Mitt Romney
Former President Donald Trump's ongoing criminal trial in Manhattan recently attracted a throng of Republicans in blue suits and red ties all taking turns praising the ex-president while bashing the trial, the witnesses and Judge Juan Merchan. One Senate Republican wasn't impressed by the show of fealty to the 45th U.S. president.
In a recent interview in Washington, Sen. Mitt Romney (R-UT) spoke candidly about his fellow Republicans, which included House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA), North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum and some of his colleagues like Sens. Tim Scott (R-SC) and Tommy Tuberville (R-AL). Romney said the display of loyalty to the presumptive GOP nominee by those vying to be Trump's running mate was "really very difficult to watch."
"There is a level of dignity and decorum that you expect from people who are running for the highest station in the land, and going out and prostrating themselves in front of the public to try and apparently curry favor with the person whose our nominee, it's a little embarrassing," Romney said.
Romney — who isn't running for another term this fall — also opined that his fellow Republicans were debasing themselves in New York despite the sordid nature of the facts coming out in the trial proceedings. The 2012 GOP presidential nominee observed that it was "demeaning" for high-profile Republicans to effectively put their reputations on the line by defending the honor of a man disputing "an allegation of paying a porn star."
Of course, while Romney has not been shy about criticizing Trump, he's also been critical of President Joe Biden's Department of Justice for prosecuting the ex-president. In a separate interview with NBC's Stephanie Ruhle, the Utah senator said that if he were president, he would have "immediately" issued a presidential pardon to Trump. He cited Lyndon Baines' Johnson's pardon of Richard Nixon as an example.
"I'd have pardoned President Trump. Why? Well, because it makes me, President Biden, the big guy and the person I pardoned a little guy," Romney said. He also added he would have pressured Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg and Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis to not bring criminal charges in their respective investigations.
"I have been around for a while. If LBJ had been president, and he didn’t want something like this to happen, he’d have been all over that prosecutor saying, ‘You better not bring that forward or I’m gonna drive you out of office,'" Romney said.
Trump's trial is in its fifth week, and defense attorneys are cross-examining former Trump attorney and fixer Michael Cohen, who is seen as one of Bragg's star witnesses. Prosecutors have said they plan to rest their case after Cohen is finished, and Trump's lawyers haven't yet clarified whether they plan to call any witnesses, or bring Trump himself to the witness stand.
Despite Romney being outspokenly critical of Trump, he has yet to say definitively how he would vote in November. The Utah senator may elaborate on his choice for president in a Wednesday night CNN interview at 11 PM.
Reprinted with permission from Alternet.
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With the presidential election less than half a year away, evidence is everywhere that the right is planning to end the American experiment in representative government if it fails to legitimately return Donald Trump to the White House.
It was clear just a few months after Trump’s seditious plot to subvert the 2020 presidential election concluded with a violent mob of his supporters storming the U.S. Capitol that the right-wing propaganda apparatus was laying the groundwork to try again in 2024. Fox News and the rest of the MAGA media, which spent the weeks after the 2020 election fabricating and amplifying a host of election fraud lies and conspiracy theories to undermine the results, had begun working to institutionalize Trump’s lie that the 2020 election had been stolen from him and to construct an alternative path to the presidency in which compliant party officials would secure a Republican victory by any means necessary.
Fox had become a loaded gun aimed at American democracy. Three years later, the bullet is in the chamber.
The disinformation ecosystem which revolves around Fox is telegraphing a plan to reject the results of the 2024 election if Trump loses. The former president’s propagandists will once again use baseless allegations of widespread fraud as a pretext to seek to overturn the vote — and GOP leaders are publicly signaling their willingness to comply.
Ultimately, this preordained coup scheme may not matter. As in 2020, Joe Biden might win by too large a margin in too many states for the plot to succeed. Or, as in 2016, Trump might win outright.
But in the event that Biden triumphs in a close election, the MAGA faithful have developed and road-tested a plan to steal it.
Fox stars aided Trump’s 2020 subversion plot. They were lying. And they’ll do it again.
It is sometimes unclear whether Fox’s falsehoods are deliberate lies. But filings in Dominion Voting Systems’ defamation suit, which the network settled in April 2023 for $787.5 million, demonstrate beyond dispute that Fox’s coverage of the 2020 election results was rooted in malicious fabrication.
Fox’s top executives and biggest stars knew for a fact that Biden was the legitimate winner of the 2020 election, even as the network’s coverage sought to undermine the legitimacy of the vote. The network, filings show, was intentionally peddling conspiracy theories in support of Trump’s stolen-election deception in order to compete with its far-right rivals.
These lies mattered. Communications revealed by the suit show that top Fox executives were aware the network was “uniquely positioned to state the message that the election was not stolen” but did not out of fears of losing viewers. They further show that when then-Fox Corp. Chair Rupert Murdoch asked his employees for evidence Fox had “fed the story that the election was stolen and that January 6 [was] an important chance to have the results overturned,” he received a list of 50 examples in response.
But the only lesson Fox’s executives apparently learned from fueling an attempted coup is that they need better lawyering to keep their damning internal emails and text messages off the front pages and avoid paying a record settlement.
Fox retained and even promoted some of its most unhinged election deniers, while punishing or even firing employees who fought the false narratives. In the years that followed, the network restocked its prime-time lineup with Trump loyalists who parrot whatever the former president says, put Trump allies and even a family member on the payroll, and replaced “news side” veterans with GOP operatives.
It’s no wonder that former employees keep loudly warning that Fox is a dangerous cesspool that produces Trumpian propaganda. The cogs who remain on the job, meanwhile, know without a doubt that they are part of a machine that manufactures lies. The pressure the network faces to hold on to its audience — including by promoting voter fraud conspiracy theories and other right-wing extremism — is stronger than ever. And so if Trump demands that Fox’s propagandists again focus on building him a pretext to overturn an election, they will do it.
The emerging right-wing scheme to overturn the 2024 election
Trumpists in the media and elsewhere have spent the years since Trump’s defeat laying the groundwork to rerun his subversion plot, systematically removing the guardrails that helped stymie the scheme in 2020, and helping him back to the Republican nomination. The result is a turnkey operation prepared to generate false election fraud claims and convert them into a rationale for Republican political leaders to reverse the results of the election and reinstall Trump in the White House.
MAGA propagandists are priming their audiences to disbelieve the election results and take action in response. They keep viewers in a state of terror with incendiary warnings that Biden is a jack-booted dictator who is deliberately trying to endanger their families, ensuring that some fraction would seek his removal by any means necessary. They valorize the January 6 insurrectionists as honorable patriots who did what they thought was right and were smeared by the media and punished by “deep state” malefactors. They flood the right-wing information ecosystem with lies and conspiracy theories about Democrats tainting past election results.
And they have already begun warning that the 2024 election will be rife with election fraud — and that only such cheating could explain a Trump defeat.
STEVE BANNON (HOST): There are no “issues" with the 2020 election — they stole it. Let me repeat that. They stole it. And they hate when we say this. They stole it. And they're on notice. They're not going to be able to steal it again. People are doing a ton of work on this, and that's still not enough, but it's going to get better. The hairy eyeball is going to be on them.
The only way they defeat Trump is to steal it. The only way they defeat Trump is they steal it. The only way they defeat Trump is they steal it. He is unstoppable.
We saw how this played out in 2020: Trump’s coup plan relied on blanketing right-wing media with stolen-election lies in order to provide cover for GOP partisans to reverse the outcome in states Biden won. Under pressure from the Fox-addled rank and file, Republican election officials would refuse to certify results in key areas, GOP state legislators would overturn the results, and GOP members of Congress and Vice President Mike Pence would hand Trump the election.
This scheme failed in part because too many Republican officials were unwilling to aid the effort. But since then, Trumpist propagandists like WarRoom host Steve Bannon and Fox’s lineup of right-wing stars have helped make election denial a core GOP value, and now, the guardrails are collapsing:
- Republicans purged their ranks of the sorts of GOP officials who resisted Trump’s subversion effort at the local, state, and federal level.
- Election lies seem to have become a benefit in GOP primaries and effectively a job requirement at the Republican National Committee, one enforced by the MAGA chorus.
- Prominent election deniers are recruiting their followers to take positions within the election infrastructure.
- In the House, Rep. Mike Johnson’s (R-LA) zealous efforts to overturn the election helped garner him the speakership, while in the Senate, Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) is on his way out of the leadership after voting to certify the electoral votes and criticizing Trump’s role in the insurrection.
- Pence is effectively a party outcast after rejecting Trump’s entreaties to overturn the 2020 election results, and the politicians seeking to replace him on the GOP ticket are pushing voter fraud lies and refusing to say they will accept the results of the 2024 election.
Donald Trump will once again stand as the Republican presidential nominee this fall, less than four years after he attempted a coup to remain in office. He still maintains, unbowed by time, notoriety, or criminal charges, that the 2020 election was stolen. At the same time, he has embraced the January 6 offenders, regularly describing them as “hostages,” promising to consider blanket pardons for their actions, and treating their attack on the Capitol as “not a moment of national shame but of celebration,” as NPR described it.
None of this seemed to give right-wing propagandists much pause as Trump romped to the nomination. The Murdochs may have begun the primary season with other plans, but Fox had spent years crafting a political environment in which any criticism of Trump was inherently illegitimate, and its stars ultimately rallied to his side. As Trump’s victory became inevitable, his vanquished rivals were reduced to complaining — accurately — that Fox and its ilk had taken Trump’s side, while the few right-wing commentators who had criticized Trump and endorsed his primary opponents bent the knee.
If he loses in 2024, Trump will reject the results and seek to overturn them, as he has throughout his political career. Indeed, he began laying the groundwork for such a strategy during the GOP primaries, warning that only Democratic “cheating” could explain such an outcome. And he has no apparent qualms over whether his deliberate radicalization of his supporters leads to right-wing political violence. Indeed, he is signaling that is exactly what he wants.
No one can say they didn’t know what was coming
Here’s part of an interview with Trump that Time magazine published on April 30, six months before Election Day:
Mr. President, in our last conversation you said you weren't worried about political violence in connection with the November election. You said, “I think we're going to win and there won't be violence.” What if you don't win, sir?
Trump: Well, I do think we're gonna win. We're way ahead. I don't think they'll be able to do the things that they did the last time, which were horrible. Absolutely horrible. So many, so many different things they did, which were in total violation of what was supposed to be happening. And you know that and everybody knows that. We can recite them, go down a list that would be an arm’s long. But I don't think we're going to have that. I think we're going to win. And if we don't win, you know, it depends. It always depends on the fairness of an election. I don't believe they'll be able to do the things that they did the last time. I don't think they'll be able to get away with it. And if that's the case, we're gonna win in record-setting fashion.
Polls suggest that the 2024 presidential election will be close. But according to Trump, he’s “way ahead” and on track to win “in record-setting fashion.” The only thing that can prevent that outcome, Trump claims, is “the things that they did the last time,” i.e. the Democratic election fraud conspiracy theories he’s been hocking since before the 2020 vote. And if that happens, Trump says, his supporters might respond to such a result with violence.
None of this is even remotely subtle.
In the lead-up to the 2020 election, some political commentators expressed doubts over whether Trump would really respond to defeat by refusing to accept the election results and taking action to try to remain in office.
But that is precisely what Trump did. Now he is saying quite clearly that he will do it again if given the chance. And his propagandists in the right-wing media will have had four years to lay the groundwork to ensure his plot’s success.
Five days after the Time interview dropped, Semafor founder Ben Smith published a Q-and-A with Joe Kahn, the executive editor of The New York Times. The interview began like this:
Ben Smith: Dan Pfeiffer, who used to work for Barack Obama, recently wrote of the Times: “They do not see their job as saving democracy or stopping an authoritarian from taking power.” Why don’t you see your job as: “We’ve got to stop Trump?” What about your job doesn’t let you think that way?
Joe Kahn: Good media is the Fourth Estate, it’s another pillar of democracy. One of the absolute necessities of democracy is having a free and fair and open election where people can compete for votes, and the role of the news media in that environment is not to skew your coverage towards one candidate or the other, but just to provide very good, hard-hitting, well-rounded coverage of both candidates, and informing voters. If you believe in democracy, I don’t see how we get past the essential role of quality media in informing people about their choice in a presidential election.
To say that the threats of democracy are so great that the media is going to abandon its central role as a source of impartial information to help people vote — that’s essentially saying that the news media should become a propaganda arm for a single candidate, because we prefer that candidate’s agenda. It is true that Biden’s agenda is more in sync with traditional establishment parties and candidates. And we’re reporting on that and making it very clear.
It’s also true that Trump could win this election in a popular vote. Given that Trump’s not in office, it will probably be fair. And there’s a very good chance, based on our polling and other independent polling, that he will win that election in a popular vote. So there are people out there in the world who may decide, based on their democratic rights, to elect Donald Trump as president. It is not the job of the news media to prevent that from happening. It’s the job of Biden and the people around Biden to prevent that from happening.
It’s our job to cover the full range of issues that people have. At the moment, democracy is one of them. But it’s not the top one — immigration happens to be the top [of polls], and the economy and inflation is the second. Should we stop covering those things because they’re favorable to Trump and minimize them? I don’t even know how it’s supposed to work in the view of Dan Pfeiffer or the White House. We become an instrument of the Biden campaign? We turn ourselves into Xinhua News Agency or Pravda and put out a stream of stuff that’s very, very favorable to them and only write negative stories about the other side? And that would accomplish — what?
That exchange generated a lot of smart responses. Critics pointed out that Smith’s question mischaracterized Pfeiffer’s critique; that Kahn’s response ignores the actual criticisms mounted by his paper’s critics, including Biden himself; that the Times’ business interests lead Kahn to endorse “a kind of performative neutrality in politics coverage”; and that, contra Kahn’s claims, the Times does not generally base its coverage decisions on polling and, if it did, the result should be a greater focus on the impact of Trump’s policy proposals on inflation and immigration than the paper actually provides.
What strikes me most about Kahn’s answer is his apparent lack of urgency. A former president left office after using the lie that the election he lost had been rigged to try to reverse the outcome, culminating in a violent assault by his supporters on the U.S. Capitol. He has all but promised to try again, and after transforming his party into a personality cult which treats the insurrectionists as heroes and his election lie as unvarnished truth, he very well could succeed.
That is the central reality of the 2024 presidential election, one that should be foregrounded to the readers and viewers on news outlets at every opportunity but often fades from the discourse. The former president’s media allies are foreshadowing their eagerness to take every possible opportunity to participate in his scheme. And the leader of the nation’s most powerful mainstream press organ gives no indication that he has considered those implications in any but the shallowest way. We are all in a lot of trouble.
Reprinted with permission from Media Matters.
President Joe Biden
New York Times political analyst Nate Cohn made an astute observation about a new Times/Siena poll, which showed President Joe Biden trailing Donald Trump in most battleground states.
"If there's any consolation [for Biden], it's that the poll is also littered with evidence that folks aren't super tuned in, and disengaged voters remain Biden's weakness," Cohn tweeted.
It's an insight that will likely define the presidential contest moving forward.
In the survey, for example, just 29 percent of registered voters said they are closely following the legal cases against Donald Trump. That means that less than one-third of voters are paying "a lot of attention" to the ongoing trial of a former president who will almost assuredly be the Republican nominee in the 2024 election.
The ancillary to Cohn's observation is that Biden performs better among high information, high propensity voters—or likely voters—a point veteran Democratic strategistSimon Rosenberg has been making for weeks now. A pattern has begun to emerge where Biden performs increasingly better as polling models move from "adults" to "registered voters" to "likely voters."
Rosenberg cites a recent Ipsos poll for ABC News, where Biden trails Trump among adults, 44 to 46 percent, but bests him by a point among registered voters, 46 to 45 percent. And Biden takes a four-point lead among likely voters, 49 to 45 percent. A Marist poll for NPR and PBS NewsHour made a similar finding, with Biden running just two points ahead of Trump with registered voters, 50 to 48 percent, but opening up a five-point lead among likely voters, 51 to 46 percent.
John Della Volpe, director of polling at the Harvard Kennedy School Institute of Politics, made the same observation about voters ages 18 to 29 in the Siena battleground poll. Among registered youth voters, Biden trails Trump by three points, but among likely youth voters, Biden leads by seven points—a net turnaround of 10 points in the direction of Biden.
"Takeaway: the more you know; the more you vote; the better Biden does. It’s not complicated," he tweeted.
In an interview with Greg Sargent on "The Daily Blast" podcast, Biden pollster Jefrey Pollock said undecided voters make up anywhere from 10 to 15 percent of the electorate depending on the state, "which is actually rather large." Those voters are disproportionately young, Black, and Latino.
The Siena poll also included about 20 percent of respondents who either didn't vote in 2020 or who did vote in 2020 but skipped the 2022 midterms.
Both sets of voters—the undecided and the lower propensity voters—are voting blocs that the Biden campaign will be targeting to make up ground in the final months of the election.
Pollock cited Nevada where, every two years, about 25 percent of the electorate consists of voters who have never before cast a ballot in an election.
"That's what makes Nevada so interesting and challenging but also as movable as it is," Pollock explained. "You've got these voters who don't really pay attention to politics, who are just getting into the political scene."
They are going to pay attention to the election much later, Pollock said. "You have to force your way into their lives," he explained, because they are more concerned with their kids’ activities, making sure they have health care, and simply paying their bills.
"We have to force them to pay attention to politics. It's why advertising and campaigns mean so much, particularly in those closing months, because we really do have to find ways to get into those houses," he said.
Biden certainly has the resources and the campaign to help address that information deficit, but whether or not his campaign manages to reach and persuade those voters remains to be seen.
As former Obama White House Communications Director Dan Pfeiffer wrote in his "Message Box" substack: "My main takeaway from the [Siena] poll is that the more voters know about Biden and Trump, the better it will be for Biden."
Reprinted with permission from Daily Kos.
Gov. Kristi Noem
Donald Trump came to the aid of embattled Republican South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem, whose story about shooting to death her 14-month old German wirehaired pointer named Cricket has been denounced by Americans on the left and right for weeks.
Gov. Noem not only chose to put the story in her memoir, but has repeatedly defended her decision to drag the dog into a gravel pit and shoot her, killing her with one bullet without even warning her child, who asked when they returned home from school, “Where’s Cricket?”
Trump, speaking Tuesday on The Clay Travis & Buck Sexton Show, the successor to the late Rush Limbaugh’s talk radio program, did not appear to have a full grasp of the story or the massive outrage and upset Gov. Noem caused.
“I’m sure you’ve seen some of the Kristi Noem story. She might be the only person getting worse press than you on the left right now with the dog shooting story,” Clay Travis told Trump. “Is she still in the mix as a VP? Have you thought maybe she’d make more sense in a cabinet? How do you analyze stories like that as you go about making a choice?”
Noem, until the dog shooting story came out, was widely believed to be on Trump’s short list as a vice presidential running mate.
“Well, until this week, she was doing incredibly well and she got hit hard, and sometimes you do books and you have some guy writing a book and you maybe don’t read it as carefully,” Trump offered as a defense of the governor whose dog-shooting story came out weeks ago. “You know, you have ghost writers, do they help you? And they this case didn’t help too much.”
“Now, she’s terrific,” Trump continued, lavishing praise on Noem. “Look, she’s been a supporter of mine from day one. She did a great job of governor, as governor. And you know, you look at South Dakota numbers. She’s really done a great job.”
Trump did not say what numbers specifically, nor did he say on what Governor Noem did a great job. he also did not answer the question Travis posed about North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un, nor did he bring up any of the other controversies surrounding the book.
“And in some form, I mean, I think I think she’s terrific. A couple of rough stories. There’s no question about it. And when explained the dog story, you know, people, people hear that and people from different parts of the country probably feel a little bit differently, but that’s a tough story. And, but she’s a terrific person. She said she had a bad, she had a bad week.”
Watch below or at this link.
Reprinted with permission from Alternet.
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When cross-examination of Donald Trump's former longtime attorney Michael Cohen officially got underway, Trump attorney Todd Blanche immediately began by letting Cohen know he didn't appreciate a remark he made about the defense counsel on social media.
The Daily Beast's Jose Pagliery, who was attending Tuesday's trial proceedings in person, posted a dispatch from the courtroom detailing a tense exchange that Blanche had with Cohen. As the cross-examination began, Pagliery said Blanche "leaned forward with both hands forcefully gripping the edges of the wooden tabletop" as he approached the lectern and adjusted the microphone. He further observed that Blanche's typically "satiny" voice was replaced by "a slight grittiness."
"Mr. Cohen, my name is Todd Blanche. You and I have never spoken or met before, have we?" Blanche asked Cohen. When Cohen responded that they hadn't spoken or met, Blanche then asked Cohen to confirm that he still knew of Blanche's existence, to which Cohen said that he did.
"You went on TikTok and called me a crying little s—, didn't you," Blanche then asked, with Pagliery noting that he "growled" the question.
When Cohen began to respond that the comment sounded "like something I would say," prosecutors then objected, and Judge Juan Merchan sustained the objection (meaning he agreed with the prosecution). Prosecutors then continued to object seven more times during the following 25 minutes of Blanche's questioning, with Merchan sustaining each one. Reporters said the constant objections disrupted Blanche's rhythm.
Eventually, the cross-examination involved Blanche confirming with Cohen the various insults he used to describe the 45th president of the United States. At one point, Blanche asked Cohen if he indeed referred to Trump as a "dictator d—bag" who "belongs in a f—ing cage." The New York Post's Ben Kochman reported that Blanche asked Cohen if he called his former client a "boorish cartoon misogynist" and a "Cheeto-dusted cartoon villain" on his podcast, with Cohen responding in the affirmative.
"The tactic is one meant to direct the 18-person jury’s attention to the man who has been heralded as the Manhattan District Attorney’s star witness while prosecutors pursue 34 felony counts of falsifying business records against Trump," Pagliery wrote.
Blanche's harsh treatment of Trump could be a result of Trump himself prodding his lead attorney to be more aggressive during proceedings. Earlier this month, the New York Times reported that Trump has been upset with Blanche's performance in the courtroom, and was urging him to more vociferously attack the judge, the jury pool, the witnesses and the process itself. The ex-president has reportedly said he wants Blanche to be more like Roy Cohn, his late former personal attorney who was eventually indicted and disbarred.
Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg's team has told Judge Merchan that Cohen will be their last witness before they rest their case. Trump is facing 34 felony counts relating to a scheme he allegedly orchestrated to buy the silence of women who claimed to have had extramarital affairs with him leading up to his 2016 campaign for the presidency.
The Manhattan trial is likely the only one of Trump's four criminal proceedings that will conclude with a verdict before Election Day. His Georgia trial has been sidelined until 2025 after the Georgia Court of Appeals agreed to hear Trump's argument to remove Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis from the case. And his two federal criminal trials are both in limbo, with U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon indefinitely postponing his classified documents trial and the Supreme Court still mulling over the ex-president's argument for absolute criminal immunity from official acts carried out as president.
Reprinted with permission from Alternet.
Michael Cohen and Donald Trump
Donald Trump has repeatedly been heard to defend himself against charges by women that he sexually harassed or assaulted by saying, how could you think that? She’s not my type. Stormy Daniels, who Trump also denies having sex with, was very much Trump’s type.
But if Trump had a “type” when it came to women, he also had a “type” with the men he surrounded himself with. Steve Bannon, who conned people out of money with a phony scheme to build part of Trump’s wall, was his type. Roger Stone, who walks around with a tattoo of Richard Nixon on his back and colluded with Russian intelligence agents to help elect Trump, is also his type.
But the person in this trial who by far best represents Donald Trump’s “type” is Michael Cohen, the lawyer Trump picked to represent him when he was president and CEO of the Trump Organization.
He’s a serial liar, a hustler, a con man, a double-dealer, a man, who if he had to, would sell his own mother to squiggle out of a corner he got himself into. Donald Trump didn’t have to take the stand in this trial. The prosecution put his moral doppelganger in the witness box in his stead.
That’s the first problem Donald Trump’s lawyers have with Michael Cohen: Everything Cohen did in covering up Trump’s one night stand with Stormy Daniels was done for Donald Trump and at Trump’s direction.
The second problem the defense has with Michael Cohen is the jurisdiction of the trial. It’s taking place in Manhattan, where both Donald Trump and Michael Cohen made their bones, as the mob saying goes. Lying, conniving scumbags have been working Manhattan since cows grazed in meadows along the creek that was eventually paved over to become Spring Street in what is now SoHo.
You could say that everyone in Manhattan has known a Donald Trump “type,” except the reality is, as residents of the prime borough of New York City, they have actually known Donald Trump himself, through his constant self-promotion during his time as a real estate developer, tabloid star, man-about-town, and reality TV host. Paying off a porn-star to protect his own reputation is supremely Trumpian, the exact kind of thing Manhattanites would expect him to do.
The third problem the defense has with Michael Cohen is, everyone in Manhattan has either read about or come across a lawyer like Michael Cohen – one who is, in the words of The Dictionary of Modern Legal Usage, to describe a hustler such as Cohen, “a rascally” lawyer, “shrewdly dishonest and unscrupulous.”
The point being, back in the day when Donald Trump was suing anybody and everybody in pursuit of (1) money, and (2) his identity as a self-declared billionaire, or being sued himself, the lawyer he chose to do his suing or to defend himself against lawsuits by others, was Michael Cohen. He was, from 2006 onward, Trump’s man, acting on Trump’s orders, doing Trump’s dirty work.
Cohen was famous for calling up journalists who wrote unflatteringly about Trump and threatening to sue them. In an interview with ABC News in 2011, Cohen put his representation of Donald Trump this way: “If somebody does something Mr. Trump doesn't like, I do everything in my power to resolve it to Mr. Trump's benefit. If you do something wrong, I'm going to come at you, grab you by the neck and I'm not going to let you go until I'm finished.” He was called Trump’s “pit bull.” In 2015, when the Daily Beast dug up a quote from the divorce action filed by Ivana Trump saying she had been “raped” by Trump when she was his wife, Cohen called the author of the piece and told him, “I'm warning you, tread very fucking lightly, because what I'm going to do to you is going to be fucking disgusting.”
Michael Cohen was speaking, of course, on behalf of his client, Donald Trump.
The fourth problem for the defense with Michael Cohen emerged today in Todd Blanche’s cross-examination of Michael Cohen: he is utterly unapologetic about who he is. Blanche tried again and again for a “gotcha” moment with Cohen on the stand. He asked, “Do you want President Trump to get convicted in this case?” Cohen, whose two books are titled Revenge and Disloyal, calmly said, “Sure.”
Blanche moved on to ask Cohen if he had called the defendant “a Cheeto-dusted cartoon villain” and “a boorish cartoon misogynist."
“Sounds like something I would say,” answered the man who once said he would “take a bullet” for Donald Trump.
Blanche went on to attack Cohen for making money off his appearance as a witness against Trump with his podcast and the merchandise he sells, such as a t-shirt with an image of Trump behind bars wearing an orange jumpsuit. Cohen was, again, unapologetic. Legal eagles such as Joyce Vance on MSNBC, who was in the courtroom for Cohen’s testimony, described Cohen as calm and collected almost to a fault, as well he should be. The defense is attacking Michael Cohen for being a clone of their client, a man who would do anything for a buck.
Apparently, the prosecution’s strategy with Michael Cohen is to show the similarities between Cohen and Trump. It’s almost as if by presenting Cohen as their summary witness, the prosecution is preparing to ask the jury in their summation, who do you want to vote for? The guy who actually had sex with a porn star and ordered its coverup, or the guy whose job it was to “take care of it” for him?
It's a gamble that could only be taken in Manhattan.
Lucian K. Truscott IV, a graduate of West Point, has had a 50-year career as a journalist, novelist, and screenwriter. He has covered Watergate, the Stonewall riots, and wars in Lebanon, Iraq, and Afghanistan. He is also the author of five bestselling novels. You can subscribe to his daily columns at luciantruscott.substack.com and follow him on Twitter @LucianKTruscott and on Facebook at Lucian K. Truscott IV.
Please consider subscribing to Lucian Truscott Newsletter, from which this is reprinted with permission.
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Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Back in 2021, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. sued Daily Kos to unmask the identity of a community member who posted a critical story about his dalliance with neo-Nazis at a Berlin rally. I updated the story here, here, here, here, and here.
To briefly summarize, Kennedy wanted us to doxx our community member, and we stridently refused. We protect our community at all costs. Shockingly, Kennedy got a trial court judge in New York to agree with him, and a subpoena was issued to Daily Kos to turn over any information we might have on the account. However, we are based in California, not New York, so once I received the subpoena at home, we had a California court not just quash the subpoena, but essentially signal that if New York didn’t do the right thing on appeal, California could very well take care of it.
It’s been a while since I updated, and given a favorable court ruling this month, it’s way past time to catch everyone up.
This has become a critical free speech case, with what’s called the ”Dendrite standard” at stake. In short, the Dendrite International, Inc. v. Doe No. 3 ruling states that anonymous speech is protected unless all of the following apply:
(1) the plaintiff must make good faith efforts to notify the poster and give the poster a reasonable opportunity to respond; (2) the plaintiff must specifically identify the poster's allegedly actionable statements; (3) the complaint must set forth a prima facie cause of action; (4) the plaintiff must support each element of the claim with sufficient evidence; and (5) "the court must balance the defendant's First Amendment right of anonymous free speech against the strength of the prima facie case presented and the necessity for the disclosure of the anonymous defendant's identity."
Put another way, a plaintiff better have a damn good reason to violate an anonymous poster’s free speech rights in order to force a media organization to unmask them.
This test, suggested by Public Citizen and the ACLU in an amicus brief, was originally adopted by a New Jersey court in 2001. Ever since, Public Citizen has avidly sought to enshrine it in additional states. One of the missing states? New York. Public Citizen has assisted our defense team and represented our community member as an opportunity to enshrine the Dendrite protections in New York.
The issues at hand are so important that The New York Times, the E.W.Scripps Company, the First Amendment Coalition, New York Public Radio, and seven other New York media companies joined the appeals effort with their own joint amicus brief. What started as a dispute over a Daily Kos diarist has become a meaningful First Amendment battle, with major repercussions given New York’s role as a major news media and distribution center.
After reportedly spending over $1 million on legal fees, Kennedy somehow discovered the identity of our community member sometime last year and promptly filed a defamation suit in New Hampshire in what seemed a clumsy attempt at forum shopping, or the practice of choosing where to file suit based on the belief you’ll be granted a favorable outcome. The community member lives in Maine, Kennedy lives in California, and Daily Kos doesn't publish specifically in New Hampshire. A perplexed court threw out the case this past February on those obvious jurisdictional grounds.
[He] does not live or work in New Hampshire, he has no meaningful contacts with this state, he did not consult any New Hampshire sources when writing the article, he did not mention New Hampshire in the article or otherwise ‘direct’ the article to this state, and he had no reason to anticipate that the ‘brunt’ of the (alleged) injury to Kennedy’s reputation would be felt in New Hampshire—particularly since Kennedy is not a resident of New Hampshire and his connections to New Hampshire are, at best, attenuated.
Then, last week, the judge threw out the appeal of that decision because Kennedy’s lawyer didn’t file in time—and blamed the delay on bad Wi-Fi.
Freakin’ hilarious! So our intrepid community member, who ultimately unmasked himself, is in the clear! But that doesn’t mean the broader case is over.
Kennedy tried to dismiss the original case, the one awaiting an appellate decision in New York, claiming it was now moot. His legal team had sued to get the community member’s identity, and now that they had it, they argued that there was no reason for the case to continue.
We disagreed, arguing that there were important issues to resolve (i.e., Dendrite), and we also wanted lawyer fees for their unconstitutional assault on our First Amendment rights. (Fun fact: The press is the only profession specifically mentioned in the U.S. Constitution.)
On Thursday, in a unanimous decision, a four-judge New York Supreme Court appellate panel ordered the case to continue, keeping the Dendrite issue alive and also allowing us to proceed in seeking damages based on New York’s anti-SLAPP law, which prohibits “strategic lawsuits against public participation.”
Here’s how one of our lawyers, Adam Bonin, described the court order: “A New York appeals court is unanimously allowing Daily Kos to proceed on claims that RFK Jr. had no right to try to unmask one of our users and that his attempts to do so violated New York's anti-SLAPP rules, which may entitle the site to seek damages against him.”
Kennedy opened up a can of worms and has spent millions fighting this stupid battle. Despite his losses, we aren’t letting him weasel out of this.
We’ve been able to fight this fight on behalf of our valued community because of your generous support.
Reprinted with permission from Daily Kos.
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Chris LaCivita
Donald Trump's presidential campaign is trying to sell donors on the idea that less is more when it comes to his flagging ground game in critical battleground states.
“We’re focused on quality over quantity. I mean, how novel a concept,” chief Trump campaign strategist Chris LaCivita told a crowd of mega donors on May 4 at Mar-a-Lago.
But here's how that leaner field organization looks on the ground to many GOP state strategists: “There is no sign of life,” said Kim Owens, a Republican operative in Arizona.
“Especially in a state that Trump lost so closely last time," Owens continued, "you’d expect to have more of a presence. I would think, ‘Let’s step it up.’ I think it’s a terrible mistake.”
These accounts come from an absolutely wild piece of reporting by four reporters at The Washington Post: Michael Sherer, Josh Dawsey, Maeve Reston, and Yvonne Wingett Sanchez. The reporting, which relates to the structural aspects of the contest, also comes at a moment when fresh New York Times/Siena polling suggests Trump is ahead of Biden in a handful of key battleground states.
Arizona's GOP operatives aren't alone in feeling mystified by the Trump campaign’s lack of presence—they are joined by those in Michigan, Georgia, and others as well.
The reason for Trump's flagging operation isn't exactly clear. To be sure, the Trump campaign is cash strapped, particularly when compared to the Biden campaign's war chest. Trump also recently took over the Republican National Committee, and the new leadership, which includes his daughter-in-law Lara Trump, reportedly scrapped the organizational plans drawn up by the old leadership under the direction of Ronna Romney McDaniel.
Under the original plan, in Georgia, the RNC was supposed to hire 12 regional field directors and 40 field organizers by the end of May, topped off by 20 field offices down the road. Instead, the RNC currently has one consultant, according to Cody Hall, a senior aide to Republican Gov. Brian Kemp, who has a tense relationship with Trump. Hall said he has "seen no evidence" that the Trump campaign has the field operation necessary to win the Peach State.
A similar story is playing out in Arizona, where the RNC planned to open seven field offices and hire six regional field directors overseeing 23 organizers by the end of May. That plan appears to be dead on arrival with nothing to take its place.
An RNC presence is also missing in action in other battleground states, including Michigan, where several unnamed operatives were concerned.
Additionally, the Bank Your Vote effort, an early voting operation the RNC had launched at the beginning of the year, has gone dark with its website entirely offline for an indefinite amount of time.
Yet Trump campaign staffers and allies appear to be gaslighting their way through the deficit.
Asked about the Bank Your Vote operation by the Post, James Blair, the national political director for both the Trump campaign and the RNC, said, "It is full speed ahead. Stay tuned for more on the program.”
Blair's response was par for the course in the piece, which makes it difficult to pinpoint exactly what is happening with the RNC and the Trump campaign, which effectively appears to be a joint operation at this point. But among Republican operatives in these states—who are usually instrumental to implementing a statewide strategy—everyone is in the dark.
Perhaps most concerning is that Trump directed the RNC leadership to focus their efforts on election security rather than field operations and turnout. According to the reporting, Trump is plenty sure of his own ability to turn out his voters.
But here's another way to read that: Trump has no earthly idea if he can turn out enough people to win on the front end, so he's training the campaign's resources on ways to cause trouble on the back end. They’ll do this by questioning the integrity of the vote and, therefore, the election's results.
“Focus on the cheating,” the Post reported Trump told McDaniel and others when she was still leading the organization.
So as its GOTV operation flails, the RNC is planning a massive "election integrity" operation with "tens of thousands of volunteers who will monitor precincts and vote counting across the country," according to the reporting.
Reprinted with permission from Daily Kos.
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Prosecutor Susan Hoffinger questions Michael Cohen in New York Supreme Court on May 13, 2024
Michael Cohen today surpassed everyone’s expectations of what would happen when the New York lawyer who has been known to be a “loose cannon” took the stand.
Under direct examination by the prosecution, Cohen gave one or two-word answers repeatedly: Yes. No. I did. He did. When they got to the point of his testimony, which was to tie the Stormy Daniels payoff directly to Trump’s anxiety about how her story would affect his campaign, Cohen was stellar.
Referring to the possibility that Stormy Daniels would speak about her one night stand with Trump before election day, Trump told Cohen, “This is a disaster, a total disaster. Women will hate me.” Trump said “guys, they think it’s cool” that Trump had sex with Stormy Daniels in a hotel room in Lake Tahoe, but if women hear about it, “this is going to be a disaster for the campaign.”
Polls in 2016 already had Trump running seriously behind Hillary Clinton with women because of the Access Hollywood tape, in which Trump boasted that with women, he could “grab’em by the pussy” anytime, because “when you are a star, they let you do it. You can do anything.”
Cohen described Trump as desperate at the thought of the Stormy Daniels story coming out days before the election. “Get control of it! Just get past the election. If I win, it’ll have no relevance when I’m president. And if I lose, I don’t really care.”
When Susan Hoffinger, the attorney for the prosecution, asked Cohen if he had talked about Trump’s wife, Melania, with him, Cohen answered, “Yes.” Cohen then described Trump’s attitude about the possibility that his wife would learn about his one night stand with Daniels. “Don’t worry. How long do you think I’ll be on the market for? Not long.”
That comment is a direct reference to the idea that Melania might divorce him over the Stormy Daniels story. It is also the reason that the row of seats for family members behind the defense table has been empty for four weeks, save for one day that Trump’s son, Eric, attended the trial for part of one day. The empty seats in the family row are in full view of the jury box.
Melania has her pride, even if her husband doesn’t.
Lucian K. Truscott IV, a graduate of West Point, has had a 50-year career as a journalist, novelist, and screenwriter. He has covered Watergate, the Stonewall riots, and wars in Lebanon, Iraq, and Afghanistan. He is also the author of five bestselling novels. You can subscribe to his daily columns at luciantruscott.substack.com and follow him on Twitter @LucianKTruscott and on Facebook at Lucian K. Truscott IV.
Please consider subscribing to Lucian Truscott Newsletter, from which this is reprinted with permission.
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Sen. Tommy Tuberville
Donald Trump’s courtroom entourage has expanded in recent days, with a troupe of thirsty elected Republicans jockeying for position to win his favor. But to what end, when even Trump’s own family—except for son Eric—hasn’t bothered to show at the New York hush money trial?
Sen. Rick Scott of Florida skipped a vote last Thursday to stand by his man. On Monday, a trio of elected Republicans showed up in the Manhattan courtroom. Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance, Alabama Sen. Tommy Tuberville, and Rep. Nicole Malliotakis of New York were eager to play to the cameras, but didn’t get much of a chance to bask in the limelight.
“After traveling with him in his motorcade, court officers were ordered to prohibit us from standing with President Trump as he addressed media” and they also “prohibited us from speaking to media,” Malliotakis complained. That’s all because “They WANT to silence the truth, protect their narrative and create the false perception that he has no support. Far from it!” she claimed.
Scott insisted Thursday that he was there because “I have known Donald Trump a long time … I knew him before I was governor. I consider him a friend. And what he is going through is just despicable.”
What could Scott get out of this? Maybe he thinks Trump will return the favor by supporting his reelection campaign. Scott has also been angling for the GOP leadership spot in the Senate since 2022, and might be considering what Trump could do for him there. Or perhaps he’s vying for a Cabinet slot, like secretary of Health and Human Services? He’s certainly shown he knows his way around Medicare—or at least how to defraud Medicare to the tune of $1.7 billion. He even tried to spin that investigation to his favor Thursday, saying Trump was the victim of “political persecution,” just like him.
“By the way, I saw this. It happened to me,” Scott said on Fox News. “I fought Hillarycare, and guess what happened when I fought Hillarycare? Justice came after me and attacked me and my company.”
He could be auditioning for the role of Trump’s vice president, but he’d have a problem there. Scott would have to leave Florida to do it, since the presidential and vice presidential candidates can’t call the same state home. That didn’t stop Dick Cheney back in 2000. He just declared he was a resident of Wyoming, and the courts bought it.
Vance is the likelier veep contender. He’s been circling Trump for weeks, reportedly texting or talking daily with Don Jr. and saying all the things Trump wants to hear, including that “the main goal of this trial is psychological torture” of Trump.
“I think that when you look at all of these attacks on Donald Trump, you have to be honest with yourself and say, this is not about law and this is not about justice,” Vance said on CNN Sunday.
In that interview, Vance also blew off the fact that Trump hangs around with well-known antisemites and white nationalists like Nick Fuentes and said that he would only accept the results of the 2024 election if they are “free and fair.” That’s all music to Trump’s ears, and Vance is clearly working overtime for that coveted top-of-the-ticket favor.
Tuberville’s Monday appearance in the courtroom is probably just a ploy for media attention. It’s possible he imagines he could be Trump’s No. 2. Or maybe he’s eyeing a Cabinet position—like secretary of Defense. Tuberville probably thinks he’s an expert and proved his bona fides through his months-long blockade of military promotions.
It’s hard to believe that the biggest Trump toady of them all—South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham—hasn’t shown up yet. And other veep contenders are really letting Vance get the jump on them. Where has South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott been? Don’t forget Marco Rubio, who also has a Florida man problem, but that’s fixable.
What about North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum, who Trump likes because he’s “very rich”? Or Trump’s “killer” friend, Rep. Elise Stefanik of New York? They’re missing a big opportunity here.
Navigator collects, analyzes, and distributes real data on progressive messaging. The Hub Project's Bryan Bennett and Gabriela Parra talk with Kerry about what they are seeing in their research this election cycle, and which messaging can help progressive candidates win elections in 2024—and beyond.
Reprinted with permission from Daily Kos.
RFK Jr. Campaign Director Reveals Her True Allegiance Is To Trump
Angela Stanton King
Angela Stanton King, a far-right commentator working as a director for Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s presidential campaign, said on a conspiratorial podcast last month that she loves Trump and that Kennedy is “another option” because her “fear is that they're going to stop at nothing to keep Trump from winning.”
She also said that she's working to take away votes from President Joe Biden and “if Trump or Kennedy gets it, I don't lose either way.”
Stanton King’s remarks resemble those of then-Kennedy official Rita Palma, who argued that the independent candidate’s presence on the New York ballot would help Trump defeat Biden, which she said was her “No. 1 priority.” (Palma was later fired.)
Kennedy has frequently attempted to appeal to right-wing audiences. He has also promoted numerous conspiracy theories as a commentator and has populated his campaign with conspiracy theorists.
Stanton King fits the Kennedy campaign's attempts to cater to right-wing media audiences. She is a far-right speaker, author, and guest on right-wing programming. She has claimed that the election was stolen from Trump, promoted the QAnon conspiracy theory, and made bigoted remarks about LGBTQ people.
She works as the Black voter engagement director for Kennedy and has participated in events and door knocking with him. He also recorded a song with her. This past weekend, Stanton King appeared at a campaign event with Kennedy’s running mate Nicole Shanahan.
Stanton King has been a strong supporter of Trump, who pardoned her in 2020 for a 2004 car theft sentence. In 2021, for instance, she said: “Trump can’t be President forever and I know that. But he’s the only one bold enough to fight these evil Demonic Satanic forces from the pits of HELL and I’m standing with him.”
Stanton King is still praising the former president, including while doing surrogate work for Kennedy on the April 20, 2024, edition of Nino’s Corner. That show is hosted by David “Niño” Rodriguez, a far-right podcaster who has said that Biden “stole the election”; 9/11 “was an inside job”; and COVID-19 “was a hoax and vaccines would kill u.” He has frequently promoted QAnon, including offering programming that analyzes “Q drops” and “Q posts.”
During the start of his interview with Stanton King, Rodriguez said: “I will say, I'm one foot in, one foot out with RFK. I'm a Trump supporter. Everybody knows that.” Stanton King replied: “Me too.” She later said that she’s “in a pickle here because I love” Trump and Kennedy and said:
ANGELA STANTON KING: RFK is liked by a lot of people. Like, we love Trump, but we know that RFK is not afraid to stand up to the establishment either. And I think that's what many of us respect about RFK. And for me personally, I made this decision because I was tired of being on one side where all we're doing is constantly fighting, and I was tired of not being able to work with certain people in my community because I was being labeled as a Trump supporter. And I just honestly believe that in order for us to come together that we do have to stop fighting.
She later stated that part of her efforts is to take away votes from Biden:
DAVID RODRIGUEZ: Throughout history, right, it's shown that third-party candidates kind of siphon votes from one or the other. And it looks like in this instance with RFK, he's going to probably take a lot of the votes away from Biden. Correct? I mean, that's what you're looking [inaudible]--?
STANTON KING: Well, yeah, that's true because he, and not to cut you off, but for my community — and you know how it is, you know how the media has created this stereotype that Trump and the Republicans are all racists — so for people in my community that aren't necessarily comfortable with coming over to the Republican Party, this provides a space for them. And to me, I'm like, listen, we've got to get away from the Democrats. So you guys have two options, right? If you don't want to vote for Trump, then Kennedy is a much better option than Joe Biden. And for me, shifting my community is very important. And I think that the independent space provides a safety net for those that are just not comfortable with the Republican Party but want to step away from the Democrats.
Stanton King continued offering Trump-friendly rhetoric during the interview (“I love Trump”), including stating that she loves Trump and views RFK Jr. as “another option” because she fears that “they're going to stop at nothing to keep Trump from winning”:
STANTON KING: My fear is that they're going to stop at nothing to keep Trump from winning. And I don't want to just give it over to Joe Biden. If for some reason we see another 2020, we need to have another option. And I think that RFK may be that. So that's kind of like where I'm at. I love Trump, my Republican friends that have supported me so much, I love them too. But even sometimes when it comes to the Republican Party, we've seen where the Republican Party didn't even stand behind Trump. Like, they let them get indicted four times. We saw what Mike Pence did with the vote. You know what I'm saying? So, I think it's time for us all to put people over party.
She later said that while campaigning with Trump she saw him draw vastly bigger crowds than Biden, asking, “How in the world was Joe Biden able to win or steal or whatever an election from Trump?”
She also suggested that she'd be happy if either Trump or Kennedy wins the election, stating: “If Trump or Kennedy gets it, I don't lose either way.”
STANTON KING: I love them both very dearly. A Trump-Kennedy ticket would mean the world to me because they're both guys that have shown me that not only do they care for me, but they care for my community. So for me, it's the winning ticket. Like I don't lose either way, right? If Trump or Kennedy gets it, I don't lose either way. But for both of them to get in, to me that would be a dream come true. And I don't know what those guys are doing. Trump hasn't picked a VP yet, and I'm thinking like Trump still may want to — if Trump got in and Kennedy didn’t, Trump still may want to pull Kennedy and make him, you know, the director of health administration. There are just so many options here. But I don't think that the Kennedy campaign and the Trump campaign are enemies.
Stanton King later portrayed the 2024 election as “us against the Democrats, either way it goes. It's the Republicans and independents against the Democrat Party. And we've gotta all unite.”
Reprinted with permission from Media Matters.