It’s all so stupid and ridiculous. But, as discussed on today’s BradCast, the stupidity and ridiculousness knows no bound now that he’s won a criminal immunity ticket from the Supreme Court. So we will all pay the price until voters change the score. [Audio link to full show follows this summary.]
To that end, Gubernatorial primary elections were held in New Jersey on Tuesday for this November’s general election. Democratic U.S. Rep. Mikey Sherrill, a Navy pilot and former prosecutor, will face off with Trump-endorsed Republican Jack Ciatterelli, who came within just about three points of unseating the state’s now termed-out Democratic Gov. Phil Murphy four years ago.
Perhaps more interesting on Tuesday were six state legislative special elections held in three different states. Democrats outpaced expectations in five of them, including one in Tulsa, Oklahoma, where a native American candidate trounced her Republican challenger by a landslide 69 points! The results amounted to a 50-point over-performance by the Dem as compared to their results in the Presidential election in the same district last November. In all, Dems are now running an average of about 16.4 points ahead of their 2024 results in special elections in 2025.
Then, it’s back once again to the mess here in Los Angeles, which isn’t really a mess at all. Or, at least, it wasn’t until tough guy Donald Trump decided to pretend that largely peaceful protests against his immigration policies required him to violate the law to federalize California National Guard troops and deploy them with the U.S. Marines to support the ICE round-ups of hard-working, non-criminal migrants in the city including, apparently, children.
In a televised address on Tuesday night, CA’s Governor Gavin Newsom, who, along with L.A. Mayor Karen Bass, opposed Trump’s federalization and deployment of troops in the city, described the President’s “authoritarian”, wannabe “dictatorial” tactics. He warned that Trump is now waging war on democracy and the Constitution itself, and that Americans outside of California can expect to see much the same thing soon in their own hometowns. Will Americans heed his warning?
We’re joined today by fellow L.A. resident HEATHER DIGBY PARTON, award-winning Salon columnist and longtime Digby’s Hullabaloo proprietor, and another OG blogger friend known simply as ‘DRIFTGLASS’, co-host of his weekly Professional Left Podcast. As usual, they are here for a roundtable discussion to help us make sense of it all…as senseless and stupid as it all is.
Both share thoughts on what they see as the real point of Trump’s dumb but dangerous incitement of violence here in L.A., what it is meant to distract from, and where all of this is headed. Is there any chance this doesn’t lead to an invocation of the Insurrection Act by Trump, so he can really violate the law, American values, rights, and the Constitution itself?
“Donald Trump simply has no reason to obey the law anymore, of any kind, for any reason,” argues Driftglass. “They feel no compunction about breaking the law because there’s no one to stop them” Because he was elected, after receiving criminal immunity from SCOTUS, he believes “he can do whatever he wants. It’s an ugly, terrifying fact that we warned people about for years. We begged people not to do this. We still came up short, because 77 million or so people voted for exactly this.”
But, will even MAGA support the deployment of U.S. troops on American streets? Something that Republicans, including MAGA, have pretended for years to oppose? “As long as Trump is doing it, they’ll be for it,” asserts Digby. “The minute it’s not him, they’ll be against it. They retired the concept of hypocrisy a long time ago.”
It is going to worse before it gets better, she warns, citing Trump’s top henchman Stephen Miller who, she says, “has given interviews saying that they have plotted this out. Plan B, Plan C. They’ve been thinking this stuff through. This is actually part of their plan. They’re testing the electrified fence here to see what they can get away with.”
There is, of course, much much more from both of them today, including on a couple of stories you may have forgotten about for some reason, from just days ago. For example, last Friday, less than a week ago, Elon Musk publicly accused Trump of being named in the unreleased Epstein Files. Also, if you remember, Congressional Republicans passed a bill to slash $1.4 trillion worth of health care and food assistance from low-income Americans to help defray the cost of some $4 trillion in tax cuts mostly for the wealthy, at the cost of a $3 trillion spike to the national debt.
Remember when Republicans used to care about such things? As Digby sez: “They retired the concept of hypocrisy a long time ago”…
So glad you decided to break the glass today, Brad.
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