John Hendrickson: Trump Finds Another Line to Cross

Former President Donald Trump, perhaps threatened by President Joe Biden’s well-received State of the Union address, mocked his opponent’s lifelong stutter at a rally in Georgia yesterday. “Wasn’t it—didn’t it bring us together?” Trump asked sarcastically. He kept the bit going, slipping into a Biden caricature. “‘I’m gonna bring the country tuh-tuh-tuh-together,’” Trump said, straining and narrowing his mouth for comedic effect.

Trump has made a new habit of this. “‘He’s a threat to d-d-democracy,’” Trump said in his vaudeville Biden character at a January rally in Iowa. That jibe was also a response to a big Biden speech—one tied to the anniversary of the January 6 insurrection. (Guess who the he was in that sentence.)

More than Trump’s ugly taunt, one thing stands out to me about these moments: the sound of Trump’s supporters laughing right along with him. This is a building block of Trumpism. The man at the top gives his followers permission to be the worst version of themselves. https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2024/03/donald-trump-mocks-joe-bidens-stutter/677708/

Edward Luce: Democracy dies in Trumpian boredom

Call it the banality of chaos. Here is a checklist of Donald Trump’s recent activity. He promised on day one of his presidency to let January 6 convicts out of jail, close the US-Mexico border and ‘drill baby drill’ for gas and oil. He feted Viktor Orbán in Mar-a-Lago as the best leader in the world and assured Hungary’s strongman that he would not ‘give a penny’ to Ukraine. He took out a $91.6mn surety bond to pay defamation damages to his sexual assault victim, E Jean Carroll.

He purged the Republican National Committee with 60 staff firings — the opening move by his daughter-in-law, Lara Trump, who he handpicked as RNC co-chair. He did a U-turn on TikTok, now saying its Chinese parent company should retain ownership. He mimicked Joe Biden’s stutter, insisted that America’s true inflation rate was 50 per cent and attacked Jimmy Kimmel as the worst ever Oscars host. It seems almost trivial to add that new detail emerged about Trump’s apparent soft spot for Adolf Hitler.

All this happened since last Friday. Now multiply that by 47, which is the number of five-day slots between now and the general election. Even the most diligent Trump observer would feel catatonic after a few such increments. It is thus little surprise that most of his recent episodes did not hit the headlines. In another time, with a normal candidate, any single one would hijack the news cycle. Trump’s candidacy is so far off the charts it is almost paranormal. That is the essence of his political appeal. It means he is judged by a different standard to Biden, or any other politician, Democratic or Republican. https://www.ft.com/content/35106042-2e96-4dde-8cf6-734c6e89fd9e

Gabriel Schoenfeld: He can win

I’VE BEEN A PESSIMIST about Joe Biden’s chances to get re-elected this November. His tired appearance, his shuffling gait, his gaffes—the intense media attention on all of this was dragging him down and setting the stage for the unthinkable return of Donald Trump. Thursday night’s State of the Union address has gone a great distance to cure me of my pessimism. Biden’s performance was electrifying. Watching it, you can’t help but think: He can win. https://plus.thebulwark.com/p/state-of-the-union-biden-calls-out-trump-maga

Susan Glasser: So Much for “Sleepy Joe”: On Biden’s Rowdy, Shouty State of the Union

But, with Biden trailing Donald Trump in the polls and facing persistent
questions from within the Democratic Party about his ability to win reëlection and serve a second term, the President had no choice but to try something different for the large national TV audience. The result was a most unusual State of the Union—partisan, shouty, and even, at times, a bit rowdy. What a contrast to the usual hoary clichés and bipartisan applause lines. Democrats loved it; Republicans looked on, squirming in their seats as if they’d accidentally been forced to sit through the Democratic National Convention.

Congress, it turns out, is an appealing backdrop for a campaign rally. And there is nothing that this President likes more than to extol the virtues of infrastructure spending and union manufacturing jobs before a cheering crowd in the packed House chamber. With his Presidency on the line, no one was going to accuse this eighty-one-year-old of a geriatric showing when it mattered. https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-bidens-washington/so-much-for-sleepy-joe-on-bidens-rowdy-shouty-state-of-the-union Philip

Charles Sykes: Donald Trump, the luckiest politician who ever lived

A federal judge has declared him liable for rape. He faces paying a half-billion dollars in legal judgments for fraud and defamation. Twice impeached, then defeated for reelection, he has been charged with 91 felonies. He has been arrested and his mug shot published; he will spend much of the year in and out of courtrooms. On the campaign trail, his rambling speeches are gaffe-ridden and prone to malapropisms and meltdowns.

In a normal universe, this would not be the description of a fortunate man.

But we do not live that universe, and we must consider the very real — and infuriating — possibility that Donald J. Trump is the single luckiest politician who ever lived.

For almost a decade (though it feels even longer), we’ve watched him trip through minefields, totter on the edge of sinkholes and step on trapdoors, each time thinking: This is it. Now he’s going down. It has become a mantra of dashed hopes: The walls are (once again) closing in on Donald Trump. He’s on the brink, desperate. This time, surely this time. And yet, somehow, he escapes.

The latest example of Trump Luck was Colorado’s decision, amid all his other legal problems, to ban him from its primary ballot using a novel legal theory. The Supreme Court smacked down Colorado on Monday, handing Trump a 9-0 victory that only makes him look stronger.

With a major criminal trial looming for trying to overturn the 2020 election results, the Supreme Court on Feb. 28 threw him a lifeline on his immunity claim, likely pushing his moment of reckoning past Election Day.

The felony election-interference case against him in Georgia has been thrown into disarray by alleged prosecutorial hanky-panky.

Trump was caught with a Florida stash of classified government documents, including war plans, but last spring he somehow managed to draw the extraordinarily friendly Aileen M. Cannon as the judge in the case.

On the campaign trail, Trump is prone to bouts of incoherence that seem to suggest he is losing it. But, lucky man that he is, the Justice Department chose a special counsel whom Trump had appointed to be the U.S. attorney for Maryland to investigate President Biden’s mishandling of classified documents; declining to charge him last month, the prosecutor made the Biden’s memory lapses the story.

By now, this must feel like a familiar pattern.

In 2016, with Trump less than two weeks from seemingly certain election defeat, FBI Director James B. Comey decided to kneecap Hillary Clinton.

When an audio recording surfaced during the 2016 campaign revealing Trump bragging about being able to grab women by the genitals, his opponents just knew he was done. They hadn’t reckoned with Trump Luck: His evangelical supporters, it turned out, were willing to shelve their morals to win an election.

That year, Trump lost the popular vote by millions but won the presidency in the electoral college. Even he looked like the guy at the slot machine who can’t believe it when the bells clang and the coins start flying.

It must feel almost providential to Trump that his rise to power has also coincided with the downfall of much of the traditional fact-based media, as well as the emergence of just the sort of alternative-reality information silos that he needed to shape his narrative and platform his bluster, bombast and fakery.

So now, despite (waves hand) all this, Trump is about to clinch the GOP nomination for the third time, and most national polls show him leading President Biden as he seeks to a return to the White House.

Has anyone ever been this lucky? https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/03/05/donald-trump-luckiest-politician/

Jen Psaki: What do Republicans stand for?

Perhaps the most revealing part about Thursday night, at least when it comes to members of the Republican Party, was what they refused to stand for. And I mean that literally. Traditionally, members of an opposing party will remain seated when they disagree with the president, and stand up — or at least clap — on matters of bipartisan consensus.

But on Thursday night, many Republicans refused to stand when President Joe Biden celebrated even the most fundamental American values and accomplishments. House Speaker Mike Johnson was a particularly awkward example of this, as he grimaced in his chair through the majority of the speech. Johnson and his peers refused to stand to celebrate job growth, plummeting inflation, or Biden’s pledge to buy American goods and products. They didn’t stand up to support literacy or increased access to preschool.

They didn’t stand in support of removing lead pipes for clean drinking water, ending cancer or protecting our troops.

They refused to stand for IVF, even though most claim they now support it. They refused to stand up against fentanyl traffickers. Those should all be no-brainers.

Unbelievably, Republicans didn’t even stand in defense of democracy — either here at home, or around the world — and they refused to stand up for NATO, the alliance that has kept the world safe for 75 years.

Biden admonished, “You can’t love your country only when you win.” And Republicans made clear Thursday that they certainly don’t seem to love much of America at all, as long as a Democrat is in office. https://www.msnbc.com/inside-with-jen-psaki/republicans-stand-for-biden-state-union-rcna142560

Dan Pfeiffer: How Trump Fumbled his Attack on Biden's Age

Donald Trump and the Republicans smelled blood. President Biden had recently been on the defensive about his age. A series of polls released over the weekend heightened Democratic concerns. The Republicans knew the press would treat a misstatement or minor gaffe during Biden’s State of the Union address as a campaign-ending transgression.

Before the speech, MAGA Inc., a Trump-aligned Super PAC, released a brutal ad concerning Biden’s age that questioned whether he would survive a second term.

And just to twist the knife, they ran the ad during Morning Joe, which, like Message Box, is a staple of the President’s media diet.

Republican House members in the room tried to goad Biden into a mistake. Marjorie Taylor Greene, dressed in full MAGA regalia, staked Biden out as he walked to the dais and then tried to interrupt him while he spoke about border security.

None of it worked. Biden delivered a boffo performance, and the media coverage and online conversation have all been about the strength and vigor he demonstrated.

Thursday night demonstrated the folly of Trump’s “Sleepy Joe” strategy. https://www.messageboxnews.com/p/how-trump-fumbled-his-attack-on-bidens

Bess Levin: “Parody-Level Terrible”: Even Republicans Are Panning Katie Britt’s Creepy-as-F**k State of the Union Response

Success is not a word people are using when discussing Katie Britt’s response to Biden, which had a vibe that could be best characterized as “low-budget horror movie,” “Handmaid’s Tale–esque,” or simply “creepy as f--k.” In fact, the whole thing was so weird and cringeworthy—from the Alabama lawmaker’s unsettling whispering, to the words “steeped in the blood of patriots,” to the sense one got that after the director yelled “cut,” Britt was going to go threaten a kindergarten teacher for letting her kid read a book about kindness—that even Republicans are panning her response. And they’re not holding back!

“Everyone’s fucking losing it,” one GOP strategist told the Daily Beast of the response to Britt’s kitchen table rebuttal, which will no doubt be parodied on Saturday Night Live this weekend. “It’s one of our biggest disasters ever.” Said a source close to Donald Trump: “Her performance was the stuff of nightmares.” Speaking to a Business Insider reporter, a Republican Hill staffer opined: “She really thinks she’s killing it. But it’s comical. Like SNL quality.” On X, conservative commentator Allie Beth Stuckey wrote: “…the delivery was parody-level terrible.” https://www.vanityfair.com/news/katie-britt-state-of-the-union-rebuttal

Jonathan Chait: Biden Was So Good, Trump Is Accusing Him of Performance-Enhancing Drugs

After Republicans spent years depicting him as a near-comatose vegetable who literally does not know where he is, President Biden delivered a forceful State of the Union address. This created a dilemma for Republicans. One option was to attack the speech as partisan and mean. Another, more deranged choice, was to insist that Biden had only pulled it off due to the aid of performance-enhancing drugs.

You can guess which option Trump went with. The former president began posting manically on social media that his adversary, who he has previously labeled “sleepy” and also the mastermind of a plot to control the Ukrainian justice system for the benefit of his son, was on some kind of drug combination. https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/biden-state-of-the-union-speech-drugs-trump.html

Philip Bump: How James Comer keeps the Biden impeachment dream alive

Last May, before the formal inquiry was underway, House Oversight Chairman James Comer (R-Ky.) joined Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) in elevating an accusation of bribery against President and Hunter Biden. There was no evidence for the claim and some evidence against it; last month, the person who made the accusation was charged by the Justice Department with lying about it.

But most of the effort led by Comer focused on trying to show that Joe Biden was involved in his son’s business. Last week, Hunter Biden himself testified behind closed doors and, according to a transcript, deflected the allegations one by one. Comer’s entirely circumstantial case withered even further.

This is a problem. Republicans and Comer in particular have convinced Republican voters that their investigation has been successful and found real problems. But they haven’t, as numerous members of Congress have pointed out, meaning that the chances of actually impeaching Biden are withering, too.

So Comer is doing what is done when a hustle is collapsing: He’s doubling down, appearing on Sean Hannity’s Fox News show to reassure Fox viewers that all was well with the effort to hold the president to account. (It is not surprising that Hannity should host such an effort; he was an early investor in this political pyramid scheme and he’s as eager as anyone to keep it moving forward.) His argument? Hunter Biden slipped up, and Republicans are ready to pounce. https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/03/07/biden-impeachment-inquiry-comer/

Thomas Zimmer: The Much Vaunted Guardrails Are Failing

Most of you who are reading this probably remember where you were on January 6, 2021 – how you heard about what was happening in Washington, DC, how you felt watching the images of a violent assault on the Capitol. Imagine someone had told you that evening, or maybe the morning after, that over three years later, Donald Trump, the man at the center of an unprecedented attempted coup, still would not have faced any real consequences – that, in fact, he would be almost guaranteed to escape any serious legal and constitutional consequences before the next presidential election in which he would be, once again, the leader of the Republican Party?

I’m assuming most of you would have asked “What on earth went wrong?” – and concluded some variation of “Well, I guess we are f*cked then.” That certainly would have been my reaction. Not even necessarily because such an outcome was unthinkable: It certainly shouldn’t have been for anyone who had been paying attention to what had been happening on the American Right. But because it would have been – and still is! – shocking nonetheless. Shocking, but not necessarily surprising. The basic mood in the era of Trump.

The guardrails are failing not only to hold Trump accountable directly, but also, absent any serious legal and political consequences, to at least tell the people how exceptionally dangerous Trump and those who are fueling, enabling, and supporting him are. If someone assumes that this is still a country with functioning institutions, then it’s only logical for them to conclude that Trump walking free means his transgressions can’t be that bad.”

“At some point, it becomes really hard to expect people to break through their routines and actively defend democracy, as is necessary in a situation of crisis, if the institutions we ask them to trust shy away from doing their part – if they instead continue to signal ‘normalcy,’ that politics as usual is still an option or, at the very least, that exceptional, unprecedented measures would be ‘too extreme.’” https://thomaszimmer.substack.com/p/the-much-vaunted-guardrails-are-failing