Late night talk show comedians are having a field day with Trump’s rally flop and what is billed his dejected ‘walk of shame’ afterwards back to the White House, that some have even set to music.
Seth Meyers, who has made no secret of his contempt for Trump, was clearly enjoying having fun at Trump’s expense.
After initially managing to bring the covid-19 infection rate down in California, the state I live in, and the state started to open up a bit, there has been a disturbing resurgence in cases, similar to rises seen in other states. It has not been statewide but mainly in certain counties. This has resulted in the governor Gavin Newsom ordering restrictions on behavior.
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Most of the media coverage of Trump’s Tulsa rally focused on the embarrassingly meager crowd and the bizarre elements of Trump’s speech in which he launched a ten-minute explanation as to why he looked so shaky when he walked down a ramp at West Point and then more time showing that he could drink a glass of water with just one hand. Really. What he did not speak about was George Floyd, Juneteenth, and the 1921Tulsa massacre that happened a few miles away, all of which would have been very timely. But in his mind, trying to heal deep racial wounds is utterly unimportant when compared to trying to show that he retains basic motor functions.
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The level of support for Trump is something that absorbs a lot of interest. His approval numbers, both nationally and in the so-called battleground states, are underwater (i.e., more disapprove than approve) and he also trails Joe Biden. But people are still shell-shocked by his 2016 victory that defied the polls and so are reluctant to place too much stock in them, thinking that he might well pull off another upset win.
But there is another indicator and that is South Carolina Republican senator Lindsey Graham. The warmongering neoconservative Graham is one of the most shamelessly hypocritical and opportunistic members of his party and that is saying a lot. He and his Republican colleagues in Congress have been the enablers of Trump’s many excesses. But he is also a self-serving weathervane. When Trump initially announced his candidacy in 2015 and was written off as a joke, Graham was one of his most vicious critics, savaging him mercilessly as utterly unfit for the office. But as Trump’s fortunes rose and he won the nomination and the presidency, Graham became one of his most unctuous supporters and enablers, slobbering all over him and doing whatever he wanted, and more.
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I must admit, I am wallowing in schadenfreude over the Trump Tulsa debacle. There is something delightful about seeing a malignant narcissist not get the praise and adoration he so desperately craves and expected. The Tulsa fire department is now saying that there were only 6,200 people in attendance, one third of the capacity in the 19,000 seat stadium, and half of even what the Trump campaign conceded of 12,000, a truly pathetic turnout.
Trump is, unsurprisingly, furious about being so humiliated and is lashing out.
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In a blistering attack, Meyers points out how despicable John Bolton is and always has been, and then goes on to say that capitalism in the US has created the highly unjust and unequal system that we now have, where the wealthy make out like bandits while the rest of us are squeezed dry. It is encouraging that the evils of capitalism are increasingly and explicitly being highlighted by mainstream media.
When I wrote on Friday that last week was terrible for Trump, I had no idea that the worst (best?) was yet to come. Because yesterday we saw two more debacles.
First we had the fiasco of the firing of Geoffrey Berman, the US Attorney for the Southern District of New York, in what was clearly an act designed to get rid of someone who was conducting investigations that were likely getting too close for comfort to Trump, his family, and his cronies.
And then yesterday’s rally in Tulsa that Trump had been salivating over as the chance to get on top of things by riling up his rabid base with his racist, jingoistic rhetoric, out to be a damp squib. The Trump campaign had even built an outdoor stage so that Trump and Pence could address the expected huge overflow crowds before the main event. The rhetoric was on display for two hours but the crowd was not. The massive crowd that he had predicted failed to materialize. The stadium has a capacity of just 19,000 people but was nowhere near capacity. As a final indignity, the outdoor stage was dismantled even before the rally ended.
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On Tuesday, the state of New York holds its primary elections and Ryan Grim and Akela Lacy describes ome interesting races that are being closely watched, where progressives are trying to wrest the Democratic party nominations from entrenched establishment politicians, seeking to emulate Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez’s surprise win in 2018.
THE FIRST INSIDE the gates was Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, when she knocked off Queens machine boss Joe Crowley in June 2018. Three months later, a slew of progressive and socialist insurgents beat incumbents in New York state legislative primaries: some who’d been serving decades, and others who’d been part of the renegade Independent Democratic Conference, which shifted power in Albany toward Republicans. Those primaries brought Jessica Ramos, Alessandra Biaggi, Julia Salazar, and a host of others to Albany, where they uncorked a burst of bottled-up of progressive legislation.
Then came Tiffany Cabán, a former public defender who ran a shoestring campaign for Queens district attorney and came out ahead on election day in the summer of 2019, only to lose by a few dozen votes when the absentee ballots were counted.
The campaigns of the last two years created a roadmap for left-wing insurgents this cycle, with the Cabán and Ocasio-Cortez races pointing progressives to the New York City neighborhoods where their strength is particularly strong, exposing opportunities to unseat new incumbents. The 2018 bids for governor, lieutenant governor, and attorney general, by Cynthia Nixon, Jumaane Williams, and Zephyr Teachout, respectively, left behind additional local data. While Jamaal Bowman’s challenge to Rep. Eliot Engel has gotten the most coverage, Reps. Yvette Clarke, Greg Meeks, and others are fending off spirited challenges from the left. ProgressiveMondaire Jones, meanwhile, has moved into the lead in an open congressional primary in a southern New York district. That same force is rattling the cages of the machine in down-ballot races throughout the city.
If the Trump administration were not so corrupt, dangerous, and harmful to so many people, their sheer incompetence would be laughable. Take for example their attempt to fire the Geoffrey Berman, US Attorney for the Southern District of New York. Attorney General William Barr announced at 9:00 pm on Friday night that Berman was “stepping down” effective immediately and thanked him for his “tenacity and savvy” while in the office he had led since 2018. The timing of the announcement immediately raised suspicions that this was another of the notorious ‘Friday night news dumps’ which administrations use to avoid media scrutiny of dubious actions.
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Somme of you may be familiar with the ‘crazifiction factor‘, a term invented by John Rogers to explain the 27% of Americans who seem to be willing to vote for the most bizarre candidates. The Onion reports that the Pew Research organization that conducts polls on various aspects of American life has come up with a different figure.
WASHINGTON—Classifying millions of citizens around the country as “total goddamn mysteries,” a resigned Pew Research study released Friday found it was impossible to determine what the fuck was going on with 15% of Americans. “After an exhaustive, year-long venture, we are still just as confused, if not more confused, about what the deal is with all these indecipherable weirdos,” said lead researcher Jenna Kirkman, before throwing her arms into the air, and calling a large portion of Americans “lost causes.” “According to our very frustrating research, a large portion of Americans are just freaks who will never be understood, no matter how hard we try. Are they happy? Sad? Old? Young? Unfortunately, because so much of the nation are just total fucking randos, we may never actually know.” At press time, Kirkman added that the remaining 85% of Americans were basic as shit, allowing researchers to easily parse every detail about their boring, miserable lives.
(This is of course satire.)