Trump was Breitbart. DeSantis is Infowars.
Plus: The GOP's Senate woes
On Fox News, “McConnell makes grim prediction about Republicans in Senate races, references 'candidate quality'“
If only they had been warned. (More on this a bit later.)
Meanwhile, it turns out that Russia’s spies are as craptacular as its military. And stuff continues to mysteriously blow up in Crimea.
And, lordy, we may get to see some [heavily redacted] parts of that Mar-a-Lago search warrant affidavit after all.
Happy Friday.
On yesterday’s podcast, the Wapo’s Phillip Bump discussed (among other things) Ron DeSantis’s strategy of appealing to the fringe.
Here’s a partial transcript of what he told me.
Bump: I say this all the time, and I will continue to say it, the reason that Donald Trump won in 2016, is because he was the guy who was willing to say what the fringe was talking about, and that the establishment wouldn't talk about because it was ridiculous.
He was willing to say it.
Trump was willing to be the voice of the fringe. He was willing to parrot it back to the base, what they were hearing on Breitbart, and what they're hearing on Fox News, in a way that the establishment wouldn't, right? And that has been his success ever since. He's been engaging and rallying the far right of the Republican Party that didn't feel like they had a voice, justifiably, in politics.
And that's what DeSantis is doing as well.
He's really playing to that same far right and he is, in the same way that Donald Trump was Breitbart to the establishments, Fox News in 2016.
Now, Breitbart is, you know, almost establishment-esque to some extent, and Ron DeSantis is Infowars, right?
I mean, so it is this constant, okay, I'm going to engage where this most fervent element of the base is, and we call that Trumpism, but it's, you know, really just the fringe, and engaging the fringe has proven to be a successful strategy for winning elections.
And I think that's what DeSantis is doing
As it happens, while we were talking, Bump was writing a column that elaborated on his point. You can read the whole thing here.
[DeSantis] is making a bet on beating Trump at his own game, appealing to and energizing the right-most flank of the GOP by a relentless public focus on amplifying what the fringe is talking about. Much was made of Laura Ingraham’s public skepticism about whether it was useful to bring Trump’s baggage into a 2024 presidential contest.
But for my money, the more interesting development was Alex Jones’s endorsement of DeSantis — on the grounds that DeSantis, unlike Trump, has credibly appealed to the anti-vaccine fringe.
**
Speaking of DeSantis and the fringe: “DeSantis knocked by Jewish leaders for rallying with Pennsylvania GOP candidate.”
Florida Democrats and Jewish leaders joined religious groups in Pennsylvania in condemning Gov. Ron DeSantis, R-Fla., for his plans to appear Friday with Doug Mastriano, the Republican candidate for governor in Pennsylvania.
Mastriano’s ties to Gab, a right-wing social media site that has become a hub of anti-Semitic and racist commentary, have come under fire for the last few weeks.
**
Meanwhile….
The Florida governor not only suffered a legal defeat yesterday, he was also bench-slapped by the federal judge who ruled that his STOP WOKE Act was unconstitutional.
[Judge Mark] Walker said the law, as applied to diversity, inclusion and bias training in businesses, turns the First Amendment “upside down” because the state is barring speech by prohibiting discussion of certain concepts in training programs.
“If Florida truly believes we live in a post-racial society, then let it make its case,” the judge wrote. “But it cannot win the argument by muzzling its opponents.”
Is this #winning?
Speaking of bench slaps
Oh my.
The story so far: In a futile effort to appease Stop the Steal MAGAites, Wisconsin’s GOP Assembly Speaker Robin Vos named a former state supreme court justice named Michael Gableman as a special investigator to investigate to 2020 election.
Former Supreme Court Justice Michael Gableman in a video promoting his shambolic “investigation’ of the 2020 election. (YouTube | Office of the Special Counsel)
It didn’t go well.
The probe cost taxpayers nearly a million dollars and came up with… nothing. And it didn’t protect Vos from the crazies.
Gableman went full MAGA, appearing at a recent Trump rally and endorsed Vos’s election-denying primary opponent. (Vos won, but only narrowly.)
Last week, Vos — who started the whole shambolic mess — fired Gableman, and yesterday a Wisconsin judge delivered a blistering critique of the whole fail-probe.
"From August 30 through December 4, 2021, the evidence speaks for itself. OSC{Office of Special Counsel, ie, Gableman] accomplished nothing.
“It kept none of the weekly progress reports the Wisconsin State Assembly required it to keep.
“It recorded no interviews with witnesses.
“ It gathered no measurable data..."
"It organized no existing data into any analytical format.
“It generated no reports based on any special expertise.
‘It did commence lawsuits against other parts of our state and local government, although at time of this writing, OSC has received no relief. ..."
"Instead, it gave its employees code names like 'coms' or '3,' apparently for the sole purpose of emailing back and forth about news articles and drafts of speeches."
"It printed copies of reports that better investigators had already written, although there is no evidence any person connected with OSC ever read these reports, let alone critically analyzed their factual and legal bases to draw his or her own principled conclusions."
"It does not matter how often OSC repeats its baseless arguments. The time has come and gone for OSC to show its substance.
“There simply is nothing there."
As for arguments that Gableman’s counsel had made to the court, the judge described one brief as “ a fever dream version of the facts of this case,” and “a pernicious and selfish attempt to repaint the truth.”
For good measure, the judge revoked the permission for Gableman’s out of the state attorneys — including prominent conservative attorney James Bopp —to continue to argue in Gableman’s defense, “because the motion to which they have signed their names applies phony legal principles to invented facts. Near every claim they make is frivolous under Wisconsin law.”
"If this case were not on appeal, I could sanction OSC and each of its seven lawyers for their specious legal arguments..
You can read the whole spectacularly devastating ruling here.
Meanwhile, in Maryland
Governor Larry Hogan is calling BS on his state’s GOP nominee to succeed him.
Hogan, who has previously called [GOP gubernatorial candidate Dan Cox,] a “QAnon whack job,” described the GOP nominee as “a nut” during a recent radio interview and reiterated his prediction that Cox has “no chance whatsoever” of being elected as Maryland’s governor in November.
“He’s not, in my opinion, mentally stable,” Hogan, who is term-limited, said Wednesday on WGMD radio, based on the Eastern Shore. “He wanted to hang my friend, Mike Pence, and took three busloads of people to the Capitol.”
In contrast: “Once Alarmed, Mainstream Pennsylvania Republicans Unite Around Mastriano.”
Pennsylvania Republican officials who had warned that Mr. Mastriano was unelectable have largely closed ranks behind him, after he proved to be the overwhelming choice of base Republicans.
Is the GOP blowing the Senate?
Mitch McConnell apparently thinks so.
“I think there’s probably a greater likelihood the House flips than the Senate. Senate races are just different — they're statewide, candidate quality has a lot to do with the outcome,” he said in Florence, Kentucky, at a Northern Kentucky Chamber of Commerce luncheon when asked about his projection for the 2022 election.
“Right now, we have a 50-50 Senate and a 50-50 country, but I think when all is said and done this fall, we’re likely to have an extremely close Senate, either our side up slightly or their side up slightly.”
In Pennsylvania's open Senate race, the nonpartisan Cook Political Report changed its rating Thursday from "toss up" to "lean Democrat" as GOP nominee Mehmet Oz, a celebrity doctor, struggles against Democrat John Fetterman, the state's lieutenant governor, who leads in recent polls.
Apart from Oz, Republicans have nominated numerous first-time candidates backed by former President Donald Trump in states such as Georgia, Arizona and Ohio to run against seasoned Democratic politicians…
The Republican Party establishment also failed to recruit preferred candidates in other states, like New Hampshire.
McConnell may be feeling déjà vu from 2010 and 2012 when his party fell short of capturing control of the chamber in part due to weak candidates such as Christine O’Donnell in Delaware, Sharron Angle in Nevada and Todd Akin in Missouri.
Cheap Shots
Elise Stefanik’s pick is having a normal one.
And, speaking of unhinged bigots…
Um, wow.
Charlie, I don't think that DeSantis cares much about what is actually taught in schools or in corporate DEI sessions. The STOP WOKE Act isn't intended to go into effect--it is intended to be struck down by the courts so that DeSantis can then campaign and fundraise off of stopping the tyranny of the woke judges.
I call this strategy "performative unconstitutionality." It creates a perpetual motion machine of writing a blatantly unconstitutional bill that won't pass even the most cursory legal review, grandstanding to pass said law, a bench slapping from a court that declares the law unconstitutional, fundraising off of the court loss, grandstanding about a different bill, etc. Tim Eyman, a political grifter here in Washington, perfected this particular dark art.
The Gableman smackdown is rather amazing, but it just reinforces the sad fact that the truth of these election claims is irrelevant, even when scrutiny of elections rises to the level of an OSC investigation. They launch a completely partisan investigation, a former WI Supreme Court Justice runs it thoroughly incompetently and unprofessionally, because what matters is not the truth of the claims being investigated, but that there is an investigation, no matter how farcical, being conducted.
It harkens back to Trump's first Impeachment, when he extorted Zelensky to get him just to announce an investigation, not even necessarily conduct an investigation. Hell, it harkens back to Bengazi. If you make outrageous claims, without proof, that no one should take seriously, but then you launch an official investigation into these claims based on nothing, then the claims get the patina of credibility. This Wisconsin investigation could barely even be called an investigation, it came up with nothing, but it served its purpose, and election deniers will continue to claim without evidence that the election was stolen. Same with the Committee Trump set up to prove that fraud, in an election he won, caused him to lose the popular vote.
Same with Cyber Ninjas in Arizona. It cost a fortune, the firm conducting the audit was completely tied to Trump and committed to demonstrating fraud occurred, it took months longer than originally projected, it was conducted by a firm with no expertise in elections, and it concluded there was no evidence of fraud (though they tried to spin it) and that Biden's margin of victory was wider than originally thought. But none of that stopped Kari Lake from winning the Republican nomination for governor of Arizona on a platform consisting of nothing other than 'Democrats stole the 2020 election from Donald Trump.'
We have a party whose voters are convinced, based on no evidence, that elections are rigged, and who are completely uninterested in all proof to the contrary, because they believe what they believe and they like believing it, since it means the Democrats must be evil. And this is of course a recipe for violence in the streets.