Trump's word: "fight."

I have a simple point to make, but before I do, I want to acknowledge that "fight" was also Hillary Clinton's word, and here we see the music video shown at the 2016 Democratic National Conviction and it's full of celebrities brimming with determination to fight (for what we know they went on to lose):

Trump won in 2016, and he went on to lose — or are you one of the millions who think he won? — in 2020, and now he's fighting to win again. Out there fighting, we know what happened in Butler, Pennsylvania, and we know that "fight" was Trump's word in the most immediate dire moment:

"If it is felony 'election interference' for a candidate to try to keep private the details of a seamy relationship, what other candidate concealments — of a lawful and entirely personal nature — must be reported?"

"Must the out-of-pocket settlement for that fender-bender be disclosed, since it conceals a candidate's bad driving skills? How about plastic surgery, since it masks the true ravages of age or health?... The Democratic National Committee and the Hillary Clinton campaign in 2016 paid an opposition-research firm to produce a bogus dossier that accused Mr. Trump of collusion with Russia. They fed it to the FBI and leaked it to the public prior to the 2016 election. The DNC and Mrs. Clinton's campaign reported the expenditures to the Federal Election Commission but concealed their true nature by describing the payments as 'legal' services, as Mr. Trump did with his NDA. The FEC fined them for the deception, but under Mr. Bragg's theory it should count as criminal election interference."

Writes Kimberley A. Strassel, in "Alvin Bragg and Democrats' 'Election Interference'/His theory in New York state’s Trump case is crazier than you think" (Wall Street Journal).

Ron DeSantis tells Bill Maher "don't act like" it was a "unique thing" to say that the election was stolen...

... and gets applause from the "Real Time" audience:

"Let's go back to 2016. Your friends in Hollywood were cutting ads telling the Electoral College to vote against Trump... because the election was stolen. They said Russia stole the election. For years they said that."

"[A]fter the flurry of hard-right rulings this June, many professors had their 'own personal grieving period.'"

"But they quickly turned toward 'grappling with how we teach our students' to understand the Supreme Court’s reactionary turn.... A professor must say what the court claims it’s doing, then explain what it is actually doing, which is often something completely different. This technique can disillusion students, leading them to ask why they’re bothering to learn rules that can change at any moment.... Students confront a legal system in a crisis of legitimacy led by an extreme and arrogant court. Still, they must slog on, most gathering substantial debt as they go, pretending that 'law' is something different from politics, a higher realm of reason and rationality where the best arguments prevail.... My father, Nat Stern, retired from a 41-year career at Florida State University College of Law in May.... When I asked him why he decided to retire, he told me that he had no desire to explain the Supreme Court’s conservative revolution as the product of law and reason rather than politics and power.... 'For the bulk of my career,' he said, 'I’ve felt I could fairly explain rulings and opinions that I don’t endorse because they rested on coherent and plausible—if to me unconvincing—grounds. In recent years, though, I’ve increasingly struggled to present new holdings as the product of dispassionate legal reasoning rather than personal agendas.'"

Writes Mark Joseph Stern in "The Supreme Court Is Blowing Up Law School, Too/Inside the growing furor among professors who have had enough" (Slate). 

I got there via David Bernstein at Instapundit, who says: "We all know that left-learning lawprofs would be dancing in the streets if SCOTUS were equally aggressive to the left. And indeed, while Stern portrays discontent with the Court as a question of professional standards rather than ideology, he does not manage to find a single right-leaning professor to quote in his article."

I remember just before the 2016 election, when I was making my decision to retire.

"Twitter executives who created the rules said they had once held views about online speech that were similar to Mr. Musk’s...."

"But Twitter’s power as a tool for harassment became clear in 2014 when it became the epicenter of Gamergate, a mass harassment campaign that flooded women in the video game industry with death and rape threats.... In September 2016, a Russian troll farm quietly created 2,700 fake Twitter profiles and used them to sow discord about the upcoming presidential election between Mr. Trump and Hillary Clinton.... In 2017... women boycotted Twitter during the #MeToo movement, and Mr. Dorsey... announced a list of content that the company would no longer tolerate: nude images shared without the consent of the person pictured, hate symbols and tweets that glorified violence. In 2018, Twitter banned several accounts linked to the hack-and-leak operation that exposed Mrs. Clinton’s campaign emails, and it began suspending right-wing figures like Alex Jones from its service because they repeatedly violated policies.... The next year, Twitter rolled out new policies that were intended to prevent the spread of misinformation in future elections, banning tweets that could dissuade people from voting or mislead them about how to do so.... In preparation for the 2020 U.S. presidential election, Twitter banned manipulated videos known as 'deepfakes' and forbade users to share material obtained through hacking campaigns. That policy was tested when The New York Post published an article containing emails purportedly obtained from the laptop of Joseph R. Biden Jr.'s son Hunter. Fearing that the materials came from a hack-and-leak operation, Twitter blocked the article from being shared on its platform...."

A quick history of Twitter's shift away from free speech, excerpted from "Inside Twitter, Fears Musk Will Return Platform to Its Early Troubles/Content moderators warn that Elon Musk doesn’t appear to understand the issues that he and the company will face if he drops its guardrails around speech" (NYT).

It seems that the earliest motivation was to protect women and to keep them from avoiding the site. But then it turned into assisting the Democratic Party.

"What does 'worse than Watergate' mean?"

Asks Andrew C. McCarthy in "Did Durham find something worse than Watergate? Not so far" (The Hill). 

Let’s say a presidential administration puts the government’s law enforcement and intelligence apparatus in the service of its party’s presidential candidate by trying to portray the opposition party’s candidate as a clandestine agent of a hostile government.

"By all rights, Russiagate should be dead as a serious news story. But as the Real Time episode showed, 'collusion' is still alive for some..."

"... and the bulk of the case essentially rests now upon the characterization of one person from the above passage as a Russian agent: a former aide to Paul Manafort named Konstantin Kilimnik...."

Writes Matt Taibbi in "Konstantin Kilimnik, Russiagate's Last Fall Guy, Speaks Out/The Senate Intelligence Committee, the Treasury, and even Robert Mueller pointed fingers. But none bothered to question him" (Substack).

"The Indictment of Hillary Clinton's Lawyer is an Indictment of the Russiagate Wing of U.S. Media."

 Writes Glenn Greenwald (at Substack).

The FBI... quickly concluded that there was no evidentiary basis to believe any of it.... The central role played by the U.S. media in perpetuating this scam on the public — all with the goal of manipulating the election outcome — is hard to overstate....

I have been reading and trying to get around to blogging "The Secret History of the Shadow Campaign That Saved the 2020 Election" since 2:10 p.m. yesterday.

2:10 p.m. is not a normal time for me to be blogging. I tend to blog between 4 a.m. and 10 a.m. Sometimes I come back to the computer in the afternoon or evening, but usually not to analyze something complicated. And if other people are jumping on a new item, there's less and less reason, as the hours wear on, to blog the link just to show it to you. I feel more and more obligated to get into some of the complicated layers.

2:10 p.m. yesterday was when I first saw the article and decided it was very important. It's 9:36 a.m. the next day now, and I've put up 7 posts, beginning at 5:30 a.m. But the entire time, I've been putting off what I know I need to do and completely intend to do, blog "The Secret History of the Shadow Campaign That Saved the 2020 Election." 

This is a long article, and understanding it, for me, involves figuring out why Time published it and understanding the possible bias of the author, Molly Ball. It's hard not to read "saved the... election" as rigged the election. Why is this coming out now, just before the weekend before the impeachment trial begins? Time is openly proclaiming that something "secret" happened in the "shadow"? 

MORE: An excerpt:

"I like Ivanka... look, anybody can decide to run if they want to. I mean I'm not entitled to anything and so forth. I've got to earn my way forward."

Said Marco Rubio, on Fox News Sunday, when Chris Wallace asked him about the possibility that Ivanka Trump will primary him when he runs for reelection Florida in 2022. 

Wallace wanted to know "How seriously do you take Ivanka Trump as a potential opponent?" But Rubio ignored the opportunity to slight Ivanka and say that somehow she's not serious.

Anyway, Rubio is up for reelection in 2022. Six years before that, he had to do his reelection campaign while also running for the Republican nomination for President. Remember how Jeb Bush — in a last-ditch effort to make something of his own badly failing presidential campaign — criticized Rubio for not staying in Washington and doing his senatorial work? That happened in October 2015, when it was clear that Rubio was the best hope to get a moderate Republican candidate instead of Trump. Here's my blog post about that. I thought Jeb should have withdrawn and endorsed Rubio instead of attacking him on a very fake issue.

"Trump wasn’t elected because Clinton was cordially detested. What American presidential candidate since George Washington hasn’t been?"

"She was dull on the stump. But if dullness were politically fatal, the entire American political system would have been in the cemetery with President Harrison since 1841. (He gave a two-hour inaugural address in freezing rain, then caught a cold and died a month later.) Clinton’s 'popular vote' victory was and is inconsequential. America, since its founding, has had a devolved system of voting for the president that eschews nationwide first-past-the-post to give more obscure regions (our Scotlands) a greater say than weight of population would allow. She and Trump knew the rules. The cheating would have been different in a different game. Russian electoral interference was doubtless factual but doubtfully culpable. I’ve spent time in Russia. The idea that the Russians could fine-tune America’s enormously complex machinery of election is … I’ve driven Russian cars. And there’s no use blaming Trump’s election on the rise of populism. 'Populism' is an epithetic catch-all in use whenever the ideas popular with the good and the great aren’t popular.... America is what you get when you turn a random horde of people loose in a vast and various space. Some came here on the make, some on the run, some were dragged here involuntarily as slaves, some were chased here by poverty, oppression or bigotry and some were here already and were defeated by disease and demographics until they became foreigners in their own country. The bunch of us have never got along...."

From "Trump v Biden: PJ O’Rourke on why this US election is the craziest yet/Why on earth isn’t Joe Biden set for a landslide? The inimitable political commentator takes a ringside seat at the election circus" by (obviously) P.J. O'Rourke writing in the Times of London.

"The 'blue wall' is reforming in the Rust Belt."

Writes Lara M. Brown, the director of the Graduate School of Political Management at George Washington University, in The Hill.

In 2016, President Trump broke through Hillary Clinton’s “blue wall.” He won three states that Democrats had carried since the 1980s: Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin....

[N]ow, less than four years later, all three of those states have shifted again and presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden is leading Trump....

According to Pew Research Center’s analysis of the exit polls, [Hillary Clinton] earned only 37 percent of the white Catholic vote.... As poorly as Clinton did, the largest percentage point decrease for a Democratic candidate occurred between 2008 and 2012, which suggests that white Catholics had “soured” on Obama’s presidency before Trump declared for the presidency. Clinton should have seen this coming...

While it remains unlikely that Biden, a Catholic, will be able to pull a majority of white Catholics towards the Democratic Party in November, were he to garner 45 percent of their votes, it seems likely that Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin will again be colored blue....

The wall that Trump may have erected by November is not along the country’s southern border, but a blue one across the Rust Belt.

First, "were he to garner 45 percent of their votes" — I just have to note the use of that word, "garner."

Second, I've said it before, and sometimes I think I'm the only one who feels this way, but "Rust Belt" is an offensive term. On November 9, 2016, I wrote:

Suddenly, the place where I live isn't called the "Blue Wall" or the "Fire Wall" anymore. It's: "Rust Belt."

When we ceased to operate to generate power for the Democratic Party, it was back to the old insult.

If you call us the "Rust Belt," you are saying our time has passed, that we once prospered because there was manufacturing, but it's gone and it's not coming back. That's not what Donald Trump said to us when he campaigned through the Midwest in 2016. Where is the optimism?

Don't try to get me to vote for Biden by telling me he's the hater's choice and I'm a hater.

At first I couldn't understand this Politico headline: "Trump is getting trounced among a crucial constituency: The haters/In 2016, Donald Trump cleaned up among voters who disliked him and Hillary Clinton. This year, Biden is winning big among the comparable group."

But then I understood, and I saw that it was talking about me. It's a reference to people who don't like either major party presidential candidate and have to decide which one to vote for. Traditionally, that's called picking "the lesser of 2 evils." The "evil" is in the candidate, not in the poor voter who is forced to pick one of them. How dare Politico put the word "hater" on us!

“There are a number of people who hate politics and politicians, and they play somewhat of a swing role in the country,” said Mark Mellman, a Democratic pollster.

In 2016, he said, “the people who decided the election were people who disliked both Clinton and Trump, and they voted overwhelmingly for Trump. This time, it’s a smaller number of people who dislike Trump and Biden, but that smaller number of voters is voting for Biden.”

What does it mean to "hate politics and politicians" but to still want to vote? Biden is more of a "politician" from the world of "politics," so if the "hate" were really for "politics and politicians," the "haters" should embrace Trump, because he rose up out of commerce and entertainment and dared to do his own thing that by some crazy fluke worked. I found that too weird to vote for, but if I'd been more motivated by a hatred for politics and politicians, I'd have voted for him. And — who knows? — maybe this time I will. Call me a hater and I'm more likely to. Don't try to get me to vote for Biden by telling me he's the hater's choice and I'm a hater.

"This is akin to reviewing the Titanic and saying that the captain was not unreasonable in starting the voyage. The question is..."

"... what occurred when icebergs began appearing. Horowitz says that investigative icebergs appeared very early on, and the Justice Department not only failed to report that to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act court but also removed evidence that its investigation was on a collision course.... Like the crew of the Titanic, the FBI knew investigative icebergs floated around its Russia investigation, but not only did it not reduce speed, it actively suppressed the countervailing reports. Despite the many conflicts to its FISA application and renewals, the FBI leadership, including McCabe, plowed ahead into the darkness."

From "Horowitz report is damning for the FBI and unsettling for the rest of us" by Jonathan Turley (The Hill)(with lots of good detail to support his analogy).

Today, I will reveal something that I have kept secret for 3 years — who got my vote for President, here in swing-state Wisconsin, in 2016.

I've had my reasons for keeping my vote secret, but this morning, I woke up with the thought that I now have a very good reason to reveal it, because I have something specific to say, and I want to recommend something, and knowing how I voted will reinforce my recommendation.

I have revealed all my other votes in the presidential elections of my voting life: 1972 McGovern, 1976 Ford, 1980 Carter, 1984 Mondale, 1988 Dukakis, 1992 Clinton, 1996 Clinton, 2000 Gore, 2004 Bush, 2008 Obama, 2012 Romney.

Clearly, I'm a swing voter. Notice that there are 3 men on that list that I voted for once and voted against once. In 6 of the last 11 elections, then, there was a man I was capable of voting for and against. Carter, I voted against when he had not yet established that he was presidential material, and then I voted for him, when he had been a pretty bad President. That's because I thought Reagan was dangerously extreme. I voted against George W. Bush in 2000 because I'd settled into voting for Democrats and I didn't like the social conservatism, but I voted for him in 2004, because 9/11 happened and we were in the middle of a war. With Obama, I did the reverse, voting for and then voting against. I voted for because I thought his opponent was unprepared to handle the financial crisis. I voted against him because the congressional Democrats had overreached and because of the military disarray exemplified by Benghazi.

Maybe you can extrapolate what I must have done in 2016, but I have made a point of never telling you. And maybe you can figure out why today feels different to me and I'm going to reveal what I have held secret for 3 years.

"I hate the news right now. Everyone seems to think the thing to talk about is Donald Trump, which strikes me as profoundly stupid."

"I watched 5-and-a-half Sunday morning talk shows yesterday, and I heard the same thing over and over. Trump has lost some unregainable portion of the women. He can never get them back, but he could never have won anyway, and really what he is is America's expression of anger. We're an angry, angry America, and this lout is, apparently, an embodiment of our collective id."

That's something I wrote on August 10, 2015. I'm encountering it now because I clicked on the "sunrise" tag in the previous post. I wanted to compare my sunrise photographs. I was stunned to see a post — "Dawn walk thoughts" — with exactly the theme that had arisen on the blog this morning, there plain as day 4 years ago.

The old post is a list of 6 "dawn walk thoughts," and what's quoted above was #3.

Donald Trump, the 2016 candidate, was open about his plan to prosecute his political enemies. Remember "Because you'd be in jail."

Watch it again, it has thrilling/chilling new resonance:



From the October 9, 2016 debate transcript:

"Ukrainian government officials tried to help Hillary Clinton and undermine Trump by publicly questioning his fitness for office. They also disseminated documents..."

"... implicating a top Trump aide in corruption and suggested they were investigating the matter, only to back away after the election. And they helped Clinton’s allies research damaging information on Trump and his advisers, a Politico investigation found. A Ukrainian-American operative who was consulting for the Democratic National Committee met with top officials in the Ukrainian Embassy in Washington in an effort to expose ties between Trump, top campaign aide Paul Manafort and Russia, according to people with direct knowledge of the situation. The Ukrainian efforts had an impact in the race, helping to force Manafort’s resignation and advancing the narrative that Trump’s campaign was deeply connected to Ukraine’s foe to the east, Russia...."

From a 2-and-a-half-year-old article in Politico — "Ukrainian efforts to sabotage Trump backfire/Kiev officials are scrambling to make amends with the president-elect after quietly working to boost Clinton" — which was linked to last night by Instapundit.

ADDED: I created a new tag just now — "Trump and Ukraine" — and then I searched the archive to see where it might need to be added. That got me back to some things that I'd lost track of. I'll put these in reverse chronological order. After you read the first 3, you'll see that everything we're getting excited about these past few days was already basically there in the news last April/May. For me, this reinforces the suspicion I aired yesterday, that the real motivation for surfacing this story now is to push Biden out.

From May 11, 2019:

"Facing withering attacks accusing him of seeking foreign assistance for President Trump’s re-election campaign, Rudolph W. Giuliani announced on Friday night that he had canceled a trip to Kiev in which he planned to push the incoming Ukrainian government to press ahead with investigations that he hoped would benefit Mr. Trump. Mr. Giuliani, President Trump’s personal lawyer, explained that he felt like he was being 'set up,' and he blamed Democrats for trying to 'spin' the trip. 'They say I was meddling in the election — ridiculous — but that’s their spin,' he said."

The NYT reports.

From May 10, 2019:

“We’re not meddling in an election, we’re meddling in an investigation, which we have a right to do. There’s nothing illegal about it," said Giuliani. "Somebody could say it’s improper. And this isn’t foreign policy — I’m asking [Ukraine] to do an investigation that they’re doing already and that other people are telling them to stop. And I’m going to give them reasons why they shouldn’t stop it because that information will be very, very helpful to my client, and may turn out to be helpful to my government."

From "Rudy Giuliani Plans Ukraine Trip to Push for Inquiries That Could Help Trump" (NYT).

What is Ukraine currently investigating that Giuliani wants to encourage? According to the NYT, it's "the origin of the special counsel’s investigation into Russia’s interference in the 2016 election" and "the involvement of former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s son in a gas company owned by a Ukrainian oligarch."

The investigations had been opened by Ukrainian prosecutors serving during the term of the country’s current president, Petro O. Poroshenko. He lost his re-election bid last month to Volodymyr Zelensky, a comedian and political newcomer....

"Close advisers to former Vice President Joe Biden are debating the idea of packaging his presidential campaign announcement with a pledge to choose Stacey Abrams as his vice president...."

"But the decision poses considerable risk, and some advisers are flatly opposed. Some have pointed out that in a Democratic debate, he could be asked why no one on the stage would be a worthy running mate. Advisers also know that the move would be perceived as a gimmick...."

Axios says.

"As Russia collusion fades, Ukrainian plot to help Clinton emerges."

A headline at The Hill.

Ukraine’s top prosecutor divulged in an interview aired Wednesday on Hill.TV that he has opened an investigation into whether his country’s law enforcement apparatus intentionally leaked financial records during the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign about then-Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort in an effort to sway the election in favor of Hillary Clinton....

ADDED: It should say "As allegations of Russia collusion fades." The collusion didn't fade. There was no collusion. Apparently.