His fascist rhetoric is "unhelpful"

I wrote yesterday about the Colorado Supreme Court tossing the nasty guy off the presidential primary ballot. Today are some responses to that ruling. Mark Sumner of Daily Kos wrote first about reactions from fellow candidates. Haley said the issue should be in the hands of voters. (It was in the hands of voters and they said no. Do Republicans want a rematch so they can overrule voters?) Christie’s response was a muddle. DeathSantis said nothing. The strangest was Ramaswamy who declared he would remove himself from the ballot if the nasty guy wasn’t put back. Sounds good to me. He also called on Christie, DeathSantis, and Haley to remove themselves. In his rant he did not use the word “democracy.” Then the Colorado Republican Party threatened to replace the primary with a caucus where there is no ballot. And they turned it into a fundraising opportunity. And Texas lieutenant governor Dan Patrick threatened to remove Biden from that state’s ballot. Don’t be surprised if Texas AG Ken Paxton files such a suit. One of the nasty guy’s claims is he’s more electable than DeathSantis or Haley or the rest of them. Kerry Eleveld of Kos suggests with the nasty guy being tossed off the Colorado ballot and with similar cases in 16 other states that electability claim may no longer be true. Can his rivals take advantage of the moment? Joan McCarter of Kos reported as this Colorado case heads to the Supreme Court and the nasty guy’s immunity case and others now at the court there are growing calls for Clarence Thomas to recuse himself. If he doesn’t and if the new ethical standards are to mean anything Roberts needs to force a recusal. The reason is straightforward: The cases are about insurrection and Ginni Thomas was deep in the insurrection plot.

“The federal recusal statute requires that any ‘justice, judge, or magistrate judge … shall disqualify himself in any proceeding in which his impartiality might reasonably be questioned,’” [Senate Judiciary Committee member Richard] Blumenthal writes. “In addition, recusal is required when a Justice ‘or his spouse … is known by the judge to have an interest that could be substantially affected by the outcome of the proceeding; [or i]s to the judge’s knowledge likely to be a material witness in the proceeding.’”

In a pundit roundup for Kos Chitown Kev quoted Jesse Wegman of the New York Times discussing the case getting to the Supreme Court.

They are aware that he will whip his die-hard followers into a frenzy against the Supreme Court itself, just as he unleashed his followers to try to bend Congress to his will on Jan. 6. The justices’ challenge will be to face all of this head-on rather than to run scared from it, as so many Republican lawmakers did on that day, when they continued objecting to the certification of Joe Biden’s electoral votes even after the bloody attack on their workplace. The justices’ challenge is to not twist the law in a craven effort to appease an authoritarian movement that sees violence as the answer, win or lose.

There are several other pundit comments in the post and appropriate cartoons in the comments. Sumner reported:

Trump is not just humming Hitleresque themes, but bellowing full-bore Nazi slogans to his red-hat rally crowds. It shows that just as he has done so many times in the past, he has crossed the line and found that the white supremacist territory on the other side suits him just fine. Trump is making his similarity to Hitler into the core of his 2024 campaign.

The latest phrase is “poisoning the blood,” a phrase straight from Hitler. It could be as much a part of the 2024 campaign as “Lock her up” was in 2016. Juana Summers of NPR spoke to reporters Odette Yousef and Franco Ordoñez about that phrase. Some of what they said: Yes, the nasty guy’s dehumanizing language has increased and the target has shifted from outsiders, such as Muslims, to political opponents within the US. Posts on Truth Social talk of this being the “final battle to save America” with the implication this is the last election. He’s no longer flirting with with autocratic themes, but now into strongman messaging. He says the enemy cheats, so the rules are already broken, so elect me to break them for you. When he targets a person that person gets a lot of threats. And there are parts of his base who want and are counting on him being a dictator. Eleveld reported that Biden has taken note, creating campaign messages pointing out what the nasty guy said and how that mimics what dictators have said. Some news organizations are making the same points. Eleveld also reported what we might expect. About all Republicans can say about the nasty guy’s fascist rhetoric is that it’s “unhelpful.” Beyond that they didn’t condemn it. An Associated Press article posted on Kos looked at the things we’ve learned from the nasty guy’s New York fraud trial after 40 witnesses and 2½ months. Some of them: The courtroom was a campaign stop. Every courtroom appearance was a chance to stand before the cameras and rail against how unfair the trial was. Even with how fraudulent his statements of value were Deutsche Bank still loaned him lots of money. It makes me wonder what Sarah Kendzior and Andrea Chalupa (who I haven’t listened to in a long time) would say about the global crime syndicate that influences Deutsche Bank using those loans as way to pay him for serviced rendered. The nasty guy tried to buy the Buffalo Bills football team back in 2014. But there were doubts about his real net worth. If he had completed the purchase he wouldn’t have run in 2016. His residence in Trump tower, where he lived from at least 2012 to 2016 was almost 11,000 square feet, though on financial statements he declared the size to be 30,000 square feet. The guy doesn’t know how big his apartment is? As I’ve written I recently took two trips by airplane. On both flights of both trips I checked one bag and paid the fee, and carried onboard a bag small enough to fit under the seat in front of me. I watched, but didn’t take part in, the scramble for overhead bag space with some passengers having to leave bags at the end of the jetway. Dartagnan of the Kos community discussed the old, comfortable way of flying compared to the modern, uncomfortable way. The incentives that created this mess also created a predictable response – people try to gain the slightest advantage over their fellow passengers. Well into the discussion Dartagnan quoted a bit from the article Why Airlines Want to Make You Suffer, written by Tim Wu in 2014 for the New Yorker. Modern airlines make their money with extra fees.

Here’s the thing: in order for fees to work, there needs be something worth paying to avoid. That necessitates, at some level, a strategy that can be described as “calculated misery.” Basic service, without fees, must be sufficiently degraded in order to make people want to pay to escape it. And that’s where the suffering begins. ... Fee models also lead most people to spend unwarranted time and energy calculating, agonizing, and repacking in the hope of avoiding paying more. The various fees make prices hard to compare, as a ticket can now represent just a fraction of the total expense. These are real costs, and they are compounded by ticketing practices, which demand perfect timing. When customers miscalculate their schedules or their plans change, the airline is ready with its punishment: the notorious two-hundred-dollar rebooking and change fee

. Sigh. If it didn’t take Amtrak 36 hours to get from Detroit to Austin... Or arrive in Charlotte in the middle of the night... I actually did take Amtrak from Detroit to St. Paul. That 15 hours was bad enough.