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Divided We Stand

Divided We Stand
New book about the 2020 election.

Monday, March 18, 2024

The Return of the Russian Assets


Josh Dawsey at WP:
Former president Donald Trump is expected to enlist Paul Manafort, the former campaign manager he pardoned, as a campaign adviser later this year, according to four people familiar with the talks.

The job discussions have largely centered around the 2024 Republican convention in Milwaukee in July and could include Manafort playing a role in fundraising for the presumptive GOP nominee’s campaign, according to these people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private deliberations. While no formal decision has been made, the four people described the hiring as expected and said Trump was determined to bring Manafort back into the fold.


Manafort worked for Trump in 2016 before being ousted and later convicted of tax and bank fraud felonies as part of Robert S. Mueller III’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election. He served time in prison before receiving a pardon in the final days of Trump’s time in office.

From a bipartisan report by the Senate Intelligence Committee:

Manafort hired and worked increasingly closely with a Russian national, Konstantin Kilimnik. Kilimnik is a Russian intelligence officer. Kilimnik became an integral part of Manafort's operations in Ukraine and Russia, serving as Manafort's primary liaison to Deripaska and eventually managing Manafort's office in Kyiv. Kilimnik and Manafort formed a close and lasting relationship that endured to the 2016 U.S. elections. and beyond. 

Last year, Michelle Price reported at AP:

Former President Donald Trump called into an event hosted by his former national security adviser Michael Flynn over the weekend, telling his ex-adviser, “We’re going to bring you back.”

After scrubbing a rally in Iowa on Saturday night because of bad weather, Trump spoke via telephone at an event for Flynn’s “ReAwaken America Tour” held at the former president’s Miami resort. The retired lieutenant general, a top figure in the far-right movement, has been one of the leading proponents of Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election.

During the call, which was captured on a video of the event posted online, Flynn is seen holding a cellphone up to a microphone as Trump, on the line, says to Flynn, “You just have to stay healthy because we’re bringing you back. We’re going to bring you back.”
...

Flynn, who resigned from the Trump administration less than a month after Trump’s inauguration in 2017, was charged later that year with lying to the FBI about conservations he had with the Russians on Trump’s behalf. He twice pleaded guilty, but Trump ultimately pardoned him in the final weeks of his presidency.





Sunday, March 17, 2024

Trump Rhetoric

 Our books have discussed Trump's low character, which was on display yesterday in Ohio.  Marisa Iati at WP:

Former president Donald Trump ratcheted up his dehumanizing rhetoric against immigrants Saturday by saying that some who are accused of crimes are “not people.”

“I don’t know if you call them people,” he said at a rally near Dayton, Ohio. “In some cases they’re not people, in my opinion. But I’m not allowed to say that because the radical left says that’s a terrible thing to say.”

Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee, was in Ohio to stump for Senate candidate Bernie Moreno, who is in a tight three-way race for the Republican nomination to challenge Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown. Moreno, a businessman, is facing Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose and state Sen. Matt Dolan in Tuesday’s primary.

...
Later in the rally, Trump warned it will be a “bloodbath for the country” if he is not elected. The comment came as he was promising to hike tariffs on foreign-made cars, and it was not clear exactly what Trump was referring to with his admonition.

“Now we’re going to put a 100 percent tariff on every single car that comes across [the] line, and you’re not going to be able to sell those guys — if I get elected,” he said. “Now, if I don’t get elected, it’s going to be a bloodbath for the whole. That’s going to be the least of it. It’s going to be a bloodbath for the country.”
...

Immigration is shaping up to be an explosive issue in the presidential campaign. Trump and President Biden staged dueling visits to Texas border towns last month, castigating each other for a recent surge in illegal immigration.

Trump said the influx of migrants was “a Joe Biden invasion.” Biden blamed Trump for the death of a $20 billion bipartisan bill to increase detention capacity and hire thousands of Border Patrol officers.

Trump’s comments Saturday represent an escalation of his long-harsh language on the topic. Since beginning his 2016 campaign by calling Mexican immigrants “rapists,” Trump has made inflammatory attacks on migrants a theme of all of his campaigns. He accused immigrants in October of “poisoning the blood of our country” — a remark some likened to the “contamination of the blood” concept that Adolf Hitler laid out in “Mein Kampf.” Trump has rejected that comparison and has continued to use similar language.

 Trump has been referring to nonwhite people as "animals" for a very long time.

Saturday, March 16, 2024

Trump Trial Delays

In Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politicswe look at Trump's dishonesty and disregard for the rule of law.

 Our next book will look at the 2024 campaign and the impact of Trump's legal problemsNew York courts have found that he is a rapist and a fraud.

Ben Protess, Alan Feuer, William K. Rashbaum and Maggie Haberman at NYT:

The schedule seemed stacked against Donald J. Trump: four criminal trials in four cities, all in the same year he is running for president.

But rather than doom Mr. Trump, the chaotic calendar might just save him.

Mr. Trump, who as president helped reshape the federal judiciary, has already persuaded the Supreme Court to delay his trial in Washington. His lawyers have buried judges in Florida and Georgia in enough legal motions and procedural complaints that his cases there have no set trial dates, either.

The case in Manhattan, where the district attorney accused Mr. Trump of covering up a sex scandal during and after the 2016 presidential campaign, was the only one not mired in potential postponements.

Until now.

On Friday, Justice Juan M. Merchan, who is overseeing the case, delayed the trial at least three weeks, until mid-April.

Friday, March 15, 2024

House GOP Woes

Our new book is titled Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics.  Among other things, it discusses state and congressional elections. 

Scott Wong, Sahil Kapur and Ben Kamisar at NBC News:
Rep. Ken Buck, R-Colo., who frequently defied his own party and announced last fall he would not seek re-election, said Tuesday he will resign from Congress at the end of next week, further shrinking the GOP's already razor-thin majority.

"Today I am announcing that I will depart Congress at the end of next week," Buck said in a statement. "I look forward to staying involved in our political process, as well as spending more time in Colorado and with my family."

His departure will cut the House Republican margin to 218-213; Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., will continue to have two votes to spare before needing Democrats to govern. But illnesses and other unexpected absences could make his already difficult job even more ch
Reese Gorman and Riley Rogerson at The Daily Beast:
For their annual retreat, House Republicans traveled to the Greenbrier resort in West Virginia this week to rally around a message to defend their House majority and to settle on a path forward to fund the government.

There was just one problem: Less than half of the GOP conference even bothered to show up.
...

[M]uch of the schedule fell apart even before Republicans arrived. The poor turnout prompted organizers to compress the retreat from a two-and-a-half day event into little over a day. House Republicans invited former President Donald Trump to attend, but he declined. And the retreat’s marquee speaker, Fox News Business host Larry Kudlow, dropped out at the 11th hour. (Republicans replaced him with Howard Lutnick, the CEO of financial services firm Cantor Fitzgerald.)
...

Many of Republican leadership’s loudest detractors skipped out on the retreat. Rep. Chip Roy (R-TX), who has bemoaned the dearth of conservative policy wins this Congress and dangled ousting Johnson, didn’t deign to make an appearance.

Neither did several of the eight Republicans responsible for ousting McCarthy. Rep. Nancy Mace (R-SC) was busy prepping for her appearance on Real Time with Bill Maher on Friday. Rep. Tim Burchett (R-TN) told CNN he has “a farm to run.” And fittingly, as Johnson emphasized to members that they needed to support their colleagues, Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) was in Texas campaigning for Republican influencer Brandon Herrera, who is challenging fellow Republican Rep. Tony Gonzales.

Thursday, March 14, 2024

RNC and the Bliss Precedent

 Our latest book is titled Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics. The 2024 race has begun. The nomination phase has effectively ended. Trump has begun turning the RNC into his personal fiefdom. 

After becoming president, Nixon sacked RNC chair Ray Bliss, who had declined to subsidize Nixon's campaign travel in the 1966 midterm campaign.  Bliss was probably the greatest RNC chair in history up to that time.  At Politico, William Hershey and John Green write:

The episode represented a big step toward the development of candidate-centered politics, of which Trump is a reigning master. In candidate-centered politics, one service that party chairs can’t — or won’t — easily provide is a check on the excesses of ambitious office holders.

With his record of winning races, Bliss, who died in 1981, would have stewed over the GOP’s losing efforts during McDaniel’s long tenure — most notably the loss of the House in 2018, the Senate in 2020, and the disappointing results of 2022. He would have understood McDaniel’s limited ability to rein in Trump in recent years but would have disapproved of the deference she showed him while he and the party were out of power.

In his view, party organizations should be independent of candidates and respect the diversity of opinion among rank-and-file Republicans. Ideally, the party would also serve as an independent check on office holders as well — something he hoped to do with Nixon — but at the very least it could serve as a neutral incubator for future candidates when it did not hold the White House.

All of this would have put him at odds with Trump. If there were any questions about whose interest the new RNC leaders will serve, Lara Trump, Trump’s daughter-in-law and an RNC co-chair along with North Carolina GOP chair Michael Whatley, put them to rest.

“Every single penny will go to the No. 1 and the only job of the RNC — that is electing Donald J. Trump as president of the United States and saving this country,” she told Newsmax in February. This prospect may not be music to the ears of congressional, state and local Republicans.

One test of the new leadership’s intent will come soon enough. Trump’s team has said it will not use the RNC to pay his mounting personal legal bills, which are estimated to be in the millions, as it did when he was president. But with a family member and other Trump lieutenants now controlling the party’s fundraising machinery, the gravitational pull toward supporting Trump by any measure possible will be strong.


Wednesday, March 13, 2024

Trump on Social Security and Abortion

Our latest book is titled Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics. The 2024 race has begun. The nomination phase has effectively ended.  With Super Tuesday, the withdrawal of Nikki Haley, and the State of the Union, the general election campaign has begun.

Abortion and Social Security are probably the Democrats' two best issues this year.  Calder McHugh at Politico:
But now, thanks to an unforced error, Trump has effectively opened the 2024 general election campaign with a return to the third rail he sought to abandon almost a decade ago. Asked in a CNBC interview Monday whether he’d changed his outlook on how to handle entitlements, Trump argued in a word salad-heavy answer that “there is a lot you can do in terms of entitlements, in terms of cutting and also the theft and the bad management of entitlements.”

It’s not obvious from his answer whether he’s had a material change of heart on Social Security, because it’s not obvious what he means at all. In early 2020 he made a similar comment that he quickly walked back, that he would “at some point” look at cutting entitlements; nothing came of it. But this time, his campaign immediately recognized he had stepped on a landmine. A campaign spokesperson tried some cleanup on Monday, arguing that Trump will “continue to strongly protect Social Security and Medicare in his second term.”

By then, though, it was too late. Trump suddenly found himself on the defensive, in the position so many prior GOP nominees have been in. He had given up the tactical advantage he had used to swamp his GOP rivals in the 2016 primary, back when he recognized that, when it came to entitlement reform, the only winning move is not to play.
...
Recognizing the opportunity, the Biden campaign today released a video of the president watching Trump’s answer, shaking his head, and turning to the camera to say, “this man has no idea what he’s talking about. Over my dead body will he cut Social Security so he can give tax breaks to the super wealthy … This is worth the fight all by itself.”

The entitlement fight isn’t the only ghost of past elections that have inconveniently returned. Since Roe v. Wade was overturned in 2022, he has largely avoided articulating a clear position — his stance seems to be coalescing around support for a 15-week or 16-week national ban.

But his strategic ambiguity isn’t sustainable in an election where abortion rights are center stage. This isn’t 2016, when he had yet to appoint three Supreme Court justices who voted to overturn Roe v. Wade and his Republican primary rivals were attacking him for his formerly pro-choice stance.

In 2024, he owns Dobbs. And, thanks to his recent remarks, Democrats will make sure he owns the longstanding Republican position on entitlement reform. It’s a rough, but somehow familiar, way to kick off the general election.

Tuesday, March 12, 2024

CMC Connects: 2024

 Unusual aspects of 2024:


Polls suggest a close race -- but early polls are not a reliable guide




Five ways Biden could lose:

1.  Economic crisis
3.  Scandal
4.  Spoiler

Two ways Trump could lose:

1.  Age and health

2.  Criminal conviction
        Impact on voters?