Author: A.T.

They’re leaving MAGA

Former MAGA zealot Rich Logis received this yesterday:

Hello!  I live in Springfield Missouri and saw your billboard next to a Maverick and was amazed by it. Missouri is an extremely MAGA state and seeing something like this was a breath of fresh air knowing how toxic the MAGA community is. I went to your website and was touched by all of the stories and the impact you guys are having on people’s lives. This is truly an awesome representation of what it’s like to be a true American and helping others around you without shaming them. I cannot thank you enough for creating such a website and support team for people.

Separately, Rich blasted this email:

The Villages, a retirement community of about 150,000 people in central Florida, was once called “The New Headquarters for Make America Great Again” by Fox News.

. . . a community so red that in both 2016 and 2020, Trump took more than 70% of the vote in Sumter County — the county The Villages calls home.

But recently, that’s been changing. The Villages Democratic Club has nearly doubled its membership since 2020, neighbors who kept their Harris lawn signs tucked away are finding each other, and in March, The Villages held its largest anti-Trump protest ever, with local media estimating nearly 7,000 residents turning out against him.

And this week, thanks to the support of people like you, we put a Leaving MAGA billboard up in The Villages. . . .

Read in full to see how LeavingMAGA plays a meaningful role in saving democracy.

WEEKEND BONUS

1946 Birthed Three Presidents — And Remade the World.  “For better and worse.”

 

Semi-Corrections

MOZART

Randy W.: “Mozart WASN’T bured in a pauper’s grave. He made quite a bit of money from his music.”  

→ Apparently, he did — yet died more or less penniless.

EINSTEIN

Rob N.: “Yes, Einstein died with just $65,000.  While not a huge amount of money back then, the value today would be about $825,000.  Not a fortune — but not exactly broke.”

→ Fair.  But still.

INEQUALITY

Marcus W.: “I read your thoughts about wealth inequality.  It’s not that simple.  See: What Liberals Get Wrong About the Middle Class.”

→ The middle class is shrinking, the authors say, but so is the proportion of Americans below the middle class — because the upper-middle class is growing.  Then again, wealth inequality has become grotesque.  As of 2022, they report, the share of wealth held by the middle class had fallen to 8% from 24% in 1989, while the share held by the top 3% rose from 26% in 1989 to 53% in 2022 — and has surely only grown more unequal since then.

Join the Patriotic Millionaires, if you are one — or their grassroots arm if you’re not!

HEGSETH: PREMEDITATED MURDER

Top Pentagon Official Admits Boat Strike May Have Killed Victims of Human Trafficking.  

Worth reading.  I believe you will conclude Hegseth intended to kill all aboard; that most were likely not drug smugglers; that even suspected drug smugglers deserve a fair trial; that, if convicted, deserve something less than the death penalty; that drug smugglers on a small boat heading away from the United States pose no threat to the United States that would warrant their execution.  (And that murdering the two final passengers, clinging to their capsized boat, is the very definition of a war crime — look it up.)

Hegseth should be fired and tried as a war criminal.

 

Winning In Maine; Losing in New York

SOLD ON GRAHAM PLATNER

Watch a minute of his victory speech and/or his interview yesterday on Morning Joe.

Trey Beck believes he will win — and should.  Me, too.

BOOED — BIGLY

Adam Kinzinger:

Here’s an uncomfortable fact that we all need to accept: this president can’t handle the truth. And that keeps me up at night.

Moments before tip-off at Game 3 of the NBA Finals Monday evening, the cameras inside Madison Square Garden found Donald Trump in James Dolan’s private suite, high above the court, as Avery Wilson began to sing the national anthem. The president stood with his granddaughter Kai beside him, his right hand raised in a slow salute, his jaw set in the particular way it gets when he is trying to look presidential. And then, as it always does, the crowd told the truth.

The boos started the moment his face appeared on the jumbotron and did not stop for a full minute. Not scattered boos. A sustained, unified wall of sound from 19,812 people who had paid thousands of dollars to watch a basketball game and found themselves, instead, sending a message to the man who had turned their neighborhood into a security checkpoint for the evening. The watch party outside the arena had been canceled. Several blocks of midtown Manhattan had been closed. Thousands of fans had been rerouted, delayed, and searched extensively. The city had been inconvenienced for a man the city did not want there. And it said so, loudly, the only way it could.

The jeers ended when the flag filled the screen. They returned when Trump’s face appeared again. And they evaporated entirely when Jalen Brunson was shown standing on the court, because the crowd had not come to Madison Square Garden on a Monday night to make a political statement. They had come to watch the Knicks. Donald Trump made that impossible.

Somewhere in the second half, the cameras caught the president with his eyes closed. His head had dropped slightly. His shoulders had settled in the way that bodies settle when the muscles holding them upright have given up the effort. The White House, which has developed considerable experience explaining away photographs of this kind, later described it as a long blink. It was not a long blink. It was a 79-year-old man who had fallen asleep at a basketball game he had forced his way into.

The Knicks lost for the first time in the series. The crowd was deflated. The building emptied. And somewhere in the motorcade back to JFK, the president prepared to tell the world what had happened.

Standing on the tarmac before boarding Air Force One, Trump was asked directly about the reception he had received. He did not hesitate. “I thought it was great,” he said. “I mean, I thought it was amazing, actually. You mean when they had the camera on me? I thought it was very good, yeah. It was certainly amazing. It was, I think, mostly cheers. It was loud and it was very enthusiastic.”

I want to be careful here, because the temptation when reporting something like this is to treat it as simply another lie in an administration that tells many of them. But I do not think that is what Monday night was. Lies, by definition, require some awareness of the truth being obscured. What Trump described on that tarmac did not sound like a man who knew he had been booed and was covering it up. It sounded like a man who had genuinely processed the evening differently from everyone else in the building. The pool reporter from The Washington Times, not exactly a hostile outlet, wrote that Trump was thunderously booed. The video is unambiguous. The audio is clear. None of that appears to have registered.

At 2:11 in the morning, unable to sleep, Trump posted to Truth Social. He shared a clip from a conservative news site showing his motorcade driving through the city, with a handful of supporters cheering along the route. A Fox News contributor had captioned it: “NYC loves Donald Trump.” In the same clip, plainly audible, New Yorkers were booing as the motorcade rolled past. He posted it anyway, because to him, that was the night. That was what had happened. The cheers were real. The boos did not exist in any way that required acknowledgment.

I have been writing about this presidency for a long time now, and the question I find myself returning to, more than any other, is not whether Trump lies. He does, constantly, and the documentation of that is overwhelming. The question that keeps me up at night is something more unsettling: how much of what he says does he actually believe? Because there is a meaningful difference between a president who knows the truth and hides it, and a president who has lost the capacity to distinguish between what he experiences and what he wishes he had experienced. The first is a problem of character. The second is something else.

Consider what that operating system looks like applied to the decisions that actually matter. The CIA delivered an assessment telling the White House that Iran has restored 90 percent of its missile capability after two months of war and $30 billion in spending. Trump called the reporting virtual treason. His approval rating has collapsed to the low thirties. He describes a country that loves him. Inflation hit 3.8 percent in April. His economic team told CNBC that Americans are simply overwhelmed by winning. Nineteen thousand people booed him during the national anthem at Madison Square Garden. He went home and posted that New York City loves him.

This is not a new pattern. But something about Monday night made it impossible to look away from, precisely because sports arenas are one of the last places in American life where reality is genuinely non-negotiable. The score is the score. The crowd noise is the crowd noise. You cannot spin a jumbotron. Thousands of people had their phones out. The audio exists on a thousand separate recordings, uploaded to a thousand separate accounts within minutes of it happening. There is no version of that evening in which the president was not booed, and no version of his response to it that made sense given what everyone in that building heard and felt.

What I keep coming back to is the granddaughter. Kai Trump sat beside her grandfather in that suite for the whole of it. She heard what the crowd said when his face appeared on the screen. She watched the game. She watched him close his eyes. She was there on the tarmac when he described the night as mostly cheers. And she is seventeen years old, growing up inside the particular reality her grandfather has constructed, learning from the closest possible distance what it looks like when a man decides that the world around him must conform to his version of events rather than the other way around.

I don’t know what she took away from Monday night. I hope it was something honest. Because the rest of us don’t have the option of looking away from what it means when the person making decisions about a war, an economy, and a democracy comes home from a basketball game and tells the world it was mostly cheers.

It wasn’t. And we all heard it.

– Rep Adam Kinzinger

IF EINSTEIN WAS SO SMART . . .

James D Scurlock:

Churchill was broke his entire life, ditto for Vincent Van Gogh. Mozart was buried in a pauper’s grave because he never made enough for a proper burial. Despite his brilliance, Albert Einstein’s estate was worth just $65,000 when he died.

Have a great day.

 

Hidden Shame

EPSTEIN

In the files released so far (where are the rest?), his name appears more than 38,000 times.  Why are they heavily redacted?  What are they hiding?  Is it possible there’s something shameful that even MAGA supporters could not abide?

DELANEY

By and large, Trump’s detention centers, like Delaney Hall, are not housing “the worst of the worst.”  Most have no criminal record, many are children, some are American citizens.  Why is the Trump regime denying members of Congress, governors, lawyers and the press access?  What are they hiding?  Is it possible the conditions and injustices are too shameful for even MAGA to abide?

(Meanwhile, the cruel, unChristian mass deportation program is costing taxpayers a ton while weakening Social Security.)

YANG

The shame here is inequality.

Sure, if you’re born to wealthy parents you deserve a better life than someone born poor.  (But do you really? And how much better?)  And sure, if you’re born with the DNA for exceptional intelligence or looks or athletic prowess, you deserve a vastly better life than someone born with more typical, let alone sub-optimal genes.  (But do you really? And how much better?)

(As long-time readers know, I once asked Warren Buffett why he’s a Democrat.  He introduced me to John Rawls’ “Veil of Ignorance” — the thought experiment where you’re in the womb, about to be born but don’t know whether you’ll be black or white, rich or poor, male, female, or intersex, straight or gay, etc., etc. — and you have the power to determine what kind of social structure you would like to be born into.  Health care only for the rich?  Medicare for all?  Medicare for all with the right to buy a “first class overlay”?  Etc.)

Ronald Reagan launched the current binge of ever-widening inequality and exploding National Debt, amplified by George W. Bush and now Trump.

It threatens to grow even worse with AI.

Andrew Yang has spent a decade addressing this issue, first with The War on Normal People: The Truth About America’s Disappearing Jobs and Why Universal Basic Income Is Our Future and yesterday, when he argued that we should Tax AI, not humans.

Have a great day.

 

Looted

Remember when it was shameful to tell a lie?

He lies about everything.

Republicans are okay with that somehow, but Mika isn’t having it (8 must-watch minutes).

Remember when it was shameful to protect pedophiles?

Trump won’t comply with the law he signed that passed 427-1 in the House and unanimously in the Senate.

He is above the law.

BONUS

Trump: What’s the Deal? (Full 1991 BANNED Documentary)

“He is a con artist.” — Marc Rubio

“We must put an end to this lunacy.” — also Marc Rubio

 

 

Platner, Collins, VERU, And An Important (Overlooked) Step On The Road to Autocracy

SUSAN COLLINS : BRETT CAVANAUGH

More on the Graham Platner race here.  Must-watch if you’re undecided (7 minutes).  We’re gonna win.

YOUR PLATNER RESPONSES

At one extreme and the other:

Clare D.:

Have you seen Democrats can do better than Graham Platner. They must demand he drop out. It’s pretty devastating.

Peter S.:

I am so pissed at Democrats attacking him when Trump just brushed it off as locker room talk about saying on tape he would just “Grab em by the pussy”, dozens of women accusing him of harassment or worse, raping his first wife, —-ing a porn star while Melania was pregnant and paying her hundreds of thousands in hush money, walking in on teen girl pageant contestants naked on purpose and being mentioned more than any other person in the Epstein files who’s now desperately burying the files, and distracting from it by starting a war. None of that was disqualifying and yet they’re going to crucify Platner for consensual sext messages with adult women? He should make this very point. This is the same disgraceful treatment they gave the great Al Franken. Kirsten Gillibrand [cannot be forgiven] for what she did to Al. And any Dem who attacks Platner is almost as bad. Granted, Platner’s peccadillos are worse than the absolute NOTHING Al did, but still on a scale of Al’s being a 1 and Trump’s being 100, Platner is maybe a 5. Rally around him. He’s not a perfectly groomed lifetime striver for political office but what he says and believes and how he expresses himself like a real person is exactly what the Democratic Party needs more of in spades.

VERU

The stock that some of us first bought around $5.40 opened at $2.18 Thursday, traded as high as $7.33 on news that Veru had signed a deal with Novo Nordisk — to test the effect of taking its drug enobosarm alongside Wegovy — and closed the week (in after-hours trading) at $3.15.

The hope is that anyone taking weight -loss drugs like Wegovy may one day want to take enobosarm as well to reduce the loss of muscle mass.  It could be huge — or just fade away.  Did I mention that this is a stock to buy only with money you can truly afford to lose?

BONUS

Donald Trump just tripled the size of his personal army inside government. It was illegal.

 

Heather Cox Richardson

PRIDE

It’s June.  Chris Gallant, running to flip NY-1 blue, here tells that part of his story (90 seconds).

OSSOFF

Such a contrast with Mike Johnson (140 seconds).

PULTE

Charlie Sykes:

On Tuesday we learned that the Pentagon has hired a convicted January 6 rioter for a sensitive counterterrorism job. . . .

That story was overshadowed by Trump’s appointment of MAGA-loyalist Bill Pulte as acting Director of National Intelligence. But the two stories are related, because, as Derek Thompson wrote, they are an indication that we have entered “Late-stage Kakistocracy” — the “phase of democratic decline where the regime starts running out of people who will work for it, and so the folks who aren’t qualified for their current positions are promoted to even larger positions for which they are even more unqualified.”

Under the law that established the DNI, appointees are required to have “extensive national security expertise.” Pulte, who heads up the Federal Housing Finance Agency, has none. He has no background in either intelligence or law enforcement. . . .

[But] Pulte has the one qualification that Trump is now demanding: As he scrapes the bottom of his barrel, the president is looking for appointees ready and willing to abuse the powers of government to punish his enemies. In Pulte — as in Todd Blanche and Ken Paxton — he has found the whole package. Pulte proved his willingness to use his position to help Trump target NY AG Letitia James, Senator Adam Schiff and others. Nothing has come of the cases, but it was the malice that counted. Now he gets to use the resources of the nation’s intelligence community to pursue that agenda.

HCR

I could listen to historian Heather Cox Richardson all day — and will, if and when my application is approved.

(I’ve applied for 4 extra hours in every 28-hour day that no one else gets but me.)

But I did find 50 minutes Tuesday to listen to this one.

If you do, I think you may find yourself subscribing to her channel, as more than a million of us have.

EPSTEIN

Any news?