Today's Tweet

It's not likely I'm gonna see anything better'n this all week

#Ukraine In Kharkiv, a chimpanzee escaped from a zoo. It was walking around the city while zoo employees tried to convince it to return. Suddenly it started to rain, and the ape ran to a zoo employee for a jacket and then agreed to return to the zoo. pic.twitter.com/4AGiAHw1wf

— Hanna Liubakova (@HannaLiubakova) September 6, 2022

It Gets Worse

Trump is always shopping for a sympathetic judge - and to be clear, there's generally nothing wrong with that, except when it gets real fuckin' obvious that there's something really fuckin' wrong with it.

Legal scholars criticize judge's 'laughably bad' ruling in favor of Trump 'special master' request

U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon on Monday granted former President Donald Trump's request for a third-party "special master" to review the more than 11,000 documents federal agents took from his Mar-a-Lago residence under a search warrant on Aug. 8, separating out any that may violate attorney-client privilege or executive privilege.

Cannon, nominated by Trump in 2020 and confirmed after his electoral defeat, also ordered the Justice Department to stop using the documents for investigative purposes in its criminal probe of Trump's handling of highly classified government documents. She allowed a parallel intelligence community review of potential national security harm from the storage of top secret documents in a non-secure private club.

Legal scholars called Cannon's ruling unprecedented, in the sense that it goes against decades of court precedent — especially expanding the special master role to include executive privilege potentially claimed by a former president over the executive branch, for government-owned documents the Justice Department argues Trump had no right to take or keep.

This was "an unprecedented intervention by a federal district judge into the middle of an ongoing federal criminal and national security investigation," University of Texas law professor Steve Vladeck tells The New York Times. "Enjoining the ongoing criminal investigation is simply untenable," agreed Paul Rosenzweig, a George W. Bush administration official.

"To any lawyer with serious federal criminal court experience who is being honest, this ruling is laughably bad, and the written justification is even flimsier," Duke University law professor Samuel Buell tells the Times. "Donald Trump is getting something no one else ever gets in federal court, he's getting it for no good reason, and it will not in the slightest reduce the ongoing howls that he is being persecuted, when he is being privileged."

Former Attorney General William Barr was more blunt. "I think it's a crock of sh-t," he told the Times on Friday. "I don't think a special master is called for." He made similar comments to Fox News, arguing that a special master is a "waste of time" and the FBI appears totally justified in seizing the documents.

Justice Department spokesman Anthony Coley said the DOJ is "examining the opinion and will consider appropriate next steps in the ongoing litigation." If the department appeals Cannon's ruling, the appeal would be heard by the Atlanta-based 11th Circuit, where six of the 11 active judges are Trump appointees.

COVID-19 Update

We can expect some kind of surge this fall and winter, even though the nerds are fairly certain it won't get too bad because they've given us some great tools to fight.

But we have to keep in mind that it's still a problem, with the potential to regain its monster status if we let down our guard.

Dead Americans: 1,043,446

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Covid forecast: Major fall surge unlikely, but variants are a wild card
Newly reformulated boosters could suppress some of covid’s cold-season spread

Cold weather favors the coronavirus. But as summer gives way to fall, infectious-disease experts are guardedly optimistic that the spread of covid-19 this autumn and winter won’t be as brutal as in the previous two years of the pandemic.

Coronavirus scenarios from multiple research teams, shared in recent weeks with federal officials, foresee stable or declining hospitalizations in early fall. The scenarios show the possibility of a late-fall surge. A new variant remains the biggest wild card. But several factors — including the approval this week of reformulated boosters and the buildup of immunity against the latest strain of the virus — could suppress some of the cold-season spread, experts say.

“There’s sort of even odds that we would have some sort of moderate resurgence in the fall. But nothing appears to be projecting anything like an omicron wave,” said Justin Lessler, a University of North Carolina epidemiologist who helps lead the collection of covid-19 planning scenarios from a group of research organizations.

The scenarios assume that reformulated vaccine boosters will be embraced by the public at a rate similar to that of the annual flu shots — possibly an optimistic assumption given that more than half of Americans eligible for boosters have yet to receive their first dose.

Peter Marks, the top vaccine official at the Food and Drug Administration, said in a briefing Wednesday that the approval of reformulated boosters comes as the agency is “looking at a possible fall wave, with a peak around December 1st.”

Predictions about the pandemic rarely age well. In the United States, the pandemic appeared to be winding down in May 2021 amid a vigorous vaccination campaign, only to get wound up again with the rise of the new variants.

The emergence of a new variant in September could result in a wave of infections and severe illness in December, according to Lauren Ancel Meyers, director of the University of Texas Covid-19 Modeling Consortium. A variant emerging in October would push the peak to January, she said.

Any new variant that could change the pandemic’s trajectory would have to be more transmissible than the omicron subvariant BA.5 currently circulating. It might emerge from an obscure branch of the virus’s family tree — which is exactly what happened last November, when omicron, with its stunning package of mutations, appeared in southern Africa and immediately overtook the reigning delta strain.

Vaccines remain highly effective at lowering the infection fatality rate and keeping people out of the hospital, and the Biden administration continues to lean heavily on vaccination and boosting as the most powerful weapon against the virus. Anthony S. Fauci, the president’s chief medical adviser for the pandemic, told The Washington Post that the fall campaign against the virus will demand widespread uptake of booster shots.

“We’re not going to eradicate it. We’re not going to eliminate it,” Fauci said. “But we do have the capability to get it to a low enough level so that it doesn’t continue to disrupt the social order.”

The federal government, meanwhile, is turning much of the fight against the virus over to the private sector. As of Friday, the government would no longer mail free coronavirus tests to the public. The plan is to transition the payment of treatments to insurers, pharmacy benefit managers, hospitals and patients themselves by the middle of next year. Updated boosters have already been purchased by the federal government and will remain free to consumers.

But booster uptake so far has been underwhelming. Of the 62 million people over the age of 50 who are eligible for a second booster, only 22 million have received it so far, according to CDC data. Of the 95 million people between 18 and 49 who are eligible for their first booster, only 38 million have availed themselves of it.

Some may be waiting for the reformulated vaccine before rolling up their sleeves again. But covid apprehensiveness is not what it once was, and many may feel that a couple of shots is enough.

Moreover, some people may need help getting access to an additional shot, said Brown University epidemiologist Jennifer Nuzzo. She would like to see stronger messaging from the government to encourage vaccination.

“The most important thing we can do — top, top, top of my list — is make sure that everyone who is at high risk is up to date with their vaccinations,” she said.

Many companies are requiring workers to report to the office but no longer require vaccination or provide regular coronavirus testing. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)

The CDC is reporting about 82,000 new covid cases daily, on average, although the true number of infections is assumed to be many times higher because so many people test themselves at home. The more reliable number is hospitalizations, currently about 30,000 patients, according to the CDC. Both numbers are trending downward, as is the death toll, which has been hovering around an average of 400 per day, according to the CDC. (The Washington Post’s coronavirus tracker, which relies on data from state health departments rather than the CDC, showed the seven-day average for deaths was 554 as of Saturday.)

Average daily deaths peaked above 3,300 in January 2021, as the virus spread in an overwhelmingly unvaccinated population, and topped 2,600 per day the following winter amid the omicron wave.

If no new coronavirus variant emerges, the numbers should stay stable or decline until the new year, the report from Lessler’s forecasting group states.

The most pessimistic scenario is that a new variant will appear and the booster campaign will get rolling late, resulting in a projected 1.3 million hospitalizations and 181,000 deaths over a nine-month period (August 2022 to May 2023), compared with 700,000 hospitalizations and 111,000 deaths in the most optimistic scenario, with no new variant and an early start to the booster campaign.

Dylan George, director of operations at the CDC’s recently established Center for Forecasting and Outbreak Analytics, compares disease modeling to weather forecasting. The agency looks at many models, incorporating variables to create a wide range of plausible scenarios. Right now, he said, the CDC believes that the BA.5 subvariant is cresting in most of the country.

Behavior is another variable in the equation. Precautions have largely been relaxed for much of the country. Many companies are requiring workers to report to the office but no longer require vaccination or provide regular coronavirus testing. Schools have dropped mask mandates.

“People are not wearing masks,” George said. “People are running around in bigger groups. People are traveling more. Schools are not having any kind of mitigation. Will that impact spread in a bigger way as well?”

Waves of infection are to some degree self-limiting. The virus “burns through all the susceptibles,” as George put it, losing momentum. But then time passes, and immunity wanes. Vaccine-based immunity against infection appears to drop significantly in a matter of months, even as protection against severe disease continues.

Another complication is the presence of other circulating viruses, including influenza, which also has a cold-weather seasonal signature.

“There’s all sorts of respiratory things, especially as we go into the school season,” George said. “How is flu going to play out now that we’re all coming together? … There has always been concern about the ‘twindemic.’ ”

Fauci noted that, following a cascade of new subvariants earlier this year, the BA.5 omicron subvariant and the almost identical BA.4 have not been challenged this summer by a new strain. Immunity against BA.5 and BA.4 has been steadily building in the population as people get infected and then recover. That immunity should get a significant enhancement from the new boosters that have been designed to fight not only the original strain of the virus, but also BA.5/BA.4.

“I don’t think it’s going to be a major surge if it stays BA.5,” Fauci said of the hypothetical fall wave of cases.

Amid a broader return to normal behavior there remains a significant contingent of people who are covid-cautious — aware that hundreds of people a day are still dying from the virus — and continue to wear masks indoors or limit contacts with others.

Millions are now experiencing the health crisis of “long covid,” an array of post-infection symptoms that include severe fatigue and brain fog. It is a slippery disease to diagnose conclusively because many symptoms could signal long covid or a different ailment. One CDC report said 1 in 5 infected people develop long covid.

Marks, the FDA official, said he routinely fields calls from people in their 20s and 30s with long covid symptoms, and said the illness represents a serious public health challenge. “The brain fog, in some cases, the mood changes — people who used to be very bright and cheery, who now are anxious and depressed — those things seem to be very real,” he said.

Some patients have struggled with long covid for more than two years and have been unable to return to work or resume their pre-pandemic way of life.

“Some are young, healthy, athletic people, and they can’t even go back to work,” said Akiko Iwasaki, an immunologist at Yale University School of Medicine. “People should know the risk before they remove the mask and stop getting their boosters.”

Millions are now experiencing “long covid,” an array of post-infection symptoms that include severe fatigue and brain fog. (Matt Roth for The Washington Post)

Evidence points to the virus settling into a seasonal pattern, said Columbia University epidemiologist Jeff Shaman. Viral transmission is enhanced by the low humidity of the indoor environment during the winter as well as by the decline in sunshine and its sterilizing ultraviolet radiation, Shaman said.

He worries that the virus could continue to sicken and kill people at rates higher than the seasonal flu, which, according to CDC data, took between 12,000 and 52,000 lives per year between 2010 and 2020. If the covid mortality continues at the same rate as it has been over the past five months, that would be roughly 120,000 deaths a year, Shaman calculated. If that is the new normal, it’s sobering, he said.

Infectious-disease experts don’t want to tempt fate with sunny forecasts. The coronavirus is still adapting to people as it mutates randomly, and natural selection favors the most immune-evasive strains.

“My forecast is that you can’t really forecast,” Fauci said. “It is such an unpredictable virus in the sense that we’ve been fooled before, and we likely will continue to be fooled.”

Fading Threat

I hope I'm not just hoping it'll be OK. I hope I'm not just thinking people will come to their senses and realize the fantasies of the MAGA rubes are unsustainable, and that they don't really want to shit-can democracy in favor of politics-by-brute-force.

I hope Americans' short attention span can be extended enough for us to see we really don't want to model our system after China or Russia, and that we really don't want the mechanism of transferring power to make us look like Afghanistan or Iraq.

Paradoxically, the passing of time puts distance between Jan6 and where we are now, and I think maybe, instead of forgetting about the unpleasantness and getting back to a comfotably numb status quo ante, more people are coming to understand that democracy is not something we have unless it's something we do, and it's a helluva lot better to get together and vote every once in a while than it is to drop bombs on each other.

The weird thing I think way too many of the MAGA gang are being deliberately blinded to is that while the US was born of bloody violent revolution, the founders immediately set about putting together a system that would prevent us from ever having to go through that shit again - we could make things more to our liking without shooting each other and burning down each other's barns, if we could just muster the courage to insist that we ourselves honor our commitment to forming that more perfect union.

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Opinion
Why I’ve stopped fearing America is headed for civil war

Five years ago, I began to worry about a new American civil war breaking out. Despite a recent spate of books and columns that warn such a conflict may be approaching, I am less concerned by that prospect now.

Back then, I wrote in a series of articles and online discussions for Foreign Policy that I expected to see widespread political violence accompanied by efforts in some states to undermine the authority and abilities of the federal government. At an annual lunch of national security experts in Austin, I posed the question of possible civil war and got a consensus of about a one-third chance of such a situation breaking.

Specifically, I worried that there would be a spate of assassination attempts against politicians and judges. I thought we might see courthouses and other federal buildings bombed. I also expected that in some states, right-wing organizations, heavily influenced by white nationalism, would hold conventions to discuss how to defy enforcement of federal laws they disliked, such as those dealing with voting rights. Some governors might vow to fire any state employee complying with unwanted federal orders. And I thought it likely that “nullification juries” would start cropping up, refusing to convict right-wingers committing mayhem, such as attacking election officials, no matter what evidence there was.

We still may see such catastrophes, of course. Our country remains deeply divided. We have a Supreme Court packed with reactionaries. Many right-wingers appear comfortable with threatening violence if things don’t go their way, and a large minority of the members of Congress seems unconcerned with such talk. I continue to worry especially about political assassinations, because all that takes is one deranged person and a gun — and our country unfortunately has many of both.

And yet, for all that, I am less pessimistic than I was back then.

Oddly enough, the main things that give me hope arise from former president Donald Trump’s attack on the electoral process, culminating in the Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol. At the time I feared that the unprecedented insurrection was the beginning of a sustained war on American democracy.

Yet nothing much happened. Rather, with the executive branch crippled and the legislative branch divided, the judicial branch of the federal government held the line. Again and again, both federal and state courts rejected claims of election fraud. Now those who alleged fraud without substantial evidence are themselves being investigated. Hundreds of people who invaded the Capitol, attacked police and threatened lawmakers were tracked down and charged with crimes. It was as if the American system had been subjected to a stress test and, albeit a bit wobbly, passed.

Moreover, the Capitol invaders turned out to lack the courage of their convictions. Having broken the law, they shied away from the consequences. Unlike the civil rights activists of the 1960s, they did not proudly march into jails, certain of the rightness of their cause, eager to use the moment to explain what they had done and why. They lacked the essentials that gave the civil rights movement and others sustainability: training, discipline and a strategy for the long term.

More recently, the House select committee examining how Jan. 6 came to pass has established a factual record that cannot be denied. While unfortunately not truly bipartisan, it also shows part of the legislative branch of the federal government finally awakening and responding to the attack that branch suffered. The Justice Department’s slow but steady pursuit of Jan. 6 perpetrators “at any level” targets those who thought they could speak or act without repercussions. And the American people are paying attention. A recent NBC News poll found that “threats to democracy” topped the list of pressing issues facing the nation.

Yes, we still have a long way to go. There are no signs of a national reconciliation in the offing. Some Trump followers no doubt will be elected to Congress and to state offices this fall, and control of both houses of Congress is uncertain.

But it is beginning to feel to me like the wave of hard right — not “conservative” — reaction has crested. As we saw in the recent vote in Kansas, the Supreme Court’s ruling against abortion has awakened many women, and some men, to the dangers of letting that court go wildly out of step with the American people.

In addition, the events of the past few years, most notably the pandemic and some natural disasters, have reminded many Americans that there is a place for good and effective government, especially in providing the basic societal needs of public health, public safety, air and water quality, and roads and other forms of transportation. That revived appreciation is one more reason I think the danger of civil war is receding.

So, while the patient is not yet healthy, I see some signs that the fever is breaking and the prognosis is improving.

Overhead

I'm gonna stay with the music thing

'til I'm 25 or 30, and then go hard

on my dream of being an accountant.

I Do Bite My Thumb, Sir

One of Trump's many weaknesses is that he can't resist walking into a spinning propeller.

So Joe spins it up for him.

(pay wall)

Biden Laid the Trap. Trump Walked Into It.

At his Pennsylvania rally, the former president gave exactly the narcissistic display his Democratic nemesis tried to provoke.

In 2016, Hillary Clinton warned that Donald Trump was a fool who could be baited with a tweet. This past Thursday night, in Philadelphia, Joe Biden upped the ante by asking, in effect: What idiot thing might the former president do if baited with a whole speech? On Saturday night, the world got its answer.

For the 2022 election cycle, smart Republicans had a clear and simple plan: Don’t let the election be about Trump. Make it about gas prices, or crime, or the border, or race, or sex education, or anything—anything but Trump. Trump lost the popular vote in 2016. He lost control of the House in 2018. He lost the presidency in 2020. He lost both Senate seats in Georgia in 2021. Republicans had good reason to dread the havoc he’d create if he joined the fight in 2022.

So they pleaded with Trump to keep out of the 2022 race. A Republican lawmaker in a close contest told CNN on August 19, “I don’t say his name, ever.”

Maybe the pleas were always doomed to fail. Show Trump a spotlight, and he’s going to step into it. But Republicans pinned their hopes on the chance that Trump might muster some self-discipline this one time, some regard for the interests and wishes of his partners and allies.

David Frum: The justification for Biden’s speech

One of the purposes of Biden’s Philadelphia attack on Trump’s faction within the Republican Party was surely to goad Trump. It worked.

Yesterday, in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, Trump addressed a rally supposedly in support of Republican candidates in the state: Mehmet Oz for the Senate; the January 6 apologist Doug Mastriano for governor. This was not Trump’s first 2022 rally speech. He spoke in Arizona in July. But this one was different: so extreme, strident, and ugly—and so obviously provoked by Biden’s speech that this was what led local news: “Donald Trump Blasts Philadelphia, President Biden During Rally for Doug Mastriano, Dr. Oz in Wilkes-Barre.”

Yes, you read that right: Campaigning in Pennsylvania, the ex-president denounced the state’s largest city. “I think Philadelphia was a great choice to make this speech of hatred and anger. [Biden’s] speech was hatred and anger,” Trump declared last night. “Last year, the city set an all-time murder record with 560 homicides, and it’s on track to shatter that record again in 2022. Numbers that nobody’s ever seen other than in some other Democrat-run cities.”

Trump spoke at length about the FBI search of his house for stolen government documents. He lashed out at the FBI, attacking the bureau and the Department of Justice as “vicious monsters.” He complained about the FBI searching his closets for stolen government documents, inadvertently reminding everyone that the FBI had actually found stolen government documents in his closet—and in his bathroom too. Trump called Biden an “enemy of the state.” He abused his party’s leader in the U.S. Senate as someone who “should be ashamed.” He claimed to have won the popular vote in the state of Pennsylvania, which, in fact, he lost by more than 80,000 votes.

The rally format allowed time for only brief remarks by the two candidates actually on the ballot, Oz and Mastriano. Its message was otherwise all Trump, Trump, Trump. A Republican vote is a Trump vote. A Republican vote is a vote to endorse lies about the 2020 presidential election.

On and on it went, in a protracted display of narcissistic injury that was exactly the behavior that Biden’s Philadelphia speech had been designed to elicit.

Every day since the FBI search of Mar-a-Lago has brought new proof that Trump still dominates the Republican Party. He has extracted support even from would-be rivals like Florida Governor Ron DeSantis—rituals of submission within a party hierarchy that respects only acts of domination.

Republican congressional leaders desperately but hopelessly tried to avert the risk that this next election would become yet another national referendum on Trump’s leadership. Despite Trump’s lying and boasting, politicians who can count to 50 and 218—the respective numbers needed for a majority in the Senate and House—have to reckon with the real-world costs of Trump’s defeats. But Biden understood their man’s psychology too well.

Biden came to Philadelphia to deliver a wound to Trump’s boundless yet fragile ego. Trump obliged with a monstrously self-involved meltdown 48 hours later. And now his party has nowhere to hide. Trump has overwritten his name on every Republican line of every ballot in 2022.

Biden dangled the bait. Trump took it—and put his whole party on the hook with him. Republican leaders are left with little choice but to pretend to like it.

Today's Politics Girl

Leigh McGowan - Politics Girl

Today's Turnaround

There's hypocrisy, and there's Republican hypocrisy, and then there's DumFux News.

The Recount:

Where Did All That Money Go, Rick?

Today's reminder never to put a Republican in charge of the money.

The party that always bragged about being pragmatic and clear-eyed and competent is now officially the party you can't trust to manage a middle school car wash.

But it's more than that.

It's possible that the main problem with GOP fundraising is that people are turning away from Republicans in general because the MAGA gang has become so toxic. I think there's an awakening of distrust of a party that's spent the last 35 years fucking things up on purpose in their attempt to tear down our democracy, while disguising that project with the standard Myth of Former Greatness.

The social stigma attached to being swindled makes fraud one the most under-reported crimes. People you've been conned are likely to be very quiet about it because it's embarrassing to admit you fell for some bullshit that an awful lot of your friends and family tried to warn you about.

Republicans have been railing against "the collective" forever, so why is anyone surprised to learn they're behaving in a totally self-serving manner?

    (pay wall)

How a Record Cash Haul Vanished for Senate Republicans

The campaign arm of Senate Republicans had collected $181.5 million by the end of July — but spent 95 percent of it. A big investment in digital, and hyperaggressive tactics, have not paid off.

It was early 2021, and Senator Rick Scott wanted to go big. The new chairman of the Senate Republican campaign arm had a mind to modernize the place. One of his first decisions was to overhaul how the group raised money online.

Mr. Scott installed a new digital team, spearheaded by Trump veterans, and greenlit an enormous wave of spending on digital ads, not to promote candidates but to discover more small contributors. Soon, the committee was smashing fund-raising records. By the summer of 2021, Mr. Scott was boasting about “historic investments in digital fund-raising that are already paying dividends.”

A year later, some of that braggadocio has vanished — along with most of the money.

The National Republican Senatorial Committee has long been a critical part of the party apparatus, recruiting candidates, supporting them with political infrastructure, designing campaign strategy and buying television ads.

By the end of July, the committee had collected a record $181.5 million — but had already spent more than 95 percent of what it had brought in. The Republican group entered August with just $23.2 million on hand, less than half of what the Senate Democratic committee had ahead of the final intense phase of the midterm elections.

Now top Republicans are beginning to ask: Where did all the money go?

The answer, chiefly, is that Mr. Scott’s enormous gamble on finding new online donors has been a costly financial flop in 2022, according to a New York Times analysis of federal records and interviews with people briefed on the committee’s finances. Today, the N.R.S.C. is raising less than before Mr. Scott’s digital splurge.

Party leaders, including Senator Mitch McConnell, are fretting aloud that Republicans could squander their shot at retaking the Senate in 2022, with money one factor as some first-time candidates have struggled to gain traction. The N.R.S.C. was intended to be a party bulwark yet found itself recently canceling some TV ad reservations in key states.

The story of how the Senate G.O.P. committee went from breaking financial records to breaking television reservations, told through interviews with more than two dozen Republican officials, actually begins with the rising revenues Mr. Scott bragged about last year.

The committee had squeezed donors with hyperaggressive new tactics. And all the money coming in obscured just how much the committee was spending advertising for donors. Then inflation sapped online giving for Republicans nationwide. And the money that had rolled in came at an ethical price.

One fund-raising scheme used by the Senate committee, which has not previously been disclosed, involved sending an estimated millions of text messages that asked provocative questions — “Should Biden resign?” — followed by a request for cash: “Reply YES to donate.” Those who replied “YES” had their donation processed immediately, though the text did not reveal in advance where the money was going.

Privately, some Republicans complained the tactic was exploitative. WinRed, the party’s main donation-processing platform, recently stepped in and took the unusual step of blocking the committee from engaging in the practice, according to four people familiar with the matter.

The texts had been part of a concerted push that successfully juiced fund-raising, though it used methods that experts say will eventually exhaust even the most loyal givers.

One internal N.R.S.C. budget document from earlier this year, obtained by The Times, shows that $23.3 million was poured into investments to find new donors between June 2021 and January 2022. In that time, the contributors the organization found gave $6.1 million — a more than $17 million deficit.

Mr. Scott declined an interview request. His staff vigorously denied financial struggles, said some of the canceled television ads had been rebooked, and argued the digital spending would prove wise in time.

“We made the investment, we’re glad we did it, it will benefit the N.R.S.C. and the party as a whole for cycles to come,” said Chris Hartline, a spokesman for Mr. Scott and the committee.

Yet as Republican chances to retake the Senate have slipped, a full-blown case of finger-pointing has erupted across Washington, with Mr. Scott a prime target. His handling of the committee’s finances has become conflated with other critiques, especially a flawed field of Republicans who have found themselves outspent on television.

Mr. Scott’s please-all-sides decision to stay out of contested 2022 primaries has been second-guessed, including by Mr. McConnell. Mr. Scott’s detractors accuse him of transforming the N.R.S.C. into the “National Rick Scott Committee” — and a vehicle for his presidential ambitions.

“The spending wouldn’t matter if the polling numbers looked better,” said Liam Donovan, a Republican lobbyist and N.R.S.C. donor. “To the extent the red wave is receding, people look for someone to blame.”

The financial fortunes of the group alone will not sink Republican chances in November. A super PAC aligned with Mr. McConnell has more than $160 million in television reservations booked after Labor Day.

Mr. Hartline dismissed those questioning the group’s digital spending as “disgruntled former staff and vendors.” He said the $28 million invested had tripled its file of email addresses and phone numbers and added 160,000 donors.

“Our goal is to build the biggest G.O.P. digital file to help the party now and in the future,” he said. He declined to discuss the texting scheme.

Mr. Hartline said the Senate Democratic arm has more money because it had not yet spent significantly on television. Mr. Scott, he said, had strategically spent early, with nearly $30 million on ads aiding Republicans through July.

That sum, however, is actually less than the $37.4 million the G.O.P. committee reported in independent expenditures for candidates as of the same date two years ago.

A huge online outlay

For months last year, the National Republican Senatorial Committee was far and away the nation’s biggest online political advertiser, outspending every other party committee combined and pouring money into platforms like Google at levels almost unseen except in the fevered final days of 2020.

The sums were so breathtakingly large — peaking at more than $100,000 a day on Facebook and Google — that some concerned Democrats began to study the ads, fretting that somehow Republicans had unlocked a new sustainable way to raise money online.

They had not.

The Senate Republican bet had been this: By spending vast amounts early, the party could vacuum up contact information for millions of potential donors who could then give repeatedly over the coming months.

The internal budget document showed the shortcomings of the approach. The first month of outreach investment, June 2021, was projected to generate $3.2 million for the committee by November 2022. But the other $22 million in investments over the next seven months combined were projected to add up to a narrow net loss by Election Day.

Still, the document showed the digital department was asking for more: an additional $12 million in February and March. Mr. Hartline dismissed the document as a “potential draft budget.”

Not long after, the spending spigot was cut off. The committee went from being the biggest political spender on Facebook to being completely absent on it. No Facebook fund-raising ads ran from April to late August, company records show.

Digital fund-raising has dried up across the Republican spectrum in recent months, and the N.R.S.C. has been hard hit. Online donations to the committee plunged by 37 percent between the first and second quarters of this year. If not for $10 million in transfers from the Republican National Committee, the Senate arm would have spent more than it raised this cycle.

In the most recent six months that fund-raising data is available, the N.R.S.C. in 2022 has raised $15 million less than during the same six-month period in 2020.

The tight finances stand in contrast to the House Republican campaign arm, which entered August with $110 million — spending 57 percent of the money it had collected, compared with the Senate committee’s 95 percent.

In its pursuit of cash, the Senate committee has increasingly adopted a pro-Trump tone: Of the more than 1,500 emails sent this year, more than 900 have invoked Donald J. Trump in the sender line. Zero have mentioned Mr. McConnell anywhere, despite the fact that the committee’s ostensible goal is to make him majority leader.

In August, four Senate candidates, including J.D. Vance, the Republican nominee in Ohio, trekked to Nantucket, Mass., for an event that netted each an initial $25,000.Credit...Maddie McGarvey for The New York Times

The N.R.S.C.’s larger donor program has struggled at times, too. In August, four Senate candidates, including J.D. Vance, the Republican nominee in Ohio, trekked to Nantucket, Mass., for an event that netted each an initial $25,000, according to multiple officials, a paltry payout for the far-flung event.

Tensions are high. Mr. Vance recently snapped at Mr. Scott over a different issue with committee staff in a phone call, according to two people with knowledge of the conversation.

Though the committee exists chiefly to help Republican Senate candidates, under Mr. Scott it has only occasionally leveraged its enlarged email list to fund-raise directly for them. And when it does, the fine print indicates the N.R.S.C. keeps 90 percent of the proceeds.

‘Reply YES to donate’

The unsolicited text messages seeking contributions to the Senate Republican committee began buzzing phones in mid-2021 — often without identifying whom they were coming from.

“This is URGENT!” read one such flurry of messages. “Do YOU support Trump?”

Then came the key line: “Reply YES to donate $25.”

Those who wrote back “YES” automatically had a $25 donation to the National Republican Senatorial Committee charged to their credit cards, though the initial message said nothing about the destination and there were no links to click to find out. The committee used a tool that paired donors’ phone numbers with credit-card information saved on WinRed.

The Times documented the practice through interviews with people who had received such texts and made donations, Republican officials familiar with the tactic and a review of thousands of messages flagged by the spam-blocking app RoboKiller.

RoboKiller used the volume of texts marked as spam to estimate that tens of millions of “reply YES to donate” messages were sent from an 855 phone number that has been used by the Senate Republican committee.

Giulia Porter, a spokeswoman for RoboKiller, described the practice as predatory because it used donors’ saved credit card information to send money without telling them where it was going. “It does speak to how quickly the tactics have evolved technologically,” she said.

It is not clear how many people donated in response to the texts. But demands for N.R.S.C. refunds, a key metric of donor dissatisfaction, have soared, with the amount returned to donors quadrupling, from less than $2 million in 2020 to more than $8 million now.

The Senate Republican refund rate equals 6.6 percent of direct individual donations this cycle; the Senate Democratic committee’s rate is 1.67 percent.

WinRed declined to comment on stopping the Senate committee from using the tactic. The committee is still using the “reply YES to donate” function in texts, but it is now disclosing itself as the sender of the messages.

All told, the Senate committee has poured more than $26 million into expenses marked as texting-related since 2021, part of a digital budget that ballooned so quickly that Republicans, even inside the committee, are talking about a financial autopsy to examine whether there have been potential conflicts of interest.

Gary Coby, Mr. Trump’s longtime digital director, is an adviser to the committee and widely seen as the main behind-the-scenes influence on the N.R.S.C.’s current digital operations. Two of his companies, Direct Persuasion, a digital agency, and Opn Sesame, a texting firm, have been paid by the Senate committee more than $4.6 million combined. Two others that he has promoted, DirectSnd and Red Spark Strategy, have received another $9.2 million.

The N.R.S.C.’s digital director, Daria Grastara, worked for Mr. Coby during the Trump 2020 campaign. She was a director for Direct Persuasion, according to her LinkedIn page. While at the Senate committee, Ms. Grastara has maintained financial ties to at least one firm that has been paid committee funds and informed the N.R.S.C. of the arrangement, according to a person briefed on the situation.

Mr. Hartline called Ms. Grastara a “fantastic employee” but declined to discuss any specifics, adding only, “She has been open and transparent with all parties involved since the beginning of the cycle.” Ms. Grastara, who attended Direct Persuasion’s Miami Beach retreat this year, did not respond to a request for comment.

Mr. Coby referred questions to the N.R.S.C., which declined to discuss his financial relationships.

In a broad statement, Mr. Hartline said Mr. Scott had “instituted the toughest conflict of interest policy at the N.R.S.C. for our staff and vendors to clean up issues from the past.”

Scott versus McConnell

Mr. Scott has taken to saying that money could be the party’s greatest impediment to taking control of the 50-50 Senate in November, and he has been acting to make up financial ground.

Committee staff beyond the finance department have been asked to devote an hour per week to calling donors for cash. “Everyone plays a role in fund-raising,” Mr. Hartline said.

Under campaign finance law, a portion of the committee’s funds are supposed to be walled off for legal expenses, and are not to be used for campaigning. Yet in July, the committee’s biggest expense — a $1 million media buy, apparently for Colorado and Washington ads — came from those restricted legal funds, according to federal records.

“We will always find the most effective, efficient and creative way to get our message out and stretch every dollar, in accordance with the law,” Mr. Hartline said about the expenditure. “If the Democrats don’t like that, tough.”

Prior to politics, Mr. Scott led a major for-profit hospital chain. He was forced out in the late 1990s and the company went on to pay $1.7 billion in federal civil and criminal penalties for health care fraud.

He has clashed with Mr. McConnell, who recently lamented Senate “candidate quality” in 2022. Mr. Scott shot back that “trash-talking our Republican candidates” was “an amazing act of cowardice.”

Mr. Scott also rolled out his own “Rescue America” agenda despite Mr. McConnell’s desire to keep the policy focus on Democrats. Mr. Scott’s initial openness to taxing more Americans and letting Social Security expire has been used repeatedly by President Biden to bludgeon Republicans.

Mr. Scott’s sharp elbows have earned him enemies. His family vacation on a yacht outside Italy, for instance, promptly leaked.

Just after Labor Day, Mr. Scott has another trip planned. It is not to a key Senate battleground. He is headed to Iowa, helping a House candidate in the leadoff state on the presidential nominating calendar.

Today's Tweet

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— 𝕐o̴g̴ (@Yoda4ever) September 4, 2022