Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

So it was an October Surprise A Day, like an Advent calendar but for crime.

Accountability, motherfuckers.

People are complicated. Love is not.

I see no possible difficulties whatsoever with this fool-proof plan.

We are aware of all internet traditions.

Accused of treason; bitches about the ratings. I am in awe.

You can’t attract Republican voters. You can only out organize them.

My years-long effort to drive family and friends away has really paid off this year.

But frankly mr. cole, I’ll be happier when you get back to telling us to go fuck ourselves.

It’s the corruption, stupid.

Peak wingnut was a lie.

An almost top 10,000 blog!

Nancy smash is sick of your bullshit.

Nevertheless, she persisted.

Reality always wins in the end.

Usually wrong but never in doubt

They traffic in fear. it is their only currency. if we are fearful, they are winning.

We are builders in a constant struggle with destroyers. let’s win this.

The poor and middle-class pay taxes, the rich pay accountants, the wealthy pay politicians.

Shallow, uninformed, and lacking identity

They fucked up the fucking up of the fuckup!

The willow is too close to the house.

Infrastructure week. at last.

I’m going back to the respite thread.

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Friday Evening Open Thread: Monster Mash

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Feels like a metaphor for the RNC, dunnit?

… As the current seatholders contemplate the terror of being only the second biggest gourd at the Communal Death Festival…

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Late Night Open Thread: Trump ‘Gifts’

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Speaking of “gifts”…

The Saudis had so little respect for Trump, even while he was in office, they gave him cheap fakes:

The Saudi royal family showered Donald J. Trump and his entourage on his first trip abroad as president with dozens of presents, including three robes made with white tiger and cheetah fur, and a dagger with a handle that appeared to be ivory.

A White House lawyer determined that possession of the furs and dagger most likely violated the Endangered Species Act, but the Trump administration held onto them and failed to disclose them as gifts received from a foreign government.

On the last full day of Mr. Trump’s presidency, the White House handed them over to the General Services Administration — the wrong agency — rather than the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, which seized the gifts this summer.

At that point, there was a surprise.

The furs, from an oil-rich family worth billions of dollars, were fake.

“Wildlife inspectors and special agents determined the linings of the robes were dyed to mimic tiger and cheetah patterns and were not comprised of protected species,” said Tyler Cherry, a spokesman for the Interior Department, which oversees the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

Officials at the Saudi Embassy in Washington declined to comment…

In addition, the Trump administration never disclosed that Jared Kushner, Mr. Trump’s son-in-law and a top White House adviser, received two swords and a dagger from the Saudis, although he paid $47,920 for them along with three other gifts in February, after he left office…

Bess Levin, at Vanity Fair, “Picture This: Jared Kushner Brandishing a Dagger and Two Swords”:

… Obviously, this raises more questions than it answers. Because the gifts were paid for, and Kushner presumably retained possession of them, what special display case does he keep them in? Does he show them off to visitors, saying, “These are from my buddy MBS, you know, the guy who had a man chopped into tiny pieces”? And maybe most importantly, how many times a week do you think he takes the swords and dagger out to play with them, and how many times has Ivanka had to take him to the emergency room for stitches despite having told him on numerous occasions, “Jared, these are not toys”? Inquiring minds would like to know…

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GOP Grifters After Dark Open Thread: The Lyin’ in Winter

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It was whispered, IIRC, that the Federalist hired Molly Hemingway for her last name, and yet was eventually forced to ‘upgrade’ her to editor. It’s not so much that she’s a bad writer (though she is), but she’s too obviously angry, sadly incapable of layering the required sombre veneer of just-the-facts plausibility over this week’s assault on democracy and/or reality.

If that’s true, maybe the professional GOP Death Cultists don’t really want TFG running for president again. They want him to remain the God-Emperor of Marred-At-Largo, a celebrity figurehead to keep the rubes agape while sharper intellects set up the next judicial insurrection, a daily bloviating puppetshow that aw shucks, we’re all just simple populists here…

“I don’t like her … and I don’t like me.”

Former President Donald Trump was looking at a photo of the two of us that his assistant had just taken on my phone. It wasn’t up to his specifications…

A few weeks after Biden was inaugurated, I told Trump during a phone call that I was going to write a book about the 2020 election. He invited me to come see him.

That’s how I ended up in Florida in late February, for our first interview. The moment you land at the Palm Beach International airport, people joke about having made it to the Free State of Florida, but that’s exactly how it feels compared to D.C.

My friend Karol Markowicz, a writer who escaped Brooklyn for an area near Palm Beach just so her children could attend school during the lockdowns, describes the area as “The Hamptons, but colorful and risk-taking. Everyone is rich enough that they don’t care what anyone else thinks of them.”

Palm Beach in the winter is just perfect. The town is full of beautiful men and women who seem to have the right balance of work and leisure. With the blissfully temperate climate and the gorgeous — and yes, colorful — homes and lawns, I began to fantasize about what life-changing events would have to occur for me to be able to make the move also…
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By our May interview, Trump was still disappointed in McConnell, who he called “a disgrace to the Republican Party. He’s gutless. He should have fought for us on the rigged election. Can you imagine Schumer saying ‘We have to declare Trump the winner to get the country going’?”

“The problem with the Republicans is they don’t know who to fight,” Trump said.

I asked him who he thought might make a better leader for Republicans. He discussed a few names off the record, and said, “Leadership is a very funny thing. Oftentimes you don’t know who’s going to be a good leader until they’re there. It’s like you throw the baby into the water and they turn out to be an Olympic champion, or maybe it won’t work out so well. I’ve watched people that have such capability, and they turn out to be lousy leaders. You never know.”…

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Wednesday Morning Open Thread: The Battles Continue

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Elsewhere… even Forbes has stopped worrying about TFG’s fee-fees:

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Politics After Dark Open Thread: Rooting for (More) Injuries

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Just so as we’re all up to date on the latest GOP outbreak…

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Late Night Open Thread: No Man Is A Hero to His Press Secretary

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Especially not the Nekkid Emperor of Marred-A-Lago:

Little is known about what happened in the 90-minute conversation between President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin in Osaka, Japan, two years ago. But as journalists were quickly ushered out of the room at the 2019 Group of 20 Summit, Stephanie Grisham once again found herself with a close-up view of the action.

She saw Trump lean toward Putin that day and tell him: “Okay, I’m going to act a little tougher with you for a few minutes. But it’s for the cameras, and after they leave, we’ll talk. You understand.”

It’s just one of many telling interactions detailed by Grisham in her new book, titled “I’ll Take Your Questions Now.” One of the most senior and longest-serving Trump advisers, she worked as the president’s third press secretary and as first lady Melania Trump’s chief of staff and communications director before she resigned on Jan. 6 during the Capitol riot…

A major theme of the book is the culture of lies that pervaded Trump’s administration. “Casual dishonesty filtered through the White House as if it were in the air conditioning system,” Grisham writes…

She is particularly negative about the president’s daughter, Ivanka Trump, and her husband, Jared Kushner — both of whom held senior White House positions. She wrote that the first lady and White House staff called Ivanka “the Princess” who regularly invoked “my father” in work meetings, and Grisham dubbed Kushner “the Slim Reaper” for his habit of inserting himself into other people’s projects, making a mess and leaving them to take the blame.

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1 + 1 = 3 (Open Thread)

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There’s been talk in comments about an opinion piece by Robert Kagan published last week in The Washington Post. The title of the piece is “Our constitutional crisis is already here,” and it’s hard to sum up, but I’ll try. One of Kagan’s premises is that if Trump remains on this side of the dirt and is healthy enough, he’ll definitely run again in 2024.

I don’t know if that’s true, but if it is, Kagan’s second premise comes into play, which is that the Trump cult has already successfully undermined faith in elections* for millions and may have put enough state-level levers in place to at least cause massive chaos and potentially violence if he loses again. The evidence for that is solid already, IMO.

Kagan says reform is needed before the 2022 election and that we’re running out of time. He says it will require every Democrat and a small handful of Republicans to act like patriots to address a metastasizing threat of an authoritarian takeover and/or large-scale social upheaval resulting from state legislature fuckery around election results.

Kagan says this must be done to uphold constitutional order, even at the cost — gasp! — of ditching the filibuster rule, which appears no where in the US Constitution. Sadly, that seems extremely unlikely.

One thing I found compelling about the piece is that it lays out what makes Trump a uniquely dangerous threat. People who say he’s a symptom not the disease, that the road to Trumpism leads back to Nixon, Reagan, Bush II or wherever they draw the line aren’t wrong. But they aren’t capturing the full story either, IMO.

I don’t get it, and I never will, even if I live to be 1,000, but Trump is the center of a cult of personality. As Kagan says, Trump doesn’t need to “deliver” on an agenda to keep his followers loyal because Trump being a giant, shouty, self-pitying asshole is the product.

Those of us outside the cult don’t see the appeal, but it’s undeniable, and it doesn’t seem to be waning as we’d hoped after the last election. In that time, tens of thousands have died because they refused to take the pandemic seriously — all because Trump and his disciples told them not to. It’s still happening.

Who else has that power in the Republican Party? In any party? (Ron DeSantis, Greg Abbott, etc., are trying, but IMO, they’re still riding Trump’s coattails.) So, as much as we’d all like to stuff that shit-bag Trump down the memory hole and speak his accursed name no more, doing that right now would be disastrously premature, according to Kagan, like the dummies in slasher films who let down their guard because they think they’ve neutralized the killer.

Anyhoo, it’s a thought-provoking article and well worth burning a free click and discussing here, IMO. Otherwise, open thread.

*The best of all possible worlds, IMO, is Trump drops dead or otherwise declines to run again, and millions of Republican voters don’t bother to turn out because they don’t trust elections and they hate the institutional Republican Party for disrespecting Trump, even though with few exceptions, Republicans groveled before him. The schadenfreude would be unbearably delightful.

1 + 1 = 3 (Open Thread)Post + Comments (188)