On Our Weekly "Virtual Route 66" This Week: On The Week That Was

Elections have begun and many countries have already held elections including Iran, Indonesia, and Pakistans with others forthcoming throughout the ensuing weeks and months.

Our team has pulled together thoughts courtesy of the Coop Scoop, The Bulwark, Crooked Media, the Real News Network, Financial Times, The Economist, and USA Facts as the US State of the Union Looms, the War in Ukraine rages on and on and the war in Gaza continues \with no apparent end in sight--although as we went to press there was a pending cease-fire and delegations were due in Cairo: 

MARC A. CAPUTO FEB 27

- Donald Trump really adding some flourish to his disinformation on the campaign trail.    Republicans have created an absolute shitstorm in Congress and are falling apart internally. Somehow, people still vote for them!   The old Mesozoic Era dinosaur himself, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell announced on Wednesday that he plans to step down from GOP leadership in November, which will end his tenure as the longest-serving Senate leader in American history. AND one of the worst, we might add! The 82-year-old McConnell has faced health issues in the past year, including two incidents when he froze bizarrely while answering questions from reporters. He also fell and suffered a concussion at a fundraiser last year. Classic gerontocracy problems!   There’s no denying that McConnell has been incredibly influential…in normalizing some of the worst policies and most underhanded legislative lever-pulling the Senate had ever seen. He’s the man who ensured the Supreme Court’s conservative supermajority, which overturned Roe vs. Wade before launching a further parade of horrible right-wing decisions. He helped pack the lower courts with Trump nominees, who will be there for a generation. He gleefully stifled former President Barack Obama’s agenda. Of course, he’s had plenty of time to do so much damage.He began his congressional career in 1984 at age 40 during the Reagan administration. (All things being equal, Joe Biden was first elected to the Senate at age 29 in 1972.) McConnell suggested he plans to finish out his term, which will end in 2026. Always one to worship at the altar of “civility”, President Biden said on Wednesday he was sorry to hear McConnell step down, adding, “I’ve trusted him, and we have a great relationship. We fight like hell. But he has never, never, never misrepresented anything.” Come ON, man! This is the guy who cynically denied Merrick Garland a Supreme Court confirmation, who said in 2010 that his top legislative priority was making Obama a one-term president. You don’t have to be nice to him!   McConnell has a frosty relationship with disgraced former president Donald Trump, who has been known to make racist remarks against McConnell’s wife Elaine Chao. Chao served as Trump’s Secretary of Transportation. McConnell did the bare minimum of refusing to back Trump’s claim that the 2020 election was stolen, but that should not be mistaken for a greater moral compass. McConnell called Trump “responsible” for the Jan. 6 insurrection, before voting to acquit Trump in the Senate impeachment trial. McConnell was staunchly in favor of most if not all of Trump’s horrendous policies. It’s also extremely likely McConnell will endorse Trump before November. McConnell’s departure announcement comes just as the White House and Congressional Democrats are trying to cajole Republicans to do their jobs and avert a government shutdown.   Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer told his colleagues on Wednesday that he and other negotiators in Congress are “very close” to reaching a deal that would side-step a government shutdown at the end of the week, and added that the group “continue[s] to make very good progress on an agreement.” Sen. Patty Murray (D-WA), who chairs the Senate Appropriations Committee, said that far-right nonstarter policy riders have been the biggest obstacle to reaching a deal. Senate GOP Whip John Thune said on Wednesday that the funding deadlines could be pushed back by one and two weeks, respectively, but he and many others aren’t in favor of kicking the can down the road.    Mitch McConnell’s departure and the poison pills in the GOP’s government funding legislation are both representative of a Republican Party moving ever-further to the right. Freedom Caucus psycho and guy who is currently under an Ethics Committee investigation Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) tweeted that he and his far-right buddies have “now 86’d McCarthy, McDaniel, and McConnell,” referring to ousted GOP Speaker Kevin McCarthy and RNC Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel, who recently announced she will step down after months of pressure from Trump and his allies. Mitch McConnell may fancy himself as the standard bearer of a more “respectable” bygone era of Republican politics, but in many ways, his personal brand of obstructionism, his career-long opposition to helping any Americans besides the wealthy, and his role in remaking the judiciary paved the way for the ascendant far-right wave that now defines the GOP. Don’t let the door hit you on the way out, Mitch! Alabama’s Supreme Court shocked pro-choice supporters across the country after they essentially redefined ‘personhood’ by ruling the destruction of embryos as a crime. On the latest episode of Hysteria, hosts Erin Ryan and Alyssa Mastromonaco discuss the significant impacts and horrendous effects we expect to see as a result. To learn more about the consequences of this decision, head to the Hysteria feed, available wherever you get your podcasts. President Biden won Tuesday’s presidential primary contest in Michigan easily. But in second place, 13 percent of Michigan Dem primary participants voted “Uncommitted”—a protest to send a message to Biden about their opposition to his handling of the Israel-Hamas conflict. “Uncommitted” received over 100,000 votes, significantly more than Biden’s actual human challengers Marianne Williamson and Dean Phillips. On Tuesday night, Biden released a 326-word statement on X thanking Michiganders for making “their voice heard” but made no mention of Israel or Gaza.  Meanwhile, Senior United Nations aid official Ramesh Rajasingham told the U.N. Security Council on Tuesday that “if nothing is done, we fear widespread famine in Gaza is almost inevitable.” The World Food Program also warned that famine is imminent in northern Gaza, and reported that child malnutrition in the enclave is currently the worst in the world. A report by the U.N. children’s agency said on Monday that 1 in 6 children in Gaza are acutely malnourished. Almost 30,000 people have been killed in Gaza since the war began, and another 70,300 injured, according to the Gaza Health Ministry. At least 242 IDF soldiers have been killed since the ground invasion of Gaza began, according to the Israeli Military. The Supreme Court announced it will take up disgraced former president Donald Trump’s claim of broad immunity from prosecution, which keeps the federal criminal case against him in Washington D.C. on pause. The court scheduled oral arguments for the week of April 22.    A judge in Illinois ordered Trump removed from the state’s primary ballots due to his role in the Jan. 6 insurrection, making the Prairie State the third to boot Trump, following Maine and Colorado. The Supreme Court is currently deciding whether any of this will be allowed to stand.   A New York appeals court denied Trump’s initial bid to pay a reduced $100 million bond on the $464 million judgment in his civil fraud case brought by state Attorney General Letitia James (D-NY).    As a shock to absolutely no one, two-thirds of Americans think frozen embryos shouldn’t be considered people, according to a new Axios poll. That being said, one-third thinking they should is still too high!   The Supreme Court on Wednesday appeared deeply divided on whether or not to uphold a federal ban on bump stocks, a device that allows semi-automatic rifles to fire continuously. The ban was initially approved under Trump in the wake of a 2017 mass shooting in Las Vegas, where a single gunman killed 58 people using bump stock devices.    An Indiana man named Andrew Nickels pleaded guilty on Tuesday to threatening to kill a Michigan elections clerk the week after the 2020 election. He left a voicemail for the Rochester Hills, MI Clerk Tina Barton, saying she deserved a “throat to the knife” (lol these guys can’t even get their threats right) because she “frauded out America of a real election.” I wonder which former president helped give him that idea!    At a Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Sen. Tim Kaine (D-VA) said President Biden’s legal justification for attacks on Houthi militants in Yemen is “laughable.” Kaine acknowledged that “Houthi behavior is abhorrent,” but the senator expressed “grave skepticism” about the White House’s interpretation of presidential military powers    The Tennessee House of Representatives passed a bill on Monday that would largely ban the display of pride flags in public school classrooms, sending the legislation to the state Senate.    A woman spouting full-fledged neo-Nazi and anti-semitic rhetoric named Lori Kauffman is running to represent Boston’s First Suffolk District on the Massachusetts Republican State Committee. Kauffman, (who was raised Jewish!) said she wants to “exile all Jews,” ban same-sex marriage, make being trans “illegal.” MassGOP released a statement condemning Kauffman and warning people not to vote for her. They unanimously passed a resolution to condemn her in December. Here’s a hot tip: if Republicans don’t want Nazis in the party they should stop being so welcoming to Nazis!! In truly hilarious news, the CEO of oil giant ExxonMobil Darren Woods blamed the public for “waiting too long” to address climate change.

(Composite / Photos: GettyImages / Shutterstock)

FOR YEARS, DONALD TRUMP’S CAMPAIGN STAFF struggled to get him to make donor calls and take fundraising seriously.

But that was before Trump faced an incumbent president and a primary opponent who was outraising him. It was before he was hit with nearly $540 million in civil fines against him and his family business in two New York cases. And it was before his political committee shelled out about $50 million in legal bills stemming from those civil cases (as well as the four criminal indictments he faces).

Now Trump is wooing contributors more than ever, sources tell The Bulwark. They say Trump is making fundraising a priority by:

• Hosting more traditional events and making donor calls. Trump has two fundraisers this week at Mar-a-Lago, had two there last week, and raised $6 million on the day New York Justice Arthur Engoron slapped the Trump Organization with a record fraud fine. His campaign pulled in another $6 million from a South Carolina fundraiser days before he beat Nikki Haley in her home state’s presidential primary. Former Democratic Congresswoman and 2020 presidential candidate Tulsi Gabbard is headlining a March 7 Mar-a-Lago fundraiser as well for Trump.

• Quietly raising money for the Republican National Committee’s “nominee fund,” which he can’t yet access because he’s not yet the presidential nominee, much to his annoyance. At the same time, he’s also pulling in millions more to the pro-Trump MAGA Inc. super PAC.

• Beefing up his online and digital fundraising staff. They have an emphasis on raising more small-dollar donors online, who are still the financial lifeblood of his campaign. And 10 cents of every dollar raised online goes to his Save America committee, which finances nearly all his legal bills. Small-dollar donors have been decreasing for Trump, according to a CNBC report that found some contributors have complained about overbilling.

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Trump’s legal issues have impacted his money picture in multiple ways: (1) They made some big donors nervous about giving to him, depriving him of money he otherwise would have had sooner. (2) They led some big donors to give to Haley instead, thereby prolonging her campaign. (3) They armed Trump critics with the argument that he wants the RNC to pay his legal bills. (4) The big financial judgments against him have made cash more scarce for Trump—which in turn make it harder to fill gaps by self-funding (which Trump has always been loath to do and hasn’t done this cycle).

“He’s much more engaged than I’ve ever seen him at this, and that’s because he has to be,” said one Republican familiar with the campaign’s finances. “The numbers right now aren’t good, but we should raise a billion dollars or $900 million at this pace now. We’ll have enough.”

The Republican, who spoke on condition of anonymity to describe private conversations with Trump, was with the former president at the February 16 Mar-a-Lago fundraiser after Justice Engoron’s fine and said Trump “was clearly peeved. He knew it was happening. The number was clearly a lot. But he was strangely in a good mood. You or I would be in therapy if something like that happened to us, but Trump compartmentalizes and the business stuff doesn’t matter as much. What matters is becoming president. He thinks he’s going to win. And he believes that if he wins, all this other stuff gets taken care of.”

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“He believes that if he wins, all this other stuff gets taken care of.” What an amazing statement. Get the inside story of MAGA every week, from Marc Caputo at The Bulwark.

Trump has reported having enough cash and assets to pay off the fines, and he briefly fumed to others that he viewed the rulings against him as a way to take all of his easier-to-get money.

“That’s how much cash I have. They’re trying to take my cash away,” Trump told one.

Trump’s need to focus on fundraising came into sharp focus last week when his campaign reported raising $8.8 million, spending $11.4 million and ending with $30.5 million in the bank in January, during the Iowa caucuses and New Hampshire primary. By contrast, President Biden banked nearly $56 million, raised nearly $6.9 million more than Trump, and spent about $5.8 million less than Trump.

The disparities between the Republican National Committee and Democratic National Committee are stark as well. The DNC pulled in $5.8 million more than the RNC, spent $3.5 million more, and ended the month with $15.4 million more in the bank.

The DNC is also under Biden’s control; the RNC isn’t (yet) under Trump’s.

But Trump forced the pending resignation of RNC Chair Ronna McDaniel, who announced Monday she plans to step down on March 8 when the RNC’s voting members meet. They’re likely to install Trump’s picks: North Carolina’s Michael Whatley as chair and Trump’s daughter-in-law, Lara Trump, as co-chair. Trump wants co-campaign manager Chris LaCivita to take over the role of chief operations officer.

 

Last Thursday, Lara Trump told reporters that Republican voters would “absolutely” support financing Trump’s legal bills. She didn’t explicitly say that the RNC would pay for them, but NBC reported she said it, leading Haley’s campaign to accuse her of it saying it as well.

In response, LaCivita told reporters on Saturday that the RNC would not pay for Trump’s lawyers.

“No,” he said when asked directly about it. Asked again to clarify, an exasperated LaCivita said, “fucking no.”

RNC member Henry Barbour of Mississippi, who supports Haley, said he wants to make sure LaCivita and the Trump campaign make good on their word, so this weekend he floated a draft resolution for the RNC to vote on on March 8 that says “the Republican National Committee will not pay the legal bills of any of our candidates for any federal or state office, but will focus our spending on efforts directly related to the 2024 election cycle.”

“Part of the thinking is to get them on the record [over the legal bills]. It’s in the RNC’s interest,” Barbour told The Bulwark.  He’s also sponsoring another resolution calling on the RNC to remain neutral during the primary “until a nominee is clearly determined by reaching 1,215 delegates.” The Trump campaign projects he’ll hit that threshold by mid-March.

Barbour acknowledges that neither resolution is likely to pass. To introduce the measures, Barbour needs to win the backing of two RNC members from 10 states or territories, and he doesn’t yet have that on the 168-member panel. 

Still, Barbour said, “it’s important to have this discussion.”

Another RNC member, John Wahl of Alabama, said Trump’s support is so strong on the committee that the resolutions probably wouldn’t pass if they won the support of 20 members for introduction. But, he said, “the few folks who aren’t with Trump are nervous” about Lara Trump’s comments concerning Trump’s legal bills and how her sole focus was on ensuring a Trump victory.

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So far, Trump has been able to finance his legal bills through his Save America committee, which has spent an average of almost $3.9 million every month since January 2023, according to Federal Election Commission reports. Last month, Save America spent $2.9 million on legal bills and reported incurring an additional $1.8 million in new debts for legal fees. To cover the costs, Save America has been raising money online from small donors and it has been receiving regular cash infusion refunds from the MAGA Inc. super PAC, which had been given $42 million by Save America last year. If that sounds confusing . . . it is.

“MAGA Inc. can only refund [for legal expenses] what Save America gave it, so it’s got around $12.75M remaining before that avenue gets closed off,” Rob Pyers, a campaign finance expert, told The Bulwark. “Trump has about two or three months of runway before the MAGA, Inc. refund-well goes dry and Save America needs to find another funding source to pay his lawyers.”

Other than that, Pyers said, his main takeaways from the most recent finance reports “are that the DNC / Biden advantage is about what I’d expect for an incumbent/party in power [and] the RNC needs to start raising a ton of money quickly.”

Which puts more pressure on Trump to put away his pride and dial for dollars.

“It used to be impossible to get him to do that. He loved the imagery of being self-funded but he really didn’t self-fund,” said one Republican involved in his 2016 and 2020 campaigns. “The bulk of his fundraising is small and medium-sized donors online. That’s partly because he’s not the toast of the financial elite. And he never will be.”

Trump is more likely to make the calls if he knows it will yield a max-out donation for his campaign ($6,600) and even bigger checks for his super PAC, Save America, or the RNC nominee fund. 

In contrast to his prior campaigns, Trump now has a staff that both stays in regular contact with big donors—including those who have yet to give to him, like billionaire Ken Griffin—and follows up after calls to make sure the checks are (figuratively) mailed and (literally) cashed.

“It’s no longer amateur hour at the Trump campaign,” said one confidant. “And that means the candidate needs to be a pro about fundraising.”

Coop Scoop: The Hour of the Quislings

The Supremes throw up roadblocks to getting Trump into the dock.

THE COOP SCOOP

February 28-29

By Marc Cooper

With the clock ticking loudly toward an existential election, and with the economic and judicial noose tightening around the neck of the accused criminal who will be the GOP nominee for president, his flock of enablers, allies and quislings are now scrambling to take up their repective positions…either by becoming full time militants in the Trump army or by vaguely distancing themselves from the Supreme Leader.

The punctuation mark on that assertion comes from what is now our rogue and unabashedly autocratic Supreme Court, the primary Quisling organization in American. On Wednesday when they moved to further delay the January 6 federal trial of Donald Trump they did what almost nobody predicted.

So let’s talk straight about what the Supremes are doing: they are fucking around with us and doing everything they can, without saying it directly, to make sure Trump’s major criminal trial not happen before the election, or not happen at all, so he can be re-elected.

We can speculate what an authoritarian America might look like, but we are getting a rather chilling preview as both the Supreme Court and the House majority as well as several state governments are already in the grip of MAGA and are busy rolling back this century and much of the previous.  Look no further than the absolutely lunatic regimes in Texas and Florida not to mention the religious zealots in robes in other states ruling that embryos are full human beings and that dreadlocks should be banned from high school students –even honor students.

The decision by the Supremes. –which they could have made 10 days ago—to hear Donald Trump’s plea for permanent immunity defies any printable reaction.   It is a bald-faced move to delay his trial as long as possible.  Every serious legal expert said there was NO reason whatsoever to hear the case as it is equal to a banana asking the court to be exempt from human consumption.  A Republican-studded district appeals court unanimously denied Trump’s plea for a level of royal-level monarchy and there was no logical reason for the Supremes to take the case.

And, yet, they did. And the case will be heard of course by at least one justice, RV maven Clarence Thomas, whose wife was up to her neck in the subversive movement to deny a peaceful transition of power in 2020.  Just like any other Banana Republic corrupt court.  Worse, the Supremes have set the hearing for April 22.  Though they could have set it for next week, but…why hurry?  The court MIGHT makes its ruling within a few days or a week after the April hearing.  More likely it will not come until the end of their term in late June. And given that all proceedings on the case are now on hold, and given there are a ton of pre trial motions that will have to be considered, it is now UNLIKELY that the crucial Jan6 trial will not happen before the election.  It’s an affront to our collective intelligence and it holds in contempt the American electorate who have the right to know if they are being asked to vote for someone who will turn out to be a felon convicted of conspiring to overthrow the government and to illegally remain in power.

That’s to not even mention the real possibility that this totally political and theocratic court will rule that Trump indeed does have the legal armor and immunity of a 14^th Century King and they grant him immunity, wiping out all and any future trials.  Ten days ago I would have said that is impossible. Today I give it a 50/50 chance as the court sinks ever deeper into the muck of moral degeneracy and putrid rot.  And that should scare the living piss out of all of us.  

In the meantime, by sitting on this case and further dragging it out, the course is granting de facto immunity to Trump as he continues to elude the dock where he very much belongs.

And down in Florida, the inexperienced MAGA flunky, Ailleen Cannon, who Trump appointed to the federal bench right before he fled office, and who is now hearing the slam dunk guilty  case of Trump and his purloined government documents, is doing everything except throwing her body across the train tracks to slow down, postpone and try to extinguish the case – a case if it goes to court would almost certainly bring convictions on obstruction of justice.

Folks, last week I wrote that I was giving up on any serious, cross ideological, multi racial anti-Trump  coalition in the streets and suites emerging and that we were left with the only hope that Trump’s defeat had to be outsourced to the courts. I’m gonna have to retract that thought, at least the second hall about the courts.  The ball is back in the court of the citizenry and the calendar to get off their asses and confront these fascists is running fast and short.

Now America’s own Count Van Papen, the dissolute conservative German aristocrat and pol who opened the mainstream doors for the Nazis, that walking and talking bag of human waste, Mitch McConnell, has also made his move today.  Just as the German conservatives quickly got eaten by their junior Nazi allies, Mitch is the latest to get pushed out by the same thugs he enabled.   It’s Mitch who helped Trump turn the federal judiciary into a bible thumping chapter of the Federalist Society,  It’s Mitch who engineered the obstruction that led to an extremist majority on the Supreme Court.  It’s Mitch that legitimized the filth that Trump put before the Senate.  It was also Mitch who actually wavered during Trump’s second impeachment.  He was on the verge of turning his thumbs down and leading a Senate majority to convict Trump and bar him from running again.  Instead, he chickened out.

Then, he made the mistake of telling the truth when he announced his acquittal vote by uncategorically suggesting that Trump had broken the law and should be dealt with by the criminal justice system.  He never did anything about that since.  But it cost him his personal relationship with Trump to whom he has not spoken since 2020 and it sealed his political fate.  His years of ass-licking Trump and of effectively leading the GOP Senate in its subversive course was rewarded by his own members making it known he’s now too much of a squish.  Mitch is gonna try to get replaced by someone who is not a card-carrying MAGA nut case but odds are slim.

No tears to be shed over Mitch winding up in the rubbish bin.  But it’s not really much good news. It is just one more indicator that the slow-moving coup by MAGA to completely consume the former Republican Party is being completed…the same way the Nazis disposed of their “friends” among the conservatives.  MAGA now controls SCOTUS and the House and the departure of Mitch means the removal of the biggest hurdle in fully taking over the Senate.  Don’t rule out us five years now pining over the Good Old Days when Mitch was GOP senate leader! 

These events coincide with Trump purging the RNC of its current leadership under the pliant quisling Ronna McDaniel (Romney’s niece who dropped the use of her name to not anger the Big Boss).  She was 101% loyal to Trump but even that is no longer enough.  She is being purged and replaced by his genius daughter-in-law of Der Leader, Lana Trump. 

Half the Republican Senate and 2/3 of the Republican House have already endorsed Trump and the other lemmings will soon follow suit.

The Trump takeover game has just about been played out. I’m only curious how the MSM will continue to treat Trump henceforth – continuing to rely on the fantasy that there is some Republican Party that is now not an appendage of declaredly anti-Democratic, xenophobic and racist MAGA organization. 

All this invokes more echoes from 1930’s Germany.  After Hitler consolidated power and began jailing his opponents and turning against and purging his former allies, he changed the sworn oath taken by all his armed forces.  They no longer pledged allegiance to Germany, the Reich or anything else other than to affirm their personal loyalty to the person of Donald Trump.  Just as the Republican Party pledged no platform in 2020 other than unbridled support for Der Trump.

That’s the hard news for me today.  Just two quick addendums. I will get around to commenting on the primaries later this week, but I will limit myself on the election to saying if you are an anti-Trump voter then you are out of your mind if you hesitate in voting for Biden. Morality and politics are two different things though they occasionally intersect. If you think you cleanse your soul and keep your hands clean by abstaining or not voting for Biden then you are dirtying that same soul  beyond any repair by effectively voting for Trump.  Strip away all the wishcasting and ought-to-bes and understand, please, that it is only Joe Biden or Donald Trump and their respective teams, advisors and supporters, who will be in power next year.  If you are not supporting one, you are supporting the either. You get no brownie points for being a, pure thinking liberal, a bona fide anti war activist or a clean-handed socialist if you are living under a Trump dictatorship that you did not help to block.

I still cling to the hope that the totality of the American people are going to reject MAGA in November.  I am also going to repeat you are kidding yourself into believing It Can’t Happen Here. It sure as hell can and having observed fascist takeovers in other countries, if it comes to pass, the speed with which it will be consolidated will make your head swim. ++

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What’s next for Julian Assange Following a charged two-day extradition hearing in London, the fate of the WikiLeaks founder hangs in the balance. Continue reading…

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