Trumpwatch 2.0

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Politico:
Judge demands answers for Trump Administration’s ‘stunning’ refusal to seek return of Kilmar Abrego Garcia: ‘Nothing has been done’.

[Matt]

Politico:
Judge demands answers for Trump Administration’s ‘stunning’ refusal to seek return of Kilmar Abrego Garcia: ‘Nothing has been done’.

Impeach the motherfucker...

[radioandtventhusiast]

Politico:
Judge demands answers for Trump Administration’s ‘stunning’ refusal to seek return of Kilmar Abrego Garcia: ‘Nothing has been done’.

Impeach the motherfucker...

I wish, but the GOP is too spineless to convict, even the "moderate" ones.

[MegaHertz]

This is where my head's been for a while. This is great writing. Hopefully you have a few minutes to read it.

***********************************



Peter Birkenhead on Trump’s approval rating: why it does not fluctuate (much) from its stagnant 47%, no matter what; why it doesn’t matter to those of us interested in saving our democracy; and what does matter:

As of today, Donald Trump’s supposedly “tanking” approval rating stands at 47%. Which is pretty much where it’s been for the past eleven years. Yes, there have been minor upticks and downturns of a few points here and there. Yes, a majority of Americans disapprove of the tariffs. Yes, a majority think the economy is heading in the wrong direction. And yes, a majority disapprove of the job Trump is doing.

That’s not new. Trump’s popularity has almost never been above 50%, except for very brief periods of time. He’s never needed it to be. His power derives not from the size but the durability of his popular support, and there’s rarely been an approval rating as stubbornly durable as his.

Especially given the hundreds — thousands — of incidents over the past decade that would have sunk the careers of, say, Kamala Harris, Joe Biden, Barack Obama, or Hillary Clinton.

Think of it. All the corruption, the scandal, the pain and death and misery. All the insults to human decency and injuries to democratic ideals.

And his numbers are still pretty much where they were when it all started.

I am uninterested in whatever minor variation will follow yesterday’s vile display in the Oval Office, or tomorrow’s outrage, or next week’s. They will mean nothing.

What Trump supporters (as a whole, as a voting bloc, PLEASE don’t tell me about your MAGA cousin who’s having second thoughts) are thinking means nothing. The only thing that matters is what Trump’s opponents are thinking. What we’re thinking.

I remember making posts like this during Trump’s first term, and wondering exactly what I’m wondering right now.

Which is very much not, “What will it take for his supporters to turn away from him,” but rather, “What will it take for his opponents to realize his supporters won’t turn away from him?”

Because the answer to that question is crucial. It will shape everything that happens over the next few weeks and months.

If, as I suspect, a sizable number of us are sitting at home today thinking that Trump’s open defiance of a Supreme Court ruling, refusal to return an innocent, legal resident of the US from a gulag in El Salvador, and declaration that he wants to send American citizens to the same prison without due process, will somehow harm his approval rating, that does not bode well for our side.

Nothing will harm his approval rating.

Sure it might — might — go down a few points in the next few days. It won’t mean a thing. Give it a few weeks.

To believe otherwise is to not understand the story of the Trump era. The story of the Trump era isn’t “A bad man came along and duped a bunch of well-meaning, gullible people.” Donald Trump didn’t conjure his supporters from the ether with his magic MAGA wand. His supporters conjured him.

They wanted him. Badly. They’d been looking, searching, begging, screaming for someone like him, pushing every Republican candidate further and further to the right with every election cycle, demanding loudly that they “take a tougher” line on this, and “not give an inch” on that, that they “tell it like it is,” and “say what everyone is thinking,” for years. For decades.

They werent duped.

They are never going to see the light. (Of course a few will, here and there. But not in meaningful numbers.) There will be no scales falling from eyes, no epiphanies, no death bed conversions. Not among the bedrock base, which has not budged an inch in ten years.

They waved signs that said, MASS DEPORTATIONS NOW at their third Trump convention.

They weren’t duped.

The only duping that’s gone on is the self-duping many of us have been guilty of for many years. It’s a very human, very understandable, thing to do. To think better of your fellow human beings than perhaps they do themselves. To believe that, with enough patience, empathy, education and reason they are bound to see the error of their ways.

That belief is a dangerous one in this moment. It manifests in political choices that are bound to not only fail, but help the bad guys continue doing bad things.

It doesn’t matter if a few thousand Trump supporters see the error of their ways. It doesn’t matter if this or that Republican politician is momentarily seized by courage or conscience and speaks up about his or her disappointment in the president. The overwhelming majority of Trump supporters will remain Trump supporters NO MATTER WHAT.

Did you ever think you’d see Republican voters support a candidate who was openly subservient to Russia? Did you ever think you’d see them support a flagrant, serial adulterer and drug user? A denigrator of the military? A draft dodger? A New Yorker?

In 2014 Republicans raged at President Obama for supposedly not working hard enough to stop the Ebola epidemic. Six years later they followed Trump’s lead and physically threatened people working to stop an epidemic.

Nothing will shake them.

Well, almost nothing.

There is one thing, one thing Donald Trump could do to lose significant support. And no, it is not making his supporters “feel the pain.” It is not making them poor. These are people who are openly welcoming an imminent recession.

No, the one and only thing Donald Trump could do to tank his approval rating would be to stand in front of a camera and say, “Black and Latino people are as fully human as any white man or woman. They are possessed of the same inalienable rights, and deserving of the full enjoyment of those rights and the opportunities they promise, opportunities they have for too long been denied.”

Now THAT would be a deal breaker.

Because that’s the deal. They give him everything, he gives them fewer Black actors on their TV’s, fewer Black managers at their offices, fewer Latino pilots on their planes, fewer Spanish names on the backs of their team’s uniforms.

He breaks THAT deal, and all bets are off.

So we need to get it straight. We cannot see this struggle as a debate, as a project of persuasion. If some MAGA supporters are persuaded along the way, great! I say welcome them with open arms. And never, ever stop fighting hard to make their lives better. All of their lives.

But progress is going to come when we, not they, see the light. Before the left can meaningfully slow the MAGA rampage it needs to come to terms with the fact that the enemy isn’t Trump, but the people who put him in the White House.

That is a very hard thing for a lot of us on the left to accept about our countrymen. But this struggle is more analogous to a civil war than it is to a heightened disagreement between poltical parties. We won’t win it by persuading the enemy, but by overwhelming him.

Our energies should be channeled towards each other. Galvanizing, motivating, and enabling each other. Creating and sustaining solidarity. We can get a hundred first-time protestors out in the streets, or first-time voters to the polls, for the same investment it takes to turn one MAGA supporter toward the light.

Our hope doesn’t lie in Trump’s poll numbers going down. It lies in our commitment to keeping students from being disappeared and government workers from being fired and cancer research labs from being defunded and democracy from being destroyed.

Our hope doesn’t lie with them, it lies with us.
~Peter Birkenhead

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Politico:
A federal judge ruled that agencies unlawfully froze funds, ordering the agencies to immediately resume disbursing the money.

[TC Talks]

"Home growns" are next to be sent to El Salvador. This is truly a five alarm fire.

https://www.thedailybeast.com/trump-say ... ador-next/

It has been pointed out that Barron Trump has falls in this category. Melina was granted citizenship after Barron was born. Let's let that kid outta here.

[zzand]

That makes him an anchor baby and if birthright citizenship is tossed then he should be deported along with mom.

[TC Talks]

That makes him an anchor baby and if birthright citizenship is tossed then he should be deported along with mom.

I'll provide the handcuffs. Ever thing this is a rouse to get rid of the wife without allimony?

[MotorCityRadioFreak]

AP:
The Supreme Court says the Trump Administration must facilitate the return of a Maryland man mistakenly deported to El Salvador.

Good.

He won't comply.

If he doesn’t then it’s an inevitable confrontation and a constitutional crisis. He will at some point simply not comply with the Supreme Court on some ruling. Does he use that bullet here and now?

And now, nothing happens….

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AP:
The Supreme Court says the Trump Administration must facilitate the return of a Maryland man mistakenly deported to El Salvador.

Good.

He won't comply.

If he doesn’t then it’s an inevitable confrontation and a constitutional crisis. He will at some point simply not comply with the Supreme Court on some ruling. Does he use that bullet here and now?

And now, nothing happens….

It hasn’t completely played out either. The Supreme Courts ruling was flabby enough to give the Administration cover to behave this way. The district judge doesn’t appear to be buying it. The real question now is of she will hold anyone in contempt.

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First it was AP… now the other two wire services, Reuters and Bloomberg News have lost their customary permanent press pool slots. Reuters:

Wire services including Reuters and Bloomberg News will no longer hold a permanent slot in the small pool of reporters who cover President Donald Trump, the White House said on Tuesday, as it moves to exert greater control over who gets to ask him questions and report on his statements in real time.

The decision comes after the Trump administration last week lost a court challenge brought by another wire service, the Associated Press, over its earlier exclusion from the press pool.

The pool typically consists of around 10 outlets that follow the president wherever he goes, whether it is a meeting in the Oval Office where he makes statements or answers questions, or trips at home or abroad.

Under the new policy, wire services will lose their customary spot in the pool and will instead be part of a larger rotation with about 30 other newspaper and print outlets.

Given their mission to deliver real-time information to other news organizations and readers, wire services tend to cover the president and the White House more closely on a daily basis than most outlets.

Other media customers, particularly local news organizations that have no presence in Washington, rely on the wires for up-to-date reporting, video and audio.
Financial markets are also dependent on the wire services’ real-time reports of statements the president makes.

"Reuters news coverage reaches billions of people each day, mostly through the thousands of news organizations around the world that subscribe to Reuters services," a Reuters spokesperson said. "It is essential to democracy that the public have access to independent, impartial and accurate news about their government. Any steps by the U.S. government to limit access to the president threatens that principle, both for the public and the world’s media."

Reuters remains committed to covering the White House in an impartial, accurate and independent way, the spokesperson added.

AP said the administration's actions were a grave disservice to the American people.

"We are deeply disappointed that the administration has chosen to restrict the access of all wire services, whose fast and accurate White House coverage informs billions of people every single day, rather than reinstate The Associated Press to the wire pool," spokesperson Lauren Easton said in a statement to Reuters.

Bloomberg did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Until the current administration, the three wire services - AP, Bloomberg and Reuters - were all standard members of the pool. But the White House barred AP in February after it refused to refer to the body of water south of the United States as the "Gulf of America" as Trump had ordered it be called.

After shutting out the AP, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said her team would determine "who gets to enjoy the very privileged and limited access in spaces such as Air Force One and the Oval Office." Up until then those places had been decided by the White House Correspondents' Association, an organization made up of journalists who cover the White House and the president.

According to guidance provided to Reuters by a White House official on Tuesday, Leavitt will have the discretion to determine the members of the pool on a daily basis “to ensure that the president’s message reaches targeted audiences and that outlets with applicable subject-matter expertise are present as events warrant."

The official said outlets will be eligible to be included in the pool "irrespective of the substantive viewpoint expressed by an outlet."

Last week, a federal judge in Washington ordered the administration to allow AP journalists to attend events open to similar types of news organizations in the Oval Office and on Air Force One, as well as larger spaces in the White House while its lawsuit moves forward.
The judge found Trump's White House retaliated against the AP over its editorial choices, violating protections for free speech under the U.S. Constitution. The White House is appealing the ruling.

[TC Talks]

I thought the courts reinstated AP's access to the Press Room citing 1st Amendment issues.

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I thought the courts reinstated AP's access to the Press Room citing 1st Amendment issues.

Yes but they have changed the press pool that travels with him so that instead of the three wire services embedding with him at all times on a permanent basis they are rotating them out for other outlets with Leavitt deciding who gets to go. You can bet your bottom dollar “other outlets” are friendly outlets.

I am under the impression that the Administration didn’t simply roll over and accept the court order on the AP… they have appealed.

[Matt]

I thought the courts reinstated AP's access to the Press Room citing 1st Amendment issues.

Yes but they have changed the press pool that travels with him so that instead of the three wire services embedding with him at all times on a permanent basis they are rotating them out for other outlets with Spokeshole deciding who gets to go. You can bet your bottom dollar “other outlets” are friendly outlets.

I am under the impression that the Administration didn’t simply roll over and accept the court order on the AP… they have appealed.

FIFY

[Rate This]

I thought the courts reinstated AP's access to the Press Room citing 1st Amendment issues.

Yes but they have changed the press pool that travels with him so that instead of the three wire services embedding with him at all times on a permanent basis they are rotating them out for other outlets with Spokeshole deciding who gets to go. You can bet your bottom dollar “other outlets” are friendly outlets.

I am under the impression that the Administration didn’t simply roll over and accept the court order on the AP… they have appealed.

FIFY

How about Ku Klux Karoline? Heard that one the other day.

Meanwhile…
AP:
The Trump Administration says it’s suing Maine over the participation of transgender athletes in girls sports.

KGO San Francisco:
California will sue to stop Trump from imposing sweeping tariffs, Newsom says.

MarketWatch:
U.S. retail sales hit 26-month high as shoppers race Trump-tariff price boosts.