Trump campaign press pass brandished on air by QAnon podcaster Brenden Dilley
Vanity Fair recently reported that several journalists from mainstream publications, including The Washington Post, NBC News, Axios, and Vanity Fair, were denied press access to Trump’s campaign events, seemingly in retaliation for their previous critical coverage. Meanwhile, Media Matters found that the campaign has granted press credentials to the QAnon-promoting MG Show and Brenden Dilley, a podcaster who has promoted the QAnon conspiracy theory and leads a “meme team” that creates pro-Trump content.
Washington Post reporter Isaac Arnsdorf has allegedly been barred from Trump’s campaign events since February, according to Vanity Fair, over his rejection of a campaign request to change the title of his book Finish What We Started: The MAGA Movement’s Ground War to End Democracy. Several other reporters also allegedly had press access revoked over critical coverage or public spats with campaign officials. Vanity Fair reported:
In recent weeks, the [Trump] campaign has taken similar punitive measures against other reporters, according to multiple sources familiar with the moves. An Axios reporter had their credentials approved for an event and then revoked the same day, following the publication of a story about the Trump-led Republican National Committee’s struggles in swing states. (An Axios spokesperson declined to comment.) At least one other Post reporter was temporarily denied press credentials to multiple events after accurately reporting on Trump’s public statements. Most recently, Brian Stelter, a special correspondent for Vanity Fair, was denied press access to Trump’s rally in Schnecksville, Pennsylvania.
While it has barred mainstream journalists, the campaign has granted press credentials to a QAnon-promoting show and a podcaster who creates pro-Trump content.
At least one host of the QAnon-promoting podcast MG Show was seemingly given a press pass for Trump’s December 17 campaign rally in Reno, Nevada. Days before the rally, co-host Shannon Townsend announced on the podcast that after seeking press passes for the rally, the show was granted the status of “accredited media with Donald Trump and the rally campaign.” Afterward, Townsend posted images from the rally, including one that appears to show him holding a press pass in a media area.
In response to reporter Brian Stelter posting on April 19, “I applied for press credentials for Trump's most recent rally in Schnecksville, Pennsylvania and was rejected,” Townsend shared an image of his credentials for the Nevada rally, and said, “I have mine.”
MG Show had previously received press credentials for a 2021 Trump rally in Sarasota, Florida, at which host Townsend wore a wristband with the QAnon slogan “where we go one, we go all” — or “WWG1WGA” for short — and led a crowd in chanting the slogan. The Trump campaign was forced to publicly distance itself from QAnon and MG Show after receiving backlash for credentialing the conspiracy theorists.
In January, Brenden Dilley, a podcaster who has previously promoted the QAnon conspiracy theory, bragged that he was given press credentials for the Trump campaign's Iowa caucus event.
Dilley has been the leader of a pro-Trump online “meme team” which calls itself “Trump’s Online War Machine,” and he has admitted that he “make[s] shit up” to further Trump’s agenda and hurt his political opponents. During an episode of his show, Dilley displayed the press pass, bragging that he got a “special” and “exclusive” press credential that got him into the “Trump War Room,” where he said “pretty much the entire Team Trump comes through.”
Barring mainstream journalists from campaign rallies and other events is hardly new for the Trump team. During his 2016 presidential campaign, Trump and his allies waged an all-out war on the press, including banning certain journalists from events, and attacking critical coverage and entire mainstream news outlets as “fake news.”
Trump's presidential term was also marked by repeated instances where mainstream journalists were barred from official events and press conferences over unflattering coverage and unwanted questions. And his reelection campaign also reportedly issued a blanket credential denial against Bloomberg News over the outlet’s perceived “bias” against him.
Reprinted with permission from Media Matters.
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Judge Juan Merchan
Monday was genuinely historic. For the first time since the nation was founded, a jury sat down to hear criminal charges against a man who once served as the nation’s highest executive. Despite months in which pundits had dismissed this case as the weakest of the criminal cases Donald Trump is facing, the prosecution got off to a powerful start, outlining for the jury Trump’s long history of scandal, cover-up, and playing fast and loose with legalities.
Judge Juan Merchan kept things moving quickly. Even though Monday was a half day to allow everyone to go home for the Passover holiday, the trial moved through opening statements from both sides and saw the first witness take the stand.
That first witness was David Pecker, the former publisher of the National Enquirer. Though Pecker was only on the stand for a few minutes on Monday before the shortened day was called to a halt, his testimony, along with the opening statement from prosecutor Matthew Colangelo, made clear that this case is not only going to be a challenge for Trump, it’s also going to be a challenge to journalism.
In his brief appearance Monday, Pecker was open about how the National Enquirer did business. As The Washington Post reports, Pecker described the process at the Enquirer using a term that makes many journalists at more reputable outlets sneer: “checkbook journalism.”
That is, to get the stories that decorated the paper’s lurid pages, Pecker and his colleagues at the National Enquirer simply took the very direct route of opening up the checkbook and paying for them. Compared to hiring investigative reporters and the associated resources of a solid newsroom, this can be a relatively inexpensive way to operate. And when it comes to juicy behind-the-scenes tales of globe-trotting celebrities, checkbook journalism may be the only way to get the stories otherwise hidden from the public.
As Pecker made clear, those checks were often cut to hotel workers, limo drivers, or other workers who stood around being socially invisible while celebrities were at play.
Paying for a story may seem morally questionable, and many schools of journalism would hold it unethical. But is it really that much more dubious than hiring Ronna McDaniel to provide news commentary, or populating your whole newsroom with former Trump staffers?
The stories served up by the National Enquirer are often designed to feed prurient interests, but there’s another form of journalism that may be far more destructive than writing a check to someone who very likely needs it. And a big hint at that kind of journalism also surfaced in the first morning of the trial.
Midway through Colangelo’s opening statement to the jury, New York Times crime reporter Jonah Bromwich was struck by a singular thought about the story of how Trump’s relationship with Stormy Daniels was kept out of the news.
For years, this story has been told by reporters with caveats and caution. So it’s really striking to hear Colangelo lay the hush money scheme directly at Trump’s feet, with perfect clarity. “It was election fraud, pure and simple,” Colangelo says bluntly.
That certainly is “striking.” And it absolutely begs the question of why reporters would have spent years tiptoeing around this story. Why did Colangelo’s statement seem so shocking when compared to other reporting on these same events?
Bromwich might want to ask that of the other New York Times reporter working from the courthouse on Monday, Maggie Haberman.
Haberman and her bosses at the Times might turn their noses up at the idea of breaking out a wallet for checkbook journalism, but they certainly seem to be open to even more damaging access journalism.
As The New Yorker reported in 2023, Haberman has long been Trump’s personal chronicler, regarded as a “safe” and “friendly” choice when Trump needed to add some faux dignity to some claim or event. Haberman could not only be counted on to edit events to prevent Trump from coming off too badly, but she saved up some of the juiciest events she witnessed, leaving them out of real-time reporting to later drop it in her book. That included withholding knowledge that Trump intended to stay in the White House after losing the 2020 election to President Joe Biden.
Haberman was far from alone when it came to withholding critical information from the public. For example, ABC News' chief Washington correspondent, Jonathan Karl, did not mention a memo from former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows describing the whole scheme to undo Biden’s victory until Karl had a chance to drop that memo in his book nearly a year later.
The New York Times’ coverage of Monday’s court action includes its disdain for the kind of journalism practiced at the National Enquirer. In describing the catch-and-kill scheme Pecker created to protect Trump, the Times wrote, "In the world of tabloid journalism, where ethical lines are blurry, deciding what to publish and why is often a calculus that covers favors doled out and chits called in."
But how does that “blurry” world differ from the kind of access journalism practiced at The New York Times and other major news outlets? When a journalist is more interested in maintaining a source than delivering the truth, questions get pulled and hard facts are omitted. AsEditor & Publisher reported in 2021, even when a source lies to a reporter, the source is rarely dropped because reporters may feel they could need that source again in the future.
Bromwich found the story of Trump’s crimes so “striking” because prosecutors were doing what the Times is supposed to do, delivering a naked, straightforward accounting of the events without pulling punches or dropping in a charming little diner for folksy insights.
As CNN reported earlier this month, The New York Times seems to be fixated on polls about President Joe Biden’s age, while giving scant attention to Trump’s borrowed Hitler quotes or his desire to be a dictator. Few major media outlets seem to be interested in critically reporting the violent rhetoric Trump uses at his campaign rallies or the way his speeches frequently dwindle into gibberish.
And as theSan Francisco Chronicle said about Haberman squirreling away vital information:
In this instance, if Trump was so unstoppered he had started to conjure a coup, that’s news with a half-life of right now. Whistles must be blown, play stopped, the 25th Amendment consulted, Mike Pence invited in to measure the Oval Office for new drapes. At once.
Maybe the truth wouldn’t be so striking if the New York Times would report it more often.
Reprinted with permission from Daily Kos.
CNN Correspondnent Kaitlan Collins outside the New York courthouse where Trump is on trial
CNN’s Kaitlan Collins on Monday detailed Donald Trump’s frustration with courthouse security as “a few dozen” supporters “are kept cornered off a bit of a distance” from the former president’s Manhattan “hush money” trial.
Opening statements in the Manhattan district attorney’s 34 felony count case against Trump began Monday morning as prosecutors alleged the former president lied “over and over and over” in an “illegal” conspiracy to hide hush money payments to adult film star Stephanie Clifford, whose stage name is Stormy Daniels, the New York Times reports.
According to Collins, Trump is growing increasingly frustrated as he views “this all through the lens of the campaign trail.”
“I think big picture, when you look at what Trump has been saying, his mindset going into this, he’s complaining about the gag order incessantly,” Collins told CNN’s Anderson Cooper. "I’m told privately the idea that he can't directly attack the judges family, the prosecutors in this case — he can go after [Manhattan District Attorney] Alvin Bragg— but not other members of the team … it has been a big thing of his.”
“The other thing: there's a lot of security outside the courthouse,” Collins noted. “Understandably, we saw what happened last week. It is a former president who is going on trial.”
Collins appeared to be referencing the death of Max Azzarello, who succumbed to his injuries on Saturday after setting himself on fire across the street from the Manhattan Criminal Courthouse on Friday.
Collins continued, “Trump has been complaining that his supporters — when there's only a few dozen, it's not a huge group because we've been live outside the courthouse for several weeks now — that they can't come closer to the courthouse.”
“Because he is viewing this all through the lens of the campaign trail and what that means going into it and the fact that they are kept cordoned off a bit of a distance so people can get in and out of the courthouse has been driving him crazy,” Collins concluded.
Watch the video below, via CNN, or at this link.
Reprinted with permission from Alternet.
Donald Trump outside the New York courthouse
Hours before the start of opening arguments and the second week of the trial of the first former U.S. president to face criminal charges, Donald Trump is urging his supporters to “rally behind MAGA” and “go out and peacefully protest” at courthouses across the country, as he laments the protections and high security at Manhattan’s Criminal Courts Building.
Trump’s remarks come just days after a man set himself on fire last week outside the same courthouse where jury selection was underway in Trump’s criminal trial. That man later died.
Seizing on current news stories, Trump claimed “Palestinian protesters, and even rioters,” are “allowed to roam the Cities, scream, shout, sit, block traffic, enter buildings, not get permits, and basically do whatever they want including threatening Supreme Court Justices right in front of their homes.”
NCRM has found no reports of pro-Palestinian protestors “threatening Supreme Court Justices right in front of their homes.” Over 100 pro-Palestinian protestors were arrested in New York City last week, according to Reuters.
Trump also complained that “people who truly LOVE our Country, and want to MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN, are not allowed to ‘Peacefully Protest,’ and are rudely and systematically shut down and ushered off to far away ‘holding areas,’ essentially denying them their Constitutional Rights.”
The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled areas designated to house protestors are legal, including at courthouses depending on the protestors’ motivations.
“America Loving Protesters should be allowed to protest at the front steps of Courthouses, all over the Country, just like it is allowed for those who are destroying our Country on the Radical Left, a two tiered system of justice. Free Speech and Assembly has been ‘CHILLED’ for USA SUPPORTERS. GO OUT AND PEACEFULLY PROTEST. RALLY BEHIND MAGA. SAVE OUR COUNTRY!”
Trump concluded by misquoting the famous Democratic U.S. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt: “THE ONLY THING YOU HAVE TO FEAR IS FEAR ITSELF.”
This is not the first time Trump has urged his followers to show up and show support for him. Ahead of his expected indictment in New York District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s criminal case against the ex-president, Trump told his supporters to “protest,” and “take our nation back!” in all-caps.
Last week, MSNBC‘s Lawrence O’Donell “explain[ed] how Donald Trump’s wish for a revolution during his first criminal trial did not happen because his supporters did not show up.”
Donald Trump has been criminally indicted in four separate cases and is facing a total of 88 felony charges, including 34 in his New York criminal trial for alleged falsification of business records to hide payments of hush money to an adult film actress and one other woman, in al alleged effort to suppress their stories and protect his 2016 presidential campaign, which could be deemed election interference.
Reprinted with permission from Alternet.
Dave McCormick
David McCormick, who is Pennsylvania's presumptive Republican U.S. Senate nominee, has often suggested he grew up poor in a rural community. But a new report finds that his upbringing was far more affluent than he's suggested.
The New York Times reported Friday that McCormick — a former hedge fund executive who lived in Connecticut as recently as 2022 — has been cagey with voters about his childhood. McCormick has tweeted that he was "raised in Bloomsburg working on his family's farm," said on a 2022 podcast that he "started with nothing" and told CBS News that same year that he "didn't have anything" growing up as the son of two schoolteachers.
But according to the Times, McCormick's father, Dr. James H. McCormick, was appointed president of what is now Bloomsburg University by Gov. Milton Schapp (D) in 1973. He moved his family into Buckalew Place — the official mansion for presidents of the school that currently spans 5,500 square feet — when his son was just eight years old. The Times reported that he was paid a salary of $29,000 at the time, which is more than $200,000 in today's dollars.
"He had a very privileged childhood," 76-year-old Linda Cromley — a lifelong Bloomsburg resident who attended church with the McCormicks for a stretch — told the Times. "He didn’t grow up a poor kid. Which doesn’t mean that he has to — but don’t pretend that you were."
During a roundtable discussion earlier this year, McCormick referred to himself as a "farmer that's got a big farm in Columbia County." However, that's a reference to his family's 600-acre Christmas tree farm that they purchased after the McCormicks had already been living at Buckalew Place for several years.
Mary Gummerson, who rented part of the farm with her husband for more than three decades, told the Times that while David McCormick had spent some summers baling hay and trimming trees, his description of himself as a "farmer" was somewhat misleading.
“They were hunters and he grew up in a farm kind of environment," Gummerson said. “But no, he’s not planting corn.”
McCormick didn't respond to the Times' interview request, but clarified in a statement that "growing up, we lived on campus at Bloomsburg State College and my parents owned a farm 10 minutes down the road." He added that the Times' highlighting of the discrepancies between his descriptions of his biographical details and the actual details of his upbringing were "hair-splitting, frivolous, cherry-picked distortions of what I have always said."
Pennsylvania's U.S. Senate primary is Tuesday, though McCormick has no Republican opposition. He will face off with Sen. Bob Casey (D-PA) in the November election, who is seeking a fourth six-year term. According to RealClearPolitics' polling average, Casey leads McCormick by more than five points.
Reprinted with permission from Alternet.
Abortion opponents have maneuvered in courthouses for years to end access to reproductive health care. In Arizona last week, a win for the anti-abortion camp caused political blowback for Republican candidates in the state and beyond.
The reaction echoed the response to an Alabama Supreme Court decision over in vitro fertilization just two months before.
The election-year ruling by the Arizona Supreme Court allowing enforcement of a law from 1864 banning nearly all abortions startled Republican politicians, some of whom quickly turned to social media to denounce it.
The court decision was yet another development forcing many Republicans legislators and candidates to thread the needle: Maintain support among anti-abortion voters while not damaging their electoral prospects this fall. This shifting power dynamic between state judges and state lawmakers has turned into a high-stakes political gamble, at times causing daunting problems, on a range of reproductive health issues, for Republican candidates up and down the ballot.
“When the U.S. Supreme Court said give it back to the states, OK, well now the microscope is on the states,” said Jennifer Piatt, co-director of the Center for Public Health Law and Policy at Arizona State University’s Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law. “We saw this in Alabama with the IVF decision,” she said, “and now we’re seeing it in Arizona.”
Multiple Republicans have criticized the Arizona high court’s decision on the 1864 law, which allows abortion only to save a pregnant woman’s life. “This decision cannot stand. I categorically reject rolling back the clock to a time when slavery was still legal and where we could lock up women and doctors because of an abortion,” state Rep. Matt Gress said in a video April 9. All four Arizona Supreme Court justices who said the long-dormant Arizona abortion ban could be enforced were appointed by former Gov. Doug Ducey, a Republican who in 2016 expanded the number of state Supreme Court justices from five to seven and cemented the bench’s conservative majority.
Yet in a post the day of the ruling on the social platform X, Ducey said the decision “is not the outcome I would have preferred.”
The irony is that the decision came after years of efforts by Arizona Republicans “to lock in a conservative majority on the court at the same time that the state’s politics were shifting more towards the middle,” said Douglas Keith, senior counsel at the left-leaning Brennan Center for Justice.
All the while, anti-abortion groups have been pressuring Republicans to clearly define where they stand.
“Whether running for office at the state or federal level, Arizona Republicans cannot adopt the losing ostrich strategy of burying their heads in the sand on the issue of abortion and allowing Democrats to define them,” Kelsey Pritchard, a spokesperson for Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, said in an emailed statement. “To win, Republicans must be clear on the pro-life protections they support, express compassion for women and unborn children, and contrast their position with the Democrat agenda.”
Two months before the Arizona decision, the Alabama Supreme Court said frozen embryos from in vitro fertilization can be considered children under state law. The decision prompted clinics across the state to halt fertility treatments and caused a nationwide uproar over reproductive health rights. With Republicans feeling the heat, Alabama lawmakers scrambled to pass a law to shield IVF providers from prosecution and civil lawsuits “for the damage to or death of an embryo” during treatment.
But when it comes to courts, Arizona lawmakers are doubling down: state Supreme Court justices are appointed by the governor but generally face voters every six years in retention elections. That could soon change. A constitutional amendment referred by the Arizona Legislature that could appear on the November ballot would eliminate those regular elections—triggering them only under limited circumstances—and allow the justices to serve as long as they exhibit “good behavior.” Effectively it would grant justices lifetime appointments until age 70, when they must retire.
Even with the backlash against the Arizona court’s abortion decision, Keith said, “I suspect there aren’t Republicans in the state right now who are lamenting all these changes to entrench a conservative majority on the Supreme Court.”
Meanwhile, abortion rights groups are trying to get a voter-led state constitutional amendment on the ballot that would protect abortion access until fetal viability and allow abortions afterward to protect the life or health of the pregnant person.
State court decisions are causing headaches even at the very top of the Republican ticket. In an announcement in which he declined to endorse a national abortion ban, presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump on April 8 said he was “proudly the person responsible” for ending Roe v. Wade, which recognized a federal constitutional right to abortion before being overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court in 2022, and said the issue should be left to states. “The states will determine by vote or legislation, or perhaps both, and whatever they decide must be the law of the land,” he said. But just two days later he sought to distance himself from the Arizona decision. Trump also praised the Alabama Legislature for enacting the law aiming to preserve access to fertility treatments. “The Republican Party should always be on the side of the miracle of life,” he said.
Recent court decisions on reproductive health issues in Alabama, Arizona, and Florida will hardly be the last. The Iowa Supreme Court, which underwent a conservative overhaul in recent years, on April 11, heard arguments on the state’s near-total abortion ban. Republican Gov. Kim Reynolds signed it into law in 2023 but it has been blocked in court.
In Florida, there was disappointment all around after dueling state Supreme Court decisions this month that simultaneously paved the way for a near-total abortion ban and also allowed a ballot measure that would enshrine abortion rights in the state constitution to proceed.
The Florida high court’s decisions were “simply unacceptable when five of the current seven sitting justices on the court were appointed by Republican Governor Ron DeSantis,” Andrew Shirvell, executive director of the anti-abortion group Florida Voice for the Unborn, said in a statement. “Clearly, grassroots pro-life advocates have been misled by elements within the ‘pro-life, pro-family establishment’ because Florida’s highest court has now revealed itself to be a paper tiger when it comes to standing-up to the murderous abortion industry.”
Tension between state judicial systems and conservative legislators seems destined to continue, given judges’ growing power over reproductive health access, Piatt said, with people on both sides of the political aisle asking: “Is this a court that is potentially going to give me politically what I’m looking for?”
Reprinted with permission from Daily Kos.
- Instead Of Fixing Harsh Abortion Law, Arizona Republicans Flee State House ›
- Hannity Blames Democrats For Failure To Repeal Arizona's 1864 Abortion Law ›
- Arizona Republicans Mock Protesters After Killing Abortion Ban Repeal ›
- With IVF Ban, Fakery On Abortion Rights Is Biting Republicans Hard ›
- GOP Rep. Steel Got Pregnant With IVF -- Then Sponsored A Bill To Ban It ›
- Fox Buries Arizona Court Decision Ordering Near-Total Abortion Ban ›
- New York City Advertising Abortion Access On Billboards In Southern Cities ›
Donald Trump in Manhattan courtroom
During his public remarks in between courtroom appearances, former President Donald Trump has consistently spoken with a defiant tone about the charges he's facing and in maintaining his innocence. However, a new report suggests that he is privately seething with rage about everything from how he's been depicted in official court sketches to various unflattering news reports.
According to Rolling Stone reporter Asawin Suebsaeng, Trump is convinced the courtroom sketch artist is "out to get him," complaining that some of the images the artist produced "were likely drawn to make fun of him."
"One such sketch captured Trump snoozing, with his eyes closed and head tilted," Suebsaeng wrote.
Suebsaeng also reports that Trump is "volcanically angry" about the various reports that emerged in which he was apparently sleeping intermittently during court proceedings. The New York Times' Maggie Haberman — who provided much of the paper's coverage of Trump during his time in the White House — reported earlier this week that he couldn't stay awake for the entirety of jury selection several days this week.
"He appeared to be asleep,” Haberman told CNN. “He didn’t pay attention to a note his lawyer passed him. His jaw kept falling on his chest, and his mouth kept going slack.”
Rolling Stone reported that, according to one unnamed source, the former president's anger is "maxed out, even for him." Suebsaeng wrote that Haberman's report provoked "an irate denial from Trump’s campaign and reigniting the former president’s antipathy towards Haberman."
"The resentment lasted the entire week, the sources add. It did not help Trump’s denial that he continued to doze off while seated in the Manhattan courtroom throughout the rest of the week," Suebsaeng wrote. "Despite his dozing being widely reported, the former president has laid much of the blame for the detail going viral at Haberman’s feet. He was even observed glaring at her on Monday as he exited the courtroom following her CNN appearance."
Trump is also enraged at late night host Jimmy Kimmel, who has turned the 45th president of the United States into a constant punchline for many of his jokes during this week's episodes. He recently attacked the comedian on his Truth Social platform, referencing his hosting of the Academy Awards earlier this year.
The former president lashed out as "Stupid Jimmy Kimmel, who still hasn’t recovered from his horrendous performance and big ratings drop as Host of The Academy Awards, especially when he showed he suffered from TDS, commonly known as TRUMP DERANGEMENT SYNDROME, to the entire World by reading on air my TRUTH about how bad a job he was doing that night." The former president additionally shared his opinion that Kimmel pulled a "CLASSIC CHOKE' during his Best Picture announcement, confusing the host with trophy presenter Al Pacino.
The Trump campaign continues to deny the rumors that Trump is angry about his coverage of the trial, with campaign spokesman Steven Cheung insisting to Rolling Stone that Suebsaeng's sources are lying.
“None of these sources know what the hell they’re talking about and clearly have no access to any type of factual information,” Cheung said. “These are the types of losers who will try to peddle fantasy as fact because they live miserable existences.”
Reprinted with permission from Alternet.
Presidents Joe Biden and Volodymyr Zelensky outside Mariyinski Palace in Kyiv, Ukraine on February 20, 2023
That whisper of wind you heard through the budding leaves on trees this afternoon was a sigh of relief from soldiers on the front lines in Luhansk and Donetsk and Zaporizhzhia as the House of Representatives overcame its Putin wing and passed the $95 billion aid package which included $61 billion in aid to Ukraine.
There hasn’t been a Ukrainian aid bill passed by the House since December of 2022, a little less than a year after Russia’s illegal invasion of Ukraine began. The Biden administration began asking for this aid package for Ukraine last August, but because Donald Trump told them to, House Republicans have been sitting on their hands and refusing to pass it.
Ukraine’s situation on the ground has reached crisis proportions, with some units along the 600-mile front lines in the east and south of the country completely out of howitzer ammunition with which to counter constant Russian bombardments. Ukraine has also begun to run out of missiles and ammunition for its air defenses, leaving some armored units defenseless against a resurgence in Russian air power and attacks by unmanned suicide drones.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, in an interview with PBS News Hour this week, said that the lack of artillery ammunition has left his country outgunned by Russian forces ten to one. “Can we hold our ground? No. In any case, with these statistics, they will be pushing us back every day.”
Ukraine recently suffered the loss of the industrial town of Avdiivka, just west of Donetsk, and is being hammered all along the front lines. Russian artillery and rocket strikes flattened the town in the same way they did in Bakhmut earlier in the war.
NATO allies have kept up their support for Ukraine in the absence of U.S. aid, with Denmark donating its entire stock of 155 mm artillery rounds to Ukraine. But European aid alone has not been enough to stop recent changes in Russian strategy brought on by the lack of aid from the United States. Russia has taken advantage of Ukraine’s weakened air defenses and has begun hammering population centers with heavy “glide bombs” dropped from Russian jets that only months ago Russia was reluctant to use in Ukrainian airspace because of its air defenses.
Speaker of the House Mike Johnson (R-LA) told reporters on Wednesday, “I really do believe the intel and the briefings that we’ve gotten.” This is possibly the first time that a Republican politician has stood up and said he believes the American intelligence community since then- President Trump told a news conference in Helsinki, Finland, that he believed Russian intelligence over his own FBI and CIA. That Johnson had to be dragged kicking and screaming into this admission says all anyone needs to know about who Joe Biden is dealing with as he tries to provide leadership for America’s foreign policy around the world. Republicans, led by Trump, have disparaged and lied about U.S. intelligence abilities for nearly a decade now.
Why bother having a CIA, DIA or NSA if you’re not going to pay attention to the intelligence they provide? Much of it these days is so-called “signals intelligence” gathered by satellite surveillance and electronic eavesdropping on enemy communications. Because of civilian satellite companies like Maxar Technologies, at least some of U.S. intelligence is backed up publicly and we can see it for ourselves. Much of it hardly needs expert analysis. We were able to follow the fall of Bakhmut in real time in some of the satellite photos provided by Maxar.
But Vladimir Putin has enough supporters among House Republicans, including such leading lights as Marjorie Taylor Greene, that Donald Trump has been able to stymie aid to Ukraine for almost a year. Now that military assistance from the U.S. will begin flowing again, Ukraine has a chance to counter the Russian summer offensive that is expected to begin as early as June.
Even though a temporary victory has been won against the Putin wing of the Republican Party, I’m afraid we’re in yet another “can you even imagine” moment with the political party that used to call itself “the party of Lincoln.” With six months to go before elections in the fall, there is no doubt in my mind that we’ll be unable to imagine the garbage that will emerge from the mouth of Donald Trump and his Russia-friendly acolytes.
Watch this space.
Lucian K. Truscott IV, a graduate of West Point, has had a 50-year career as a journalist, novelist, and screenwriter. He has covered Watergate, the Stonewall riots, and wars in Lebanon, Iraq, and Afghanistan. He is also the author of five bestselling novels. You can subscribe to his daily columns at luciantruscott.substack.com and follow him on Twitter @LucianKTruscott and on Facebook at Lucian K. Truscott IV.
Please consider subscribing to Lucian Truscott Newsletter, from which this is reprinted with permission.
Gov. Jim Pillen
Every state is different. Nebraska is quite different. It is one of only two states that doesn't use the winner-take-all system in presidential elections. Along with Maine, it allocates its Electoral College votes to reflect the results in each of its congressional districts.
In 2020, Donald Trump lost the Omaha-based congressional district while winning Nebraska's other two. That cost him one electoral vote. In a very close election, that one vote could matter. Hence, Trump and his people have been pressuring Nebraska to adopt "winner-take-all," whereby whatever candidate received the most votes statewide would get all five of Nebraska's electoral votes.
This move is especially bold because in 2016, Trump did win Omaha's district. One supposes he could win it again the old-fashioned way, by getting more people to vote for him than for Joe Biden. As he's proved in terrifying ways, Trump is not a stickler for honoring the will of the people.
Don Bacon, the Republican representing the Omaha district, supports the Trump camp's efforts to change the state's method for assigning electoral votes. "I think it undermines the influence of Nebraska," he told CNN.
The opposite is more likely. Were Nebraska to embrace "winner-take-all," neither candidate would have great incentive to campaign there at all. As for the politics of it, one strains to understand how pushing to deprive his constituents the right to allocate their electoral vote is going to win Bacon love in his purple district.
So far these efforts have failed, even in the GOP-dominated state legislature. Good for them.
But pressure remains. Nebraska's current Republican governor, Jim Pillen, has offered to support a special legislative session to move the state to winner-take-all. "I will sign (winner-take-all) into law the moment the legislature gets it to my desk," he vowed.
However, Nebraska's unique political culture is deservedly a point of pride. There could be blowback on those who help outsiders try to change it.
For example, Nebraska is the only state with a one-chamber legislature. This dates back to 1934, when Nebraskans voted to replace a governing body with both a House and a Senate with a unicameral one. Party affiliations are not listed on the ballot.
This reform was pushed through by George W. Norris, a devout Republican. Norris argued that there was no logic in having a two-house legislature. On the contrary, it cost the taxpayers more money and made politicians less accountable to the people.
"The greatest evil of two-house legislature is its institution of the conference committee," Norris wrote in his autobiography. That's where power brokers could fiddle with passed bills.
"There the 'bosses' and the special interests and the monopolies get in their secret work behind the scenes," Norris wrote. "There the elimination of a sentence or paragraph, or even a word, may change the meaning of the entire law."
Meanwhile, were "reliably Democratic" Maine to adopt a winner-take-all system, that would cancel any Republican advantage in a Nebraska that did likewise. Maine's rural 2nd congressional district favored Trump both in 2016 and 2020.
Adding intrigue, Maine's House recently narrowly voted to have the state join an interstate compact that would assign its Electoral College votes to whatever presidential candidate won the national popular vote. So far 16 states have joined the compact, which would go into effect only if the members have enough electoral votes to determine the outcome.
In 2020, Biden won over seven million more popular votes than Trump did. And in 2016, Hillary Clinton comfortably beat Trump in the popular vote by three million.
It would not seem in Republicans' interests to encourage states to change how they count electoral votes. After all, as Nebraska goes, so could Maine.
Reprinted with permission from Creators.
Jimmy Kimmel
Donald Trump attacked late-night talk show host Jimmy Kimmel in an early morning all-over-the-map social media post Wednesday. That night, Kimmel told his audience that he learned about Trump’s latest attack on him from all the text messages waiting for him when he woke up.
“Usually, like, I'll have maybe four,” he said. “I had 100 because it appears that I once again ruffled the feathers of our Kentucky Fried former president who is—apparently, with all that's going on—still smarting from my joke about him at the Oscars."
After reading Trump’s Truth Social screed out loud, Kimmel joked, "My first thought is I'm impressed by his use of the word 'vaunted.' He was even able to spell it correctly, which is really good!" He added, "But literally everything else is not just wrong, but ‘maybe we should be worried about him’ wrong. Like, ‘maybe we should take the keys away from grandpa’ wrong."
Kimmel then fact-checked Trump’s rant.
He conceded that Trump calling him "stupid Jimmy Kimmel" was a debatable fact. But he took issue with Trump’s claim that Kimmel is not only bad at hosting the Academy Awards, but he was somehow responsible for the show’s “big ratings drop”—a “weird” assertion, Kimmel said, because ratings were up this year.
Does the late-night comedian suffer from “Trump derangement syndrome,” as the Donald claims?
“There's only one person who suffers from Trump Derangement Syndrome,” Kimmel said. “His name is Donald Trump."
Kimmel noted that a big part of Trump’s attack on him seems to be rooted in his inability to distinguish Kimmel from Academy Award-winning actor Al Pacino.
"Now, don't get me wrong,” he said. “I wish I was Al Pacino. I'm just not."
As for Trump’s insistence that Kimmel’s wife, along with people behind the scenes of the show, were begging Kimmel to not read Trump's Truth Social attack live on air during the Academy Awards broadcast, Kimmel gave this hilarious blow-by-blow account of how that all went down.
What happened is they showed me what he posted. I looked at it. I said, “Oh, I'm going to read this.”My wife went, “Oh no.”
I said, “Oh yes.”
And that was that. That was the whole story.
Kimmel said he wasn't planning to accept hosting duties again, even though he's been asked, but now that Trump weighed in on it, he has to consider it.
"You know what? Maybe you can watch on the TV in the rec room at Rikers with all the guys," he said.
And since it clearly still bothers Trump, Kimmel played the clip of him making fun of Trump at the Academy Awards by reading out Trump's attack on him.
Kimmel then reminded the audience that his show received better ratings than Trump would have you believe, with a graph showing that ratings have increased in the two years Kimmel has hosted.
"I just want to say that that is not 'down.' You want to know what 'down' looks like?” Kimmel asked, before putting up a graph showing stock plummeting. “This is the value of Truth Social stock, your company. That's 'down.'"
Zachary Mueller is the senior research director for America’s Voice and America’s Voice Education Fund. He brings his expertise on immigration politics to talk about how much money the GOP is using to promote its racist immigration campaigns.
Reprinted with permission from Daily Kos.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
The extended family of third-party presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. made an explicit effort Thursday to blunt his appeal among Democratic voters by endorsing President Joe Biden en masse.
Robert's sister Kerry Kennedy, daughter of former Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy and niece of former President John F. Kennedy, called Biden “my hero” at an endorsement event in Philadelphia featuring at least 15 members of the Kennedy clan.
“We want to make crystal clear our feelings that the best way forward for America is to reelect Joe Biden and Kamala Harris for four more years,” she said, a clear sign of the threat third-party candidates pose to Biden's 2024 reelection bid.
Almost simultaneously, news broke that RFK Jr. and his tech entrepreneur running mate Nicole Shanahan qualified for the ballot in the swing state of Michigan after being nominated by the Natural Law Party.
The ultimate effect of third-party candidates this cycle and exactly where they will make the ballot remains unclear. But we do know that Donald Trump, who has never won more than 47 percent of the vote, will need a spoiler or two siphoning away votes from Biden in order to prevail in November.
The supposed bipartisan group No Labels recently complicated Trump's calculus by ending its bid to find a candidate to run. That leaves anti-vaccine activist RFK Jr., Green Party candidate Jill Stein, and Harvard professor Cornel West as potential spoilers to Biden's reelection, either individually or as a group. Kennedy, who polls highest and has the resources to potentially get on the ballot in all 50 states, poses the biggest threat.
It remains to be seen whether Kennedy's candidacy—which draws interest from conspiracy theorists and Kennedy-nostalgic Democrats alike—will hurt Biden or Trump more in November. But some polling suggests that Kennedy is currently skimming more voters away from Biden.
What is clear is that Trump benefits disproportionately from every third-party candidate in the race since he fell several points shy of reaching 50% in both 2016 and 2020. By contrast, Biden won in 2020 with 51% of vote—just barely enough to tilt the Electoral College in his favor. It’s telling that Kennedy's presidential bid has been bankrolled by one of Trump's biggest donors, Mellon banking heir Timothy Mellon, and championed by one of Trump's biggest allies, Steve Bannon. Not so coincidentally, a key Kennedy campaign official, Rita Palma, also said her No. 1 goal was blocking Biden's reelection bid. Palma has since been axed by the Kennedy campaign.
All that said, it is incumbent upon the Biden campaign to blunt Kennedy's allure among Democrats to make him a bigger drag on Trump in November.
“If Kennedy makes it on the ballot in these states—and that’s a big if—we’re going to make sure voters know how extreme his policies are and that MAGA megadonors are bankrolling his spoiler campaign to be a stalking horse for Donald Trump,” said Democratic strategist Lis Smith, who is advising the Democratic National Committee on the matter.
The Kennedy family itself, with its enduring star power among Democrats, has been searching for ways to kneecap RFK Jr., who's leveraging the family name while damaging the Kennedy legacy with his antithetical stances.
But at some point soon, the Biden campaign will have to deploy a strategy to neutralize Kennedy's Democratic appeal, and a recent Engagious focus group in Pennsylvania of 11 Trump-to-Biden swing voters may offer a window into one potential avenue.
According to Axios, roughly half of the swing voters who participated in the focus group said the candidates' stances on abortion would play a role in how they voted in the fall.
Six of those swing voters also said they would vote for Kennedy over Biden and Trump, but questions about Kennedy's abortion stance became an immediate hang-up for them.
"If he doesn't agree with what I agree with abortion, then I'm going to switch," said participant Michael W.
Rich Thau, the focus group moderator and president of Engagious, said that pro-choice swing voters who expressed support for Kennedy "seemed to second-guess their support when confronted with the argument that a vote for Kennedy is effectively a vote for Trump and his abortion policies."
After some initial jostling last year, Kennedy told NBC News’ Ali Vitali that he supported abortion during the first three months of pregnancy but would sign a federal abortion ban if elected.
“I believe a decision to abort a child should be up to the women during the first three months of life," Kennedy said. "Once a child is viable, outside the womb, I think then the state has an interest in protecting the child." The exchange between Kennedy and Vitali was captured on video, making it fodder for attack ads.
Kennedy’s campaign has since backtracked on those remarks, issuing a statement saying he does not support a federal ban on abortion.
“Mr. Kennedy supports a woman's right to choose,” says the statement, adding that it’s “not up to the government to intervene in these difficult medical and moral choices.”
A national abortion ban is a nonstarter with Democratic voters, and perhaps most importantly, many Democrats who aren't thrilled about voting for Biden but would never consider voting for Trump.
In a follow-up exchange with Daily Kos, Thau said, "For pro-choice Trump and Biden voters, the risk posed by voting for RFK Jr. could be too much if abortion is a top-tier concern."
He added that he hasn't yet come across another issue that "would have the same effect on RFK-curious swing voters as abortion does. It’s not to say there aren’t such issues … but I haven’t pushed or probed on those yet."
Whatever the range of issues that could dissuade Democrats from voting for Kennedy, abortion appears to offer the Biden campaign a starting point.
Reprinted with permission from Alternet.
- Bully Bobby Is No Friend Of Free Speech ›
- How RFK Junior's Farcical Campaign Betrays The Kennedy Legacy ›
- Deadly Outbreak: When RFK Jr's Vaccine Lies Killed Samoan Kids (VIDEO) ›
