Nikki Haley's a great reminder of how very much Trump hates women

 

It's a woman who isn't bowing down. Blech! Getty Images

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By Kerry Eleveld

for Daily Kos

Tuesday, January 30, 2024 at 10:41:25a MST

 

REPUBLISHED BY:

Blue Country Gazette Blog

Rim Country Gazette Blog 

Donald Trump is a hater of many things: losing, the law, political enemies. Trump comes unglued over so many things, it’s sometimes easy to forget just how much he despises women—especially women who dare to challenge him. 

Enter former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley, who has not obeyed Trump's post-Iowa orders to exit the race and "unite" as a party around him. How dare she not submit to his wishes, especially following his victory in New Hampshire. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis folded like a cheap suit. How dare she insist on staying in the race through South Carolina, the next big prize on the GOP primary map and Haley’s home state.

Trump's angry victory speech following his win in the Granite State was just the beginning of his vitriol. His favorite pet name for Haley is Birdbrain. He's gone full birther on her, questioning her eligibility to be president. He's also played the race card, referring to Haley by her given name, Nimarata, while misspelling it as "Nimrada"—just to make certain his followers know she has Indian heritage (i.e., she isn’t white). 

Trump also can't seem to distinguish between the many women he despises, like they've all melded together in his thick brain. He recently confused Haley for former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi when discussing the Jan. 6 insurrection. He accused the woman he sexually assaulted, E. Jean Carrol, of “running for office” … or was he talking about Haley? And earlier this month, Trump tweeted out a photoshopped image of Haley with Hillary Clinton superimposed on it. 

Because who can tell the difference anyway? It's a woman who isn't bowing down. Blech!

For her part, Haley seems to be blossoming under the warm glow of Trump's rage. The Biden campaign couldn't be more pleased to have a sane Republican surrogate continuing to bring out the worst in Trump, her anti-women policies aside.

Most recently, the Biden-Harris rapid response account tweeted out footage of Haley telling CNBC's “Squawk Box” that voters "don't want the chaos anymore."

"Just think in the last 24 hours what he did," Haley said, "he has a temper tantrum and talks about revenge. Then the next day he goes and says, ‘Anybody that supports her is not going to be part of my MAGA group.’"

The longer Haley stays in the race, the more her presence reminds women voters of Trump's total contempt for them. 

It's a throwback to Trump's 2016 "grab ‘em by the pussy" Access Hollywood tape, his assertion that then-Fox News host Megyn Kelly had "blood coming out of her wherever" following a tough interview, and his creepy stalking of Hillary Clinton during a presidential debate.

Trump has made the Republican Party less welcoming to women than when he began his takeover of it, and when Trump is on the ballot, that alienation has translated to a double-digit deficit for Republicans among female voters.

Here's how women voted in the last several elections:

• 2016: Clinton 54%, Trump 39%, D+15

• 2018: Democrats 58%, Republicans 40%, D+18

• 2020: Biden 55%, Trump 44%, D+11

• 2022: Democrats 51%, Republicans 48%, D+3

The 2022 midterms stand in stark contrast to the previous cycles partly due to the fact that Trump wasn't directly on the ballot and partly because Democrats controlled the White House, making the ‘22 midterm a referendum on Democratic control of Washington.

But for obvious reasons, Team Biden and Democrats want women to remember the anti-Trump rage that drove them to the polls in the 2016, 2018, and 2020. And every minute that Trump rails against Haley is another minute spent enraging women voters, exercising that muscle memory, ahead of November.

Trump with his kind of woman - a judge who knows her place.

House GOP wages war with itself, the Senate, and reality - all at our expense

House Speaker Mike Johnson running away from reality with lunch.

By Joan McCarter for Daily Kos

Daily Kos Staff 

Monday, January 29, 2024 at 3:30:04p MST 

 

REPUBLISHED BY:

Blue Country Gazette Blog

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The government-funding can that Congress kicked down the road earlier this month is inexorably rolling toward the new deadlines in early March, and so far, none of the 12 appropriations bills that have to be completed have made it through both the House and the Senate. But that doesn’t seem to be a priority this week, because the House Republican majority is once more at war with itself, the Senate, and reality. The agenda for this week includes fighting over the border policy bill the Senate is preparing, fighting over a tax bill that should be a no-brainer for every member of Congress, and impeaching a cabinet secretary over nothing.

House Speaker Mike Johnson is working hard to appease both Donald Trump and the MAGA crowd in the House on the border legislation that a bipartisan group in the Senate has been working on. That’s the immigration policy changes Republicans insisted be included in a national-security supplemental funding package with aid to Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan. Now that a deal on immigration—which Republicans have been claiming to be the most important policy issue of the day—is within reach, the House is rejecting it. They would rather have the issue to run on in this election than to actually do something to solve it.

That’s putting Johnson at loggerheads with Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, who is pushing hard for some sort of deal in order to salvage assistance to Ukraine—a top priority for the Kentucky senator. Last week, Johnson said the deal is “dead on arrival,” without even seeing legislative language. And the fight has spilled over into the Senate, where hard-line MAGA members—like Ohio’s J.D. Vance, who is opposed to Ukraine aid—are lining up against McConnell.

“If you’re going to take a tough vote, you take one but you want to accomplish something. The worst of all possible worlds is you take a vote, you put a lot of political pressure on the House and you don’t get any policy accomplished,” Vance told Politico. The Senate could vote on the legislation as soon as this week.

Back in the House, there’s what should be a no-brainer tax bill on tap. But it’s got both the hard-liners and the moderates up in arms. The bill would extend the child tax credit to help more working families and reduce some business taxes. What more could you want in an election-year tax bill? Republicans are turning on each other along familiar breaklines: MAGA vs. everyone else.

The Freedom Caucus is pushing a lie that the tax credits would go to “illegal foreign nationals.” Of course, that’s not true, and even Americans for Tax Reform, a right-wing lobbying group, is saying so. They point out that anyone receiving the tax credit has to have a Social Security number, and that “There are no ‘anchor baby bonuses’ in this bill as one organization alleged.” 

Meanwhile, the so-called “moderates” in the GOP conference—largely a group of New York Republicans representing swing districts—are hopping mad that their No. 1 issue isn’t included in the bill. That’s raising the SALT cap, the limit on federal deductions for state and local taxes. “There is real anger about the process,” one GOP lawmaker in the SALT Caucus told The Hill.

House moderates might unite on the other big issue in the House Homeland Security Committee: impeaching Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas over nothing. Back in November, eight of them originally voted to defuse a motion from Rep. Majorie Taylor Greene of Georgia to impeach Mayorkas by instead sending it to committee. The group argued that if it was going to happen, it needed to happen through the committee process. Now that it has, they’ll probably be on board, never mind that there is absolutely no foundation for the action, and that the Senate will not vote to convict Mayorkas. It seems like this bunch of moderates figure they’ll have better luck getting reelected in their Biden districts on taxes than on bucking MAGA leadership.

Now that a deal on immigration—which Republicans have been claiming to be the most important policy issue of the day—is within reach, the House is rejecting it. They and Trump would rather have the issue to run on in this election than to actually do something to solve it.

Bidenomics isn’t simply working; it’s a wonder.

By Mark Sumner for Daily Kos

Daily Kos Staff 

Friday, January 26, 2024 at 11:00:17a MST 

 

REPUBLISHED BY:

Blue Country Gazette Blog

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On Thursday, President Joe Biden was in Wisconsin to announce nearly $5 billion in new infrastructure spending as a result of the infrastructure bill he signed in 2021. The legislation is responsible for more than 44,000 projects in all 50 states. And no matter how many times Republicans try to take credit for a bill they almost all voted against, these improvements and the jobs they bring are all due to Biden and the Democrats who pushed it through in the House and Senate.

Also on Thursday, the Commerce Department stunned pundits by reporting that the United States’ GDP growth in the final quarter of 2023 was a shockingly good 3.3%. Despite predictions of a recession that seem to have been repeated every quarter for the past two years, growth is strong and shows no signs of slacking. Under Biden, America has surged out of the recession created by Donald Trump’s mishandling of the pandemic and has emerged with an economy that even Fox News can’t stop gushing about. 

As more bridges go up and the national economy booms, the nation just keeps adding more new jobs, including 216,000 in December. Overall, the economy added 2.7 million jobs in 2023, keeping the unemployment rate at just 3.7%. That’s down from a pandemic-induced peak of 14.8% under Trump.

And that is just the start of the good news.

Dragging America out of the trough that Trump enabled and keeping businesses alive during the pandemic took a heavy level of investment from the government. It was no surprise when inflation began creeping up in 2021 and reached 9.1% in 2022. Over half of that number may have been due to greedy corporations who took advantage of the pandemic to pad their bottom lines, but that didn’t stop it from hurting consumers.

But in the past year, inflation has largely been wrestled under control, ending the year up only 3.9%. There’s still some distance to go to reach the Federal Reserve’s target rate of 2%. However, 2023 was also a year in which U.S. salaries saw major increases. The average 4.4% increase in pay exceeded inflation for the year and helped consumers regain some of the ground they’d lost in the previous year.

Those salary increases may partially reflect the fact that three major unions reached new agreements with corporations in the past year. The United Auto Workers reached an amazing new agreement with the big three U.S. manufacturers that includes a 25% wage increase over the next four years while promoting the construction of more electric cars and battery plants in the United States. The Writers Guild of America reached an agreement with film and television producers that was termed “exceptional,” and then the actors and crew members protected by SAG-AFTRA followed with another big win for workers that protected their members in a rapidly changing industry threatened by AI.

All those changes were made possible by the most pro-union, pro-labor, pro-worker president since FDR. Biden became the first sitting president to stand on the picket line with workers. It’s little wonder that UAW President Shawn Fain has given Biden a wholehearted endorsement while describing Trump as a “scab.”

And while Trump is telling his audiences that one of his first priorities, if he gets back into the White House, will be to tell the energy sector to “drill, baby, drill,” someone might want to let him know that almost every sector of the energy industry is producing at record levels. Not only are renewables surging under Biden, but the highest level of U.S. oil production in history is happening right now, not under Trump.

The economy’s strength seems to finally be getting through to Americans, despite a media that can’t seem to give up the doom-and-gloom. Americans are now feeling more optimistic about the economy than they have in many months.

And here’s one more little thing: While CEO pay has skyrocketed since America was introduced into conservative “trickle-down” economics, the ratio of pay between CEOs and workers fell slightly in 2022 partly because of the tight labor market, and those union deals are expected to drive this number down more when the results are in for 2023.

Bidenomics isn’t simply working; it’s a wonder.

One is working.  One is smirking.

Trump ignores $83 million judgment, but loves Hubba Hubba Habba

A cartoon by Jeff Danziger

Daily Kos

Jan. 24.

REPUBLISHED BY:

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He inherited a fortune, spent a lifetime not paying debts, and has taken it to a whole new $83 million level.

He's still trashing her.  Now he wants to be our dictator?  Really people.  Trump has to be stopped.

MUST READ: What Has Biden Done For Me?

By Just Saying

Community

Daily Kos

Thursday, January 25, 2024 at 2:42:41p MST

REPUBLISHED TO: 

Blue Country Gazette Blog

Rim Country Gazette Blog

[Gazette Blog editor's note: A relative who doesn't intend to vote in November recently explained her rationale: "What's Biden done for me?"  If you've experienced something similar from an acquaintance, here, in the best MAGA vernacular, is some "ammunition."] 

[Updated to include suggested additions to list. Thanks, everyone, for the suggestions and the kind remarks!]

My son gets too much non-information from youtube videos, including repeated claims that Biden “hasn’t really done anything”. I promised I would provide him a list of Biden’s accomplishments so far. Using whitehouse.gov and DailyKos’s Good News Roundup — ”Boosting Biden” series, I made a bullet list of achievements. I also wanted something I could cut and paste if I read the same claim on social media. (You’re free to use, as well.) Let me know if I got anything wrong, or if I missed anything:

Through Executive Orders, executive and administrative actions, and bipartisan legislation, Biden's accomplishments include:

Economy/Employment

• Over the past two years, inflation reduced by two-thirds while unemployment kept low and economy grew by 3%
  

• Avoided recession

• Two of the strongest years of job growth in history

• Nearly 11 million jobs created since 2021

• Created more manufacturing jobs in 2022 than in any single year in nearly 30 years

• 3.5% unemployment rate — the lowest in 50 years

• 750,000 new manufacturing jobs

• Near record low unemployment rate for Hispanics

• Near record low unemployment rate for African-Americans

• Record low unemployment rate for people with disabilities

• Awarded the most ever federal contracting dollars to small businesses and disadvantaged small businesses

• Incentives in the Inflation Reduction Act have spurred companies to spend nearly $300 billion on investments in manufacturing

• As a result of the CHIPS and Science Act, which provides incentives for domestic manufacture of technology, in just one year, U.S. companies have announced $166 billion in investments in semiconductors and electronics. This will provide American jobs, decrease reliance on foreign manufacturing of critical technologies, and position the US to lead future scientific innovations.

• Creating “workplace hubs” to provide training, re-training, technical education, and apprenticeships in emerging technology and manufacturing

• Increased funding to the IRS to enable audits of high-income taxpayers, resulting in the recovery of over $160 million in back taxes owed by millionaires and billionaires

Cost Of Living

• Executive Orders and releases of strategic oil reserves resulted in gas prices more than $1.60 lower than their summer 2022 peak

• $15 minimum wage for Federal workers and contractors

• Over 100 actions to lower household energy costs by $100 per year

• Over 16 million households receiving lower cost or free high-speed internet through the Affordable Connectivity Program

• Commitments from 20 leading internet providers to increase speeds and cut prices

• Inflation reduced by two thirds from its 2022 high

HealthCare & Costs

• Millions of Americans are saving $800 per year on health insurance coverage

• Four out of five people can buy health insurance on healthcare.gov for $10/month or less

• Health insurance coverage rates increased by 50% since January 2021

• More people with health insurance – 92% insured is the highest in history

• Lowered Medicare recipients’ health care expenses, including by capping out of pocket expenses on prescription drugs at $2,000 per year, capping insulin costs at $35/month, and providing free vaccines

• Lowered the cost of hearing aids by making them available over the counter

• $37 billion in funding for senior and disability services, including community based services

• Improvements to veterans' health care, particularly for veterans exposed to harmful chemicals

• Advanced research on cancer and other diseases through the ARPA-H initiative

• “Cancer Moonshot” with the goal of cutting the cancer death rate by at least half over the next 25 years

• Hosted White House Conference on Hunger, Nutrition, and Health; with a goal to end hunger and reduce diet-related diseases

Students& Student Loan Debt

• More than 40 million borrowers able to benefit from student debt relief

• Canceled over $22 billion in student loan debt so far

• Increased the maximum value of Pell Grants by $900

Climate/Environmental Protections

• Rejoined the Paris Agreement to combat climate change

• Over 100 Executive Orders and legislation to develop clean energy, protect America's lands and waterways, reduce pollution, and stimulate the development of clean energy businesses

• Reducing costs of electric vehicles (EVs) for families, initiating first national EV charging network, and historic investments into EV batteries and materials

• Assistance to American offshore wind industry, and convened the nation’s first federal-state offshore wind partnership

• New policies and regulations to reduce super pollutants like HFCs and methane gas, and to reduce other emissions fueling climate change

• $350 million to 14 states for the reduction of methane gas

• More than $1 billion for cleanup of Superfund sites, over $250 million to clean up brownfield sites, and $725 million for abandoned mine lands

• Restored protections for Bears Ears, Grand Staircase-Escalante, and Northeast Canyons and Seamounts National Monuments; and designated Camp Hale-Continental Divide National Monument for conservation of lands and waters and to protect tribal cultural resources and support outdoor recreation

• $1 billion to clean up and restore the Great Lakes

• $729 million to Virginia for railway projects

Reproductive Freedom

• Executive Orders to protect reproductive rights, including access to emergency care, protecting the right to travel, and strengthening patient privacy

COVID Relief

• 79% of American adults vaccinated against COVID-19, at no cost

• Mailed over 740 million free COVID-19 tests

• Funding to schools for safe re-openings

Infrastructure

• Infrastructure investments in all 50 states, D.C., territories, and tribal nations

• Through the Infrastructure and Stimulus bill, over $1.9 trillion to improve, repair, and build water delivery systems, public transportation, high-speed internet, bridges, roads, railways; and to promote American industries, create jobs, and lower inflation

Crime

• Reduced crime rates: violent crimes down 8% in 2023; in over 175 cities, murder rates down nearly 13%

• Signed legislation to hire more police and invest in community policing

• Signed legislation to reauthorize and strengthen the Violence Against Women Act

• Signed an Executive Order to improve public safety and criminal justice for Native Americans, and to address the problem of missing and murdered indigenous people

• Executive Orders making sexual harassment in the military a crime and implementing procedures to strengthen the military's response to reports of sexual assault

Gun Violence

• Signed the most significant gun violence prevention legislation in nearly 30 years, including enhanced background checks and other measures to keep guns out of the hands of dangerous persons

Marijuana Reform

• Thousands of pardons for people convicted of simple possession of marijuana under federal law and on federal lands and D.C.

• Initiated review of the drug scheduling of marijuana, with a view to reducing the classification of marijuana from Schedule 1 to a more appropriate Schedule

Voting Rights

• Signed the Electoral Count Act, to protect election integrity

Diversity/Equality

• Appointed a record number of women and people of color to serve in the Biden Administration

• Appointed the first African-American woman to the Supreme Court – Ketanji Jackson

• Most diverse judicial appointments in history, including 66% women and 65% people of color

• Record number of federal contracts to small, disadvantaged businesses + measures to increase access to credit for small businesses fuel dramatic increases in small, black-owned business and in black family wealth

• Proposed new regulations to prohibit discrimination against persons with disabilities by the medical profession and in the providing of medical treatments

• Proposed new regulations to prevent discrimination against persons with disabilities by child welfare agencies and in child welfare decisions (e.g., foster care services, child placements, etc.)

• Signed bipartisan legislation protecting same-sex and interracial marriage

• Executive Order to protect LGBTQ+ Americans in the military from discrimination in housing, health care, education, and employment

• Invested historic funding for Tribal governments and Native communities

Criminal Justice & Civil Rights

• Executive Orders for reforms to criminal justice system, to improve prison conditions, provide assistance to parolees and recently-released, and to improve police practices, including banning chokeholds, reducing no-knock entries, creating a national police accountability database, and reducing the transfer of military equipment to police departments

Foreign Policy

• Support to Ukraine against Russian aggression, including weapons and humanitarian aid

• Strengthened NATO, G7, and other alliances

• Completed the withdrawal of US troops from Afghanistan. The withdrawal process was not without mistakes, but a perfect withdrawal would have extended U.S. involvement in a mission that no longer had purpose. “I was not going to extend this forever war, and I was not going to extend a forever exit,” said President Biden.

• Significant action to curb Chinese threats to U.S. national security and economic interests, including increased restrictions on China’s access to U.S. advanced technology and hosting the first trilateral summit with South Korea, Japan and the United States, while also working to improve communications between the U.S. and China.

• December 2023, announced sale of over $300 million of military equipment to Taiwan in support of Taiwan’s national defense needs, the 12th military sale to Taiwan since Pres. Biden took office.

• Successful counter-terrorism missions against ISIS and Al Qaeda

Sources: Whitehouse.gov; DailyKos.com (Good News Roundup “Boosting Biden” series)

Yeah, Joe, truth be told you deserve another term.

HOW LOW CAN GOP GO? - McConnell considers killing major immigration deal to help Trump

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell

By Joan McCarter for Daily Kos

Daily Kos Staff

Thursday, January 25, 2024 at 12:30:13p MST

REPUBLISHED BY:

Blue Country Gazette Blog

Rim Country Gazette Blog 

Republicans have the biggest policy win on immigration in decades within their grasp, but Donald Trump is calling the shots now, so the deal is all but dead. In what’s been reported as a Senate Republican meeting Wednesday, leader Mitch McConnell told his colleagues he doesn’t “want to do anything to undermine” Trump.

This is the same McConnell who reportedly privately celebrated the fact that “Democrats are going to take care of the son of a bitch for us” by impeaching Trump for his role in the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection. The McConnell who, after voting not to convict Trump on said impeachment charges, publicly declared Trump "practically and morally responsible" for the attack on the Capitol that day in his floor speech announcing that he would not vote to impeach Trump. Trump “seemed determined to either overturn the voters' decision or else torch our institutions on the way out,” McConnell said at the time.

"A mob was assaulting the Capitol in his name," McConnell added. "These criminals were carrying his banners, hanging his flags and screaming their loyalty to him."

But now McConnell’s apparently declaring his loyalty to Trump, as well, while the Republican civil war fomented by Trump spills over from the House to the Senate. On Wednesday, McConnell reportedly told Republicans they are in a “quandary” over Trump’s opposition to the proposed bill, which would give Republicans big concessions on border policy. He even used Trump’s own words, to show that a big victory is in reach.

“He did a good job of quoting Donald Trump saying in 2018 that we will never get a Democrat to vote for this [border] stuff,” Republican Sen. Kevin Cramer of North Dakota told CNN. But that wasn’t enough for MAGA politicians, who “want to kill it and run on the issue,” as one Senate Republican source told The Hill. Another GOP senator said after the meeting, “I think the border portion is dead.”

Senate MAGA members held a press conference Wednesday to attack the possible deal and to  declare war on McConnell for even considering cooperating on the bill. Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas basically called McConnell a traitor to Republicans. “Chuck Schumer’s enemies in Congress are conservatives in the Senate and are House Republican leadership,” Cruz said. “And sadly, Mitch McConnell’s enemies are conservatives in the Senate and House Republican leadership.” And Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin said, “The problem is our leader. … Leader McConnell is really the stage manager of this negotiation.”

McConnell isn’t publicly crying uncle, not yet, telling one reporter Thursday that talks are still ongoing, but the writing is definitely on the wall. Trump doesn’t want a border deal, and McConnell doesn’t seem likely to try to defy him, not when it could endanger his own leadership position.

For a brief, shining moment, Mitch acted like a Republican adult able to stand up to The Donald.  Now he's reverting to Moscow Mitch.

Five reasons for Democrats to like what they saw in New Hampshire - a lot

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By Kerry Eleveld

Daily Kos Staff

Wednesday, January 24, 2024 at 1:56:58p MST

REPUBLISHED BY:

Blue Country Gazette Blog

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Former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley could have dropped out after losing a second state to Donald Trump, but instead she pledged to take her better-than-expected showing in the Granite State and give her home state of South Carolina a chance to have its say.

Here are five very good reasons for Democrats to like what they saw in New Hampshire.

1.

Haley could have demurred to Trump and accepted her near-certain fate of being vanquished by him down the stretch. Not so fast, said Haley, who, since losing New Hampshire, has sharpened her attacks on Trump, questioning his mental competency and calling him a loser.

"With Donald Trump, Republicans have lost almost every competitive election. We lost the Senate, we lost the House, we lost the White House, we lost in 2018, we lost in 2020, and we lost in 2022,” Haley said on Tuesday night.

"Trump's a loser!" responded one voter in the crowd. "He's a loser!" echoed another.

In another section of the speech, Haley revisited Trump recently confusing her with former Democratic Speaker Nancy Pelosi. "The other day, Trump accused me of not providing security at the Capitol on Jan. 6," Haley recalled, eliciting chuckles from her supporters.

"Geriatric!" yelled one attendee.

Haley continued, saying she has long called for mental-competency tests for candidates over the age of 75. "Trump claims he'd do better than me in one of those tests—maybe he would, maybe he wouldn't," she said. "But if he thinks that, then he should have no problem standing on a debate stage with me.”

Frankly, this is some of the most pitch-perfect material we have seen from Haley. She looked poised and confident in the threat she poses to Trump (i.e., exposing his weaknesses), and best of all, her critiques immediately got under Trump's exceedingly thin skin.

2.

Trump seethed about Haley's speech despite the fact that she congratulated him on his win. He called it "bullshit," disparaged her dresses as cheap, and threatened her with an investigation unless she drops out.

So much for him calling for unity after Iowa. How dare Haley refuse to drop out and stop lodging completely true, blistering attacks on him!

But this is who Trump is—a seething loser. And the more it's on full display and the more voters get reacquainted with it, the better.

3.

The New Hampshire electorate highlighted Trump's general election weaknesses even as he dominates the Republican primaries.

Exit polls showed the party ID of the electorate included:

• 51% of Republicans, down from 55% in 2016.

• 43% of independents, a slight uptick from 42% in 2016.

• 6% of voters who generally consider themselves Democrats double the 3% who voted in 2016. (Voters registered as Democrats could not vote in the Republican primary; only registered Republicans and undeclared voters could.)

In terms of total turnout, the roughly 300,000 voters who cast a ballot shattered the previous turnout record, set in 2016, when about 287,000 people voted in the Republican primary.

What that tells us is that although more voters turned out, fewer of them were Republican than in 2016, while more of them identified as independents and Democrats.

Haley overwhelmingly won those independents (58% to Trump's 39%) and voters who consider themselves Democrats but are registered otherwise (86% to Trump's 5%). In other words, the anti-Trump vote was very motivated to vote—a good sign for Democrats as President Joe Biden looks to rebuild his 2020 anti-Trump coalition.

But congrats, Republicans! You got your guy.

4.

Speaking of Biden, he put the “disruptive Democratic challenger” narrative to bed by trouncing his only real rival, Rep. Dean Phillips, with a write-in campaign, 55% to 20%. Finito.

5.

Haley planning to stay in the race is the icing on the cake for Democrats, especially as she appears to finally be hitting her messaging stride. Haley could drop out, but frankly, what else does she have to do?

As a strategist for a pro-Haley super PAC told NPR, "A month in politics is a long time."

Sure is, and Trump, at age 77, is carrying a world of legal weight on his shoulders. Who knows? Haley might just give it a month.

"I won.  Nikki needs to quit the primaries like a good housewife."

 

Trump's secret sauce comprised of people who have given up on America

They know Trump is a liar. They know he may go to jail. But they’re voting for him anyway.

By Mark Sumner for Daily Kos

Daily Kos Staff 

Tuesday, January 23, 2024 at 11:18:21a MST

REPUBLISHED BY:

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Anyone watching a Donald Trump rally knows that some portion of his supporters consist of true believers. The ones who think he was sent by God. The ones who think he’s here to stop the child-eating, pizza-parlor-dwelling lizardmen. The ones who are just itching to slip into their great-grandpappy’s Confederate grays.

But another kind of Trump supporter may be the most numerous. They know Trump is a liar, that he lost the 2020 election, and that many of his ideas are bad. They support him because they’re just tired and disappointed with their lives. They believe Trump will change things. They really don’t care how.

In past cycles, some of these voters talked vaguely about “economic anxiety.” But this time around, they seem even less focused. They don’t know what’s wrong, and they don’t know how to fix it. They know only that they want things to be different. Even if, for some, that means burning it all down.

One of those voters, an Army vet interviewed by Politico, is absolutely aware of what he will get from Trump.

“Our system needs to be broken,” he wrote to the reporter, “and [Trump] is the man to do it.”

This isn’t someone who thinks all Americans are behind Trump, or that Trump will heal the nation’s divides, or that Trump even has some policy that will help him personally. He’s looking for the opposite of all that. He’s looking for damage. He’s looking for people to hurt.

“He breaks the system,” he said, “he exposes the deep state, and it’s going to be a miserable four years for everybody.”

“For everybody?” I said.

“Everybody.”

And then? There is no “and then.” No happily ever after. This voter expects Trump to take the country and “pull it apart.” That’s the goal, and he’ll vote for that.

Other Trump supporters, like those interviewed by CNN recently, aren’t as explicit. They know Trump is a liar. They know he may go to jail. But they’re voting for him anyway.

One man whom CNN spoke with calls Trump “ignorant and rude.” Then he explains how he put a Trump flag on his house even though it made his wife angry. When she told him he was “ruining Christmas” and took the flag down, he put it back up.

Another woman admits that Biden won the 2020 election, then says she’s not a fan of Biden because he’s “been caught in a lot of lies.” The incongruity of these statements doesn’t seem to bother her. She explains that it’s okay for Trump to lie because “I don’t like politicians” and she doesn’t believe Trump is a politician. “I don’t think he plays the game.” So lying, including trying to remain in office after losing the 2020 election, is okay—so long as it’s Trump.

One man is asked about Trump’s theft of classified documents and the possibility he will go to jail. “Then he goes to jail,” the man says, with a shrug. “And I guess he won’t be president.” But until then, this man is voting for Trump because “he is definitely different.” He goes on to admit that Trump comes with a lot of drama but says that doesn’t bother him, either.

“No, because we have other branches of government that deal with it,” he says. “They can keep him in line. He can’t have everything he wants.”

This man and another blue-collar worker go on to defend the idea of Trump giving a tax cut not to them but to their bosses. “If you hit [the bosses] harder with taxes, that takes away from me,” says one of the men.

This belief in trickle-down economics—even as CEO salaries have skyrocketed, unions have been destroyed, and productivity increases have not been matched by salaries—is the central conundrum that Democrats have faced for decades. Despite all the evidence, people still believe in the debunked theory. Giving a tax break to their bosses is the only specific policy named by any of these voters other than a generic “close the border.” They don’t see Trump having awarded a massive tax break to the wealthy as a bad thing. They want more of that.

What all these stories have in common is that they center on people who have only the vaguest idea of what Trump might do for them. He’ll “work on the economy,” they say, or “help fishermen.” But none of those interviewed seemed concerned about the details. And yet the details are unfortunately what will hurt them—and everyone else—the most. After all, Trump is telling us exactly what he will do, including how he will prevent those other branches of government from impeding his quest for absolute power.

In the end, the voter who voiced his desire to destroy the nation and generate misery for everyone seems to be the only one who knows what he wants—and what he would get from Trump.

Trump supporters join in the opening prayer at a rally.

ALDOUS J. PENNYFARTHING: Trump's Haley-Pelosi mixup is just the latest on a long list of concerning mental 'mistakes'

"The man is not well, and it’s high time people who know him best (helloooo! John Kelly!) intervene."

 

By Aldous J. Pennyfarthing for Community Contributors

Community

Daily Kos

Saturday, January 20, 2024 at 12:35:14p MST

 

REPUBLISHED BY:

Blue Country Gazette Blog

Rim Country Gazette Blog 

It’s bad form to make fun of older people suffering from age-related cognitive issues. Many of us have dealt with parents or other loved ones who occasionally have trouble distinguishing fantasy from reality, so we understand how fraught such situations are. At the same time, those of us with elderly parents know that if Dad wanders too close to traffic—or the nuclear launch codes—we’re obliged to do what we can to protect both him and society at large.

On Friday night, confirmed rapist and prank presidential candidate Donald Trump took to his woolly-headed pulpit to assure New Hampshire voters that his top rival for the GOP presidential nomination, Nikki Haley, would be a disaster for this country—because she, not Trump, was somehow responsible for the chaos that occurred in Washington, D.C., on Jan. 6, 2021.

Transcript:

DONALD TRUMP: “No one ever reports the crowds, you know. By the way, they never report the crowd on Jan. 6, you know. Nikki Haley, Nikki Haley, Nikki Haley. Do you know they destroyed all of the information, all of the evidence, everything. Deleted and destroyed all of it. All of it, because of lots of things. Like Nikki Haley is in charge of security. We offered her 10,000 people.”

As you probably guessed, in this clip Trump is confusing Haley with former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, whom Trump has previously claimed rejected his offer of troops to protect the Capitol in the lead-up to the Jan. 6 attacked. That never happened, of course. And Haley is demonstrably not Pelosi. In fact, Haley and Pelosi have virtually nothing in common other than being female politicians who make Trump’s wee mind regress nearly as fast as his nethers.

Also, “my murderous, frothing, America-hating mob was simply HUGE” is probably not the kind of thing one should brag about when running for president. But that pretty much goes without saying. 

Of course, those who pay close attention—i.e., Democratic voters—know that the right-wing “Biden is senile” trope has always been projection. Donald “No Puppet! No Puppet!” Trump’s decision during the 2020 election to lean heavily into that trope was perhaps the first indication that his own synapses were firing blanks.

The second clue, for this writer, anyway, was the frequent boasting—which continues to this day—about passing a dementia test that doctors tend to administer only to patients they suspect of having dementia. A test that most unremarkable 5-year-olds could pass, as one of the questions requires grasping the difference between a rhinoceros and a lion.

In fact, just days ago, Trump was still nattering on about his triumphant dementia-test conquests.

The Washington Post:

“I think it was 35, 30 questions,” the former president said in Portsmouth, N.H., of the test, which he said involved a few animal identification queries. “They always show you the first one, like a giraffe, a tiger, or this, or that — a whale. ‘Which one is the whale?’ Okay. And that goes on for three or four [questions] and then it gets harder and harder and harder.”

The only problem: The creator of the test in question, called the Montreal Cognitive Assessment, or MoCA, said it has never included the specific combination of animals described by Trump in any of its versions over the years.

In fact, Ziad Nasreddine, the Canadian neurologist who invented the test, said the assessment — intended primarily to test for signs of dementia or other cognitive decline — has never once included a drawing of a whale.

In other words, the man who’s previously claimed he has one of the world’s greatest memories—but who couldn’t remember having claimed that when confronted with the statement—can no longer recall which animals he was asked to identify on a dementia test.

Then again, “I passed a dementia test!” is not much of a flex when running for president. It’s like sending unsolicited mall-walking videos to the U.S. Olympic track team, so the nation’s premier runners can be stunned as you perambulate past Wetzel’s Pretzels in Juicy Couture.

But it does sound like the kind of thing someone who’s mentally sunsetting (and, in Trump’s case, we’re talking a mid-December northern Alaska sunset) would blurt out to reassure himself that he’s just as sharp as he was in his prime. You know, back when he was telling random porn stars that he sincerely wished every shark in the world would die.

Of course, Trump has been dangerously mentally deficient for years—and it doesn’t necessarily relate to his apparent cognitive decline. Who could forget his presidential prescription for disinfectant injections—a call that may have led to an increase in deadly poisonings. Or his weird hydroxychloroquine obsession, which, according to one recent study, likely contributed to thousands of deaths. 

As president, he also reportedly wanted to nuke hurricanes, shoot immigrants in the legs, build alligator-filled moats at the border, nuke North Korea (while blaming it on someone else), and convince everyone to rake their local forests to prevent forest fires. He also thought colonial troops bravely seized all the airports during the Revolutionary War.

More recently, Trump said World War II may be right around the corner, claimed windmills are killing whales, insisted he won all 50 states in the 2020 election, and suggested he ran for president against Barack Obama and George W. Bush, which he most definitely did not. 

If Joe Biden said or did even one of those things, it would be a forever meme akin to Mike Dukakis’ tank helmet or Howard Dean’s scream. But seemingly everyone—including members of the media—tacitly acknowledges that Trump’s brain was never presidential, so he gets a pass.

After all, Trump being effervescently weird has never really been a man-bites-dog story. It’s more like a “man bites dog before chewing off his own arm to free it from a Pringles can” story. In other words, par for the course. And so he gets away with seemingly everything.

That said, the man is not well, and it’s high time people who know him best (helloooo! John Kelly!) intervene on behalf of our ever-fragile democracy. Plus, Trump is a rapist. How is it possible more people don’t know about that?

Maybe that’s something Haley should have brought up during the last fleeting days before Tuesday’s New Hampshire primary. Or whenever she’s done plotting to overrun the U.S. Capitol (again) from her lofty speaker’s office, that is.

“'I passed a dementia test!' is not much of a flex when running for president."