a coup against the democratic regime happens and it’s not punished, that is a very strong indicator of the end of the rule of law and the victory of that authoritarian movement.
Jason Stanley, professor of philosophy at Yale and author of How Fascism Works.
Peter Navarro Is Now In Prison
The only higher-up imprisoned for Jan. 6 so far is Peter Navarro, whose offense was refusing to comply with a subpoena from the House committee investigating the attack on the Capitol. Navarro reported to prison yesterday, but not before conducting a Four Seasons Landscaping-style press conference in a Miami strip mall.
The Whys And Wherefores Of Aileen Cannon
While everyone is still scratching their heads over U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon’s bizarro order Monday in the Mar-a-Lago case, some deeper reading on the case:
- NYT: Judge in Trump Documents Case Draws Attention for Slow Pace
- Roger Parloff was in Cannon’s courtroom last week for a daylong hearing in the case and files this dispatch.
Just Another Normal Day At Mar-a-Lago
TPM’s Hunter Walker: Trump Invited Boat With Massive QAnon Flag To Dock At Mar-a-Lago For ‘Refreshments’ On Sunday
TPM On TV
Our own Josh Kovensky joined MSNBC’s Joy Reid last evening to talk about his fantastic story on the Society for American Civic Renewal: Inside A Secret Society Of Prominent Right-Wing Christian Men Prepping For A ‘National Divorce’
A Whirlwind Of A Day For Texas SB4
A series of unusual and fast-paced court orders over the course of Tuesday left the status of controversial Texas immigration law in a highly uncertain state until late in the day.
To make sense of it all, I would suggest reading Texas law professor Steve Vladeck.
Sherrod Brown Gets The GOP Opponent Dems Wanted
Trump-backed businessman Bernie Moreno (R) easily won the GOP primary for U.S. Senate in Ohio, beating state Sen. Matt Dolan (R). Democrats had gone as far as boosting Moreno in the primary in hopes of facing off against him in the general in what will be a challenging re-election bid for Sen. Sherrod Brown (D), one the Senate’s most progressive members.
2024 Ephemera
- Down the memory hole: Fox News buries its own scoop on Mike Pence’s unprecedented refusal to endorse the man he served under as vice president.
- The band is back: Trump is considering bringing former 2016 campaign chairman Corey Lewandowski back to help on the GOP convention alongside former 2016 campaign chairman Paul Manafort.
- “Too Big To Rig”: Donald Trump is dialing up his warnings of a rigged 2024 election by unveiling a new slogan calling for a landslide victory that no amount of “election fraud” can overcome.
Smooth, Real Smooth
An Ohio congressional campaign inadvertently sent out its concession email in the middle of Election Day, hours before polls closed:
You might remember the candidate, Derek Myers, as the volunteer in then-Rep. George Santos’ congressional office who made a bizarre secret audio recording of internal office discussions and provided it to TPM.
Myers officially conceded hours after the mistaken concession, when he finished 11th in an 11-candidate GOP primary field in the OH-02.
Ending On A Sober Note
For the past nine months, mean land and sea surface temperatures have overshot previous records each month by up to 0.2 °C — a huge margin at the planetary scale. A general warming trend is expected because of rising greenhouse-gas emissions, but this sudden heat spike greatly exceeds predictions made by statistical climate models that rely on past observations. Many reasons for this discrepancy have been proposed but, as yet, no combination of them has been able to reconcile our theories with what has happened.
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Boom! Or Pre-Boom!
Our goal for the first day of our membership drive was 100 new members. As of 10:03 PM on the east coast we’re at 99. Click here to put us over the edge.
MSNBC Covers TPM’s Story On An Exclusive Secret Society Of Powerful, Christian, Right-Wing Men
MSNBC host Joy Reid had Josh Kovensky on to discuss his story, which was published earlier this month. Read the full article here.
Off to a Good Start
Off to a good start, folks. We’ve signed up 70 new TPM Members so far today in the first day of our annual TPM Membership drive. We would love to get to 100 by the end of the day. If you’re not a member, please take a moment to join us. Click here to sign up! Want to know more about the drive? Click here.
Pence Said On Fox News He Won’t Endorse Trump — But You Wouldn’t Know That From Watching Fox News
On Friday, former Vice President Mike Pence made the surprise, historically unprecedented announcement that he will not be endorsing his former boss in 2024 — during an interview with Fox News’ Martha MacCallum.
Continue reading “Pence Said On Fox News He Won’t Endorse Trump — But You Wouldn’t Know That From Watching Fox News”SCOTUS Bows To Texas Bid To Annex Immigration Enforcement Away From Feds, For Now
The Supreme Court on Tuesday allowed Texas to smash through more than a century of precedent around federal supremacy over immigration law, with some members of the Court’s conservative majority citing procedural concerns to do so.
Continue reading “SCOTUS Bows To Texas Bid To Annex Immigration Enforcement Away From Feds, For Now”Trump Invited Boat With Massive QAnon Flag To Dock At Mar-a-Lago For ‘Refreshments’
Former President Trump loves his beautiful boaters, apparently even when they are publicly expressing support for the extreme QAnon conspiracy theory. Photos posted to Facebook purportedly show Trump standing by the lawn at his private Florida beach club, Mar-a-Lago on Sunday and waving over two boats, one of which was prominently decorated with a massive flag bearing his face and the well-known QAnon slogans “TRUST THE PLAN” and “WWG1WGA,” which is an acronym for “Where We Go One, We Go All.”
Continue reading “Trump Invited Boat With Massive QAnon Flag To Dock At Mar-a-Lago For ‘Refreshments’ “Folks, Let’s Do This!!!
Folks, let me cut to the chase. Today kicks off our annual TPM membership drive. It is, as always, critical. Our team works all year producing the coverage, commentary and, we hope, insight that makes TPM a valued and trusted news source and our publishing team works just as hard fine-tuning our membership model, trying to add to our subscription numbers. But we rely on a key bump in the numbers during the annual drive. That’s what kicks off today. So if you’re a reader but not a member, please consider joining us. Or maybe you’re a former member. Can we coax you back? Think of it as fake it til you make it. Sign up for a year or even a month. See how it goes. We think you’ll want to stay.
What kind of work will you be supporting? We pride ourselves on punching way above our weight. We always have. Our membership page says, “Small Team, Big Results.” We work hard to make that true every day. But just consider some of our big exclusives since our last drive: There was our big series on The Meadows Texts. More recently we brought you our exclusive series on The Chesebro Docs and our big exclusive on the SACR Document Trove, our exposé on the secret society of White Christian men prepping a Christian nationalist government to take over after the fall of the American “regime.” Of course, everyone was on the Santos story. But TPM was the first to report the most substantial of the *alleged* (ahem) crimes that got him indicted and finally led to his expulsion from Congress. Sometimes, of course, we just love us some good old fashioned sleaze, with some sports adjacency thrown in — like our look at just who paid for Arkansas Gov. Sarah Sanders epic six figure Super Bowl Extravaganza. (She sleazed it up bigly but good lord that was a good game!) Of course, as has always been the case at TPM, most of our best work doesn’t come in one-off big exclusives. It comes with a close, incremental, informed coverage of critical topics that often fall just below the national news radar. An ongoing example of that has been Kate Riga’s coverage of SCOTUS, the federal judiciary and particularly the tentacles the right-wing legal project has driven down into it in recent years, creating pipelines from the country’s most radical Trumpite judges right up to the high court. I even chip in myself with a few pieces.
That’s the work you’re supporting with your membership dollar. That’s the club we want you to become part of by subscribing. Some fun stats: Over 90% of our revenue comes directly from members. And the overwhelming majority of that revenue goes directly to the people who do the work. Salaries and benefits make up 74% of our expenses. It’s not going to some derivatives or debt service or into a corporate vortex that’s impossible to understand. This is a fully independent outfit. All the strategy emerges from inside the organization and that’s where all the final decisions are made too.
This is where you come in. If you’re not currently a member, please take a moment and join today. Just click right here. We want to sign up 1,000 new members during our drive. A huge number, but we think we can do it. If you’re already a member and are just really jazzed up about TPM after reading this you can always contribute to the TPM Journalism Fund. That’s really for another day and our other big annual drive. Today is about bringing more of you into the club. So what do you say? Join us!
What New Madness Has Aileen Cannon Visited Upon Us?!
Morning Memo comes to you this week from Knoxville, Tennessee, where I’m checking in on my folks. Sign up for the email version.
Buckle Up!
A rapid-fire series of developments in the various Trump legal entanglements Monday demonstrate anew what a precarious position Trump is in. Precarious probably doesn’t do it justice. There is simply no precedent for a major party nominee for the presidency to be under criminal indictment in four different jurisdictions while also burdened by half a billion dollars in civil judgments against him.
Let’s get to it.
The Newest Cannon Craziness
U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon has unlocked new achievements in weirdness and incompetence.
On Monday, she issued an order directing Special Counsel Jack Smith and Donald Trump to each come up with a set of proposed jury instructions based on two hypothetical interpretations of the Presidential Records Act. Both of her interpretations are wrong as a matter of law and favorable to Trump, putting Smith in an extraordinary bind.
If this is confusing, trust me, it’s not you. This is a strange and unusual place to be at this stage in a criminal case. Cannon clearly doesn’t understand her role or the law at issue. She is casting about for help, but doing so in a way that is not going to be helpful to her or to the case.
This is where I would usually insert a brief (and incisive!) explanation of the legal issues, but that’s impossible to do here. It makes no sense.
It’s an utter mess and left legal observers flabbergasted.
A Sampling Of The Reaction To Cannon
- George Conway: “In the decades that I have been a lawyer, this is the most bizarre order I’ve ever seen issued by a federal judge. What makes that all the more amazing is that the second and third most bizarre orders I’ve ever seen in federal court were also issued by Judge Cannon in this case.”
- Joyce Vance: “[I]t’s two pages of crazy stemming from the Judge’s apparent inability to tell Trump no when it comes to his argument that he turned the nation’s secrets into his personal records by designating them as such under the Presidential Records Act.”
- Much more here …
Trump Fails To Get James’ Bond
Donald Trump came up short, he told an appeals court, in obtaining a bond to secure payment of the $454 million judgment against him obtained by New York Attorney General Letitia James. Some 30 companies rebuffed Trump, most refusing to accept real estate as collateral for the bond. The deadline to obtain a bond is March 25, after which James can begin collecting on her judgment against him – unless the appeals court gives Trump some relief.
Good Catch
NBC News dug into UCC filings in Florida to find evidence of the collateral that Trump used to secure the $91.63 million appeal bond he posted in the E. Jean Carroll case: It’s a brokerage account at Charles Schwab held by the Donald J. Trump Revocable Trust.
Trump: I Didn’t Rape Her! I Sexually Assaulted Her!
Donald Trump has sued George Stephanopoulos and ABC News for defamation, claiming that it was libelous for Stephanopoulos to say on his March 10 Sunday show that Trump had been found liable for raping E. Jean Carroll when he had only been found liable for sexually assaulting her. Good luck with that one!
Keep An Eye On Georgia RICO Case
Trump and his co-defendants having formally asked the trial judge to allow them to immediately appeal his decision not to disqualify District Attorney Fani Willis. If granted, it could add significant delay to a case that is already going to drag deep into 2025.
Key Pre-Trial Rulings In The Hush Money Case
The trial judge in the now-delayed Stormy Daniels hush money case issued several important pre-trial evidentiary rulings Monday:
- Prosecutors may not play the Access Hollywood tape but they can ask witnesses about it.
- Prosecutors may call Michael Cohen, Stormy Daniels, and Karen McDougal to the stand.
- Prosecutors may argue that Trump was seeking to influence the 2016 election.
- Prosecutors may present evidence of the National Enquirer using “catch and kill” to protect Trump from unflattering stories.
Peter Navarro Reports To Prison Today
Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts rebuffed Trump White House official Peter Navarro’s last-ditch effort to avoid serving four months for his contempt of Congress conviction. He is to report to federal prison in Miami today.
Paul Manafort Is Back At The Worst Possible Time
With Trump under financial pressure and angling to avoid jail, the possible reemergence of Russia-oligarch-whisperer Paul Manafort – himself convicted in the Mueller probe and later pardoned by Trump – as an adviser to the Trump campaign is a development that I would find implausible in a fictional political thriller, but here we are:
- Brian Beutler: Desperate Trump Turns Once Again To Paul Manafort
- David Corn: Trump Considers Adding Paul Manafort—a “Grave Counterintelligence Threat”—to His Campaign
- Marcy Wheeler: “Donald Trump is considering hiring the former business partner of two alleged Russian spies, admitted money launderer Paul Manafort, to help with fundraising.”
Notable
The Supreme Court was cool to the argument from red states that the Biden administration had illegally coerced social media platforms into removing misinformation.
Centering Christian Nationalism
TPM’s Josh Kovensky reports on a little-noticed speech last fall given by former Trump OMB Director Russ Vought that puts Christian nationalism at the center of the Trump II agenda.
Lovely …
Donald Trump: Any Jewish person who votes for Democrats “hates their religion” and “everything about Israel.”
What An Intern Program!
A conservative “influencer” and former intern for Rep. Paul Gosar (R-AZ) has been charged in the Jan. 6 attack. Isabella Deluca interned with Gosar for three months starting the fall of 2022, after she had already been contacted by the FBI and while she was under investigation.
Gosar interns should ring a bell for you.
One of the them popped up in this May 2023 TPM story about the ties between a Gosar staffer and neo-Nazi Nick Fuentes.
Then in January 2024, the Arizona Mirror published a story on two other Gosar interns who had “expressed deeply racist, homophobic and antisemitic beliefs.”
Smart Move!
With a bench warrant outstanding against her back in Michigan, pro-Trump lawyer Stefanie Lambert showed up anyway for a hearing in federal court in Washington, D.C., where she was representing former Overstock CEO Patrick Byrne in a defamation case brought by Dominion Voting Systems. She was arrested after the hearing by U.S. marshals. The bench warrant was issued after she failed to appear to face four felony counts in a voting machine tampering case that grew out of bogus 2020 election conspiracies.
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