Rick Wilson: The Coming MAGA Crackup

Donald Trump is not the formidable force he was in 2016 or 2020. He’s an angry, sleepy, and embattled old man stuck in courtrooms, not the swaggering strongman dancing and japing in front of 30,000 people at rally after rally. While happy warriors Joe Biden and Kamala Harris campaign across swing states, Trump’s political options are narrowing.

His fundraising is diminished; he’s lost over 200,000 small donors and even his most ardent supporters know their contributions aren’t being used to re-elect Trump but to pay his lavish legal bills. In April, Nikki Haley notched around 17% of the vote in Pennsylvania despite being out of the race for weeks.

Trump lost the message reach he enjoyed before: stuck in the social media hinterlands of Truth Social, he reaches just 7 million people today, as opposed to the almost 90 million he had on Twitter before his ousting in 2021. In 2016, he was able to set and drive a narrative against Hillary Clinton, and millions of GOP voters amplified it. Now, that superpower is gone.

Even Fox News is showing the strain of covering for him. Of course, they still can’t risk hosting him live on their air because they’re terrified of the pending Smartmatic lawsuits and stung from the multi-billion dollar Dominion Voting Systems settlement.

The MAGA media ecosystem, from Fox to bottom-feeder weirdos like the Gateway Pundit, has seen cataclysmic drop-offs in their view counts online. Some of this is due to changes in the Facebook algorithm, but it goes beyond Mark Zuckerberg spinning the dials behind the scenes. Reasoned and principled conservative argumentation may be boring to some, but replacing it with Catturd and boomer MAGA memes might have been a mistake.

After nearly a decade of breathless excuse-making for Trump and assertions about Democrats that routinely included treason, corruption, pedophilia, and global conspiracies to force us to all eat bugs, the bit is tired. When the Rapture never comes, the flock gets restless.

Finally, Trump is like the drunken uncle at the party; he’s increasingly embarrassing, even for many Republicans. They’re tired of making excuses, tired of explaining away the crazy, and tired of defending the indefensible. He’ll always have his base, but many in that base repel the more moderate Republicans and independents. The Dobbs decision and Trump’s boasting over ending Roe v. Wade have cut deeper into the more affluent demos in the GOP than he cares to admit. https://therickwilson.substack.com/p/the-coming-maga-crackup

Dana Milbank  Now playing off-Broadway: Trump’s synchronized sycophants

Sen. Tommy Tuberville knows a great deal about the judiciary. The Alabama Republican is on record asserting that the three branches of government are “the House, the Senate and the executive.”

And so this week, the former college football coach took his expertise in jurisprudence to Donald Trump’s hush money trial in New York, watched for a few minutes and came out to offer reporters his legal analysis.

“How can you be convinced by somebody that is a serial liar?” Tuberville wanted to know. “I mean, there should be no reason that anybody should listen to this guy.”

One hundred percent, Coach! Tuberville was talking about the witness, Michael Cohen, but he didn’t have the self-awareness to realize he was also describing the defendant, perhaps the most famous liar in American history.

The Manhattan Criminal Courthouse was overflowing with lying liars this week. Inside the courtroom, Cohen testified about all the lies he told for Trump: lying to Congress, lying to the public, lying about Trump’s involvement with Russia, lying about Trump’s alleged trysts and how Trump bought the silence of his accusers. Trump’s lawyers, in their cross-examination, sought to convince the jury that the former Trump fixer is so prolific a liar that he is still lying, as are Stormy Daniels, Karen McDougal and anybody who accuses Trump of anything, ever. Trump himself, in statements to the cameras in the hallway outside the courtroom, lies about the terms of the gag order, the “corrupt” judge, the view of “everybody” with legal experience that he committed “no crime” — and whatever else comes to his lips.

In a sense, all of the lawmakers flocking to New York owe their jobs to Trump: One cross word from him, and they’re out faster than you can say “primary challenge.” And so they performed for Trump outside the courthouse as a troupe of synchronized sycophants.

“This is a sham trial!” said Trump, inside the courthouse.
“Sham of a trial,” parroted Johnson, outside the courthouse.
“Sham trial,” repeated Vance, Malliotakis and Biggs.
“A crooked sham trial,” said Good.
“This is a sham,” echoed Mills.
“A politicized sham,” offered Ramaswamy.
“There’s no crime!” said Trump, inside the courthouse.
“There’s no crime here,” repeated Johnson, outside the courthouse.
“There is no crime,” said Donalds.
“What is the crime?” asked Ramaswamy and Boebert.
“It’s election interference!” proclaimed Trump.
“It is election interference,” chorused Johnson.
“It’s election interference,” said Burgum.
“Election interference,” said Gaetz and Good.
“Election interference at its finest!” said Mills.
President Biden is “weaponizing the Department of Justice,” announced Trump.
“Weaponized DOJ,” chorused Boebert.
“Weaponized against President Trump,” Johnson echoed.
“Weaponization against our president,” repeated Mills.

The Greek chorus dutifully echoed Trump’s claim that the case is a “scam” and a “witch hunt.” They repeated his bogus assertion that the “Federal Election Commission said there’s not a problem, there’s no case.” (In reality, a deadlocked FEC dropped the case after Republican commissioners said it was redundant because Cohen had already been convicted of an election law violation.) They endorsed his nonsense accusation that “Biden’s office is running this trial” in New York state courts. And they seconded his constant complaint about the “unconstitutional” gag order. (An appeals court this week upheld the order, saying Trump’s statements “posed a significant threat to the integrity of the testimony.”)

“I wanted to be here to show some support for my friend,” said Vance.

“I’m here, and all of us who are here, as friends of Donald Trump, supporting him” was Ramaswamy’s version.

“We’re here voluntarily supporting our friend, President Trump,” said Gaetz.

On social media, Gaetz posted a photo of him standing behind Trump in court with the message “Standing back and standing by, Mr. President” — referring to Trump’s 2020 debate instructions to the Proud Boys, whose leaders were convicted of seditious conspiracy related to the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection.

That’s what friends are for. “I do have a lot of surrogates and they are speaking very beautifully,” said Trump.

There they were again Thursday afternoon, attacking the judge, his daughter, the prosecution and witnesses. Some invented new slanders that even Trump hadn’t attempted. Rep. Andrew Ogles (R-Tenn.) referred to witness Stormy Daniels as a “hooker” and a “woman who was paid for sex.” Luna called Cohen someone who “screams explicitives (sic) against President Trump.” But, mostly, they dutifully parroted Trump’s own words — particularly about the “judge who is totally corrupt.”

“Corrupt judge,” said Good.
“Corrupt judge,” said Boebert.
“Corrupt judge,” said Rep. Michael Cloud (R-Tex.).
“Corrupt judge,” said Gaetz.

Ed Kilgore: Justice Alito’s ‘Stop the Steal’ Flag Is Symbol of New Partisan Era at Supreme Court

One of the homes flying an inverted flag during that time was the residence of Supreme Court Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., in Alexandria, Va., according to photographs and interviews with neighbors. The upside-down flag was aloft on Jan. 17, 2021, the images showed. President Donald J. Trump’s supporters, including some brandishing the same symbol, had rioted at the Capitol a little over a week before. Mr. Biden’s inauguration was three days away. Alarmed neighbors snapped photographs, some of which were recently obtained by The New York Times. Word of the flag filtered back to the court, people who worked there said in interviews.

“That time,” to be clear, was shortly after the January 6 insurrection, in which the “inverted flag” was prominently displayed and when, as the Times notes, “the court was still contending with whether to hear a 2020 election case, with Justice Alito on the losing end of that decision.”

The revelation casts a new and baleful light on the furious and defiant tone Alito subsequently adopted in writing and defending the infamous majority opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which reversed Roe v. Wade after nearly half a century in which the Court recognized a constitutional right to choose abortion. Roberts, it should be recalled, tried to steer the Court toward a less inflammatory and more incremental attack on abortion rights, but Alito was having none of that. Indeed, the most persuasive (if unprovable) theory about the infamous leak of Alito’s opinion months before Dobbs was announced is that he wanted to freeze the Court where it was lest Roberts succeed in mitigating the damage to its reputation.

If you view the latest stage in Supreme Court evolution as a revolt led by Alito and Clarence Thomas against Roberts’s leadership, the flag-flying incident could well be a landmark moment. In response to the Times report, Alito blamed the incident on his wife (and his neighbor):

We’ll see if the revelation of the freak flag flying at the Alito home spurs Roberts into another frenzy of claims about the independence of a Court majority he clearly no longer controls. But it may be too late. This may ultimately be remembered as the Alito-Thomas Court, signaling an era when control of the commanding heights of the federal judiciary became another prize of partisan supremacy. https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/alito-flag-is-symbol-of-new-partisan-era-at-supreme-court.html

Jacob Heilbrunn: The Real Danger if Trump Is Re-elected

Donald Trump may be regularly depicted as an impetuous toddler in chief, but he appears to possess genuine convictions about international relations. Ever since he gave an interview to Playboy magazine in 1990 decrying Mikhail Gorbachev for failing to hold the Soviet empire together (“not a firm enough hand”) and praising the Chinese Communist leadership for crushing the student uprising at Tiananmen Square (“they were vicious, they were horrible, but they put it down with strength”), Mr. Trump has extolled authoritarian leaders as possessing the right stuff, while he has dismissed democratic ones as weak and feckless.

This impulse is not a new phenomenon for the United States; it dates back to World War I and World War II, when leading American conservatives praised foreign autocrats such as Kaiser Wilhelm II, Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini and Francisco Franco as their ideological comrades in arms. Until now, however, no modern president has lauded autocracy as a model for America.

During his four years in office, Mr. Trump blustered about alliances and praised foreign dictators but never actually upended America’s foreign policy. That could change in a second Trump administration. The former president is poised to adopt a radical program centered on constructive engagement with foreign strongmen and hostility toward democratic allies; it would include abandoning NATO. It would convert America from a dominant economic and military power into what Mr. Trump purports to abhor — a global loser. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/21/opinion/trump-foreign-policy.html

William S. Becker: After almost a decade of Trump, America is tired. And scared.