It seems to me that the news tends to be slow on weekends during the Biden administration, while Mondays are a firehose. (In contrast, Trump’s people tended to dump news in the middle of the night, after Fox News Channel personality Sean Hannity’s show was over, which may or may not have been a coincidence.)
So, lots going on today as the Biden administration continues to make the case that a democratic government can work for ordinary Americans while Trump and his supporters insist that a country run by such an administration is an apocalyptic nightmare.
First, economic analyst Steven Rattner reported today that according to The Economist, since the end of 2019 the American economy has grown about 8%, while the European Union has grown about 3%, Japan 1%, and Britain not at all. Rattner and economist Brendan Duke reported that entrepreneurship in the U.S. is booming, with 5.2 million “likely employer” business applications filed between January 2021 and December 2023, more than a 33% increase over those filed between 2017 and 2019.
Economists Justin Wolfers and Arin Dube noted that, as Wolfers wrote, “[f]or the first time in forever, real wage gains are going to those who need them most.” Wages have gone up for all but the top 20% of Americans, whose wages have fallen, reducing inequality.
Federal Trade Commission (FTC) head Lina Khan announced that after the FTC challenged a set of AstraZeneca inhaler patents last September as being improperly listed, today AstraZeneca said it would cap patients’ out-of-pocket costs for its inhalers at $35, down from hundreds. Earlier this month, Boehringer Ingelheim did the same.
The Environmental Protection Agency today announced it was banning asbestos, which is linked to more than 40,000 deaths a year in the U.S. and was already partly banned, but which is still used in a few products. More than 50 other countries already ban it.
Also today, President Joe Biden issued an executive order to advance women’s health research to integrate women’s health into federal research initiatives, strengthening data collection and making funding available for research in a comprehensive effort to equalize attention to men’s and women’s health across their lifespans. The federal government did not require women’s health to be included in federally funded medical research until 1993. In a speech today, First Lady Jill Biden recalled that in the early 1970s, researchers studying estrogen’s effect in preventing heart attacks selected 8,341 people for the study. All of them were men.
Last month, First Lady Biden announced $100 million in funding for research into women’s health, and last Thursday Vice President Kamala Harris visited a Planned Parenthood clinic that provides abortion care in addition to breast cancer screening, fibroid care, and contraceptive care. She noted that women’s reproductive health has been in crisis since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in June 2022, with women in some states unable to access the care they need.
Former president Trump, who is now the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, prompted some of the economic reporting I noted above when he tried to spark attacks on President Joe Biden by asking on social media if people feel better off now than they were four years ago. This was perhaps a mistaken message, since four years ago we were in the early days of the coronavirus pandemic. Supermarket shelves were empty, toilet paper was hard to find, healthcare professionals were wearing garbage bags and reusing masks because the Trump administration had permitted the strategic stockpile to run low, deaths were mounting, the stock market had crashed, and the economy had ground to a halt.
On this day four years ago, I recorded that “more than 80 national security professionals broke with their tradition of non-partisanship to endorse former Vice President Joe Biden for president, saying that while they were from all parties and disagreed with each other about pretty much everything else, they had come together to stand against Trump.”
Here in the present, Trump appears to be getting more desperate as his problems, including his apparent growing difficulty speaking and connecting with his audience, mount. Last week, in an interview, he echoed Republican lawmakers and pundits when he suggested he was open to cutting Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, something Republican lawmakers try to avoid saying to general audiences because it is hugely unpopular. Trump has since tried to repair that damage, for example, when he insisted on Saturday that it was he, rather than Biden, who would protect those programs. (In fact, Biden has called for expanding the social safety net, not contracting it, and last year forced Republicans to back off from proposed cuts.)
Saturday’s speech illustrated the degree to which Trump’s rhetoric has become more profane and apocalyptic as he vows revenge on those he sees as his enemies. Campaigning in Vandalia, Ohio, for his chosen Senate candidate, Trump suggested that certain migrants “are not people.” Then he said he would put tariffs of 100% on cars manufactured in Mexico by Chinese companies for sale in the U.S., “if I get elected. Now, if I don't get elected, it's going to be a bloodbath for the whole—that's going to be the least of it. It's going to be a bloodbath for the country.”
By Sunday, Trump’s embrace of the word “bloodbath” had created a firestorm. Surrogates insisted that he was talking about the auto industry alone, but as scholar of rhetoric Jen Mercieca and legal commentator Asha Rangappa note, Trump is a master at giving himself enough plausible deniability for his supporters to claim that, as Rangappa put it, “he wasn’t saying what he was saying. I know what he meant. He knows what he meant. You know what he meant.” In the same speech Saturday, Trump called those convicted of violence on January 6, 2021, “hostages” and “patriots,” and has said he would pardon them, appearing to endorse violence to return him to power.
This morning, Trump’s lawyers told a court that Trump cannot come up with either the money or a bond for the $454 million plus interest he owes in penalties and disgorgement after he and the Trump Organization were found guilty of fraud in a Manhattan court earlier this year. The lawyers say they have approached 30 different companies to back the bond, and they have all declined. They will not issue a bond without cash or stock behind it. Trump's real estate holdings, which are likely highly leveraged, aren’t enough.
Last year, Trump said under oath that he had “substantially in excess of 400 million in cash,” and that amount was “going up very substantially every month.” Apparently, that statement was a lie, or the money has evaporated, or Trump doesn’t want to use it to pay this court-ordered judgment on top of the $91.6 million bond he posted earlier this month in the second E. Jean Carroll case.
Timothy O’Brien of Bloomberg notes that Trump’s desperate need for cash makes him even more of a national security threat than his retention of classified documents made it clear he already was. “[T]he going is likely to get rough for Trump as this plays out,” O’Brien writes, “and he’s likely to become more financially desperate with each passing day,” making him “easy prey for interested lenders—and an easy mark for overseas interests eager to influence US policy.”
This morning, Josh Dawsey of the Washington Post reported that Trump is turning to his 2016 campaign manager Paul Manafort to advise him in 2024. Dawsey notes that the campaign’s focus appears to be on the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee in July, which suggests Trump’s people are concerned that his nomination will be contested. Manafort has been known as a “convention fixer” since 1976.
Manafort is also the key link between the 2016 Trump campaign and Russian operatives. Manafort worked for many years for Ukrainian politician Viktor Yanukovich, who was closely tied to Russian president Vladimir Putin. When Ukrainians threw Yanukovich out of office in 2014, Manafort was left with large debts to Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska. In 2016, Manafort began to work for Trump’s campaign. An investigation by a Republican-dominated Senate Intelligence Committee into the links between Trump’s campaign and Russia determined that Manafort had shared polling data from the Trump camp with his partner, Konstantin Kilimnik, who the senators assessed was a Russian operative.
In 2018, as part of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation, Manafort was found guilty of hiding millions of dollars he had received for lobbying on behalf of Yanukovych and his pro-Russian political party, then getting loans through false financial records when Yanukovych lost power. A judge sentenced him to more than seven years in prison.
Trump pardoned Manafort in December 2020, shortly after losing the presidential election.
Former President Donald J. Trump says that his recent warning of a “blood bath” if he is not elected president in November was made in the context of electric vehicles and that he was not talking about political violence generally.
But if discussing a type of automotive technology in bloody terms seems odd to some, it fits in the increasingly brutal language Mr. Trump has been applying to electric vehicles, one of his favorite foils.
He has long claimed electric cars will “kill” America’s auto industry. He has called them an “assassination” of jobs. He has declared that the Biden administration “ordered a hit job on Michigan manufacturing” by encouraging the sales of electric cars.
And on Saturday, after ticking off a litany of false claims about electric vehicles, he spoke about slapping a “100 percent tariff” on cars manufactured in Mexico but imported into the United States. “And you’re not going to be able to sell those cars,” he said. “If I get elected. Now if I don’t get elected, it’s going to be a blood bath for the whole. That’s going to be the least of it. It’s going to be a blood bath for the country, that’s going to be the least of it. But they’re not going to sell those cars.”
Edward W. Maibach, director of the Center for Climate Change Communication at George Mason University, says Mr. Trump deploys graphic language to stir up his crowds.
“Donald Trump is a master of concrete language,” he said. “The term ‘blood bath’ is nothing if not concrete. Strong emotions are a great way to rally the base,” he said. Other experts in political speech say they believe Mr. Trump is normalizing violence by peppering a screed against electric vehicles with promises of a “blood bath” if he loses the election.
Jennifer Mercieca, author of “Demagogue for President: The Rhetorical Genius of Donald Trump,” noted that in his weekend speech, Mr. Trump jumped from complaining about the failure of the United Auto Workers to endorse him to making claims about the auto manufacturing industry leaving the United States for Mexico to the blood bath comment and then back to car sales.
“Because his speech was so disjointed it makes it difficult to know if he was threatening the U.A.W. workers, the U.S. auto manufacturers, or the nation as a whole,” Ms. Mercieca said. But, she added, “In a sense, it doesn’t matter because Trump was threatening all at once.”
Ms. Mercieca, who teaches communications at Texas A&M University, called Mr. Trump’s rhetoric a strategy of “ad baculum,” which is using threats of force or intimidation to coerce behavior.
“Trump paints a dire picture of the nation, threatening economic ruin if he isn’t put in charge,” she said. “Using threats of force to gain power over a nation is authoritarian,” she added, “not democratic.”
This morning, Josh Dawsey of the Washington Post reported that Trump is turning to his 2016 campaign manager Paul Manafort to advise him in 2024. Dawsey notes that the campaign’s focus appears to be on the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee in July, which suggests Trump’s people are concerned that his nomination will be contested.
Peter Navarro Reports To Prison Today
Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts rebuffed Trump White House official Peter Navarro’s last-ditch effort to avoid serving four months for his contempt of Congress conviction. He is to report to federal prison in Miami today.
Jared Kushner says Gaza’s ‘waterfront property could be very valuable’
Donald Trump’s son-in-law also says Israel should bulldoze an area of the Negev desert and move Palestinians there
PHOENIX — As the board of supervisors for Arizona’s largest county abruptly ended a meeting late last month, a swarm of people rushed toward the dais, shouting that the members were illegitimate.
The Maricopa County leaders made a beeline for a side door and were swiftly escorted out of the chamber by security guards, who called for backup from the sheriff’s office. After the meeting’s live-feed went dead, a member of the crowd yelled that a “revolution” was underway.
“I’m here today to put you on public notice and to inform you that you are not our elected officials,” said Michelle Klann, co-founder of a pro-Trump group, from a podium she had commandeered. “This is an act of insurrection. Due to all the voter fraud, you have never been formally voted in.”
The scene at the Feb. 28 meeting terrified many Maricopa employees and others who were reminded of what happened after Joe Biden won the county — and, with it, Arizona — in the 2020 presidential race. Back then, Trump supporters used baseless fraud claims to try to pressure or scare elected leaders into changing the results for the metro Phoenix county, which is home to more than half of Arizona’s residents.
Now, with another presidential election quickly approaching and Arizona again likely to be central to Donald Trump’s electoral strategy, the incident late last month has revived fears that officials responsible for running Maricopa County elections will be targeted with a campaign of threats and abuse — or worse.
“This was an organized, coordinated attack,” said one top county official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive security matters. “It was a dress rehearsal for the election.”
Since the 2020 vote, the Maricopa supervisors — most of whom are Republicans — have faced relentless public ridicule, conspiracy theories and death threats for signing off on the results and refusing to go along with Trump’s efforts to overturn the outcome.
Trump’s razor-thin loss of the state — a mere 10,457 votes of nearly 3.4 million cast — thrust its most important battleground county into the heart of national efforts to undermine confidence in elections.
Arizona voters in 2022 narrowly defeated Republican candidates for governor and other statewide offices who made election denialism a centerpiece of their campaigns. The issue remains a major animating force for the state’s GOP, and Republican lawmakers have even gone so far as to try to break up Maricopa in a move widely seen as retribution for the county’s role in Trump’s defeat.
Maricopa supervisors have become accustomed to the crowds of people who heckle and disparage them in public meetings, a tactic that has played out since the 2020 vote in localities around the nation, from California to Texas. In response to escalating disruptions, Maricopa officials have recently become more aggressive in ordering out unruly attendees or adjourning sessions early to try to avoid viral confrontations.
But the chaotic ending to last month’s meeting marked for some a new level of menace — one reminiscent of the tone preceding the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol — and illustrated the lengths to which Trump’s supporters are willing to go in disrupting public proceedings. Trump’s fraud claims were debunked long ago, but his most ardent backers remain unconvinced.
“There are people who have believed those messages — as false as they are — and are believing that they need to take action,” said Tammy Patrick, the chief executive for programs at the National Association of Election Officials.
In the case of last month’s meeting, the action taken ended peacefully. Outnumbered, the county’s security staff waited for sheriff’s deputies as they calmly ushered out the approximately 20-person crowd. No arrests were made.
Before the board met again in public last Wednesday, supervisors rehearsed emergency evacuation drills, according to people familiar with the training who spoke on the condition of anonymity as they are not allowed to talk about security measures publicly.
Video cameras were added to the chamber and about a dozen uniformed and undercover law enforcement officers or security guards stood watch during the meeting. Sheriff’s deputies swarmed outside and, away from public view, members of a SWAT team had gathered in case they were needed. The board cordoned off rows of seats closest to the dais and required that speakers during the public comment period be escorted to the microphone.
The most popular portion of the meeting — a pet showcase that helps to match homeless dogs with new owners — took place virtually to reduce activity in the chamber and keep employees safe.
“Please know that this is done to protect your safety as well as ours,” Jack Sellers (R), chairman of the board, told the crowd, speaking of the new security measures.
Outside the meeting, Klann and others asserted without evidence that the county board represented foreign interests — not constituents of Maricopa County. Klann declined to answer questions.
The crowd that confronted county leaders on Feb. 28 included supporters of a new Arizona-based anti-government group that Klann co-founded called The Peoples Operation Restoration. The group’s website features a painting of Trump dressed as a Founding Father and riding a horse.
Citing false claims that the 2020 election was stolen and challenges to the validity of U.S. laws and structures, supporters have shown up to Maricopa meetings and offices in recent weeks delivering paperwork that falsely claims leaders are illegitimate and have broken the law.
Klann and supporters gained attention for a similar effort waged against school boards around the nation involving pandemic-era public health measures, said Katie McCarthy, an investigative researcher for the Anti-Defamation League’s Center on Extremism. The strategy, she said, had served as a “harassing intimidation tactic” that is now being echoed in the election denial movement in Arizona.
Some in the group that gathered outside the chamber on Wednesday said they did not recognize the county supervisors’ authority because they do not believe the results of the 2020 election. They said they came to know each other during the post-2020 review of 1.1 million ballots in metro Phoenix, which affirmed Biden’s win.
“We’d like them replaced,” said Brenda Ireton, a pro-Trump Republican who said she views the board as “corrupt” and “bought and paid for” by unknown interests.
Inside the chamber, the board moved quickly through its agenda. When the pro-Trump activists entered, about 15 minutes after the meeting had begun, at least one of them live-streamed on a phone while another carried professional-looking camera gear. As the meeting entered a period reserved for public comment, the group began to loudly complain that they were not allowed to speak. They had missed the deadline — 10 minutes after the meeting had started — to submit paperwork to do so.
As the meeting barreled to an end and supervisors spoke about community events in their districts, the shouting began. Supervisor Thomas Galvin (R) thanked officers in the room for protecting them.
“You’re an insurrectionist,” a woman jeered.
Galvin shot back: “Your performance is noted.” The board chair stepped in, warning those disrupting the meeting that he would have them removed if they continued shouting.
“Every single two weeks we try to do this here,” Galvin told the attendees. “This is the people’s business — we represent 4.5 million people in this county. You don’t get to control what people get to hear.”
Amid another fraught election season, county leaders are drafting rules for public meetings as a way to try to force civility — and make clear the consequences for those who disrupt the board’s work, according to three people familiar with the discussions. The county must vote on any proposed rules before they take effect, possibly within the next two months.
The rules could become critical to the board’s ability to perform its duties, including the approval of election results. Supervisor Bill Gates (R) declined to speak about the proposed rules, but said that he appreciated the board chairman’s work behind-the-scenes to try to balance First Amendment rights with the board’s attempts to do its work without disruption.
“In a year filled with what’s expected to be difficult meetings,” said Gates, who has been the target of particularly intense attacks, “it’s important to be able to maintain control.”
A meeting in Arizona’s largest county, Maricopa, ended chaotically last month, raising concern that the former president’s supporters could try to undercut the election.
Planned Parenthood. Men with saggy pants. People who tore down Confederate flags and monuments. The Rev. Al Sharpton.
Mark Robinson, the GOP nominee in one of this year’s most competitive governor’s races, has declared them all comparable to or worse than the Ku Klux Klan in social media posts that have drawn little attention. The posts are part of a long record of comments ranging from provocative to bigoted that are getting more scrutiny as the campaign heats up in North Carolina — and that some Republicans worry will be a liability in a battleground state.
Robinson has become one of the year’s most polarizing candidates, winning enthusiastic support from the conservative base and disdain from Democrats. Campaigning to become his state’s first Black governor, he has touted his potential appeal to Democratic-leaning minority voters as a rising conservative who “looks like them” and offers “common-sense solutions to the problems that they face.”
His past comments could complicate that outreach, and they have drawn criticism from other Black leaders. Robinson has criticized the civil rights movement of the 1960s and attacked prominent Black people in harsh and offensive terms, calling Michelle Obama, for instance, a man and an “angry, anti-American, communist black lady” who speaks “ghetto” and “wookie.”
Robinson’s references to the KKK, a white-supremacist group that has terrorized Black Americans, underscore the risks Republicans have taken in nominating him — a longtime factory worker who posted a wide range of insults on Facebook before he became a viral hit on the right with a speech about gun laws in 2018. He was elected lieutenant governor of North Carolina in 2020 and won the gubernatorial primary by landslide this month with former president Donald Trump’s endorsement. At a rally, Trump praised Robinson as “Martin Luther King on steroids.”
In 2014, Robinson wrote on Facebook that “an ignorant man with a sheet over his face in the country and an ignorant man with his pants hanging off his behind in the city are two sides of the same worthless wooden nickel,” adding a hashtag that suggested he was talking about people of different races: “ignoranceknowsnotcolor.”
In 2016, he likened certain Black people to those enslaved on plantations: “A ‘plantation minded’ negro hates a free thinking black person worse than ANY Klansman EVER could or EVER will.”
The next year, he wrote that he considered the KKK less reprehensible than “Black gang murderers” and Planned Parenthood, a health nonprofit whose services include abortions. “The KKK never claimed to love black folks like many of the murders in Chicago probably do, and the KKK never tried to eradicate the black race like PLANNED PARENTHOOD is,” he said, putting the KKK third in his ranking of “most evil.” Other posts took similar aim at Planned Parenthood or, as he called it, “klanparenthood.”
A spokesman for Robinson’s campaign, Michael Lonergan, said in an email that The Washington Post’s and other news outlets’ reporting shows “there is one set of rules for white liberals in the press, and another for black conservatives.”
He noted two instances of cartoonists comparing Republicans to the KKK in local news outlets. One of them depicted former Kentucky attorney general Daniel Cameron, who is Black, grabbing the “coattails” of a white-hooded Trump. Another, from 2021, criticized Republican members of the North Carolina education board — which includes Robinson — with an illustration of a white-hooded elephant.
Both cartoons sparked backlash at the time, including from Robinson, who held a news conference denouncing the education board’s depiction. The opinion editor of the company behind the drawing had defended it as “hyperbole and satire.”
“That you would portray a Black man, just because he’s in the GOP, as a Klansman … the hypocrisy is mind-numbing, folks,” Robinson said next to a big screen displaying the cartoon. He called it “vile.”
A reporter noted at the news conference that Robinson’s critics might call him a hypocrite because of his own statements on social media. News outlets had not picked up on the KKK posts but had covered others that featured antisemitic tropes, homophobic statements and an abundance of abrasive language.
“When I made those posts as a private citizen, I was speaking directly to issues that I’m passionate about,” Robinson responded at the time. “But as a public servant … I have to put those opinions behind me and do what’s right for everyone in North Carolina. And I’m grown enough to do that.”
The policy dispute behind the cartoon was illustrative of Robinson’s approach to race as an elected official. Echoing other conservatives around the country, he has forcefully criticized many anti-racism efforts as misguided while arguing that Democrats are overly focused on racial identity. On the North Carolina education board, he opposed new social studies standards that eventually passed with the phrase “systemic” removed from a discussion of “racism.”
Marcus Bass, whose group Advance Carolina focuses on engaging Black voters in the state, said he will be working to raise awareness about Robinson’s past statements and record. “He is a culmination of the worst sound bites, the worst sections of blog sites,” Bass said.
Doug Wilson, a Democratic strategist in North Carolina who is Black, predicted that voters will recoil as they learn more.
“If you look at the folks we elect, they’re pretty mild-mannered,” Wilson said.
Robinson’s critics have sometimes taken his words out of context, fueling his supporters’ common refrain that people are out to smear him. Recently, widely shared video clips of Robinson saying he wanted to “go back to the America where women couldn’t vote” left out his justification that he admired Republicans in that era who he says “fought for real social change” and helped expand voting rights.
But the context of many of Robinson’s most controversial statements is clear, making some in the GOP queasy. North Carolina’s state treasurer, a Republican, accused Robinson of “spewing hate” while running against him in the primary contest.
Robinson has occasionally drawn attention on the forums of Stormfront, a white-supremacist website founded in the 1990s by a KKK leader from Alabama. A 2021 thread praised Robinson’s comments on LGBTQ people and Jewish people, among others. Asked about the mentions on Stormfront, Robinson’s campaign did not directly address them and generally accused the media of treating Black conservatives unfairly.
Other public figures of various backgrounds have gotten blowback for comparing foes to the KKK. Former GOP presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, who is Indian American, was criticized for calling a Black Democratic congresswoman one of the “grand wizards of the modern KKK.” In 2019, Rep. Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.), who is Black, defended his reference to Trump as “the grand wizard of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue” and cited Trump’s false claims about Barack Obama’s birthplace as well as his comments about good people “on both sides” of the infamous white-nationalist rally in Charlottesville.
Robinson made KKK comparisons in more than a dozen Facebook posts over several years. Some of them refer to Black people. In 2015, Robinson addressed a Facebook post to “all those black folks running around attacking people for carrying flags and ripping flags off houses and trucks and … all the people on social media who applaud their foolishness,” an apparent reference to Confederate flags.
He called them as ignorant as “any Klansman,” adding the hashtags “counterproductive” and “apelikebehavior.”
Another post featured a photo of Sharpton, a liberal Black civil rights leader, next to a picture of a Klan member and said, “TWINS!!!!!!!!!”
Sharpton predicted in an interview that Black North Carolinians will mobilize against Robinson and said that comparing Sharpton’s nonviolent activism on racism and voting rights to the KKK is “as politically asinine as one can get.”
Decades ago, according to news reports, Sharpton linked some New York politicians to the KKK while advocating for a woman whose rape allegations were eventually rejected by a jury, which concluded they were fabricated. Sharpton noted that the woman was found with the letters “KKK” on her torso and said, “I was speaking on behalf of someone I believed at the time.”
In Florida, Kansas, Ohio, Illinois, and Arizona, Republican voters chose their presidential candidate today. The results highlight the weaknesses former president Trump is bringing to the 2024 presidential contest.
Trump, who is the only person still in the Republican race, won all five of today’s Republican races. But the results showed that his support is soft. Results are still coming in, but as I write this, former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley, who has suspended her campaign, received between 13% and 20% of the vote, Florida governor Ron DeSantis—who has also suspended his campaign—picked up votes, and “none of the names shown” got more than 5% in Kansas.
Even in Ohio, where Trump’s preferred Senate candidate won, Trump received less than 80% of the Republican vote. After NBC News conducted an exit poll in Ohio, MSNBC producer Kyle Griffin reported that of Ohio Republican primary voters—who are typically the most committed party members—11% said they would vote for Biden in November and another 8% said they wouldn’t vote for either Trump or Biden.
Trump has money problems, too. This morning, Brian Schwartz of CNBC reported that while Trump has pushed Haley voters away, Biden’s team has courted both voters and Haley donors to help Biden defeat Trump. Schwartz said that at least a half dozen former Haley fundraisers have decided to help Biden.
Aside from the Haley supporters who are moving to Biden, Trump’s campaign faces a money crunch. As Schwartz reported yesterday, small donors have slowed down their financial support for Trump considerably, possibly because of fatigue after 9 years of Trump’s supercharged fundraising pitches. Big donors have also been holding back funds out of concern that they will not go toward electing Republicans, but rather will be used to pay Trump’s legal fees.
On March 14, Trump’s people organized a new joint fundraising committee, called the Trump 47 Committee. It is designed to split the money it gets between state Republican parties, the Republican National Committee, and Trump’s Save America Political Action Committee (PAC). As Schwartz notes, Save America spent $24 million on Trump’s legal bills in the last six months of 2023.
While running for president is pricey, so is breaking the law. The former president continues to rail against the law that he must deposit either money or a bond to cover the court-ordered $454 million he owes in penalties, disgorgement of ill-gotten gains, and interest, after he and the Trump Organization were found liable for fraud. “I would be forced to mortgage or sell Great Assets, perhaps at Fire Sale prices, and if and when I win the Appeal, they would be gone. Does that make sense? WITCH HUNT. ELECTION INTERFERENCE!” Trump posted on his social media channel.
Lisa Mascaro, Mary Clare Jalonick, and Jill Colvin of the Associated Press wrote today that Trump is putting the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol at the heart of his presidential campaign, rewriting the five deaths and the destruction to claim that the rioters were “unbelievable patriots” whom he will pardon as soon as he takes office again. His new hires at the Republican National Committee to replace staff he fired are strengthening the idea that Biden stole the 2020 election.
He’s being helped by loyalists in Congress who are trying to rewrite the history of that day to claim that Trump and the rioters have been persecuted by the Department of Justice. They are attacking the testimony of witnesses like Cassidy Hutchinson, former aide to former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, about what she saw that day, although she testified under oath and they are not similarly bound to tell the truth. Trump has said former Wyoming representative Liz Cheney, a Republican who served as vice chair of the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol, “should go to Jail along with the rest of the Unselect Committee!”
But while Trump’s supporters are willing to sing along to a recording of incarcerated participants in the riots singing their version of the national anthem—the song lyrics are credited to “Donald J. Trump and J6 Prison Choir”—the fact that more than 1,200 people have been charged for their actions that day and many of them have been sentenced to prison seems likely to dampen enthusiasm for trying something like that again.
Today, former Trump advisor Peter Navarro also had to report to prison, in his case a federal prison in Miami, for refusing to comply with a subpoena from the January 6th committee for documents and testimony. Last September, a jury found Navarro guilty of contempt of Congress, rejecting his insistence that he didn’t have to answer to Congress because Trump had invoked executive privilege over their conversations about overturning the 2020 presidential election.
Navarro vowed to take the case all the way to the Supreme Court, but a federal appeals court agreed with the verdict, and yesterday, for the Supreme Court, Chief Justice John Roberts rejected Navarro’s plea to stay his sentence. “I am pissed—that’s what I am feeling right now,” Navarro told reporters just before he reported to prison for his four-month sentence.
Trump is also facing renewed scrutiny on his past behavior. With the election interference case in Manhattan heating up, Trump sought to block his former fixer Michael Cohen, adult film actress Stormy Daniels, and former model Karen McDougal from testifying. All of them say Trump paid to keep voters from hearing negative stories about him before the 2016 election. Judge Juan Merchan denied those motions.
And there was a surprise announcement today. Tomorrow, the House Oversight Committee will hold another hearing in the Republicans’ ongoing attempt to impeach President Joe Biden. Today the Democrats on the committee announced they have invited Lev Parnas as their witness. The Ukrainian-born Parnas was an associate of Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani and was deeply involved in the effort to create dirt to smear Biden before the 2020 election.
In 2022, Parnas was convicted of wire fraud, false statements, and breaking campaign finance laws by funneling money illegally to Trump and other Republican lawmakers. Since he broke with Giuliani, he has been eager to explain what happened and how. He will likely bring up stories that Trump would prefer that voters forget.
Representative Jamie Raskin (D-MD), the top Democrat on the Oversight Committee, told reporters: “Lev Parnas can debunk the bogus claims at the heart of the impeachment probe and, in the process, explain how the GOP ended up in this degraded and embarrassing place.”
A meeting in Arizona’s largest county, Maricopa, ended chaotically last month, raising concern that the former president’s supporters could try to undercut the election.
Pro-Trump disruptions in Arizona county elevate fears for the 2024 voteQuote:PHOENIX — As the board of supervisors for Arizona’s largest county abruptly ended a meeting late last month, a swarm of people rushed toward the dais, shouting that the members were illegitimate.
Hey everyone, we are so lucky! We may get to witness a unique phenomenon of modern jurisprudence, acted out again for us in a few days.
It’s called the “let’s prove Donald Trump is above the law dance” and it’s coming to TVs, podcasts and newspapers all over the world.
Trump has been given a deadline of March 25th to come up with $454 million to post as bond in his NY civil fraud case.
His lawyer’s offer to post the much lower amount of $100 million has already been rejected, and Attorney General Leticia James has already begun her weird practice of boasting publicly about what she’s gonna do to Trump - this time it’s seize his assets. Do you feel the tension building, as the media hypes up another “showdown” between Trump and Justice?
Will ANYTHING happen to Trump? Will his assets be seized? Will the court do ANYTHING of consequence to Trump, to honor the deadline they set for his compliance?
Or will we get to watch a fresh example of Trump taking another dump on the lawn of U.S. Justice, AS. IT. HAPPENS.?
Be sure to stay tuned!!
While Republicans on the House Oversight Committee continue to insist that President Joe Biden has committed crimes, testimony today by a former associate of Trump’s disgraced ex-lawyer Rudolph Giuliani was so damning not for Biden but for Republicans that Representative Stephen Lynch (D-MA) told his colleagues: “When you review the entire record of evidence of these hearings going back over a year, you've actually provided more evidence to impeach Donald Trump for a third time than you have in so much as laying a glove on Joe Biden.”
The effort to impeach Biden has faltered as Oversight chair James Comer (R-KY), other Republican members of the committee, and their colleagues have repeatedly told right-wing media that Biden was involved in corrupt business deals with foreign countries in the face of actual testimony and evidence that has not supported those allegations. Republican lawmakers and even right-wing media figures have begun to suggest that the investigation has turned up nothing and the effort should be abandoned.
But House extremists have promised their base that they will impeach Biden, and Comer has steadfastly refused to back down. In a public hearing today, Republicans called as witnesses Tony Bobulinski, a former business partner of President Biden’s son Hunter, and another business associate, Jason Galanis.
Bobulinski is a Trump ally. Democrats called out inconsistencies in Bobulinski’s first testimony before the committee, and in his opening statement today, Bobulinki relied on his military record to prove his honesty. Then he called Hunter Biden and President Biden’s brother James Biden, both of whom testified under oath, liars. He also called Hunter Biden’s defense attorney a liar, and President Joe Biden “a serial liar and a fabulist.” Bobulinski went on: “Representatives Dan Goldman [D-NY] and Jamie Raskin [D-MD], both lawyers…, will continue to lie today in this hearing and then go straight to the media to tell more lies.”
Earlier this month, Bobulinski sued former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson for $10 million, calling her “a liar and a fraud” for her claim that Bobulinski had worn a ski mask when he met quietly with Hutchinson’s boss, Trump’s then chief of staff, Mark Meadows, at a campaign rally in Georgia. Hutchinson produced a photograph supporting her claim.
In his opening statement, Bobulinski claimed that “the Chinese Communist Party…successfully sought to infiltrate and compromise Joe Biden and the Obama-Biden White House.” He has insisted that Biden profited from Hunter Biden’s business deals, but his claims have never been verified, and other witnesses have testified that Biden was never involved in his son’s businesses.
Galanis is serving a 14-year sentence for defrauding a Native American tribe and numerous pension fund investors of tens of millions of dollars. He joined the proceedings virtually from federal prison.
While Bobulinski and Galanis continued to insist, without evidence, that Biden is corrupt, the eye-popping testimony today came from the witness called by the Democrats: Lev Parnas.
Parnas is a Ukrainian-born former associate of one-time Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani. He was deeply involved in the attempt to smear Hunter Biden before the 2020 presidential election. This attempt included then-president Trump’s 2019 phone call to Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky to force him to announce he was opening an investigation into the Ukrainian energy company on whose board Hunter Biden sat. Trump suggested he would not release the money Congress had appropriated to enable Ukraine to resist Russian incursions into Crimea until Zelensky agreed to such an announcement.
That call eventually led to Trump’s first impeachment, in December 2019.
During that impeachment and ever since, Parnas said, “I have never wavered from saying that there was no evidence of the Bidens’ corruption in Ukraine—because there truly was none. On the contrary, by setting up a search for false criminality, every individual majorly involved in this plan was disguising their own criminal activity. That persists to this very day: The impeachment proceedings that bring us here now are predicated on a bunch of false information that is being spread by the Kremlin.”
Parnas said, “My mission for Giuliani and Trump would come to encompass nearly a year of traveling across the globe to find damaging information on the Bidens. This included trips to Ukraine, Poland, Spain, Vienna, London, and other locations…. In my travels, I found precisely zero proof of the Bidens’ criminality.”
What he did find, Parnas said, was that “the Kremlin was forcing [disinformation] through Russian, Ukrainian, American, and other channels to interfere in our elections. Ultimately this was meant to benefit Trump’s re-election, which would in turn benefit Vladimir Putin.”
Every person pushing “the Biden corruption rumors” knew they were “baseless,” Parnas said. And then he named names: “Then-Congressman Devin Nunes [R-CA, who at the time chaired the House Intelligence Committee], Senator Ron Johnson [R-WI], then chair of the Senate Homeland Security Committee], and many other individuals understood that they were pushing a false narrative. The same goes for John Solomon [of The Hill], Sean Hannity, and media personnel, particularly at FOX News, who used that narrative to manipulate the public ahead of the 2020 election. They are still doing this today, as we approach the 2024 election.”
In 2022, Parnas was convicted of wire fraud, false statements, and breaking campaign finance laws by funneling money illegally to Trump and other Republican lawmakers (including then–California representative Kevin McCarthy, as longtime members of this community will remember).
In his testimony, Parnas noted: “When I was arrested, my original indictment linked me to an individual referred to as unindicted co-conspirator 1. We now know this individual to be Congressman Pete Sessions [R-TX], who sits on this very committee today.” Parnas also called out Trump’s attorney general Bill Barr, who he says knew about the attempt to smear the Bidens from the day he took office, and said that Trump personally encouraged Giuliani to interfere in Ukrainian politics.
As Justin Rohrlich of The Daily Beast put it, “Comer…stepped on rake after rake during the hearing, consistently undermining his own conference’s case.” Finally, after Democrats had pointed out the many missteps of the committee’s Republicans, Bobulinski told Jared Moskowitz (D-FL) that “the American people are well aware of the Bidens’ corruption.” “Perfect!” Moskowitz replied. He told Bobulinski to ask Comer why he hadn’t asked for an impeachment vote. Moskowitz even offered to help the Republicans out by making a motion to impeach President Biden, urging Comer to second it. Comer declined.
Moskowitz said he wanted “to show the American people that they’re never going to impeach Joe Biden. It’s never going to happen because they don’t have the evidence. Okay, this is a show. It’s all fake. They just want to do these hearings. It’s not leading to impeachment. They’re lying to their base on Newsmax and Fox leading these people to believe that they’re going to eventually impeach the president. It’s not going to happen. At all. Ever. Period.”
While today might well be the day the Republicans’ impeachment effort sputtered to a dismal end, Parnas’s testimony points forward. “We cannot divorce the impact of this conspiracy from the Russia-Ukraine war,” Parnas said, “because Trump has no intention to keep aiding Ukraine. I told him in 2018, and I am telling all of you now, that without the support of the United States and NATO, Ukraine will not be able to withstand the barrage from the Russian Army.”
House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA), a Trump loyalist, continues to refuse to bring to a vote the national security supplemental bill passed by the Senate more than a month ago containing $60 billion in aid for Ukraine, although it is expected to pass if he does. Last week the administration announced a $300 million arms package made possible by Pentagon cost savings, and tonight, national security advisor Jake Sullivan is in Kyiv to reassure the Ukrainians that aid is coming. But while Ukrainian drone strikes have knocked out as much as 11% of Russia’s oil-refining capacity, lack of supplies has meant Ukraine’s troops have lost ground to Russian advances.
Those trying to get aid to Ukraine believe its defense is central to U.S. national security. Today the Institute for the Study of War, a nonpartisan, nonprofit research group, assessed that “[s]everal Russian financial, economic, and military indicators suggest that Russia is preparing for a large-scale conventional conflict with NATO, not imminently but likely on a shorter timeline than what some Western analysts have initially posited,” within a matter of years.
