Positive signals in a noisy environment

March 20, 2024

Five states held primary elections on Tuesday as controversies continued to swirl around Trump—none good for the ex-president. Meanwhile, President Biden departed Joint Base Andrews in Maryland at 9:00 a.m. en route to Nevada and Arizona, where he held two campaign events (Reno and Phoenix) and delivered official remarks in Las Vegas on lowering costs for American families. (Just describing Biden’s travel and appearance schedule makes me tired.)

President Biden managed to deliver three speeches without threatening a “blood bath” if he loses the presidential election or calling immigrants “animals” and “not human.” Nor did Biden call convicted insurrectionists “hostages,” promise to pardon felons who brutalized law enforcement officers, or salute traitors as they sang a bastardized version of our national anthem. As a result, Biden received almost no media coverage as he campaigned as a sane, mature, patriotic candidate. Meanwhile, Trump crowed on cable news about the attention he received for his reprehensible remarks in Dayton over the weekend.

Trump is reaping the bitter fruits of his chaos strategy. President Biden continues to garner 85 to 90% of the Democratic primary vote despite an ongoing protest movement over Biden’s GAZA policy, while Trump continues to underperform among Republican voters. In Florida and Ohio, Trump lost 20% of the primary vote to Nikki Haley, Ron DeSantis, Chris Christie and other Republican candidates who have suspended their campaigns.

Worse (for Trump), exit polling of Ohio voters shows a deep and stubborn resistance to Trump as the party’s nominee. Per NBC,

Despite his having sewn up the nomination, 20% of Ohio GOP primary voters would be dissatisfied with Trump as the nominee, 22% say he lacks the temperament to serve effectively, and 28% say he wouldn’t be fit for office if convicted of a crime.

At the end of the day, 18% say they wouldn’t support Trump in November, with 10% of that number preferring Biden and 8% saying they wouldn’t vote for either.

The most relevant metric in NBC’s exit polling is that 18% of Republican voters in a closed primary say they will not support Trump in November. Given that primary voters are typically the most loyal voters in a party’s base, losing 18% of those voters indicates a major crisis of confidence for the GOP’s presumptive nominee.

Trump's weak performance in the primaries aligns with his fundraising difficulties. See NPR, Trump campaign cash crunch: Small-dollar fatigue, major donor nerves. Per NPR, the Trump campaign’s unwillingness to discuss small-dollar donations is consistent with reports that his small donor base is suffering from fatigue. It appears that Biden raised more in a single day than Trump's monthly fundraising in January.

Moreover, major donors are increasingly nervous about Trump's erratic campaigning:

The drop in Trump small-dollar donations is magnified by a second problem: Many wealthy Republican donors have yet to commit to giving millions of dollars toward a pro-Trump political action committee, or to using their extensive networks to raise money for the campaign, according to people familiar with the matter.

Meanwhile, Biden is actively courting former donors to Nikki Haley’s campaign—with some success. See CNBC, Biden campaign recruits Nikki Haley donors to help defeat Donald Trump. There is, for example, a WhatsApp group called “Haley supporters for Biden,” a group whose membership is growing after Trump threatened to “blacklist” Haley supporters. Threatening to “blacklist” major donors whose candidate just suspended her campaign is not a winning strategy for Trump.

Trump's alienation of Haley donors is ill-timed because The League of Conservation Voters announced that it will spend $120 million in support of President Biden’s environmental policies. The $120 million brings Biden's outside support to $1 billion. See NYTimes, Outside Groups Pledge Over $1 Billion to Aid Biden’s Re-election Effort.

Trump's uncontrollable rage at any sign of disloyalty is eroding support at the margins in another important constituency—Jewish voters who support Trump because of his support for Prime Minister Netanyahu and/or Israel. (Trump has a history of promoting the antisemitic trope that Jewish voters have a “divided loyalty” between the US and Israel.)

Trump used that trope in an interview with Sebastian Gorka, in which said the following:

Any Jewish person that votes for Democrats hates their religion. They hate everything about Israel, and they should be ashamed of themselves, because Israel will be destroyed.

Trump's comments drew swift condemnation from across the political spectrum. See Axios, Trump sparks Republican groans with "awful" remarks about Jews.

Speaking of Trump hurting himself because of rage-fueled decision-making, you would think that Trump would want to avoid more publicity about accusations that he “raped” E. Jean Carroll. You would be wrong.

Trump filed a defamation suit against ABC and George Stephanopoulos for remarks made by the ABC anchor during an interview of GOP Rep. Nancy Mace. Stephanopoulos asserted that Trump had been found liable for rape—echoing comments made by federal Judge Lewis Kaplan in a post-trial order in the E. Jean Carroll defamation case against Trump. See Mother Jones, A Federal Judge Has Gone to Great Lengths to Make Clear Trump Really Did Rape E. Jean Carroll.

By filing a suit against ABC and Stephanopoulos for defamation, Trump ensures that they will respond with the obvious defense to the claim—that Trump did, in fact, rape E. Jean Carroll. That issue will be litigated in early motions to dismiss—and will prominently feature Judge Kaplan’s language in a post-trial order:  

The finding that Ms. Carroll failed to prove that she was “raped” within the meaning of the New York Penal Law does not mean that she failed to prove that Mr. Trump “raped” her as many people commonly understand the word “rape.” Indeed, as the evidence at trial recounted below makes clear, the jury found that Mr. Trump in fact did exactly that.

So, if you are looking for a signal in the noise of Tuesday’s election-related news, it is that Trump's legal, emotional, and cognitive problems—combined with his dictatorial delusions—are hurting him enough to give Joe Biden an advantage that the media chooses to ignore. That advantage does not mean that Biden (or we) can relent, but we should at least recognize that the true narrative is not being reported by major media outlets. We have plenty of reason to be confident about Democratic prospects in November. But no reason to be complacent.

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Coda

Trump has a consistent record of hurting the GOP in Senate races by backing terrible candidates whose main qualification is loyalty to Trump—see, e.g., Herschel Walker, Dr. Oz, Blake Masters, and Roy Moore. Over the weekend, Trump campaigned hard for Bernie Moreno to be the GOP nominee to challenge Ohio Senator Sherrod Brown. Moreno won 51% of the vote in a hard-fought, three-way Republican race.

Moreno has tacked hard to the right over the last decade of his public service—especially on the issues of LGBTQ equality, where he started as a moderate supporter and ended up as a hater of LGBTQ people. That progression drew extra scrutiny last week when AP revealed that someone with access to Moreno’s work email account posted a profile on a “hook-up” site. The profile said the user (linked to Moreno’s email) was seeking “Men for 1-on-1 sex” and “looking for young guys to have fun with while traveling.” See LGBTQ Nation, Anti-LGBTQ+ Senate candidate linked to gay profile on adult hook-up site.

In the normal course, Moreno’s private life should be of no concern to voters. But he ran against his opponents by smearing them as supporting an LGBTQ “indoctrination agenda” and a “radical trans agenda.”

Moreno’s attorney produced a letter from a former intern who claims that he created the profile linked to his boss’s email as a “prank”—because, you know, that’s what interns do when they are attempting to earn letters of recommendation that could be critical to future employment.

But the press has accepted the “prank” explanation without question. The former intern did not explain how he managed to send the email impersonating his boss from a computer located at a residence owned by Moreno’s parents.

Moreno’s strong anti-LGBTQ policies are even more hypocritical because Moreno has said that his oldest son is gay. In contrast, Moreno’s opponent—incumbent Senator Sherrod Brown—has a strong record of support for LGBTQ rights. Perhaps Moreno’s son can volunteer for Sherrod Brown? It should be an interesting campaign.

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The Supreme Court creates train wreck over Texas immigration law.

Over the last forty-eight hours, the Supreme Court has made a monumental mess of its review of a Texas law that seeks to assume control over the US border. If the consequences weren’t tragic, it would be comical.

The Texas law is plainly unconstitutional. It is not even a close question. But the Supreme Court created a situation in which enforcement of that law was stayed and then permitted to go back into effect multiple times in a forty-eighth hour period. It was like the Keystone Cops—all because the Supreme Court does not have the fortitude to control the rogue judges on the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals.

Here's the bottom line: As of late Tuesday evening, the Texas law cannot be enforced pending further order of the Fifth Circuit. See NBC News, Appeals court blocks Texas immigration law shortly after Supreme Court action. As explained by NBC,

A three-judge panel of the New Orleans-based 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals split 2-1 in saying in a brief order that the measure, known as SB4, should be blocked. The same court is hearing arguments Wednesday morning on the issue.

The appeals court appeared to be taking the hint from the Supreme Court, which in rejecting an emergency application filed by the Biden administration put the onus on the appeals court to act quickly.

I review the complicated procedural background below with a warning that it may change in the next five minutes. For additional detail, I recommend Ian Millhiser’s explainer in Vox, The Supreme Court’s confusing new border decision, explained.

Let’s start here: The federal government has exclusive authority to control international borders. The Constitution says so, and courts have ruled so for more than 150 years.

There are good reasons for the federal government to control international borders. If individual states impose contradictory regulations on international borders that abut the states, the federal government could not promulgate a single, coherent foreign policy—which is plainly the job of the federal government.

Texas passed a law that granted itself the right to police the southern border and enforce immigration laws, including permitting the arrest and deportation of immigrants in the US who do not have the legal authority to remain in the country.

Mexico immediately notified Texas that it would not accept any immigrants deported by Texas. (Mexico does accept immigrants deported by the US per international agreements.)

A federal district judge in Texas enjoined the enforcement of state law, ruling that it usurped the federal government's constitutional role. Texas appealed.

When a matter is appealed, the court of appeals generally attempts to “maintain the status quo” as it existed between the parties prior to the contested action. Here, maintaining the status quo meant not enforcing the Texas law that allowed Texas to strip the federal government of its constitutional authority over the border.

However, the Fifth Circuit used a bad-faith procedural ploy to suspend the district court’s injunction, thereby allowing Texas law to go into effect. In doing so, the Fifth Circuit did not “maintain the status quo” but instead permitted a radical restructuring of state-federal relations in a way that violated the Constitution and century-and-a-half of judicial precedent.

In a world where the rule of law prevails, the Supreme Court should have slapped down the Fifth Circuit's bad-faith gambit. It did not. Instead, the Supreme Court allowed the Fifth Circuit's bad-faith ploy to remain in effect—but warned the Fifth Circuit that the Supreme Court might, in the future, force the Fifth Circuit to stop playing games with the Constitution.

The debacle is an embarrassment to the Supreme Court and the Fifth Circuit. The reason the Fifth Circuit acts like a lawless tribunal is because the Supreme Court has allowed the Fifth Circuit to engage in outrageous, extra-constitutional rulings without so much as a peep of protest from the reactionary majority on the Court.

John Roberts is “the Chief Justice of the United States.” He should start acting like it by reprimanding rogue judges in the Fifth Circuit by name—and referring them to the Judicial Conference for discipline. Until Roberts does that, the Fifth Circuit will do whatever it wants.

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Concluding Thoughts

Democrats have momentum, and Republicans are back on their heels. It will get worse for Trump and Republicans. Trials—or pretrial hearings—will remind the public of Trump's history of corruption, sexual assault, and insurrection. The extreme MAGA candidates who won contested primaries with Trump's support will founder in the general election as their radical positions prove to be repugnant to independents and persuadable Republicans.

The election will be hard fought and too close for comfort in some places. But if you were forced to choose a team on Tuesday, a rational observer would choose the Democratic Party—up and down the ballot!

The primaries in five states created a lot of noise on Tuesday. But to anyone paying attention, a persistent signal in that noise indicated that Democrats are on the move, occupying the high ground, and getting stronger. That’s a good position to be in. Let’s rest there for a day to take our bearings, then resume our march to victory in November!

Talk to you tomorrow!