Trump Walked So Clay Higgins Could Run
The only notable thing about the congressman’s racist tweet was that his GOP colleagues bothered to admit it was horrible.
Totally predictableWild news out of New York City, where Mayor Eric Adams was indicted last night on federal criminal charges. Exactly which criminal charges won’t be made public until later today. But the City reports, citing unnamed sources, that “Adams is being charged with acting as a foreign agent for taking actions in his official capacity after receiving donations from foreign sources.”
Adams has pledged to fight the charges: “I will fight these injustices with every ounce of my strength and my spirit,” he said in a video released last night. “I will request an immediate trial so that New Yorkers can hear the truth.”
Adams, who is up for reelection next year, won’t step down as mayor, but New York Gov. Kathy Hochul could remove him from office early. Happy Thursday.
The Sludge Is the Point
—Andrew Egger
Yesterday, Louisiana Rep. Clay Higgins was scrolling social media at work when he saw something that got him steamed. A nonprofit representing Haitian migrants was calling for criminal charges against Donald Trump and JD Vance in Springfield for making them the targets of a national moral panic.
So Higgins did what one does when they get mad online: He tweeted about it.
“Lol. These Haitians are wild,” Higgins wrote from the Capitol. “Eating pets, vudu, nastiest country in the western hemisphere, cults, slapstick gangsters. . . but damned if they don’t feel all sophisticated now, filing charges against our President and VP. All these thugs better get their mind right and their ass out of the country before January 20th.”
You could throw darts at this since-deleted tweet and hit seven or eight different outrageous things. The racism is clear-cut! The ominous threats against people in the country legally are obscene! Calling Trump and Vance the “president and VP” is nonsensical! For the love of God, nobody is eating any pets!
The tweet was enough to briefly throw the House floor into disarray. Higgins was confronted by a number of his black colleagues, including Congressional Black Caucus Chair Steven Horsford and Rep. Byron Donalds, a member of the House Freedom Caucus and a Trump ally. Tempers flared. Horsford called for Higgins to be officially censured for bringing “discredit and disgrace to the House of Representatives.” Majority Leader Steve Scalise objected: “The tweet has been deleted already.”
Afterward, House Speaker Mike Johnson told reporters that Higgins had “prayed about it, he regretted it, and he pulled the post down.” (Where Johnson got the idea that Higgins regretted anything isn’t exactly clear—Higgins later expressed absolutely zero remorse for the post in comments to CNN.)
What’s most remarkable about the whole sordid episode isn’t that Republicans covered for Higgins—who would expect any different? What’s remarkable is that they were willing to admit he’d done anything wrong in the first place. After all, Trump has been lying and rabble-rousing about Haitians and other migrants in similarly grotesque terms for weeks, with zero pushback from the likes of Johnson. Here’s one image—out of many like it—that Trump shared on his social media site just last week:
The Republican party is always going to struggle to disassociate itself from cranks and racists. But it becomes futile even to try when a racist crank sits atop the party as god-emperor. Trump is an industrial plant pumping sewage into a river; Mike Johnson is downstream with a kitchen strainer.
It’s almost funny, in a sad sort of way, watching politicians who wish they could go back to a different form of politics contort themselves to avoid this simple and obvious reality.
Here, for instance, was Nikki Haley on her new SiriusXM radio show yesterday: “You’re not going to hear me say glowing things about Donald Trump’s personality. I have issues with him as well. . . . But politics is not for thin-skinned people. It’s just not. And I think that if you really want to do a service for your country, you have to be able to put the personal part of it aside.”
And here was Mike Pence, writing in the Wall Street Journal this week:
Republicans have an opportunity to deliver a decisive victory this November—not only for their party, but for the entire country. The key lies in doing two things: exposing the undeniable failures of Kamala Harris and the Democrats, and promoting the conservative policies that made the prior administration the most successful in generations. While I have pledged to stay out of the presidential campaign, I firmly believe that the path to victory for Republicans down ballot—whether running for the House, Senate, governorships, or state legislatures—depends on keeping those two objectives at the center of the campaign.
It’s remarkable to watch: Even people like Haley and Pence, whose careers and lives Trump has turned upside-down, continue to treat him as a weird quirk sideshow of Republican politics. The main event, they insist, is still some nebulous group of conservative policies that supposedly remain the beating heart of the Republican project. Even now, they can’t confront the fact he has taken a blowtorch to their entire world. From those ashes, people like Higgins blossom.
A Cry in the Night
—William Kristol
Listen, my children, and you shall hear
Of the midnight ride of Paul Revere. . .
I think of Longfellow’s great poem when, during each election cycle, we get the occasional midnight release of the latest polls from the Marist College Institute for Public Opinion. I don’t know when Lee Miringoff, the longtime director of the well-respected polling operation, hit upon this gimmick. I suppose it gets their polls a little more attention. It certainly ruins some of our sleep patterns.
In any case, it’s a well-established thing by now. And so here we are, staying up late, political junkies scattered across the far reaches of the internet, waiting for the stroke of midnight and for Marist’s latest polls of six swing states.
(“Get a life, Bill,” you say. “This is my life,” I reply, as I shed a tear for various roads not taken. Might I have been a serious academic, or an under-appreciated poet, or something other than a person who stays awake for Marist’s swing state polls? Possibly. But why dwell on that? As Longfellow’s contemporary Whittier has informed us, “Of all sad words of tongue or pen, the saddest are these, ‘It might have been.’”)
So there we were at midnight. And there they were! The polls!
Michigan; Harris 52-Trump 47.
Wisconsin: Harris 50-Trump 49.
Pennsylvania: Harris 49-Trump 49.
North Carolina: Harris 49-Trump 49.
Georgia: Trump 50-Harris 49.
Arizona: Trump 50-Harris 49.
OMG, as Longfellow might have said.
Three states at 50-49, two at 49-49. And if these results weren’t enough to make sleep difficult, Marist apparently failed to poll Nevada, just to leave things even more inconclusive.
Things could be worse. They were back in March, when Marist polled Georgia and North Carolina and Biden was the prospective nominee. Then Trump was up five points and three points in those states. So Harris has pulled even.
Which is important, and wasn’t inevitable. And my instinct—for what it’s worth—is that Harris has a better chance to pick up a few votes than Trump does in the final six weeks.
But the fact is we don’t know who is going to win the presidency. What we do know is that the race is—how can I say this? Let me count the ways—a tie. It’s a toss up. It’s a coin flip. It’s up in the air. It’s on a knife’s edge.
It’s a difficult thing to contemplate right before bed! If you see the election junkie in your life bleary and bloodshot today, blame Marist.
Quick Hits
GOOD TO BE IN THE FAMILY: The New York Times reports: “The private equity firm run by Jared Kushner, the son-in-law of former President Donald J. Trump, has been paid at least $112 million in fees since 2021 by Saudi Arabia and other foreign investors, even though as of July it had not yet returned any profits to the governments largely bankrolling the firm.”
More than 99 percent of the money invested in Affinity Partners, the Times notes, comes from overseas, “including $2 billion from the Saudi government’s Public Investment Fund. Most of the rest of the money comes from the sovereign wealth funds of Qatar and the United Arab Emirates.”
Why would these nations be willing to pay nine-figure sums to Jared Kushner without seeing a penny of profits in return? Sadly, we may never receive answers to such questions: Some things in this life are just beyond knowing.
DRIP, DRIP, DRIP: Another day, another round of reported resignations for Mark Robinson as his garden-variety I-once-praised-Hitler-and-slavery-on-a-porn-site controversy rolls on. Over the weekend, nearly his entire campaign staff quit; yesterday, many of the top staff in the lieutenant governor’s office—including his chief of staff and general counsel, his policy director, his communications director, and his director of government affairs—announced they plan to resign by the end of the month as well.
Robinson insists he will neither resign nor suspend his campaign. Which means we might still not be prepared for how crazy this race may get. After all, anybody with a conscience, a bit of self-respect, or any desire to thrive in halfway respectable politics ever again is fleeing like rats from a sinking ship. Who knows what happens when there is even less support staff around?
Cheap Shots
Weaponized justice system indicts another . . . . . . Democrat?
"the conservative policies that made the prior administration the most successful in generations"
OK, Mike Pence is officially as vile as Trump. The neediness of this man is just pathetic.