Abbreviated Pundit Roundup: The incoherency of Donald J Trump, filtered
Abbreviated Pundit Roundup is a long-running series published every morning that collects essential political discussion and analysis around the internet. Dan Pfeiffer/”The Message Box” on Substack: Why is the Press Making Trump Seem More Normal? Believe it or not, much of the political press has an inadvertent pro-Trump bias HH: Mr. President, are you suggesting President Biden’s using cocaine? DJT: I don’t know what he’s using, but that was not, hey, he was higher than a kite. And by the way, it was the worst, it was the worst address I’ve ever seen, the State of the Nation. I’ll tell you, State of the Union, that’s not State of the Union, because he doesn’t represent us properly. That, I can tell you. But he’s obviously, he’s being helped in some way, because most of the time, he looks like he’s falling asleep. And all of a sudden, he walked up there and did a poor job. But he was all jacked up. This is pure insanity, but perhaps the funniest part of the whole thing is that Hewitt just changed the subject and moved on to a series of questions about Trump’s vice presidential selection process. A reminder that the media often sanitizes and rewrites what Trump actually says, since he’s incoherent and they assume he just meant to say something else https://t.co/Knpg0AhW5o— Greg Dworkin (@DemFromCT) April 7, 2024 EJ Dionne/Washington Post: Joe Biden must go left and right at the same time Here’s one reason understanding the trajectory of the 2024 campaign will be so complicated: President Biden is running as both a conservative and a progressive. He must be both to win. Before card-carrying members of the right protest my characterization of Biden as “conservative,” they should consider who is carrying the banner for the most basic conservative impulse of all: preserving the nation’s institutions. There’s a reason Nikki Haley continues to win votes in Republican primaries even though she has dropped out of the race. It’s the same reason college-educated middle- and upper-middle-class voters are rallying to Biden and to Democrats generally. What a perfect campaign scandal. Montana Senate candidate Tim Sheehy says in stump speech he was shot in the arm in Afghanistan. Post finds a Ranger report of him admitting he accidentally shot himself in the arm in Glaciar National Park in 2015 and paying a $525 fine over it.…— Paul McLeod (@pdmcleod) April 7, 2024 Greg Sargent/The New Republic: Trump Is Accidentally Exposing Aileen Cannon’s Shady Pro-MAGA Game Even as the judge’s latest moves show she’s carefully disguising her advocacy for Trump, he is making it clear that he expects her to save him. Trump’s lawyers had argued that the Presidential Records Act, which was passed in the wake of the Watergate scandal, allowed him to reclassify national security documents as his personal property. That’s a grotesque misreading of the law’s history and intent, and Cannon appeared to agree, declaring that the PRA “does not provide a pre-trial basis to dismiss” the case. The media reported this as a partial “win” for special counsel Jack Smith’s prosecution team. But as constitutional scholar Laurence Tribe put it, this was a “pretend” ruling against Trump that ended up “reserving” Cannon’s ability to decide the case for Trump in a way that cannot be appealed. In short, Cannon seems to recognize that as she moves toward that endgame, it’s essential to maintain plausible deniability throughout. Nicholas F Jacobs/POLITICO Magazine: What Liberals Get Wrong About ‘White Rural Rage’ — Almost Everything The ‘White Rural Rage’ narrative gets the research wrong. I know, because some of it is mine. I’m an academic who studies rural Americans and lives in rural Maine. My job and passion is to pore over reams of data, including some of the largest surveys of rural voters ever conducted. Sitting on my computer are detailed responses from over 25,000 rural voters that I have conducted over the last decade and used to publish a range of peer-reviewed and widely cited research. And I’ve done it all largely to make sense of why rural voters are continually drawn to the Republican Party. But the thing about rage — I’ve never found it.’ ... In recent years, that rural political identity has morphed into resentment — a collective grievance against experts, bureaucrats, intellectuals and the political party that seeks to empower them, Democrats. Yes, such resentment is a real phenomenon in rural areas. But words matter; rage and resentment are not interchangeable terms. Rage implies irrationality, anger that is unjustified and out of proportion. You can’t talk to someone who is enraged. Resentment is rational, a reaction based on some sort of negative experience. You may not agree that someone has been treated unfairly, but there is room to empathize. So white rural voters aren’t mad, they just vote disproportionately for the candidate whose slogan is “I am your retr
JoriPress
Abbreviated Pundit Roundup is a long-running series published every morning that collects essential political discussion and analysis around the internet.
Dan Pfeiffer/”The Message Box” on Substack:
Why is the Press Making Trump Seem More Normal?
Believe it or not, much of the political press has an inadvertent pro-Trump bias
HH: Mr. President, are you suggesting President Biden’s using cocaine?
DJT: I don’t know what he’s using, but that was not, hey, he was higher than a kite. And by the way, it was the worst, it was the worst address I’ve ever seen, the State of the Nation. I’ll tell you, State of the Union, that’s not State of the Union, because he doesn’t represent us properly. That, I can tell you. But he’s obviously, he’s being helped in some way, because most of the time, he looks like he’s falling asleep. And all of a sudden, he walked up there and did a poor job. But he was all jacked up.
This is pure insanity, but perhaps the funniest part of the whole thing is that Hewitt just changed the subject and moved on to a series of questions about Trump’s vice presidential selection process.
EJ Dionne/Washington Post:
Joe Biden must go left and right at the same time
Here’s one reason understanding the trajectory of the 2024 campaign will be so complicated: President Biden is running as both a conservative and a progressive. He must be both to win.
Before card-carrying members of the right protest my characterization of Biden as “conservative,” they should consider who is carrying the banner for the most basic conservative impulse of all: preserving the nation’s institutions.
There’s a reason Nikki Haley continues to win votes in Republican primaries even though she has dropped out of the race. It’s the same reason college-educated middle- and upper-middle-class voters are rallying to Biden and to Democrats generally.
Greg Sargent/The New Republic:
Trump Is Accidentally Exposing Aileen Cannon’s Shady Pro-MAGA Game
Even as the judge’s latest moves show she’s carefully disguising her advocacy for Trump, he is making it clear that he expects her to save him.
Trump’s lawyers had argued that the Presidential Records Act, which was passed in the wake of the Watergate scandal, allowed him to reclassify national security documents as his personal property. That’s a grotesque misreading of the law’s history and intent, and Cannon appeared to agree, declaring that the PRA “does not provide a pre-trial basis to dismiss” the case. The media reported this as a partial “win” for special counsel Jack Smith’s prosecution team.
But as constitutional scholar Laurence Tribe put it, this was a “pretend” ruling against Trump that ended up “reserving” Cannon’s ability to decide the case for Trump in a way that cannot be appealed. In short, Cannon seems to recognize that as she moves toward that endgame, it’s essential to maintain plausible deniability throughout.
Nicholas F Jacobs/POLITICO Magazine:
What Liberals Get Wrong About ‘White Rural Rage’ — Almost Everything
The ‘White Rural Rage’ narrative gets the research wrong. I know, because some of it is mine.
I’m an academic who studies rural Americans and lives in rural Maine. My job and passion is to pore over reams of data, including some of the largest surveys of rural voters ever conducted. Sitting on my computer are detailed responses from over 25,000 rural voters that I have conducted over the last decade and used to publish a range of peer-reviewed and widely cited research. And I’ve done it all largely to make sense of why rural voters are continually drawn to the Republican Party.
But the thing about rage — I’ve never found it.’
...
In recent years, that rural political identity has morphed into resentment — a collective grievance against experts, bureaucrats, intellectuals and the political party that seeks to empower them, Democrats.
Yes, such resentment is a real phenomenon in rural areas. But words matter; rage and resentment are not interchangeable terms. Rage implies irrationality, anger that is unjustified and out of proportion. You can’t talk to someone who is enraged. Resentment is rational, a reaction based on some sort of negative experience. You may not agree that someone has been treated unfairly, but there is room to empathize.
Donald Trump Is Demanding A New Judge Just Days Before The Start Of His Hush-Money Criminal Trial
Former President Donald Trump is rehashing longstanding grievances with the current judge in a long-shot, eleventh-hour bid to disrupt and delay the case.In court papers made public Friday, Trump’s lawyers said it is improper for Merchan “to preside over these proceedings while Ms. Merchan benefits, financially and reputationally, from the manner in which this case is interfering” with Trump’s campaign as the presumptive Republican presidential nominee.The trial is scheduled to begin April 15. It is the first of Trump’s four criminal cases scheduled to go to trial and would be the first-ever criminal trial of a former president.
Since it’s that time fo year, here’s Tim Miller/The Bulwark with a mix of politics and basketball:
The Right’s “Patriotic Correctness” Double Standard
“If you ever go to an actual LSU game you’ll see that they’re never on the court for the anthem. It’s that simple. I’ve covered them for 3 years & they’ve never been,” tweeted Chessa Bouche from Baton Rouge’s BRProud News.
...
On Monday, the grifters who exist to ruin American life and make every human decision a micro-battle in their neverending cultural forever war, finally noticed this and decided to engage in some dog whistle attacks on the “dirty debutantes” of Baton Rouge.
OutKick, a sports website run by America’s wrongest man Clay Travis, began the outrage cycle by contrasting the LSU absence during the anthem with the way the Iowa players “stayed and held hands.” LibsofTikTok and the other usual suspects piled on for the retweets.
But this low-calorie outrage fest extended beyond social media. The governor of my adopted home state weighed in, saying that he believes “student athletes [should] be present for the national anthem or risk their athletic scholarship.” (Losing a scholarship over this? Insane!) The next day, his muppet-faced mug was on Fox News, where he proceeded to dunk on the young women who brought a national championship and an economic boost to his state in the days after their hard-fought defeat.
What an asshole.
And speaking of unlikeable characters, here’s Cliff Schecter on Ted Cruz:
And finally, congratulations to the awesome Dawn Staley and the South Carolina women’s basketball team! They’ve been the best all year.
