Trump – Sheila Kennedy

Don’t Confuse Me With Facts!!

During a recent get-together, discussion turned to a predictable topic: what on earth explains support for Donald Trump? How can (presumably rational) citizens look at this obviously mentally-ill buffoon spouting bizarre word-salads and facing 92 indictments, and come away thinking “Yep, that’s the guy I want to put in charge of the nuclear codes”?

A recent essay on a seemingly unrelated issue may point to at least a partial answer.

In an article about recent efforts to revitalize local news media, Doron Taussig of the Columbia Journalism Review reported that Republicans are as mistrusting of local news outlets as they are of national media outlets.

She began by citing arguments from proponents of local news asserting that– while national media sources are increasingly seen as partisan– local news enjoys widespread trust. “After all, what do high school sports and Girl Scouts building a sensory garden for shelter dogs have to do with Joe Biden and Donald Trump?”

The data doesn’t support that argument.

But if money and energy are going to be poured into local news with the assumption that local journalists are and will remain trusted across partisan lines, we’re going to be in for an unpleasant surprise. Yes, polling shows that local news is more trusted across the political spectrum than national news, but only 29 percent of Republicans surveyed by Gallup in 2021 said they trusted their local news, down from 34 percent in 2019. This is consistent with what I’ve heard from journalists who work for local outlets (mostly but not exclusively in Pennsylvania) and conservatives who read or have stopped reading them. In fact, the striking thing when you examine the relationship between local news and conservative audiences is that, in spite of all the differences between the Bucks County Courier Times and the New York Times, their alienation from conservatives sounds dishearteningly similar.

It would seem that MAGA Republicans have adopted Earl Landgrebe’s infamous position, uttered during the Watergate hearings: “Don’t confuse me with the facts, my mind’s made up.” He went on to say “I’m going to stick with my President even if he and I have to be taken out of this building and shot.” (The next day, Nixon resigned.) (Landgrebe was, sadly, a product of Indiana, a state that’s been described as so Red, voters will elect a rutabaga if it has an “R” next to its name.)

Clearly, in order to continue supporting Donald Trump, it’s prudent to shield oneself from information, facts, and reality.

That allergy to inconvenient information, however, has multiple negative consequences–and those consequences aren’t limited to ongoing support for a lunatic would-be autocrat. People who refuse to engage with probative information are ripe targets for propaganda, as Heather Cox Richardson recently reported.

Richardson cited a Washington Post article on a secret 2023 document from Russia’s Foreign Ministry calling for an “offensive information campaign” and other measures that attack “‘a coalition of unfriendly countries’ led by the United States.”

Those measures are designed to affect “the military-political, economic and trade and informational psychological spheres” of Russia’s perceived adversaries.

The plan is to weaken the United States and convince other countries, particularly those in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, that the U.S. will not stand by its allies. By weakening those alliances, Russian leaders hope to shift global power by strengthening Russia’s ties to China, Iran, and North Korea and filling the vacuum left by the crumbling democratic alliances (although it is not at all clear that China is on board with this plan).

Russian propaganda aims to bolster the most isolationist right-wing and extremist forces in America, “to increase tensions between the U.S. and China over Taiwan,” and “escalate the situation in the Middle East around Israel, Iran and Syria to distract the U.S. with the problems of this region.”

That effort has been particularly successful with the looney-tunes GOP flank elected to the House thanks to gerrymandering. As Richardson reports:

Earlier this month, both Representative Michael R. Turner (R-OH), chair of the House Intelligence Committee, and Representative Michael McCaul (R-TX), chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, warned about Russian disinformation in their party. Turner told CNN’s State of the Union that it is “absolutely true” that Republican members of Congress are parroting Russian propaganda. “We see directly coming from Russia attempts to mask communications that are anti-Ukraine and pro-Russia messages, some of which we even hear being uttered on the House floor.” When asked which Republicans had fallen to Russian propaganda, McCaul answered that it is “obvious.”

What it takes to support Trump, echo his “Big Lie,” and parrot Russian propaganda is chosen ignorance–a rejection of all contrary information by folks who don’t want to be confused by the facts.

There are a lot of them.

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Why Does Anyone Support This Buffoon?

I don’t get it.

Read a recent, snarky Dana Milbank column in the Washington Post. It began with a visit to Trump-speak–a language bearing less and less relationship to American English.

The Very Stable Genius is glitching again.

This week, he announced that he is not — repeat, NOT — planning to repeal the Affordable Care Act. He apparently forgot that he had vowed over and over again to do exactly that, saying as recently as a few months ago that Republicans “should never give up” on efforts to “terminate” Obamacare.

“I’m not running to terminate the ACA, AS CROOKED JOE BUDEN DISINFORMATES AND MISINFORMATES ALL THE TIME,” the Republican nominee wrote this week on his Truth Social platform. Rather, he said, he wants to make Obamacare better for “OUR GREST AMERICAN CITIZENS.”

Joe Buden disinformates and misinformates? For a guy trying to make an issue of his opponent’s mental acuity, this was not, shall we say, a grest look.

Milbank offered some additional examples of Trump-speak: “We’ll bring crime back to law and order,” “We just had Super Tuesday, and we had a Tuesday after a Tuesday already,” and “You can’t have an election in the middle of a political season.”

Whenever I am reminded of Trump’s intellectual lapses and/or his inability to use the English language, I marvel that this is the guy MAGA folks think should control the nuclear codes….

Much of Milbank’s column was focused on Trump’s selective memory. When he recently recited the time-honored political question “are you better off now than you were four years ago?” Milbank theorized that he’d “forgotten all about the economic collapse and his administration’s catastrophic bungling of the pandemic.”

As the Supreme Court was hearing arguments about banning the abortion pill, Trump also conveniently “forgot” his previous emphatic support for that ban, and his proposal to ban it fortuitously disappeared from his web site. Given that polling shows some 7 in 10 Americans opposed to such a ban, the Heritage Foundation also experienced a website “glitch” that conveniently obscured that part of the Foundation’s Plan for 2025.

As Milbank wrote,

The Heritage Foundation-run Project 2025, to which Trump has unofficially outsourced policymaking for a second term, said that a “glitch” had caused its policies — including those embracing a mifepristone ban — to disappear from its website. The Biden campaign said it was “calling BS on Trump and his allies’ shameless attempt to hide their agenda,” and the missing documents returned — including the language calling abortion pills “the single greatest threat to unborn children” and vowing to withdraw regulatory approval for the drugs.

Evidently, the House Republicans didn’t get the polling memo.

The extremism isn’t just at Project 2025, stocked with former Trump advisers. The House Republican Study Committee, which counts 80 percent of House Republicans as members, put out a budget last week that would rescind approval of mifepristone, dismantle the “failed Obamacare experiment” and embrace a nationwide abortion ban from the moment of conception.

Sometimes its a convenient loss of memory; other times, it’s obvious mental illness compounded by jaw-dropping ignorance. Take Trump’s “explanation” of why Truth Social’s stock wasn’t listed on the New York Stock Exchange:

He said he didn’t list the company on the New York Stock Exchange because it would be “treated too badly in New York” by Democratic officeholders. So he instead listed the company on Nasdaq, which is based in … New York. Trump said the “top person” at the NYSE “is mortified. … He said, ‘I’m losing business.’ ” As CNN pointed out, neither the president nor the chair of the exchange is a “he.”

Then there’s the most recent grift: selling bibles.

Trump is getting kickbacks for selling the Gospel — marketing God the same way he sold Trump-branded “Never Surrender High-Tops” sneakers last month for $399 a pair and, before that, digital trading cards showing Trump as a superhero.

“All Americans need a Bible in their home, and I have many. It’s my favorite book,” Trump said in the video promoting his new bible hustle.

Trump’s campaign shows a video at rallies announcing that “God Gave us Trump,” and he has called himself “the chosen one.” He’s shared a post calling him “the second greatest” after Jesus. And Milbank reports that Trump recently posted a verse from Psalms, topped by a message likening Trump’s suffering in the fraud case to the Crucifixion.

There’s much, much more–but it all begs the question: who in their right mind looks at this pathetic sociopath with his limited (and rapidly declining) intellect and his God complex and says “yes, that’s my guy!”? Is giving his supporters permission to express their racism and hostility to “elitists” really enough to outweigh the daily evidence of his manifest unfitness?

I don’t get it.

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The Best People…

Sometimes, seeing information compiled–even if you’ve come across most of it scattered over various places–makes an impact that the same information didn’t make when you encounter it piecemeal. At least, that was my reaction when I visited the blog of a reader named Dr. Chris Lamb.

I don’t know Dr. Lamb personally, but I was–and am– impressed with the sheer amount of work he did in researching Donald Trump’s “best people.” We all remember the boasts–Trump was going to hire only the “best people.” He was going to consult and use those “best people” to remake the federal government–i.e., destroy the imagined “deep state” and “drain the swamp.” We also remember how that turned out; the people who actually were competent quickly left, and a fair number of those who were venal or simply ignorant of the functions they were placed in charge of also left–and then turned on him by sharing anecdotes about his appalling behaviors.

Lamb’s list is introduced as follows:

Three years ago, after President Donald Trump left the White House, I began chronicling the names of the people who were complicit in the worst presidency in a century and what might be most corrupt presidential administration in history.

I’ve compiled 300 names (so far) for the blog,

Only the Best People: The criminals, sycophants, bigots, swindlers, liars, demagogues, pedophiles, pornographers, imbeciles, lunatics, bullies, misogynists, parasites, plagiarists, perjurers, extortionists, traitors, conspiracy junkies, and other deviants who contributed to the Trump presidency.

The following is a list of names on the blog accompanied by brief summaries of each post.

You can click a link to each person to read brief bios that run in length from 100 to 2,000 words. Each post is accompanied by links to the sources of my information.

I am going to cut today’s post short, in hopes that you will use the time saved to visit Lamb’s blog–and see, in one place, the cesspool that was Trump’s “best people.” If nothing else, it will remind you why it is so critical to keep this mentally-ill mob boss and his abysmal gang far away from the levers of power.

(When you do click through, be patient. The site takes a couple of minutes to load.)

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A Moment Of Clarity

I have previously cited and linked to Heather Cox Richardson’s daily Letters from an American, but a recent one deserves more than a passing mention. In it, Richardson does a masterful job of clarifying the stakes of November’s election.

She begins by reminding us of the events leading up to the choice we will face, reminding readers that–once it had become clear Trump had lost the 2020 election– he’d given up “all pretense of normal presidential behavior.” Not only did he try to overturn the election, ignoring the will of the voters, “his attack on the fundamental principle of democracy ended the tradition of the peaceful transfer of power established in 1797 when our first president, George Washington, deliberately walked behind his successor, John Adams, after Adams was sworn into office.”

Trump has continued to push the Big Lie, and his loyalists in the states have embraced that lie, undermining faith in our electoral system. His theft of enormous amounts of classified materials has compromised national security.

We know all this, although the recitation/reminder is important. But–as historians like Richardson are well aware–past is truly prologue.

Trump is not the same as he was in 2020, and in the past three years he has transformed the Republican Party into a vehicle for Christian nationalism.

In 2016 the Republican Party was still dominated by leaders who promoted supply-side economics. They were determined to use the government to cut taxes and regulations to concentrate money and power among a few individuals, who would, theoretically, use that money and power to invest in the economy far more efficiently than they could if the government intervened. Before 2016 that Reaganesque party had stayed in office thanks to the votes of a base interested in advancing patriarchal, racist, and religious values.

But Trump flipped the power structure in the party, giving control to the reactionary base. In the years since 2020, the Republican Party has become openly opposed to democracy, embracing the Christian nationalism of leaders like Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, who maintains that the tenets of democracy weaken a nation by giving immigrants, people of color, LGBTQ+ individuals, and women the same rights as heterosexual, native-born white men.

Richardson then underscores what most of us who follow politics know–that today’s GOP looks absolutely nothing like the Republican party of the past.

Rather than calling for a small federal government that stays out of the way of market forces, as Republicans have advocated since 1980, the new Trump Party calls for a strong government that enforces religious rules and bans abortion; books; diversity, equity, and inclusion programs; and so on. In 2022, thanks to the three extremists Trump put on the Supreme Court, the government ceased to recognize a constitutional right that Americans had enjoyed since the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision: the right to abortion.

The far-right Trumpers have paralyzed the House of Representatives.

Republican members who actually want to pass laws are either leaving or declining to run for reelection. The conference has become so toxic that fewer than 100 members agreed to attend their annual retreat that began today. “I’d rather sit down with Hannibal Lecter and eat my own liver,” a Republican member of Congress told Juliegrace Brufke of Axios.

Richardson ticks off some of the actions Trump has promised if he wins in November: purging the nonpartisan civil service created in 1883, in order to replace career employees with Trump loyalists; weaponizing the Department of Justice and the Department of Defense; rounding up 10 million people– “not just undocumented immigrants and asylum seekers but also those with birthright citizenship,” and putting them in camps, ignoring a “right that has been enshrined in the Constitution since 1868;” cutting Social Security and Medicare; and being a “dictator on Day One.”

She then enumerates many of the achievements of the Biden Administration, drawing a stark contrast between an incredibly consequential President who has worked within the traditions of this country and an autocratic madman.

Every American following the news can probably point to policies of the Biden administration with which they disagree. That’s par for the course in every administration. Liz Cheney probably said it best: we can survive what we consider bad policy, we cannot survive a president who torches the Constitution.

It is incredibly disheartening to realize that millions of our fellow-Americans harbor resentments and hatreds that this repulsive buffoon has exploited–grievances for which he serves as a vehicle. But I refuse to believe that those angry and limited people represent anything close to a majority. If they did, Republicans wouldn’t be so frantic to suppress the vote.

Click through, read Richardson’s entire Letter–and VOTE as if your life depended upon it, because in a very real sense, it does.

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Polls, Political Realities, And The New York Times

During a recent lunch with my sister and a good friend, the topic (unsurprisingly) turned to politics. The three of us are, as the kids used to say, “in sync,” so it was more a session of “who in the world looks at Donald Trump and sees someone presidential?” But at the end, my sister voiced what has become a common complaint-cum-question: what is going on at the New York Times?

We’ve all noticed it; the Times seems intent upon highlighting anything that could be considered negative about the Biden campaign, while essentially ignoring Trump’s increasing dementia. When I say we’ve all noticed it, I have evidence; the day after our lunch, both Robert Hubbell’s newsletter and Josh Marshall in Talking Points Memo addressed the Time’s obvious bias.

Hubbell’s analysis was well worth reading.

He began by addressing the Times-sponsored poll that showed Biden currently trailing Trump. “The Times covered its own poll as front-page news for three days, ignoring three other polls from reputable organizations that showed Biden leading (slightly in one poll) or tied (in two polls).”

If the Times mentioned the three recent polls that contradicted the breathless coverage of its poll, I can’t find that story. What I can find is another front-page story about Joe Biden’s age. (NYTimes: Amid Age Concerns, the White House Tries a New Strategy: Let Joe Be Joe.) At the New York Times, “No news is good news”—because if there is good news about Biden, it’s not news at the Times.

Hubbell then reported on Trump’s most recent word-salad.

The gratuitous dig at Biden’s age was published on Super Tuesday—and after a weekend during which Trump melted into incoherence while he promoted anti-immigrant hate and election denialism, called the country of Argentina “a great guy,” was defeated in his attempt to pronounce “Venezuela,” confused former President Obama and current President Biden, and asked the crowd to look at the back of his head because “I am like an artist.” (See Newsweek, Donald Trump’s String of Gaffes Over Weekend Raises Eyebrows.)

Calling those statements “gaffes” should be considered a campaign contribution.

As Hubbell reported, the Times’ bias has become so noticeable, it is prompting coverage by other media outlets. He also shared an observation by another Substack author to the effect that polls are manufactured news events and shouldn’t be considered “news events” at all–that Journalists “should not be in the business of creating news, especially in ways that they have the power to control.”

Hubbell quotes a commentary from Salon, There is something wrong at the New York Times | Salon.com

Two things…check that…three things appear to have gone off the rails at the paper we used to call the Gray Lady. First, whoever is in charge of the paper’s polls is not doing their job. Second, whoever is choosing what to emphasize in the Times coverage of the campaign for the presidency is showing bias. Third, the Times is obsessed with Joe Biden’s age at the same time they’re leaving evidence of Donald Trump’s mental and verbal stumbles completely out of the news.

Hubbell noted that he’d watched Trump’s Super Tuesday victory speech, and that (in addition to appearing sedated) he was rambling, confused, and detached from reality.

Trump repeated an internet rumor that Biden “flew in 325,000 immigrants” into our country (a grotesque misrepresentation of how the CPB processes asylum applicants fleeing their home country). He descended into incomprehensible comments about Venezuelan oil being “tar” that is refined in the US and “goes up into the air” (complete with whirly-gig hand gestures). He repeated a dozen easily disprovable lies. Even though Melania was noticeably absent, he thanked his ”family” for being present.

Finally, Hubbell turned his attention to the polling, and shared numbers showing that Trump has continued to significantly under-perform FiveThirtyEight.com’s averages. In Virginia, he underperformed by 20 points, in Tennessee, by 10, Massachusetts by 14.

Many states did not have enough polls to qualify for a FiveThirtyEight average, but in Vermont, the most recent poll had Trump winning by 30%. In fact, Haley won by 4%, an underperformance by Trump of -34.

Trump over-performed in one state—North Carolina—by +5.

Like my sister, and many of you, I have been frustrated–and worried–by the mainstream media’s coverage of the polling and the candidates.

In the wake of Super Tuesday, Americans are facing an almost-certain choice between two candidates, both of whom are older than the candidates we’re used to. One of those candidates is a good, decent man who has drawn on his experience and wisdom to power a transformational–and very much under-rated–Presidency. The other is a morally-repulsive, intellectually-vacant ignoramus rapidly descending into dementia.

That’s the choice. The New York Times isn’t covering it.

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