Saturday, August 5, 2023. Annette’s News Roundup.
I think the Roundup makes people feel not so alone.
To read an article excerpted in this Roundup, click on its blue title. Each “blue” article is hyperlinked so you can read the whole article.
Please feel free to share.
Invite at least one other person to subscribe today! buttondown.email/AnnettesNewsRoundup
______________________
Joe is always busy.
Wishing my brother and friend, @BarackObama, a very happy birthday. pic.twitter.com/BXAm9ybpLD
— Joe Biden (@JoeBiden) August 4, 2023
______________________
Kamala is always busy.
.@POTUS and I have created more jobs in two and a half years than any Administration has created in four – and last month, we added another 187,000. pic.twitter.com/42ZyenqDfc
— Vice President Kamala Harris (@VP) August 4, 2023
______________________
Trump plans to use charges to revisit 2020 election, a fraught topic for GOP.
Former president Donald Trump and some of his legal advisers see an upside to the latest criminal case against him: He can use his upcoming trial to further argue his false claims of a stolen 2020 election.
The looming courtroom showdown is poised to push his insistence that election fraud occurred in 2020 toward the center of the 2024 presidential campaign, a dismaying prospect for Republicans and some of Trump’s advisers who have urged him to stop belaboring that subject. Trump’s defense team has signaled that they’ll focus on rebutting prosecutors’ allegations that Trump knew his fraud claims were false.
The strategy offers a small consolation to the former president, who spent Thursday suffering once again from the small indignities faced by indicted federal defendants. He was arraigned after roughly an hour-long wait inside a Washington courthouse just blocks from the site of the Jan. 6, 2021, attack at the U.S. Capitol by a pro-Trump mob. Trump spent the time occasionally rapping his knuckles on a table.
Trump has said that he wanted to subpoena people about the 2020 election and argue that he won, as prosecutors allege that he knew he lost and that his claims were false, according to people close to the former president, who like others spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private conversations.
But the prospect of revisiting the validity of the last election has delighted Democrats, on top of causing consternation among Republican strategists, who see other, much more politically fruitful focal points for 2024. There are mountains of evidence — provided by top leaders in his campaign and government — that the election was not stolen from Trump, and the indictment paints a damning portrait of a man who was frequently informed of that reality.
By the time Trump left Washington on Thursday, after pleading not guilty, rain had started, and he left his car and was handed an umbrella by body man and co-defendant Waltine “Walt” Nauta, who then stood unprotected from the weather. Trump did not give a long, defiant speech as he did after the previous indictment, and he ignored shouted questions from reporters gathered on the tarmac.
“This is not the place that I left,” he said.
He staged no nighttime rallies after Thursday’s court appearance, breaking from a tradition he began with defiant speeches after his recent arraignments in New York and Miami on charges related to hush money payments and the mishandling of classified documents.
Trump’s campaign team was miffed by a lack of traffic support from local police after he arrived in Washington, forcing the motorcade to weave through rush-hour traffic. Other motorists attempted to change lanes between the motorcade, showing less deference than typical for an average funeral procession. The welcome from onlookers at the courthouse was occasionally hostile, with several middle fingers from bikers and spectators along the highway from the airport. There was a Biden flag on a corner near the courthouse.
The former president said it was a “very sad day for America.” His lawyers have vowed to aggressively fight the charges that he engaged in criminal schemes in an attempt to overturn the election results.
Michael Duncan, a Republican digital consultant aligned with Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), said in a Thursday episode of his “Ruthless” podcast that a focus on election denial in the midterms lost Republicans control of the U.S. Senate. “If this is the conversation we’re going to have over the next year and a half, it’s going to be tough for Republicans, particularly in suburban areas,” he said.
Democrats, who are preparing to run an incumbent president with low approval ratings, are even more blunt.
“Swing voters in a general election are not looking for celebration of an attempt to overturn an election and overthrow a government,” said Geoff Garin, a prominent Democratic pollster who has worked on the past three presidential races. “Swing voters and voters generally take our democracy very seriously and don’t want their votes to be made irrelevant by politicians that want to overturn elections.”
After the midterms, advisers succeeded in steering Trump away from talking about the “stolen” election, instead channeling that energy into a more forward-looking message casting the prosecutions as the latest step in a continuous conspiracy of “election interference” against him. As the charges piled up, however, Trump has resumed peppering his speeches with repeated false claims about the 2020 election and Jan. 6.
But that strategy has changed somewhat since then. Another Trump attorney, Alina Habba, said Thursday outside the courtroom that Trump’s defense team would show at trial that the former president believed that there were problems with the 2020 results, though his attorneys will not have to prove that the election result was fraudulent.
“The truth is, as an American, there were questions that he had regarding the election integrity,” she said. “We’ve seen documents come out, we’ve seen documentaries come out showing that there were issues with the election. When somebody wants to say that the 2020 election was perfect and that President Trump has no right to object to it, we’ve got to go show him all the facts, and there’s a lot of facts to show.”
Before boarding his plane to Washington, Trump returned to his debunked argument, which has already been litigated in dozens of cases around the country. He embraced a political tactic he has long used, arguing that he was being persecuted by the same political forces that unfairly denied him a second term. One person who spoke to Trump in recent days described him as privately frustrated by the indictment and his mounting legal challenges.
“I AM NOW GOING TO WASHINGTON, D.C., TO BE ARRESTED FOR HAVING CHALLENGED A CORRUPT, RIGGED, & STOLEN ELECTION,” Trump wrote on his preferred social media app on Thursday before departing New Jersey. “IT IS A GREAT HONOR, BECAUSE I AM BEING ARRESTED FOR YOU.”
He has even argued that the state and federal prosecutions, which could soon include more charges from a Georgia prosecutor over his efforts to influence the ballot count in that state, will ultimately power his campaign to victory. “I NEED ONE MORE INDICTMENT TO ENSURE MY ELECTION!” he wrote.
Trump’s rivals for the Republican nomination acknowledge that he has received a short-term political boost from the prosecutions. But they have begun to more forcefully argue that the immediate gains will translate to weakness in the general election, when a different group of voters make the difference between victory and defeat.
Trump’s leading challenger, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, has largely avoided faulting Trump for the criminal jeopardy the former president is facing, joining him in criticizing the prosecution, offering to pardon Trump if elected and calling for the case to be moved to a more right-leaning jurisdiction. But even before the latest charges in the election subversion case, DeSantis acknowledged the political risks of running a campaign centered on Trump’s legal troubles.
“If the election becomes a referendum on what document was left by the toilet at Mar-a-Lago, we are not going to win,” DeSantis told ABC News last week during a campaign stop in Iowa, referring to an instantly famous photo from the earlier indictment showing boxes stored in a bathroom at Trump’s Florida resort home. “We’ve got to focus on what the people are looking for in terms of their futures, and I just think in 2024, we won’t, we can’t have distractions.”
Trump’s allies have made the opposite argument, arguing that the prosecutions prove that the former president is a greater threat to those forces that oppose the interests of Republican voters.
“Now they’re trying to throw him in jail. Their attitudes are enough is enough: If you hate him this much, this is exactly who I want to be president of the United States,” Rep. Byron Donalds, a Florida Republican, said in an interview. “That’s where voters are. They don’t trust the federal government and the federal agencies, they don’t trust political hacks, and they don’t trust political corruption. If you hate him, we love him.”
Trump’s campaign, aiming to add to the spectacle Thursday, allowed reporters to join Trump’s motorcade from Reagan National Airport. Cable networks carried the footage of the drive live from the dashboard of a vehicle, once again blotting out coverage of his political rivals.
In a brief address to reporters before departing Washington after the hearing, Trump described the prosecution as a “persecution of a political opponent.” He also claimed that on his drive through town that he had seen filth, decay, broken buildings and walls with graffiti that he claimed were not present when he was president. Others in the motorcade did not witness urban blight that was substantially different from when Trump was president.
“We can’t let this happen in America,” Trump said.
Trump’s defiance, and continued election denial, is widely expected to continue over the coming year. Former advisers and aides point out that he has little record of behaving differently.
“He is never going to stop saying the election was stolen because that would force him to admit he is a loser,” said John F. Kelly, his former White House chief of staff. (Washington Post).
Cassidy Hutchinson recounts Donald Trump acknowledging he lost the election in a conversation with her former boss Mark Meadows:
— Republican Accountability (@AccountableGOP) August 4, 2023
"I don't want people to know we lost, Mark. This is embarrassing. Figure it out. We need to figure it out. I don't want people to know that we lost." pic.twitter.com/wkdO2poGUq
Two more things.
First, On “Mr. Trump.”
I’ve seen people address our actual President by saying “hi joe” or “ love you uncle joe” and it does not irk him, it makes him smile. https://t.co/0owmLecoxW
— Ronald Klain (@RonaldKlain) August 4, 2023
Then, on Chris Christie - just so you will know.
NEW: Republican presidential candidate Chris Christie made an unannounced visit to Ukraine on Friday to meet with President Zelensky, whom he praised for demonstrating “the resolve it takes to survive a war and ultimately win it.” #StandWithUkraine pic.twitter.com/gnIzHpR4Pa
— Republicans against Trump (@RpsAgainstTrump) August 4, 2023
______________________
Is it just me? Did we once have candidates who were civilized humans?
Outrage after DeSantis says he’d ‘start slitting throats’ if elected president | Ron DeSantis | The Guardian.
Rightwing Florida governor and 2024 presidential hopeful Ron DeSantis was widely condemned after he said that if elected to the White House, he would “start slitting throats” in the federal bureaucracy on his first day in power.
The president of the National Treasury Employees Union, Tony Reardon, called the hardline Republican’s comment “repulsive and unworthy of the presidential campaign trail”.
The president of the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE), Everett Kelley, said: “Governor DeSantis’ threat to ‘start slitting throats’ of federal employees is dangerous, disgusting, disgraceful and disqualifying.”
Among commentators, the columnist Max Boot called DeSantis’s words “deranged” while Bill Kristol, founder of the Bulwark, a conservative site, said the governor was “making a bold play to dominate the maniacal psychopath lane in the Republican primary”. (The Guardian).
______________________
Let the conversation continue - is the Supreme Court a Kingdom to itself?
Justice Elena Kagan enters fray over Congress’ power to police Supreme Court.
Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan (left) sits onstage for a panel at the 9th Circuit Judicial Conference on Thursday, August 3, 2023, in Portland, Ore., with Misty Perry Isaacson, a bankruptcy lawyer and chair for the 9th Circuit Lawyer Representatives Coordinating Committee.
PORTLAND, Ore. — Justice Elena Kagan on Thursday jumped into the heated debate over ethics at the Supreme Court, arguing that Congress has broad powers to regulate the nation’s highest tribunal despite the recent claim from one of her conservative colleagues that such a step would violate the Constitution’s separation of powers.
Kagan’s comments, at a judicial conference in Portland, came just days after the Senate Judiciary Committee responded to recent ethics controversies around justices’ luxury travel by advancing a bill requiring the court to establish an ethics code and setting up a mechanism that would enforce it.
“It just can’t be that the court is the only institution that somehow is not subject to checks and balances from anybody else. We’re not imperial,” Kagan told the audience of judges and lawyers attending the Ninth Circuit Judicial Conference. “Can Congress do various things to regulate the Supreme Court? I think the answer is: yes.”
Kagan insisted she was not responding directly to Justice Samuel Alito’s blunt statements in an interview last month that Congress would be violating the Constitution’s separation of powers if lawmakers sought to impose ethics and recusal policies on the high court.
“Congress did not create the Supreme Court,” Alito told The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page. “No provision in the Constitution gives them the authority to regulate the Supreme Court — period.” (Politico). Read the full article here.
______________________
Yesterday, Justin Jones and Justin Pearson, expelled members of the “Tennessee 3,” won back their House seats in a special election.
BREAKING: The two Democratic state representatives in Tennessee who were expelled by Republicans in April for protesting in support of gun safety on the chamber floor have won special elections to serve the remainder of their terms. https://t.co/KEhDL0cA4f pic.twitter.com/31QnXvLlDd
— NBC News (@NBCNews) August 4, 2023
______________________
FIFA Women's World Cup 2023.
Sweden, the runaway winner of Group G and one of three teams at this 2023 World Cup to finish the group stage with three victories and the full 9 points—England and Japan being the others—face the United States Women’s National Team (USWNT) on Sunday morning at 5 a.m. E.T. in the Round of 16.
The USWNT scraped through Group E and will meet Group G winners Sweden to battle it out for a place in the quarter finals. Following their group stage performances the reigning world champions head into this fixture as somewhat an underdog, as Vlatko Andonovski's side face tough opposition in Sweden - who took three wins from three in the groups. The USWNT have never failed to make it to the semi finals of a Women's World Cup.
______________________