The Drunken Uncle Returns to the Scene of the Crime

Plus: Voter Ignorance: Trump's Superpower? Or biggest weakness?

"Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past." — George Orwell

Happy Friday!

I had planned to only share my latest column (and dog pictures) with you today, but events have overtaken us again. I’m afraid I picked a particularly bad week to quit taking magic mushrooms.

Yesterday, convicted felon Donald Trump returned to the Capitol to receive the congressional GOP’s ritual genuflection and assorted toe-suckings.

It was his first visit to the building since his supporters attacked on January 6, 2021, but Mitch & Co. were eager not let a trifle like violent insurrection spoil their ceremony of surrender.

At the meetings, Trump took the opportunity to share his deep thoughts about everything from sharks tariffs to Taylor Swift and the “dirty bastards” of the Department of Justice.

The Associated Press dutifully reported what it called Trump’s “triumphant return,” which is apparently AP-speak for rambling, ranty, gaseous gibberish. (As my friend Tom Nichols noted the other day: “Perhaps the greatest trick Donald Trump ever pulled was convincing millions of people—and the American media—to treat his lapses into fantasies and gibberish as a normal, meaningful form of oratory.”)

Compare AP’s tone with this report from NOTUS: ‘Like Talking to Your Drunk Uncle’: Trump’s Closed-Door Rant to House Republicans.”

Donald Trump came to the Capitol Hill Club Thursday morning supposedly to discuss his agenda for a second term with House Republicans. Instead, Trump treated his meeting as an opportunity to deliver a behind-closed-doors, stream-of-consciousness rant where Trump tried to settle scores in the House GOP, trashed the city of Milwaukee and took a shot at Nancy Pelosi’s “wacko” daughter.

Trump’s Milwaukee insult was especially notable, since the city is the site of next month’s Republican Convention, where Trump (a convicted felon) will be crowned again.

Bringing the convention to Wisconsin was the dearest wish of former RNC chair Reince Priebus, who has apparently now decided to make a career out of gelding himself in Trump’s service. Unfortunately, no one ever gave Reince a copy of Rick Wilson’s book, “Everything Trump Touches Dies.” So, Reince has to find out on his own. Over and over and over again.

Having said that, let’s stipulate that Trump’s comment that Milwaukee “is a horrible city," will not make the Top 1000 List of The Ghastliest Things Trump Said. But, as you might have guessed, I have some thoughts about it.

On Morning Joe today, I offered a counterpoint to Trump’s drive-by sliming of my town and described the whole thing as a farce wrapped in a fiasco.

At first TrumpWorld (of course) tried to deny that he insulted Milwaukee at all.

But then hilarity ensued as Republicans scrambled to get their stories straight. Some Wisconsin Republicans, who were in the room, claimed Trump was talking about “election integrity,” or simply about the city’s Democratic-lean. Others said he was talking about crime. Still others simply beclowned themselves.

The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel chronicled the omnishambles:

[Representative Glenn] Grothman said Trump “was concerned about the election in Milwaukee” and said he thought Trump “felt we need to do better in urban centers around the country.” He suggested Trump had concerns that Republicans “didn’t do very well in Milwaukee.”

An aide to [Rep. Scott] Fitzgerald also told the Journal Sentinel that Trump’s comments “were about election integrity.”…

U.S. Rep. Derrick Van Orden, a freshman Republican who represents Wisconsin's 3rd Congressional District in western Wisconsin, blasted Punchbowl's reporting, however, saying in a post on the social media platform X that the former president was "specifically referring to the CRIME RATE in Milwaukee."

And then there was Rep. Bryan Steil, who was caught in a mangle of self-contradiction.

[Steil] who represents the state's 1st Congressional District, said: "I was in the room. President Trump did not say this. There is no better place than Wisconsin in July."

Steil later said Trump was "was talking about specific issues in" Milwaukee in the context of "a broad conversation about the challenges we face as a country, in particular the challenges that we've seen in Milwaukee."

Backfire: Even though it will now become a MAGA talking point that the city is “horrible,” Trump’s latest assholery may actually draw more attention to the fact that Milwaukee is actually a pretty great town.

BONUS: Democrat billboards hit Trump over Milwaukee comments (axios.com)

The Democratic National Committee is launching billboards in 10 locations across Milwaukee on Friday featuring former President Trump's reported diss of the city that's the site of the Republican National Convention next month.

EXIT TAKE: We often speculate about whether this or that quote might “break through.” Trust me, every single person in Wisconsin heard what Trump said about its biggest city. This broke through.

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Front page of today’s Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel:

GOP Voter Ignorance is Trump’s Superpower

Or is it his greatest weakness?

The Washington Post’s Aaron Blake noted an interesting detail in the new CBS/YouGov poll: Only 35% of Republicans say they know that Donald Trump has been indicted for conspiring to overturn the 2020 election. Almost the same number — 34% — say he has not been indicted.

This inspired my latest column over at MSNBC Daily.

Welcome, once again to Trump’s fact-free alternate reality universe, in which Trump is relying on disinformation, ignorance, and voter amnesia to propel himself back to the Oval Office.

On the stump Trump freely rewrites history, peddles bizarre conspiracy theories, and aggressively memory-holes the darker parts of his record.

Thus far, it has been working for him….

A recent poll of voters ages 18-30 found that many of them simply don’t know what Trump has said or done in the past.

A poll by the Democratic-aligned public opinion research group Blueprint found that less than half of registered voters under 30 had even heard of Trump’s call for a Muslim ban, his “very fine people on both sides” comments relating to neo-Nazis in Charlottesville in 2017, or his insistence that John McCain “is not a war hero” because he was a prisoner of war. Similarly, most young voters have never heard of Trump’s more egregious comments about women, minorities or his denigration of immigrant communities.

“It might shock those of us who eat, sleep, and breathe politics, but young voters really don’t remember the daily controversies of the Trump years and grew up understanding this kind of rhetoric as politics as usual,” Blueprint pollster Evan Roth Smith said.

In one sense, this voter ignorance is a kind of superpower for Trump. But it is also a potential weakness, especially because he is relying heavily on “disengaged voters” for his current political strength. A recent New York Times analysis found that Trump’s narrow polling lead “is built on gains among voters who aren’t paying close attention to politics, who don’t follow traditional news and who don’t regularly vote.”

But what happens when the disengaged voters become engaged or when tuned-out voters start to pay attention?

What happens when younger voters are told that Trump once said that two non-white congresswomen should “go back” to the “totally broken in crime infested places from which they came”? Or that in 2017, he said Haitian immigrants to the United States “all have AIDS” and that Nigerians would never “go back to their huts” after seeing the United States. The Blueprint poll found that huge majorities of young voters are actually bothered by the comments when they learned of them.

And what happens when voters get more details about Trump’s crimes, or are reminded of what and who he is? What happens when the memory holes are filled?

This is a potential opportunity not just for the Biden campaign, but also for the media. Trump may find out that a campaign that relies on ignorance and amnesia is far more fragile than it looks now.

You can read the whole thing here.

“Ventriloquist Dummies For Donald Trump”

I had a lively chat with the guys from 24sight — Tom LoBianco and Warren Rohas — on their new podcast. I think it’s worth a listen:

Among other things, we discussed:

• Recent events in accountability karma: Alex Jones' asset liquidation, Steve Bannon's pending prison sentence, Salem Media dropping Dinesh D'Souza and much more!

• Were politicians always this bad?

• Heritage Foundation's shift from traditional conservatism to post-constitutional nationalism

• Trump’s Groundhog Day on Capitol Hill … to talk strategy

• 2016 election and Trump’s very transactional relationship with the pro-life movement

• What Day #1 of Trump 2.0 would look like

• Renting the #NeverTrump vote in 2024 

• The vice president is the one person Trump can’t fire

Nota bene

Politico: Trump’s private demand to Johnson: Help overturn my conviction

He has been obsessed in recent weeks with harnessing the powers of Congress to fight on his own behalf and go to war against the Democrats he accuses of “weaponizing” the justice system against him.

It’s a campaign he orchestrated in the days after his May 31 conviction on 34 felony counts in New York, starting with a phone call to the man he wanted to lead it: Speaker Mike Johnson.

Trump was still angry when he made the call, according to those who have heard accounts of it from Johnson, dropping frequent F-bombs as he spoke with the soft-spoken and pious GOP leader.

“We have to overturn this,” Trump insisted.

Johnson sympathized with Trump’s frustration. He’d been among the first batch of Republican lawmakers to appear alongside Trump at the Manhattan trial. He’d been harping on Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s case and the alleged broader abuse of the justice system since before he took the gavel.

The speaker didn’t really need to be convinced, one person familiar with the conversation said: Johnson, a former attorney himself, already believed the House had a role to play in addressing Trump’s predicament. The two have since spoken on the subject multiple times.

FFS.

No, I Did Not Forget

… the obligatory dog pictures.

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Eli is still in his car harness but wanted to chill by the water.

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He’s fearless in the lake.

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Unlike the GSDs, Pete did NOT like the water. But here’s a flashback to that time he took a kayak ride.