MAGA's Latest Brain Worm

And, of course, more dog pictures

I regret to inform you that we have not yet reached peak inanity.

It was tempting to believe that the pilgrimages of the MAGA faithful to pay homage to Donald Trump’s hush money trial, and/or MTG’s unhinged rants about fake eyelashes were an indication that we were close to exhausting our capacity for eyerolls. No such luck.

Because things got even dumber yesterday.

But first the obligatory dog pictures, starting with Baby Eli and his blue dog.

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When Eli met Pete and his brother Auggie.

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Puppy Eli learns to jump off the dock.

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Last weekend, he had plans for me.

“They were authorized to shoot me!”

The latest Trumpian brainworm began, as they all do, with a bleat.

On Tuesday, court papers were released showing that even more classified documents were found at Mar-a-Lago, even after the FBI search. But Trump and his MAGA loyalists leaped on a line in the document “which says officers may resort to lethal force only when the subject of such force poses an ‘imminent danger of death or serious physical injury’ to an officer or another person.”

This is standard operating procedure, which the chronically ignorant Julie Kelly apparently did not understand.

But ignorance is not a disqualification for influence in today’s MAGAverse. Within hours, the bogus story jumped from Kelly to the former president.

Of course, the usual flying monkeys quickly converged, with MTG declaring that “The Biden DOJ and FBI were planning to assassinate Pres Trump and gave the green light.”

My old friend Ron Johnson, who apparently no longer has a staff that will protect him from public displays of asininity, also weighed in:

This is beyond outrageous. No greater example of @POTUS’s weaponization of the federal government against his political opponents.

Naturally, Fox News also fell hard for the story. Philip Bump reports:

On Fox News, host Jesse Watters — the replacement for former host Tucker Carlson — had no qualms about picking up the story.

“They’re saying Trump’s going to unleash assassination squads on his enemies,” Watters said, “but Biden unleashed armed agents into Trump’s house, authorizing them to use deadly force.” He continued to suggest that the FBI agents conducting the search perhaps wore plain clothes not to reduce the visibility of their hunt for documents but because “maybe they were looking for a little action,” hoping the Secret Service would prompt a confrontation.

Hours later, well after the Kelly-driven narrative had been demonstrated to be unfounded, Fox Business host Maria Bartiromo hosted a panel that marveled at President Biden — quickly positioned by Trump supporters as the real driving actor here — “authorizing the FBI, if it came to that and he resisted arrest … to kill Donald Trump,” as she put it.

Amid all of this rank idiocy, the FBI felt the need to issue a rare statement, clarifying that this was simply standard, boilerplate protocol:

Despite that, Trump is now fund-raising off the new brain worm. Via the Wapo:

Donald Trump on Tuesday falsely claimed in a campaign fundraising email that President Biden was “locked & loaded ready to take me out” during a 2022 search of his Mar-a-Lago estate for classified documents, an extraordinary distortion of a standard FBI policy on the use of deadly force during such operations….

A former president falsely accusing his successor and rival of posing a threat to his life is without precedent in modern U.S. history. The comments marked a sharp escalation of Trump’s baseless attacks on Biden, as the former president faces 88 criminal charges across four indictments in federal and state courts. Trump has frequently accused Biden of weaponizing the legal system against him in coordination with the Justice Department and local prosecutors. There is no evidence of such coordination.

A Tuesday evening fundraising email from the Trump campaign that was signed in the candidate’s name arrived with the subject line, “They were authorized to shoot me!” and said of the Biden administration, “You know they’re just itching to do the unthinkable … Joe Biden was locked & loaded ready to take me out & put my family in danger.”

Exit take: It’s going to get worse. But you knew that, right?

A bad night for the progs

Via Dave Weigel at Semafor:

Progressive Democrats took a pounding in Tuesday’s primaries. Multnomah County, Oregon DA Mike Schmidt, elected in a 2020 landslide as a criminal justice reformer, was on track to lose to Nathan Vasquez, a prosecutor in his office who blamed Schmidt for lower clearance rates and higher crime, and highlighted a probe of gender discrimination in the office.

Susheela Jayapal, a Multnomah County commissioner endorsed by Bernie Sanders and sister of Congressional Progressive Caucus Chair Pramila Jayapal, lost handily to state Rep. Maxine Dexter, after millions of dollars in last-minute spending attacking Jayapal’s record.

The defeat of the DA Mike Schmidt in Portland, Oregon, is just the latest setback for “progressive” prosecutors in the deepest of deep blue areas — including San Francisco, Chicago, and Los Angeles.

Over at Politico, Jonathan Martin previewed the stakes Tuesday.

Should Vasquez prevail [which he did], it would represent more than the rejection of a progressive prosecutor. It would be the culmination of simmering local frustration with crime, homelessness and drug abuse and a resounding correction to the shift left on criminal justice that took place here and in so many cities in 2020.

It should also get the attention of Democratic lawmakers everywhere. They’ve mostly found success by elevating abortion and MAGA, the party’s best one-two since Dobbs, but their vulnerabilities on quality-of-life issues remain and could prove particularly acute with the broader presidential electorate this fall.

While San Francisco’s recall of San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin momentarily drew national attention two years ago, the prosecutor battles have raged on, overshadowed by the presidential race but offering a more revealing measure of how curdled many voters have become post-pandemic.

In Chicago, home to the second-largest DA’s office in the country, the progressive Kim Foxx did not run again and was replaced in March by a former judge who pledged to prosecute retail theft as a felony and said Foxx did “not believe in accountability.” And in Los Angeles, George Gascon, who’s called himself the “godfather of progressive prosecutors,” is facing a challenge this November from a former Republican, who’s decrying “a culture of lawlessness” and sounds a lot like a subscriber to the broken windows theory of law enforcement.

Nota bene

Charlie Warzel: OpenAI Just Gave Away the Entire Game - The Atlantic

If you’re looking to understand the philosophy that underpins Silicon Valley’s latest gold rush, look no further than OpenAI’s Scarlett Johansson debacle. The story, according to Johansson’s lawyers, goes like this: Nine months ago, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman approached the actor with a request to license her voice for a new digital assistant; Johansson declined. She alleges that just two days before the company’s keynote event last week, in which that assistant was revealed as part of a new system called GPT-4o, Altman reached out to Johansson’s team, urging the actor to reconsider. Johansson and Altman allegedly never spoke, and Johansson allegedly never granted OpenAI permission to use her voice. Nevertheless, the company debuted Sky two days later—a program with a voice many believed was alarmingly similar to Johansson’s.

You can read the rest here.

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Bloomberg:

Half of swing-state voters say they’re worried about violence surrounding the US presidential election, suggesting misgivings about how an acrimonious race and its results will be received by a highly polarized electorate.

Roughly equal shares of Democrats and Republicans hold that fear, and it is even more common among independents, a Bloomberg News/Morning Consult poll found….

The unease around the election was not limited to concerns about violence. Six in 10 swing-state voters worried about misinformation, while 46% expressed similar concerns about foreign interference. Smaller numbers of voters said they had little or no confidence that the election would be fair, legitimate and free from fraud, but the share that held those concerns has grown since March.  

Full circle.