For weeks, the House Foreign Affairs Committee has been asking Mike Pompeo to testify about his use of State Department resources for political purposes, and for weeks Pompeo has been ignoring those requests. Not only did Pompeo violate all past protocol—and the Hatch Act—by speaking this week at the RNC, he did so while on a supposedly official trip to Israel. But long before that grievous violation, Pompeo provided a 1,600 page “portfolio” of information on Joe Biden to Republican senators, and only Republican senators. A subpoena for that information met with no response. Pompeo has been deeply involved in attempts to find some supporting evidence for Donald Trump’s conspiracy theories, both about Biden’s role in Ukraine and the origins of the investigation into the actions of Russia in the 2016 election.
On Thursday, the State Department finally provided a response to the House subpoena—though Pompeo didn’t deign to write anything personally. Instead, he left it to an assistant to tell the Foreign Affairs Committee that Pompeo “categorically rejects your baseless assertion that the Department may have acted inappropriately or violated any law” in "what appears to be partisan misuse of resources." In addition to denying that the State Department had provided information to only Republican members, despite overwhelming evidence that this is the case, acting (and unconfirmed) assistant secretary Ryan Kaldahl made it clear that Pompeo wasn’t going to appear before the House and that the State Department was not going to hand over any documents it had produced for Senate Republicans—not unless Democrats announce that they are also starting a formal inquiry into Joe Biden and nonexistent crimes in Ukraine.
Committee chair Rep. Eliot Engel was just as clear in his response on Friday: The House is going forward with contempt proceedings against Pompeo.
Engel’s statement did not hold back: “From Mr. Pompeo’s refusal to cooperate with the impeachment inquiry, to his willingness to bolster a Senate Republican-led smear against the President’s political rivals, to his speech to the RNC which defied his own guidance and possibly the law, he has demonstrated alarming disregard for the laws and rules governing his own conduct and for the tools the constitution provides to prevent government corruption,” said Engel. “He seems to think the office he holds, the Department he runs, the personnel he oversees, and the taxpayer dollars that pay for all of it are there for his personal and political benefit.”
The letter from Kaldahl makes it clear that this is Pompeo’s “final response,” and the idea that the House should be required to pretend—as Pompeo is doing—that there is the least scrap of truth behind the conspiracy theories Trump is promoting is ridiculous.
“Mr. Pompeo is demanding that the Committee do essentially the same thing Russia is doing,” writes Engel, “In other words, Pompeo will give the Committee what we were seeking if we join in a smear of the President’s political rival. Sound familiar?”
Engel is now drawing up a resolution holding Pompeo in contempt. There’s no doubt that Republican members will complain and attempt to delay the process. But Engel seems unlikely to be in a patient mood with only 67 days left until the election.
When Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman testified at Donald Trump’s impeachment hearing, he reassured his Soviet-born father that he would be fine. “Dad, I’m sitting here today, in the U.S. Capitol talking to our elected professionals,” said Vindman. “It’s proof that you made the right decision 40 years ago to leave the Soviet Union. Do not worry, I will be fine for telling the truth." As it turns out, his father was right to worry. Alexander Vindman left the military in July after expertise in Eastern Europe was discarded and his career was crushed in an act of petty revenge by Donald Trump.
And now it seems that Trump’s revenge wasn’t limited to Alexander Vindman, because his twin brother is the subject of a letter between four House committee chairs and the acting inspector general of the Department of Defense. Yevgeny Vindman is also a Lt. Colonel. He also worked in the Trump White House. And it seems that, during the course of the last two years, he has also voiced concerns—though he did so quietly, through channels, dealing with the attorneys at the National Security Council and Department of Defense (DOD). Even so, the Trump White House appears to have come down on Yevgeny Vindman hard. Hard in the sense of writing a demeaning evaluation designed to destroy his career.
What’s particularly interesting about the letter is not just how much Trump continues to be driven by revenge. The letter from the House also reveals part of the complaint that Yevgeny Vindman filed earlier with the DOD Office of General Counsel. Because that complaint goes beyond just Trump and anything he said in a phone call. Both Vindman brothers provided information in what were supposed to be protected environments—but there is no real protection from corruption.
Chair of the House Oversight Committee Carolyn Maloney, Chair of the Intelligence Committee Adam Schiff, Chair of the Armed Services Committee Adam Smith, and Chair of the Subcommittee on National Security Stephen Lynch all signed onto the letter formally asking the DOD acting inspector general to open an investigation into whether one or both Vindman brothers had been persecuted for disclosing information through protected channels.
In the case of the new information on the complaint filed by Yevgeny Vindman, these were serious violations of rules that he was required to report. In fact, failure to report these violations would have made Vindman subject to punishment. His concerns included passing along what he called “reasonable and in good faith concerns” about the phone call that Donald Trump placed to the president of Ukraine on July 25, 2019. But much of what he sent to the DOD was not directly connected to Trump’s phone call, or even to the broader attempt to suborn false allegations against Joe Biden.
Several complaints concerned Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs Robert O’Brien. Specifically, Vindman raised concerns that:
O’Brien, along with National Security Counsel (NSC) Chief of Staff Alex Gray, “engaged in demeaning and demoralizing sexist behavior against … female NSC professionals” including comments on their appearance and excluding women from meetings.
O’Brien was using government resources for his personal business, traveled for personal business on the government dime, used government staff to perform personal errands, and became “agitated and angry” when informed that he shouldn’t be accepting gifts from private entities related to his role in government.
Yevgeny Vindman’s complaint details violations committed by White House officials that he personally witnessed, as well as events that he was informed about as a legal advisor to the NSC. As a result of what he was seeing, Vindman wrote a note to the DOD saying: “I remain gravely concerned that the climate in the NSC is toxic and that leadership does not have regard for rules and standards. If this situation persists, personnel will depart and national security will be harmed.”
In short, Yevgeny Vindman appeared to understand the importance of allowing laws and regulations to govern the behavior of those working for the government. O’Brien and others at the Trump White House did not.
The result of Vindman providing what was supposed to be protected information following the actual law had a definite result—but not on the people violating the law. Here’s Yevgeny Vindman’s review from just before Trump’s phone call to Ukraine.
Yevgeny is the epitome of an Army officer and lawyer. He is a hardworking, disciplined, tough-minded team player who manifests the Army Values. He is unremittingly honest in delivering legal advice, without concern of repercussions. Yev does the right thing and is approachable and personable. … Yev is a top 1% military attorney and officer and the best LTC with whom I have ever worked. Functioning at the executive level, he advises White House senior staff with skill, tact, and judgment on matters of geostrategic importance. Sought by White House staff regularly, he can do any job in the legal field under unusual and constant pressure and scrutiny. Select now for Senior Service College and promote immediately to Colonel. Absolutely unlimited potential!
Here is the evaluation that Yevgeny Vindman received just eight months later.
During the prior reporting period and early portions of the reporting period, LTC Vindman performed his duties satisfactorily. Over time, LTC Vindman displayed increasingly poor judgment and failed to learn from his mistakes. On multiple occasions,his unprofessional demeanor made NSC staff feel uncomfortable. Despite express guidance from his supervisor, he continued to add himself to meetings with senior NSC staff where he did not add value. LTC Vindman’s substandard performance—his lack of judgment, failure to communicate well with his superiors, and inability to differentiate between legal and policy decisions—caused him to lose the trust of NSC senior leadership. … With additional counseling and experience, LTC Vindman’s performance may improve. He would benefit from additional experience in a slower paced work environment subject to less pressure and scrutiny. In time, he may become a better attorney
It shouldn’t be surprising that everyone who had already ignored all the other rules also ignored the rules about retaliating against information that was relayed in what was supposed to be a protected space, by someone who was trying to explain the importance of being consistent and honest.
The two evaluations actually say the same thing: Vindman is “unremittingly honest in delivering legal advice, without concern of repercussions.” The only thing that changed was the people getting the advice.
The Senate Intelligence Committee report on Russian interference in the 2016 election was slipped out to the public with less fanfare than a new menu item at Captain D’s. And like the actual Mueller report, released weeks after Attorney General William Barr produced his whitewashed summary, Republicans are just hoping everyone will read their topline statements and ignore what the investigation really found.
Somehow, after Republicans have declared over and over that there was “no collusion,” they’ve been sitting on a report that shows that Donald Trump’s campaign manager was in constant contact with a Russian operative, that both WikiLeaks and Roger Stone knew they were part of a direct pipeline from Vladimir Putin, and that the infamous Trump Tower meeting with Donald Trump Jr, Jared Kushner, and Paul Manafort was in fact a meeting with Russian spies designed to get information that could be used against Hillary Clinton. And that Ivanka Trump coordinated the daily drip of words from Moscow.
The Senate report, in fact, proves everything that had been said since before the election—Trump’s campaign directly collaborated with Russia, on multiple occasions and in various ways, to alter the outcome of a U.S. election. It also shows that multiple members of Trump’s campaign lied to investigators about these connections, and that Republican senators have been aware of these facts even as they have scorned the Mueller investigation and defended Trump and his campaign. So what are Republican senators doing about it now? Lying, of course.
The Senate report shows that Manafort was directly involved in passing along information to a Russian intelligence agent and accepting information from that agent. That’s collusion by the head of Trump’s campaign. The investigation could have stopped right there and moved on to providing information to the House for impeachment.
It didn’t stop there. It went on to explore how Ivanka Trump coordinated the use of stolen documents provided by Russia to make Trump’s attacks on Clinton more effective. How Stone helped Moscow coordinate WikiLeaks information to run cover for Trump. And how Manafort’s close coordination with Kremlin sources “represented a grave counterintelligence threat,” The report isn’t just damning, it’s damning to helling. It could not be more conclusive and more authoritative in showing that there was genuine coordination between the Trump campaign and Putin’s plans. Trump took everything Putin would give him, and begged for more.
Evidence in the report shows that Manafort’s chief contact, Konstantin Kilimnik, was connected not just with providing information to the campaign after the fact, but to the whole plot to break into DNC servers in the first place. The Trump campaign wasn’t the lucky beneficiary of a Russian plot that was already in effect. The whole thing—the break-in at the DNC, the distribution of emails through WikiLeaks, the false claims about Ukraine—was a joint Trump/Putin production from the start. They didn’t just collude, they were partners.
Why they were partners from the start is also underlined in the report, as the fifth volume contains information directly related to the leverage Putin had over Trump. That includes not just witnesses corroborating the existence of the “pee tape,” but a possible affair between Trump and a former Miss Moscow as well as a visit to a Moscow strip club. All of this, along with Manafort’s existing connections to Moscow, meant that Trump and other members of the campaign “presented attractive targets for foreign influence, creating notable counterintelligence vulnerabilities,” according to the report.
Almost as an aside, the report shows that Donald Trump and his then-personal attorney Michael Cohen negotiated repeatedly to cover up evidence in exchange for a pardon—and then everyone involved lied about it to Robert Mueller. Though that part was already known.
So what are Republican senators going to do about a report—their own report—that lays bare Putin’s tawdry leverage over Trump, the openness of Trump’s campaign to foreign influence, and the lies that campaigns staffers told to investigators every step of the way? As Lawfare points out, Republicans have a very simple solution: lying. Over and over, Republican senators have issued statements repeating the idea that the report shows “no collusion,” in direct contradiction of the actual contents.
Republicans in the Senate deserve credit for allowing the investigation to run its course rather than doing a Devin Nunes and popping out a Trump-praising nonsense piece while claiming that everything is good. But they deserve zero credit for running away from their own report or for making claims that the report doesn’t show what it clearly shows.
And while Republicans are scanning Mike Pompeo’s stack of documents looking for possible avenues of attack against Joe Biden, Biden could do a lot worse than simply making advertisements out of segments of the report created by the Republican-led Senate.
Olivia Nuzzi’s stunning look inside the Trump presidential campaign confirms everything we’ve been saying, for so long—that it’s a disorganized disaster of a mess, riven by internal discord and rival factions, with no guiding strategy that could plausibly give the incumbent president a path to reelection.
“The campaign was spending all this money on silly things. Brad’s businesses kept making money,” the first senior White House official told me. “Everyone was like, What does he even do? He’s just milking the family, basically. And nobody could understand why Jared and the family were putting up with it. That was the talk all the time. Why? Why Brad? He’s not some genius. And I guess people just came to the conclusion that, well, who else would be campaign manager? We’re kind of stuck with this guy.”
Note, the campaign is still spending money in silly things, like TV ads in the Washington DC market so that Donald Trump can see himself as he wastes entire days staring slack jawed at the TV screen. And are the partners of the two Trump siblings still making $15,000 every month in a nepotistic fleecing of campaign donors? There are no indications that has changed.
We know that the campaign has no message, and continues to have no message, comically fumbling the response to the Kamala Harris VP rollout. Indeed, this is the campaign that expended serious resources to build a case against Hunter Biden’s work in the Ukraine—an effort that led to a historic impeachment of the president, only to see a bored Trump toss it aside with little use. Also, remember Obamagate, the single most horrible scandal in the history of America? That one lasted like three days. Meanwhile, Trump can’t pivot away from “the best economy in the history of the world” (it wasn’t), even after his mismanagement of the coronavirus pandemic drove it into a ditch.
So, having “rebooted” the campaign by ditching Brad Parscale and installing Bill Stepien instead as campaign manager, how has that campaign message changed? Nuzzi asked:
But while replacing Parscale with Stepien has the look of a reboot, at the strategy level it does not seem much has changed or is likely to. Asked how the campaign can formulate a coherent message, given what life is like for most people across the country today, senior adviser Jason Miller said, “It’s very direct: President Trump built the greatest economy in the history of the world, and he’s doing it again.”
Oh well.
Finally, we’ve seen how Trump’s actual actions only serve to shrink his potential base of support, further alienating key demographic groups that have abandoned him, like those suburban college-educated white women who delivered the House to Nancy Pelosi and the Democrats in 2018. (38 of the Democrats’ 41 House pickups were in suburban districts.)
This is an ongoing Trump feature, from attacking Supreme Court decisions popular with those suburban swing voters (like protecting abortion rights, protecting young immigrants, and defending LGBTQ rights), to demonizing the Black Lives Matter movement, to defending Confederate monuments. So, what is the campaign doing to expand its base and win? Reading the Nuzzi piece, apparently nothing more than engage in wishful thinking. Take this passage, for example:
“I don’t think we’re gonna lose this campaign,” said Bob Paduchik, Trump’s 2016 Ohio state director and a senior adviser to the 2020 campaign. “I don’t think we’re losing this campaign.” He told me the polling averages didn’t show Biden winning Ohio. I said that was wrong. Well, Paduchik said, the RealClearPolitics average didn’t show Biden winning. I told him that was wrong too — that I happened to be looking at that particular website as we spoke. Even Rasmussen, Trump’s preferred polling outfit, had Trump down by five, I said. “No,” Paduchik said, Rasmussen didn’t have a poll like that. When I said it sure did, that I was looking right at it, Paduchik said he couldn’t speak to that poll since he hadn’t reviewed it himself. Either way, he said, the polls were silly, based as they are on the premise that they measure how people would vote if the election were held today. “Well, the election is not today!” he said. “We haven’t had our debates and our convention yet. It’s sort of a fantasy guess.”
This newfound belief that the debates will bail Trump out is a new level of wishful thinking. Debates don’t mean shit. Hillary Clinton wiped the floor with Trump, for all the good it did. Conventions also don’t do much to move the numbers in any lasting way, but they’ll be even less relevant in this year’s online format. But when you don’t have a message or an organization or a viable strategy to win back lost support, then wishful thinking is the final fallback.
There’s one final fascinating piece of news in Nuzzi’s piece, one that we hadn’t really seen before, and that is whether the Trump campaign is truly as organized as it claimed it is. We saw a hint of this during the hilariously botched Tulsa rally, when the campaign claimed it had 1 million people clamoring to attend. In the end, about 6,000 did. The expected overflow area outside the convention hall was dismantled even before Trump took the stage. (Herman Cain, one of Trump’s few Black friends, died because of that rally.)
The embarrassingly empty overflow area outside Trump’s failed Tulsa rally.
But that failure could easily be placed at the feet the pandemic. The campaign could be as organized as it claimed to be, and yet still fail to get a crowd because death is quite the demotivator, right? In Pennsylvania, a must-win battleground state for Trump, and one he won by a sliver in 2016, the Trump campaign claims 1.4 million volunteers and an unprecedented ground game. As Nuzzi summarizes it, “The campaign says it’s the greatest ground game to ever exist, that while you don’t see enthusiasm for the president reflected in the rigged polls, you do see it when you talk to his real supporters where they live in Real America. In fact, they talk about surveys of enthusiasm not just as though they are more reliable than real polls but as though they are the polls — as though the traditional kind simply don’t exist, or matter.”
Nuzzi sets out to find this ground game in action, attending trainings and gatherings advertised by the state’s campaign. It’s a hilarious stream of empty rooms, closed doors, and puzzled campaign staff. Like this vignette:
“What event?,” Kevin Tatulyan, an Allegheny County Republican official, asked as he waved me into the room.
“What event?,” Dallas McClintock, the regional Trump-Pence field director, asked.
One of the women, with lilac-colored hair, whipped her head toward McClintock.
“It’s your email here!” she told him, pointing to the advertisement I’d mentioned.
“My email?,” McClintock said in disbelief.
“Yeah!” she said.
He scrunched up his face.
For the next several minutes, the staffers tried to sort out how, with fewer than 100 days until the election, they had unknowingly advertised official campaign events that didn’t exist to potential campaign volunteers in the most important swing state in the country.
They squinted at their screens and asked questions.
“What time?”
“Where did you learn about it?”
“What was the address?”
The second event had been listed with an apparent misspelling in the street name, a detail that prompted the girl with the lilac hair to laugh.
“Sounds right,” she said dryly.
Trump thrives on good news and rose-colored information. Like a typical despot, he doesn’t want to hear the truth, so his staff tells him what he wants to hear. And they tell him those things were he’s sure to consume them—in the media.
So is the Trump’s campaign entire narrative about its massive ground game a fiction, designed to appease their boss? Nuzzi’s dive into this little slice of Pennsylvania certainly suggests so. Of course, we can’t and shouldn't assume that’s the case anywhere. And in any case, is anyone really staying home this November? I doubt it’s possible to suppress this vote with “good news”.
And even if Pennsylvania’s Trump operation is a mirage, that doesn’t mean it’s equally ineffective elsewhere. Remember, we’re not playing to win the presidency anymore. This is another 2018—we’re playing to deliver maximum electoral pain to the Republican Party.
What this does suggest is that a Republican Party that has surrendered to Trump, both out of fear of his tantrums, and hope that his rabid foot soldiers can bail them out, may have miscalculated to a degree that we hadn’t even dare consider. If the vaunted Trump ground game is a fiction, our down ballot opportunities may be even greater than we hoped.
I’ve said before, we are lucky that Trump is as stupid and ineffective as he is. The dumbass even admitted to gutting the USPS for electoral gain last week, like a cliche movie villain’s monologue. Now no one can pretend that Trump’s efforts aren’t nefarious, even those who wanted to like Fact Check. His penchant for surrounding himself with morons and refusal to follow federal law when making decisions has ensured that the damage he could cause was limited at best. (A quote in Nuzzi’s piece illustrates this perfectly: “What Trump does is take people who are mediocre talent at best, who know they could never have the position they have if it were not for Trump, and it creates this instant loyalty to Trump.”)
Trump has epically messed up the country, but it could’ve been worse. And now he’s bringing his special kind of incompetence, the kind that bankrupts a casino, to his reelection campaign.
That incompetence is a silver lining in what has been among the bleakest four years in our lives. It means we are on path to ridding ourselves of Trump and his party. Because at this point, we’re not fighting for November, we’re fighting for the next generation.
The sudden collapse of the United States Postal Service's ability to do their core job—deliver mail—is now so widespread a problem as to be stoking widespread public outrage. This may finally result in substantive congressional action—sort of. Perhaps.
House Democrats are now asking (but not subpoenaing) Trump Postmaster General Louis DeJoy to appear before the House Committee on Oversight and Reform on August 24th to explain his actions. DeJoy, who remains heavily invested in for-profit competitors to the USPS even as he guts federal mail delivery capabilities, was previously scheduled to appear on September 17; moving his appearance up by several weeks is an indication that Congress no longer thinks waiting until mid-September is defendable. Democrats ask that DeJoy confirm his plan to appear by tomorrow; DeJoy has also been asked to deliver requested documents by Friday, August 21.
The House is putting off the "urgent" hearing until August 24 "to give Committee Members adequate notice to prepare for your testimony" but also "to avoid conflicting with the Republican convention" beginning later that evening." Which is nice, given that DeJoy is a Republican megadonor who no doubt needs to (virtually) mingle at the now-virtual gathering.
While House Democrats' non-subpoena-based request for DeJoy's testimony gives mixed signals as to just how "urgent" Congress believes the intentional pandemic sabotage of the USPS truly is, there are other signs Congress may begin to move more rapidly. CNN reports that House Democrats are "seriously" considering calling the House back into session "as early as" this week to take actions to protect post offices. "Members are getting heavily criticized in their districts during this recess period for not coming back and trying to do something," notes CNN.
It is not clear what remedies may be plausibly available to the House. The Republican-held Senate is likely to continue to back Trump's sabotages of the USPS, moves he has explicitly said are meant to harm mail-in voting efforts, for the same reason the Senate refused to examine impeachment charges against Trump for using federal funds to extort a foreign nation into providing election help: to assist their own re-elections.
But that's becoming a more and more dangerous move to make. The United States Postal Service is one of the government services Americans most interact with, and the sabotage is creating nationwide problems that Americans are now witnessing in large numbers. Urgently needed medication taking weeks to arrive; "overnight" deliveries of live animals being delayed by over a week; checks, bills, and packages that once took mere days to ship now delayed for a month, or longer; it is untenable for both businesses and individuals. And people are getting furious.
Republican estimations that restricting vote-by-mail will prevent more Americans from casting ballots than are spurred in anger to vote against Republican incumbents come hell or high water or pandemic—it is certainly an all-or-nothing play.
Next year’s collective Republican amnesia will be something to behold. Forget “I didn’t read this tweet” responses to the latest outrage from America’s buffoon “leader” Donald Trump. They’re all going to pretend that he never existed as they rediscover their supposed “values” like not surrendering to Russia, family values (for thee, not me), and concern over budget deficits.
But for now, Republicans are still marching in lockstep toward that November cliff called “Election Day.” At least they’re doing so publicly. Privately? They’re being extra ridiculous.
“Discontent with Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy is on the rise in the House, as Republicans increasingly fearful of a loss by President Trump on Election Day gear up for an intraparty war over the future of the GOP,” reportsTheWashington Post. “A cluster of GOP lawmakers is starting to privately question whether the California Republican is putting loyalty to the president over the good of the conference. And a small group of members is discussing whether someone should challenge him for minority leader if Trump is defeated Nov. 3.”
Ha ha ha ha ha ha.
[Deep breath]
Ha ha ha ha ha ha.
This is rich.
Every single Republican in the House voted against articles of impeachment against Trump. The lone conservative who voted yes, Michigan Rep. Justin Amash, had to leave the party and become an independent to do so.
And now, as House Republicans face further decimation in the House, two years after they got body slammed into the minority, they’re wondering if someone else has been too close to Trump?
Oh, and these profiles in courage still can’t talk on the record, “[T]he frustration with McCarthy had already been brewing for weeks as Trump’s polling has sagged behind presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden. According to interviews with more than 10 House Republicans — all of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity to be frank — some GOP lawmakers are worried that McCarthy has tied the conference too much to Trump, refusing to stand up to the president or act as a buffer to distinguish the conference from him.” [Emphasis mine.]
Those 10 “worried” Republicans sure didn’t vote to impeach, that’s for sure. And when it came time to vote for the now-stalled coronavirus relief measure in May, only onevoted yes—New York Rep. Peter King. And we know he’s not one of the 10 fretting GOPers. How do we know? Because he already announced his retirement.
That’s not Kevin McCarthy casting those votes.
Of course, all Republicans have every reason to worry about November. Democrats maintain a healthy 8-10 point lead in the Civiqs generic congressional ballot daily tracker. (The same tracker spotted Democrats a 6-point 50-44 lead in 2018, an election in which the Democrats won the House popular vote by 8.6 points, 53.4-44.8.)
And for sure, being tied to Trump has been an electoral disaster for the GOP. Look at college-educated white women, the lone demographic to have significantly moved in the past four years:
Polling this year has consistently shown continuing trouble among all college-educated whites, and especially women. (Trump and his party are even losing ground among non-college whites, but I don’t trust them to deliver Democratic votes just yet. They’ve been shown to be susceptible to racist appeals in the past.)
Trump is going down. He’s taking down his party’s Senate majority, and another chunk of House Republicans in mostly suburban districts. All that is clear.
But anonymously whining that some guy is too pro-Trump, while every one of your public actions are explicitly and proudly pro-Trump, is a new level of ridiculous.
Everyone who has enabled Trump, and that’s a near-unanimous calculation when it comes to Republican elected officials, deserves to be wiped out electorally. That entire QAnon-fueled party needs to be burned to the ground. And if a science- and reason-based conservative party emerges from its ashes? Fine. Let’s have debates on the future of our country based on observable reality.
But unless your name is Mitt Romney, you don’t get to complain about the sorry, sad state of the modern GOP.
NPR's Noel King interviewed the Iowa Postal Workers Union President, Kimberly Karol. I urge you to read the entire transcript. (It’s not long.) She has been at the USPS for over 30 years, yet she has never seen anything like this. Louis DeJoy, a Trump flunky, was appointed as postmaster general. He has numerous conflicts of interests and no experience whatsoever—but he was a large Trump donor.
His changes have drawn widespread criticism. Karol admits she “is not a fan,” and she is not alone. She said "mail is beginning to pile up in our offices, and we're seeing equipment being removed.”
"In Iowa, we are losing machines. And they already in Waterloo were losing one of those machines. So that also hinders our ability to process mail in the way that we had in the past."
She said the changes made aren’t designed to save money, but to undermine public confidence in the Post Office. I would agree with that, with the added bonus for Trump of undermining confidence in the upcoming election that he is terrified of losing. She also believes DeJoy is trying to circumvent the rules that require public comment.
I would love for someone to explain to me how taking away mail sorting equipment, which stations already have, will 1) save money 2) do anything but hinder the mail going out in a timely manner. But that is the entire point, isn’t it?
Unfortunately, this is happening everywhere. Washington state officials are already complaining about mail sorting machines being removed.
DeJoy has already cut hours, cut overtime, removed trucks and jacked up the price of mail-in ballots right before the election. He is also, like Trump, opposed to the USPS getting more funding, which is as nefarious as it gets.
Vote early, in person, if you can. If you get a mail-in ballot, please take it to the elections office or a drop box. If you have to mail it, make sure you have enough postage and mail it in IMMEDIATELY. Thirty-four states won’t count it if it comes after Election Day, and Trump’s team is doing everything in their power to ensure that happens.
Trump just admitted he is sabotaging the post office to stop vote by mail. Dem leaders need to get an injunction and even consider impeachment, since this is a criminal act. It’s the right thing to do and I don’t care if the Senate acquits him—they will each have to go on record with destroying the USPS, and this puts the issue front and center. Most people don’t know this sabotage is even going on.
But Senate Republicans, led by McConnell, fell all over themselves to make sure Trump was at the helm when the pandemic hit U.S. shores. Now, what once looked like a promising cycle for Senate Republicans has turned entirely treacherous precisely because the caucus is saddled with Trump as their standard bearer.
Politico reports the party is directing nearly its entire $100 million war chest at saving the seats of eight incumbent senators while the few GOP candidates aiming to defeat a Democrat have been left almost entirely to their own devices. With the exception of funneling a little money into the effort to defeat Democratic Sen. Doug Jones in Alabama, they simply don't have the resources to play offense.
The seat of Democratic Sen. Gary Peters from Michigan, for instance, once seemed like a flippable seat. But as Trump has tanked in the state and Joe Biden is presently positioned very well there, Senate Republicans have left Republican candidate John James to fend for himself.
Instead, GOP groups, including the National Republican Senatorial Committee and the McConnell-aligned Senate Leadership Fund have been trying to bolster their defenses in Georgia, Iowa, and Montana—three states that weren't even on the radar as potential Democratic pick ups when the cycle started.
Perhaps even more striking has been the GOP spending to protect seats that Democrats weren't even truly contesting yet. In Montana and Georgia, for example, Republicans went up with defensive ads before Democrats even got there.
“It's unusual when the other side goes there first and expands the map for you,” said J.B. Poersch, president of the Democratic super PAC Senate Majority PAC.
The bottom line is that Republicans have been left with little choice but to protect a growing map of incumbents who are inextricably linked to a president who has presided over 165,000 American deaths and counting while decimating a decade of economic growth. In fact, Trump is such a drag now that McConnell has reportedly given GOP senators the green light to distance themselves from him whenever necessary. Yeah, good luck with that after four years of letting Trump trash the country without raising hardly a single objection.
"They're just not making the early investments they would if the president or the party was running better in the polls," said Saul Anuzis, a former GOP state party chair in Michigan.
And a giant part of the party's downfall is due to McConnell jamming that acquittal vote down the throats of his caucus members. Masterful.
When Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia died in February of 2016, Senate Republicans discovered a heretofore unidentified, now-infamous caveat to President Barack Obama's constitutional powers: Black presidents aren't allowed to fill vacant Supreme Court seats during an election year. The Senate refused to even consider the nomination of Merrick Garland, who was put forward by Obama for the role; instead, the seat was simply left vacant for the duration of Obama's term. When Republican Trump was installed as president the next year, the Senate swiftly confirmed his own conservative nominee.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and fawning Trump golf partner Sen. Lindsey Graham, among others, have not been shy in declaring that the previously made-up rule no longer applies under Trump. On the contrary, they say the Senate would move swiftly to confirm any last-minute nominees if a vacancy were to arise in the last months of Trump's calamitous term. The recent diagnosis of liberal court icon Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg with liver cancer (she is by all accounts being successfully treated) is putting new focus on these Republican court-packing inventions and un-inventions—and is pushing Democratic senators to more seriously consider expanding the court to rebalance it in the face of blatant Republican sabotages.
Whether Democratic senators will have the guts to actually do the thing remains an open question. But Sen. Tim Kaine—not exactly a liberal firebreather—is among those now open to expanding the Supreme Court if McConnell, Graham, and the others are insistent on undoing their own supposed ban on election-year nominees, notes NBC:
"If they show that they're unwilling to respect precedent, rules and history, then they can't feign surprise when others talk about using a statutory option that we have that's fully constitutional in our availability."
Unfortunately, that is phrased as a threat that depends on if Republicans go any further than they already have, rather than an observation about just how far they have already gone. The Democratic National Committee may go farther; they’re planning to make a call for "structural" court reforms part of the party platform.
The current Supreme Court has lost its legitimacy, and for structural rather than ideological reasons. The blocking of an Obama justice under a newly invented partisan rule that was discarded immediately afterwards put Neil Gorsuch on the court illegitimately; the Republican Senate's role in hiding evidence during Brett Kavanaugh's confirmation hearings was a near-perfect runup to the fiasco of discarded impeachment charges against Trump, not because anyone was willing to argue that Trump did not do the political extortion he was charged with but because Republican senators declared they simply did not wish to hear any evidence either way. The court is a product of the same Republican corruption that has debased the rest of Washington, and the nation. The party broke it.
“It would be very dangerous for Americans to begin to believe the Supreme Court was not the legitimate arbiter of our nation's laws,” we often hear. True, but that ship has sailed. The Supreme Court is a parody of itself already; you cannot even make good money making bets as to which conservative justices will discard their own precedents and proclamations to bend each new argument towards the preferred "conservative" outcome, because everybody else also knows that the core of conservative justices will make those flips of logic whenever the need arises. Pointing it out is now a consistent feature—and perhaps the most consistent feature—of non-conservative dissents.
It is true that Trump replacing any Supreme Court position in the next few months would quickly blossom into yet another crisis of government as the Senate swiftly erased whatever self-declared impediments were thrown up in the past, the whole of America watched it happen, and a good chunk of America came to the conclusion that the Supreme Court was now simply a structural appendage of the Republican Party. Again, though: ship, sailed. Watching the Kavanaugh nomination and listening to McConnell's unending carousel of new-rules-that-are-not, does anyone think the Supreme Court is not that appendage right now?
It was another typical day on the Sunday shows, the place where America's most powerful people congregate to, for the most part, brazenly lie to us. Today's version came with one thing that the Trump team Very Much wants to talk about—banning social media app TikTok—and several they very much did not.
The two things they didn't want to talk about: Whether Donald Trump has asked his staff about delaying the November elections, and whether Trump's White House and/or campaign will accept foreign "assistance" in defeating former Vice President Joe Biden.
WATCH: Trump adviser Jason Miller is asked three (3) times whether the Trump administration or campaign would accept foreign assistance in this election. Three (3) times, he refuses to say no. pic.twitter.com/Kcgm021pHP
That Trump campaign creature and deadbeat dad Jason Miller was so aggressively unwilling to answer straight-up whether the Trump team would be willing to accept foreign election assistance to beat Biden, on Fox News Sunday, is probably not surprising. Miller instead called it a "silly question," which to his credit is true: Trump himself faced impeachment for extorting a foreign government to provide such help, using the tools of his office, so pretending there is some remaining doubt about whether Trump and his team of people who did such a thing would do such a thing is indeed "silly."
This one is on Fox host Chris Wallace. If you book the oozing gastropod Miller on your show, you know what you're going to get: Lying. Gaslighting. Dear Leader-isms a-plenty. And you would still talk to him ... why? The point of bringing on a spokesperson who you can be absolutely sure will lie about anything and everything pertinent is what, exactly?
Newest Trump chief of staff Mark Meadows, plucked from his House seat after a campaign of vigorously defending Trump from both the thing Trump was impeached over and every last thing he wasn't, had his own moment of not-gonna-answer-that when asked on Face the Nation whether Trump, after suggesting in a tweet that the presidential election be delayed, asked "you or anybody else in the administration to look into" delaying it.
Meadows couldn't answer that one. Or rather, wouldn't answer that one, instead swerving to attacks on pandemic vote-by-mail efforts with the usual aplomb of a treasonous dirtbag man with no particular attachment to seeing those elections happen. He can't answer whether Trump administration members were specifically asked, by Trump, if there was a way to delay the elections? Really now?
White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows doesn't answer John Dickerson's question about "did the president ask you or anybody else in the administration to look into the idea of delaying the election day?" pic.twitter.com/dclXhW8ZcE
There's a coordinated Republican strategy to manufacture foreign dirt, using pro-Russian foreign forces, to attack Biden with conspiracy theories in the final months of the election so that the best American pal foreign autocrats ever had can cling to power for another four years. From Pompeo to Barr, from Nunes to Meadows to Giuliani to Miller, they're sifting through disinformation to see what they can plausibly use before the press, the American people, intelligence services and federal investigators catch wind of it.
It'll probably be very stupid things, given what Giuliani has presented so far, but that doesn't mean they won't go all-in on the effort. If Trump and his team cannot be bothered to form even a mediocre plan for combatting the pandemic that has now killed 150,000 Americans and which may kill 250,000 before November—and they clearly can’t—then arguing that whoever Trump’s running against would be even worse is the only remaining play.
