Slouching Towards Oblivion

Showing posts with label GOP. Show all posts
Showing posts with label GOP. Show all posts

Monday, March 11, 2024

Are They Waking Up?

This popped up on my Twixter feed this morning:


The rhetoric coming from the MAGA leaders is still pretty vehemently about "voter fraud", and wanting to do nothing but paper ballots, and only one day for voting, and hand counting, and announcing the results that evening. Which, of course, when taken together all but guarantees failure - which, of course again, is probably the point. Kill everybody's confidence in the process, and you can do away with all that inconvenient democracy stuff.

Then this was down the page in the replies:


It may not be so much that the rubes are being fooled, though some certainly are. It seems more like a lot of them have become thoroughly conditioned to accept the contradictions - or they're so caught up in the power game that they've decided to take a full part in it, passing the bullshit on to whoever might buy it, and reinforcing their own commitment to it (?)

Like they know what they're being told is bullshit, but they have to internalize it and rationalize it in order to make it through the day without their heads imploding.

It's a puzzlement, and I have to feel some encouragement that Ayn Rand's rule about contradictions is playing itself out.

Contradictions can and do exist, but they don't prevail, because they can't.

Monday, March 04, 2024

Monday, February 26, 2024

Where We're At

Generally, people are kinda tired of Trump's drama queen antics, and some are starting to understand they're not getting much out of it.



We're getting more confirmation it was never really about "economic anxiety". Maybe that anxiety helped fuel the rage, but it was always about the rage itself, and, as is typical of Wingnut Populists, Republicans channeled that rage into the basic fascist ploy of amping up the rubes and telling them who to blame.



The Koch PAC pulling their funding from the Haley campaign is not a sign of her crumbling.

I think it has more to do with the Plutocracy Project's main supporters looking to quiet things back down a bit, while they shift their emphasis back to the state and local levels.

Remember, one of the main objectives is to be in a position to call for a States' Constitutional Convention. They need ⅔ of the states (34) to agree to calling the convention, and in the last few cycles, they've lost some ground - Republicans had full control of the legislatures in 28 states, and now it's down to 23.

So it makes a lot of sense for them to refocus on trying to buy up those 11 states, since they're losing pretty badly at the national level.

Thursday, February 22, 2024

Willfully Useful Idiots


Republicans are conditioned to keep doubling down, and at this point, after several rounds of it, they don't think they can pull back.

I see it as a combination of Sunk Cost Fallacy and SOP for propagandists.


And then, Press Poodles like Alex Wagner can't seem to grasp the concept of calling this shit out for the fascist shit that it is.

Even after Goldman explains it to her, she softens it and ends the segment with wording that I guess is meant to soothe us - to keep us from panicking.

Maybe a little panic is what we need - to get some of these fucking idiots up off their asses and into the goddamned fight.


The only way this shit ends
is by stomping the GOP
until there's nothing left
but a greasy spot on the rug

Friday, January 05, 2024

What Do They Mean?

I think I know the answer to my question, but sometimes, like an idiot goat trying to get somebody to explain a typewriter to him, I find myself trying to make sense of something that isn't meant to make sense to me or anybody else.

Shutting down the borders is a pretty classic Daddy State type move. And when you can couple it with some good old-fashioned racial scapegoating - hey - why not?

They have yet to articulate what exactly "shutting down the border" would look like.  What does Mike Johnson mean as he calls for "... transformational policy change to secure our border, enforce our laws, and deter even more illegal immigration"?

I'm afraid it's not a big stretch to think it means machine guns, razor wire, and land mines.

And let's remember that a closed border serves to keep people in too.


Border dispute could force partial government shutdown

Far-right House Republicans are threatening to block legislation to keep the federal government operating without sweeping changes to immigration laws


Far-right Republicans in the House are threatening to force a partial government shutdown unless Congress enacts strict new changes to immigration law, imperiling crucial government services — and U.S. aid to Ukraine — over a long-fraught issue that could be critical in this year’s elections.

Dozens of GOP lawmakers toured a portion of the U.S.-Mexico border at Eagle Pass, Tex., on Wednesday to push House-passed legislation that would significantly limit migrants’ ability to claim asylum, restart construction of a border wall and cut into President Biden’s power to grant humanitarian parole to migrants. Members of the Republican conference’s most conservative flank demanded that legislation become law in exchange for their votes to approve federal spending for the rest of the 2024 fiscal year, though the GOP-led House already rejected such a trade in September.

“H. R. 2 needs to be the unflinching House policy because all of it’s important to securing the border,” Rep. Bob Good (R-Va.), chair of the archconservative House Freedom Caucus, told The Washington Post. “The president and Senate majority leader have no interest in securing the border, and so therefore, we as a House majority should say, ‘We’re not going to fund a government that is going to continue to facilitate this border invasion.’”

Federal agents recorded nearly 250,000 illegal crossings along the southern border in December, the highest total ever in one month, according to preliminary Customs and Border Protection data obtained by The Post.

That crisis is complicating efforts in Washington to head off a partial shutdown. Funding for roughly 20 percent of the federal government — including for essential programs such as some veterans assistance and food and drug safety services — expires on Jan. 19, and money for the rest of the government runs out shortly after that, on Feb. 2. But lawmakers have not yet agreed on how to pass full-year spending bills or more temporary funding. Without action by the first deadline, a partial government shutdown would begin. Congress returns next week with little time to work out the details.

The White House’s top budget official told reporters Friday that the GOP tactic significantly increased the risk of a shutdown.

“I wouldn’t say pessimistic, but I’m not optimistic [about the odds to avert a shutdown],” Shalanda Young, director of the Office of Management and Budget, said at a breakfast sponsored by the Christian Science Monitor. “Earlier this week, their border trip left me with more concerns about where they’re headed.”

House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) did not formally back the demands to link immigration restrictions with federal spending, but with a narrow GOP majority in a bitterly divided chamber, he relies on the Freedom Caucus, a group that has been a persistent thorn in the side of Republican leadership, to maintain power. He called that immigration bill, H.R. 2, a “necessary ingredient” to any immigration policy.

“Let me tell you what our top two priorities are right now,” Johnson told reporters Wednesday. “In summary, we want to get the border closed and secured first, and we want to make sure that we reduce nondefense discretionary spending.”

Republican lawmakers and political operatives say immigration issues work to their advantage, and hope to capitalize on the porous border to maintain control of their narrow House majority, retake the Senate and propel former president Donald Trump back to the White House.

“I would prefer the Senate Democrats found enlightenment and said, ‘H.R. 2 is what we want to do.’ Turns out I live in the real world and that’s not going to happen,” Rep. Kelly Armstrong (R-N.D.) said. “But if we can get a substantial win on the border, I think it is one of those rare cases where it actually really helps the country and helps us politically.”

That strategy has at least some support in the Senate, where Democrats control the chamber by a single vote, requiring help from Republicans to get around potential filibusters to pass new spending legislation.

“I think that we have a real fiscal crisis in our country, but I think the most significant crisis we have is what is going on at the southern border,” Sen. J.D. Vance (R-Ohio), a regular interlocutor between hard-right lawmakers in the House and more pragmatic Senate Republicans, told The Post on Friday. “And I encourage my Republican friends in the House to use all the negotiating leverage they can to solve this problem politically.

A bipartisan group in the Senate — Sens. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.), James Lankford (R-Okla.) and Kyrsten Sinema (I-Ariz.) — has been negotiating border legislation for weeks in connection with a separate spending bill that would devote more than $100 billion in U.S. aid to Ukraine and Israel and to the U.S.-Mexico border, among other priorities. That bill would include $14 billion in border security provisions. Senate Republicans have demanded immigration policy changes, as well as the security funding, before they’d vote to approve additional money for Ukraine.

But House Republicans are far more skeptical of Kyiv than their Senate counterparts, and demands to link immigration policy to ongoing government funding, instead of to the Ukraine aid, could mean the House won’t pass any assistance for the war in Ukraine.

This round of budgetary negotiations wasn’t supposed to be so complicated. In the spring, President Biden struck a deal with then-Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) to suspend the nation’s debt limit in exchange for limiting discretionary spending to $1.59 trillion in 2024, with 1 percent growth in 2025. Because that represented a cut when taking inflation into account, Biden and McCarthy agreed to spend another $69 billion each year in a side deal, with some of that offset by repurposing existing funds.

But House Republicans, led by members of the Freedom Caucus, were unsatisfied with that arrangement. A few months later, they ousted McCarthy from the speakership when he turned to Democratic votes in September to maintain those spending levels and avert a government shutdown. In a sign of stark internal divisions, though, the GOP-led House also rejected a stopgap funding measure with steep budget cuts that included the sweeping border changes the far right now seeks. (McCarthy resigned from Congress at the end of 2023.)

After taking over as speaker, Johnson in November also needed support from Democrats to pass another stopgap funding bill, which staggered expiration dates between Jan. 19 and Feb. 2.

The $69 billion side deal that McCarthy struck has been a sticking point through the fall and winter. Rep. Scott Perry (R-Pa.), then chair of the Freedom Caucus, told reporters just after Thanksgiving that his group would support the $1.59 trillion spending total that the debt ceiling law set — even though that was the amount that led some members to boot McCarthy from the speakership and drive the government to the verge of a shutdown — but only if it didn’t include the side agreements.

By early December, Johnson echoed the sentiment, declaring that the additional funding was not codified in law, but merely a handshake deal between his predecessor and Biden.

“This budget agreement was not a handshake agreement,” Young, from the White House OMB, said Friday. “It was a vote of Congress. It is not optional. They have to keep their word.”

“That group has got sway over Johnson. They’ve toppled McCarthy. They’re the reason why nothing’s got done in the last 12 months,” Rep. David Trone (D-Md.), a member of the House Appropriations Committee, told The Post.

Good, the Freedom Caucus’s new leader, said he has told Johnson that the speaker would “be a hero to the American people” if he threatened a government shutdown over border security.

“I think that’s a fight the American people will reward Speaker Johnson for waging,” Good said.

Saturday, December 16, 2023

On GOP Fuckery - Immigration

  • In 2013 Dems passed a bi-partisan immigration reform bill in the Senate
  • House Republicans refused to allow it on the floor for debate
  • Obama asked Republicans to propose their own immigration bill
  • Republicans refused
  • Republicans then demanded Obama do something about illegal immigration
  • Obama used Executive Order authority to put some reforms in place
  • Republicans were outraged, and called Obama a tyrant for doing what they demanded of him
Republicans don't want immigration reform - or much of anything else - they want to maintain the problem so they have an "issue" they can use to scare the rubes and tell them who to blame for it.

Thursday, December 14, 2023

Don & Kev & Lil Matty

This one kinda slipped by me.


You wanna friend? Buy a dog.


McCarthy privately recounts terse phone call with Trump after ouster

During the call, former president detailed the reasons he hadn’t intervened during the effort to remove McCarthy as speaker


In the weeks after the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, then-House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) traveled down to Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Club and threw a lifeline to the former president, who was under a cloud of controversy for provoking the historic assault.

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The fence-mending session between the two Republican leaders ended with a photo op of the two men, grinning side by side in a gilded, frescoed room. The stunning turnabout of the House GOP leader, who had previously blamed Trump for the deadly attack, paved the way for the former president’s return to de facto leader of the Republican Party.

When the tables were turned almost three years later, however, Trump did not return the favor.

Wait - Trump stiffed him? Whooda thunk it, huh?

During a phone call with McCarthy weeks after his historic Oct. 3 removal as House speaker, Trump detailed the reasons he had declined to ask Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) and other hard-right lawmakers to back off their campaign to oust the California Republican from his leadership position, according to people familiar with the exchange who, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity to disclose a private conversation.

During the call, Trump lambasted McCarthy for not expunging his two impeachments and not endorsing him in the 2024 presidential campaign, according to people familiar with the conversation.

“F--- you,” McCarthy claimed to have then told Trump, when he rehashed the call later to other people in two separate conversations, according to the people. A spokesperson for McCarthy said that he did not swear at the former president and that they have a good relationship. A spokesperson for Trump declined to comment.

The transactional — and at times tumultuous — relationship has seemingly endured despite McCarthy’s ouster. The two continue to speak and text, according to people with knowledge of the relationship.

McCarthy has previously grappled with discrepancies between his private, disparaging comments about Trump to others and his continued fealty to the former president. In her new book, former congresswoman Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) accused McCarthy of repeatedly lying about his relationship with Trump after the Jan. 6 attack. Cheney writes that when she pressed McCarthy about why he visited Trump at Mar-a-Lago, McCarthy claimed that he was summoned by the former president’s staff out of concern for his well-being.

“They’re really worried. … Trump’s not eating, so they asked me to come see him,” McCarthy told Cheney, according to CNN.

During McCarthy’s prolonged fight for the speakership in January, Trump assisted him in clinching the gavel by leaning on some of the holdouts, which he later claimed credit for on social media. But during the Gaetz-orchestrated ouster effort, Trump remained relatively quiet. After McCarthy was removed as speaker, Gaetz indicated in an interview that Trump was supportive of his actions.

“I would say that my conversations with the former president leave me with great confidence that I’m doing the right thing,” Gaetz said.


McCarthy has not endorsed Trump or any other candidate for president. But he had always planned to endorse Trump around the Iowa caucuses next year, at a time McCarthy thought the endorsement mattered, according to people familiar with his plans. He told Trump during the call that he was unable to endorse him earlier because he feared that some of his donors would have rescinded their support if he put his thumb on the scale early in the 2024 presidential race, according to a person briefed on the conversation. McCarthy indicated to others that he also withheld his endorsement to protect some of the more vulnerable members of the House Republican conference, another person added.

Whether McCarthy will remain in public office is unclear, as he has privately indicated to allies that he has started exploring a career beyond the halls of Congress, according to people familiar with his thinking. The former speaker faces a Dec. 8 filing deadline, with a five-day leniency period offered to incumbents, to decide whether he will seek another term in 2024.

“If I decide to run again, I have to know in my heart that I’m giving 110 percent. I have to know that I want to do that,” McCarthy said at an event Wednesday. “I also have to know if I’m going to walk away, that I’m going to be fine with walking away.”

Since his ouster, he has taken a no-holds-barred approach to the people who facilitated his removal from leadership, unloading on individual lawmakers in public interviews. McCarthy and his allies have at times used their power and deep coffers to weed out Republican incumbents who caused headaches in Washington, or were misaligned with McCarthy’s interests. This month, McCarthy said in an interview with CNN that Gaetz should face consequences for his actions and predicted that Rep. Nancy Mace (R-S.C.), one of the eight lawmakers who joined Gaetz, would lose reelection for her “flip-flopping.”

McCarthy, a prolific fundraiser, has said he’d continue to assist with the party’s fundraising efforts as the new speaker, Rep. Mike Johnson (R-La.), establishes himself in the role. On Thursday, McCarthy’s top fundraiser and confidant, Jeff Miller, will host a fundraiser for the Johnson Leadership Fund, charging $10,000 to attend, according to a copy of the invitation obtained by The Washington Post. Miller, who has raised hundreds of millions of dollars for House Republicans since McCarthy became House minority leader, previously told The Post that he would start fundraising for Johnson’s team.

But it’s unclear to what extent McCarthy will personally be involved with fundraising for the House GOP conference going forward. And concerns remain about whether Johnson will be able to re-create McCarthy’s fundraising juggernaut that helped win back the House in 2022 — and will be necessary for Republicans to retain power going into the 2024 election season. To date, McCarthy has funneled $35 million in direct contributions to the House GOP campaign effort since January and has sent a total of $23.8 million to the National Republican Congressional Committee and state parties this cycle.

Trump, meanwhile, has in part dragged down the party’s fundraising efforts as he maintains front-runner status in its presidential primary. The Post previously reported that big-dollar donors have cut back on issuing big checks to the NRCC in recent years because they did not want the money being used to help Trump.

Friday, December 08, 2023

Taylor Swift




I've never heard a Taylor Swift recording. All I know about her is that she consistently sells out 70,000 seat concerts, she's sold over 100 million album units, she's a legit billionaire, and she's dating an NFL star.

Oh yeah - and she's moved many many thousands of 18-to-34-year-olds to get registered.

All of  which is making the MAGArubes crazy - crazy enough (I guess) to think that attacking her and trying to tear her down won't piss off all those newly registered voters to the point where they'll never vote Republican. Ever.



MAGAdorks are so addicted to contrarian horseshit, they need their "thought leaders" to turn everything upside down and inside out so they can get a good red pill fix before they Jones out. It's like whoever comes up with the craziest Shutter Island-style fantasy is the one everybody follows - today - it'll be different tomorrow - or in an hour or two.

And I'll harp on it some more - this shit fits with the Daddy State mold perfectly.

It Goes Around

... and then it comes around.


Thursday, December 07, 2023

The Non-Debate Debate


Again - it's not a debate. It's a series of prepackaged ads and sound bites, punctuated by the occasional shout fest - basically, an episode of The Real Wives Of MAGAville.


Key takeaways from the fourth Republican debate

As the 2024 GOP primary field narrows, four contenders sparred on gender-affirming care for minors, fentanyl, military aggression toward China and more


TUSCALOOSA, Ala. — Four Republican presidential contenders clashed in Wednesday’s presidential primary debate, as former U.N. ambassador Nikki Haley and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis sought to solidify their second-place position with less than six weeks left before the Iowa caucuses. Former president Donald Trump once again skipped the showdown.

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Haley, who has surpassed or tied DeSantis in early state public polling, found herself the target of attacks early on, and at one point former New Jersey governor Chris Christie came to her defense. Haley and DeSantis continued to tussle on China, while Christie used his airtime to hit Trump for skipping the debates. Christie accused his opponents onstage of being hesitant to cross Trump, who holds a dominant polling lead in the primary race. Meanwhile, tech entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy espoused conspiracy theories and leveled personal attacks on his rivals.


While moderators asked a range of questions from border security to gender-affirming care to Trump’s fitness for office, the candidates were not asked about abortion — an animating issue for conservatives and one of the most divisive issues of the 2024 cycle.

The debate, held here Wednesday at the University of Alabama, may be the final forum sanctioned by the Republican National Committee, as the party considers releasing the candidates to face off in other events.

Here’s what else stood out last night:

Trump’s absence overshadows the debate

The former president’s dismissal of the debates has continued to deny any of his rivals the opportunity to challenge him directly and diminished the events’ draw. Though considered risky at first, there is no sign Trump has paid any political price for skipping the debates — Wednesday he picked up the endorsement of host state Sen. Katie Boyd Britt (R).

Christie used his first chance to speak, which didn’t come until roughly 17 minutes into the debate, to go straight for Trump, and argue that his 2024 rivals’ failure to attack Trump directly was the problem. Christie called Trump unfit for office, echoing alarms that the former president would govern as an autocrat based on his recent threats to send the Justice Department after his critics.

“They don’t want to talk about the fact that when you go and you say the truth about somebody who is a dictator, or bully, who has taken shots at everybody,” Christie said of his rivals. “I’m in this race because the truth needs to be spoken. He is unfit.”

Toward the end of the first hour, Haley said Trump deserved some blame for adding to the national debt during his administration. DeSantis then agreed that Republicans were responsible for deficit spending, but he did not single out Trump.

Moderator Megyn Kelly teased opening the second hour with more discussion of Trump, but she kicked it off by asking the candidates to respond to Trump’s proposals on blocking migrants based on ideology or religion. Christie took another opportunity to turn back to Trump’s character, drawing a mix of cheers and boos from the audience despite their being instructed to watch quietly. DeSantis offered a mix of critiques, from Trump’s age and electability to his conduct during the pandemic.

While Trump sought to upstage those gatherings with his own counterprogramming, he treated this one as not even worth competing with, spending the evening at a private fundraiser instead. Viewership declined over the course of the previous debates, and because last night’s debate was hosted by an upstart network and sponsored by an alternative video-hosting site, it was likely to draw a still-smaller audience.

Haley faces an onslaught and holds her ground

During the Republican primary debate on Dec. 6, businessman Vivek Ramaswamy held up his notebook that said “NIKKI= CORRUPT.” (Video: NewsNation)
Since the last debate about a month ago, Haley’s star has risen as the leading Trump alternative in the race, surpassing DeSantis for a distant second place in the three early states. Strong debate performances have fueled her ascent, earning second looks and powerful endorsements from both donors and voters.

That momentum has provoked fresh attacks from DeSantis, Christie and Ramaswamy that were all on display Wednesday night. Out of the gate, DeSantis accused Haley of caving to pressure from the left, the media and donors. Ramaswamy criticized her for taking donations from Democrats, including LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, and for her proposal that all social media users should be verified, which she later walked back.

Haley appeared unruffled and hit back hard, calling the other candidates jealous of the support she’s gaining. “I love all the attention, fellas, thank you for that,” she said.

Christie came to Haley’s defense after Ramaswamy insulted her intelligence. Christie said he and Haley disagreed on policy but “what we don’t disagree on is this is a smart accomplished woman.” Both former governors have made inroads with the same group of independents and anti-Trump Republican voters in New Hampshire. Haley polls second behind Trump in the state, but Christie is pulling more than 10 percent of potential primary voters — a share that could prove essential to GOP consolidation efforts against Trump. Leading up to the debate, Christie called out Haley for shifting positions and accused her of trying to have it both ways on Trump.

Everybody hates Ramaswamy

During the Republican primary debate on Dec. 6, former New Jersey governor Chris Christie slammed businessman Vivek Ramaswamy for making personal insults. (Video: NewsNation)
Ramaswamy repeatedly used his time for outrageous provocations, promoting conspiracy theories that the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol was staged and that the 2020 election was stolen. As in previous debates, he made personal attacks on the other candidates, including calling Haley a “fascist,” drawing clear exasperation from them, the moderators and the audience.

After Ramaswamy insulted Haley’s intelligence, Christie came to her defense and seemed to capture the collective animosity onstage toward the political newcomer, engaging in a heated exchange.

“This is the fourth debate that you would be voted, in the first 20 minutes, as the most obnoxious blowhard in America,” Christie said. Ramaswamy swiped back with a dig at Christie’s weight.

Later, Ramaswamy held up his notepad where he’d scrawled in large print: “NIKKI = CORRUPT,” drawing boos from the crowd.

Asked by moderators whether she would like to respond, Haley replied, “No. It’s not worth my time.”

Christie goes on offense

After struggling to get words in during earlier debates, Christie established a clear role for himself in demanding accountability from Trump, as well as the other candidates.

Other than a detour to scrap with Ramaswamy, Christie was disciplined in finding ways to bring his answers back to Trump. In response to a question about restoring public confidence in federal law enforcement, Christie drew on his own experience as a U.S. attorney and proposed appointing an independent, well-respected attorney general and keeping politics out of prosecutions — a striking contrast to Trump’s threats to respond to his prosecutions by turning federal power against his political opponents.

Christie twice dinged DeSantis for dodging questions, first for not specifying what steps he would take to rescue American hostages in Gaza, and later for avoiding a clear answer on whether Trump is too old to serve.

The receptivity for such answers in today’s GOP remains unclear. Christie narrowly met the polling threshold to be included in the debate.

In the end, they're all down with fucking over brown people, and playing to the overall bigotry that's come to dominate GOP politics.


Candidates voiced hostility toward immigrants and foreign powers

Haley joined Trump in supporting a ban on migration from Muslim countries. Of Iran, she said, “You’ve got to punch them, you’ve got to punch them hard,” but said she didn’t mean bombing the country at this time. DeSantis also supported restricting Muslim immigrants and accused European countries of “importing” antisemitism. He even referred to traditional Arab clothing as “man dresses.” Ramaswamy threatened to “smoke the terrorists” on the southern border, repeated his proposal to provide the Taiwanese people with firearms, and suggested the United States should change its long-standing policy of “strategic ambiguity” in favor of committing to defend the island nation from China. He also gave credence to the “great replacement theory,” a racist conspiracy theory that posits that Jews, racial minorities and immigrants are seeking to replace White Americans through higher fertility rates and migration.



Wednesday, November 29, 2023

They Got Nuthin'

Gay nutcrackers
Satanic trees
90-dollar turkeys



Living in the Age Of Poe


Monday, November 27, 2023

Where's That Money Going?


First - the modern iteration of a made-for-reality-TV "debate" thing is nonsense. They're not debates at all. They're platforms for a series of empty platitudes, and sound bites, and live 90-second campaign ads.

If somebody wants the debate to be a real debate, then they put the candidates in a studio with no live audience, and wire up about 10,000 remote viewers with those little opinion tracker thingies, so you can gauge their responses in a more objective way.

Second - there may be something telling that can be divined from the falling levels of donations, WaPo, but when you quote a few insiders and leave it at that, you're not doing that journalism thing we're paying you to do - not all of it anyway.

Might there be some other avenue for those donations to travel?

The $9 million in the RNC's bank account is the money we can see, but Dark Money is no secret, so maybe we could get you to look a tiny bit harder(?) Just a thought.


Donations to GOP drop as worries mount about the party’s finances

Donors have not cut as many large checks to the RNC in recent years, and the party’s small-dollar program has also suffered


The Republican Party’s finances are increasingly worrisome to party members, advisers to former president Donald Trump, and other operatives involved in the 2024 election effort, according to 10 people familiar with the matter.

The Republican National Committee disclosed that it had $9.1 million in cash on hand as of Oct. 30, the lowest amount for the RNC in any Federal Election Commission report since February 2015. That compares with about $20 million at the same point in the 2016 election cycle and about $61 million four years ago, when Trump was in the White House.

The Democratic National Committee reported having $17.7 million as of Oct. 30, almost twice as much as the Republican Party, with one year before the election.

“It’s a revenue problem,” Tennessee RNC member Oscar Brock said. “We’re going through the same efforts we always go through to raise money: the same donor meetings, retreats, digital advertising, direct mail. But the return is much lower this year. If you know the answer, I’d love to know it. The staff has managed to tighten down on expenses to keep the party from going into the red.”

Donors have not cut as many large checks to the RNC in recent years, and the party’s small-dollar program has also suffered, according to people familiar with the party’s finances, who, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal party details. Some donors aren’t giving to the RNC because they think that will help Trump, which they don’t want to do, these people said, while others have said they prefer to wait until 2024 to give. Some have grown frustrated with the party’s leadership, people close to major donors said.

The party cut certain expenditures this year after projected money did not come in, according to people familiar with the decisions.

An RNC spokeswoman said the party has nonetheless deployed staff in 15 swing states to start working on get-out-the-vote efforts and election monitoring. The party is also pursuing 70 lawsuits in 19 states challenging voting rules and is encouraging Republicans to use early voting and mail ballots — methods Trump and his allies have disparaged, even as McDaniel repeatedly touts the importance of the “Bank Your Vote” initiative.

All federal party committees — Democratic and Republican — have seen downturns in revenue since 2021, a trend that operatives usually attribute to inflation and donor fatigue. And occasionally during the Trump presidency, the DNC had about as much money on hand as the GOP has now, records show.

In an interview, RNC Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel said that donors are currently more focused on giving to individual candidates during the presidential primary and that the party’s fortunes will improve once there’s a nominee.

“I think there’s more donors just fully committed to their candidate right now, saying I am all in, and once the nominee is set, I’ll be there. That’s what I hear more than anything. And they’re really solidly in the camps of their candidate, which is normal,” McDaniel said. “There’s nothing unusual about this, because they know that once their candidate gets in that we will merge and that we’ll be working together to win the White House.”

There's no way McDaniel believes that - not with kind of internal structural problems that keep boiling to the surface. And certainly not when the probable GOP candidate is shit-talking the party almost daily.

The party’s spending buttresses the Republican presidential nominee’s campaign along with down-ballot races in the Senate and the House of Representatives. In 2020, the party was flush with cash, while the Trump campaign pulled advertisements because of a cash crunch. RNC officials say the party currently has no debt.

Still, the RNC’s dwindling cash position — combined with Republican losses in this month’s off-year elections, frustrations over the 2022 midterms and grousing over the chaotic presidential primary debates — has caused renewed questions about the committee’s effectiveness and McDaniel’s leadership.

“The RNC’s electoral record since 2017 speaks for itself,” said Virginia RNC member Patti Lyman, who opposed McDaniel when she was reelected to another term in January. “The damage from that chair election goes far beyond the drop in donations. Our base was demoralized.”

McDaniel, who took over as RNC chairwoman in 2017, is the party’s second female leader and has been reelected three times. Outside her office, portraits of the 61 men and one woman who led the party before her adorn the walls. She has tried to walk a tightrope, sticking close to Trump while also keeping anti-Trump members close, her allies say, earning majority support among the committee’s 168 members.

The Wisconsin and Iowa GOP chairs sent unsolicited statements to The Washington Post praising McDaniel’s leadership of the party.

“She has strong support within the RNC. She won 110-plus votes during the election in January, and I think she has stronger support now than in January,” said Michael Whatley, the North Carolina state chairman. “I think her and the RNC team are focused on what they need to be focused on right now.”

Whatley said that the party needs “to raise more money” but that he believes that will be remedied next year.

Maybe most important for McDaniel, Trump continues to back her — although more tentatively than in the past — and associates her with his 2016 win, advisers said. In an Oct. 28 speech, Trump said that McDaniel has “done a fantastic job” and called her “a real good friend.”

Still, he has publicly and privately expressed disappointment with the RNC holding presidential debates over his objections. His team believed that McDaniel would not continue with debates after his statements, and he expressed surprise when she announced new ones.

“RNC must save money on lowest ever ratings debates. Use it against the Democrats to STOP THE STEAL! If not, REVAMP THE RNC, NOW!!!” Trump wrote on Truth Social last week.

And Trump has also voiced doubts about the RNC’s readiness for the 2024 campaign and commitment to fighting what he insists, without evidence, is voter fraud.

Some of his senior advisers have continued to complain to him about McDaniel, though she has a defender in Susie Wiles, Trump’s chief adviser. “He doesn’t like [that] she says she is ‘neutral,’” a Trump adviser said of McDaniel.

Donors sometimes complain to Trump about McDaniel, and Trump has been asking people what they think of her, which is often an ominous sign that someone is losing their standing with him, according to three people close to the former president, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to reveal internal discussions. People close to both McDaniel and Trump say they have frequent and friendly conversations.

A Trump spokesman did not respond to requests for comment.

Republican frustrations burst into the open this month after GOP losses in races for the Virginia legislature, the Kentucky governorship, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, and on an Ohio ballot initiative on abortion rights.

In October, the RNC rejected a request for additional funding for the Virginia GOP this fall, said the state party chairman, Rich Anderson. RNC officials said they had budgeted based on a meeting earlier in the summer with Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s team in which they didn’t ask for money.

Other state party officials have grown frustrated when they’ve asked the RNC for money to pay legal bills and been turned down, according to people familiar with the discussions.

In TV and podcast interviews after the elections, McDaniel repeatedly defended the RNC’s refusal to pay, arguing that federal campaign finance laws limit the national committee’s involvement in state elections. In fact, there are no limits on RNC transfers to state parties.

McDaniel has also faulted Republican campaigns for avoiding the subject of abortion instead of adopting a message she has encouraged, to prevent abortion after 15 weeks and allow for a range of exceptions. And her allies say that many of the election losses she has been blamed for were elections in which Trump was widely viewed as the main issue on the ballot.

Numerous conservative organizations have ginned up online attacks on McDaniel, questioning the party’s spending and preparedness — and her loyalty to Trump.

During the third GOP debate, candidate Vivek Ramaswamy went so far as to call on McDaniel to resign. An online video showed Ramaswamy talking before the debate with right-wing influencer Benny Johnson, workshopping an attack on McDaniel and deciding to use it as his opening salvo in the debate.

The chairwoman said she believes other groups and critics have a financial interest in attacking her.

“When you have the RNC and when you’re in this position, there’s always going to be outside groups criticizing because it helps them raise money. They have to have a foil, right? So you’re going to go against the RNC because it helps your organization raise money and do things,” she said.

While Trump has been demanding that the RNC cancel future debates, Ramaswamy and other trailing candidates have complained about the qualifications, format, scheduling and moderators. Trump has grown agitated that the RNC is having them at all. The RNC took over organizing the debates in 2015 because of campaigns’ dissatisfaction with the media-run free-for-all forums in the 2012 primary.

“I think we’ve taken it a step further by having a small-dollar donor component and also reasonable polling thresholds that I think are very, very reasonable, but also eliminating that double debate stage,” McDaniel said, referring to the situation in 2015 when lower-ranking candidates in the large field debated separately. “The RNC is always going to be a bit of a punching bag.”

But that approach this year has made the RNC the target of criticism, and some top Republican Party officials have privately conceded that the debates have often gone off the rails.

“Who in the world would schedule a debate on the same night as the Country Music [Association] Awards unless you were actually trying not to reach Republican primary voters?” said former RNC executive director Scott Reed, referring to the Nov. 8 debate. “I don’t believe the party should be in the debate business. Let the conservative marketplace decide, and let the campaigns decide where they want to show up. It’s been a colossal failure.”

The attacks have take a personal toll on McDaniel. People close to her said she has not been enjoying the job this year. They said she assiduously monitors criticism online and has frequently complained about the difficulties of her job.

“Republicans have the infinite capacity to eat our own and participate in circular firing squads as opposed to attacking the real culprits for America’s decline,” said Steve Hantler, an adviser to megadonor Bernie Marcus, who supported McDaniel’s opponent in January’s election for party chair.

McDaniel appeared unfazed during her visit to a meeting of the South’s RNC members this month, according to Jonathan Barnett, an RNC member from Arkansas who supported McDaniel’s challenger in January.

“Ronna is going to take the punches, no problem at all,” he said. “It doesn’t do any good for anyone on the RNC to do anything to remove her. We all just have to focus on our states and the presidential primaries and move on.”

Saturday, November 18, 2023

Today's Republican Fuckery


Gettin' real tired of these dog-ass Republicans spinning this shit - that they can hide every shitty thing they do behind "My right to free speech."

"Your Honor, even though we have nothing but QAnon bullshit and my client's own fantasy version of the events in question, the defense will establish that the gun used to murder the deceased was merely expressing its God-given right to speak freely, and that my client - as a public official - was duty-bound to assist ... and blah blah fucking blah."  

I understand we have to sort this crap out carefully, because we're setting precedent with every court decision. But Jeezus H Fuq, these idiotic "philosophies" have to be squashed, and they have to be squashed posthaste and with prejudice.


Tina Peters files federal lawsuit to block criminal investigations, prosecutions against her

Peters, a Republican who ran unsuccessfully for Colorado secretary of state last year, was indicted on 10 counts by a Mesa County grand jury. Her trial begins Feb. 7.


Former Mesa County Clerk Tina Peters filed a federal lawsuit Tuesday seeking to halt local, state and federal criminal investigations and prosecutions against her in a security breach of her county’s election system in 2021.

The 43-page lawsuit was filed against U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland, Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold and Mesa County District Attorney Daniel Rubenstein. It claims their continued investigations into Peters violate her constitutional rights to free speech, freedom of association and right to petition the government to redress her grievances.

The lawsuit comes as Peters is scheduled to go to trial Feb. 7 in Mesa County. A grand jury indicted her in March 2022 on 10 counts stemming from her actions during an election software update in May 2021. Peters is facing felony and misdemeanor charges, including attempting to influence a public official and criminal impersonation.

Belinda Knisley, Peters’ deputy clerk at the time, was also indicted in the case. Knisley pleaded guilty in 2022 to three misdemeanors and agreed to testify against Peters.

Peters’ new lawsuit claims she was performing her duty to preserve records as an elections official when she had a consultant make a “forensic image” of the elections software before the update completed by Denver-based Dominion Voting Systems. Two months later, passwords used during the update were posted online by a conservative website.

The lawsuit claims the investigations and prosecutions by state and federal authorities constitute retaliation and harassment of Peters.

Rubenstein, a Republican, said Wednesday he hadn’t been served with the lawsuit.

“I … am aware that one has been filed,” he told The Sun. “Having been elected as the district attorney for the 21st Judicial District, I have a constitutional, statutory, and ethical obligation to represent this community in criminal matters.”

Griswold, the Democratic secretary of state said in a statement: “Tina Peters compromised her own voting equipment in an attempt to prove the Big Lie and risked her constituents’ constitutional right to vote. Her attempts to evade accountability with this frivolous lawsuit will not work.”


Peters, who claims without evidence that the 2020 election was stolen, ran unsuccessfully for secretary of state last year, losing the Republican primary by nearly 90,000 votes. She also ran unsuccessfully earlier this year to be chair of the Colorado GOP.

Peters was separately sentenced to home detention and community service earlier this year for trying to prevent authorities from seizing an iPad she used to make a prohibited recording of one of Knisley’s court hearings. The sentence was stayed pending an appeal. Peters was also held in contempt of court for making the recording and fined $1,500.

Tuesday, November 14, 2023

Fight!

"He's a bully with 17 million dollars and a security detail."

"He's the type of guy that, when you were a kid, he'd throw a rock over the fence and run home and hide behind his mama's skirt." 


Stay with it to hear how the NPR lady reported it.


And then some jagoff MAGA dick in the Senate decided he wanted to go a few rounds with a witness in committee.

These idiots are not worth the bucket of piss it'd take to drown 'em.

Saturday, November 04, 2023

A Bullet To Dodge


Another long one. Project 2025.

Some bullet points:
  • Implement the Unitary Executive doctrine
  • Replace 20,000 federal employees with MAGA loyalists
  • Dismantle and privatize (or assign to the states) as much of the federal government as possible
According to the "New Conservatism" (aka: Radical Libertarianism) government should perform only three basic functions:
  1. Defend commercial interests abroad
  2. Keep the domestic peace
  3. Settle contract disputes

Inside the Next Republican Revolution

Whether Trump wins or not, the GOP plans a renewed assault on his nemesis, the “deep state.”

Can conservatives train enough loyalists to actually get the job done?

Paul Dans points to a massive book prominently displayed on a table in his Capitol Hill office — written, Dans says, “in the sweaty summer of 1980.” Yellowing and torn at the edges, it is a 1,091-page manifesto of conservative governance titled A Mandate for Leadership. “That book really became the bible of the Reagan Revolution. That’s kind of what we’re working from,” says Dans, a tall, MIT-educated lawyer who is leading a team of former Trump officials preparing a new “America First” agenda for the next Republican president — whether it’s former President Donald Trump or not.

In truth, the program laid out by Dans and his fellow Trumpers, called Project 2025, is far more ambitious than anything Ronald Reagan dreamed up. Dans, from his seat inside The Heritage Foundation, and scores of conservative groups aligned with his program are seeking to roll back nothing less than 100 years of what they see as liberal encroachment on Washington. They want to overturn what began as Woodrow Wilson’s creation of a federal administrative elite and later grew into a vast, unaccountable and mostly liberal bureaucracy (as conservatives view it) under Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal and Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society, numbering about two and a quarter million federal workers today. They aim to defund the Department of Justice, dismantle the FBI, break up the Department of Homeland Security and eliminate the Departments of Education and Commerce, to name just a few of their larger targets. They want to give the president complete power over quasi-independent agencies such as the Federal Communications Commission, which makes and enforces rules for television and internet companies that have been the bane of Trump’s political existence in the last few years.

And they want to ensure that what remains of this slashed-down bureaucracy is reliably MAGA conservative — not just for the next president but for a long time to come — and that the White House maintains total control of it. In an effort to implement this agenda — which relies on another Reagan-era idea, the controversial “unitary theory” of the Constitution under which Article II gives the president complete power over the federal bureaucracy — Dans has formed a committee to recruit what he calls “conservative warriors” through bar associations and state attorneys general offices and install them in general counsel offices throughout the federal bureaucracy.


The Project 2025 team is scouring records and social media accounts to rule out heretics — effectively administering loyalty tests — and launching a so-called Presidential Administration Academy that tutors future MAGA bureaucrats with video classes in “Conservative Governance 101.” Dans says 17 lectures have been prepared (with titles such as “Oversight and Investigations” and “The Federal Budget Process”), with another 13 in production, and nearly a thousand potential new bureaucrats recruited from around the country are already in training. These efforts are intended to ensure that the chaos and high-level defections of Trump’s first term never happen again, along with prosecutions like the ones the ex-president now faces.

The broad outlines of this agenda — which build on efforts begun toward the end of Trump’s first term — have been known for some time. But it is only recently that many of the details have emerged, as well as how far-reaching these aims are. It has also become clear that, even more today than in 2016, Trump’s personal agenda has become the party’s agenda, despite all the Republicans who have defected from him. And that the new GOP establishment is using his populist insurgency to resurrect — in fact, entirely reconceive — its old Reaganite assault on the federal government. In its current formulation, this has less to do with sheer size — as Nikki Haley bravely pointed out at the Aug. 23 debate, Trump himself “added $8 trillion to our debt” — than on restoring “accountability” to government.

“It’s not just about 2025. It’s about ’29 and ’33 and ’37,” adds Brooke Rollins, Trump’s former domestic policy chief, who is now CEO of the Trump-endorsed America First Policy Institute. Rollins, like Dans and others who consider themselves aligned with the goals of Project 2025, believes the training program amounts to a new front in the conservative movement. In the past, she says, “the business of governing and process was not our strong suit.”

That’s going to change, says her associate Doug Hoelscher, former director of Trump’s White House Office of Intergovernmental Affairs, who recently took over the America First Transition Project at AFPI, which is rolling out a similar agenda of its own. “Biden put about 1,200 people in the field on Day One. President Trump put in about 500,” Hoelscher says. “That shows how unready the right has been historically to govern.”

While they have a willing vehicle in Trump — not to mention the support of most of his primary opponents — many conservatives recognize they will have to compensate for Trump’s built-in liabilities. If they truly want to dismantle the “deep state” they believe they have to create, almost from scratch, a workforce that won’t sacrifice competence to Trump’s obsession with loyalty above everything else.

⬆︎ That may be the big flaw - the contradiction that makes it all unworkable. Fierce loyalty and high competency are generally not found in the same person. Throw in the kind of rank paranoia that's requisite for being a 'good little Daddy Stater' and you've got something destined for the ash heap - after the inevitable fiery destruction of an awful lot of good things and people along the way.

“This is a coming-together of the movement that has never been seen before,” says Dans, who keeps on his desk a replica of Reagan’s burgundy leather plaque inscribed in gold lettering, “It CAN Be Done.” Dans gained prominence in the latter stages of the Trump term when he joined John McEntee, the former body man for Trump who rose to head of the Presidential Personnel Office at age 29. They ousted alleged disloyalists such Dale Cabaniss, who ran the Office of Personnel Management, which manages benefits and retirement issues for the federal government’s civil service. Now McEntee is on board at Project 2025 and what he started in 2020 is the GOP template for the future. Together, with James Sherk (another former Trump official) they are seeking to resurrect “Schedule F,” an executive order Trump adopted in the last weeks of his administration–and Biden later rescinded--to expand the number of federal workers he could fire from the usual 4,000 or so political appointees to 20,000 or more who occupy key policy-making positions.

The exact number being targeted is still being decided, says Russell Vought, Trump’s former director of the Office of Management and Budget, who has been tasked with implementing the Project 2025 policy program. But ultimately the goal is to remove what Dans calls the “tenured class of political high priests.”

President Donald Trump and first lady Melania Trump arrive for his acceptance speech to the Republican National Committee Convention on the South Lawn of the White House in 2020.
If Trump manages to make it back to the White House, his first target would almost certainly be the Department of Justice and the FBI, the two agencies he has long viewed as overtly antagonistic to him. | Evan Vucci/AP Photo

Some engaged in the 2025 project say they intend to move beyond what Vought calls “updated Reaganism” and the “post-1950s National Review fusionism” that supplied the intellectual construct for the conservative movement in the mid-to-late 20th century.

“I love Ronald Reagan. But it’s not the 1980s, it’s 2023. It’s not just a big government we’re up against but a weaponized one,” says Vought, who is now head of the Center for Renewing America — one of some 75 conservative groups, many formed in just the last year or so, that have signed onto Project 2025. Too many executive branch agencies are no longer answerable to the president, he says, and constitutional oversight has morphed over the decades into unconstitutional control by an “imperial Congress.”

If Trump manages to make it back to the White House his first target would almost certainly be the Department of Justice and the FBI, the two agencies he has long viewed as overtly antagonistic to him.

But that’s only a start.

“We think it’s more systematic than it is just about Trump. We have political prisoners in America for the first time I can remember,” Vought says, referring in part to those convicted for their roles in the Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol. “We have people that are in jail that are no threat to their community and no flight risk, that are being mistreated in jail. The court system has adopted a paradigm that they are a threat to democracy.”

As a result, Vought says, “We have to be thinking mechanically about how to take these institutions over.” Vought is reassembling his old team at the Trump OMB and describes his role as drafting fresh executive orders, playbooks and memoranda for cabinet secretaries to be “ready on Day One of the next transition. Whatever is necessary to seize control of the administrative state is really our task.”

‘Experts at killing bureaucracies’

For Trump personally, of course, this is a live-or-die agenda, and Trump campaign officials acknowledge that it aligns well with their own “Agenda 47” program. Trump’s public career has been marked by his ferocious conviction that he has been victimized by one element of the “deep state” or another since the start of his presidency — the Defense Department wouldn’t follow his orders, the FBI tried to undermine him with Russiagate, no one built his wall fast enough and so on. And Trump is in danger of becoming a “political prisoner” himself if he’s convicted of one or more of the 91 criminal counts listed against him in four separate indictments. “Either the deep state destroys America or we destroy the deep state,” the former president declared at his first campaign rally in March.

Dans and others involved in Project 2025 concede that their assault on the “administrative state” is not going to focus on politically delicate entitlements such as Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, Veterans Administration programs and retirement plans, unemployment compensation and agricultural price support programs — all of which amount to about half the $6.3 trillion federal budget. “That is not going to be on the front burner,” Dans says.

Out on the campaign trail, other leading GOP candidates such as Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and Vivek Ramaswamy are trying to outdo each other by openly embracing — rhetorically at least — the agenda of taking down a federal government “weaponized” against conservatives. The top target for all of them is the same as Trump’s — the DOJ. Earlier this month, Ramaswamy declared he wants to slash nearly half of the non-defense federal workforce, amounting to a million employees, and to eliminate the Department of Education, the FBI, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the IRS and the Commerce Department. As for DeSantis, his spokesperson Bryan Griffin told POLITICO Magazine that he’s been out ahead on the issue, saying: “Ron DeSantis is the only candidate for president who can break up and rein in the bureaucracy.”

Trump, of course, contends that it’s all his idea: “Everyone knows his America First agenda actually works, which is why many are copying him,” his spokesperson Liz Harrington said in an email. Trump’s Agenda 47 platform includes “a ten-point plan to dismantle the deep state and reclaim our democracy from Washington corruption” and pledges to achieve what he failed to do in his first term by moving up to 100,000 government positions out of the “Washington swamp.”

Dans is somewhat vague when asked about specific efforts to inject Project 2025 into the GOP presidential race. He and others want to avoid getting entangled in the ugly war of words on the Republican campaign trail. But the new conservative coalition has been “in touch with every major candidate” about these plans, says Hoelscher. POLITICO Magazine has learned talks have been ongoing with officials as high as Susie Wiles, Trump’s senior advisor, and David Dewhirst, a top aide to Ron DeSantis (Dewhirst also recently joined the project as a senior consultant). Project 2025 has also reached out to Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.), who’s been hinting at an independent run, as well. And Dans has set up a legislative outreach committee to garner GOP champions on Capitol Hill, though he admits that “is really in the beginning stages right now.”

Dans says that while the new movement is seeking to ensure the elimination of dissident bureaucrats like Sally Yates, the former acting attorney general who refused to implement Trump’s travel ban on Muslims in 2017; and Alexander Vindman, the former NSC official who in 2019 accused Trump of perfidy over Ukraine, the Covid-19 crisis proved to be the best illustration of the problem of an unaccountable federal “priesthood.”

“The archetype of what we want to end in a bureaucrat is none other than Dr. [Anthony] Fauci,” Dans says. Many conservatives believe that Fauci, the longtime director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, helped cost Trump a second term by allegedly overreacting to the Covid crisis without taking directions from the president and helping to shut down the economy unnecessarily.

“No bureaucrat should have an action figure made of him,” jokes Dans. “Fauci had 50 years on the job in one of the most technically demanding and ever-changing professions in bio-science. Either the person is a genius on the order of Einstein or is Machiavellian in terms of keeping power. I would submit the latter.”

Anti-intellectualism/Anti-expertise is a hallmark of authoritarian regimes.

Vought says his team is also working on a slew of detailed plans on the DOJ in particular that would allow the White House to “defund a lot of functions.” One proposal would require Congress to start with a 25-percent cut in FBI funding to eliminate the bureau’s intelligence capabilities, which have transformed it “from a law enforcement agency to a domestic intelligence agency.” Another proposal would gain White House control of the solicitor general and bring Justice Department attorneys into line with the president’s wishes, as well as allow them to raise legitimate questions about election “fraud” without fear of retribution.

A Justice System that can operate independently from the Executive is absolutely essential to a functioning democracy.

Two key figures involved in Project 2025 were both recently indicted along with Trump in Georgia: former Trump chief of staff Mark Meadows, who’s head of the Conservative Partnership Institute; and Jeffrey Clark, who is working for one of the groups aligned with Dans, the CPI-launched Center for Renewing America. Clark, an environmental lawyer who almost precipitated a mass resignation by Justice Department attorneys in December 2020 when Trump threatened to make him acting attorney general, is seeking to implement Trump’s first-term wish to eliminate any independence by the DOJ. In a paper published in May by the CRA, Clark argued the idea the Justice Department “is or should be independent” is unconstitutional.

Furthering the Trump agenda, CRA is also working on a paper that will take classification decisions out of the hands of deep-state bureaucrats. It is developing other plans to allow a president to halt congressionally mandated funding at his pleasure, as Trump did when he held up foreign aid to Ukraine allegedly to pressure its president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, to investigate President Joe Biden and his son Hunter, eventually touching off the impeachment crisis.

All such efforts, Vought insists, would respect the principle of checks and balances and restore constitutional order as the Founders intended. “It’s more trying to get back to the Founders’ understanding of the executive branch,” Vought says.


And, of course, this is Politico, so here comes a small bit of their usual Both Sides shit:

Indeed, the irony of all this — and it’s a bitter, almost unresolvable irony — is that both sides of the political spectrum are now holding up the “Constitution” as the thing they most want to preserve, and yet they remain utterly opposed about how to do it. For Democrats it’s about holding Trump accountable under the Constitution; for Republicans, it’s about taking down the unconstitutional administrative state they believe is after Trump. No negotiations between the two sides are planned.

Many of the key players in this ambitious program openly acknowledge that their efforts were doomed in the first Trump term because they didn’t know what they were doing; it was no contest confronting a Democrat-stuffed “deep state” (as well as all those RINOs Trump brought in), and conservatives have never been good at translating movement ideology into action going back to Reagan and the “triumph of politics.”

Along with Meadows, one of the godfathers of the new conservative insurgency is Dans’ boss, Kevin Roberts, president of The Heritage Foundation, which came of age in the Reagan era and is now reinventing itself as the main mouthpiece of Trumpism, overseeing Project 2025.

“What we’ve never gotten right in the modern conservative movement, even under Reagan, was having a network of right of center professionals who were ready to go,” says Roberts. “To get 10,000 to 20,000 names into this database who are not only submitting their resumes but also being vetted to some extent, and who, depending upon the classification of the position we think they’re suitable for, are going through these training modules — that’s the part that’s never been done before.

“Do we have conservatives who are experts at killing bureaucracies?” Roberts says. “No. The conservative movement has not developed this capability. But we’re going to as a result of Project 2025.”


‘Republicans still don’t like the idea of expertise’

Little of the Project 2025 agenda is likely — even remotely likely — to happen, of course.

In recent decades, a few small agencies have been privatized, some powers ceded to states and localities. But the growth of the federal bureaucracy generally goes in one direction, history teaches, as demonstrated over the decades by the GOP’s spasmodic efforts to eliminate the Department of Education — now viewed as the evil font of “wokeism” — which Reagan declared on the 1980 campaign trail to be a “bureaucratic boondoggle.”

Moreover, while the orneriness of the Pentagon and military leadership were a problem for Trump — and a particular target of the new agenda — the Trumpists also want to be hawkish on China. And that’s going to present a huge problem if they want to bring the military-industrial complex — which everyone involved in Project 2025 agrees is the most out of control — into line with White House wishes.

One of the few generals who hasn’t abandoned Trump — and works for the America First Policy Institute — is retired Army Lt. Gen. Keith Kellogg, who complains in an interview that Biden is going too easy on Chinese President Xi Jinping. “Eventually we’re going to have to draw the bright line. And this administration hasn’t drawn it yet,” Kellogg says. His proposal is to resurrect something like NSC-68, the founding strategy for the Cold War adopted under Harry Truman in 1950. “Give me an NSC-68 for China,” Kellogg says. The problem: NSC-68 created the modern national security state — and a new one will almost certainly make the Pentagon and defense industrial complex even more unwieldy since external threats tend to enlarge the national security apparatus. Just look at the Department of Homeland Security. And recall that Reaganite attempts to dismantle the Department of Education were abandoned after its 1983 report, A Nation at Risk, suggested that the U.S. could lose the Cold War in the classroom.

Moreover it strains credulity to describe Congress as “imperial” when in so many respects, critics say, Congress has actually neglected its duties or kicked them over to the White House — avoiding such issues as new Authorizations for the Use of Military Force (AUMF), for example.


Some conservative scholars and government experts say that Project 2025’s grand plans to transform the federal bureaucracy are often comically naïve. Not only are they unworkable, critics contend, but if they’re implemented they will likely only render the federal government even more incompetent than conservatives now say it is. And certainly more chaotic and amateurish than in Trump’s first term.

“What it totally reminds me of is the Iraq occupation: 21-year-old kids who just came out of Patrick Henry College running a country into the ground,” said Geoffrey Kabaservice, author of Rule and Ruin: The Downfall of Moderation and the Destruction of the Republican Party, “That sounds like their vision for America.”

Kabaservice, a conservative himself who works for the libertarian-oriented Niskanen Center, concedes many of the Project 2025 plans for reform are “legitimate.” One chapter of the new Mandate for Leadership, co-authored by Dans, Donald Devine and Dennis Dean Kirk, sounds anodyne enough. It calls for a better examination-based hiring system, pay for strong performers along with cuts in what they see as a too-generous pension system, and easier ways of dismissing poor performers. But “Schedule F,” Kabaservice says, is nothing less than “an attempt to eviscerate government and replace it with Trump stooges.”

In many ways, the notion that one can replace decades of on-the-ground experience — say in running a health care bureaucracy or policing the border — through a video training program is very Trumpian. Who better to hire legions of unctuous but untried newbies, after all, than the man who declared, “I alone can fix it,” and who routinely used to say — whether the subject was Covid-19 or nuclear weapons — that he knew more than the scientists and generals.


The deeper problem, Kabaservice says, is that “Republicans still don’t like the idea of expertise. They actually seem to believe all you need to know about running a country that underpins the global order is something you can know by being a mom.”

Dans dismisses these criticisms by recalling William F. Buckley’s famous quip: “I’d rather entrust the government of the United States to the first 400 people listed in the Boston telephone directory than to the faculty of Harvard University.”

“I would trust a mom coming back into the workforce who had just successfully raised four kids to be able to manage an agency,” says Dans. “We have a lot of faith in our common man. We are the party of the forgotten man, the citizen farmer, the folk who really make this country run. I think a lot of it is intuitive, respectfully. We live in a modern society where an entire class of managers have managed to insert themselves and make it increasingly complex and intermediate all these points to the extent where no one actually understands the functioning.”

Kevin Kosar, a scholar at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, has also argued that conservatives need to create a pipeline of people good at governing. But he says they’ve had so little experience at legislating in the post-New Deal era — with minor interludes of power such as the mid-80s and ’94 Newt Gingrich takeover of the House — that they don’t really know how to accomplish government reduction. He says the biggest problem with this grandiose new agenda is just how murky it really is, not to mention its end goal. “It’s entirely up for grabs. What if they get the White House? OK, boom. They get Schedule F. Boom. Does that mean we no longer have a weaponized government? Is it fine now?”

The Trumpers involved in Project 2025 say they realize they can’t replace everybody — and they don’t want to. Vought says he wants “career number crunchers” at OMB who possess “the continuity of expertise” to stay on — only to add more political appointees to keep them in line.

But the project’s authors are the first to admit that implementing most of it will require enormous political power that they do not currently have. “Yes, this is daunting, there is no doubt about it,” says Roberts. “It requires not just a plan and it doesn’t just require the personnel. This requires controlling not just the White House but both chambers of Congress.”

Dans pooh-poohs such concerns and says he’s focused on the long term. “This is all about bringing newcomers to Washington. This land is your land, this federal government is your federal government. It’s not just the sole province of people in the metro D.C. area,” he says. “I believe that within 350 million Americans we can find conservative warriors who are at the top of their game.”

‘I know the good ones. I know the bad ones.’

But can they? For people who have focused mainly on the headlines in the last few years — currently dominated by Trump’s fourth indictment and the nasty repartee on the GOP campaign trail — it may look like a second-term President Trump would have some difficulty implementing such plans. Certainly, he might have trouble finding experienced, nationally known people to stock his Cabinet.


After all, since the end of Trump’s last term and especially the Jan. 6, 2021 uprising, a parade of high-level former officials — starting, of course, with his vice president, Mike Pence who is now an opponent in the primary — have vociferously broken with him. These include the most senior members of his cabinet — his former attorney general, secretary of state, U.N. ambassador (another current opponent) and several ex-defense secretaries and national security advisers. Trump’s former chief of staff, John Kelly, has called him “the most flawed person I have ever met in my life.” As his criminal trials at the federal, state and local levels move forward — especially in the Georgia case with its 18 co-defendants — more former acolytes may be “flipped” to turn against him.

But a large phalanx of loyal Trumpists remains in Washington — most of them scattered in conservative action groups on Capitol Hill and Pennsylvania Avenue — and few of them seem to care whether Trump runs as a convicted felon or not. Among them are the directors of the AFPI, sometimes described as a Trump “cabinet in waiting”: Larry Kudlow, the former chair of CEA; Rick Perry, Trump’s secretary of energy; Chad Wolf, former acting DHS secretary and former Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, who heads the Center for a Healthy America at AFPI; Kellogg, who could run the Pentagon (another possibility is Chris Miller, Trump’s last acting defense secretary); and U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer, who implemented Trump’s neo-protectionist policies and writes in his new book, No Trade Is Free, that Trump will go down as “a great president, truly one of the greatest.”

Others who would likely be in line for senior jobs are Vought, former national security adviser Robert O’Brien and Stephen Miller, Trump’s immigration pit bull, who has formed yet another aligned group under CPI, America First Legal, that is challenging nearly every Biden executive order in court. A second-term Trump also could bring in his many loyalists on Capitol Hill, like Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), chair of the House Judiciary Committee.

One former Trump official, Troup Hemenway, said all the disaffections from Trump have made things easier. “Folks actively opposed have kind of revealed themselves and they’re not going to be invited back,” he said.

The candidate himself, speaking in Iowa in March, seemed to agree. “When I went there [to the White House], I didn’t know a lot of people; I had to rely on, in some cases, RINOs and others to give me some recommendations, but I know them all now,” Trump said, referring to “Republicans in Name Only.” “I know the good ones. I know the bad ones. I know the weak ones. I know the strong ones.”

Perhaps. But the biggest mystery — and challenge — will be determining who the new loyalists will be. For the America First Policy Institute, which is helping to implement Project 2025, its grandest ambitions lie in soliciting governors and state attorneys general to the cause, among others. AFPI will soon launch America First “state chapters.” Adds Rollins, AFPI’s CEO: “What AFPI is building is very much an outside of Washington D.C. approach. There is so much talent and so many really incredible people currently in college or in the private sector who would love to come in.”

Another challenge will be training and vetting the right people to do what conservatives have traditionally hated to do — deploy the power of the federal government — without themselves becoming the new enemy. “That’s the most expensive part,” says Roberts. “It’s probably 75 percent of the costs of this project — building the conservative ‘LinkedIn’ as we like to call it. There is vehement agreement that this is the most important part of the project.”

"Conservative LinkedIn" - sounds pretty elitist to me. 🤔

‘A furious reaction against elites of all stripes’

However that plays out, it is hardly an accident that so much public outrage exists against Washington elites, that Project 2025 has leapt to embrace it, and that Trump has so effectively exploited it over the past six years. Indeed, if one sets aside the outrages committed by Trump — and a lot of the other craziness now possessing the GOP — Project 2025 very likely has a substantial political base. One that isn’t going away.

Why? For the last several decades both political parties have offered up lesson after lesson in misdirection: from the folly of deregulating markets and skewing taxes to favor multinational companies and capital gains-earners at the expense of the working class to launching one of the least-justified and costliest wars in modern history in Iraq, one that had a disproportionate effect on working class families who make up the bulk of the armed forces. This created deep anger and resentment over the crushingly unequal society the United States has become, feeding populism not only on the right but the left as well. (Recall how the once obscure socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) nearly defeated Hillary Clinton in the 2016 Democratic primaries on the strength of his own populist agenda.)

In his new book, Lighthizer even makes a point of thanking labor leaders and Lori Wallach — perhaps the most respected trade expert in the progressive movement — as “a longtime friend and co-conspirator who was a constant advisor and liaison with many on [Capitol] Hill.” The rage against Washington also extends to Trump’s last Defense chief, Chris Miller, a career special forces soldier who views, like most of the new Trumpian right, the Iraq invasion as a monumental disaster based on lies and “wants to fire most of the generals at the Pentagon, slash defense spending by half, shut down the military academies, break up the military-industrial complex,” according to an intimate profile of Miller by Peter Maass published in March.

As a result, the intellectual conservatism of Buckley and other conservative thinkers has been transmuted into its virtual opposite, and the Project 2025 team has embraced it. As Matthew Continetti writes in his 2022 book The Right: The Hundred-Year War for American Conservatism: “What began as an elite-driven defense of the classical liberal principles enshrined in the Declaration of Independence and Constitution of the United States ended up, in the first quarter of the 21st century, as a furious reaction against elites of all stripes.”

Some critics believe this is all rhetorical window dressing for what would be, in a second Trump term, four years of personal vengeance at any cost. Kabaservice says the new concept of “national conservatism” embraced by the Project 2025 crowd — code for Trump’s odd, ungainly blend of neo-protectionism, neo-isolationism and Reaganite trickle-down economics — is merely an “attempt to intellectually retrofit a rationale for Trumpism.”

But it would be a mistake to think that even if Trump somehow goes away — either into retirement or into prison — Republicanism will change with him gone. That’s because Trump’s success in merging the conservative movement with his political persona is really an extension of the mistrust of elites in Washington, and that sentiment won’t subside any time soon. As Continetti writes: “Untangling the Republican Party and conservative movement from Donald Trump won’t be easy.”

The new right, and now national conservatives, are in “a condition of fracture and flux” and it has become hard to tell any longer who belongs on the Right and who doesn’t, Continetti says.

Now Trump’s acolytes are filling the vacuum. But it is possible that, as happened in Trump’s first term, the new conservative revolution will eventually eat its own. After all, starting with the saga of Jeff Sessions — the ultra-conservative senator who was one of the earliest Trump backers and then found himself ousted as attorney general — the Trump administration was characterized by loyalists who were never loyal enough for him.

One present and growing danger, Vought concedes, is that “an uncomfortable number of former Trump folks” aligned themselves with DeSantis, beginning last fall before the Florida governor’s campaign began to tank. Some like Vought say they are worried that too many former Trump devotees are removing themselves for consideration for positions in a second term.

Dans says this new Republican revolution is trying hard to “learn from the mistakes” of the old one — which is one reason the Project 2025 team is, like Reagan, avoiding threatening people’s entitlements. But it is also true that if they succeed with even a small part of their ambitions, Reagan could end up looking like a milquetoast middle-of-the-roader left behind on the ash heap of history.

It all sounds pretty nutty,
but we dismiss it at our peril.