Bess Levin: That Sound You Hear Is Donald Trump Screaming, Crying, and Throwing Up in a Mar-a-Lago Bathroom

A lot of money is going to legal and people who don’t do much, and not a lot is left over to do marketing and advertising, said one Trump adviser, who like others spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal plans. A lot of the money we’re raising is just going to legal.

And if you’re thinking perhaps Trump was chipping in at least a little bit of his own money for his legal fees, think again. According to the Post, the former guy is not relying on his personal fortune to cover his legal bills. (You expected Trump pay for this s--t out of pocket like some kind of commoner? C’mon now.) https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2023/07/donald-trump-fulton-county-racketeering-documents-trial-date

Jonathan Last: For Republicans, the time to ditch Trump is always tomorrow.

This country is going down the road of criminalizing political differences. I think that’s wrong. . . .

And so you have a situation where the Department of Justice, FBI had been weaponized against people they don’t like . . . And so what I’ve said, as president, my job is to restore a single standard of justice to end weaponization of these agencies.

We’re going to have a new FBI director on day one; we’re going to have big changes at the Department of Justice. . .

I hope he doesn’t get charged.

So where McConnell refused to convict on impeachment because he trusted the justice system to pursue Trump, DeSantis now attacks the justice system for indicting Trump—even going so far as to promise that he will fire the Trump-appointed, non-partisan director of the FBI in retaliation for the justice system doing what McConnell promised Americans it would do.. https://thetriad.thebulwark.com/p/a-lesson-about-pain-and-power

Molly Jong-Fast: Is the Sheer Stupidity of Republican Politics Breaking Through?

House Republicans have collectively lost their minds.

You’d think that House Republicans might have slowed their roll after the man they pushed as their star whistleblower against Hunter Biden, Gal Luft—an Israeli-American dual citizen who claimed to have compromising information on President Joe Biden and his son—was charged with serious crimes last November. Or especially when, per the recently unsealed indictment, it became clear that those crimes included being an unregistered foreign agent for China, trafficking arms, breaking international sanctions, and making false statements to federal officials. (According to the DOJ, Luft faces a maximum of 100 years in prison. Luft, who the DOJ now considers a fugitive, has previously chalked up the charges to political persecution.)

But no, House Republicans have not skipped a beat in their relentless hunt for a smoking gun on the Bidens. Instead, charging full speed ahead in defense of their missing whistleblower during last week’s ultra-mortifying House Judiciary Oversight hearing, a furious-looking and jacketless Jim Jordan accused the FBI of suppress[ing] American speech, of course, conservative speech in particular. I find it stunning. Stunning is a word for it.

Perhaps more stunning is that this particular MAGA caucus seems completely immune to both shame and common sense. Typically the Speaker of the House sets a party’s agenda in Congress. But there is no functional leader of the House Republican Party. Instead, it’s made up of an ensemble cast of chaos agents providing a comedy of errors each week Congress is in session.

Some of this abject embarrassment surely could have been prevented if House Speaker Kevin McCarthy had control over his caucus. For example, few—except for, perhaps, Democrats—benefited from hearing Wyoming congresswoman and election denier Harriet Hageman accuse lifelong Republican and Donald Trump–appointed FBI director Christopher Wray of having personally worked to weaponize the FBI against conservatives. Wray reminded the clown car of his résumé. The idea that I’m biased against conservatives seems somewhat insane to me, given my own personal background, he said. And that wasn’t even the most embarrassing moment from the hearing; Florida Republican Matt Gaetz accused Wray of being blissfully ignorant as to the Biden shakedown regime and claimed that people trusted the FBI more when J. Edgar Hoover was running the place (to which Wray said there’s been a sharp increase in Floridians applying to the FBI). Representative Troy Nehls even brought up the right-wing conspiracy theory that somehow January 6 rioter Ray Epps was working for the FBI to discredit Trump. Epps is currently suing Fox News after former host Tucker Carlson spread this conspiracy theory.

Republicans ended last week with the passage of a defense budget bill, which according to The New York Times, would limit abortion access, transgender care and diversity training for military personnel. In other words, it was littered with partisan poison pills, each representing another Republican dog whistle and passed 219 to 210 on partisan lines.

McCarthy continues to enable the madness. Now it’s just up to Democrats to ensure Americans know just how much more this could spiral out of control if Republicans actually controlled all of government. https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2023/07/sheer-stupidity-of-republican-politics

Eric Lutz: Ron DeSantis's Florida Board of Education: Hey, What About the Personal Benefit of Being a Slave?

Ron DeSantis’s war on wokeness in schools ascended to dangerous new heights Wednesday, as Florida’s State Board of Education approved new African American studies curriculum standards that, among other things, would force public school students to learn about some of the supposed upsides of slavery — a whitewashing of history that the state’s largest teachers union decried as a big step backward for education.

The new rules approved Wednesday, which require teachers— in a section on slavery— to note that slaves developed skills, which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit. In a section on Reconstruction and beyond, a period marked by Jim Crow and routine white terrorism on Black communities, the new rules dictate that students must be taught about acts of violence perpetrated against and by African Americans, which, as Democratic State Senator Geraldine Thompson pointed out, suggests incidents like the Ocoee Massacre were sparked by violence from African Americans.

That’s blaming the victims, said Thompson, who, as The Washington Post notes, helped pass a 2020 law requiring Florida schools to teach about the 1920 massacre, in which a white mob killed dozens of Black residents of Ocoee, Florida, in Election Day violence. (Manny Diaz, Florida's education commissioner, praised the changes, saying that this is something that is going to set the norm for standards in other states.)

DeSantis, of course, shows no sign of stopping: His relentless culture war helped lift him to national prominence, and he has made it his central — nay, his only — pitch to GOP voters in his sputtering presidential campaign. We’ve made the state of Florida the place where woke goes to die, he said at a recent campaign event. And now, it is our mission as Americans to ensure that in January 2025…we leave woke ideology in the dustbin of history where it belongs. https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2023/07/florida-african-american-studies-lgbtq-curriculum-change

Maureen Dowd: The Moment of Truth for Our Liar in Chief

A man is running to run the government he tried to overthrow while he was running it, even as he is running to stay ahead of the law.

That sounds loony, except in the topsy-turvy world of Donald Trump, where it has a grotesque logic.

The question now is: Has Trump finally run out of time, thanks to Special Counsel Jack Smith, who runs marathons as an Ironman triathlete? Are those ever-loving walls really closing in this time?

Trump has been denouncing Jack Smith as a deranged prosecutor and a nasty, horrible human being. Trump has been zigzagging his whole life and now, unbelievably, he’s trying to zigzag back into the White House, seemingly intent on burning down the federal government and exacting revenge on virtually everyone.

So it will be interesting to see what the top lawyer with the severe expression makes of the bombastic dissembler. Smith seems like a no-nonsense dude who works at his desk through lunch from Subway while Trump is, of course, all nonsense, all the time.

Smith has a herculean task before him. He must present a persuasive narrative that Trump and his henchmen and women (yes, you, Ginni Thomas) were determined to pull off a coup.

His letter telling Trump he’s a target of the Jan. 6 investigation reportedly does not mention sedition or insurrection, which leaves people wondering exactly what Trump will be charged with.

Of all the legal troubles Trump faces, this is the case that makes us breathe, Finally, as Susan Glasser put it in The New Yorker. It is, as she wrote, the heart of the matter.

Trump ultimately might not be charged with staging an insurrection or sedition. And that would be a shame. For the first time, a president who lost an election nakedly attempted to hold onto power and override the votes of millions of Americans.

If that isn’t sedition, it’s hard to figure what is. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/22/opinion/trump-jack-smith.html

Michael Hiltzik: The false centrism of political group No Labels

The politician the purportedly centrist political group has been most assiduously promoting lately is Sen. Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.). Manchin has demonstrated his centrist bonafides by doing things such as killing an expansion of the Child Tax Credit, an anti-poverty program of proven effectiveness, and blocking initiatives for renewable fuels in favor of protecting coal and other fossil fuels (he’s an investor in the coal industry).

That might tell you all you need to know about No Labels, but there’s more. The organization doesn’t disclose its donors, but Mother Jones has reported that they include private equity investors, a natural gas billionaire and real estate and insurance industry figures.

On many issues, No Labels is claiming to map out a middle ground between Democrats and Republicans that doesn’t really exist. No Labels says its goal is to combat political polarization in America, but the country is not, in fact, polarized. Large majorities favor abortion rights, gun control, making the rich pay their fair share in taxes, and protecting voting rights.

No Labels tries to both-sides the GOP’s allegiance to an extremist former president and its platform of eliminating abortion rights, constricting voting rights and advancing discrimination against racial and ethnic minorities and LGBTQ+ individuals. That Democratic Party policies are the polar opposites of those hardly makes it as extremist as the GOP. Where’s the middle ground when one side wants to expand rights and opportunities, and the other wants to destroy them? https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2023-07-20/the-false-centrism-of-no-labels

Katy Rich: Ted Cruz Goes to War Against Barbie

Susan B. Glasser: Finally, the Trump Case We’ve Been Waiting For

One word came to mind when I heard the news this week that Donald Trump had received a target letter from the Justice Department special prosecutor Jack Smith, indicating that an indictment is likely of the former President on charges connected with his effort to overturn the 2020 election and remain in power: Finally. This, in the end, is the heart of the matter, a long-delayed reckoning with an offense against the constitutional system so great that it is without historic precedent—no President before Trump ever did such a thing.

Trump received the target letter on Sunday, and revealed it in one of his trademark hysterical social-media posts on Tuesday: HORRIFYING NEWS! Over the next couple of days, there were still more legal setbacks. In Florida, a Trump-appointed federal judge overseeing Smith’s other criminal case against the former President—for illegally holding on to top-secret documents—appeared deeply skeptical of Trump’s argument that she should delay a trial indefinitely since he is running for President. In Georgia, the state’s Supreme Court ruled against Trump’s motion to block the Fulton County district attorney, Fani T. Willis, from prosecuting him for his efforts to pressure officials to overturn his 2020 defeat in the state; criminal charges could result in the coming weeks. In New York, meanwhile, a judge said that Trump could not switch the venue of his Manhattan criminal trial for allegedly paying hush money to silence a former porn star with whom he had an affair. Trump is also facing two more civil lawsuits in New York, both of which could go to trial next year. America’s new political reality, in short, is: Donald Trump, Full-Time Defendant.

And yet Republicans remain in such thrall to their Orange Jesus—the honorific that Party apostate Liz Cheney so memorably quoted one of his acolytes calling him during last summer’s January 6th hearings—that, with each new legal woe, his prospects of winning the 2024 G.O.P. nomination keep going up. Few if any of these cases are likely to be fully resolved before the start of next year’s Republican primaries. Trump’s campaign is now explicitly a race not just to retake the Oval Office but to save himself from criminal conviction. This convergence of campaign and courtroom is, as the former Republican National Committee counsel Benjamin Ginsberg said this week, a toxic mix unprecedented in the American experiment. Something’s gotta give.

Will there be new details showing that it was the President himself who orchestrated the conspiracy to overturn election results in battleground states? New examples of Trump pressuring officials or government agencies? Damning evidence in his own words that he knew he had lost the election and proceeded anyway? Will there be a turncoat—Mark Meadows, perhaps?—to provide revelations from inside Trump’s fevered quest to stay in office after the voters had spoken? I hope and expect so after more than two and a half years of waiting. And yet somehow those questions still seem subordinate to the one that the indictment will not and cannot answer: Did it come too late? https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-bidens-washington/finally-the-trump-case-weve-been-waiting-for

Lois Parshley: Climate Collapse Could Happen Fast

Ever since some of the earliest projections of climate change were made back in the 1970s, they have been remarkably accurate at predicting the rate at which global temperatures would rise. For decades, climate change has proceeded at roughly the expected pace, says David Armstrong McKay, a climate scientist at the University of Exeter, in England. Its impacts, however, are accelerating—sometimes far faster than expected.

For a while, the consequences weren’t easily seen. They certainly are today. The Southwest is sweltering under a heat dome. Vermont saw a deluge of rain, its second 100-year storm in roughly a decade. Early July brought the hottest day globally since records began—a milestone surpassed again the following day. For a long time, we were within the range of normal. And now we’re really not, Allegra LeGrande, a physical-research scientist at Columbia University, told me. And it has happened fast enough that people have a memory of it happening.

In fact, a growing number of climate scientists now believe we may be careening toward so-called tipping points, where incremental steps along the same trajectory could push Earth’s systems into abrupt or irreversible change—leading to transformations that cannot be stopped even if emissions were suddenly halted. The Earth may have left a ‘safe’ climate state beyond 1°C global warming, Armstrong McKay and his co-authors concluded in Science last fall. If these thresholds are passed, some of global warming’s effects—like the thaw of permafrost or the loss of the world’s coral reefs—are likely to happen more quickly than expected. On the whole, however, the implications of blowing past these tipping points remain among climate change’s most consequential unknowns: We don’t really know when or how fast things will fall apart.

There’s a sense of awe—in the original meaning of inspiring terror or dread—at witnessing  sweeping changes play out across the landscape. Many scientists knew these things would happen, but we’re taken aback by the severity of the major changes we’re seeing, Ripple said. Armstrong McKay likened the challenge of being a climate scientist in 2023 to that faced by medical professionals: You put a certain emotional distance between you and the work in order to do the work effectively, he said, that can be difficult to maintain.

Although it may be too late to avert some changes, others could still be staved off by limiting emissions. LeGrande said she worries that talking about tipping points may encourage people to think that any further action now is futile. In fact, the opposite is true, Ripple said. Scientifically, everything we do to avoid even a tenth of a degree of temperature increase makes a huge difference. https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2023/07/climate-change-tipping-points/674778/

Tim Miller: There is only an imaginary Republican presidential primary

Christopher R. Browning: A New Kind of Fascism

Trump inflicted grave damage on our country’s political culture, stoking toxic polarization and reveling in dishonesty. And Trumpism did exhibit distinct elements of the fascist style of politics: the inflammatory rallies; the incessant mongering of fear, grievance, and victimization; the casual endorsement of violence; the pervasive embrace of conspiracy theories; the performative cruelty; the feral instinct for targeting marginalized and vulnerable minorities; and the cult of personality. But the Trump presidency lacked any warlike, expansionist interest, and that made it decisively unlike 20th-century fascism.

Thankfully, also, Trump himself was too lazy, inexperienced, and unprepared to set about systematically constructing a true dictatorship. The main focus of the Trump presidency was less plans and programs and more the theatrics of satisfying his constant, insatiable need for attention and adulation. Everything—whether the state of the economy or the chocolate cake served to China’s Xi Jinping at Mar-a-Lago—had to be extolled as “the greatest ever.”

Until the final weeks of Trump’s term, the guardrails of American democracy seemed to hold firm. The institutions of the federal government remained relatively intact, and civil servants largely secure and uncorrupted. The United States experienced democratic backsliding but not democratic collapse.

In a second term, however, a newly emboldened Trump could well attack democracy itself. The MAGA Republican Party of his making has openly explored ways to transform states where they control all branches of government. States that were once pluralistic democracies with at least some chance of a transfer of power are coming to resemble one-party regimes directed by a minority of the population.

In Florida, Governor Ron DeSantis, Trump’s putative rival for the 2024 Republican nomination, has turned his state into a laboratory for testing how a determined, calculating, uninhibited authoritarian can maximize executive power. In many respects, he has already accomplished at the state level what Trump did not have the discipline and focus to do at the federal level. And DeSantis has created a blueprint for other Republican state leaders to follow. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/07/trump-second-term-isolationist-fascism/674791/