Week of October 6
The Trump administration uses chaos and news exhaustion as tactics to keep its opponents overwhelmed and off balance.
Perhaps it’s better to pick one issue a week to follow. This week, I am keeping the government shutdown, birthright citizenship, the Argentinian deal, the aftermath of speeches by Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth at the Quantico Marine Corps base and assorted other embarrassments and scandals on the back burner.
The focus for me is the attempts to legitimize the administration to use the National Guard in Chicago and Portland, Oregon. It’s a huge issue for several reasons:
• Using National Guard troops in such a way can be seen as a way to normalize a military presence in advance of the elections next month and the midterms year later.
• The arrogance and lack of respect for the law and judiciary is comically obvious. Judge Karin Immergut initially ruled that the administration couldn’t move troops to Portland. She wrote that the rationales presented to her were “untethered to facts,” according to Politico. That’s judicial-speak for saying that the administration was lying. The punchline is that Hegseth subsequently took steps to send National Guard troops from California and Texas to Portland, Chicago and other states. The ploy–using troops from states not specifically mentioned in the judge’s order–was so egregious that Immergut held a hearing late on a Sunday night to clarify and rectify the situation.
• The context of this is question of how plugged in Trump. The challenges to our system being made by the administration’s action are profound. The people need to know if these moves are being made or molded by Stephen Miller, Russ Vought or anyone else. We deserve to know what the president is being told.
An underlying tension since Trump entered office is whether or not the administration would follow adverse judicial decisions. The odds of this situation providing that answer were high. They rose higher when Chicago and Illinois filed lawsuits against the administration on October 6.
Earlier Quick Hits after the music break…
Little Richard — Richard Wayne Penniman — is one of the pillars of rock and roll.
The Macon, GA native was born in 1932, the third of 12 children. His father was both a bootlegger and a Seventh Day Adventist preacher. The dramatic details of his biography are told in many places, of course, including the The History of Rock, Biography and The Wall Street Journal, which are sources for this post.
Richard’s father kicked him out of the house when he was 13 due to his effeminate manner. Richard spent a few years gaining his footing. He recorded some music and worked at other jobs. (Continue Reading…)
Week of September 22
The general wisdom always has been that Donald Trump’s core of support is solid and unshakeable. That core loves him and will always come out to vote. Beyond this, he needed a respectable but not dominant percentage of more centrist Republicans and rightward leaning Democrats to win elections. The base-first strategy was brilliant and served him well.
Some very big things have changed. The most important is that Trump doesn’t need to win any more elections. He is done electorally. This frees him up to be himself publicly even more than he was before. It also enables him to work full time on opportunities that flow high political office: Making money, gaining retribution and security a pardon for the crimes he knows he committed.
A second and related change is that the makeup of the president’s circle is radically different than during his first term. The first term featured a number of people with gravitas and a grounding in and respect for how our government works. Those folks were not welcome into this administration. The current crew are enablers and sycophants. Their job is to not say no.
The ramifications of these two changes are enormous. And they have been on display during the past week or so. There was the statement and Charlie Kirk’s funeral that he hates his enemies, the Jimmy Kimmel affair, the two-count indictment against James Comey (which legal experts seem to unanimously call an embarrassment), weird accusations of a plot because the escalator and teleprompter system at the U.N. malfunctioned and other smaller things. Next week, apparently, Fox personality Pete Hegseth will convene an all-hands meeting at the Quantico, VA, Marine base. The goal, apparently, is to instill the warrior instinct on men and women who all have spent decades of their lives protecting us. None of this normal.
The president’s behavior clearly is leading to a slow decline in his approval ratings. It’s hard to validate, but I believe it is tied to a deeper realization among ever-wider swatches of the public of three things: Trump is uninterested in voters’ needs, wholly focused on his own agenda and that he is just not fully there anymore.
The questions going forward:
How unleashed is Trump? Could he surprise as he worries about his legacy?
Will Republicans become more assertive as the president’s approval ratings head towards the 20s?
Will the Democrats get their act together?
Will the power the public demonstrated in the Kimmel affair broaden and embolden the organized resistance?
Will the Supreme Court finally figure out that they are empowering a very dangerous individual and the unitary executive doctrine nonsense?
There are others. The bottom line is that the public must stay engaged and vote.
Earlier Quick Hits after the music break
Posting this to carry on the boxing theme of the headline and the image at the top of this page. LL Cool J’s real name is James Todd Smith. He was raised on Long Island and in Queens, NY.
Smith had a difficult upbringing according to the Wikipedia profile. Despite that, he has had a tremendously successful career. He is among the first big stars of hip-hop. Smith subsequently became an actor and has had his own sit-com, been a cast member of NCIS Los Angeles. His list of acting credits is long and impressive.
Earlier Quick Hits:
September 22
Early Voting has started Virginia’s gubernatorial race. The Democratic candidate, Abigail Spanberger has a 12% lead–52% to 40%–against Republican candidate Winsome Earle-Sears, who is the current attorney general. The poll was conducted by Christoper Newport University.
To the north, Democrat Mikie Sherrill is eight points ahead of Republican Jack Ciattarelli in the latest Quinnipiac University poll of the New Jersey gubernatorial race. Sherrill has 49% and Ciattarelli 41% with the rest back minor candidates or are undecided. In a two-person race, Sherrill has 51% and Ciattarelli’s 42%.
An internal poll found Ciattarelli ahead of Sherrill 46% to 45%.
The latest Reuters/Ipsos poll has consistently bad news for President Trump. The poll found that 56% of Americans disapprove of his performance versus 43% who approve. The pollster asked respondents of their opinions on six tops–economy, crime, tariffs, immigration and the wars in Ukraine and Gaza–and found that the president is underwater (below 50%) in them all.
Feelings on whether the country is headed in the right or wrong direction is seen as an indicator of the elections that follow. If that holds true, the Republicans are in a tough spot 14 months before the midterms.
An Associated Press-NORC poll found that 51% of Republicans think the country is headed in the wrong direction. In June, just 29% of Republicans held this view. Overall, 75% of adults in the country think the country is headed in the wrong direction.
A man named Nicholas Wimbish of Milledgeville, GA, was sentenced to serve 20 months in prison and pay a $2,000 fine after pleading guilty to one count of conveying false information and making hoaxes.
Wimbish was employed as a poll worker at the Jones County Elections Office in Gray, Georgia. On October 16 of last year he and a voter had a “verbal altercation,” according to the Justice Department. Wimbish subsequently sent a letter threatening to bomb the polling place and made it appear that it was written by the man with whom he argued.
