Who’s ahead in the national polls?

The updated average for each candidate in 2024 presidential polls, accounting for each poll's recency, sample size, and methodology is at https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/polls/president-general/2024/national/

LITIGATION TRACKER ... Trump Trials Clearinghouse

https://www.justsecurity.org/88175/trump-trials-clearinghouse

THE WEEK'S BEST QUOTES. . .

VIDEOS ...

Here are 3 minutes straight of Donald Trump confusing and forgetting people's names, the names of cities he is in and more. https://twitter.com/MeidasTouch/status/1803555145311285517

There were some cognitive questions… he would from time to time become confused. He confidently told me that Joan Rivers voted for him when he ran for President and she died 2014.  — Author who interviewed Trump six times: https://www.threads.net/@acynig/post/C8YYe-Yxre

“We answer to God in Heaven. You’re not even allowed to say that anymore. Today, if you say that they want to arrest you. If you say that, they want to arrest you.” — Donald Trump, speaking before a Christian group. https://www.mediaite.com/politics/christianity-will-not-be-safe-trump-tells-faith-group-they-could-be-arrested-for-religion-under-biden/

John Oliver on Project 2025 and a second Trump term. https://x.com/blueatlgeorgia/status/1802904289783767542

"If I took this shirt off, you would see a beautiful beautiful person. But you would see wounds all over. I’ve taken a lot of wounds I can tell you. More than I suspect any president ever." — Trump to applause. https://x.com/Acyn/status/1804580363840504129

"I said Dana! Dana. I have an idea for you to make a lot of money. You're gonna start a new migrant fight league. Only migrants. And then at the end of the year the champion migrant is gonna fight your champion' ... these people are killers in so many different ways.” — Trump in Philadelphia. https://www.threads.net/@aaron.rupar/post/C8ixPcLAvBw/

 

IN THIS ISSUE

IN THE NEWS

OPINION

The Borowitz Report: Louisiana Orders Classrooms To Display All Ten Commandments That Trump Has Broken

The Republican governor of Louisiana signed a new law on Wednesday requiring every classroom in the state to display a poster listing all Ten Commandments that Donald J. Trump has broken.

Governor Jeff Landry said the poster would enable students “to keep track of how many Commandments they have broken so they can better follow Trump’s example.”

“At the end of each year, teachers will issue a report card indicating which Commandments the students have broken and which they have not,” the governor said. “If they have not broken all ten, they will be required to repeat the grade.”

“We want Louisiana's students to grow up to be productive felons," he added.

Critics, however, said the law would give some students an unfair advantage, since children of Republican officials start learning how to break the Ten Commandments almost from birth. https://www.borowitzreport.com/p/louisiana-orders-classrooms-to-display

 

Trump vows to defund schools requiring vaccines for students if he’s reelected

Donald Trump pledged to cut funding to schools with vaccine requirements, PBS News reports. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/trump-vows-to-defund-schools-requiring-vaccines-for-students-if-hes-reelected
 

Trump's underwhelming business support

There are no, zero, Fortune 100 CEOs  that have donated to former President Trump this election cycle. https://www.axios.com/2024/06/25/trump-ceo-low-support-republicans
 

Scoop: 16 Nobel economists see a Trump inflation bomb

“Sixteen Nobel prize-winning economists are jumping into the presidential campaign with a stark warning: Former President Trump’s plans would reignite inflation and cause lasting harm to the global economy if he wins in November.

“The Nobel laureates are lending their academic prestige to a political argument the Biden administration has been making for weeks: Inflation would be worse under Trump.” https://www.axios.com/2024/06/25/nobel-prize-winners-biden-economy-trump-inflation
 

Far-Right Militias Are Back

Far-right extremists and their militias are back, and just like in 2020, they're organizing online in a very brazen way. Jake Lang, one of the people charged after the January 6th Capitol riot and, while he's been incarcerated, Lang has organized a pro-gun nationwide militia on Telegram, the Encrypted Messaging Act. https://www.wired.com/story/far-right-militias-extremism/
 

Senate Democrats Launch Probe of Kushner’s Firm

Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) this month launched an investigation into Affinity Partners, the Saudi-backed private equity firm led by Jared Kushner.

Wyden is chair of the Senate Financial Committee, and as a member of the majority could get enough votes to subpoena documents that House Democrats have unsuccessfully sought. https://www.axios.com/2024/06/20/jared-kushner-senate-democrats-investigation
 

Fact check: Trump rewrites Wisconsin history in rally filled with false claims

Donald Trump made more than two dozen false claims at his Tuesday campaign rally in Racine, Wisconsin, including two significant attempts to rewrite Wisconsin history.

The first was a slightly vaguer than usual version of his familiar lie that he won Wisconsin in the 2020 presidential election. He lost the state by 20,682 votes.

The second was a version of a false claim Trump delivered in 2020 and again in 2022: his assertion that he had saved the Wisconsin city of Kenosha from destruction in 2020 when Gov. Tony Evers, a Democrat, refused to take action to deal with the civil unrest that followed the police shooting of a Black man.

Trump made lots of other false claims during the Racine rally. Here’s a quick fact check on 12 of them:

• He said “the world was at peace” when he was president in 2020, though there were numerous ongoing armed conflicts.
• He  said Democrats rigged the 2020 election, which did not happen.
• He  said people’s votes “tend to disappear” after they are cast, which is just not true.
• He  said the country is “in the middle of the worst crime wave in modern history,” though preliminary statistics show crime declined sharply in 2023 and the first quarter of 2024.
• He said he has been indicted more times than notorious gangster Al Capone, who was indicted at least six times to Trump’s four.
• He said somebody left cocaine at the White House “about a month ago,” though that happened about 11 months ago, and said it was “hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of cocaine,” though photos show the cocaine was in a small bag worth nothing even remotely close to that amount.
• He said he went to Washington, DC, the other day for one of his trials, though the trip was actually for meetings with congressional Republicans.
• He said then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi turned down his offer of 10,000 soldiers at the Capitol January 6, 2021; there is no evidence she ever received such an offer, and she wouldn’t have had the power to reject it if she did.
• He said no previous president had taken even 10 cents “out of China” from tariffs; the US has had tariffs on China since the 1700s and generated billions per year from them under predecessor President Barack Obama — and study after study has shown that Americans pay the tariffs, not China.
• He said Syria and Turkey have been fighting over their border “for 2,000 years,” though historians have said this is nonsense: Turkey and Syria were both part of the Ottoman Empire, and the modern border between them is less than 100 years old.
• He said he thinks cumulative inflation under Biden is “40 or 50 percent”; it’s actually about 19%. https://edition.cnn.com/2024/06/19/politics/fact-check-trump-rewrites-wisconsin-history/index.html 

Mystery fundraising firm takes in millions from the Trump campaign

Donald Trump’s political operation has routed more than $3 million so far this year through a Delaware limited liability company whose owners are not publicly disclosed, according to campaign finance records — a strategy that mirrors past efforts to mask exactly how his campaign is spending donor cash. https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2024-election/mystery-fundraising-firm-takes-millions-trump-campaign-rcna156755
 

House Republicans are doing everything they can to get noticed by Donald Trump

Earlier this month, Florida Representative Greg Steube introduced legislation to change the name of parts of the oceans surrounding the US after Trump. 

Now, another Republican wants to see Trump on the $500 bill. Arizona Representative Paul Gosar introduced a bill earlier in June pushing the Treasury to start printing $500 bills again, 79 years after stopping. This time with a portrait of Trump in the place of President William McKinley, who served in the top job from 1897 until his 1901 assassination.

Gosar argued the stunt would draw attention to high inflation under President Joe Biden. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/donald-trump-republicans-name-dollar-bill-b2565507.html
 

Trump falls behind Biden in latest Fox News poll as he insists ‘nobody can ever trust’ network

Donald Trump has fallen two points behind Joe Biden in the latest national presidential election poll from Fox News, the first time the president has been in the lead in that survey since last October.

Biden is on 50 per cent and Trump on 48 per cent in the head-to-head poll, a slim majority that nevertheless appears to suggest the Republican’s guilty conviction at his New York hush money trial last month is beginning to have an impact.

Trump wasted no time in lashing out at the conservative network on Truth Social, complaining that “nobody can ever trust Fox News” so long as former GOP House speaker Paul Ryan serves on its board of directors, calling the executive “lightweight”, “pathetic” and “a very disloyal person”.

Addressing the Murdochs directly, Trump wrote: “Rupert and Lachlan, get that dog off your board – You don’t need him. ALL YOU NEED IS TRUMP.” https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/trump-news-fox-poll-republican-president-latest-b2565774.html
 

Trump cranks up false, inflammatory messages to rake in campaign cash

“1 MONTH UNTIL ALL HELL BREAKS LOOSE! THEY WANT TO SENTENCE ME TO DEATH.”

The fundraising message blasted out to his supporters was a reference to the former president’s sentencing scheduled for July 11, when he faces fines or possible jail time after being convicted on 34 charges of business fraud in connection with hush money paid to an adult-film star. A death sentence is not under consideration in the case. Neither is a “GUILLOTINE,” as another fundraising pitch suggested last week.

The incendiary emails are part of a concerted strategy that has allowed the campaign to erase a financial lead that President Biden’s campaign had opened up in recent months, according to people close to the former president who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they weren’t authorized to speak for the campaign. But experts in small-dollar fundraising say the solicitations are aggressive even by the standards of Trump’s frequently hyperbolic and inflammatory language. https://www.washingtonpost.com/elections/2024/06/22/trump-fundraising-false-aggressive/
 

Trump Hawks American Flag Pins

Trump’s campaign is billing it as a must-have fashion accessory for his supporters: an American flag lapel pin with the former president’s name scrawled in gold block letters across it — in all caps.

The pins were available starting Thursday for a $50 donation to the Trump campaign, the latest merchandising gambit from a candidate who has hawked a plethora of products over the decades, most recently Bibles and Trump sneakers. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/22/us/politics/trump-hawks-american-flag-pins-with-his-name-in-gold-splashed-across-them.html
 

Fueled by climate change, extreme wildfires have doubled in 20 years

A new study analyzing satellite data focused on extreme wildfires, which have severe consequences for humans and the planet.

The frequency and magnitude of extreme wildfires around the globe has doubled in the last two decades due to climate change, according to a study released Monday.

The analysis, published in the journal “Nature Ecology & Evolution,” focused on massive blazes that release vast amounts of energy from the volume of organic matter burned. Researchers pointed to the historic Australia fires of 2019 and 2020 as an example of blazes that were “unprecedented in their scale and intensity.” The six most extreme fire years have occurred since 2017, the study found. https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2024/06/24/extreme-wildfires-increased-study/

 

THE DAILY GRILL … 

“What I want to do, and what I will do, is you graduate from a college, I think you should get automatically, as part of your diploma, a green card to be able to stay in this country. That move wouldn’t only apply to graduates of four-year universities either. That includes junior colleges too. Anybody graduates from a college — you go in there for two years or four years. If you graduate, or you get a doctorate degree from a college, you should be able to stay in this country.” — Trump in Thursday’s "The All-In Podcast." https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/trump-green-card-college-graduate-b2567470.html

VERSUS

“President Trump has made it clear that on day one of his new administration, he’s going to shut down the border and launch the largest mass deportation effort of illegal aliens in history. Trump’s green card proposal would also include an “aggressive vetting process” that would “exclude all communists, radical Islamists, Hamas supporters, America haters, and public charges. He believes, only after such vetting has taken place, we ought to keep the most skilled graduates who can make significant contributions to America. This would only apply to the most thoroughly vetted college graduates who would never undercut American wages or workers.”  — Trump campaign spokesperson Karoline Leavitt  walking back a promise from the former president that he would automatically give green cards to all overseas students studying in the US once they graduate. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/trump-green-card-college-graduate-b2567470.html
 

"Nancy Pelosi’s daughter is a whacko, her daughter told me if things were different Nancy and I would be perfect together, there’s an age difference though.’ — TRUMP to House Republicans" -- close to exact quote.  Jake Sherman@JakeSherman https://x.com/sfpelosi/status/1801260770560221221

VERSUS

Speaking for all 4 Pelosi daughters — "This is a LIE. His deceitful, deranged obsession with our mother is yet another reason Donald Trump is unwell, unhinged and unfit to step foot anywhere near her — or the White House." — Christine Pelosi https://x.com/sfpelosi/status/1801260770560221221



"I LOVE THE TEN COMMANDMENTS IN PUBLIC SCHOOLS, PRIVATE SCHOOLS, AND MANY OTHER PLACES, FOR THAT MATTER. READ IT — HOW CAN WE, AS A NATION, GO WRONG??? THIS MAY BE, IN FACT, THE FIRST MAJOR STEP IN THE REVIVAL OF RELIGION, WHICH IS DESPERATELY NEEDED, IN OUR COUNTRY. BRING BACK TTC!!! MAGA2024." https://daringfireball.net/2024/06/lousiana_ten_commandments_trump

VERSUS

#7. Thou shalt not commit adultery.
I mean come on!
https://daringfireball.net/2024/06/lousiana_ten_commandments_trump

 

Leah Litman: Something’s Rotten About the Justices Taking So Long on Trump’s Immunity Case
 

For those looking for the hidden hand of politics in what the Supreme Court does, there’s plenty of reason for suspicion on Donald Trump’s as-yet-undecided immunity case given its urgency. There are, of course, explanations that have nothing to do with politics for why a ruling still hasn’t been issued. But the reasons to think something is rotten at the court are impossible to ignore.

As of Tuesday, 110 days had passed since the court agreed to hear the Trump immunity case. And still no decision.

This court has lost the benefit of the doubt for myriad reasons, including its willingness to act quickly in cases that benefit Republican interests. In addition to the disqualification case, two and a half years ago, the court scheduled a challenge to the Biden administration’s test-or-vaccinate policy two weeks after the justices decided to hear it, and then issued a decision invalidating the policy less than one week later.

In a case in South Carolina decided by the court 6-3 in May, it was not speed but sloth that aided Republicans. The court allowed the state to continue using a 2021 congressional map that a lower court had found was an unconstitutional racial gerrymander. Both parties in the case had asked the court to rule by Jan. 1; when no decision was issued by mid-March, a district court panel ordered the contested map to be used in this fall’s election.

In the immunity case, the question before the court is this: “Whether and if so to what extent does a former president enjoy presidential immunity from criminal prosecution for conduct alleged to involve official acts during his tenure in office.”

In addressing that question, the court could follow a path well charted in other cases and rule narrowly. The justices need not resolve anything and everything related to presidential immunity. It would be enough to conclude that whatever the precise bounds of presidential immunity, it doesn’t extend to orchestrating a monthslong effort to overturn the valid results of a presidential election.

Even if presidents enjoy some immunity for official acts, plotting to remain in office while continuing to question the results of an election they clearly lost isn’t one of them. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/19/opinion/supreme-court-trump-immunity.html

 

Dan Pfeiffer: Why Trump's Plan for Revenge is Very Real (and Scary)

“In the first term, Trump had two types of staffers: incompetent, but loyal (think Seb Gorka) and mostly competent, but not particularly loyal (John Bolton). Most of the more skilled and experienced Republicans wanted nothing to do with Trump and worried that serving in his administration could be a career ender that came with high legal bills and a lifetime of infamy.”

“This time around, more Republicans who pull the levers of power and execute on Trump’s wishes will go to work in the White House and across the federal government. The Heritage Foundation and other Right Wing think tanks have spent years creating lists of Republicans both willing and able to follow through on Trump’s most extreme wishes. The first question in every interview will be about loyalty.”

“The biggest change from 2020 is that the Republican Party establishment transformed into the MAGA party.” https://www.messageboxnews.com/p/why-trumps-plan-for-revenge-is-very
 

Jake Lahut How the NFL’s ‘Worst-Ever’ Owner is Blocking Movie Showing ‘Rapist’ Trump

The billionaire former owner of the Washington Commanders is blocking the release of a biopic of Donald Trump which portrays the former president as a rapist.

Dan Snyder, once described as the NFL’s worst franchise owner, might be able to stop The Apprentice hitting screens thanks to a bizarre twist: He helped finance the movie.

The Apprentice portrays a young Trump and his relentless rise in New York where he is tutored and advised by the amoral attorney Roy Cohn. In the film Trump, played by Sebastian Stan, is shown appearing to rape his first wife Ivana—an allegation she made during their divorce and later disowned.

It was shown at the Cannes film festival, where The Daily Beast’s critic Esther Zuckerman described Jeremy Strong’s portrayal of Cohn as Oscar-worthy.

But the fate of the movie lies in the hands of Snyder, who Trumpworld sources said is acting on his own initiative to stand in the way of its release. The sources were “thrilled” at Snyder’s act of obeisance to his fellow billionaire.  https://www.thedailybeast.com/how-dan-snyder-is-trying-to-block-trump-biopic-the-apprentice-from-theaters

 

Frank Bruni: Audaciously and laughably, a playboy plutocrat turns himself into Everyman

Are you a Black voter enraged by criminal justice inequalities? He feels your pain. He knows your pain. In a Manhattan courtroom recently, he confronted what you confront: same stacked deck, same disrespect. Or at least that’s a perspective that Trump’s allies have promoted since a jury said “guilty” 34 times.

Do East Coast elites look down their upturned noses at you, and does the big bad federal government try to quash any actions you take or words you utter in defiance of it? Him, too! When federal agents came for those classified documents scattered like pocket change around Mar-a-Lago, they were really coming for you. They used Trump to teach you a lesson and flexed their contempt for you through their indictment of him. He has made that claim repeatedly.

In a fund-raising email sent by his campaign last week, Trump said, “If we fail to have a MASSIVE outpouring of patriotic support — right here, right now — they’ll TAKE ME OUT and move on to their real target: YOU!!”

And all the Jesus Christ allusions of late by Trump and his disciples? No ambiguity there. No subtlety. He is dying — well, going through a tough time with titanic legal bills — for your sins. But you can always make things better by buying a $59.99 Trump-branded Bible. https://messaging-custom-newsletters.nytimes.com/dynamic/render
 

Elizabeth Bruenig: Trump Dreams of a Swifter Death Penalty

During a recent campaign event in Phoenix, Arizona, Donald Trump mused about capital punishment. “We’ve never had [such] massive amounts of drugs pouring into our country,” he said. “And by the way, you’ll never solve the problem without the death penalty.” Trump also said he had made a deal with Xi Jinping prior to the end of his term that would have seen China executing anyone found to be manufacturing fentanyl for sale in America, though the only verifiable fact related to this claim is that China cracked down on fentanyl sales to America under pressure from the Trump administration.

He then riffed on the same theme at a rally in Las Vegas, where he again announced that the United States would have no drug problem if this country, like China, captured, tried, and executed drug dealers all within a very short span of time. Trump declared that Xi told him that these almost instantaneous capital proceedings are known in his country as “quick trials,” and that they’ve essentially resolved China’s struggle against illegal narcotics. (According to fact-checkers at Politifact, Trump’s description of China’s liberal use of capital punishment is essentially correct, but evidence refutes his assessment that the method is as effective as he claims, or would be effective here.)

Trump’s strange pontification on sharks and batteries attracts more attention than his criminal-justice designs, but these more substantive policy ideas are at least as disturbing. There’s something satisfying in the presumption that one simple fix could erase all American addiction. But it’s nonsense, and destroying the death-penalty appeals process would be both naive and intentionally cruel. Trump may be dreaming aloud when he offers up the possibility of sudden death for drug-related crimes, but enacting such a policy would significantly degrade American law and justice.

Trump’s fixation is odd, in part because capital punishment has never eliminated any category of crime. Use of the death penalty in a particular jurisdiction does not even deter crime: Decades of research have consistently found that murder rates are lower in states that do not execute criminals. But for Trump, it’s the punishment frequently offered up in place of a credible plan to actually treat opioid addiction and other forms of drug abuse. He suggested its use in a 2023 Fox News interview, saying, “I don’t know that this country is ready for it. I just don’t know,” reflecting on how shocking it would be to introduce capital punishment for selling drugs. “It’s not easy to say the death penalty.” (Drug trafficking is already a capital offense federally and in two states, a fact Trump appears to be unaware of.) https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2024/06/trump-death-penalty-policy/678728/
 

Charles Sykes: The Flimsiness of Trumponomics

Economists are warning that Trump’s reported idea to eliminate the income tax and replace it with massive tariffs on imports would cripple the economy, explode the cost of living, and likely set off a trade war. And because the math doesn’t come close to working, it would also tremendously increase the national debt.

In other words, Trump’s latest notion is both economically and fiscally illiterate. “If a 20yo interviewing for a House internship suggested replacing the income tax with a massive tariff, they’d be laughed out of the interview,” Brian Riedl, a conservative budget expert, wrote on X.

The politics of Trump’s latest scheme are perhaps even worse, because this plan exposes the hypocrisy of his faux populism. Indeed, what’s striking about the idea is just how regressive and non-populist it is. Replacing the income tax with tariffs would result in massive tax cuts for the ultrarich—at the expense of middle and lower-class Americans. Brendan Duke and Ryan Mulholland of the left-leaning Center for American Progress estimate that Trump’s proposal would raise taxes by $8,300 for the middle 20 percent of households, if American consumers end up bearing the full brunt of tariffs on imports.

In the real world, this huge new tax would suppress demand for imports, which would in turn drive down the revenue from the Trump tariffs. The result: massive deficits as revenue falls short, even-higher taxes on the remaining imports, and draconian cuts in spending, including the entitlement programs, such as Social Security and Medicare, that Trump has promised (if somewhat inconsistently) to protect.

And then there is the Ghost of Smoot-Hawley. Historians and economists regard the 1930 Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act—which dramatically boosted tariffs on imports—as a disastrous miscalculation that deepened the Great Depression. Trump’s tariff tax is Smoot-Hawley with its hair on fire.
All of this might explain the skepticism of the otherwise friendly CEOs who talked to Trump at a recent meeting of the Business Roundtable. “Trump doesn’t know what he’s talking about,” one CEO reportedly said; the CEO reportedly added that Trump failed to explain how he planned to implement his policies. Some of the executives apparently seemed surprised by the realization that the former president’s economic ideas were nonsense.

Maybe they should start paying closer attention. But so should Trump’s base. Despite Trump’s insistence that he is the tribune of the forgotten common man, the former president’s economic incoherence could prove devastating to the very voters he claims to champion. https://www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/archive/2024/06/the-flimsiness-of-trumponomics/678753/
 

Katie Glueck: How Misleading Videos Are Trailing Biden as He Battles Age Doubts

A flurry of recent clips, many of them edited or lacking context, laid bare a major challenge for the president as he tries to persuade voters he has the energy for a second term.

In the last two weeks, conservative news outlets, the Republican National Committee and the Trump team have circulated videos of Mr. Biden that lacked important context and twisted mundane moments to paint him in an unflattering light. Among other things, they created the impression that the president:
 

Wandered off during a meeting with other Group of 7 leaders, an image that The New York Post ran on its front page (he was greeting paratroopers)
 

A video edited and shared by The New York Post on X claimed to show President Biden wandering off during a Group of 7 gathering. The New York Times annotated additional footage showing Mr. Biden giving a thumbs-up to some paratroopers.

Footage shared on social media by the Republican National Committee appeared to show Jill Biden leading President Biden out of a D-Day event while President Emmanuel Macron of France greeted veterans. Longer footage shows Mr. Biden also greeting veterans and walking side by side with the first lady.

The Republican National Committee shared a clip that sought to show President Biden awkwardly crouching. The full video shows him eventually sitting down after the next speaker was announced.

A New York Times review of these videos found that some scenes were cut short and taken out of context, while other clips were cropped in a way that omitted crucial details when compared with additional footage.

Campaigns and political groups have long disseminated damaging videos of their opponents, sometimes misleadingly edited ones.

But the flurry of clips released this month is a fresh reminder of the steep, multifront and evolving challenge that Mr. Biden, 81, faces in convincing voters that he is spry enough to serve another term. As polls show a close race, many Americans harbor doubts about his fitness — and selectively sliced snippets from his routine public appearances are fueling those worries and sending conspiracy theories spiraling across social media. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/21/us/politics/biden-age-videos.html

 

Anne Applebaum:  The New Propaganda War

On February 24, 2022, as Russia launched its invasion of Ukraine, fantastical tales of biological warfare began surging across the internet. Russian officials solemnly declared that secret U.S.-funded biolabs in Ukraine had been conducting experiments with bat viruses and claimed that U.S. officials had confessed to manipulating “dangerous pathogens.” The story was unfounded, not to say ridiculous, and was repeatedly debunked.

Nevertheless, an American Twitter account with links to the QAnon conspiracy network—@WarClandestine—began tweeting about the nonexistent biolabs, racking up thousands of retweets and views. The hashtag #biolab started trending on Twitter and reached more than 9 million views. Even after the account—later revealed to belong to a veteran of the Army National Guard—was suspended, people continued to post screenshots. A version of the story appeared on the Infowars website created by Alex Jones, best known for promoting conspiracy theories about the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School and harassing families of the victims. Tucker Carlson, then still hosting a show on Fox News, played clips of a Russian general and a Chinese spokesperson repeating the biolab fantasy and demanded that the Biden administration “stop lying and [tell] us what’s going on here.”

Chinese state media also leaned hard into the story. A foreign-ministry spokesperson declared that the U.S. controlled 26 biolabs in Ukraine: “Russia has found during its military operations that the U.S. uses these facilities to conduct bio-military plans.” Xinhua, a Chinese state news agency, ran multiple headlines: “U.S.-Led Biolabs Pose Potential Threats to People of Ukraine and Beyond,” “Russia Urges U.S. to Explain Purpose of Biological Labs in Ukraine,” and so on. U.S. diplomats publicly refuted these fabrications. Nevertheless, the Chinese continued to spread them. So did the scores of Asian, African, and Latin American media outlets that have content-sharing agreements with Chinese state media. So did Telesur, the Venezuelan network; Press TV, the Iranian network; and Russia Today, in Spanish and Arabic, as well as on many Russia Today–linked websites around the world.

This joint propaganda effort worked. Globally, it helped undermine the U.S.-led effort to create solidarity with Ukraine and enforce sanctions against Russia. Inside the U.S., it helped undermine the Biden administration’s effort to consolidate American public opinion in support of providing aid to Ukraine. According to one poll, a quarter of Americans believed the biolabs conspiracy theory to be true. After the invasion, Russia and China—with, again, help from Venezuela, Iran, and far-right Europeans and Americans—successfully created an international echo chamber. Anyone inside this echo chamber heard the biolab conspiracy theory many times, from different sources, each one repeating and building on the others to create the impression of veracity. They also heard false descriptions of Ukrainians as Nazis, along with claims that Ukraine is a puppet state run by the CIA, and that NATO started the war.

Outside this echo chamber, few even know it exists. At a dinner in Munich in February 2023, I found myself seated across from a European diplomat who had just returned from Africa. He had met with some students there and had been shocked to discover how little they knew about the war in Ukraine, and how much of what they did know was wrong. They had repeated the Russian claims that the Ukrainians are Nazis, blamed NATO for the invasion, and generally used the same kind of language that can be heard every night on the Russian evening news. The diplomat was mystified. He grasped for explanations: Maybe the legacy of colonialism explained the spread of these conspiracy theories, or Western neglect of the global South, or the long shadow of the Cold War.

But the story of how Africans—as well as Latin Americans, Asians, and indeed many Europeans and Americans—have come to spout Russian propaganda about Ukraine is not primarily a story of European colonial history, Western policy, or the Cold War. Rather, it involves China’s systematic efforts to buy or influence both popular and elite audiences around the world; carefully curated Russian propaganda campaigns, some open, some clandestine, some amplified by the American and European far right; and other autocracies using their own networks to promote the same language.
  https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2024/06/china-russia-republican-party-relations/678271/
 

Olga Khazan: I Watched Russian TV So You Don’t Have To

In Russia’s version of the war, Russians are liberators, Ukrainians are Nazis, and the West is full of mendacious hypocrites. To turn on Russian TV news is to enter a parallel universe, one where even the word war is forbidden. Russian President Vladimir Putin’s government has now blocked or restricted any other sources of coverage, so this is the only version of the world most Russians see.

To get a sense of what Russians are told about the war, I fired up Russian state TV for a few hours a day over the past week from my laptop. Though the state-run news channels do include purportedly on-the-ground news reports, much of the action is on talk shows, which are “where the more extreme or nationalistic narratives are pushed,” Sarah Oates, a political-communication expert at the University of Maryland, told me.

Hosts and panelists stick closely to the same Kremlin talking points, lending the broadcasts an endless, looping quality, even by cable-TV standards. One panel of white guys who love Putin dissolves into another, and another. “Every third word is Ukraina, America, NATO,” says Bakhti Nishanov, a senior policy advisor at the U.S. Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe. “Even if you were just not paying attention … it’s in your subconscious.”

On Russian TV sets, people, walls, and floors are decked out in the “Z” marking that Russian troops paint on their tanks. I saw it used to mean za pobedu (for “victory”) and za mir (for “peace”), even though that’s not how you write the letter Z in Russian. Throughout, I heard references to parts of Ukraine being “cleaned out” and “brought to order,” and that Ukrainians “will only understand the truth about their country once it’s liberated.” The penalty for dissent is great, and the talk-show guests are in constant agreement. They nevertheless frequently end up yelling, spitting twisty consonants at one another until the host introduces a new way in which the government line is correct.

Perhaps the saddest fact is that Russians—now cut off economically, geographically, and culturally from the rest of the world—may not know what they’re in for. Watching their own channels, they are left with the rosy view that victory is near, and that they will be the victors. In the words of one talk-show pundit I saw on Russian television last week, “This will all pass. Without Russia, Europe is not Europe, and the world is not the world.” https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2022/03/how-russian-tv-portrays-war-ukraine/627010/
 

Ben Terris The unbearable heaviness of thinking everything is good for Trump

“I think it probably martyrs Trump even more,” says Michael LaRosa, a former spokesman for first lady Jill Biden.

“He’s running as the world’s biggest victim,” says Frank Luntz, a political consultant and Trump critic, “and Americans rally around victims.”

Democrats are always “looking for the dark lining in the silver cloud at all times,” especially with regards to Trump, says Dan Pfeiffer, former adviser to President Barack Obama and current podcast host, whose inbox and text messages filled up with this kind of anxious talk after the Trump verdict.

“It’s only natural that people would become catastrophizers about Trump,” Pfeiffer says. “But it’s actually not true that he hasn’t faced accountability. Every time he has been on the ballot since 2016, literally and figuratively, he has lost.”

Mythologizing Trump as some kind of invincible monster who can absorb all attacks and only become stronger — that might be the thing that helps Trump and his Republican allies, Pfeiffer says. “When we pretend like he can survive anything, it imbues him with strength and gives him political advantage with a lot of people,” he says. “But the reality is, how bad a criminal do you have to be to be one of the most politically connected and richest guys around, and still be convicted of 34 counts of falsifying business records? The truth is he’s kind of a clown.”

“If you actually think it’s good to be convicted of multiple felonies, you probably need to go outside and touch grass,” says Jesse Ferguson, a Democratic consultant and former spokesman for the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign. “He’s far more Darth Vader than Obi-Wan Kenobi. If you strike him down, he doesn’t become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.”

To be fair to the worriers, there is a playbook for turning something as obviously bad as a criminal conviction into a political advantage. It just usually happens in other countries.

“This is a unique situation for the United States,” says Kateryna Odarchenko, a political consultant who worked for onetime Ukrainian prime minister and political prisoner Yulia Tymoshenko. “But in other countries where political persecution really exists, candidates use their criminal cases against them to say, ‘You see, I effectively fought the system, and they came for me.’” Trump has a potential opportunity, Odarchenko says, to try to use the case against him to cast himself as a “classical hero” fighting against a “big evil.” And he’s going there. “I was just convicted in a RIGGED political Witch Hunt trial: I DID NOTHING WRONG!” screamed a recent fundraising plea. In at least one way, it’s working: The Trump campaign used anger over the verdict to raise a staggering $141 million in May. https://www.washingtonpost.com/style/power/2024/06/18/trump-2024-anxiety/
 

Greg Sargent: Trump Just Revealed How He’ll Attack Biden at Debate—and It’s Vile

“You can’t say you weren’t warned: At the upcoming presidential debate on June 27, Donald Trump plans to highlight a handful of horrific murders—allegedly by undocumented migrants—and blame them on President Biden. We know this because Trump told us so right on his Truth Social feed.”

Said Trump: “We have a new Biden Migrant Killing—it’s only going to get worse, and it’s all Crooked Joe Biden’s fault. I look forward to seeing him at the Fake debate on Thursday. Let him explain why he has allowed MILLIONS of people to come into our Country illegally!” https://newrepublic.com/article/182993/trump-biden-debate-attack
 

Molly Jong-Fast: Donald Trump’s Persecution Complex

Like many an autocrat before him, Donald Trump loves projection. And why shouldn’t he? He’s used the method to great success! Who could forget when, during his 2016 campaign, he assigned Hillary Clinton such labels as “monster,” “unbalanced,” “unstable,” and “dangerous,” at one point even saying, “She’s really pretty close to unhinged.” Now, you might not have been a big fan of Clinton’s in 2016, but, if anything, she was perhaps a little too hinged—which is partly why she struggled to convey an authentic persona to voters. By contrast, when it comes to Trump, hinges, as it were, are not even in the political toolbox.

It’s been more than two weeks since the former president’s criminal conviction—and instead of, say, reflecting on his past misdeeds, the former president is still using the moment as a prime opportunity for projection. In fact, from the very moment Trump got indicted in the New York hush money case, he started attacking Joe Biden and his allies. “This is all done by Biden and his people. This is done by Washington. No one has ever seen anything like this,” Trump baselessly rambled not long after his guilty verdict, even though his hush money case was brought by the state—not the federal government. The former president’s broadsides are hardly limited to Bidenworld; he has also attacked the judge, jury, witnesses, and prosecutors—before, during, and after the case. “This was a rigged trial by a conflicted judge who was corrupt,” he said late last month.

None of this projection is surprising. “That’s been sort of Trump’s…method of operating,” Liz Cheney told Anderson Cooper back in December as Trump, the guy who tried to overturn a free and fair election in 2020, accused Biden of trying to destroy democracy. “It is a real threat to his political success if people recognize that—that he himself is trying to unravel democracy.” Cheney was right; to keep the wool over his supporters’ eyes, Trump has employed three tactics: intimidating his enemies into supporting him by projecting onto them his own qualities (remember “Lyin’ Ted”?); labeling unwinnable enemies RINOs (Cheney and Adam Kinzinger); and painting himself, the aggressor, as the ultimate victim. https://www.vanityfair.com/news/story/donald-trumps-persecution-complex
 

Jamelle Bouie: The Lazy Authoritarianism of Donald Trump

Trump, in his first term, was not equipped to do the work required of him.

By no means is Trump the first president or even the first Republican president to abuse the power of the office in an effort to overcome the constitutional limits of the office. We can see something similar with Richard Nixon and Watergate as well as Ronald Reagan and Iran-contra, when the White House circumvented a congressional prohibition on foreign aid to rebel groups in Nicaragua.

But Trump makes no distinction between himself and the office of the presidency. He is the kind of man who might say, “L’état, c’est moi” if he knew of anything other than his own desires. He has the heart of an absolutist.

For Trump to bend to the presidency, he would have to embark on the impossible task of denying himself the satisfaction of imposing his will on others. And so he has tried to break the presidency instead, to transform a constitutional office defined by its limits into an instrument of his personal authority.

A second term would mean even more of the chaos, corruption, disorder and incompetence that defined his first four years in office. Trump and his more ideologically driven allies and advisers would smash through the constitutional system in a reckless drive to satisfy their dreams, desires and delusions. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/21/opinion/trump-second-term.html