One Right-Wing Battle After Another

Our new book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. The first year of the second Trump administration  has been full of ominous developments -- including a tranche of racist and anti-Semitic chats by prominent Young Republicans.  Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation, defended Tucker Carlson after his softball interview with Nazi wannabe Nick Fuentes.

Zach Kessel at The Free Beacon:

Leaders of Advancing American Freedom (AAF), the nonprofit led by former vice president Mike Pence, said that their move to hire more than a dozen former Heritage Foundation employees represents a significant shift within the American right.

AAF president Tim Chapman described the organization’s addition of Heritage Foundation’s legal, data, and economics centers, a move that doubles its size, as a "reorganization of the conservative movement.

"People are voting with their feet as to where they feel they are best suited to be," Chapman said.

The mass defections from the Heritage Foundation are part of the continuing fallout from president Kevin Roberts’s release, in October, of a clumsy video taking aim at critics of the podcast host Tucker Carlson, who had recently conducted a friendly interview with the neo-Nazi Nick Fuentes.

The new AAF hires include John Malcolm, who led the Heritage Foundation’s Meese Center for Legal and Judicial Studies and will lead the new Edwin Meese III Institute for the Rule of Law at AAF; Richard Stern, who directed Heritage’s economics center and will lead the Plymouth Center for Free Enterprise at AAF; and Kevin Dayaratna, who ran Heritage’s data analysis center and will build a similar program at his new institution.

...

Since Roberts released the video in late October, three Heritage Foundation board members—Princeton University professor Robert George, Abby Moffat, and Shane McCullar—have resigned. McCullar said he took issue with the fact that the think tank "hesitates to condemn antisemitism and hatred" and "gives a platform to those who spread them." George expressed frustration that Roberts "could not offer a full retraction" of his video statement.

Michael Starr at The Jerusalem Post:

During her Saturday show, Political commentator Candace Owens urged her audience to read a 19th-century antisemitic book and accused Jews of orchestrating the Transatlantic Slave Trade and racial conflict between Caucasian and African Americans.

The YouTube show episode focused on Owens's grievances with conservative pundit and Daily Wire co-founder Ben Shapiro, who had criticized her during his Thursday Turning Point USA AmericaFest conference speech.

AT WP, Jim Geraghty writes of Turning Point USA's year-end conference: 

The smiling faces of [Tucker] Carlson and [Megyn] Kelly were lined up on a poster for the conference alongside podcaster Ben Shapiro, longtime Trump ally Stephen K. Bannon and Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard. (I realize this is a quaint and old-fashioned notion, but currently serving U.S. intelligence officials should not be speaking at a partisan pep rally.)

On Thursday, as the conference kicked off, Shapiro decided to address the elephant in the room.

“If Candace Owens decides to spend every day since the murder of Charlie Kirk casting aspersions at TPUSA and the people who work here, who worked with Charlie every single day, his best friends … and, yes, at Erica Kirk and to imply or outright claim complicity in a cover-up over Charlie’s murder, to spew absolutely baseless trash implicating everyone from French intelligence to Mossad to members of TPUSA in Charlie’s murder or a cover-up in that murder, then we as people with a microphone have a moral obligation to call that out by name.”

...

On Thursday, as the conference kicked off, Shapiro decided to address the elephant in the room.

“If Candace Owens decides to spend every day since the murder of Charlie Kirk casting aspersions at TPUSA and the people who work here, who worked with Charlie every single day, his best friends … and, yes, at Erica Kirk and to imply or outright claim complicity in a cover-up over Charlie’s murder, to spew absolutely baseless trash implicating everyone from French intelligence to Mossad to members of TPUSA in Charlie’s murder or a cover-up in that murder, then we as people with a microphone have a moral obligation to call that out by name.”

....

For his part, Bannon bellowed, “Ben Shapiro is like a cancer and that cancer spreads.”

Trump's Duma

 Our new book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. The second Trump administration is off to an ominous start.

Josh Dawsey at WSJ:

Inside the White House, top advisers joke that they are ruling Congress with an “iron fist,” according to people who have heard the comments. Steve Bannon, the influential Trump ally, likened Congress to the Duma, the Russian assembly that is largely ceremonial. When senior White House aide Stephen Miller recently held a party at the exclusive Ned’s Club to celebrate his 40th birthday, House Speaker Mike Johnson (R., La.) showed up to honor Miller, the people said.

Bannon, who worked in the first Trump administration, attributed some of the faded resistance to Trump’s comeback after four years “in the wilderness,” a period that he said hardened Trump. “He’s doing things now he wouldn’t have ever considered the first time,” Bannon said. “He’s jackhammering away on levels you haven’t seen before.”

...

In Congress, some lawmakers privately didn’t want to name this year’s spending package the “Big Beautiful Bill,” but agreed to Trump’s demands. When he has called Republicans to tell them to vote for questionable nominees, they have largely acceded. Some GOP lawmakers who wanted to release the Jeffrey Epstein files backed down after getting calls from top Trump aides.

Members grew increasingly scared of being on Trump’s bad side after watching him successfully defeat so many senators and representatives in primaries, and watching him torpedo the speaker bid of Rep. Tom Emmer (R., Minn.) with a single post. He has demanded cuts that curbed Congress’s ability to regulate spending, cutting billions that Congress had already approved, to little outcry.

“People laying down their arms on the most jealously guarded power that Congress has tells you a lot about what people think their likelihood is of being successful in fighting back,” said Brendan Buck, a political strategist and onetime top aide who served under Speaker Paul Ryan.

 

Epsteingate

Our new book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. The second Trump administration is off to an ominous start. Its incompetence extends to current officials and nominees.

 Glenn Thrush at NYT:

The bitter blame game over the handling of the investigation into the disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein erupted in public on Friday between Attorney General Pam Bondi and the senior leadership of the F.B.I., particularly the bureau’s deputy director, Dan Bongino.

Ms. Bondi and her allies believe that Mr. Bongino, who parlayed a he-man image and promotion of conspiracies into a top law enforcement job, planted stories in the conservative news media blaming Ms. Bondi for the backlash after an announcement earlier this week that the Epstein case would be closed, according to officials close to the situation. The officials spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss conversations intended to be private.

It escalated into an angry face-to-face confrontation at the White House on Wednesday, when an irate Ms. Bondi accused Mr. Bongino of leaking information to the news media in the presence of the F.B.I. director, Kash Patel, the White House chief of staff Susie Wiles and one of her deputies, Taylor Budowich. Mr. Bongino denied it, they said.

...

On Friday, a high-profile Bongino booster — the far-right influencer and conspiracist Laura Loomer — claimed, in two dramatic social media posts, that the bureau’s deputy director had taken Friday off to collect his thoughts, and was “now seriously thinking about RESIGNING” over Ms. Bondi’s actions in the Epstein case.

A person close to Mr. Bongino did not dispute her characterization, describing him as very angry and considering a range of options, including quitting.

It would not be the first time Mr. Bongino, who has struggled to retain credibility with the right-wing base while overseeing the bureau’s day-to-day-operations, has suggested the pressures of the job were getting to him: “People ask all the time, ‘Do you like it?’ No. I don’t,” he told Fox News last month.

Ashleigh Fields at The Hill:

Former White House aide Steve Bannon suggested Friday that the GOP could lose dozens of House seats in the 2026 midterms over the Trump administration’s handling of files related to disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein.

“You’re going to lose 10 percent of the MAGA movement. If we lose 10 percent of the MAGA movement right now, we ain’t gonna … we’re gonna lose 40 seats in ’26,” he told a live audience during his “War Room” podcast. “We’re gonna lose the president.”

 

The New GOP

Our new book is titled Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics.  Among other things, it discusses the state of the parties. The state of the GOP is not good. Trump and his minions falsely claimed that he won the election, and have kept repeating the Big Lie. 

 At Axios, Jonathan Swan and Lachlan Markay write that Trump changed the GOP power structure.  He revealed that old organizations had little sway with primary voters.  New organizations do.

Who had the power:

• The U.S. Chamber of Commerce
• The NRA
• The Koch network
• Heritage Action
• The Drudge Report
• National Review
• Conservative movement groups such as Tea Party Express, FreedomWorks, and the Senate Conservatives Fund.

Who has power now:

• Donald Trump
• Tucker Carlson
• Family and former aides to Trump
• Fox News
• Club for Growth
• Daily Wire
• Breitbart News
• Online influencers including Candace Owens, Ben Shapiro, Dan Bongino, Joe Rogan, Jack Posobiec, Charlie Kirk and Marjorie Taylor-Greene.
• Steve Bannon
• Susan B. Anthony List

Trumpists Take Over the Precincts

Our new book is titled Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics. Among other things, it discusses the state of the parties. The state of the GOP is not good. Trump and his minions falsely claimed that he won the election, and have kept repeating the Big Lie. Now they are trying to take over state and local parties, where they can influence nominatios and challenge election results.

 Isaac Arnsdorf, Doug Bock Clark, Alexandra Berzon and Anjeanette Damon at ProPublica:

On his “War Room” podcast, which has tens of millions of downloads, Bannon said President Trump lost because the Republican Party sold him out. “This is your call to action,” Bannon said in February, a few weeks after Trump had pardoned him of federal fraud charges.

The solution, Bannon announced, was to seize control of the GOP from the bottom up. Listeners should flood into the lowest rung of the party structure: the precincts. “It’s going to be a fight, but this is a fight that must be won, we don’t have an option,” Bannon said on his show in May. “We’re going to take this back village by village … precinct by precinct.”

...

ProPublica contacted GOP leaders in 65 key counties, and 41 reported an unusual increase in signups since Bannon’s campaign began. At least 8,500 new Republican precinct officers (or equivalent lowest-level officials) joined those county parties. We also looked at equivalent Democratic posts and found no similar surge.

“I’ve never seen anything like this, people are coming out of the woodwork,” said J.C. Martin, the GOP chairman in Polk County, Florida, who has added 50 new committee members since January. Martin had wanted congressional Republicans to overturn the election on Jan. 6, and he welcomed this wave of like-minded newcomers. “The most recent time we saw this type of thing was the tea party, and this is way beyond it.”

The Tea Party Connections to the Insurrection

In Defying the Odds, we discuss Trump's dishonesty and his record of disregarding the rule of law.  Our next book, Divided We Stand, looks at the 2020 election and the January 6 insurrection.

Jim Rutenberg, Jo Becker, Eric Lipton, Maggie Haberman, Jonathan Martin, Matthew Rosenberg and Michael S. Schmidt at NYT:

The rally had been planned by Women for America First, which was quietly becoming the closest thing Mr. Trump had to a political organizing force, gathering his aggrieved supporters behind the lie of a stolen election.

The group’s founder, Amy Kremer, had been one of the original Tea Party organizers, building the movement through cross-country bus tours. She had been among the earliest Trump supporters, forming a group called Women Vote Trump along with Ann Stone, ex-wife of the longtime Trump adviser Roger Stone.

With donors including the Trump-affiliated America First Policies, Women for America First had rallied support for the Supreme Court nomination of Amy Coney Barrett and defended Mr. Trump during his first impeachment.

The group’s executive director was Ms. Kremer’s daughter, Kylie Jane Kremer, who recently worked on Sean Hannity’s radio show. Two organizers helping the effort, Jennifer Lawrence and Dustin Stockton, were close to Mr. Bannon, having worked at Breitbart and then at his nonprofit seeking private financing to help complete Mr. Trump’s border wall. (In August, federal prosecutors accused Mr. Bannon of defrauding the nonprofit’s donors, after an investigation that included a raid of Ms. Lawrence and Mr. Stockton’s motor home; they were not implicated, and Mr. Bannon, who pleaded not guilty, was later pardoned by the president.)

...

For the Kremers, Ms. Lawrence and Mr. Stockton, the instrument of that fight would be a reprise of the Tea Party Express, a bus tour to enlist state and federal lawmakers in Mr. Trump’s effort to keep states from certifying results ahead of the Electoral College vote. Equally important, it would be a megaphone to rally the dejected faithful.

...
The emcee of the Louisiana stop, the Tea Party activist James Lyle, announced that the next day’s event in Missouri was now going to be a thank-you — Senator Josh Hawley had just become the first senator to announce that he would object. “You’ve got to thank them when they do the right thing,” Mr. Lyle said.

...

And Mr. Stockton recently announced a new plan on his Facebook page: a “MAGA Sellout Tour.”“What we do now is we take note of the people who betrayed President Trump in Congress and we ge them out of Congress,” he said. “We’re going to make the Tea Party look tiny in comparison.”

Trump's Personnel Scandalabra

In  Defying the Odds, we discuss the people surrounding Trump.  (The update  -- recently published --includes a chapter on the 2018 midterms.)

The choice of servants is of no little importance to a prince, and they are good or not according to the discrimination of the prince. And the first opinion which one forms of a prince, and of his understanding, is by observing the men he has around him; and when they are capable and faithful he may always be considered wise, because he has known how to recognize the capable and to keep them faithful. But when they are otherwise one cannot form a good opinion of him, for the prime error which he made was in choosing them.

Unable to satisfy the public about his lenient deal, as a prosecutor, of pedophile Jeffrey Epstein, Alexander Acosta has quit as Labor Secretary.  At WP, Paul Waldman lists other Trump officials who had to quit:

• Michael Flynn, national security adviser (pleaded guilty to crimes)
• Sean Spicer, press secretary (terrible liar, became object of universal ridicule)
• Anthony Scaramucci, communications director (lasted 10 days)
• Steve Bannon, chief strategist (fired in White House shakeup)
• Tom Price, secretary of health and human services (had taste for private jets)
• Rex Tillerson, secretary of state (called Trump a “f---ing moron”)
• Brenda Fitzgerald, CDC director (bought and sold tobacco stocks while leading one of America’s chief health agencies)
• Scott Pruitt, EPA administrator (too many scandals to detail)
• Ryan Zinke, secretary of the interior (multiple mini-scandals)
• Kirstjen Nielsen, secretary of homeland security (combination of malice and incompetence)
• Patrick Shanahan, acting secretary of defense (bizarre domestic violence story)
• David Shulkin, secretary of veterans affairs (had government pay for European vacation)
• Rob Porter, White House staff secretary (accused of domestic abuse by both his ex-wives)
• David Sorenson, speechwriter (accused of domestic abuse by ex-wife)

Foreign Influence

 In  Defying the Odds, we discuss  Trump's record of scandal.

I found Bannon's tools.
Facebook ad tools, scrapers, targeting scripts, etc.
Federal authorities have it all now.
Smoking gun evidence involving foreign influence in US elections.
Reports going up momentarily at: https://t.co/nLj8P5DeaG and https://t.co/ZjfGvuXqsx pic.twitter.com/B9uPUHX0KZ

— Chris Vickery (@VickerySec) March 26, 2018

Craig Timberg and Tom Hamburger at WP:

Cambridge Analytica assigned dozens of non-U.S. citizens to provide campaign strategy and messaging advice to ­Republican candidates in 2014, according to three former workers for the data firm, even as an attorney warned executives to abide by U.S. laws limiting foreign involvement in elections.

The assignments came amid efforts to present the newly created company as “an American brand” that would appeal to U.S. political clients even though its parent, SCL Group, was based in London, according to former Cambridge Analytica research director Christopher Wylie.

Wylie, who emerged this month as a whistleblower, provided The Washington Post with documents that describe a program across several U.S. states to win campaigns for Republicans using psychological profiling to reach voters with individually tailored messages. The documents include previously unreported details about the program, which was called “Project Ripon” for the Wisconsin town where the Republican Party was born in 1854.

Bannon Endorsements Lose Value

In Defying the Odds, we discuss congressional elections as well as the presidential race.

Kevin Robillard at Politico:

After his ouster from the White House late last summer, Republican Senate candidates of all stripes sought the backing of the Breitbart chairman and his affiliated political group, the Great America Alliance. The thinking was that an endorsement from Bannon would provide an implicit Trump seal of approval, even if the president himself couldn’t or wouldn’t wade into a Republican primary battle.

But Trump’s evisceration of Bannon on Wednesday — after his former ally said in an upcoming book that Donald Trump Jr.’s meeting with Russian operatives was “treasonous” and “unpatriotic” — has freed GOP candidates who didn’t win Bannon’s backing to slam those who did as disloyal to the president. And at least one candidate who sought Bannon’s endorsement ended up attacking him.

Trump's statement:

Steve Bannon has nothing to do with me or my Presidency. When he was fired, he not only lost his job, he lost his mind. Steve was a staffer who worked for me after I had already won the nomination by defeating seventeen candidates, often described as the most talented field ever assembled in the Republican party.

Now that he is on his own, Steve is learning that winning isn’t as easy as I make it look. Steve had very little to do with our historic victory, which was delivered by the forgotten men and women of this country. Yet Steve had everything to do with the loss of a Senate seat in Alabama held for more than thirty years by Republicans. Steve doesn’t represent my base—he’s only in it for himself.

Steve pretends to be at war with the media, which he calls the opposition party, yet he spent his time at the White House leaking false information to the media to make himself seem far more important than he was. It is the only thing he does well. Steve was rarely in a one-on-one meeting with me and only pretends to have had influence to fool a few people with no access and no clue, whom he helped write phony books.

We have many great Republican members of Congress and candidates who are very supportive of the Make America Great Again agenda. Like me, they love the United States of America and are helping to finally take our country back and build it up, rather than simply seeking to burn it all down.

Bannon on the Trump Tower Meeting: Treasonous, Unpatriotic

In Defying the Odds, we discuss Russian involvement in the 2016 campaign.

At The Guardian, David Smith writes about Michael Wolff's new book, Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House.  Wolff spoke with Bannon.

He is particularly scathing about a June 2016 meeting involving Trump’s son Donald Jr, son-in-law Jared Kushner, then campaign chairman Paul Manafort and Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya at Trump Tower in New York. A trusted intermediary had promised documents that would “incriminate” rival Hillary Clinton but instead of alerting the FBI to a potential assault on American democracy by a foreign power, Trump Jr replied in an email: “I love it.”

The meeting was revealed by the New York Times in July last year, prompting Trump Jr to say no consequential material was produced. Soon after, Wolff writes, Bannon remarked mockingly: “The three senior guys in the campaign thought it was a good idea to meet with a foreign government inside Trump Tower in the conference room on the 25th floor – with no lawyers. They didn’t have any lawyers.

“Even if you thought that this was not treasonous, or unpatriotic, or bad shit, and I happen to think it’s all of that, you should have called the FBI immediately.”

Bannon went on, Wolff writes, to say that if any such meeting had to take place, it should have been set up “in a Holiday Inn in Manchester, New Hampshire, with your lawyers who meet with these people”. Any information, he said, could then be “dump[ed] … down to Breitbart or something like that, or maybe some other more legitimate publication”.

Bannon added: “You never see it, you never know it, because you don’t need to … But that’s the brain trust that they had.”

Bannon also speculated that Trump Jr had involved his father in the meeting. “The chance that Don Jr did not walk these jumos up to his father’s office on the twenty-sixth floor is zero.”

Nehlen

In Defying the Odds, we discuss Trump's relationship to bigotry.

Paul Nehlen, the alt-right guy and Bannon pal running again in a primary against Paul Ryan, has gone full Nazi.

#ShallNotCensor pic.twitter.com/lIDrrd14wt

— Paul Nehlen (@pnehlen) December 27, 2017

1/ You Need This Red Pill:

There is a construct that you are either support Jews or you are an antisemite.

That is incorrect.

You need to know a new term: philosemite (someone who is extremely in love with Jews)

— Paul Nehlen (@pnehlen) December 26, 2017

Allison Kaplan Sommer  at Haaretz:

Several other examples of Nehlen’s increasingly combative rhetoric and quest for “white nationalist street cred” were detailed in a recent HuffPost article. Huffpost reported: “On Dec. 8, Nehlen used Gab, a micro-blogging platform used primarily by white nationalists, to repost a drawing another user had made for him. The drawing showed a puny Ryan, seen as the anti-Trump, next to a buff 'Chad' Nehlen. (Chad is an alt-right term for a fit alpha-male womanizer). In the accompanying text, Nehlen is described as having redpilled on globalism, RR and JQ.”

Redpilled, a reference to the Matrix movie trilogy, is used to describe an awakening to white supremacist teachings. RR stands for race realism, and JQ stands for the Jewish question, the anti-Semitic conspiracy theory that Jews have undue influence over the media, banking and politics.

Trump, Bannon, and the GOP After Alabama

In Defying the Odds, we discuss congressional elections as well as the presidential race.   In Alabama, accused child molester Roy Moore ran for the Senate with the support of party-destroyer Steve Bannon and sexual harasser Donald Trump.

Lloyd Green at The Hill:

After Trump slut-shamed Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.) on Tuesday for having the temerity to call for his resignation over allegations of sexual harassment, early Wednesday morning Trump was busy disassociating himself from the stench of Moore’s humiliating defeat in a haze of deflection. To be precise, at 6:22 a.m. Eastern time, our commander-in-chief tweeted, “The reason I originally endorsed Luther Strange (and his numbers went up mightily), is that I said Roy Moore will not be able to win the General Election. I was right! Roy worked hard but the deck was stacked against him!”

Numbers went up mightily? Decked stacked him? Trump may as well have said that he was for the Iraq War before he was against it. Apparently, Trump forgot, no one forced him to back Moore. In the run-up to Tuesday, Richard Shelby, Alabama’s senior senator, announced that he would not vote for Moore, while Trump’s Attorney General Jeff Sessions and former senator, refused to say for whom he cast his ballot. The fact is that in a single cycle in a single state, Trump backed two losing candidates.
...
If Trump is the face of the Republican Party then Bannon is its soul, and therein lies the Republicans’ dilemma. In these polarized and polarizing times, the Republican base grows ever angrier, making the GOP primary playbook ever more likely morph into a roadmap for driving over a cliff come November. Whether the Republicans can do anything about that remains to be seen.

 Jones’s win is a reminder that running statewide is not the same thing as running for Congress but with more money and a louder megaphone. Rather, it is about speaking to a larger population with varied concerns. Nuance still matters, and being normal counts.

During the Obama years, the Democrats forgot these rules and saw their party get hollowed out, losing control of both houses of Congress as well as governorships and state legislatures aplenty. Hopefully, the Republicans will get a grip soon enough. Just don’t bet on it.

Philip Bump at WP:

 Using data from Pew Research and the Census Bureau, we put together this look in 2015 at how the country will change by 2050.

Older — but less white and, importantly, less religious. In other words, it will in significant ways look much less like the voters who supported Roy Moore than those who supported the Democrat, Doug Jones. Two-thirds of Jones’s support was nonwhite. Six-in-10 Jones voters were women. In fact, about a third of Jones’s support came from black women alone.

...

 Many Republican leaders have seen this demographic problem coming for a long time. They probably didn’t expect it to emerge so soon, and in Alabama. It’s not their party’s fault that it happened where and when it did, but it’s a reminder that it may start happening more and in more places.

One more word of warning for the GOP. Moore’s electorate was much less diverse than Trump’s — and even with that slightly-more-diverse electorate, Trump lost the national popular vote by millions of votes.

The Bannon Base

In Defying the Odds, we discuss changes in the major parties.

Lloyd Green writes at The Hill:

In 2012, two-thirds of Mitt Romney’s individual contributions came in the form of large donations. As for his backers, their top five employers were large banks: Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, Morgan Stanley, JPMorgan Chase and Wells Fargo, according to Open Secrets. Of Romney’s top five donor states, only Texas voted for him. At the same time, however, West Virginia was the state nearest to Wall Street that Romney won. As a practical matter, however, West Virginia may as well have been in a separate galaxy.

By contrast, small donors comprised an outsized portion of Trump’s campaign haul. In other words, Trump’s donors were his voters, and vice versa, and that nexus is not one that has escaped Bannon’s eyes. At Moore’s primary night party last month, Bannon hammered away at the fact that Moore was not graced by a deep bench of donors, and the reality is that Moore was outspent 10 to one.

Over the next 14 months, Corker stands to repeatedly stymie Trump. As a legislative body that relies upon consensus to function, a coalition of Democrats and renegade Republicans are poised to block Trump at every twist and turn. Yet that does not constitute party building, and for the moment it is Bannon who is keeping his eye on that prize.

After Las Vegas

In Defying the Odds, we discuss issues such as gun control

Mike Allen at Axios:

In a moment of such jarring tragedy, three sad but indisputable realities of America 2017 were exposed — and then amplified — within minutes of the shooting:

1. Our gun manufacturers are heavily incentivized by market demand and lax laws in most states, and by the federal government, to allow mad men to accumulate all the firepower they crave for mass killings. This didn't change after Columbine or Sandy Hook. And won't now.

2. President Trump and congressional Republican have every incentive to protect the status quo. Read and reflect on this chilling text from Steve Bannon to Axios last night. when asked if Trump will revert to his earlier support of gun control:

"Impossible: will be the end of everything," Bannon told Jonathan Swan.

When asked whether Trump's base would react worse to this than if he supported an immigration amnesty bill, Bannon replied: "as hard as it is to believe actually worse."

Go deeper: Why Trump is unlikely to do a Chuck-and-Nancy deal on gun control.

3. Yesterday, the same platforms the Russians used to manipulate voters were the middle men for B.S. conspiracy theories about Vegas.

Google results amplified an online claim that the shooter was "a Democrat who liked Rachel Maddow, MoveOn.org, and associated with the anti-Trump army," per CNN's Oliver Darcy.

"Facebook promoted several dubious websites on its Crisis Response page."

Be smart: Trump's election showed the capacity for an unconventional politician to beat the system. But the dynamics post-shooting are the same — and we would argue getting worse, because heartless people can use social media to spread lies and fear with such ease and precision.

Todd Akin, the 2017 Edition

In Defying the Odds, we discuss congressional elections as well as the presidential race.

On Friday, Trump gave an odd, rambling speech, nominally in support of appointed Senator Luther Strange in the Alabama runoff. Jonathan Martin at NYT:

“If Luther doesn’t win, they’re not going to say we picked up 25 points in a very short period of time, they’re going say, ‘Donald Trump, the president of the United States, was unable to pull his candidate across the line,’” he predicted to 7,500 Alabamians at a rally on Friday night as Mr. Strange looked on.

His blurting out of his political stage directions was a vintage moment of Trumpian indiscretion. But it also had the benefit of being accurate. The contest between Mr. Strange and Roy Moore, a former State Supreme Court justice and evangelical firebrand, is the most significant test yet of the president’s power to sway the party’s conservative base.

...
“If Roy Moore wins, Bannon and all the other of those people will pop out of the woodwork everywhere,” said Senator Richard C. Shelby, the veteran Alabama Republican, referring to the former Trump adviser Stephen K. Bannon, who has taken a leading role against the preferred candidate of his former boss. 

Moore was removed from the bench for defying a court order to take down the Ten Commandments from the State Supreme Court.  In the past, he supported banning homosexual acts.

It is the sort of message that terrifies Republican elites, who fear he could be a more weaponized version of Todd Akin, the 2012 Missouri Senate candidate who lost after saying women’s bodies could block a pregnancy in cases of “legitimate rape.”

“Roy Moore would be the Todd Akin of 2017 and 2018 for every Republican on the ballot,” said Karl Rove, the Republican strategist, who is aligned with the Senate Leadership Fund. “Republicans will be asked, ‘Do you agree homosexuality should be punished by death, do you believe 9/11 was a result of God’s anger?’ He’ll say outrageous things, the media will play it up, and every Republican will be asked, ‘Do you agree with that?’”

...
 “I think they’ll go after that seat,” Mr. Shelby said of the Democrats’ approach should Mr. Moore win on Tuesday. That is less likely if Mr. Strange captures the nomination, he said. “If Luther wins, he’s in.”

The Senate Democratic campaign arm has lined up a pollster to test Mr. Jones’s strengths and Mr. Moore’s vulnerabilities. And Alabama Democrats are openly rooting for the former judge.

 “We want Roy Moore to win that primary,” said Patricia Todd, a Democratic state representative from Birmingham. “He gives us a better shot in the general election.”

Incompetence Update

In Defying the Odds, we discuss Trump's approach to governing.

Bannon is gone. Kelly is in place, for now.  and chaos reigns.

At The Washington Post, James Pfiffner writes:

[C]onsider Trump’s efforts to repeal and/or replace the Affordable Care Act, which first failed to make it through the House before a second attempt passed, and then failed twice to pass the Senate. In urging Congress to act, Trump changed his position at least five times. The shifting positions and responsibility showed the lack of a coherent approach to policy and an inability to coordinate with Republicans in Congress.

Many other White House misfires reveal general dysfunction. Trump’s skeptical attitude toward NATO was opposed by his vice president and his national security team of McMaster, Mattis and Tillerson. In his Oval Office meeting with Russian diplomats, Trump revealed sensitive intelligence received from Israel. Trump wanted to dump the nuclear deal with Iran, but Mattis, Tillerson and McMaster disagreed. Trump’s tweets declaring a ban on transgender service members caught the Pentagon by surprise. Trump did not discuss his Aug. 8 threat that North Korea would be met “with fire and fury” with Mattis, Tillerson, McMaster or Kelly. After Tillerson said that Americans should “have no concerns about … the rhetoric of the past few days,” Trump tweeted that U.S. forces were “locked and loaded.”

These disconnects between Trump, his White House staff and Cabinet members seem to validate Republican Sen. Lindsey O. Graham’s quip to The Washington Post: “I don’t believe Trump colluded with the Russians, because I don’t believe he colludes with his own staff.”

Bannon Out

Daily Beast:

He’s out.

Late this week, President Donald Trump began telling senior staffers and outside confidants that he intended to sack Steve Bannon, the nationalist firebrand and White House chief strategist who helped steer Trump’s chaotic presidential campaign to victory.

Two Trump administration officials told The Daily Beast on Friday that the president has said that he wanted Bannon “out” and “gone” this week.

On Friday afternoon, they made it official, with chief of staff John Kelly informing Bannon of the change in direction.

senior WH official on effect of Bannon's departure: "Not much. Most people wondered what he did beside leak in unending defense of himself"

— John Harwood (@JohnJHarwood) August 18, 2017

In 2012, Donald Trump offered these musings on White House personnel changes. pic.twitter.com/sTcEtfOtMu

— Sahil Kapur (@sahilkapur) August 18, 2017

If you're interested, I speak about my years of covering Bannon in this @FrontlinePBS documentary. https://t.co/5qgSapa5ox

— Robert Costa (@costareports) August 18, 2017

Bannon Speaks

Bannon spoke to Robert Kuttner of The American Prospect, then made the ridiculous claim that he didn't know it was an interview.

Contrary to Trump’s threat of fire and fury, Bannon said: “There’s no military solution [to North Korea’s nuclear threats], forget it. Until somebody solves the part of the equation that shows me that ten million people in Seoul don’t die in the first 30 minutes from conventional weapons, I don’t know what you’re talking about, there’s no military solution here, they got us.” Bannon went on to describe his battle inside the administration to take a harder line on China trade, and not to fall into a trap of wishful thinking in which complaints against China’s trade practices now had to take a backseat to the hope that China, as honest broker, would help restrain Kim.

“To me,” Bannon said, “the economic war with China is everything. And we have to be maniacally focused on that. If we continue to lose it, we're five years away, I think, ten years at the most, of hitting an inflection point from which we'll never be able to recover.”

Bannon scoffs at officials who disagree.

“Oh, they’re wetting themselves,” he said, explaining that the Section 301 complaint, which was put on hold when the war of threats with North Korea broke out, was shelved only temporarily, and will be revived in three weeks. As for other cabinet departments, Bannon has big plans to marginalize their influence.

“I’m changing out people at East Asian Defense; I’m getting hawks in. I’m getting Susan Thornton [acting head of East Asian and Pacific Affairs] out at State.”

Bernie Is Popular, Bannon Is Not

In Defying the Odds, we discuss the improbable presidential candidacy of Bernie Sanders.

Jonathan Easley reports at The Hill:

Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders (I) is the country’s most popular active politician, underscoring his importance to the Democratic Party as it seeks to rebuild in the wake of a disastrous 2016 election cycle.

Sanders is viewed favorably by 57 percent of registered voters, according to data from a Harvard-Harris survey provided exclusively to The Hill. Sanders is the only person in a field of 16 Trump administration officials or congressional leaders included in the survey who is viewed favorably by a majority of those polled.

White House chief strategist Stephen Bannon is far and away the least popular political figure in the poll, with only 16 percent viewing him favorably, compared with 45 percent having a negative view of him.

The White House Is Incompetent at Dealing with Congress

Mike Allen reports at Axios:

When the balky hardliners of the House Freedom Caucus visited the White House earlier this week, this was Steve Bannon's opening line, according to people in the conference room in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building: 

"Guys, look. This is not a discussion. This is not a debate. You have no choice but to vote for this bill." 

Bannon's point was: This is the Republican platform. You're the conservative wing of the Republican Party. But people in the room were put off by the dictatorial mindset. 

One of the members replied: "You know, the last time someone ordered me to something, I was 18 years old. And it was my daddy. And I didn't listen to him, either."

Tim Alberta reports at Politico about Trump's Thursday meeting with the Freedom Caucus

"Forget about the little shit," Trump said, according to multiple sources in the room. "Let's focus on the big picture here." 

The group of roughly 30 House conservatives, gathered around a mammoth, oval-shaped conference table in the Cabinet Room of the White House, exchanged disapproving looks. Trump wanted to emphasize the political ramifications of the bill's defeat; specifically, he said, it would derail his first-term agenda and imperil his prospects for reelection in 2020. The lawmakers nodded and said they understood. And yet they were disturbed by his dismissiveness. For many of the members, the "little shit" meant the policy details that could make or break their support for the bill—and have far-reaching implications for their constituents and the country. 

"We’re talking about one-fifth of our economy," a member told me afterward

On Tuesday, Trump spoke to the entire GOP Conference

Then Trump made a mistake. After singling out Meadows and asking him to stand up in front of his colleagues, Trump joked that he might "come after" the Freedom Caucus boss if he didn't vote yes, and then added, with a more serious tone: "I think Mark Meadows will get on board

It was a crucial misreading of Meadows, who has been determined to please both the White House and his conservatives colleagues on the Hill. Upon assuming the chairmanship of the Freedom Caucus earlier this year, Meadows was viewed suspiciously by some of his members who worried that the North Carolina congressman is too cozy with Trump and would hesitate to defy him. Meadows campaigned extensively with Trump last fall and struck up a relationship with White House chief strategist Steve Bannon, who communicates with him almost daily by text. Meadows knew the health care fight would be viewed as a test of his independence from Trump, and the moment the president called him out, he was boxed in.